It’s entirely ludicrous but highly enjoyable.

Johnny Depp and Keira Knightley manage to sparkle, but this overstuffed sequel is no treasure.

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.

As light as a squirt of styling mousse.

Marley & Me gets so much surprisingly right. It may be designed to reach a broad audience, but it doesn't pander.

As a story of courage and personal growth, The Guardian is perfunctory, a saga of character building that could (and may, advertently or otherwise) serve as a Coast Guard recruitment vehicle. But it's far more interesting as a tale of two faces: Kutcher and Costner have a kind of visual chemistry that's just as elusive as the other kind. And the connection and contrast between them remind us that Hollywood isn't as forgiving of older male actors as we like to think.

So, yeah - even if In Time descends from its gripping and thought-provoking premise into a mediocre chase thriller before it's over, it's still pretty damn satisfying to watch in the current climate.

A pallid, mediocre tale that treacles its way through well-worn channels.

Who cares about the fate of privacy, of all things, when you can watch three sexy babes stamp out crime in zip-off suits and high-heeled boots?

Brian De Palma's Redacted doesn't quite work as a movie. But it works as SOMETHING.

The movie is efficient but scores zero in suspense, wit or class.

This piece of midsummer madness is undeniably silly and delusional, a dire political fable told as tongue-in-cheek pastiche.

I have to hand it to Hardwicke: I was a lot less bored by The Nativity Story than I feared I'd be.

Anger Management is so almost-but-not-quite funny that it feels like one colossal gyp.

The embodiment of every conservative paranoid's slathering fantasies about Paula Jones, Vince Foster and Whitewater.

It's an intensely crafted and genuinely memorable horror film from a striking new talent.

Both for good and for ill, LUV has a film-school feeling about it, and channels a legacy of fatalistic American crime cinema that includes "Mean Streets" and "Treasure of the Sierra Madre."

Wild Side is sometimes maddening to watch, but will haunt you for days afterward.

The Devil's Own isn't the disaster its bad advance publicity might lead you to expect. But it's a disjointed, sluggish picture.

The fatal flaw of Down With Love... is that in mining what's kitschily amusing about those movies, it also re-creates far too faithfully everything that's unbearable about them.

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

The Holiday drags on for more than two hours, long enough for even the most ardent suitor to lose interest. The premise, so delectable at the start, quickly begins to feel tired and oversold.

A wild and sweet little picture about sex, redemption and music, though perhaps not necessarily in that order.

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

Taken on its own terms, it's a light, sweet, curiously enjoyable misfit romance, whose real star is not Aniston but her magnificently awkward Lothario, Jason Bateman.

Citizen Koch is kind of a mess. But it’s a mess well worth discovering for yourself.

How's the movie? Big, loud, brutal and stupid, that's how it is. But then, you don't need a critic to tell you that -- anyone with a grade-school education who's seen the previews can figure that out.

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.

The Lake House is an example of the way bad movies can sometimes be more interesting than merely mediocre, workmanlike ones, and of the way they sometimes compel us even against our better judgment.

It's a tight, taut, expertly crafted thriller from a director to watch.

Whatever the reason, Bean saddles Atkinson with a story that hangs on him like a dead weight and a filmmaking style that surrounds him like dead air.

A ponderous but mesmerizing tick-tock thriller.

[Rec] 2 is a pell-mell, edge-of-your-seat, theme-park ride through hell, and I strongly advise you to ignore the aspersions cast upon it by snooty critics and random Internet fanboys alike. I am your friend, horror fans! I know what you need, and this is it.

Unexpected late-summer treat.

Grand, juicy fun regardless, tapping as it does into some archetypal pleasure center.

LaBute, in his infinite and marvelous wrongness, infuses his movie with a delicacy of feeling that couldn't be more right for the material. LaBute obviously approached the project with his hands and his heart open: Frame by frame, it's a humble picture, a movie that isn't afraid to be an entertainment.

The thing is, it works. Or at least it works for me. I left the theater convinced that House of Fools is Konchalovsky's best work in almost 20 years (which it is) and that it might be something close to a masterpiece.

Airy and enchanting, this romantic comedy works overtime to sprinkle moonlight and stardust over itself.

A gentle, easygoing picture -- it's not exactly dramatically gripping, but somehow, its spirit carries it through.

Spins toward its glum, dishwater-gray whirlpool of an ending, which doesn't have nearly as much emotional punch as it should. It doesn't leave you feeling spent -- only soaked.

It turns out to be more a throwaway piece of pop ephemera, like a '90s "Casino Royale," momentarily arresting and soon forgotten.

As you sit through the interminable two-hours-plus that constitute The Fifth Element -- a colossally stupid, overbearingly pompous new movie by Luc Besson -- you can expect to become acquainted with boredom on the most elemental level.

People will either love Detachment or hate it, and either way it provides powerful testimony to the unrivaled passion and undiminished craft of director Kaye, whose notoriety in the film industry is matched by his near-total invisibility to the general public.

Baldwin brings so much lumbering weariness to his role that we can't help feeling something for his character

Watching Last Holiday, I kept waiting for the moment I could decree the movie truly terrible, the instant I could comfortably put my pen and notebook away and give it up for lost. But that moment never came, partly because I never fail to take pleasure in Latifah, and partly because I couldn't shake the eerie feeling that the movie I was watching was something of a ghost from another time.

The pleasant surprise when you actually watch Insidious is that it turns out to be a moderately effective suburban-family creep show, majorly in debt to "Poltergeist" and "The Exorcist" and capturing at least a little of their spirit.

Speaking as someone who despises almost every aspect of the Thatcherite social-economic consensus that has defined the capitalist world for thirty years (and almost every aspect of Thatcher's actual policies), she deserves more than this.

Such weak medicine. Sure enough, it goes down. Keeping it down is another matter.

In this bizarrely discordant mixture of ultraviolent action footage, bad acting, crisp special effects and futuristic camp, the remnants of Heinlein's rhetoric of military pride stick out like a grimy Marine uniform at a high-toned Hollywood party.

Doesn't seem geared to kids at all: It's so adult that it's massively boring.

An achingly sweet, shambling creation that takes its time and wanders through slow-moving sight gags and odd supporting performances (like Mia Farrow's, as a dithery, lonely woman who is among the store's only customers) and ends up with a marvelously warm community-melding scene out of maybe 1924, with a bunch of people standing around on the street watching a black-and-white silent film.

Considered as a whole it's a wonderful and hilarious phenomenon, most of it is executed to Dadaist perfection.

The bigger question to ask about 300 is why, for a supposedly rousing tale of heroism, it's so curiously unaffecting.

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.

So unapologetically loopy and lush and ridiculous that I found it irresistible.

The whole thing is handsomely mounted, with plenty of Goya paintings and supposed observations about the ironies of history and the cyclical nature of life, etc. Forman's always been a huckster, but I never thought I'd see him waste this many good actors on a movie this bad.

The characters in the Argentinean heart-warmer Valentín spend so much time squabbling and yelling that after a while I began to long for a nice movie about a family of mutes.

It's almost really cool, without quite being really cool.

You know how they say to find one thing and do one thing well? Well, Pattinson's thing is glowering. It doesn't help matters that the movie itself is so painfully mediocre.

For deeply steeped Marvel Comics aficionados it will probably be fairly satisfying, and there’s no reason on earth why anyone else should even bother.

This is a thriller where the cutting, even in most of the action sequences, is meticulous but leisurely. The elaborate set pieces are so beautifully worked out that you could take them apart, shot by shot, and fit the pieces back together like an intricate Chinese puzzle.

Watching The Producers is simply exhausting.

A canny, ingeniously crafted guilty pleasure.

Depp aside, the movie is higher on style than it is on substance.

The movie has some sex in it, and yet it's as unsexy as a rusty old olive oil can (minus the olive oil).

Suffers from a lack of conviction.

The movie never fails to be crisply written and cannily delivered, but it's way too steeped in TV-culture inside jokes for its own good, and August's attempts to suffuse the whole thing with ontological or theological meaning are ultimately pretty dumb.

A compelling and unpretentious indie built around two wonderfully layered performances and straightforward storytelling. Give it a listen.

What we’re left with is a teen-oriented action flick with an A-minus cast, a mixture of “Transformers”-style robot battles and cops-and-robbers showdown that never feels all that exciting or cutting-edge, bracketed by some intriguing and half-successful moments of social commentary.

The charm and the shoddiness of Haiku Tunnel stem from the same source. It's basically a San Francisco underground theater production that somehow escaped onto the movie screen without losing any of its eccentric, insular qualities.

Whatever complex or interesting ideas might have been found in the source material have been watered down, skimmed over, mashed into nonsense or simply ignored.

Windtalkers is the best of Woo's American movies, and the one with the sturdiest and most direct links to his earlier pictures.

If you want a movie that eviscerates “The Hunger” and eats its bloody insides while daring you to look away, here it is.

It's exactly the sort of movie that Hollywood specializes in, the kind which seems on paper as if it ought to be entertaining, but winds up a massive and chaotic drag.

Although The Brothers Grimm is partly an inventive fantasy, it's also a cluttered, jangly action picture, and there's too much noise and commotion for Gilliam's subtler ideas to really resonate.

An oddly listless and downbeat affair, setting these two beloved eccentrics adrift in a road movie that's rarely funny enough to connect as absurdist comedy and rarely compelling enough to work as recession-era male-bonding melodrama.

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

Part of what's so entertaining about Six Days, Seven Nights is the way Reitman happily mixes all the conventions of the stranded-on-an-island motif -- unpleasant encounters with creepy-crawly nature, the building of stuff out of bamboo and found objects, the first kiss in paradise.

Even with its abundant flaws and its willingness to embarrass itself this strange and extraordinary film never lost me and never let me go; it wrapped me in a dreamlike rapture and then in a sense of profound and nearly universal personal tragedy.

Death at a Funeral works and then some. The movie is labored, overly familiar and about 10 miles away from deep -- an elemental, sometimes excremental comedy about petty twits behaving badly. As totally unnecessary remakes go, it's one of the best.

It's one of the year's signature film experiences.

It's that sense of ardor that's missing from Ben Chaplin's performance in Birthday Girl.

Kate Hudson gives the best performance in the movie, though she seems always on the verge of being funnier and dirtier than she's allowed to be. Elsewhere the cast is accumulated for their cachet more than for any role they're given to play. Some of the casting makes no sense.

Watching Streep and her two BFFs, played by Christine Baranski and Julie Walters, grinning and giggling their way through Mamma Mia! I felt I was being thoroughly, and unenjoyably, punished.

If anything, Think Like a Man, the awkward but intermittently amusing black-centric ensemble film built out of comedian Steve Harvey's self-help bestseller "Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man" deserves a gold star for its generous portrayals of Caucasians.

What really saves She’s All That from being just another why-good-heavens-you’re-beautiful piece of piffle, however, is the way its lesser elements sparkle. The romantic comedy may be predictable, but director Iscove’s over-the-top parody of faux celebrity — by way of Lillard’s gleefully preening, partying, getting-sensitive-for-the-camera ex-Real Worlder — is a hoot.

Noé isn't a kid (he'll turn 40 this year) but he's still young as a filmmaker; he may yet learn to control his desire to sear the audience's eyes out with a red-hot poker before he's even started telling a story.

Statham isn't an actor who coasts, not even in a recklessly enjoyable picture like Transporter 3. He does the work, so we don't have to: His Frank Martin is the personification of pleasure without guilt.

Without a genuinely charming central character to pull it together, the movie is a shamble of tedious passages punctuated by a few desultory chuckles.

You feel you've been both a little creeped out and vigorously entertained. Its showmanship comes through in the clutch.

One reason Wild Things works so well is that director John McNaughton sustains a darkly comic tone throughout the film without letting it degenerate into farce.

Malkovich is usually such a numbingly self-serious actor. But he cuts loose here in a way that's outlandishly brilliant: It's his best performance in years.

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

Gitai's experimental technique in Free Zone is dizzying, sometimes thrilling.

At times fun but mostly maddeningly uneven, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back feels less like a full-fledged movie than a side project Smith took on to amuse himself and his buddies.

My Blueberry Nights may not quite be what fans of either Jones or Wong Kar-wai -- directing his first film in English -- are expecting. It's a late-night, lovelorn mood piece in a minor key, not complicated or convoluted, finally more confection than substance.

"Star Wars" fans deserve better.

There's plenty to like here, especially for connoisseurs of the action genre, and there's also plenty to make you wonder whether Besson and co-writer Robert Mark Kamen scribbled their screenplay on a batch of Marseilles cocktail napkins and then lost one or two.