Graced with so many fanciful touches and features such a marvelous assortment of U.K. and American actors that it seems almost unjust that the final product is so curiously lacking in magic.

The movie of the season for sci-fi and horror fans.

A landmark -- the first movie to give a convincing, feature-length account of sex from a woman's point of view.

This adolescent comic-noir trounces Shakespeare's "Macbeth," but Maura Tierney sizzles as a vengeful Lady Frycook.

Angel-A isn't as nutso as some of Besson's other pictures: It doesn't have the crazy inventiveness of, say, "The Fifth Element." As I watched it, I found myself wishing it were just a little loopier. But the picture is still seductive and pleasing.

If you can get past its toothpick of a premise, Run Fatboy Run is a perfectly enjoyable light comedy. It's also just good enough that I wanted it be better.

It's the kind of small pleasure that can make you feel intensely grateful.

The Judge is watchable but thoroughly specious. It’s dull and reassuring, an infantile fantasy of homecoming and forgiveness set in a mythical version of America no one in the target audience has ever seen.

The big screen doesn't seem to like Kutcher much, or even to GET him, whatever there is to get.

A highly entertaining and refreshingly nonjudgmental movie

Lush, even juicy entertainment.

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.

Should have been either a whole lot worse or a whole lot better than it is: If it were worse, we could simply toss aside the things that are fun and entertaining about it and not even think twice. And if it were better -- well, we'd have fewer complaints all around.

Occasionally thrilling, sometimes hilarious and mostly absolute claptrap. Think of it as a lot like drinking a fourth cup of holiday eggnog: Not really a good idea at all, but you might have fun.

In its better, non-jizz-related moments, Ted 2 is a loosey-goosey stoner road trip with an irrelevant, appealing blend of innocence and sweetness: John and Sam doing a “Walk Like an Egyptian” dance number in the law library, for no particular reason, or the “Law & Order” theme-song lyrics, a bit of brilliant standup material stuck in the middle of a movie.

Could have been a decent psychological portrait; it ends up being a fairly weak thriller.

The pacing is off, the emotional tone is wobbly, and none of the actors seem to be acting in the same style or the same movie.

Perfectly inoffensive and harmless, but it's also drab and inert.

There's a fine line dividing Hollywood tradition and overly manipulative junk, and Tears of the Sun crosses it.

So unself-conscious and breezy that you find yourself sailing along with it; its flaws become as negligible as harmless barnacles nestled well below the water line.

This is a sweet-tempered and small movie that’s not remotely trying to be hip.

I'm not really sure how strong this material is on its own: I kept trying to imagine what The Oh in Ohio would have been like with other actors in the leading roles, and I couldn't -- Rudd, DeVito and especially Posey seem integral to it.

I walked out of Scary Movie feeling as if I'd been whacked around with a two-by-four for an hour and a half.

Chan is still one of the most amazing -- and one of the most charming -- physical performers the movies have given us.

Spacey's engaging for a while in one of his patented double-edged, sharky roles.

Wants to be a dizzy, precarious thrill ride. Glenn provides the only gravity that doesn't seem dull, literal and earthbound.

There's a refreshing surefootedness in the way Amiel, his screenwriters Cooper Layne and John Rogers, and most of his actors recognize how preposterous the idea of traveling to the center of the earth in a souped-up Rototiller really is.

A feebly pleasant surprise: It's not as cheap, loud and sleazy as it might have been, but it's also too eagerly well-meaning and indistinct to really stick. It's a piece of mildly entertaining, inoffensive fluff.

High Crimes does offer good, often sharp and funny work from its two stars. But you can't fake excitement, and it's a lousy feeling to know that the best commercial movie I can point you to right now is this shallow, self-erasing nonsense.

May be the best Farrellys movie yet, even though it doesn't live up to the pair's usual level of uproarious, crass comic genius. They're learning, movie by movie, to articulate ideas that are more and more sophisticated, without being oppressively heavy-handed.

Might have been classy, entertaining junk -- if only it were entertaining.

Setting such larger aesthetic questions aside, there isn't much to dislike about The Longest Yard, at least once you've gotten used to the pervasive fear of homosexuality that seems to ooze from the film's pores.

You could definitely call it awful, and I'm about to do so, repeatedly and effusively. In fact, One Day is an appallingly bad movie made by talented people who could and should have done much better, but somehow all drove off the cliff together.

An elegant but muddled affair, worth seeing despite (and maybe because of) its own split personality.

Too heavy on applied charm and too flimsy when it comes to plot. The picture has a hapless, meandering quality that's tolerable at first but ultimately becomes maddening, as if it were a cartoon narrative recounted by a distracted 4-year-old.

The movie’s just too boring and middlebrow.

It sometimes produces moments of unexpected power. It also produces a bizarre and fatally uneven movie, veering from black comedy to utter stupidity to maudlin religiosity, which seems to have been made in total defiance of both narrative conventions and emotional logic.

Isn't so much a movie as a tract, a parable in which the charred wisdom of its characters is much more significant than the intricacies of their lives.

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.

It's often breezily entertaining.

A romantic comedy doesn't need to be original to be enjoyable, and yet The Proposal still falls way too short of the mark.

Brash, chaotic and jostlingly entertaining.

Everything the first "Mummy" was fun for not being. It's loud and chaotic, jammed with effects that don't wow us precisely because they are trying so hard to wow us.

It may follow a formula, but sometimes formula equals comforting routine. And there are times, in the movies and elsewhere, when routine is exactly what you need.

The movie overall is painless if not exactly electrifying.

The overblown and overlong version of Percy's adventures largely fails to capture the quirky allure of Riordan's books.

A finely balanced piece of comedic machinery.

An absurd little trifle, but it does have a kind of buoyant, punky energy.

Aggressively offensive.

Delightful screwball comedy.

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.

As drama it feels forced and highly conventional.

It could be funnier, sharper, more probing, but at its best it is sexy, and that's always something to celebrate.

The story sounds great, on paper: It''s got interracial romance and betrayal, political and ethnic violence, and a faint feminist undercurrent. But the resulting movie is so pretty and so utterly lifeless you can almost smell the embalming fluid coming off the screen.

Isn't just a movie about decapitation; it's a decapitated movie. It has no idea where its head is at.

Ridley Scott's A Good Year is a bonbon made by a mechanic, a well-intentioned diversion put together by someone who clumsily adds the right ingredients in the wrong proportions at the wrong time. But sometimes, if you get the sugar level close to right, you can do OK, and A Good Year offers some pretty basic pleasures that movies often fail to give us these days.

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.

Stupid, empty and -- worst of all -- fantastically boring.

Argento always gives us something to watch, and maybe even something to fear. I've never seen her in a movie where I haven't been at least a little bit scared of her.

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.

Everything about Pee-wee's Big Adventure, from its toy-box colors to its superb, hyperanimated Danny Elfman score to the butch-waxed hairdo and wooden-puppet walk of its star and mastermind, Pee-wee Herman, is pure pleasure.

If you're ready to roll with Hotel and take what it gives you, there's some rich entertainment here.

Lost the friskiness and wildness and charm the movie might have had.

Boring at best and insidious at worst.

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

The picture is so gentle, it barely leaves an impression.

So contemptuous toward its own characters, and its audience, that it chokes off any visceral thrills it might have offered. The movie substitutes calculation for brains, and the filmmakers seem to think we'll all be too stupid to notice.

It's all just an embarrassment, the kind of pointless slog you'll encounter on Netflix in two years and wonder, How the hell did that get made?

This is a weird movie hybrid, both a tasteful picture and an angry one.

Mirkin hits just the right note between naughty and raunchy.

Legally Blonde was content to tickle you. The new one is something akin to a band that has a surprisingly successful debut deciding to rerecord all their originals and release a "Greatest Hits" collection for their second CD. It's both familiar and off.

Might have been an oversized Hollywood dazzler. Phoenix keeps it firmly and modestly on a human scale.

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.

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.

Almost always a pleasure to watch. Pushing Tin is, essentially, a western -- Cusack really is the fastest gun in the West.

A maddeningly indistinct picture.

A fantastical sex farce, and a highly amusing one at that, without being the least bit momentous or memorable.

Redford glances too lightly off the story's racial questions. You could call that approach "eminently tasteful" if you're looking for a nice substitute for "wimpy."

Spacey mucks up an otherwise pretty and pleasantly vague take on E. Annie Proulx's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.

The movie feels choppy and rhythmless. And he's (Chelsom) rather hopeless at dance sequences.

It should have been sent straight to video. As a courtroom drama, it stumbles from one ludicrous howler to another. Were the movie's "legal technical advisers" on another planet while the rest of the world was learning about legal procedure courtesy of the O.J. trial?

Despite the fact that The Day After Tomorrow is harnessed to the very real threat of global warming, it's still just a big, dumb movie, another Hollywood entertainment that, instead of tweaking and teasing our brains for fun, leaves us feeling thick and stupid.

The picture is almost shamefully entertaining, bold and self-effacing at once: Its intelligence reveals itself as a devilish gleam, not a pompous layer of shellac. Why can't more Hollywood movies be like this one?

The biggest disappointment of 27 Dresses is that it inhabits a Harlequin romance New York City, one remarkably short on homosexuals and divorce.

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.

Blade in no way resembles a good movie, but its combination of music-video bombast, goth-rock sensibility, high-tech industrial production design, cold-blooded glossy magazine visuals, high-fashion club culture, horror movies, blaxploitation movies, Hong Kong movies and comic-book nihilism make it diverting trash.

Like the rest of this new breed of witch story, it's about sisterhood instead of the supreme allure of housewifery, but like all too many witch movies (old and new), it's really just a self-congratulatory paean to banality and shrunken horizons.

Toback's method of presenting the evidence without judgment backfires, finally appearing just as shapeless as the movie's structure.

It's dispiriting to see good actors doing smart, solid work with so much unadulterated garbage swirling around them. Scott's art is also death, and we, the audience, are the ones he's jabbing at with his ruthless paintbrush. It's about time someone told him where to stick it.

The satire doesn't go far enough.

Isn't the worst film in the world, but its vision of reality seems so stylized, so fake, that I came out of it wondering whether it has the slightest idea what it's talking about.

This movie is bizarre, conflicted, unintentionally hilarious and profoundly mediocre – something like one of those based-on-a-true-story demonic possession yarns, with its polarities reversed – but not stupid in the way you’re probably thinking.

The initial setup for the story is engaging enough, but Noyce and cinematographer Ross Emery have shot the whole thing in generic digital fake black-and-white, so it looks like a late-‘90s TV commercial for a soon-to-be-recalled compact car.

No director yet has found the best use for Hudson, the role that will tap those terrifying and thrilling reserves that are just lying in wait. But Softley comes closer than anybody has.

Rock of Ages is an effulgent celebration of fakeness. It isn't trying to be real; it's trying to be faker than any fake thing has ever been before.

Duchovny gives a nicely shaped performance here -- he still has the ability to suggest the boyish eagerness beneath Fox's blasé demeanor. But the movie really belongs to Anderson.

Such a feebleminded, good-natured comedy that it actually makes you laugh with that timeless gag of somebody pretending to cough while calling someone else a bad name.

A definite improvement on the recent spate of dull action movies, if only because it has such a marked sense of humor about itself and the genre it belongs to. But somehow it never quite finds its center.