Actually, as Eddie Murphy PG comedies go, Meet Dave isn't bad. In fact, it's kind of sweet, innocent almost – kid-friendly in the best sense.

The phrase in the title "wanted and desired" is offered by a producer friend of Polanski's who describes him as "wanted" in the United States, but "desired" in Europe, where sexual behaviour is treated more honestly and artists' dark sides are celebrated.

An amused and affectionate look at the writer who formed a crucial link between the New Journalism of the 1960s and today's blogosphere.

The Wackness is one of those Sundance coming-of-age films, with all that implies: a surfeit of forced edginess, kooky characters, cynicism-coated sentimentality and self-absorbed angst.

The promise is dangled yet never developed. Rather, the narrative slips into a backstory that alternates between confusing and contradictory.

The result is a whodunit so nicely crafted that you're tempted to forgive the Byzantine plot -- hell, you're even tempted to pretend you actually understand its twisting obscurities.

Mixing Chaplinesque delicacy with the architectural grandeur of a Stanley Kubrick film, director Andrew Stanton recycles film history and makes something fresh and accessible from it without pandering to a young audience.

This is a blockbuster busting out of the block; this is a Hollywood staple served up on a European platter; this is summertime fare with a wintry verve.

The Last Mistress proves that Breillat has found something in the luscious language of the 19th century that makes sense to us today.

Mixes broad slapstick and off-hand one-liners in a sometimes surprisingly funny mixture.

The Love Guru is a comedy like the Leafs are a hockey team.

Sure, this is marginal, but it's precisely in the margins that the movie excels.

The arc of Nazneen's character, from drudge to feminist heroine, is predictably saintly. Chanu is a far more intriguingly human figure, the redeemed fool.

Being risibly bad, The Happening is at least worth a laugh. Exactly one laugh, by my reckoning, and completely unintended but no less full-throated for that.

Playing characters familiar to the fans, we have William Hurt as a blustering general, Tim Blake Nelson as a kooky scientist and Tim Roth as an evil soldier who morphs into a monster. All of them seem to be directing themselves.

Mock-heroic yet still lyrical, faux-mythic but honest too, uniquely and absurdly and often hilariously Canadian, My Winnipeg is like no documentary you've ever seen.

All this is as fascinating as it is humbling, even when Herzog ventures a little too far down eccentricity's back alley.

The film lacks the comic ingenuity of the best in CGI critter movies. It's not fun-for-the-whole-family, like "Shrek." Still, it's a howl and amazement for anyone under 12.

This picture is to comedy what carpet bombing is to aerial warfare: The onslaught is so relentless that occasional direct hits on the funny bone are a statistical guarantee.

This is a fairly well-made picture that's just been fairly well-made too many times before, a knock-off of a thousand other knock-offs.

As an epic action movie, Mongol is satisfying enough. Think "Braveheart." Think "300." Just don't think too much.

The film walks the fine line between exploitation and empathy to cast a chilly, memorable spell.

Bad summer films, full of furious hype and signifying nothing, are hardly exceptional these days, nor is the sound they typically make: the dull scrape of a culture hitting rock bottom. Yet this one seems uniquely bad; this one is a threshold-breaker with a different sound, the crack of rock-bottom giving way to a whole deeper layer of magma.

Both Speedman and Tyler deliver solid, nuanced performances as a couple caught at the most fragile moment in their relationship.

History repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce, Karl Marx said. That might explain the possibility of even making a movie such as Stuck.

One of those international co-productions full of good intentions and blandly polished results.

What Boll gives us is a boring beating over the head.

Conducting another symphony in action, Spielberg seems a bit bored – always competent but never inspired – and who can really blame him? He tries to fire his interest by swiping a few tropes from the fifties pop bin, not-so-sly allusions to teen-trash movies and those McCarthy-era horror flicks. After that, there's really nowhere to go but inwards, which is when Spielberg starts looting Spielberg.

Conclusions and answers are perhaps luxuries that Sharma's film can't afford.

The wee mousie is fun, all right, yet like the occasionally ragged editing, the fun just gets haphazardly wedged in.

At its most interesting when it shows the lives of women and children prisoners, the film has the feel of a movie-of-the-week cliché when it returns to Julia's improbable crime.

There's something here for everyone to dislike - the whole clan can have fun making fun of this thing.

Though frantic from the get-go, A Previous Engagement rarely finds its feet. Devoid of the fine balance of grace and chaos necessary to any screen farce, the proceedings are slapdash, repetitious and badly overextended.

If Leguizamo imports a hint of pathos into his performance, Waterston adds a dollop of menace to hers, delivering another of Ross's attacks on what separates girls from men. In this world, women are their own worst enemy.

What Happens in Vegas should damn well have stayed in Vegas.

Yes, the Empire may be crumbling, and the natives getting restless, but it's all happening with such lyrical loveliness - even the corpses look good. Consequently, when the rains in Before the Rains finally arrive, there's nothing to cleanse, no real dirt to wash away - not with history already so neatly packaged and polished to a dull shine.

The strengths of Fugitive Pieces are its fluidity and subtlety. Emotional repression may be one of the most difficult conditions to portray honestly, and Dillane's performance of Jakob is a study in the art of creating sympathy by not asking for it.

Cynical, hip, politically opportunistic and loaded with kick-ass comic action.

Made of Honor should come with a bar code and a Wal-Mart display - this isn't a movie, it's a commodity. The generic brand is the romantic comedy, and the manufacturer's material of choice is recycled plastic, smoothly glued together to assure the consumer that the purchase is risk-free and thoroughly predictable.

Some films, like some people, wear their artsy pretensions on their sleeve, and there really isn't much going on beneath – it's just a posturing armband wrapped around a plain arm. Welcome, then, to the emptiness of Mister Lonely, a movie that goes to extraordinary lengths to say ordinary things.

Disappointingly unique.

Few movies have captured the intoxicating effect of pop culture on kids better than Son of Rambow.

A painfully predictable movie.

A lamentably slack and dishonest genre exercise.

No political tract, but it can be surprisingly bold.

The ethical fallout, the lingering fog of the so-called war on terror, is not that people don't know what's wrong or who's guilty - it's precisely that they do, and count it as the cost of doing business.

No, there isn't anything wrong with comfort entertainment. Then She Found Me could have, should have been something special - a "Knocked Up" for weary boomers. The only hitch is that it isn't all that entertaining. Nor comforting for that matter.

Before that marvel of human engineering - China's Three Gorges Dam - completes its legacy of human upheaval, there are vanishing sights to be seen.

Every actor and actress involved seems to have been instructed to act as guilty as possible and, in this at least, they're entirely convincing. Not guilty of murder, perhaps, but of a really unfortunate career choice.

Although veteran choreographer Yuen Woo-Ping ( Kill Bill, The Matrix) handles the wire action, the camera work is merely okay and the sequences are on the familiar side. Still, it's fun to see Chan resurrect his loopy, staggering "drunken master" fighting style.

Dull moments, so much the rule in most genre comedies, are the exception in Forgetting Sarah Marshall -- it does run long, but it mainly rollicks.

Exasperating and goofy documentary.

A bland, timid and thoroughly un-thrilling teen thriller.

Quaid doesn't have much to work with, and so deflects the portrayal away from the mind toward the body – consistently giving the coot a hunched, pigeon-toed gait. Nice try, but that bird won't fly.

A bad-cop, worse-cop movie.

The actor - like everyone else in this tedious yet affecting film - rises well above his soft-headed, solipsistic material, turning in a performance of nuanced delicacy.

When you watch Canadian actor Ryan Reynolds, there's often a sense that you're not just watching him perform in a movie, you're watching the next stage of his unfolding career plan.

Ultimately, though, it's the life-affirming sentiments of the documentary and not its backstage drama that may turn it into a popular hit, especially among boomers who can now legitimately fantasize about their impending retirements as musical stars.

For all its fuss and fury, Flight of the Red Balloon succeeds magnificently.

Like a Keret story, Jellyfish is economical – a mere 78 minutes – but it packs into its taut, intersecting storylines a charming melancholy and a surprisingly rich depth.

Leatherhead's a comedy of stock setups and kooky digressions in which nothing really comes to a head, and running at close to two hours, it lacks the essential brevity of the form.

Even with dyed hair, heavy makeup and a cigarette dangling from her bottom lip, Portman still looks like a schoolgirl pretending to be somebody's mom.

The movie's dated, stereotypical comedy often contradicts its wholesome intentions, coming across as laboriously cutesy and occasionally perverse.

As cinematic flops go, nothing falls quite as hard as a failed black comedy.

Ultimately, Shine a Light is illuminating indeed, even fascinating, but not in the way Scorsese intended. What he has created, inadvertently, is an invaluable documentation of semi-fossilized Stones – musicologists may like it, sociologists should love it and, some distant day, anthropologists will treasure it.

When it comes to exploring with dignity and humour the choices a woman must make for her family, Tuya's Marriage is the clear winner.

Its peculiar strain of anti-Americanism aside, Run, Fat Boy, Run tries to bridge the gap between self-deprecating Brits and self-aggrandizing Yanks, settling down somewhere between the two. Don't ask me where, exactly, but this mid-Atlantic meeting point is an ultra-neutral zone.

What a big cheat of a movie. Wanting to be everything to everybody – a tough gambling picture, a revenge-of-the-nerds fantasy, a Vegas caper flick, a sweet little romance, a simple morality tale – 21 is just a bet-hedger dealing from multiple decks, designed to leave you with an occasional tidbit to like but nothing at all to love.

Great title, and the whiff of existential loneliness that it conjures up – brothers locked not in solidarity but in solitude – permeates the entire movie.

With the release of Stop-Loss, a precedent of sorts has definitely been set. If we've yet to see a brilliant Iraq movie, the wait is over for a bad one – this is it.

Puerile and idiotic it may be, but Superhero Movie is nonetheless smarter than most of its lowbrow brethren in the Hollywood sub-sub-category known as the spoof movie.

Drillbit Taylor brings Seth Rogen's hot streak to a sudden halt.

What makes The Grand a memorable comedy is that the main stories are really about families – how they screw you up and how they save you. And you don't have to understand poker to know the rules of that game.

What's fun about Benson Lee's documentary Planet B-Boy isn't just the amazingly athletic displays of B-boys he puts on screen, but the film's sense of cultural discovery.

Perry's methods are never subtle, but no contemporary filmmaker works harder to make sure ribs are tickled and tears are jerked.

Shutter has the look and feel of a proper J-horror film. Tokyo is seen as a series of gloomy gun metal skies. And the acting is more subdued than in Hollywood horror movies.

Hoary, rather than whore-y, Irina Palm is shameless only in its mawkish sincerity.

If Under the Same Moon is formula melodrama, the film is well acted and its lead character perceptively drawn.

I meant what I said And I said what I meant A flick pretty faithful 'Bout 80 per cent.

At times, the film is more fun than it deserves to be, and it's probably a lot more fun if you're a 13-year-old with an addiction to "Bully: Scholarship Edition."

The whole picture plays like a pop-up book in a welfare agency.

Is Funny Games an unqualified success? No, and for this reason: In order to analyze the devolution of violence into entertainment, the premise obliges the film to superimpose a complicated game atop the genre's simple one – in other words, it makes a game out of the game it condemns.

If CJ7 feels like the love child of Charles Dickens, Mao Zedong and Steven Spielberg, it's because that's exactly what this PG-rated, Chinese-made fantasy is.

If you thought "300" was silly, think of 10,000 BC as 33.333 times sillier.

Semi-decent, somewhat okay, not-half-bad.

You know a movie has taken a very strange turn when you find yourself eagerly awaiting the next appearance by Donny Osmond.

The pleasant surprise is Brosnan. Actually, this shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who's seen "The Matador" or "After the Sunset." The former Remington Steele and James Bond is maturing nicely and choosing some complex scripts to show off his acting chops.

It might seem, from 2002's "Gerry" to his ersatz Kurt Cobain biopic, "Last Days," that Gus Van Sant has been making the same movie: an enigmatic and poetic paean to (teenaged) male beauty, disaffection and inscrutability.

Thoughtfully crafted but ultimately lugubrious, Green's latest only really connects when the director sticks to the small stuff.

A mix of credible sociology and tired melodrama, along with a palpable sense of déjà vu. Because the plight of boyz 'n' the hood is a global tragedy, its depiction on the screen has become a global commonplace with its own attendant danger – the tragedy is starting to feel trite.

What might have been delicious trash lacks the courage of its trashy convictions, and the result is high-born melodrama with the juice boiled out, so much dry cabbage on fine-china plate.

A first film from director Mark Palansky, written by sitcom veteran Leslie Caveny (Everybody Loves Raymond, Mad About You), and the two are obviously indebted to the fanciful imagination of Tim Burton.

Come to think of it, Ferrell is to the sports comedy what the Toronto Maple Leafs are to the hockey biz: Hard-core fans are sure to show up and find reasons to be amused. The rest of us can only hope for better days.

Actually, occasionally, does feel good. Now if only it had something to say.

Apparently pitched somewhere between a farce and a fable, this flick is neither. Just foolish. And frustrating. And, mostly, damned annoying.

A conventional mixture of thriller and moral drama, the film is unsettling in both intentional and unintentional ways.

A typically hypnotic, slow-coiling drama from 80-year-old French filmmaker, Jacques Rivette.

Quaid and Whitaker, who serve more or less as the designated humans in this clockwork contraption of a film, are capable in corny roles, but otherwise Vantage Point is as stuffed with cardboard performances and expositional speeches as any seventies disaster flick.