The film's lack of focus leaves most, if not all, of the characters just a hair less developed than they should have been; the plot holes just a bit more conspicuous than they might have been; and the ending just a touch less poignant than it could have been.

Isn’t like a lot of modern horror movies. It’s not about torture, or dead children, or weepy vampires with great hair. It’s an attempt to reinvent the monster movie, which we're all about. It’s too bad it couldn’t have been contemporized. Period movies can so easily become parodies of portentousness, and that’s what happens with this one.

Russell Brand is absurd, funny and wonderfully out of place in a family movie.

Subtly gaining momentum as it dexterously glides through pages of good-time, snappy dialogue, Criminal offers no time to catch your breath, let alone enough to think through its reality-stretching story flaws and subtext-lacking motives.

Understanding what McGrath is trying to pull off is not the same thing as McGrath pulling it off; as ambitious as it is, Infamous falters in execution too often to create a lasting impression.

This is a fun midnight movie. Horror fans, get your friends together and go see some gore and some naked chicks in three dimensions.

Looks, feels, and tastes like a more accessible evolution of "Cremaster," so try to gauge your own tolerance for indulgent eccentricity (at 135 minutes, it could stand to lose 20).

This one aims for bleak and hits it.

After a slow start, this feel-good family film is a nice postcard from the Big Apple that may benefit New York and the Museum of Natural History as much as it does 20th Century Fox.

Ultimately, it is a serviceable, well-made thriller that earns its R rating.

Although mixing teen humor with sentiment will never be done as well as in "American Pie," John Tucker Must Die has just enough heart to entertain the "MySpace" set.

In the scenes where Efron isn't on screen, things tend to get boring. Plus, we could've lived without having watched so many scenes where Zac is showing off his basketball skills.

There's a persistent surface level, one-off quality to the whole business that repels emotional involvement at every juncture and seems stylistically in keeping with Disney's reluctance to greenlight each new Narnia film until the last one has proven itself at the box-office.

On the plus side, there are these super-scary mechanical octopus-type things with a billion eyes and metal tentacles that fly in great awful swarms and look like the non-organic versions of the flying-brain-and-spinal-cord monsters that made the otherwise laughable '60s sci-fi flick "Fiend Without aFace" so cool.

Even the great cast didn’t make following the convoluted plot any easier. And all that jumping around makes the film feel a lot longer than it is.

Over the years, Pacino's Method has become his madness, and now, whether he's playing Shylock or Satan, he doesn't become the part so much as the part becomes him.

Sexy, stylish, and legitimately suspenseful.

An unexpectedly retro throwback to '80s actioners and '90s hacker movies, totally preposterous in both its heroic near-death escapes and abstract tech-jargon explanations for how anyone with geeky inclinations can remotely override any computer system with a few easy keystrokes.

It is a cute, silly romantic comedy, with little suspense and nothing particularly new to add to genre.

While 1408 is no classic, it is refreshing to see a horror picture that just wants to do its job rather than prove to its audience how ruthlessly nihilistic it is.

The family dynamic, paired with a few delicious action scenes, is engaging enough that we hardly notice the fillm's major flaw, a rather flimsy and sometimes jingoistic subplot having to do with California's independence.

The depiction of everyday life at the orphanage is far more compelling than Vanya's personal quest. It's unfortunate that once the Italian hits the road, The Italian loses its way.

There's much visual inventiveness and a good sense of fun here. But I was expecting something more spectacular.

Joyeux Noel is no gritty war film; this is more of a Christmas miracle movie, full of melodrama. Carion juggles a large, multicultural cast, and few of the characters stand out; most are there to represent the types who pop up in your standard war-movie battalions.

A tart, funny, moderately over-the-top hijinks-and-snafus yarn.

As a meditation of American life, Greendale is anything but coherent, but it is fluidly free-associative and shows bizarre wit, as when Young himself shows up to play Wayne Newton. [March 2004, p. 27]

As a superhero movie, it's something of an underachiever, missing out on easy opportunities to push the idea to the next level.

Aesthetically wild and otherwise mild.