The Lightning Thief is loud, scary, oversexed, and really unfun. All that would have been fine if my daughter liked it, but instead it left her and her friend stunned.

The picture has some fun slapstick set pieces and an inventively manic turn by Gibson.

Even if you find the satire in Josie and the Pussycats self-serving, you might still love the movie, buy the soundtrack, and surrender to the hype. That's what happened to me.

The Box plays like "The Pardoner's Tale" as retold by the conspiracy theorist haunting your neighborhood Radio Shack.

A second-rate but bearable black comedy.

The film is seamlessly made, its mood balanced dreamily between sexy-funny and sexy-scary.

Revolutions isn't as stupefying as "Reloaded"--and, of course, our expectations have been drastically lowered. But it's an abysmal anticlimax all the same.

A wicked black comedy with unexpected emotional resonance, one of the most purely pleasurable movies of the year so far.

From time to time, Bad Teacher gestures vaguely at the movie it could have been. Diaz slouches and snarls effectively through the early scenes. It isn't till we realize her redemption will be unsatisfying that the character starts to curdle.

Ought to have been called "Slugs for Snails," so leisurely does it creep toward its predictably bombastic conclusion.

Con-artist caper comedies are almost always piffle, but there's a fierce, cruel competition at the heart of Heartbreakers that gives it some bite.

The enthralling dance numbers-flashy spectacles with feathers and bras made out of pearls and netting-and the combined sass levels of Cher and Christina Aguilera gloss over the movie's weaknesses.

Sometimes the film’s frenetic pace works, as in a brutally efficient half-second fight in an airplane bathroom. But more often, it feels like cinematographer Oliver Wood and editor Billy Weber are feuding.

Swing Vote isn't exactly a toothless political satire. It's something worse: a satire with dentures.

I walked out of Choke feeling hustled, which is appropriate enough, I guess, for a movie that's a portrait of a compulsive hustler.

The movie is one dead, overcomposed scene after another.

Doesn't really work but has a good cast and great craggy ocean-framed scenery.

When it comes to weaving personal stories in and out of the special-effects set pieces, the director has the most colossal antitalent since Ed Wood Jr.

Good as it is, The Legend of Zorro would be a hollow feat without leads who are drop-dead-gorgeous movie stars and spectacular clowns.

Irresistible might be a movie for the moment before or the moment after, but it feels entirely out of step with the one it’s in.

There's something curiously off about The Time Traveler's Wife.

Gleefully pushes everyone's buttons...and that manages to exploit our own racial discomfort and envy in ways that leave us hungry for more.

No one rises above the material, though, except for Walken, who looks pleased with the paycheck and the top-shelf tequila. As a shady lawyer, Mickey Rourke is smooth and funny, but recognizable only by his familiar purr.

Takes off into the comic stratosphere in its first sequence and then slowly sinks to Earth, made logy by its noble means and Sayles' increasing inability to shoot anything but fat clots of undramatic talk in the most boring manner imaginable.

Oddly enough, it's when the action of Ong Bak 2 stops that this funkadelic freakshow shines. The screen is stuffed with a gallery of grotesques, some of Thailand's best character actors, who spend their time bleeding, bellowing, and slurping up eyeballs.

Once you accept the utter and profound inconsequentiality of Rock of Ages, there's much to enjoy in it, from Zeta-Jones' capable hoofing (as a dramatic actress I find her deadeningly dull, but the woman can dance) to Giamatti's sly performance as a calculating, gray-ponytailed rock impresario.

The problem with the movie's semisupernatural crime plot, though, isn't that the resolution is completely outlandish; it's that the outlandishness is insufficiently grounded in pseudoscience.

It's bursting with goofy banter, Hollywood in-jokes, sexy love scenes, and chases that go on much too long but have the kind of madcap self-indulgence that makes questions of logic or credibility seem dull-witted. It's a great piece of mindful escapism.