Beyond question, the results are overstated, outrageous and wildly juvenile. But they're also a hoot to watch.

The movie is funny, definitely funny. But underlying the humor is a vision so bleak, so despairing and so utterly hopeless as to make "No Country for Old Men" almost look cheerful.

For all the hip checks and bloody noses, it doesn't have a mean bone in its body.

Yet, even at its worst, Zombieland is better than most movies of its kind - disgusting but not too disgusting, and with a few laughs.

Ricky Gervais, instead of resting on formula and on a familiar persona, uses his first opportunity as a big-screen actor-director to make an original comedy that expresses some real thinking and feeling.

The final message is a strong one: Even when the starting forward is one of the best high school players ever, basketball is still a team sport.

The bad news is that the characters and situations are platitudes and the story is so heavy-handed that the film is hard to sit through.

It's a celebration of a shady landmark, but also a lament.

Connoisseurs of straight-to-video mayhem will revel in the latest chapter of the "Universal Soldier" franchise, which manages to strike that delicate balance between over-the-top ridiculousness and well-crafted filmmaking. [28 Feb 2010, p.Q28]

Provides a powerful look at the complex condition of autism and family dedication.

Succeeds in its modest goals of building tension slowly and generating a handful of legitimate scares. A few people in the audience were laughing during the first half of the film. No one was laughing during the long walk out of the theater.

If Max and his "Hell" collaborators feel stymied by the summer hit "The Hangover," they'd be justified to scream to the bromance gods that someone stole their film's concept. But those guys did it the right way, bro.

Coco Chanel is not the most lovable of heroines, but it's a strength of the film that director Anne Fontaine allows Tautou to make Coco as cold and ungiving as she does.

Owen is a magnetic, sensitive presence at the center of a movie that doesn't deserve him and that barely deserves to be seen.

Much of the movie has a structureless, documentary feeling to it, which is good and should have been pushed further.

The Providence Effect" is flawed, but it's still a moving film.

No matter where you stand, there's no denying "Capitalism" is flat-out polemic wizardry.

Much of the action onscreen doesn't ring true. Seasoned independent film director Henry Jaglom doesn't just explore the subject - he smothers the audience with it.

Dull and unilluminating.

Matt Damon's old-fashioned, brilliantly calibrated character turn as a corporate schnook-turned-whistle-blower; and Marvin Hamlisch's retro-groovy score. For the movie's first hour or so, the pair of them together make for four-star entertainment. The last half hour, not so much.

A dead-serious piece of activist filmmaking.

Delivers all the pain, melodrama and redemption that fans of the genre demand.

Enjoy the film for its witty dialogue and fun performances, but know that there isn't a single good scare. An episode of "Murder, She Wrote" has more thrills.

Klapisch's masterstroke was to place at the center of a movie a man, forced by circumstances, to stop and simply observe.

The main drawbacks of The Burning Plain are its intentionally coy narrative and a zero-hour revelation that's ill-thought-out and generates some pretty chintzy psychobabble. It's the wobbliest element in an admirable, complex and frustrating movie.

A peppy, bouncy documentary that is watchable and informative, although Tickell's celebrity name-dropping at times detracts from the serious message.

A fine-boned, luminous tribute to Keats and the sufferings of love.

Hushed minimalism is a rare and appealing quality in the cinema these days, but so little happens in 35 Shots of Rum that I'm hard-pressed to describe the plot. It doesn't exactly have one.