I don't mean that this movie is strikingly good or strikingly bad, in cosmic terms -- it's a solid but totally forgettable entertainment, redeemed somewhat by Barrymore's loud, horsey laugh and some agreeably racy comic situations.

In "Buffalo 66," Gallo was an unfunny prankster. In The Brown Bunny, wearing his heart on his sleeve, he's a real filmmaker.

The sharpest, most authentic portrait of Hollywood life made in the last several years. (As a movie about contemporary Los Angeles, it's approximately 617 percent better than the monumentally bogus "Shopgirl.")

The experience of watching The Night Listener didn't make me feel "real" at all, only stuffed.

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

If you're willing to suspend not just disbelief but also all considerations of logic and intelligence and narrative coherence, it's also a rip-roaring, fun adventure, fatefully balanced between high camp and boyish seriousness at almost every second.

The delirious and sometimes nasty little pleasures that Taken offers don't hinge as much on surprise as they do on the action (which is crisp and fast, with a minimum of computer enhancement) and on the story's unabashedly sentimental underpinnings.

Stupid, crude and hilarious, Step Brothers works by sneaking past our better judgment.

The result is a bombastic, flashback-ridden farrago of skulking villains, scenery-chewing actors, sub-"Ivanhoe"-style dialogue and what seems like a dozen pretty, flaxen-haired men storming in and out of rooms in snits.

Super is occasionally brilliant, sometimes awful and terribly confusing overall.

The movie starts out as a sweet piece of hardcore pie, full of energy and "Repo Man"-esque satire, but ultimately deteriorates into a Percodan-flavored "Afterschool Special."

This Saint is a glum piece of post-Cold War paranoia, and director Phillip Noyce approaches it with the same plodding earnestness he brought to his Tom Clancy adaptations ("Patriot Games," "A Clear and Present Danger").

Robert De Niro and Frances McDormand almost rescue this lifeless, clichéd cop drama! Close isn't good enough!

There’s enough unfulfilled possibility in True Story to make it an intriguing introduction to this story of deception and self-deception, but the balance between true-crime cable soap and the darker, richer layers of Franco’s performance never quite adds up.

I have to assume that Russell Crowe and Warner Bros. did not deliberately set out to insult and anger the Armenian diaspora and its friends around the world, or to participate in covering up a monumental 20th-century crime that shaped the world we live in and remains swathed in too much historical shadow. They disgraced themselves by making this movie the way they did, and then redoubled the disgrace by releasing it this week.

But when people have sex in a movie -- that wasn't, you know, made in Hungary and meant to convince you that life is meaningless -- isn't it a good idea to make it seem kind of hot? Because on that score, No Strings Attached is a near-total failure.

Perry never solves the stage-to-screen translation problem. But the path he has chosen is as intriguing as it is irksome, and it works better than you might expect.

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.

A minor and superficial summer diversion that offers female viewers not much more than a two-hour escape fantasy, but that's not a crime.

Past the first third, Planet of the Apes is entertaining enough, but it stops far too short of being completely seductive.

Lean, fast and undeniably entertaining.

Pretty much rocks.

Sometimes movies make sense in a logical way; sometimes they make only emotional sense. No Reservations makes no damned sense at all.

You need a pair of huge, hairy ones to make a picture this bad and call it Flawless.

It’s a crisp and often hilarious female-centric social satire loaded with delicious talent from the TV-comedy pool.

There's an unkillable something at the heart of Septien, an artistic ambition that's not calculated or cynical, that feels homegrown American but is thoroughly resistant to totalitarian spectacle and the manufactured tides of mass opinion. There's no substitute for that.

Delicious dark comedy.

A would-be tween-oriented hit so scrubbed and sanitized and not worthy of paying attention to that it can barely be said to exist at all.

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

This premise could, just maybe, make for a decent thriller, but everything about Murder by Numbers is so flavorless and rote, so devoid of real suspense and human interest, that you never suspect for a moment that the answers are likely to be engaging.

A Perfect Murder is more like a handful of anemic ice cubes floating in a lukewarm puddle.

This is a glazed, inhuman, cluttered piece of work, a storytelling mishmash that buries the considerable charms of its actors under heavy drifts of silt.

It's great that Perry has seized opportunity for himself and for the performers he employs. But has he succeeded only in creating a kind of ghetto for black-themed entertainment that's of sub-par quality -- one that, admittedly, makes him a lot of money?

This Diane Arbus, as she's portrayed by a tremulous Nicole Kidman, radiates warmth and empathy that's nowhere to be seen in the work of the real Diane Arbus. Fur is intended to be a tribute to Arbus, but it's more a fancifully embroidered tapestry of wishful thinking.

Conspiracy Theory doesn't know whether it wants to be a comedy, a political thriller, a romance or a satire.

Todd Solondz's newest debacle drips with contempt for his audience, his characters and his critics.

It may not be a great film, but for moviegoers, Letters to Juliet is like that long buried missive of its title -- a hopeful sign that when we hold out for good things, our patience is sometimes rewarded.

The Island walks a weird, wobbly line between being stupid, falsely fattened-up entertainment and a picture that just might have possibly been made by a person with a brain -- a scrambled one, but a brain nonetheless.

An acceptably entertaining picture. At just 100 minutes long, it feels tight and trim, and unlike so many contemporary action pictures, it boasts only one ending, instead of three false ones. What's more, it's just as dumb as the original.

There's enough sweetness, and enough just-under-the-surface intelligence, in The Education of Charlie Banks to suggest that Durst may have a future as a filmmaker.

The most sterile of bodice-rippers, a genteel soap opera in which the sex and intrigue are so muted, so tasteful, that they practically blow off the screen in a scattering of dust.

The movie never makes much of a case for its own existence; it's a mediocre western clumsily welded to a mediocre alien shoot-'em-up, and if you allow yourself to think about its treatment of history for as long as one second, you'll feel insulted.

Sometimes stylish flashiness can be fun, and the movie does have a terrific, bleached-out, ice-blue look. But anyone who cares about what actors do has a right to be distrustful of a director who puts more emphasis on the look of his movie than on the performances.

Hoary epic of British Empire valor and cowardice, remade for seventh time, remains rot, old boy.

An uninspired, recycled Mafia gags caper.

The difference is that Michael Caine delivered the impossible; Jude Law can't.

Lacks any layers beyond its own amiable inconsequentiality. It needs the spark of the distinctively American slapstick craziness that has distinguished Frye's previous work.

Cassandra's Dream, an earnest meditation on greed, desire, murder and class struggle, is one of Woody Allen's funniest movies in years -- except Allen doesn't know it.

My eyes never left the screen and my attention never wandered; in a restricted, technical sense of the term, Kidnapped is a masterpiece. But I make no claims for its moral value or for any cathartic or redemptive qualities.

The super-duper whiteness of Ashton Kutcher is funny. Just not funny enough.

It's not merely that these subjects have already been satirized to the point of ultimate tedium; more importantly, Simone just isn't very funny.

Has the same relationship to the dark emotions it glosses that Disneyland's Jungleboat Cruise ride has to an actual excursion down the Amazon.

Range has a marvelous feel for the clichés and conventions of TV-news documentary, and the tone of mournful elegy he strikes here is both convincing and -- believe me, I'm shocked to be writing this -- moving.

Even if you think you know where Lucky You is headed, there's something pleasurable about watching it unfold, maybe chiefly because Hanson isn't trying too hard.

Bleach out the colors, backdate the wardrobes, insert Gary Cooper and Rosalind Russell and you've got one of Frank Capra's lesser films.

With The Good German, Soderbergh -- generally a terrific and creative filmmaker -- apes a style, and a way of seeing, that he clearly doesn't understand. It feels like a hit to the stomach.

2012 is totally, certifiably nuts, without being quite as off-the-wall kitschy as Emmerich's last special-effects extravabanzoo, "10,000 BC."

There's no buildup, just emotional peak after emotional peak.

Hu, a Chinese-American immigrant who made a mid-career switch from business to filmmaking, approaches these characters with genuine passion and compassion, and her evident talent shines through the timeworn material. Acting by all three principals is tremendous.

For me, Franken is funniest at his least guarded and his most incorrect, and as he inches toward becoming a politician himself, we get less and less of that.

Best described as not too bad. Much of the time, though, it's pretty terrible.

That's the culture we live in, where the once-proscribed Pleasure Principle has become iron law and where the recycled, bloated, fish-belly emptiness of something like TRON: Legacy carries boredom to extravagant new heights.

Isn't much more than a student film made by a talented amateur who's in over his head. Burns has a decent eye and a breezy sense of pace, and he'll make better movies if he remembers where he came from.

An offshoot of a popular computer game, is really all about inducing visual awe. And for the first few minutes, it does.

I'm delighted to tell you that the new Thing was made by people who understand what the horror audience wants and don't treat it like a bunch of brain-dead children. Mirabile freakin' dictu.

This movie isn’t terrible enough to derail the “Sherlock Holmes” star’s upward trajectory toward pop-culture domination, but Cumberbatch’s subtle and intriguing performance as the inscrutable Aussie loner behind WikiLeaks is surrounded by a plodding and minor melodrama that’s ludicrously ill suited to the material.

It's an intriguingly murky B-movie that should satisfy genre buffs.

The picture is just a catalog of strained camera moves and preprogrammed gags, with no wit or style.

It's made with an accurate and loving, but also wary and squinty-eyed, view of the South. If only the movie hung together better overall.

The directorial debut of the writer of "The Usual Suspects" keeps tossing the genre hand grenades one might expect, but they all wind up duds.

Terminator Salvation has no brains and no soul; it's just a mass of stiff, creaking metal joints. Clearly, the machines have won.

What we've really got here is a tame screwball adventure dressed up with some desert scenery and some awful computer graphics.

Hancock is just intriguing enough that I kept wishing it were better. But Berg doesn't have the subtle touch that this material needs.

Taken as a whole, Antichrist is a gorgeous, mesmerizing construction, and almost every one of its frames shimmers with demented, imaginary life... It offers more proof, if we need any, that von Trier is one of the most accomplished cinema artists of our time, and also perhaps the most deeply trapped in his own head.

Gripping: Even when it wobbles off-track, it has some juice to it.

Sleuth is well acted, and directed by Branagh with chilly, distant ingenuity. It has a certain edge and daring, or more to the point it pretends to.

So truly and exceptionally fine, a spiny and dispassionate little masterpiece of a marriage movie.

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

Sure, sex and drugs can take you to a higher plane. But not if a movie crushes your will to live first.

The fact that its sound and photography are gracefully crafted, or that fragments of a tolerable film are visible here and there, only makes its dumb-ass, romance-novel version of tragedy worse. This is one of the most badly botched mainstream movies I've seen in years.

The movie doesn't for a moment pretend to be subtle, and it has a sprawling, unfocused quality. But it's got some juice, and it's even faithful, in some surprising ways, to the essence of the original.

Here's an idea: Let's just take that same gizmo-packed alien-attack buddy-flick blockbuster from the summer of '97 ... and make it dumber!

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.

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.

The picture is outrageously predictable and somewhat poky, but there's also something admirably bold about the way it so adamantly demands we swallow its hokum.

Viewed as cinema, it’s an unstable and almost surrealist combination of Soviet-style war propaganda film, Zack Snyder-style action flick and sentimental fairy tale.

There's a gloomy quality to The Good Night I sort of appreciated -- much of it was shot in London, although it's supposed to occur in New York -- but after the initial acerbic setup fades, Gary becomes less and less likable and the movie evaporates into nothing.

Leaving the theater, I couldn't quell those waves of disappointment: It just should have been funnier.

A quiet, unglamorous film that sneaks up on you slowly. I found it had a lovely, peculiar emotional resonance by the time it was over, but it's likely to appeal more to documentary buffs and obsessive Gondry fans than ordinary moviegoers.

All of these women, and Day-Lewis too, sing and dance vigorously and enthusiastically throughout Nine, and the results are spotty, though you can't accuse anyone of not trying.

Not 10 minutes into the smeary mess that is The Man in the Iron Mask, the only sensible question to ask yourself is, "What am I doing here?"

30 Minutes or Less features about half of a decent idea, which works out OK since it ends up as half a movie.

Couldn't be more unhip -- it just never hits the groove.

As it stands, the picture's primary subject is its style; the promotional materials give as much space to the trickery ("a tension-filled, real time journey, experienced in a single uninterrupted shot") as they do to rising leading lady Olsen.

Put Bruce Willis and this bewildering World War II movie in front of the firing line.

What keeps the movie going, besides Softley's intelligent direction and Mathieson's inventive cinematography, is the actors' duet between Spacey and Bridges.

Gets off to a great start and then simply shuts down, like an awesome vintage car on an ambitious road trip.

The good-natured silliness of it all kept me laughing.