It's in the script, however, that del Toro the writer falls a wee bit short of del Toro the visionary.

The leaden performances (Erik Scott Smith is the worst offender), the unlistenable musical interludes, the amateurish caricatures, and the short stories' lack of overall cohesion make this a garden party you should take a rain check on.

It's difficult to enjoy a thriller in which the big reveal is such a clunker, but if there's an exception to that rule, Tell No One might be it.

When it works, it really works, but it's debatable whether its target audience will really enjoy anything more than the nifty robots. Which is fine, too. Robots are pretty cool.

If you're looking for memorable dialogue and gripping drama, then you better get in line for another flick. But if it's spellbinding special effects and high-wire acts you crave, Wanted should be at the top of your list for big budget thrill rides.

A disaster, representing a number of negative firsts for Shyamalan.

By handing the directorial reigns to Louis Leterrier, the Parisian filmmaker responsible for the breathless "Transporter" films, Universal reveals its desire to emphasize spectacle over story.

Fans of strange love stories and detective thrillers would do well to investigate this indie gem.

It was definitely a great idea to give Kung Fu Panda the IMAX treatment. The fight scenes, quivering whiskers and moist noses, foggy mountaintops, and fluttering peach blossoms are equally impressive on the huge, curved screen.

To find a comparison for You Don't Mess With the Zohan in Adam Sandler's filmography, you have to go back to 2000's "Little Nicky," a film with a fantasy slant that allowed for jokes of unencumbered silliness.

It gives you everything you ever loved about the series, and blows it out into super-size cinematic proportions.

It's clear the creators wanted to bring our hero back but were uncertain where to put him. Sadly, Indiana Jones is not relevant amidst the atomic blasts and disillusionment of the Soviet era, and he's not even recognizable in the pixilated universe of recent cinema. To quote the great Dr. Jones, "It belongs in a museum!"

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.

This is not a film occurring in an alternate or imaginary reality; rather, it is a film of NO reality, that is, a picture that changes the rules of its universe strictly according to its creators' whims.

The Fall is a movie whose every frame pulsates with the desire to be a transportive, transcendent work of cinema. And each one of said frames is full of visual bedazzlement and wonder. So full that one is loathe to sum up with the phrase "Close, but no cigar." But there is something, finally, kind of pushy about the film's desire to be a masterpiece.

It hardly adds up to much, but it doesn't mean to, and it'll leave you with a cleaner conscience than an Austin Powers picture.

Iron Man is the first Marvel Comics superhero movie I would willingly sit through a second time. This is the result not just of what the movie does, but what the movie doesn't do.

What to make of it all? Hard to say. Just to take in the fact that its soundtrack is made up of music by both J. Spaceman and Sun City Girls is to understand that this is a picture that's divided against itself in a way that's perhaps too hermetic to be comprehended.

For whatever its flaws, Redbelt offers up a good deal of Mametian red meat while also trying to break out of some of the strictures that Mamet's erected around his own work.

An exhausting 90 minutes of SNL-centric mediocrity that gives one the nagging feeling that Tina Fey's inability to cut the cord is going to quickly start to cool interest in her upcoming projects.

At the screening I attended, someone walked in wearing a shirt that read "I HEART BONGS," so that gives you a pretty good idea of the target audience. Maybe this time they will rouse themselves from the couch and make it possible for us to follow Harold and Kumar through more adventures.

It's distinctly Morrisean, as it were, and seeing his style applied to subject matter with which one is already somewhat familiar makes one... well, question the style a bit.

Yeah, it's pretty funny. And it's a pretty accurate depiction of a certain feature of male romantic humiliation. But it's also a little -- and this is one of my two misgivings about the movie -- expected.

While "House of Sand and Fog" remained (somewhat precariously) balanced on the knife-edge that can turn tragedy into bathos, this picture doesn't fare nearly as well, and begins weighing down the viewer with its putative significance only minutes after its opening credits.

Whatever planet these dance sequences are happening on, their cuckoo surrealism is the movie's saving grace.

Dennis Quaid is mostly lost at sea as Lawrence Wetherhold, the Carnegie Mellon lit professor; he apparently saw fit to tinker with his performance as filming went along, greeting us in some scenes as a noticeably swishy highbrow, while at other moments he's channeling the smiling, drunken menace of Nicholson's Jack Torrance.

If you’re looking for some big, stupid fun, you could do worse than Street Kings.

This is not a children's picture, although it touches on the imaginative powers and emotional resilience of children. It's another slice of Hou's distinctly poetic realism, and as such, also a kind of tribute to Paris -- the Paris of both today and of the older film.