Cold Mountain is a romance, refreshingly free from the taint of any political realities other than the "War is hell" variety. It's also completely juiceless.

I'm not quite saying that the unabashed squareness and silliness of Larry Crowne are negatives. They're almost admirable in themselves, and certainly constitute a selling point.

If a couple who belonged to the Christian Coalition, or your maiden aunt, or George and Laura Bush were looking for a reassuring night out, Raising Helen would fit the bill nicely.

Here, Lynch has traded some of his disturbing originality for noir formula and schticky weirdness.

As a ninth-generation descendant of Abigail Faulkner, a convicted Salem witch who only escaped execution because she was pregnant at the time, I call down a terrible malediction upon the people who made this entertaining but indefensible movie.

The Prestige is a trick box with too many false bottoms. Ultimately, the last one simply gives way -- leaving us with a hole, and a little residual darkness, but not much else.

The movie's ridiculous good humor -- laced with just enough barbs to keep it from going soft -- suggest that it's been made with some thought and care. I often found myself laughing in spite of no one, not even myself.

The Replacement Killers has a plot -- barely -- but no story.

It's a charming if conspicuously unfinished film, a half-riotous, half-idiotic send-up of the teen horror genre with a vaguely hip political twist.

Feels very nicely made, at least until it falls apart: By its midpoint, you start to recognize that it has acute creepy-thrilleritis, which means that it promises us some things at the beginning that it has no intention of actually following up on.

If Jackie Brown lost 45 minutes, it might have been a snazzy entertainment. As it is, it wears out its welcome well before the end.

This In-Laws isn't a disaster, it's just not very good.

Anderson's other hallmarks here are brilliant gags that deflate in the execution, potentially interesting characters that end up so flat they feel as if they'd been cut out of paper, a plot that's all setup and no story.

Despite its stellar leading ladies, Anywhere But Here is still a predictable generation-gap drama.

Catch a Fire just doesn't spark.

A good-natured but massively flawed little comedy.

There are moments when Cage (with his perpetually worried eyebrows) and Caine (with his inherent emotional elegance) carry the picture admirably enough.

Management is ultimately undone by its own bland idiosyncrasies. It's nothing but a mismanaged opportunity.

Some questions just can't be answered by science, and the quandary of why Creation is so poundingly dull is one of them.

Beyond that educational element and the delicate performances of Dancy and Byrne, I found Adam dramatically limp, predictable and in a curious way even retrograde.

Not far below the surface Captain Phillips is also an unpleasant and uncomfortable experience, a film that’s not entirely happy with itself.

Alternately winsome and irritating documentary.

There's a reason why Looney Tunes cartoons were six minutes long. Stretched out over an hour and a half, they're wearying.

This is a highly enjoyable summer thrill ride with an action heroine who likes to be on top, literally and figuratively.

Nothing but plot and production values, and there's barely a laugh in it that isn't quashed.

It's a meticulous nest of interlocking elements, not at all haphazard. But in its unrelieved bleakness and singularity of vision, it supplies very little in the way of conventional movieness.

If you buy the overprocessed headcheese of the serial killer as refined genius, you'll love Red Dragon. Or maybe not. Even Hannibal Lecter devotees may lose patience with this picture's grandiose, self-serious ponderousness -- that's Lecterese for, "It's kind of boring in patches, actually."

The movie’s just too boring and middlebrow.

There are some yucks in this ludicrous movie, but what was amusingly imbecilic at 20 inches becomes simply simian at 20 feet. To paraphrase SCTV's fishing louts, some things just don't blow up real good.

Lloyd Webber is everything loud, dumb and tiresome, and everything loud, dumb and tiresome in Evita is him.

For its perilous ambitions, Unbreakable has to be admired, but any ending that succeeds only in pulling the rug out from under a credulous, trusting audience has to be laughed at and called out for the extravagant nonsense that it is.

Would be more fun if it were either more shameless or more principled in the bad-girl way, taking a stance on the value of artistry and attitude over commerce.

Always worth watching when Angelina Jolie steps to the fore. Somehow, she takes a thuddingly ill-conceived role and turns it into gold

Isn't as uproarious as it pretends to be. The foul language, the constant repetition of words like the aforementioned "boobies" -- look, they've even got me doing it -- doesn't feel daring or cathartic, only canned.

While I don't think Blades of Glory is exactly homophobic -- it's not mean-spirited enough for that -- there's something a little too cheap and easy about the way it plays up to the ultra-straight guys in its target demographic.

Alone among the cast, Farrell seems to understand that this movie -- which is lazy and stoned, for all its loud music -- needed somebody to go ape-shit, to pretend to give a crap or at least to have fun.

In the end, Alice in Wonderland comes off as manufactured instead of dreamy. Burton delivers all the wonder money can buy; what's missing is the wonder it can't.

Handled more delicately, Monster's Ball could have been a fine little movie about human beings' capacity for growth and change. As it is, it's less than half a fine movie. The great surprise is that its actors come through in the clutch.

Perfect Stranger is one of those movies that two years, or two months, from now, you won't recall having seen. Ostensibly a movie about big secrets, it comes up with few that are worth keeping, or telling.

Does become more engaging as it lurches along, perhaps because you give up hoping that anything will really happen and settle into the Nicolas Roeg-meets-David Lynch-at-the-cast-party-for-"Taxi Driver" atmosphere of mid-'70s nothingness.

The movie is straightforward in a way that makes it feel less manipulative than it might.

The plot has been greatly streamlined from Ellroy's book, but even so, it isn't any clearer, and the ending, convoluted and barely believable, hits with a thud.

One of those unapologetically cerebral space-exploration sci-fi movies that's both boring and compelling at once.

I felt unable to decide between this movie is the most badass thing ever and OMG turn it off.

It's difficult to make this mediocre adaptation of perhaps the best-loved book in C.S. Lewis' Narnia series -- seem particularly interesting.

This is a pale simulacrum of those high-style travel-porn thrillers of the '60s and '70s, which only serves to remind us that those aren't as easy to pull off as they look, and also that maybe they weren't so great in the first place.

I feel prodigious emotion underneath the pretty, preserved features of The Ballad of Jack and Rose, channeled into a vehicle that's a half-successful imitation of "You Can Count on Me" or "In the Bedroom."

I was startled to look up the running time and discover that X-Men: First Class is only 104 minutes; the second half is so clunky it feels much longer.

I don't know when a bad movie has made me laugh as much as this one. Most of the gags are vintage silliness: foreign double talk, characters donning funny costumes, well-timed profanities.

The fault isn't all in the chemistry, or lack thereof. The more pressing conundrum of "Forces" is that writer Marc Lawrence paints his lead character into a morally ambiguous corner.

I wouldn’t say that Taylor-Johnson has made a good movie from Fifty Shades of Grey, precisely. That’s asking too much. But she and Marcel have risen to the challenge of this bizarre cultural moment with an odd and memorable film.

Save for a few inspired canine gags and a handful of very pretty visual details, Up left me cold. Its charms appear to have been applied with surgical precision; by the end, I felt expertly sutured, but not much else.

Her (Taymore) interpretations and interpolations range from brilliant to indifferent to extremely silly; as Taymor surely knows, there's nothing especially revolutionary in asking Helen Mirren to play the central role of Prospera.

The result is something like a weepy Lifetime melodrama told in the languorous, self-indulgent style of European art cinema, as if Michelangelo Antonioni or Bernardo Bertolucci had wound up in debt to multiple ex-wives and were forced to churn out straight-to-cable movies, circa 1986.

Bend It Like Beckham is supposedly a movie about youth; its biggest shortcoming is that it rarely feels young.

Sructured like a Mad magazine parody where there's a promised joke in each frame. It doesn't add up to a movie.

The first half of the film leisurely examines the deterioration and possible salvation of the soul in a once-glorious, rapidly disintegrating landscape. (His Alaska is full of closed factories, wandering tourists and strip mines.) The second half, with its contrived setup and its individual journeys of self-discovery (harvesting kelp and building fires), is artificial and sadly undermines all that's gone before.

There's something refreshing about the way it invites us to splash around in its little wading pool of amorality.

From a narrative and cinematic point of view, the problem with Joy is simple. Russell is almost totally uninterested in the story of how Joy Mangano explored a bizarre and unknown new business model and became its first self-made tycoon, and as a result we aren’t interested either.

Chéri is a perfect example of a movie that gets many of the details right and the vibe all wrong.

I enjoyed the hell out of it for a while, but it got irritating and self-congratulatory long before it was over and I desperately do not want to see it again.

To believe Déjà Vu, or even to pretend you can actually follow it, you'll need heavy-duty gear -- harness belt, spelunking helmet, a great deal of rope, PowerBars for sustenance. A little coffee wouldn't hurt, either.

The real surprise of Private Parts is that it isn't very funny. It's a flat piece of work with long, slack stretches.

Winds up a lot closer to the movies it's taking off from than it cares to admit: cheap, unimaginative and predictable. It's the horror movie equivalent of one of those "Saturday Night Live" sketches that drags on interminably, though nobody in it seems to have any idea of just what the joke is.

The picture is an exercise in exploitation joi de vivre, and your enjoyment of it will depend on your tolerance for shameless, reckless, unredemptive violence with relatively little artistic or spiritual value. After all, there's a time and a place for everything.

Herman Boone was no doubt a terrific football coach, but the lessons to be drawn from his success in Alexandria are ambiguous, and Remember the Titans is too wrapped up in its weepy macho sentimentality to address them clearly.

The picture is moderately diverting. But it's never much fun.

It's too convoluted by half, and turns what ought to be an idiosyncratic, delightful folktale-film into a baffling personal psychodrama with a nasty sting in its tale. Still, Breillat wouldn't be Breillat if she made movies that were easy to like, or to get your head around.

These interlocking stories don't move along as swiftly or as urgently as they should, and much of the dialogue thumps along on square wheels.

The movie is designed to stir up controversy. (Linklater and Schlosser have admitted as much.) But can you really stir up controversy with a lesson plan?

Comes off not as topical but as opportunist. The picture is brushed with a fine glaze of slickness, a product sealed in a blister pack. It's like airplane air -- it has a packaged freshness that isn't really fresh at all.

If anything, Boulevard is the apotheosis of Williams’ later career, not an anomaly. I wish I could tell you it was a better and more satisfying film, but even its odd, strangled and almost antique quality – it plays out like a well-intentioned Sundance drama from about 1986 – feels curiously appropriate.

MacGruber dutifully rehearses the genre's standbys -- so dutifully, at times, that the joke disappears altogether.

Stone is an undeniably stylish director, and his talent for conveying intense emotion is well put to use here. But more often Stone's in-your-face technique is as exhausting as his steroid-enhanced players.

This is like a Tony Scott movie on quaaludes: Words and pictures are matched up in counterintuitive ways, and although the cutting is much slower than in Scott's hyperactive showboating, it makes just about as much sense. The movie's leisureliness is aggressive; the picture is artfully designed to make you feel that if you're bored, it's your own damn fault.

It's kind of endearing and kind of asinine.

Horror fans should see this, at least in geeky admiration for what it pulls off, but in the long run it's no more than a crisp footnote to genre history.

A very gentle picture, intended to soothe us, not to jolt or shock us. But it's so gentle that it lacks any discernible energy; sometimes it seems there's barely enough tension in the story to keep the images from sliding off the screen.

When you watch Greenwald's barrage of pirated Fox News footage -- his filmmaking techniques are clearly testing the outer limits of the "fair use" doctrine, and may yet land him in court -- it's an overwhelming experience well beyond the hoot-inducing moments.

It might not measure up to the 1967 original, but now Satan's got sooty pussycat eyes and a kitten-cruel smile.

But as badly as the younger women in The First Wives Club are treated, none of the three central characters, with whom we're supposed to identify so strongly, comes off that well either.

Although his (Eastwood's) intentions are good, he simply isn't capable of the wry, wistful blend of humor and sadness this story desperately needs.

It might be too slow and morbid for American viewers without an existing interest in the subject.

I would have hated Love Actually less if it had been a total, clumsy disaster; the problem is that Curtis does pull off some amazingly well-tuned moments, as well as some very funny ones.

Even as a nostalgia ride, Starsky & Hutch poops out before it ever gets going.

The movie overall is painless if not exactly electrifying.

Seyfried’s performance is worth the price of admission. But Linda Lovelace deserved something more.

The plot construction here is especially lazy. The whole movie is built toward the dance competition.

Gandini makes it seem as if the nation of Dante and Fellini has been conquered by "Girls Gone Wild." As hyperbolic cases go, that's a pretty delicious one, but it's not quite true yet.

Suffers from way too many fight scenes that last way too long and look way too computer-generated.

If the resulting film doesn't work equally well at all levels, Wood (who starred in "Thirteen") gives an astonishing performance that pushes it most of the way there.

Hawke gives his all here -- or maybe just half his all -- and it isn't quite enough: He's trying to be soulful, but he really just looks a little tired. The real delight is Willem Dafoe, as the rednecky leader of the survivor humans.

Reasonably effective.

It's almost as lame-brained as any Hollywood blockbuster, if prettier and more pretentious.

Never as delightful and silly as it needs to be. The action is often manic, and there's a veneer of unapologetic corniness to it.

I wasn't sure a movie musical could be worse than last year's styrofoam-and-gilt swan-boat travesty "Phantom of the Opera," but I'm afraid Rent proves me wrong.

The picture is clever, somber, quiet: There's just no reason it has to be as deadly boring as it is.

In the end, Tupac: Resurrection gives us too much raw Tupac, and yet somehow not enough. He remains a mystery -- one who still sells lots and lots of records.