It's nicely made, well shot, and reasonably well acted, yet it's enough to filet the life force right out of you. We need stories in order to dream, and to live. But that doesn't mean we have to buy every crappy one that comes down the pike.

The Thin Red Line, either by incompetence or willful perversity, dispenses with plot, characterization, dramatic structure and emotional payoffs in favor of the sort of painstakingly composed pictorial diddling that invariably gets critics frothing about the director's "indelible" images.

I’m being deliberately mean about a plot device that Curtis wants to come off as a goofy, harmless comic metaphor, but the idea that this implausible inherited trait is actually a cryptic, creepazoid form of domination over women is right there in the movie.

I left Australia feeling drained and weakened, as if I'd suffered a gradual poisoning at the hands of a mad scientist.

As enjoyable as Close is, Heights as a whole is a mannered simulation that only occasionally and accidentally feels like real New York life.

Actually, the problem with wunderkind director Shane Acker's "stitchpunk" animated fantasy 9 isn't so much that it bears a sped-up, dumbed-down resemblance to "The Lord of the Rings," although it does. It's more that Acker's dark and whimsical creation, so clearly in the tradition of his mentor Tim Burton, is wondrous to behold but offers only an indifferent and generic mishmash of quest fantasy and post-apocalyptic science fiction when it comes to story.

A little more flair and polish could have made Girlfight a terrific movie instead of just the decent one it is.

After its deceptively fleet opening 20 minutes or so, Chamber of Secrets settles into a plodding amble, a rickety framework in which many allegedly exciting things happen -- and are forgotten only minutes later.

Through its first two-thirds, at least, Hide and Seek does a good enough job of piquing our curiosity that the movie's ultimate dumbness is more than a minor insult.

Certainly pleasant enough, and if you can put the preachiness out of mind it's entertaining, in its square, conventional way.

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.

A little like the '80s crowd-pleaser "Ghost," but way artier.

I don't begrudge Take Me Home Tonight or the whole "I Love the Eighties" juggernaut its fight for its right to party, but there is something touchingly off-base about it.

Over and over again, Hoblit misses opportunities to make an engaging picture, instead giving us a merely pedestrian one.

It's deluxe and handsome and has no soul.

A disappointingly blunt, monochrome work.

It's sunny and cheerful without coming off as too saccharine.

You know how they say to find one thing and do one thing well? Well, Pattinson's thing is glowering. It doesn't help matters that the movie itself is so painfully mediocre.

It's a cynical way to pass time, the cynicism that comes from being presented with something you've seen a hundred times before.

By the end of Love Object a dorky loner who wants a rubber sex doll at his beck and call seems a lot less objectionable than a director who wants a talented flesh-and-blood actress at his.

The lost opportunity of Hidalgo isn't that it fails to live up to its potential for romantic adventure, but that it fails to dig into the romance between man and horse that's at the heart of the story.

Everything about Proof of Life is intriguing and a little off.

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

Made in Dagenham offers girl power in a can, lightly seasoned with swinging London and topped with cute-clumsy Sally Hawkins charming us to pieces. But the real women of Dagenham deserve better, and so do their sisters in the audience.

The surprise of the movie is that it actually does have a talented director and star. It doesn't begin to make up for the low quality of the story or the numerous other unfortunate elements, but it does suggest little flashes of something that, with more thought, might actually have been somewhat interesting.

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 picture is so gentle, it barely leaves an impression.

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.