A slow-paced and often confusingly plotted crime drama that never lives up to the delicious potential of its premise.

What is puzzling is the incompatibility of the two leads with their roles. Raven is supposed to be a high school senior on a road trip to check out prospective universities. But she acts like a adolescent on a sugar high during a weekend sleepover.

Sustains itself through terrific forward momentum and two glorious star turns by gifted actresses Frances McDormand and Amy Adams.

In Paranoid Park, Gus Van Sant enters the world of high school kids just as he did in "Elephant," achieving this time a much sharper, more focused portrait of how these rapidly maturing young people act, think, speak and behave.

Snow Angels succeeds because of the depth of its well-drawn characters. With no cinematic sugarcoating, it's an organic story that draws us in to these people's lives, as flawed and destructive as they may be.

A hyperactive, wishful-thinking special effects fantasy suitable for family outings.

Put three old friends in a convertible for a cross-country road trip to a loved one's funeral, and what do you get? Very few surprises, in this feel-good fluff that, despite offering nothing novel, could do well with older audiences who rightly feel that too few films are being made with them in mind.

Shot in high definition and filmed at many historic locations, the film somehow still lacks the splendor of an epic, and its urgency to get on with the next plot point leaves much unexplained while context goes out the window.

The result is an entertaining comedy for young girls and older girls who still like a good romantic fable.

The comedy is sloppy, crude and contains far too many misfires, but the film does capture the old ABA spirit in its ungainly struggles to wrestle laughs from seriously mediocre material.

An unusually poetic and meditative eco-themed documentary, Laura Dunn's The Unforeseen is as beautiful as it is ultimately depressing.

Iranian-American filmmaker Ramin Bahrani has followed up his well-received Man Push Cart with another penetrating portrait of life on the outskirts of New York.

Yelchin delivers one of those performances that pop eyes... It's a breakthrough role.

While this actor-filmmaker has delivered such worthy films as "A Rage in Harlem" and "Deep Cover" in the past, this misbegotten effort would be instantly forgettable if not for its potential as future camp classic.

It's an exuberant, fanciful fable set amid the scruffy outskirts of American society, where people's need for escapism coincides with their desire to participate in its creation.

Straight out of the slice-and-dice school of filmmaking, Vantage Point fractures chronology and perspective in a vain attempt to disguise its flimsiness.

At least a fright-wigged Joe Mantegna, delivering an execrable cameo as a whacked-out doctor, has a good excuse for his presence; the writer-director is one of his former film students.

This "Living Dead" exercise delivers far less monstrosity and a great deal of pomposity, not to mention dull characters who aren't nearly as lively as those dead guys.

The film is far from a complete washout, and this is chiefly a tribute to its immensely attractive and appealing cast. Ryan Reynolds proves to have the stuff of a true leading. man.

Jumper proves disappointingly inert. All the state-of-the-art visual effects in the world can't compensate for spotty plotting and bland characters that prevent an intriguing premise from going the distance.

An enjoyable adventure fantasy that pushes all the requisite buttons while still managing to throw in a pleasant surprise or two.

The wall-to-wall soundtrack naturally features plenty of today's leading hip-hop and R&B artists, including Flo Rida, T-Pain, Missy Elliott and Trey Songz.

A "little" film with a great reach.

A soggy, listless affair, this would-be fun-in-the-sun sunken-treasure frivolity starts taking on water from the get-go, thanks to drawn-out exposition and languid pacing.

Ultimately best suited for the confines of late-night cable.

Chock full of wonderful lines delivered by a splendid cast, the film toys with the conventions and mostly transcends the limitations.

Shot on sometimes lousy-looking video, it seems unreasonable to ask audiences to pay to see this picture on a big screen. But "Wild West," particularly with a bit of editing, would be a standout on cable, where shoddy production values would be eclipsed by some very funny material and the emcee presence of a sometimes charismatic (and sometimes obviously road-weary) star.

The cast's evident delight might be enough for some moviegoers, but with so much talent and so little modulation on offer, audiences subjected to the onslaught could reasonably expect a higher laughs-to-torture ratio.