If it's a nonsensical patchwork quilt, it's mostly a watchable one.

Don't ask for much, and your expectations will be met. Why invest anything as extraneous or irrelevant as "thought" into such a transaction?

Kate Winslet is a mesmerizing force in her own right, but too much of Holy Smoke turns out to be hot air.

It remains a puzzling dream, vivid in detail and overly obvious in symbolism, fueled by half-digested lumps of malice and wonder.

Beckinsale tackles the downscale role manfully, but Rockwell is nearly unrecognizable as the pudgy, suicidally depressed, chronically inept Glenn, who's acting out a half-convincing portrayal of himself as a born-again Christian.

A consistently engrossing piece of work.

Lomborg has clearly been stung by the suggestion that he's a front man for know-nothingism, and Cool It is an agreeable and partly successful attempt to repair his image.

By the end of Wonderland, I might have felt completely pistol-whipped if not for the gracefulness of some of the movie's actors.

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

Pearce may be the other big star in Traitor, and while his performance is serviceable, it doesn't cut deeply. Taghmaoui, as a radical motivated by moral certainty, is the real actor to watch here.

This film is never less than pleasant to spend time with, and that’s not a minor consideration when it comes to summer moviegoing.

Well-enough made and highly watchable, but it lacks the one thing that would put some swing in its step and some swagger in its attitude: a sense of jazz.

Follows a consistently predictable arc. In some sequences, you can tell not just what's going to happen next, but what shot is coming next. And the movie's weird mixture of moralism and affectlessness cancel each other out.

Citizen Ruth takes such pains not to take sides that it doesn't have any fun. Each faction gets the same amount of screen time, yells at the same volume, is equally unpleasant.

For me, the meticulous style, the fascination with ritualized (and ludicrous) violence and the film-geek self-referentiality all seem like markers of a film made by a young man, for other young men. If I were 23, and full to the brim with dark-hearted existentialism, I might love it too.

Almost all of the movie's romantic lunacy is too calculated and sly; the picture never quite sweeps us away.

Undone by simply trying too hard.

When one of the young women Vera attends to nearly dies of complications, the police arrest her -- and the movie goes thud, taking Staunton's performance along with it.

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.

Arguably, A Girl Cut in Two is more fun around the edges, as an assemblage of bizarre supporting characters and throwaway comic bits, than it is down the middle, as a classic French morality tale.

Unwieldy, long-winded, self-indulgently nutso and, in places, very, very boring. It also caps off its two-and-a-half-hour run time with an extended finale – partially orchestrated to David Bowie's "Cat People" theme song, no less – that I could watch again and again with pleasure

This is an ambling, relaxed talking-head docu in the grand European style.

The surprise of Anatomy of Hell is that Siffredi's character is ultimately more vulnerable than the woman

Live Flesh isn't terrible. It's accomplished and watchable.

In its quest to create "wholesome" entertainment, the movie industry is furiously turning back the clock four decades or so, to the days when men were men, girls were cute but knew their place and pencil-necked Poindexters stayed out of your damn face.

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.

A chaste, lively and mildly goofy romance to dispel the winter blahs.

Zbanic is such an acute observer of women's lives in their intimate details, and constructs such fine scenes, that I think this might be the best film to emerge from the aftermath of the Balkan conflict.