Alexander Payne's new movie, Sideways, makes you feel like you're trapped at dinner with a wiseass who's trying to convince you what a sensitive guy he is.

Shrink offers a roster of wonderfully eccentric characterizations, shoehorned into a dramatic structure that's just a little too formulaic.

A discombobulated summer movie that’s kind of fun but doesn’t have nearly enough story to fill up two hours.

This hot-button picture isn't especially well thought-out, but it might be crafty and manipulative enough to rile up audiences.

This is Lunson's debut picture and she's smart enough to keep the whole affair very simple.

Some fragments of that Dostoevskian romance linger on here: Just enough so that Wyatt and Wahlberg nail the climactic scene, when Jim is literally playing for his life, and make it momentarily seem to mean something. But not quite enough that you’ll remember what that something might be the next day.

Despite its problems, the picture still satisfies -- more than a lot of allegedly worthy "A list" movies do. In a movie world where heavyweight often means top-heavy, Against the Ropes shows some pretty fleet footwork.

There's a pleasantly malevolent ridiculousness hovering around How to Lose a Guy. But the movie would have been so much better if it had jumped into its mean-spiritedness with gusto and passion, instead of just splashing around in it halfheartedly.

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.

Starts out, and ends up, as a thriller trying valiantly to show us layers of moral depth. But in between that beginning and ending, Paxton's vision (as well as that of Brent Hanley, who wrote the script) becomes wavy and indistinct, a blurry muddle of sensationalistic, prurient grisliness masquerading as a meditation on the nature of evil.

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.

Even as Sylvester Stallone's long goodbye to the heroic underdog who made him famous descends from pathos into silliness, and from fairy tale into hallucination, you can't help liking the big galoot.

With little more than table scraps for a budget, Surf Nazis Must Die features rotten acting, cheesy action and effects, a grainy picture and poor sound. It is, in short, a typical Troma film -- not quite in the same league as "Toxic Avenger," perhaps, but no less a treat for fans.

It just doesn't have the buoyancy, or the resonance, that this kind of semifactual flight of fancy needs.

Though I admire much of what Cuesta does in L.I.E., the film didn't give me much pleasure. I didn't find it unpleasant or repulsive; it's just that I felt he was too much outside the story.

The sad thing about All the Real Girls is that Green seems more in love with his perceived unconventionality than he does with his characters. If that's not a town without pity, I don't know what is.

It might be nice if Ghosts of Mars had more to offer than snappy repartee and shameless gore, or if it could borrow a little narrative tension from its Alien Chain Saw forebears.

The picture never quite finds its footing.

The best and most moving part of Miracle may be the closing credits, in which we see pictures of the actors accompanied by the names of the real-life characters they played and a strip of type that tells us where they are now.

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.

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.

Shelton has directed Dark Blue in a jacked-up urban thriller style that simply does not play to his gifts. He's a sidewinder, the sort of writer-director who tells his stories through loopy character details and anecdotes.

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

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.

One of those movies where the small pleasures stack up high enough to dwarf the disappointments.

A corny, old-fashioned backstage farce.

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