The latest demonstration of the impossibility of making a good movie from a bad script is provided by When in Rome, a romantic comedy approved by the previous regime at Disney.

The movie is a letdown, stringing together pointless episodes to little effect. It's the kind of thinly conceived, quirk-for-quirk's-sake indie that gives indies a bad name.

More than delivers on the excitement and terror of this existential flirtation with one's own mortality. Where it falters is trying to link this event to Nazi-era politics and a feeble love story.

The film has enough entertaining action and sly humor to please its target audience.

It never rises above formula fare.

Andre Techine's many admirers will not be disappointed by his latest offering, The Girl on the Train, but they might be hard-pressed to define it.

Perhaps best suited for younger audiences, who will be more receptive to a vital history lesson only if it's given a music video-style treatment.

Amiel's greatest achievement is that Creation is a deeply human film with moments of genuine lightness and high spirits to go with all the deep thinking.

Dwayne Johnson's energetic performance enlivens an otherwise by-the-numbers family comedy.

An Argentine comedy that, despite some interestingly offbeat moments, is unlikely to reach much commercial traction on these shores.

A fanciful and melancholy portrait of exiled Russian poet Joseph Brodsky.

The Hughes Brothers' measured, well-paced direction complements the comic-book simplicity of this narrative.

The film belongs to Jarvis, however, and she makes the most of it with expressive features that convey Mia's mixed-up emotions from raging temper to sweet vulnerability. She will go far.

Most of The Spy Next Door is pretty tired stuff from "Pacifier"-style slapstick to comic relief delivered by, of all people, erstwhile country star Billy Ray Cyrus.

The film's action takes place mainly in one room, with the five characters posturing like angry macho men but slowly revealing their arrested development and juvenile ignorance of life in general and women in particular.

The Spierigs have assembled a strong cast, but even their best efforts -- notably by Neill, whose Bromley is the ultimate vampire squid, tentacles wrapped around the face of this scary new world -- can't pump any real life into the bloodless script.

The collision of adolescent hormones and parental folly, hardly new cinematic territory, gets a bracing absurdist slant in Youth in Revolt.

An uneven romantic comedy that feels as fresh as a hunk of week-old soda bread.

Tales of cynical curmudgeons rediscovering their humanity have long been a cinematic staple, but Wonderful World brings a refreshing lack of sentimentality to its take.

Over-the-top -- and ultimately tiresome -- female mud-wrestling, kick-boxing and cat fights in a parody of old exploitation movies.

With neither the dramatic nor comedic aspects of the story line being remotely convincing, the best efforts of the talented cast go for naught.

An evocative examination of the clash between tradition and modernism in the handling of an age-old problem.

It's a superb cinematic work and an appropriately serious one, given its subject matter and its intentions.

The story is a sketchy, dramatically muddled rumination on familiar Williams themes about the Old South and its brave, beautiful, rebellion women always on the brink of love, suicide or madness.

The tight time-frame gives the excellent cast a chance to play with intensity, making even old genre hands hold their breath and feel their minds sufficiently shaken up.

Sherlock Holmes goes wrong in many ways except for one -- at the boxoffice.

The film is neither intelligent enough nor silly or grotesque enough to become a lasting favorite.

What Meyers doesn't do is take chances. She sticks to formula and predictability. In "Complicated," this is as much a matter of casting as writing.