The Good Son is a second-rate thriller with first-rate production values. On a lower budget and without the hottest child star in America in the cast, Ruben and McEwan might have made a meaner, tougher and more successful thriller.

Donnie Yen is famous for combining martial arts traditions into his own unique fighting style and Collin Chou, who studied with Sammo Hung, is up to the task of holding his own.

The third Die Hard film is easily the most spectacular, featuring an exploding subway train and a manic car chase through the congested streets of New York that rivals "The French Connection."

That there's precious little chemistry between buffed-and-tanned stars Parker and McConaughey is only the first of this slight, overly busy film's problems.

The only thing that enlivens Beauvois' anti-thriller is Baye's beautiful performance.

The film's longer running time means more dead spots and the more elaborate stunts demand tighter scripting and less room to improvise, which is a shame since improvisation is the Reno's gang real strength. Forgiving fans, however, won't care a whit.

Even set against the Sierra Club beauty of Redford's Montana, it's hard to get excited by fisherman casting their lines into the water.

Lots of violence, typical of the Corman exploitation mill, but the film still shows the budding talent of Scorsese in his use of moving-camera and period detail.

If not precisely poetic in its elaborate offensiveness, it's certainly imaginative. Unfortunately, that's not the same as interesting or engaging, unless you're a dyed-in-the-wool fan.

The key to enjoying the fourth installment in this testosterone-fueled franchise is accepting that it's a live-action cartoon that makes no effort to conform to the laws of gravity, plausibility or common sense.

Fine performances from Sam Rockwell and Brad William Henke deserve some passing attention.

The product of this ingenuity is a slight spin on an obscure motion-picture artifact, but it's surprisingly artfully done.

Endearing without being especially engaging.

Baldwin dominates the screen with his slick, beefy swagger, and if Prinze is less than convincing as a kid from Brooklyn, Caan and Ferrara nail Carmine and Bobby with such assured economy that it hardly matters they're one-note roles.

The film's pared-down narrative is anything but aimless, and it pays off in a haunting final last scene scored with Gang of Four's "Damaged Goods."

Beautifully encapsulates the film's sensibility, a bizarre mix of reverse cool and childishness.

However fact-based the material may be, Jordan's salt-of-the-earth characters, with their bluster and pride and rough-edged loyalty, are all too familiar, and their travails feel formulaic, right down to the life-affirming climax.

Sivan's film is well acted, beautifully photographed and oddly reassuring. It comes perilously close to suggesting that the injustices of colonial rule were the product of morally weak and misguided individuals rather than a system that empowered and enriched foreign interests at the expense of locals.

If you don't care about the characters, then everything's just a big, dumb joke.

This version is a well-handled retelling of the classic Louisa May Alcott tale.

Although the fairy-tale script is as old as the motion picture industry itself, the resourceful cast of Coming to America brings freshness to the annoyingly cliched material. Unfortunately, Landis' inelegant direction nearly derails the film.

The result is both deeply personal and maddeningly unfocused.

Ultimately, Bubble is less important as a film than as an experiment in simultaneous cross-platform film distribution.

One would have to be heartless not to be engaged by Strictly Ballroom's romantic, dewy sentiment, but the predictable plot is difficult to bear, as are the broad characterizations.

In Koepp's comedic variation on a similar theme, the dead are not just unhappy -- they're irritatingly needy.

Barnes, now in his seventies and relocated by the Witness Protection Program, is shot only in silhouette, but there's plenty of footage of him in his heyday, dressed to the pimpalicious nines and playing to the cameras like a movie star.

It has a certain Midwestern charm that settles calmly in the stomach, making the viewer feel warm, comfortable, and quick to smile.

The fact that it was shot at the picturesque Utah resort is a huge plus and the film is so unabashedly eager to please.

Bello is phenomenally good as the embittered Marcia, while Stuart and Christensen do their best with their less complex roles, but they're all undermined by Alfieri's shrill, mannered dialogue and cliched backstories that wouldn't be out of place in a dysfunction-family-of-the-week movie.

Simultaneously gorgeous and forgettable, sentimental and prurient.

Canadian-born choreographer Alison Murray draws on her own experiences as a 15-year-old runaway living in squats and on the streets, in her feature-filmmaking debut, which is a clear-eyed look at the pleasures and price of abandoning conventional mores for experimental lifestyles.

A deeply personal coming-of-age story steeped in heady nostalgia and all the creative myopia that too often comes with it.

Peter Berg's fast-talking and unnecessarily complicated tale of Middle East terrorism is more smoke and mirrors than meat. It may come on like Syriana, but it boils down to little more than a diverting episode of "CSI: Riyadh."

Not surprisingly, we're left with characters that feel only half sketched and fail to resonate on their own -- but onto which much can be read by Hou's most ardent fans -- in a poetic looking film that's ultimately as inflated and empty as the balloon itself.

The animation is no better than competent, but the film has a nice bluegrass-style musical score by Ed Bogas and should be fine for the kids and "Peanuts" fans.

Yuen would have been better off exposing more of that reality and celebrating less of the joyful silliness of the model works, let alone staging pointless hip-hop-inflected dance numbers set to Yang Ban Xi musical themes.

It's a show we don't see, presumably because of issues with music rights, and while "much ado about nothing" might be overstating things, after more than an hour and a half of buildup, it would have been nice to see Wu-Tang perform.

Despite energetic dance sequences and appealing leads, the film falls prey to pat psychologizing and some stunningly puerile notions of history.

Jefferson in Paris is a rich confection indeed, filled with tidbits about fashion, customs, art, and commerce in 18th-century France and America. But like a meal consisting of nothing but petits-fours, this lavish biopic is too much dessert and not enough main course.

Yes it's as corny as Kansas in August, but this admittedly formulaic sports drama is base on a true story and has something important to say about the fate of many small Midwestern American towns whose popular sports teams fall victim to school consolidation.

Director Stephen Purvis and writer Chris Haddock never rise above the material's inherent pulpiness, but they keep the twists coming until the very end.

Shelly was murdered before she could continue developing as a writer and director, and while this, her last film, is extremely uneven and undermined by an excess of quirk, Keri Russell's performance as a pregnant pie-guru is a charmer with a bracing streak convincingly desperate determination.

Jon Poll's harmless, occasionally entertaining debut feature.

Formulaic though it is, the story hits the right emotional buttons and promises that hope and dogged work trump despair.

A woman's picture with a few - precious few - contemporary flourishes.

For parents who were unable to secure tickets for the young fans in their households, it's nothing short of a godsend.

Daniel is so hopelessly immature, and played with such puppy-dog overkill by Williams, that it's impossible to root for him--until you meet his wife, whom Sally Field makes even less appealing.

Rather than confront what it sets up, it takes the one joke and runs - till it runs out of steam.

The work of Hackman and Mastrantonio keeps the action afloat and more credible than it deserves to be.

It's a "Taxi Driver"-inspired odyssey into violence and insanity that runs close to two hours -- a long time to be riding shotgun with a madman.

Ryan has a wonderful way with Hartley's often difficult dialogue, and is engaging even when the rest of the film is not

Katzir's documentary is as much a labor of love as Spaisman's theater, and it's often rough around the edges.

Mukherjee's charm keeps the child-like Geeta from being thoroughly annoying, and the musical numbers are pleasant, if not particularly memorable.

Though this third installment is not quite as nuts as the second film, it's nevertheless firmly set in the same ridiculous mold.

If you know there's so such place as Avenue E in the East Village, or if you've ever taken a bath in your kitchen, this one's for you.

Now seen for the first time in close-up, these "boys" are well past adolescence, which makes Bennett's sympathy for poor Hector a bit easier to take.

Lurie's film never fully reconciles the story about newsroom ethics with the sentimental drama about bad dads and bereft sons.

The screenplay is blessedly free of mediocre songs and light on flashy pop-culture in-jokes.

For a movie of its type, Max Payne is a little short on excitement and heavy on pathos.

Daniel Sullivan's earnest adaptation of Jon Robin Baitz's play is worth seeing for Ron Rifkin's performance alone.

Catania and Ignacio's film works best on the level of straightforward biography told through the reminiscences of friends, family, members of Busch's Lost-in-Limbo theatrical troupe and, best of all, Busch himself.

Broad, hackneyed and stultifyingly predictable.

A big success in Europe, the film has already spawned two sequels, the first of which is due to be released in the fall.

There's a terrific movie buried in Woody Allen's tale of two American girls broadening their horizons in Barcelona, and every once in a while tantalizing glimpses penetrate the twee narration and mannered performances.

The acting is flat, and the scientist's ideological speeches too bluntly designed to mirror post-9/11 rhetoric. But there's a dreamy fascination to the iconic images of machines fighting a perpetual war for the human creators they'll inevitably outlast.

The major problem with White Nights is that it tries to be so many things at once that it fails to be much of anything other than a vehicle to watch two of the best dancers around strut and tap their stuff.

Surprisingly compelling, if not up to dealing with the larger political issues it raises.

A Holocaust film that's light on sentimentality but high on human drama, Defiance tells one of those remarkable survival stories that's so incredible it must be true.

It hits more often than it misses, and the best parts are always the simplest, in which the stars wing it with nothing to go on but their natural chemistry.

Wongpim pays tribute to classic Italian Westerns in his face-hugging close-ups, but his film is more silly than existentially anarchic, and its exotic quirkiness wears thin quickly.

A risky, not entirely successful comedy about mental disability, based on the novel by Sherwood Kiraly.

Regrettably, however, the weird elegance of Chris Van Allsburg's much-praised picture book has been all but lost in translation.

It's handsomely shot by Stuart Dryburgh and nicely acted, and if it tastes a bit bland, you'll soon forget that, along with just about everything else about it.

Could as easily be called "Spurlock: Cultural Learnings Of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation Of America."

Barber's screenplay is mired in cliches that got old in 1935.

Packs five films' worth of drama, crises and revelations into one, and often lapses into sitcom triteness.

Its assets are considerable: affecting performances (especially Irma P. Hall as blind Aunt T.) and sharp writing.

The film gets off to a slow start and runs long, but Gold and Helfand effectively stake out their own piece of a large and complicated issue.

When it comes right down to it, there are two kinds of people in this world: Those who despised Comedy Central's notorious series Strangers with Candy as the rudest, crudest and most offensive show ever to appear on television, and those who loved it for those very reasons.

This madcap paranormal love triangle is charming on its own terms.

Though rooted in broad stereotypes and sassy platitudes, the film's feisty cast and generally sunny outlook make for warm and reassuring comfort viewing, the equivalent of a straight-from-the-box dish of mac and cheese.

Biopic cliches hamstring producer-star Jennifer Lopez's pet project.

Meyrou follows the family through the three day trial, the verdict and its aftermath, but the perpetrators remain a mystery.

It's the supporting characters' combination of smarts and sass, not to mention an honest and positive depiction of the mentally challenged, that turns this potentially crude and heartless comedy into something that the Special Olympics actually endorses.

Equal parts "Mad Max" and "Day of the Dead," this third and supposedly final entry in the Resident Evil franchise is no less derivative than its predecessors but moves along at a brisk clip.

It's swiftly paced and never dull, but the heavy-handed symbolism comes fast and thick.

Despite a terribly conceived coda, Luke and his brothers have mostly succeeded, thanks in large part to sharp dialogue, a solid vintage soundtrack (Rick Nelson's "Garden Party" features prominently) and some great older actors -- Cassel is a particular standout -- from the heyday of American cinema.

How can such awful things come out of the mouth of such a pretty girl?

By turns fascinating and intolerable.

A painfully slow psychological thriller.

The good news is that Battle for Terra's moments of unbalance ultimately right themselves into a surprisingly earnest, engaging film.

The golden shadows of the waning Old West are thrown across the big screen with full reverential treatment in this solid, unsurprising rendition of Jim Harrison's widely praised novella.

Luckily, Towne has assembled a marvelous cast who somehow manage to keep the film moving, despite their obvious confusion over just what it is they're supposed to be feeling.

The result is a rather conventional, Biography Channel-style portrait of a man who helped change the face of theater in the last quarter of the 20th century.

McCormack and Cochrane can't transcend the clichéd, meandering dialogue, so Brad and Lexi's dilemma never feels like anything but a didactic contrivance.

Isn't exactly a straightforward biography, but rather a snapshot of the iconoclastic American maverick at a particular point in his career.

Intelligently acted but oddly stagnant adaptation of Brian Morton's acclaimed novel.

Newcomer Gregory never captures the mercurial charisma for which Jones was famous (and which Jagger notoriously channeled in his movie debut, "Performance"), without which his story is just another cautionary tale about fast times, intemperate passions and bad dope.