The easygoing comedy keeps a familiar story going despite minor plot hiccups.

Thomas’ direction, especially of the villainous roles, gives a lot of the action a self-conscious, not-quite-real quality. Some aspects of the movie’s intentional artifice work better than others.

The main point of the film remains its style, which is so constantly and loudly reinforced that it’s often hard to concentrate on the story.

The proceedings quickly degenerate into deafening video game-style fiery mayhem featuring endless explosions and depictions of human combatants melted into anguished looking skeletons.

Journey to the West may not rank among Chow’s classics, but it’s a crowd-pleaser that also serves as a reminder of what the director can accomplish when he’s on his game.

Respectably crafted but short on invention and serious scares.

Awful Nice, about two perpetually warring brothers, grates on the nerves from first moment to last.

An impressively mature directing debut from Italian actress Valeria Golino, who crafts an often engrossing character study around an assisted suicide activist.

Particle Fever succeeds on every level, but none more important than in making the normally intimidating and arcane world of genius-level physics at least conceptually comprehensible and even friendly to the lay viewer.

Annette Bening captivates as the self-delusionist, with Ed Harris ruggedly irresistible as the object of her fantasy.

More a tone poem or gallery installation piece than a verite outing.

Other than for the pleasure of watching Green try to conquer ancient Greece dressed as a distant forebearer of Catwoman, more is less and a little late in this long-aborning sequel.

A likeable if familiar underdog tale.

Overlong, willfully obscure and scatologically extreme, the film will elicit a variety of negative responses despite offering some individual elements that, on their own, would surely impress any of Barney's admirers. The work simultaneously is more fully realized and less creatively inspired than the Cremaster cycle.

Features fine performances from the veterans in its cast. But it ultimately comes across as little more than a compendium of cliches.

This quite mediocre spawned-from-television feature feels like a Jesus film designed primarily for true believers, meaning that the faith-based public that has already been put on alert by seal-of-approval-dispensing church leaders that this is a film to see will make the Fox release into a significant Heartland attraction.

A constant low-boil of ridiculousness both mocks and sustains Non-Stop, a jerry-rigged terror-on-a-plane thriller with a premise so far-fetched as to create a degree of suspense over how the writers will wriggle out of the knot of their own making.

Fatal Assistance is a chilling indictment of how billions of dollars in aid were squandered or lost, and how aid and politics are inextricably linked.

While this low-budget effort seems to have its heart in the right place and features a sensitive, moving performance by Oscar winner Melissa Leo, it ultimately feels like a compendium of bizarre character quirks adding up to a barely coherent whole.

It is a strange cross-breed between an old-fashioned WWII epic full of genre cliches and a modern update whose meticulous historical recreation is frighteningly real.

Over the decades, there’s been no shortage of boneheaded premises for romantic comedies, but the painfully ill-conceived Barefoot takes boneheadedness to regrettable places.

More casual fans are advised to wait a movie or two and see if Begos can do anything new with the idiom he knows so well.

While One Candle, Two Candles… sheds much needed light on the archaic, barbaric custom that is its subject, its jocular tone threatens to undermine the importance of its message.

Ali has a deft hand in creating a fantasy world based on the classical Sita-Ravana model, and gives Bhatt free rein to project herself with unabashed teenage appeal.

If the plotting was only more coherent and audience-friendly and the story-telling more disciplined, the film's extraordinarily complex atmosphere would be irresistible.

It’s all absurd in a way that is typical Besson. But it’s also undeniably entertaining, and it marks a relatively pain-free way to kill, if not three days, at least a couple of hours.

Whenever the camera settles down to record a simple conversation between two characters, things suddenly feel stilted, as if the filmmakers cannot build the drama without flinging a hundred different things in front of the lens at the same time.

While Anderson excels in the film’s many moments of digital doom-and-gloom, he can’t deliver a single authentic emotion between the two star-crossed leads, leaving us with a sooty aftertaste of having sat through one very loud rendition of Titanic in togas.