It's one of the year's signature film experiences.

It's that sense of ardor that's missing from Ben Chaplin's performance in Birthday Girl.

Kate Hudson gives the best performance in the movie, though she seems always on the verge of being funnier and dirtier than she's allowed to be. Elsewhere the cast is accumulated for their cachet more than for any role they're given to play. Some of the casting makes no sense.

Watching Streep and her two BFFs, played by Christine Baranski and Julie Walters, grinning and giggling their way through Mamma Mia! I felt I was being thoroughly, and unenjoyably, punished.

If anything, Think Like a Man, the awkward but intermittently amusing black-centric ensemble film built out of comedian Steve Harvey's self-help bestseller "Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man" deserves a gold star for its generous portrayals of Caucasians.

What really saves She’s All That from being just another why-good-heavens-you’re-beautiful piece of piffle, however, is the way its lesser elements sparkle. The romantic comedy may be predictable, but director Iscove’s over-the-top parody of faux celebrity — by way of Lillard’s gleefully preening, partying, getting-sensitive-for-the-camera ex-Real Worlder — is a hoot.

Noé isn't a kid (he'll turn 40 this year) but he's still young as a filmmaker; he may yet learn to control his desire to sear the audience's eyes out with a red-hot poker before he's even started telling a story.

Statham isn't an actor who coasts, not even in a recklessly enjoyable picture like Transporter 3. He does the work, so we don't have to: His Frank Martin is the personification of pleasure without guilt.

Without a genuinely charming central character to pull it together, the movie is a shamble of tedious passages punctuated by a few desultory chuckles.

You feel you've been both a little creeped out and vigorously entertained. Its showmanship comes through in the clutch.

One reason Wild Things works so well is that director John McNaughton sustains a darkly comic tone throughout the film without letting it degenerate into farce.

Malkovich is usually such a numbingly self-serious actor. But he cuts loose here in a way that's outlandishly brilliant: It's his best performance in years.

Some questions just can't be answered by science, and the quandary of why Creation is so poundingly dull is one of them.

Gitai's experimental technique in Free Zone is dizzying, sometimes thrilling.

At times fun but mostly maddeningly uneven, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back feels less like a full-fledged movie than a side project Smith took on to amuse himself and his buddies.

My Blueberry Nights may not quite be what fans of either Jones or Wong Kar-wai -- directing his first film in English -- are expecting. It's a late-night, lovelorn mood piece in a minor key, not complicated or convoluted, finally more confection than substance.

"Star Wars" fans deserve better.

There's plenty to like here, especially for connoisseurs of the action genre, and there's also plenty to make you wonder whether Besson and co-writer Robert Mark Kamen scribbled their screenplay on a batch of Marseilles cocktail napkins and then lost one or two.

Straightforward, a bit literal-minded, very faithful to the book and largely compelling.

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

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.

In "Buffalo 66," Gallo was an unfunny prankster. In The Brown Bunny, wearing his heart on his sleeve, he's a real filmmaker.

The sharpest, most authentic portrait of Hollywood life made in the last several years. (As a movie about contemporary Los Angeles, it's approximately 617 percent better than the monumentally bogus "Shopgirl.")

The experience of watching The Night Listener didn't make me feel "real" at all, only stuffed.

Seyfried’s performance is worth the price of admission. But Linda Lovelace deserved something more.

If you're willing to suspend not just disbelief but also all considerations of logic and intelligence and narrative coherence, it's also a rip-roaring, fun adventure, fatefully balanced between high camp and boyish seriousness at almost every second.

The delirious and sometimes nasty little pleasures that Taken offers don't hinge as much on surprise as they do on the action (which is crisp and fast, with a minimum of computer enhancement) and on the story's unabashedly sentimental underpinnings.

Stupid, crude and hilarious, Step Brothers works by sneaking past our better judgment.