Sounds promising. What a disappointment then to report that Just Like Heaven is more like purgatory, a sweating, straining attempt to marry the wisecracking fury of the modern sitcom to the classic Rock-Doris, Cary-Kate romantic comedy.

Of course, given the abundance of voice-over, Nic Cage is unburdened from any great need to act. But he narrates splendidly, delivering the stuff with an unrepentant glee laced with liberal doses of irony.

Schreiber has one major casting coup in Eugene Hutz, the New York-based Ukrainian/Gypsy/Punk musician who plays Alex.

Ghoulishness and innocence walk hand-in-hand in Tim Burton's Corpse Bride, a movie that digs into Hollywood's past to resurrect the antique art of stop-motion animation and create a fabulous bauble of a movie.

So no one would argue that Thumbsucker sucks. But the thing does seem just so indie-movie familiar.

This one's just painful.

Separate Lies is deceptive in more ways than it intends. Because the acting is so uniformly superb, we're almost fooled into believing that the movie is as good as the cast. It isn't, not by half.

Laugh? Well, once.

By the conclusion, the movie turns into the ursine answer to "Free Willy," veering dangerously close to New Age parody: Free your inner bear -- and begin to heal from the last time you got mauled.

Positively hops with jolts and frights but they're the cheap kind.

The tedious, tortuous storyline and lifeless cast are two larger problems.

Grade Underclassman an "Unacceptable effort," and "D" for derivative.

Constant is the very thing The Constant Gardener is not. Attractive yet fickle, the movie beckons enticingly one moment and wanders off the next.

Sorry, but the real Grimms did a whole lot more with a great deal less.

Though The Cave really, really tries to be scary from as many directions as possible, it fails to hold much in reserve and never manages to build suspense.

The trouble with Undiscovered isn't that it's actively annoying but it's so dramatically listless it seems determined to become Unremembered.

While "Wedding Crashers" ultimately succumbs to endorsing the mushy romantic clichés that it spends the rest of the time ridiculing, The 40-Year-Old Virgin offers a wiser take on the anxieties, negotiations and expectations that surround love and sex, particularly for people who've been burned before.

Sitting through Red Eye is like watching a master carpenter at work on a custom bookcase. No one would call the result art, but you're sure bound to admire the sheer craft of the thing, the clean lines and seamless joints and meticulous attention to detail.

Valiant is weak tea next to the best of Pixar and DreamWorks.

My advice is to choose the first half, where things are really funny until they aren't.

Bold, intelligent and provocative.

Shamelessly cross-promotional "extreme" sports flick.

A fine, solid cast and fully exploited settings cannot make up for the by-the-numbers screenplay, which is filled with all-too-convenient plot points.

In the worst scenes in Deuce Bigalow: European Bigalow, it's as if Schneider and Co. are straining to invent new taboos just so they can break them, a strategy that provokes more confused silence than laughter.

The director's approach is far too ham-fisted and erratic to bring Four Brothers up to the level of enjoyable trash -- it's too crummy to earn that distinction.

The picture's broad outline may be fact, but everything inside gets painted in a deep shade of bogus.

Compelling, disturbing.

It is also extremely well-written in the fearless way of a smarty pants on a roll in the university cafeteria.

It's not so much a movie in three acts as three movies stuffed into a single casing, and often showing the strain.

In lieu of a movie, we get a series of car chases rudely interrupted by the occasional smattering of dialogue.

It's like watching a man trying to scratch an itch by eating an egg. It doesn't address the problem. It's also the sort of thing that Europeans love to think about America -- everybody looking, nobody finding -- and it might explain why this decent, but by no means great, film won the Grand Prix at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival.

Only a master director could make such a beautifully flawed film.

The documentary My Date with Drew is "Don Quixote" meets "Bowfinger" meets "Swingers" for the reality-TV generation.

A movie that gets wonderfully under your skin.

As confusing, horrific and unsettling as a nightmare can be, at least you wake up and the memory fades. Darwin's Nightmare, tragically, is not a dream, but rather a haunting, beautifully made reality check well worth waking up to.

What's curious about the film, in an anthropological way, is that it's made up of a series of false human moments yet remains entirely predictable.

An engaging and surprisingly sharp allegory about high-school hierarchies and adolescent growing pains.

Cohen (The Fast and the Furious, xXx) is no stranger to cornball excess but Stealth is his chef-d'oeuvre, a movie so audaciously preposterous and jingoistic it plays like a parody of the genre.

The structure of the film mirrors the changes in the joke which in turn reflect the moral of the story -- hey, it's all a matter of perspective.

Fortunately, writer-director Craig Brewer manages to conjure a world so rich and believable that we barely notice the Hollywood predictability of the plot.

As the careening cars go splat, splat, splat, the director's vision of the future looks like a cheerfully mindless combination of two extremes of carnival entertainment: demolition derby and whack-a-mole.

It falls short of the original but surpasses its sequels.

While this may all sound seductively warped to those who enjoy movies featuring sexually deviant confinement and torture, blasphemous rants and rampaging rednecks, The Devil's Rejects does not live up to its sick, twisted and campy intentions. "Straw Dogs" meets "Smokey And The Bandit" for the new millennium it ain't.

With no previous acting experience, she's (Stilley) a natural between the sheets but a rank amateur between the vowels.

Perhaps the harshest criticism of the new German film The Edukators is that it doesn't make you feel any better edukated.

The result is a movie that seems not quite real and yet never false but somehow partakes of both -- rather like the prospect of death.

The creative and experimental use of sound and photography are a big part of what makes November an intriguing film.

Burton's movie is not only more faithful, complex and better cast, it has an essential ingredient: squirrels.

There's little doubt a person can get a little pent-up looking for a good romantic comedy -- but you might want to save yourself until something better comes along.

A tart-coated sugar pill of a movie.

He [Salles] has managed to create a movie that's pretty bleak for a Hollywood -- especially Disney -- thriller. His theme, as a director, is the indignities of poverty and, in his way, he pays more attention to that agenda than he does in generating any real thrills.

In a summer of low movie expectations and worse results, Fantastic Four is a not-so-bad mindless bit of camp escapism that doesn't try to eclipse its dime-store comic book roots.

With its visual splendour, The Beautiful Country is indeed lovely to behold, but its story of human misery and survival doesn't always benefit from the painstaking art direction, picturesque vistas and surges of dramatic music.

Reportedly, after seeing the film, rapper Eminen is anxious to play a wheelchair athlete in a coming movie.

This is B-movie material all the way, yet it's not only watchable, it's engrossing. That's because the material is in the hands of an A-talent director, who knows, as few of his contemporaries do, how to manipulate the plastic qualities of a film: the lighting, editing, composition, camera movement and production values.

With no help from the dialogue, Kidman doesn't have a clue how to make clueless interesting. Not for lack of trying. Her efforts, which often consist of channelling Elizabeth Montgomery by way of Marilyn Monroe, are painful but insistent.

Land of the Dead is a horror flick, but not a screamy one -- the booming soundtrack pumps up the drama, and the gore induces squirms, but zombies more titillate than anything.

The Clowns and the Krumpers have a rivalry that parallels the Bloods and the Crips battle for the neighbourhood, but fought out in moves, not bullets.

Ultimately, Potter's fable is about how a catastrophe forces us to ask what we believe and why.

Parents of young children should be warned: Here's a family-values film that won't be much fun for the whole family.

A good, breezy once-over-lightly on the life and times of a Hollywood titan, but not much more.

Herbie without the herb has never been my cup of tea.

But for a lightweight summer romantic comedy, The Perfect Man delivers the goods and includes a couple of scenes that are, surprisingly, fresh and quite funny, both of which, incidentally, involve the music of Styx.

Lacks the energy and vibrancy of the best films to come out of the city in the past few years.

Will make you glad to be living on the same planet as Miranda July.

My Summer of Love may sound like the title of a hot teen flick, but it is a truly refreshing grown-up big-screen film, a rare gem in this summer of duds.

The mild but affable story of an ad man's midlife crisis, King of the Corner is an actor's film in every way.

All of the story is so absurdly humourless that it is dramatically inert, as if Nolan had decided the only way to make the Batman character more substantial was to put weights on his wings.

Alas, around about the third act, the idea grows tired and the whole thing gets derailed. Too bad, because it's a good ride until it isn't.

The filmmakers have also advertised that their new movie eliminates the "Pow! Right in the kisser!" threats of spousal abuse that permeated the original series. The question of audience abuse has yet to be addressed.

For a movie aimed at children, Shark Boy and Lava Girl is gloomy.

With its bold screen-filling imagery, this is definitely a movie to be relished on the big screen.

Wilder's created world is alive with his erudition, his sympathy for his characters in their loneliness and flawed goodness. This film doesn't do him justice but it's a gesture in the right direction.

In 5 x 2, the 2 are terrific; it's the 5 that needs work.

With the notable exception of Martin Scorsese's opus, most boxing flicks suffer form a certain amount of raw-boned sentimentality, the sort of easy melodrama that pits naive underdogs against corrupt overlords, or age against youth, or purity against prejudice. Even the recent "Million Dollar Baby" succumbed in the final act. But this one, where "Rocky" meets "The Waltons," has us reeling under its saccharine weight.

So the questions arises: Why bother watching the contrived fiction when the eye-popping fact is readily available? Answer: Why, indeed.

Since there's no evidence in the film that Green teaches his students how to compose, improvise or experiment with the music, presumably the next wave will come from somewhere else.

For such a mush-ball teen movie, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants carries a welcome amount of grown-up emotional truth.

Though Sandler's resemblance to a pro athlete is indiscernible, his mockery of authority and his penchant for buffoonery and slapstick violence make him more of an heir to Reynolds than might be expected.

Credit Madagascar with negotiating a hopeful truce in the ongoing battle between the computer and the animation. Judged merely by appearances, its look is a lovely compromise. Too bad everything else has been compromised right out of existence.

There's almost a perverse pleasure in watching occasionally weak performers mar an essentially sound screenplay. That's the saving grace of Saving Face -- Wu gets the hard part right.

Unlike "Microcosmos" (all insects) and the acclaimed nature doc "Winged Migration" (all birds), Genesis is bogged down by its intentions and too vast a "cast."

The greatest story ever has finally been told. Or, if you prefer, the damn thing has come to its merciful end.

While Mindhunters aspires to be a psychological thriller, it's really just mindless entertainment.

Luckily for the viewer, Ferrell is an irresistible presence. His occasional moments of unwarranted weirdness are the only thing that makes this otherwise pedestrian movie bearable (let alone interesting) to watch.

Add them up and the sum has a certain mathematical inevitability: Really annoying characters, really annoying movie.

In its defence, the movie means to incorporate Jet's conversion into its theme, serving up his new pacifism as a choice morsel of irony. But it doesn't taste ironic, just bland, and we aren't biting either.

The considerable charm of Mad Hot Ballroom can be traced directly to its choice of subjects. They happen to be 11-year old kids, and the lens loves every precious one of them.

One of those crime flicks besotted with its own plot.

The original was shot in 3-D; this, by contrast, is 1-D all the way.

The movie espouses a kind of Unitarian ecumenical egalitarianism that has about as much to do with medieval times as quantum physics. No one should be offended except -- of course -- those who like movies that excite the mind as well as the pulse.

The film has enough laughs to stock a 90-minute entertainment. Unfortunately it throws out enough material to fill five comedies. And most of the jokes die in silence, throwing off a flop-sweat tsunami that carries away Short's best work.

Unlike Todd Solondz's "Happiness," Mysterious Skin is not an abuse movie that seeks to offend or upset.

A powerful, brutal, funny, tragic, vibrant, very human movie.

The result is a film where blisteringly naturalistic drama bumps up against sentimentally arch melodrama (that's the biggest collision in Crash). Haggis showed the same tendency in his script for "Million Dollar Baby," yet there it was better hidden under a simpler narrative. Here, the tendency has gotten magnified right along with his thematic ambitions.

The charm of the movie's first 20 minutes soon turns shrill and manic, as invention is piled upon invention.

The most gratifying thing about xXx: State of the Union is that nobody wastes much time on character, motivation, plausibility, dialogue or sex -- all that slow stuff that drags down ordinary movies.

As a writer-director, he's (Kim Ki-Duk) a wizard with the camera but a plebe with a pen. His latest, 3-Iron, continues the frustrating trend.