By this time, cinematographer Fred Kelemen's mostly stationary camera has revealed about all there is to see in a fine array of textures in such things as the wooden table, the rough floors, the walls of stone, the ropes on the horse and the skin on the boiled potatoes. That does not, however, make up for the almost complete lack of information about the two characters, and so it is easy to become indifferent to their fate, whatever it is.

It's a pleasure to surrender to the movie's lush visuals, which are accompanied by wonderful jazz classics performed by Valdes, Estrella Morente, and Freddy Cole (Nat King Cole's brother), among many others.

"No Country for Young Kids" would be just as suitable a title for The Woman in Black, a hoot of an old-fashioned British horror film.

It's the affable cast, headed by Drew Barrymore and John Krasinski, that really makes the picture so widely accessible.

As the band of adventurers skips from one supersized Survivor-like challenge to the next, one can't help feeling the creative potential of Verne's vision is wasted.

Perfect Sense is dense: It's a very complex and intelligent story hybrid that, must have looked great on paper and sounded impressive in discussion, but as a movie, it splatters all over the screen in unsatisfying genetic mutations.

The result is a largely entertaining picture with too few (and late-arriving) scares to satisfy the multiplex crowd, but one that will please many die-hard genre aficionados.

Director-screenwriter Ben Wheatley brings a fresh mystery and bite to the hitman genre, although a deeply weird twist and buckets of gore may throw more than a few audience members.

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.

Starring a painfully awkward Katherine Heigl, One for the Money mostly resembles a failed television pilot.

The good news is that it will be a good 15 years before we're forced to encounter the character again in Spring. Maybe by then he'll be less of a downer.

It's something you'd think only the crassest of Hollywood producers would come up with - injecting sex appeal into an event as ghastly at the Nanjing massacre - but it's an element central to The Flowers of War, a contrived and unpersuasive look at an oft-dramatized historical moment.

To his credit, director Asger Leth (Ghosts of Cite Soleil) gets right to the business at hand where the set-up is concerned, but it's in the execution that this would-be thriller falls flat.

More aggressively violent and thankfully less mythology driven than previous installments, Underworld: Awakening is strictly for the converted.

Every character here is so squeaky-clean, and the prejudice as depicted is so toothless and easily overcome, that the film feels like a gingerly fantasy version of what, in real life, was an exceptional example of resilient trail-blazing.

The Grey, a man's-man of a genre picture that will satisfy the action audience while reminding more discerning viewers what they saw in director Joe Carnahan's decade-old breakthrough, "Narc."

Despite dynamic subject matter, prime archive material and insightful interviewees, Whitney Sudler-Smith's intrusive presence onscreen somewhat trivializes his documentary tribute to Halston and the decadent disco years.

Dori Berinstein's tender but sharp portrait finds a lot of depths in the woman whom many see as a camp figure.

A grindhouse quality that makes Loosies almost fun in flashes. But flashes are all they are -- pleasures even more fleeting than an off-brand smoke bummed from strangers in an alley.

Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky's final film about the West Memphis Three demonstrates how the first two docs played a role in galvanizing national support to free the wrongly convicted men.

The lead role of a working class former smuggler who dirties his hands again to save his family fits Mark Wahlberg like a glove.

Relentlessly unpleasant and nihilistic in its approach and execution, The Divide is best appreciated as a virtual instruction manual on how not to behave during a crisis.

A teens-in-trouble thriller with barely enough momentum to make it to the end credits. Performances and script are made-for-cable grade.

Staggeringly cornball and squeaky-clean even when flirting with such issues as interracial sexual rivalries.

Never gets off the ground, trotting out the same predictable twisting heads and psycho-babble without a whiff of originality or discernible visual flair. As a result, the would-be thriller proves as scary and unsettling as a slab of devil's food cake - only considerably less satisfying.

As in all the director's work, the cast is given top consideration and their realistic acting results in unusual depth of characterization.

A hilarious date movie for couples of all orientations.

The fact that Norwegian Wood is based on Haruki Murakami's 1987 international best-seller should encourage many viewers to give this long, elegantly shot, sporadically involving Japanese film a try.