Newfoundland-set comedy is formulaic but pleasing.

Overall, Space Jam is a seamless marvel as Jordan slams and jams in the Looney Tune world.

Edward Burns' best riff yet on guys trying to sort out their feelings about women.

Katz is much more interested in observing Jake's newfound emotional core — and probably a bit too confident that a moist-eyed Kroll can turn this quite likable but slight family reunion into something more touching.

A full-flavored, absorbing tragedy.

An involving and ambitious fictionalized look at Rob Ford's downfall that is far from satisfied with gawking at that Toronto trainwreck, Ricky Tollman's Run This Town also intends to make points about racism and sexual harassment; to lament the slow-motion death of journalism; and to give voice to a generation of young adults who've been maligned by the oldsters who, as the movie sees it, made them the way they are.

A real audience pleaser, so long as that audience is mentally agile and adult, for it comes at you from odd angles and features three distinct story lines and 10 main characters.

A dynamic breakout performance from Gina Rodriguez helps this rap-infused drama about a young Los Angeles Latina overcome its patchy storytelling.

A low-key mystery that's initially engaging but ultimately lacks sufficient intrigue to sustain interest.

More a film about ideas and theories rather than a story that’s more directly involving emotionally.

Easygoing and always likeable but hardly packed with laughs.

Deadly earnest in its highbrow seriousness, William would seem ripe for parody, except that "Encino Man" got there first.

The film doesn't quite manage to sustain interest for the duration of its 86-minute running time. But it does exert a certain voyeuristic fascination, thanks in no small part to the eccentricities of its central figure.

Raso takes Kodachrome (shot entirely on Kodak motion picture film) as a departure point to keenly deconstruct the bonds that hold families together and the betrayals that drive them apart, relying on an unshowy style that emphasizes the actors’ captivating performances.

It’s a surprisingly meaty work that works on several levels at once.

Few films have so poignantly portrayed a father's relationships with his sons as The Boys Are Back.

The film ultimately fails to satisfy because of the limitations of both the format and subject.

This tale of a lovable jerk who learns the meaning of sacrifice should capitalize on its star's sitcom popularity to hit one out of the park.

Does a good job of reviving stale material. Thanks to a snappy script by Josh Goldsmith and Cathy Yuspa and an effervescent performance by Jennifer Garner, this romantic comedy has a buoyant personality.

Chen's direction is his most staid yet, but the riveting story speaks for itself.

A gloomy but perhaps realistic depiction of the forces of corruption and deceit that produce environmental catastrophes.

To say that thespians live for opportunities such as this is an understatement, and Schull, whose restrained underplaying only makes the material more powerful, makes the most of it.

As in their previous films (I Love You Phillip Morris; Crazy, Stupid, Love; Focus), directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa enjoy just scattershot success in hitting their seriocomic targets, scoring from time to time with their more coarse and outlandish gambits but rarely inducing one to take what they're watching very seriously.

The decibels, energy and overall quality are high in writer-director Kari Skogland's Fifty Dead Men Walking, her supremely well-made, highly stylized, graphic tale of Northern Ireland's "Troubles" in the late 1980s.

Writer and director Richard Tanne (Southside With You, about Barack and Michelle Obama's first date) takes what sounds like a terrible idea and transforms it into a sleek, well-played romance that largely makes the cliches believable.

For anyone not in the very specific demographic group depicted, the experience of watching this is like being trapped in a tiny downtown club, where the food isn't that good and the portions are tiny.

There’s no shortage of excitement, suspense, jokey camaraderie, sorrowful losses, satisfying comeuppances, twists and turns to fill the generous running time, with plenty of variation in the bloody encounters.

What starts as potentially interesting apocalyptic speculative fiction devolves into dreary sub-Hunger Games survivalism and banal teen romance.

A solid primer that augments exposition with a powerful sensual streak, Mark Hall's Sushi: The Global Catch aims to be a comprehensive look at the raw-fish phenomenon.

Although engaging enough to hold interest, the just slightly off casting of Ewan McGregor and Stellan Skarsgard...dampens plausibility.

How To Live Forever is less about how to delay or defeat death than a film about what gives life meaning.

A critique of post-millennial journalism is one of several ideas raised but mostly abandoned in this genre pastiche, which never really coalesces despite some promising elements.

Most of Arcadian’s potential lies in its performances (including compelling turns from Martell and Soverall) and the design of the monsters.

Poirier is a master at dialogue. His script crackles with sharp lines and he gives all his scenes a splendid comic undertow.

As the characters' lives fall apart, Ledger fails to bring the necessary gravitas to the role, and he looks a bit too healthy throughout.

Choosing it for his debut as director, Bateman demonstrates the same knack for timing and fine shadings of attitude as he does onscreen.

As cartoonish as much of this is, Pickering's story is refreshing in its refusal to paint all Christians with the same brush,

Moviegoers who don't get a kick out of spotting athletes on the screen may be less than enthralled by the otherwise formulaic comeback flick, but sports-loving viewers will likely be more enthusiastic.

It's the female performers who steal the show, especially Whitman as the uber-confident Zelda and Alexander as the girlfriend who tolerates Bernard's immaturity even while calling him out for it.

The live performances in particular feature an energized sheen sometimes missing from Perry's music videos featuring the very same songs.

The film is absorbing on a scene-by-scene basis. But it connects the dots of Raymond’s life in a perfunctory way, without locating a fluid through-line or gaining emotional access to its elusive subject.

What The Grand lacks in originality it more than makes up for with its high percentage of funny moments.

Olszanska gives an impressively intense performance, if a little too mannered at first, but neither she nor the filmmakers ever get beneath the character's skin.

Will please its core audience but won't enthrall anyone over the age of 16. (Even that might be stretching the point.)

Rodrigo Garcia's film only intermittently surmounts the limitations of the central character's parched emotional existence and restricted horizons, and the resolutions to some principal dramatic lines seem rather too easy.

The thriller aspects of the story and the overall solid level of acting -- including a sexy performance from a red-hot Nicole Kidman -- keep the audience interested but never fully emotionally involved.

Lights will put in more appearances at festivals before achieving a brief theatrical window for Kaurismaki devotees to gaze through. Most will do so with discouragement.

The great strength of the film is that it is difficult to know where cinema verite leaves off and fiction begins.

Some privileged nature footage from the African rain forest is dishonored by deeply silly narration in Chimpanzee.

This making-of-a-star drama is old-fashioned and corny, and not in a good way.

Southpaw sticks to tried-and-tested genre rules, yet an edgy cast — led by formidable leading man Jake Gyllenhaal — keeps the story in sharp focus.

While the film commits errors of taste and tact, and is generally all over the place from start to finish, those issues come off here as byproducts of a certain generosity — a sense that Anders wants to convey a full range of experience, including the messy stuff in between the usual formulaic notes and beats.

Suffice it to say that if you enjoyed Extraction, you’ll have a fine time with this one, which, in typical franchise fashion, busts its butt attempting to outdo its predecessor. And it does.

It’s Crowe who’s the film’s MVP.

Along the way, though, 2U throws enough wrinkles into the first film's action — if you don't remember it well, rewatch it before seeing this — to engage us.

It may be conventional but it’s never uninteresting, thanks to King and a strong ensemble in the key roles. And no one could argue with its value in bringing Chisholm’s achievements to the attention of younger generations perhaps unfamiliar with her legacy.

With its sly, unsettling mix of politics and psychology, Anniversary is both over-the-edge and utterly recognizable.

Money for Nothing feels less prophetic than generally handwringing -- it's just enough to produce vague worry in the unschooled without moving policymakers to do anything they're not already doing.

An affecting ensemble piece that's destined to generate a fair share of awards-season buzz.

For a time, an appealing gentleness prevails that's rooted in this unique inter-generational romance, a feeling augmented in particular by Purnell's slow-blooming flower of a performance, and if the film had remained focused more on the improbabilities of this love story, it might have emerged as something rather special.

The problem confronting writer Richard Maltby Jr. and director Chris Noonan is that Potter lived a fairly uneventful life once you remove her success as an author.

The production is over-stuffed with cutesy split screens, jarring dream sequences and a pushy score by Bright Eyes band members Nathaniel Walcott and Mike Mogis that succeed in dragging the proceedings from merely cloying to increasingly annoying.

The screenplay struggles to rise above the level of a sociological study into the realm of exciting cinema.

The film hardly could be credited with breaking any new ground, but it has a hangdog charm, much like its leading actor.

Yet another feature comedy that began life as a TV show sketch and is still stuck in infancy (not to mention infantilism), "Run Ronnie Run!" has about 10 minutes of sharp, funny satire to its name before running out of laughs. [15 Jan 2002]

The First Monday in May should prove catnip to fashionistas.

A gore-for-broke affair that strips the flesh off Sam Raimi's cult-beloved comic-horror franchise and exposes the demons at its core.

Techine's last screen retelling of a sensational tabloid case, The Girl on the Train, was sly, illusive and seductive. This one is just inert.

Dipping less rewardingly from the same well in Thor: Love and Thunder, Waititi pushes the wisecracking to tiresome extremes, snuffing out any excitement, mythic grandeur or sense of danger that the God of Thunder’s latest round of rote challenges might hope to generate. Chris Hemsworth continues to give great musclebound himbo, but the stakes never acquire much urgency in a movie too busy being jokey and juvenile to tell a gripping story.

It's frustrating to see this wonderful-looking, laugh-out-loud funny survival tale fall short of its potential.

The screenplay and the actors ooze charm as well as intelligence early on but the second half is more like a sleek thriller, something that's efficient but less jocular and surprising.

The laugher about a meek middle manager who finds a life-changing fortune takes a while to hit its stride, but in its best stretches, it offers deliriously spirited farce.

Lacks the fresh charm that made their first such an unexpected (if guilty) pleasure.

Saving the day is Harrelson's low-key, rooted performance, adding an unexpected layer of poignancy when things take a decidedly darker turn.

Successfully surmounts nearly all the challenges of making a film about a young person dying. Which means the writer-director avoids pitfalls. It is not cloying or sentimental or falsely optimistic. It avoids bathos and exaggerated emotions. Instead, the film affirms life in surprising and gratifying ways.

Has the feel of a home movie of greater interest to its participants than to an audience.

Code 46 lacks the visceral power of "28 Days Later," as well as what might be termed its "gross-out" appeal.

Ultimately, the film is as numbingly boring as, well, a lengthy train ride during which there's nothing to do but look out the window.

Fails to overcome its recycled elements but displays a winning spirit that's hard to dislike.

Khan's work, despite great performances, may not ride the popularity charts, and the film may have to content itself with attracting limited arthouse audiences.

You don't have to be Jewish to enjoy Sixty Six, but it probably wouldn't hurt.

The film is essential viewing for anyone who cares about the fate of the mountain region and the legacy of the Dalai Lama.

A would-be provocative satire that too often settles for sitcom-grade silliness, The Infidel represents an opportunity wasted.

It's an energetic and vivacious film that will appeal to fans of punk rock worldwide and should find its place in the pantheon of great music-film biographies.

Here and There deserves all the attention it can get for its limited release. Beautifully executed, the semi-autobiographical film is set between the director's adopted New York and his native Belgrade, Serbia.

A thoughtful piece of advocacy journalism.

The result is more promotional film - Springfield happens to have recently released both a new album and an autobiography - than intriguing sociology, although the rabidly intense middle-aged female fans on display are probably deserving of psychological study.

Aside from some uneven handling of the cast, Ball competently styles the action sequences throughout the film and capitalizes on his VFX expertise with pulse-pounding scenes tracking the Runners through the Maze battling Grievers.

The Story of Luke suffers all the flaws associated with disability films and more. Familiar faces in the cast may attract notice in niche bookings, but no one involved will benefit from the exposure.

There’s no denying the inherent emotional power of watching Wampler, aided by two experienced climbers, endure his arduous quest to climb a mountain twice the height of the Empire State Building.

Frustratingly devoid of any background information about the director’s storied career, the film is ultimately repetitive and tedious.

Fastvold and co-writer Corbet subscribe to the less-is-more branch of screenwriting, assuming that audiences will be drawn in by the air of mystery surrounding the sisters, when in fact the lack of narrative detail is consistently off-putting.

The earnest film’s straightforwardness and down-to-earth characters — especially the lead performance by Maggie Baird — have a gentle appeal, but its tendency to spell out every emotion and theme in on-the-nose dialogue undercuts its potential impact at nearly every turn.

While the film suffers from its own occasional sluggishness, it picks up as the lawmen watching our hero grow as strained as he is.

Even if the film does manage to reveal the splendor of each voyage, it tends to lose its characters in the landscape.

Eva is a provocative and engrossing effort that, although trafficking in familiar themes, is a notable addition to the timeworn genre.

Crucially, though all the characters get a little eccentric at times and some of their antics seem to have been imported from boulevard comedies rather than inspired by real life, in the overall scheme of things, the ensemble remains grounded in a recognizable reality.

While it features some pungently observational moments, Below Dreams is ultimately too diffuse and disjointed to have the desired impact.