With a minimalist plot, Grace Is Gone turns its primary focus on John Cusack, giving the actor an opportunity to display both his talent and his range.

This is not Schrader's finest work. The script is not tight, the ending disappoints, and there's a little too much drawn from American Gigolo. But there are some great one-liners, compelling actors, and well-developed characters.

Surprise of surprises, Revolver turns out to be worse than "Swept Away" - and not just by a little bit.

Juno has a great heroine and is blessed by a screenplay that doesn't try to do too much and finds the perfect ending.

Awake is short enough (about 85 minutes) that it doesn't wear out its welcome. It's not a good movie but it's silly and lively enough to keep most viewers from dozing off, even if that might be a more profitable use of their time.

These are fascinating, three-dimensional individuals brought into the foreground by a pair of today's finest actors.

It's a gentle, unhurried drama about how people can connect with each other through conversation, nonverbal gestures, and writing.

August Rush isn't just a bad movie - it's an aggressively bad movie.

While this is certainly not the first motion picture to blend drawn creations with real life actors, no movie to date has approached it quite this way.

What a horror film SHOULD be - dark, tense, and punctuated by just enough gore to keep the viewer's flinch reflex intact.

Regardless of the medium, this is an effectively brutal story of swords, sorcery, demons, and heroes, with an Oedipal hint or two thrown in for flavor.

While there are a lot of similarities between Rohmer's body of work and Baumbach's latest, the most crucial aspect linking the films is a difference: Rohmer's love of conversation and languorous pace engages the intellect; Baumbach provides a good alternative to an over-the-counter sleep aid.

There's something a little annoying about a movie that tries this shamelessly to be endearing and family friendly.

Newell has followed up a respectable adaptation of a Harry Potter novel with an ignominious translation of something more delicate and literate. It's hard to recommend this movie to anyone except perhaps the MST3K crew.

Fred Claus is less enchanting than the 2003 fairy tale, "Elf" (which was directed by Vaughn's good buddy, Jon Favreau), but no worse than the inexplicably popular Tim Allen series.

One of those movies in which the principals talk a lot but don't say much.

It’s mostly an off-kilter road trip that accomplishes what the Coens do best - seamlessly merging drama, violence, and quirky humor into a whole.

P2 doesn't crash and burn, but its finale is more generic than what the effective first hour leads us to hope for.

Like in "Training Day" and "Malcolm X," where he portrayed less than perfect individuals, Washington rules the screen. His portrayal is one of many things that elevates this film to the level of being consistently entertaining and occasionally compelling.

On the whole, this is another disappointing animated effort and it resides considerably lower on the totem pole than this year's current non-live action champion, "Ratatouille."

Martian Child wants to make us cry. It nearly made me gag. This is an exercise in shameless and inept emotional manipulation.

Philip Seymour Hoffman is in fine form as a man teetering on the edge.

Beneath its aw-shucks, wants-to-be-liked exterior, this is a bankrupt motion picture. It's cloying, artificial, and not the least bit romantic.

It's a depressing experience to view something like Saw IV. It's not just the soullessness that's dispiriting, but the lack of invention. When a movie does little more than repeat what its predecessors accomplished with grotesque effectiveness, it's past time to tip this corpse into its grave and bury it.

Works on its own terms, which is more than can be said of most horror films these days. If this is the kind of movie you're looking for, it delivers.

Gone Baby Gone is powerful stuff - a movie that derives its plot twists from moral conundrums rather than from narrative sleight of hand.

The film's disappointingly black-and-white approach robs characters and situations of badly needed ambiguity.

The book tore at my heart; the movie left me strangely unmoved.