From its opening montage of Hallmark-worthy kisses to a climactic clinch under the Tuscan sun, Letters to Juliet celebrates synthetic sentiment.

Too much of this love triangle rings false.

Kilcher makes the slog worthwhile--her face gleams with possibility, even in the character’s darkest moments--though one prays she escapes the typecasting trap ASAP.

The esteemed director, Ken Loach, isn’t really a fantasist--and it shows.

Sol Tryon’s dark, irrepressibly hilarious fable offers highbrow absurdism and low-budget filmmaking at their most clever and outlandish.

By movie’s end, you see flocks of umbrella-adorned commuters in a different light; and what’s often viewed as Japanese humility becomes a doorway to something huge and eternal. Bring the kids.

But while you can’t fault this labor of love’s conception, you can take issue with its leaden execution.

Although convincing as athletes, neither Miller belongs on a movie screen; personal parable or not, this feels like a too-familiar trip around the bases.

The big question isn’t whether middle-aged romance will bloom, but rather, how much sub-Jarmusch deadpan humor and pathos can you take?

An overall lack of drive drops the pacing from languorous to a slow, stalled crawl, but the journey itself isn’t the point here. For once, it’s the destination--forgiveness--that really counts.

With this depressingly bland sequel (scripted by snark specialist Justin Theroux), he’s (Robert Downey Jr.) stranded in lightweight arrogance.

Babies is barely more insightful than your average Flickr photo gallery or home movie clip: it’s just infant porn for prospective parents.

The big absence here is the man himself; Gibney couldn’t get the jailed Abramoff on camera, either due to unwillingness or a Justice Department intervention. Whatever the reason, it’s crippling.

Sherman based this obtuse psychosexual dystopia on his own hippie upbringing; the result is virtually teeming with bitter resentment for the drug-addled parent collective that inadvertently turned his adolescence into a chapter from "Lord of the Flies."

A believably unbalanced Bening scores the movie’s true coup: Karen’s revitalizing relationship with a sweetly persistent coworker (Jimmy Smits) is a rare example of Hollywood doing right by midlife romance.

Cowriter Branch isn’t much of a dramatist either, as this hoary midlife-crisis tale is watchable solely for its reliable cast.

What emerges is an illuminating, though terribly dismaying, portrait of the War on Terror’s lasting effects. Whether one retreats or steps out defiantly, there is no sanctuary.

This is like a subpar "Naked Gun" feature cooked up by Eisenstein and Godard during a drug-addled lost weekend. Where's Leslie Nielsen when you need him?

If this is what passes for contemporary art terrorism, we’ll opt instead for something truly subversive--like genuine art

Less a nightmare than a case of bad indigestion, this ’80s horror reboot is a primer in the humorless recycling of potent pop culture.

The only saving grace of this wannabe Looney Tune? The animals don’t talk.

The Good Heart dilutes Cox’s gravitas with quirk.

We like our secondhand vengeance as sleazy and bloody as the next grindhouse fiend, but even an intentional throwback shouldn’t feel content to coast on so much déjà vu.

Caan can’t seem to play up his strengths. He’s a raw talent who needs an editor for his scripts and a strong hand behind the camera guiding him. Mercy gives our guy neither.

She has real sympathy--characters that might have been brittle, mockable creations in another writer-director’s hands gain resonance here. But the filmmaker also might have very little to say apart from the way guilt enters into life, and then suddenly recedes.

Excruciatingly stupid movie.

One senses this is a production better suited to the stage.

Ghost Bird has a bad habit of briefly taking flight and then crashing back down into NPR-like stodginess.