Deschanel may not be as brilliant as the great comedian Gracie Allen (and, at any rate, it's too soon to tell). But her Rube Goldberg timing (which only seems indirect) and blissfully zonked demeanor suggest the spirit of Allen. She's the only actor in Failure to Launch who isn't earthbound; she leaves everyone else in the dust simply by hanging back.

An adamantly unterrible picture, a reasonably enjoyable diversion.

The problem -- as anyone who gets home from the movie in time to catch even a portion of "NYPD Blue" can tell you -- is that the genre that Lumet invented has buried him alive.

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.

Of course, the very existence of someone like Willmott -- a black university professor who can make an angry, ruthless satire about American racism with impunity -- suggests that we're still a long way from living in the CSA.

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

Perhaps understandably, these artifacts of a vastly different ideological and economic era -- have become kitsch objects, the focus of a half-horrified nostalgia, in the midst of the feverish Chinese boom.

It's in no way a stupid movie. The trouble is that there's only so much emotional energy you can expend on these assholes before you start wondering why you're paying attention to them at all.

Gives no indication that Jean-Luc Godard has anything left to say that is worth hearing, no indication that he has any drive or passion to continue making movies. What's on the screen is habit -- accomplished, rote, empty.

There's no life, no juice, in the picture. Instead of tempting you into submission, it merely drugs you. It's surprising that a filmmaker who gave us such a lively debut, "Chicago," could slap us with a picture as dull and worthy as this one.

There's nothing in either the conception or execution to lift it above a TV-movie tear-jerker.

An uneven but surprising movie, often outrageously funny and just as often completely flat.

There are epic impulses everywhere you look in There Will Be Blood; what's missing is character development, focused storytelling and, most significantly (apart from that terrific opening sequence), any sense of raw, intuitive drama.

(Harron) has made a passionless movie about a passionless man, and it's all supposed to add up to make us feel or even just think something, but what?

One night in 1408 stretches out until it ends up feeling more like a routine three-day business trip. The scariest thing in it may be the way the clock radio has a way of turning itself on, loudly, of its own accord. The song is always the Carpenters' "We've Only Just Begun." Now THAT'S horror.

I felt like I'd been invited to a seven-course dinner, and all seven turned out to be cake – and then the host insisted on delivering a lecture about how cake would bring me closer to God.

I'm not sure whether to recommend The Baytown Outlaws as a guns 'n' glory time-waster or warn you off it as a piece of mendacious trash. So I'll do both.

Isn't a terrible movie, but it is a tremendous disappointment.

A disappointing picture that suffers from all manner of ills: Both the direction and the dialogue are stiff and awkward, and Kramer -- who also wrote the script -- crams too many not-believable-enough subplots into the movie's "Crash"-style construction. Yet Crossing Over is an interesting failure.

Suffers from a lack of conviction.

There's nothing wrong with Chan's making a silly comedy for kids. But he's got more in him than grinning, nodding and falling down a lot. All he needs is a filmmaker who's ready to let him to make that leap.

I'm always grateful to practice a little affirmative action on behalf of grade-C sleaze movies with a budget you could probably locate in your sofa cushions or your dryer, and Tim McCann's digital-video opus Nowhere Man is a fine example of the species.

A very mixed bag. Despite some faint gestures in the direction of journalistic balance, it plays a lot like a two-hour infomercial for the Playboy publisher's historical importance, philosophical depth and personal greatness.

A simple entertainment that's by and large carried on the backs of its actors, some who are wonderful and others who are merely likable.

Eastwood is so busy humanizing Japanese soldiers that he ends up rewriting history.

To the extent that the joke is on us, the audience, and the decadent taste we've acquired for flashy violence, it works; point taken.

Even in 3D, as the picture is being shown in some theaters -- Ginormica is a disappointingly flat character.

Although it's supposed to be supremely romantic, there's no daring in it, no go-for-broke passion. It's a nice little movie about romantic compulsion, just big enough to fit in a teacup.

I suspect this guy can make a good movie if he learns the right lessons; he's made about half of one here. But the praise heaped upon A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints is way too much, way too soon.

Parts of it are brilliant; some of it feels tired and overplayed. Cohen has come up with some marvelous satirical motifs; elsewhere, he's just showing how far he'll go to get a laugh.

Warm Bodies is more a mild-mannered, emo-flavored romcom than a zombie movie. It has some tepid action scenes, a few swatches of genuine humor and a general spirit of cheerfulness, especially considering it depicts a future in which civilization has been destroyed.

The good news is that Duchovny has an undeniable feel for this medium, and a fine rapport with actors.

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

The best thing I can say about it is that the costumes and the hambone acting keep it from being a deadly bore.

Clearly designed to be an action thriller with emotional underpinnings. But you can't get blood from a stone, no matter how hard you squeeze. And so Cruise, a huge box-office star, is the single bright, blinking emblem of the failure of Mission: Impossible III.

It’s also true that toward the end of a big series the story eats the stars, and everybody in this movie, even Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss Everdeen, the Artemis-style revolutionary icon, is pretty much part of the furniture.

Team America, for all its outrageousness, is the first work from Parker and Stone that I'd describe as a failure of nerve.

Barbershop 2 is like going out for a bad meal with a group of people you love being with. You're happy to be in their company; you just wish you didn't leave feeling hungry.

The problem with Hirschbiegel's ("Das Experiment," "Downfall") convoluted, car-crash-laden Invasion is that it doesn't know what symbolism it wants to grasp.

Meet the Browns, like the rest of Tyler Perry's movies and plays, will find its audience. His talent lies in knowing what people will buy. He's a marketer, not a filmmaker.

What was once an all-important signpost to adulthood is really little more than a simple romantic comedy whose "countercultural" message, insofar as it has one, is decidedly retrograde. [Review of re-release]

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.

The film has moments of goofy delight, some pseudo-David Lynch spookery and a couple of comic supporting turns.

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?

If Client 9 plays a lot like a murky, gripping political thriller, it lacks a fully satisfying ending -- or a fully satisfying hero.

I'm not sure whether Howard and screenwriter Allan Loeb are to be commended for aspiring to something odd and original, or condemned for a result that's so messy and miscellaneous.

Snaps to life too late. But at least there IS life in it. It doesn't hold together as a piece of filmmaking, but there's no doubt it comes from somewhere close to Schreiber's heart.

It's kind of fun to watch Pacino and Liotta and Tatum and James Ransone, as Jonathan's foulmouthed partner, as they roar at each other and suck the marrow from the hambone. You can see why actors want to work with Montiel, but actors are notoriously bad judges of whether good scenes will ever add up to a worthwhile movie, which is exactly the problem here.

So some good acting and decent scares get entombed within too many dull postmodern iterations.

Kelly is devoted to telling his stories visually -- except when he's not. And the second half of The Box, unfortunately, underscores everything Kelly, as a filmmaker, wants to be and just can't.

You may find yourself spellbound or colossally irritated; it's a close call either way.

Slowly but surely, Flight degenerates from a tale of moral paradox and wounded romance into a mid-1990s after-school special about addiction and recovery.

Strives to be a work of greatness. But Kaufman's overarching vision is a lot less interesting than the small insights he gathers along the way. This is what happens when life imitates art, and blows it.

Though dazzled by its ultra-modern wizardry and the high gloss of its production values, one can also feel the globalist double standard roiling underneath the adolescent-kid fantasy plot. Jumper tells us that Americans fantasize about getting rich by stealing and going everywhere they want without restrictions; that they are materialistic, disrespect foreign antiquities, and remain blind to their own and to world history.

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.

A dragging, rhythmless piece of work.

Before long, the story's conceit -- a loud-and-clear metaphor for the ways in which we all sometimes feel alien when it comes to human relationships -- just becomes wearying.

Fantastic Four doesn't expand on, or even illuminate, anything much beyond the most basic theme of what it feels like to be an adolescent misfit. This is a comic-book movie that actually makes an effort not to go over kids' heads.

An uneven but impressively ambitious picture.

Irritatingly moralistic romantic comedy.

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.

The satire doesn't go far enough.

If a movie can be fascinating and tedious at the same time, Inside Deep Throat -- which more or less depicts the America I have just described -- is that movie.

To say that this undercover operation does not go well is an understatement, and the resulting portrait of the domestic anti-terrorism campaign, although it’s admittedly a portrait in miniature, could hardly be more disheartening.

There's almost no such thing as an entertaining holiday trifle anymore -- the kind of casual, cheerful little picture that you might see on a whim and end up enjoying, even beyond the breadth of your modest expectations. The Perfect Holiday is an attempt, at least, to resurrect the idea of the trifle

Match Point is a fatally neat exercise in detached craftsmanship, and maybe that's the best we can expect from Allen at this point.

Spartan is the same old stuff, but now it's been thoroughly Mametized, like a spray-on treatment you could spritz out of a can.

Humor is notoriously subjective, of course, but I didn't find Young Adult especially funny. It's an intermittently engaging fable of American homecoming that's both intentionally and unintentionally awkward, and flavored from bitter to sour all the way through.

I, Robot strives to be so many things that it ultimately falls away to nothing, a heap of expensive metal parts.

As light as a squirt of styling mousse.

As lousy as it is, Diary of a Mad Black Woman is weirdly fascinating.

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."

It's a compact and symmetrical picture with all its plot points in the right places, but I never found it convincing in the slightest.

Nolan may want us to believe in the darkness that lurks within each of us, but instead of leading us to it visually, he chops it up and sets it out in front of us, a grim, predigested banquet.

The new black movies make those of us sitting in the theater watching feel as if we actually count for something. That good feeling can carry you through this movie's silly and dull patches.

The movie chickens out. In the Valley of Elah could have been really interesting -- and really daring -- if it had focused on Hank's realization that his own child, supposedly a good kid, had perhaps committed the kinds of atrocities that would make any decent human being recoil. The movie (which Haggis also wrote) dances around that territory, but doesn't dare to march straight into its terrifying maw.

The picture has a lax, sleepy vibe: There's never anything taut or electric about it. And so, like Pacino's character, we sleepwalk through it.

Almost utterly defeated by its subject's sardonic stonewalling.

The irony of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is that it has the most literate pedigree of any action movie you're likely to see this year or next -- and it's been made by people who seem to have no sense of how to tell a story.

For a big-budget action movie Spider-Man 2 is modest and not assaultive -- it has a boring decency.

It's an unholy mess, simultaneously too Gothic and too sarcastic, that preaches liberation and delivers only puritanism. It's a craftsmanlike but robotic imitation of "interesting" filmmaking, only in patches, and by accident, the real thing.

So to call this a good movie is really a stretch; it's more like 38 percent of a good movie. But it probably has just enough dumb fun and pointless violence and car chases to seem like a highly viable option for large numbers of people this weekend.

Next is clearly an attempt at a puzzle movie, one of those brainteaser pictures that lures viewers into another dimension, but it doesn't have the momentum, the quick-wittedness, to keep us wondering what's going to happen next.

It's as if the whole movie's on Prozac, only in this case the antidepressants are cuteness and romance.

Whether or not Luhrmann’s “Gatsby” will go down in history as a legendary flop is not for me to judge (though all signs currently point toward yes), but it surely belongs to the category of baroque, overblown, megalomaniacal spectacles dubbed “film follies” by longtime Nation film critic Stuart Klawans.

Funny People is an ambitious, misshapen picture that feels like two, maybe even three, separate movies uncomfortably jammed into one.

Mechanical plot that seems dull even before it laboriously clanks and screeches into motion.

Whenever Harris or Tobolowsky come on-screen they stop Memento dead in its clever tracks. You want to tell Nolan to stop all the po-mo deconstructive game playing and pay attention to the two human beings in front of him.

Anyone heading to Burlesque expecting it to live up to the standards of "Showgirls" is in for some serious disappointment: Burlesque isn't good, mind you, but it isn't the kind of bad that inspires midnight screenings and drinking games and Halloween costumes.

Matsumoto isn't the first Japanese director to go all meta on the superhero tradition (consider also Takashi Miike's 2004 "Zebraman"), but this work of improbable lunacy may well max out the genre.

Paris Hilton is the big draw in Jaume Collet-Serra's not-really-a-remake horror-slasher thriller House of Wax, and she'd have to be: There's so little else going on in it that you find yourself waiting for her few brief scenes.

Fonda and Sykes are made for each other, and their incessant bickering and arguing are about the only things that give Monster-in-Law any life.

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!

Deep Impact is the work of someone crass enough, and in some essential way mad enough, to try to turn the apocalypse into a tear-jerker.

Shanley offers no resolution to this Sharks vs. Jets conflict. For that, we have to wait for "Doubt! The Musical."

It doesn't help that Julia Ormond -- perhaps the most un-Smilla-like actress walking the planet -- is cast in the starring role. She gives a competent performance, but she looks like Nancy Drew's pert-nosed cousin who somehow got trapped while sleuthing inside a snow globe, not the prickly, androgynous warrior Smilla is meant to be.

Dull and listless from the start, partly because the leads fail to connect and partly because both the script and the direction let them down.

There’s nothing disgraceful about The One I Love, and if you’re just in the mood for a VOD time-waster, you could do worse. But despite the agreeable lead performances, it doesn’t quite repay your 90 lost minutes of life.