It is a colossal bomb, an epic miscalculation, an excuse for actor self-indulgence and for what sounds very much like bad improvisation.

The film has some chuckles, if no belly laughs; it has some warmth, if no great heat.

Doesn't rank as a great film, but it's difficult to take your eyes off it, as you wonder what impossibly bizarre thing might happen next.

Watching the film one comes away feeling the bond that links these guys.

The worst kind of avant-garde film, one that hides its lack of commitment to the story, the characters and the genre under cover of being experimental. It mocks form and plays with form but offers nothing in its place, just boredom, emptiness and the oldest metaphor in captivity, about grass coming up through concrete.

But to be fair, Stone doesn't seem even to think he's offering the last word here. Rather, he's trying to offer the first word, or at least a first opportunity to hear the other side, unfiltered by television media.

In the end, Knight and Day isn't really about much of anything besides having a good time or perhaps the meaning of Tom Cruise-ness in the universe.

Visually, Jonah Hex is an orgy of overstatement: rapid edits, garish colors, harsh light.

Don't be fooled by the casual style. There is nothing casual about these emotions, or about the talent of these two filmmakers.

It's marred by loaded language and a propagandistic tone that undercuts rather than promotes its purposes.

I Am Love casts no spell and creates no narrative urgency. It's as compelling as mildly interesting gossip about people you don't know.

Let It Rain touches on class issues, feminism, immigration and the particular challenges facing a single, driven career woman in her 40s. But it's graceful in presenting its ideas, and what emerges is not a polemic but a kind of snapshot of modern-day concerns.

Toy Story 3 is a better film than "Wall-E" and "Up" in that it succeeds completely in conventional terms. For 103 minutes, it never takes audience interest for granted. It has action, horror and vivid characters, and it always keeps moving forward.

The film's final words are simple and to the point, and come from the retired cop, Seymour Pine: "You knew they broke the law, but what kind of law was that?"

A fine, fun remake of a movie that updates, transplants and reimagines the original without sacrificing its heart or goofy charm.

The A-Team is a Joe Carnahan movie, i.e., an experiment in propulsion and personality over substance and story.

It's one of the best documentaries ever made about show business, about what it really consists of and what it demands.

For at least a half hour, Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky is a brilliant and exciting film and seems almost sure to be one of the best of 2010. Then it becomes simply good. Then it becomes merely interesting. And then, about 15 minutes before the finish, it becomes dull and interminable.

This is one helluva drama, with one helluva star turn by Jennifer Lawrence as Ree.

The documentary shows the stranglehold that the teachers union has on politicians, particularly Democratic politicians. The arrogance and ignorance of some of these politicians is galling.

If this movie were a human being, it would be intelligent and sincere but so depressed as to be unable to get out of bed without a forklift.

For all its surface seriousness, Splice is a regulation monster movie. So however somber it gets, it's never truly thought-provoking, and however outrageous it gets, it's still always 20 minutes behind the audience. It's just too dumb to be serious and too slow to be entertaining. Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/06/03/MVKJ1DOO26.DTL#ixzz0pqYvhKuF

So comically fertile and yet so grounded in the reality of its characters that it's really a kind of marvel.

It's harmless.

Living in Emergency is sobering, in part because it powerfully conveys that, despite the group's heroic efforts, its impact is "a drop in a sea of oceans." There's never enough time, supplies or volunteers, but, as one of the doctors notes, "the demand is pretty much infinite."

Though the film seems less like a theatrical release and more like something that might play on an obscure PBS station at 2 p.m. on a Sunday afternoon, it's reasonably interesting as a personality study.

Lindon is a strong, sensitive actor, heir to the stoic French working-class tradition of Jean Gabin and Lino Ventura. And not enough can be said for Kiberlain, an actress willing to be seen in all her ranges.

Highly visual but cold. It's undeniably inventive, but also relentlessly fey and self-consciously zany and, in terms of story, it moves with audacious slowness.

As a Jerry Bruckheimer production and a game adaptation, Prince of Persia has every business being jumpy and sequential, and as a frivolous summer popcorn flick it has every business being inane.

The movie is not as good as his recent low-budget effort, "Diary of the Dead," but there are enough moments of satire and coolness - two Romero hallmarks - to merit recommendation.

Starts slowly, builds slowly, resolves slowly and ends slowly, if indeed it can be said to end at all.

The result is an interesting but often frustrating effort by the director of "The Sea Inside," who proves that ambition and talent aren't enough to ensure a compelling drama.

Twenty minutes in, the movie is already operating at a deficit, and it never recovers.

Wanders far away from the infectious and propulsive zing that we've come to expect the past nine years.

An intriguing portrait of an insular community, but its recounting of the seduction of a bright young man by the surrounding culture is heavy-handed.

The acting is immaculate; the editing is seamless; the imagery is blunt.

It tells a simple story - an almost archetypal story - but it does so with a lot of passion and technical sophistication.

Perrier's Bounty puts on a pretty good show: fast, foul, corny, strange.

What joy it is to watch the man (Douglas) slime himself on camera.

Scott removed the adventure aspect, and some of the movie's passion was lost, too, like a dolphin caught in a tuna net. Perhaps it's for that reason that a movie that starts out with the potential to be great somehow falls short, and what seems as if it's going to be a revelation ends up, instead, simply a worthwhile, reasonably interesting variation on an old theme.

The film's grungy, ultra-low-budget look, thanks to the Safdie's handheld camera, is just right for catching the crummy, hardscrabble, rat-infested milieu.

A squishy-soft romance set to bouncing Italian pop. It's like a long swallow from a bottle of a very sweet wine. Goes down easy, warms the gut, leaves a film of sugar on the teeth.

It's one thing for a romantic comedy to be predictable - they all end at the same destination, after all. But it's quite another thing to be predictable at every twist and turn of the story.

A documentary that is often told in adages, riddles and poetry.

As Kaiulani's story, it falls flat, having collapsed under the weight of the genre's mushier conventions. There are too many swooping violins, too many trite generalizations, too few moments that throw a light on history and turn it into art.

Along the way, Looking for Eric emerges as a portrait of a world and a way of life. You will probably not want to live in Manchester after seeing this film, but you'll like and respect the people.

A better-than-average follow-up, but Tony doesn't suit up enough.

To cover the Abramoff scandal is to follow tangent after tangent, until it seems as if prison was in the lobbyist's plans from the beginning.

Still, the goodwill lingers, even though Mother and Child falls down, dies and is beginning to look a little green and stiff about 15 minutes before the finish line.

At first, The Oath looks as though it will be a study of the soul-corroding effects of twisted ideology, but it emerges as the reverse.

A very funny French comedy of a variety that usually doesn't make its way here.

The similarity between the children is the most striking part of the movie.

So any "Nightmare" movie has a built-in handicap going in, but the better ones find ways to compensate, by casting appealing young actors (they're always young), by having imaginative dream sequences and - most important of all - by keeping the dreams short. By that standard, this new "Nightmare" is a fairly decent effort.

It's a strange thing, this type of whimsy. Kari offers us ideas in place of characters, and yet he expects us to see through these ideas to the real-life conditions they represent - and then to respond to them in kind.

Harry Brown has more to say, about aging, about old-school courtesy in collision with blind stupid violence, and about how sometimes pensioners on a fixed income get stuck in neighborhoods that turn dangerous.

Though I wish Please Give were a little better, there aren't enough American movies like it.

This is smart, inspired, no-fuss entertainment.

I laughed hysterically, but in the interest of balanced reporting, I should add that the guy parked next to me at the screening - a boyfriend who was there under duress - emitted a series of low guttural noises suggesting profound psychological anguish.

The Losers is boring. It's predictable. It's so, so active, and yet so, so dead.

Anyone can make a bad movie. But it takes a unique set of circumstances to make a movie so horrible that people are celebrating its badness two decades later.

What we have in this film is a whole lot of nothing, and the little that's there is irritating.

You can get away with almost anything in a farce except failing to be funny, and that's what kills Death at a Funeral.

It brings together several popular strains of contemporary moviemaking and combines them into one big, shameless, audacious, compulsively watchable, irresistibly likable piece of pure entertainment.

The beauty of The Joneses is that the salesmen are as much the victims as the people they're deceiving.

It's all talking heads, clanging music, substandard graphics, long scans of Web-page headlines and Bowdon's heavily cadenced voiceovers.

From the start, we can see where this is headed: a big fat power struggle, with Omar at the eye of the storm. But the storm is more of a drizzle than an apocalyptic downpour, just one snippy conversation after another in languorous settings.

A fascinating and entertaining glimpse into the world of high-level and socially conscious graffiti artists?

The film's minimal story line, propelled by hope but dampened with heartbreak, provides the excuse for a first-rate lineup of bands spanning misty folk rock, crunchy alt-pop and thrashing Persian rap.

A movie for people who value heart and earnestness over technical filmmaking skill, and consider unpredictable plot turns a betrayal.

At times you may be moved as by no other foreign film this year - and then 10 minutes later be leaning forward in the seat just to stay awake.

Best of all, the filmmakers know when to pull the plug. Date Night clocks in at 88 minutes and would not have been as funny at 89.

So many horror conventions are at work in After.Life that either the filmmakers are parodying them or couldn't come up with anything better. I'm betting on the second choice.

It's an impressive achievement: The film reveals things about each person's inner world, and how it looks to the other, without making us feel as if we're lost in a house of mirrors.

The mixed report on La Mission is that writer-director Peter Bratt doesn't really know how to make pictures, but he does know the central character in his movie.

The Square really tightens the screws - it's so skillfully made it makes you shift uncomfortably to the edge of your seat. It's a binge of cringe.

When You're Strange is a remedial Doors class, taught by a professor who sounds as if he's doing voiceovers for car commercials.

Has compelling stretches, but the film's formal concerns overwhelm the storytelling.

The documentary is interesting as a human story. And anyone who loves the Kuchar brothers' films or underground cinema in general will take extra pleasure in it.

Brosnan has never been so opened up, so emotional and yet so precise in his work. It's a lovely performance in a film that only sometimes deserves him.

Fans of this film will some day wear out their DVDs and Blu-rays playing that fantastic battle scene again and again.

Breaking Upwards has its amusing and touching moments, but we're left wondering just what we're supposed to make of it all. In the end, the relationship at the film's core is less absorbing than the filmmakers imagine.

No matter how you dissect it, Clash of the Titans will never, ever be a serious motion picture.

The bottom line here is that Cyrus is ghastly in The Last Song, bad not just in one or two ways, but in all kinds of ways.

Most of its screenplay is far too vulgar to recount. To paraphrase Mary McCarthy, every word is an obscenity, including "and" and "the."

The success of Chloe is largely due to the contribution of screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson.

With apologies to George A. Romero and the impending zombie apocalypse, The Eclipse may be the most realistic film where something dead comes to life and tries to feast on human flesh. Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/04/15/MVST1CTGJ4.DTL#ixzz0lDuetYGS

The multiply authored screenplay is based very loosely on Cressida Cowell's popular children's books, but it owes just as much to "E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial" and the John Lennon songbook.

The movie turns from good to great as the layers are peeled away and director Hahn provides an insider's look at the creative epicenter of the studio.

Even filmgoers who aren't into dance will find this story captivating because, as much as anything, Sokvannara wants to please his audience, whether in the concert hall or the movie theater. The kid is a natural.

There's a good idea behind Repo Men, not a whole lot of thinking, but at least one whole idea.

Works overtime for just a handful of chuckles and a few big yuks.

The writing is funny during individual moments, but the cumulative result is a bit depressing, with a surprising amount of negativity.

A potboiler but entertaining enough to rise above its flaws.

Jennifer Jason Leigh (Baumbach's wife) appears in two scenes, as an ex-girlfriend of Greenberg, and she's quietly brilliant, as always.

The strength and beauty of The Runaways are that it tells the truth.

You needn't have colorful Italian relatives, like myself, to enjoy this boisterous and warm-hearted film, which sidesteps cliche while embracing the hope and love in loony dysfunctional families everywhere.

Captures an artist who has decided not to burn out, but to fade away with dignity.

What this uncaring man is doing to her (Ida), he's about to do to a nation of 50 million people. And all of them will hate themselves in the morning.