Unfortunately, the goofiness never quite finds its groove. The romantic chemistry is tepid, the comedy misses as often as it hits, the picaresque plot keeps dogging down and even actors as skilled as Platt, Irons and Lena Olin fail to register strongly in their roles.

T. M. Griffin's script is imaginative and clever.

It's a richly textured, leisurely paced, visually impressionistic epic of the American past that fairly hypnotizes the viewer with its tapestry of sights, sounds and colors.

Brosnan pulls out all the stops in his quest to be the last word in crude boorishness, only slightly relieved by the midlife soul-searching. Whether the public will buy him in this extreme role is another question. But it's a fearless, and fairly skilled, comic performance.

Some will find the surprise pleasant, others unpleasant. Whatever it is, it's the least commercial, most somberly heartfelt movie ever made by the cinema's most commercially successful filmmaker.

An extraordinarily taunt and suspenseful psychological thriller.

Not extreme enough to skate the edge of tasteless farce and not straight enough to play the material for edgy satire, The Ringer is a cheat right down to the final stretch. Breaking the rules should be more fun than this.

The texture and intensity of the odyssey makes it spellbinding.

All processed sugar and artificial flavor, right down to the sticky but tasteless happy ending.

It's a consistently funny script, tastefully packaged by super-producer Brian Grazer and directed with just the right touch by Dean Parisot.

The movie works best as spectacle: as a piece of old-style, non-CGI, on-location epic filmmaking.

In place of the dysfunctional family Christmas story we've come to expect for the holidays, The Family Stone gives us a cheerfully uncensored, generic counterculture clan and tosses a tightly wound control freak into the center of their holiday celebration.

Tommy Lee Jones steps behind the camera to direct himself in the most impressive directorial debut the American cinema has seen in some time, a contemporary western both rough and poetic, laconic and passionate.

Can't find its rhythm and stride. It plays it far too safe and slick.

A tired tale that never comes to life.

Not only does it recapture -- and enhance -- the subtle emotional core that has made the film so beloved for the past three-quarters of a century, it delivers the most eye-boggling, hair-raising movie thrill ride since 1993's "Jurassic Park."

The story is so compelling and the movie is such a pleasure to the eyes and ears.

It's by far the most uncompromising and unapologetic gay-themed drama ever made for a wide release by a major Hollywood studio with name stars.

It's funny, touching and crammed to the rafters with clever dialogue, splashy production numbers and stiff-upper-lip charm.

Working for the first time in live action, under the constraints of a classic novel, he (Andrew Adamson) proves himself to be a capable visual storyteller but no Peter Jackson.

It's not really scary, but it reaches a level of insanity so unhinged and dispassionately wretched that it defies description. Inspired, but not for all tastes.

It's a low-key, subtly inspirational drama that builds its charm slowly but surely.

The futuristic thriller is overly familiar and never especially gripping -- and too somber and cerebral for the young action crowd -- but it looks terrific and is in no way an embarrassment.

It may not exactly be a traditional love letter to his wife but actor-turned-executive producer William H. Macy has given her a plum part as Bree in screenwriter-director Duncan Tucker's offbeat road movie.

Margaret Brown's honest and non-judgmental film captures the artist's high and low points, from early appearances on regional television shows such as "Nashville Now" to the drunken and disorderly performances that defined his later years.

The most interesting moments in the film are the videotapes sent back and forth between the parents and students, as they communicate the sadness of children separated from their distant families.

A true gem: perhaps the most thoroughly charming, and completely satisfying, independent film I've seen in the past two or three years.

It never achieves the bleak poetry and tawdry tragedy of the best examples of the genre, but the understated humor is nicely played by Cusack and Thornton.

Although set 10 years after high school graduation, Just Friends is a dumb teen comedy.

Columbus is a member of the '80s generation and he gives the play authenticity, the respect of a classic, an epic visual scope and a sensibility that's blissfully free of any generational self-pity. It seems to be the movie he was born to make, and he serves it well.

Quaid and Russo outshine the script with their presence and chemistry alone.

Despite its title, the movie could hardly be less erotic. Indeed, promiscuity has never looked more totally unappealing, and its final scenes of Wilmot's advanced venereal disease are enough to make you take a vow of celibacy. A great date movie, this is not.

It's simply not a very good movie. Its story line is populated with so many characters and meaningless names that it's nearly impossible to follow, and its author's message doesn't amount to much more than a cry of despair.

Harry IV is an intelligent, visually seductive and mostly very satisfying fantasy epic of the first order.

The movie is entertaining, reasonably true to the facts of its subject's life and full of music.

Sautet lets the film wander from Ventura's desperate odyssey, but when the irresistibly charming young Jean-Paul Belmondo enters the picture as an unflaggingly loyal ally, his wandering is forgiven.

The film attempts to put Zizek's philosophy into practical, accessible terms. Accessible, of course, being a relative term.

Jordan unites his favorite actors -- Liam Neeson, Stephen Rea, Ian Hart and Brendan Gleeson -- with the swoony presence of the talented 29-year-old Cillian Murphy.

The triumphs still are affecting, the setting is compelling and some of the human moments amid the political circus and culture wars are downright moving.

Every swing of its plot is preposterous, it stumbles to a trick climax that any regular moviegoer will figure out in the first 10 minutes, and the ending is so absurdly unmotivated that it plays like a slap in the face.

Jonah Bobo and Josh Hutcherson -- may have delivered their parts just a wee too convincingly. Their squabbling is so pitch perfect that most adult viewers likely will want to reach through the screen and start crackin' some heads.

It is historically evocative, visually transporting and an exuberant romantic comedy that adheres to its source while spinning its own artful energy.

This well-meaning mistake gets lost in the metaphors.

Watts and Coffey may have vaulted Hollywood's gated enclaves, but this affectionate film shows they haven't forgotten, nor idealized, their days among the ranks of the struggling and ambitious.

Silverman is funny and, more often than not, so is the film.

It lacks both complexity and compromised characters. While the cultural backdrop is intriguing, the story is frustratingly conventional and familiar.

A disaster on all levels.

It's often funny but it flails around like a chicken with its head cut off, flapping and squawking and making a spectacle, but never really going anywhere.

The sum of the movie is devastating. One takes out of it a sense that the human cost of our endless adventure in Iraq is going to be incalculable, perhaps catastrophic -- a psychological time bomb that will be exploding for decades to come.

Takes itself awfully seriously. It feels a bit like a grudge piece, laboring to grasp at large themes, but it is as trivialized as the capricious world it explores.

"Clouds" fills its exteriors with the glory of the Utah mountains and its interiors with the work of the late Hopi artist, Dan Lomahaftewa -- a pleasing combination that gives the film its own special visual style and magic.

The movie is full of action and stunts, but after the gangbusters opening, it loses steam and imagination very quickly.

It has the low-budget look and feel of an indie dating comedy -- and not a very good one at that.

There are some surprises to be had amid the cruelty (inflicted by both Jigsaw and his test subjects), but this time around the ordeal is less grueling than simply distasteful.

Cage trots out all of this character's flaws in a form so raw and true you can't help but cringe in your seat as he careens from one self-inflicted interpersonal failure to another.

It's a volatile subject and Abu-Assad's thoughtful thriller stokes the debate.

Antonioni's moviemaking panache and distinctive narrative rhythm rarely have seemed so enticing and satisfying.

Don't expect scary from this trilogy of short horror films from a trio of Asia's most interesting directors, which are not so much extreme as twisted.

It captures the heart and spirit of one of the 20th century's most fabled ballet companies, with a history that stretches continents and decades.

Doom may be by the numbers, with a roll call of colorful types systematically exterminated while The Rock entertains with cartoonish expressions and reactions (the closest the film comes to personality).

A kind of "Seabiscuit"-lite.

Without the saving grace of comedy, Martin's natural abrasiveness is off-putting, and he just doesn't have the stuff of a romantic lead.

Yet for a film so affectingly steeped in loss, resignation and the ghosts of memory, the revelation that pulls it all together, while satisfying and even touching, lacks emotional resonance.

It's rowdy, often tasteless and very much in the buddy-action vein of the scripts that made him famous, but in a much more comic spirit.

The embittered men make fascinating subjects.

Confronts the line between the celebration and the exploitation of innocence with an uneasy tension that is discomforting at best.

Makes no effort to learn about the culture. It idolizes the idea of spiritual purity without offering any insight into what it really means.

As the film loses its focus on the "Protocols" phenomenon -- it becomes too scattered to have the impact Levin is after.

Staggeringly awful.

That rare animal, a dialogue-driven comedy -- and a good one at that. While one or two of its scenes may seem a tad too talky for today's low-attention spans, the script is mostly razor-sharp acerbic and sophisticated.

A fascinating ride through morally ambiguous territory to a place you've never been before.

Overcooked and simplistic in spots.

For such a harrowing portrait, Mandoki remains oddly distant but for a few scenes. He makes his points boldly when he should be making his points sting.

Full of compassion and good intentions, but Kirkman never spins the stories into compelling cinema.

This beautifully sculpted poetic naturalism has more in common with the expressive use of words in the great screenplays of '40s and '50s than with modern movies.

Most of the film, however, goes down easily enough. The Queer Strokes, an all-gay rowing team, provide a humorous contrast to the less sexually confidant characters.

The funniest film you'll see this year about a political assassination.

A paragon of subtlety. Yet this message is exactly what we carry out of the theater, and it lingers on with a powerful resonance.

The movie is so well-cast, sympathetically acted and delicately directed -- and so genuinely touching and funny -- that it leaps right out of the narrow confines of the family bonding formula.

It never quite adds up to anything. It's engaging enough while it's going on, but has little visceral impact or resonance.

Don't watch this film unless you have a high tolerance and an undemanding appreciation for penis jokes and humor based more on a capacity to disgust than to surprise.

Surely played better on the page than on the screen. What's left is the same old drill driven by brutal master race fervor.

Daniels gives a career-best performance.

So devoid of the usual coarse Hollywood calculation that it plays like a breath of fresh air.

It's by far the most inspirational sports movie to come along in many a month.

An undistinguished treasure-hunting epic that rips off the 1977 movie, "The Deep," in virtually every frame. It's pretty to look at, but so low-voltage and instantly forgettable that it's hardly worth anyone's time.

The film's strength is compelling character relationships and Whedon's trademark dialogue, a smarter version of the cliched action-movie barrage of wisecrack under fire, only better executed, laden in personality, and enriched with evocative western colloquialisms of a frontier culture.

Indeed, it has to be one of the most eerie, morbidly absorbing and psychologically compelling movies ever made about a writer in the agonizing process of creating an important piece of literature.

What remains is a sumptuous-looking film that sniffs at but ignores deeper Freudian implications.

The movie constantly verges on being a parody, but Moore's performance stays miraculously away from caricature.

The film is highly critical of America's counterterrorist efforts, and not at all subtle in making the point that our stupidity and Nazi-like methods have helped create -- and vastly acerbate -- our problems.

The song may be somewhat familiar, but Sach gets understated performances from his entire cast and finds interesting harmonies as they play out their clashing duets.

Far-fetched but deliciously exciting aerial nail-biter.

Apparently there's a fresh generation ready to take this at face value. That, in its own way, is refreshing.

Surreal, vaguely amusing, European-made drama.

It's absorbing and often excruciatingly suspenseful, and it gives Viggo Mortensen a strong, change-of-pace vehicle to follow up his "Lord of the Rings" triumph.

The movie is 23 minutes longer than the Lean version, yet it somehow seems much less evocative of the novel's immense scope and texture. And its Cockney accents are such a strain to understand that as much as a third of the dialogue is indecipherable.

It's so fluid and cinematic that it's hard to even envision how the piece worked on stage.