Dramatically but unevenly explores the lives of four Palestinian women during the years of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Though it is intermittently witty, visually playful and laudable in its attempt to appeal to both head and heart, Laws abandons its characters to its big concept.

Captain Jack Sparrow is back in excellent form for his fourth adventure in Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, which is more serious in the hands of a new director, Rob Marshall, and thanks to Penelope Cruz it's also a good deal sexier.

The film clicks briefly when capturing the silliness of XXX concerns, especially in script-development scenes. But whatever hilarity might have prevailed on the set doesn't translate to the screen. Intrusive music and last-act contrivances do nothing to lift the flat tone or allow the film to earn its intended emotional payoff.

There's no catharsis at the end from the journey taken, just relief that it's over.

What makes A Minecraft Movie so dispiriting is how it fails to spark the imagination, betraying a core tenet of the game on which it’s based.

Stepping behind the camera, versatile actor Dylan Baker makes an assured directorial debut, drawing spirited performances from his seasoned cast while mainly steering clear of the usual, treacly movie-of-the week conventions that often go with the territory.

In the spirit of the venture, the entire cast gets down and comes off all the better for it. Both Efron and McConaughey get very messed up physically, and both actors seem stimulated to be playing such flawed characters.

At the helm for the first-time, and working from screenwriter Christina Hodson’s slick balancing act of aspirational romance and dark psychology, longtime producer Di Novi enlivens the generic mix with a tinge of camp and a sure grasp of mean-girl dynamics.

The film's saving grace are its fast pacing and generous doses of humor, the latter of which is mostly provided by Robert Patrick's sly delivery of the many wisecracks doled out by his villainous character.

This informative but scattershot documentary about the Occupy Wall Street suffers from a surfeit of facts and figures.

A playfully self-reflexive exercise whose endless in-jokes will best be appreciated by only the most ardent genre aficionados.

The creepy evocativeness of its superbly utilized setting...and the well-realized creature designs make it a more than respectable horror effort. The haunting final shot alone makes it worth the price of admission.

Aside from a neat, if somewhat overused, optical effect that follows speeding bullets all along their whizzing aerial tracks, there is nothing here that hasn't been done before, but it's all executed with competence, starting with the performances by Tom Berenger and Billy Zane. [25 Jan 1993]

The movie is gag-filled, as you would expect of a Sandler movie, but the filmmakers realize they have hit upon an idea that is both clever and good, so they edge their comedy into some darker areas of human behavior.

Blindness is provocative cinema. But it also is predictable cinema: It startles but does not surprise.

Superficiality reigns, but then a truly affecting scene will pop up.

A road movie short on comedy and drama should at least offer a keen level of observation, but here insight is scarce and emotional resonance is faint.

The stark drama harkens back to Sidney Lumet classics like "Serpico" and "Prince of the City"-filmmaking that went after an unadorned, jagged realism, with acting to match.

The film's stars are Toni Collette and Harvey Keitel, but the proceedings are stolen right out from under their noses by supporting players Michael Smiley and particularly Rossy de Palma. The latter, familiar from the many Pedro Almodovar movies in which she's prominently appeared, nearly manages to save the picture.

Tapping cleverly into one of the newest perils in urban living, Ride will please most audiences looking for a Friday-night thrill ride.

Jay Lee's grotesque little horror film makes up for in audacity what it might lack in finesse.

The ‘70s recreation is reasonable -- there are plenty of vintage cars and pop tunes of the moment -- but the characters never register beyond the surfaces of the scenes despite being equipped with long-festering resentments and grudges.

Although the film serves as a charming introduction to audiences new to the Bollywood genre, those well studied in the history of Shah Rukh Khan movies will be most rewarded, since the screenplay and songs make dozens of references to his earlier films.

Good-naturedly gruff, unabashedly resourceful and proudly Australian, Occupation gets the job done with a minimum of fuss and an abundance of explosive set pieces that will likely endear it to domestic fans, even if it’s mostly forgettable otherwise.

This head-scratcher boasts visual imagination to spare even as its logistical complexities and heavy-handed symbolism ultimately prove off-putting.

Moviegoers who liked Taken and want more of the same will get precisely that.

Arguably, the film's hard turn into Scaresville taints what has made it appealing up to this point — and certainly, a tease in its final shot is a cheap gesture toward a possible sequel. But what comes before benefits from the cast's solid familial chemistry and an unhurried approach to the question: Should we want to talk to loved ones who've died, or leave them (and ourselves) in peace?

Where the film falls apart is in trying to steer this nightmare out of dark fantasy into the cold light of logic.

Like so many animated movies these days, it buries its ideas in a visual and aural cacophony of frenzied action sequences designed to engage the shortest of attention spans.

Moves at an absurd pace and dares anyone above 25 to keep up, yet the stream of genre-hopping jokes and sight gags makes the movie an entertaining ride.

The actors are all likeable enough, especially the gamine Demoustier, but they are stuck with limp material that’s more twee than captivating.

Murphy's comic brilliance is at the service of the story and he positively shines with a number of diverse and zany impersonations, most enjoyably a Jesse Jackson takeoff.

While several of the dance sequences admittedly pack a visual pop, the added dimension does the hokey scripting and some of the acting no favors by amplifying their already noticeable shortcomings.

It feels like a sermon delivered by an extremely cine-literate preacher.

Playing off intense, uncomfortably tight close-ups where the actors show off finely tuned displays of flickering emotions with long shots that emphasize the plush interiors and tidy suburban gardens that surround them, Sud ratchets up the tension expertly.

The slapstick and action comedy interludes are haphazardly executed at best, and matters aren't helped by the film's incredibly ugly look.

It's not much of a movie, but a hell of a ride. So what if the movie dumbs down Japanese culture to a bad yakuza movie and features Japanese characters who can barely speak Japanese? The cars are the stars here. Everything else is lost in translation.

Cute and cartoonish rule the day, and teens and tweens will be the film's chief audience.

Big George Foreman isn’t bad exactly, merely serviceable. You keep waiting for it to deliver a knockout blow that never comes.

Uneasily combining its determinedly edgy plotline with failed sentimentality, Flower is redeemed only by Zoey Deutch’s magnetic performance, which would be star-making if in the service of a better vehicle.

Good performances and a keen eye for period detail can't disguise the fact that not much is happening here story-wise.

It is unlikely that a lot of viewers come to see a Step Up film for convincing dialogue or psychological insight into a group of young things trying to make it big in a ruthless industry. But there’s barely any humor that doesn’t feel third-rate and most of the plot threads are so thin that All In occasionally feels like a satire of a dance film.

Tedious humor and sentimentality bury what could have been a pretty good road picture.

Manages the difficult feat of being simultaneously sordid and tedious at the same time and is ultimately surprisingly tame despite its unrated status.

Has the hallmarks of a top-notch Jewison production -- splendid performances, especially from leads Michael Caine, Tilda Swinton and Jeremy Northam, a pulse-quickening pace and production values that establish story and character within a distinct environment.

Director-screenwriter Kuryla displays some talent and an audaciously daring sensibility but ultimately fails to display the assured cinematic style that would make the unsavory proceedings more palatable.

Part war drama, part political thriller, part romance -- and wholly uninvolving.

The film’s cardinal sin isn’t so much that it’s unoriginal as that it’s so uninvolving it almost assures attention deficit will set in early.

Pixie is a trigger-happy comedy road movie that relies more on boorish energy than wit or charm.

A stunt-documentary whose conceit overlaps with the finding-yourself appeal of a road movie, Joseph Garner's Craigslist Joe is humbly charming.

Eastwood's main achievement here lies in trusting his hunch that the young men could handle playing themselves onscreen, with an acceptable naturalness and without self-consciousness. This they do, without a false note.

Fortunately, the two stars always brighten the proceedings.

Lumbering, lifeless, and—strange thing to say about a cadaver—almost entirely charmless. Almost entirely because both Lily James, as headstrong heroine Elizabeth Bennet, and Sam Riley, as her brooding suitor Mr. Darcy, make for a delightful onscreen pair.

A mechanical sci-fi'er absent of logic or emotions. It functions as an expensive place-filler on the Disney release schedule and, as such, will be welcomed by only the least discriminating thriller fans.

Good-humored, illuminating and without cant, Oscar-winning director Oliver Stone's documentary South of the Border is a rebuttal of what he views as the fulminations and lies of right-wing media at home and abroad regarding the socialist democracies of South America.

Given how insultingly fanboys are portrayed, even the fan base could be put off.

Fortunately, there's Lively, adopting a convincing British accent, who almost, but not quite, manages to infuse the convoluted goings-on with enough gravitas to make them convincing.

An ambitious, visually handsome production which fails to ignite.

Mark Gill's feature debut England Is Mine struggles to evoke the atmosphere of its setting — Manchester, 1976-1982 — and to bring its tantalizingly enigmatic subject into satisfying focus.

Matt Sobel’s overhaul tones down the cruelty and eliminates the more grotesque touches, resulting in a chamber drama that never gets under the skin.

A horror spoof that has little reason for being, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Undead pretty much uses up its quotient of wit with the title.

Writer-director Boaz Yakin, who has directed everything from veteran movie stars to canine thesps in his career, has a harder time with child actors, eliciting performances that are uneven enough to attract attention to the script's weaker aspects.

Sacrifices its potentially compelling central storyline to an elaborate, meta-style intermingling of supposed fiction and reality that turns out to be far more confusing than intriguing.

My problem with The Age of Disclosure isn’t the lack of opposing voices. It’s that there couldn’t be experts debunking anything here. Nothing is proven, and thus nothing can be refuted.

Schumer and Hawn know what funny looks and sounds like, and they lend their dialogue and gags — no matter how tepid — enough snap and personality to distract you, at least some of the time, from the utter laziness of the material.

Following a few years after "3 Geezers," Schumacher's reviled feature directing debut starring Simmons and Tim Allen, I'm Not Here represents a great leap forward, but still doesn't hold out much promise for future efforts that aren't built around performances by Simmons.

Fairly competent but hardly engrossing.

Writer-director Larry Blamire has clearly done his homework, and his playful cast nails the requisite acting-so-bad-it's-good pitch.

Features a fine performance by Angela Bassett, but her work is the sole subtle element.

There's little to distinguish this tale from the countless similar efforts that have preceded it, other than the exoticism of its setting. The performers do manage to bring some life to their characters.

The film becomes markedly more entertaining with every appearance by Walter Hagen (Jeremy Northam), Jones' archrival, a raconteur and bon vivant who, though fiercely competitive, enjoyed playing while drunk and clad in a tuxedo.

Although a number of the gags fall flatter than a crepe, the accent is on the charmingly juvenile as opposed to the purely puerile, with a fresh-faced cast of amiable young performers on hand to make the trek relatively painless.

It’s an instant camp classic, especially because it takes itself so adorably seriously.

If it had skipped the clichéd supernatural elements to instead concentrate on the relationship between the two central characters, Don’t Knock Twice might have emerged as an interesting film.

Despite Wilson’s on-the-nose caricature and the enjoyable comic performances of such supporting players as Lusia Strus and the ever-reliable Wendi McLendon-Covey, Paint never delves beneath the surface.

Laughs-wise, it lacks the raucous edge of an "Old School" or "Anchorman" or the retro charm of an "Elf," but there's still plenty of Will-power to fuel this likable underdog trifle. It certainly is more enjoyable than a lot of what passes for family entertainment these days.

Too dark for a very broad audience, it will flummox some viewers drawn by its cast but will strike others with its more-than-prickly approach and standoffish humor.

Neither good nor so-bad-it's-good, Perry's odd oeuvre has an allure all its own.

As franchise update, origin story, coming-of-age movie, comedy and indulgent f/x extravaganza, the feature, written by the director and Gil Kenan (Monster House), hits all its marks.

It's not really the showcase Mackie has long deserved, and at any rate, Idris' morally troubled young human is the story's real protagonist; but few fans will be very disappointed as the credits roll.

While the film bristles with cinematic verve, it also is as second-hand as an antique store.

Crammed with charmless characters and/or hammy performances.

Unfortunately, the film lacks the hypnotizing strangeness of Foreman's best stage efforts and also pales in comparison to cinematic works like Matthew Barney's far more ambitious "Cremaster" series.

Brainlessly entertaining action picture.

Eventually, though, Waiting For Lightning suffers greatly from the absence of Way himself.

It’s a solid genre outing with unsettling topical resonance.

Thugs offers a damning summary of the FDA approval process as a closed loop in which one hand washes the other and crucial data can remain hidden.

There are some thrilling sequences, to be sure, but the whole is definitely less than the sum of its parts.

While Imperfections lives up to its name with its too clever by half plotline and failure to find a coherent tone, the indie film features enough enjoyable moments to overcome its flaws.

Crowe himself, as usual, is the best thing in the film, once again upgrading less than optimal material with his indelible screen presence.

Unfortunately, the proceedings become increasingly tiresome the more the characters are killed off, with the result that despite an impressive cast, the film comes to feel like a Coen brothers rip-off.

A good old-fashioned British spy thriller.

David Lynch probably should have let Laura Palmer stay dead. Twin Peaks -- Fire Walk With Me, a feature film prequel to the much-discussed, much-admired TV series by Lynch, is a wearing experience that apparently intrigued the director as little as it inspired him.[28 Aug 1992]

It's all utterly preposterous, and yet Waugh handles the big scenes pretty well.

I’ll take this JLo as “nobody fucks with me or my daughter” killing machine, discovering her long-hidden maternal instincts, over those grimly generic rom-coms she cranks out once a year, which might as well be direct-to-inflight movies.

Feste, who has one previous effort as a writer-director, last year's "The Greatest," fails here to do the most basic thing -- give an audience a rooting interest, or any interest at all, in these four troubled people.

It takes some time for the action sequences to fully engage, but from about the movie’s midpoint, Peyton delivers a succession of staggering set pieces.