By the time Reilly's shaggy life story winds down, it's hard not to wish he'd been your friend, too.

In the end, it all remains a dramatically inert set of talking points, and not even the high-caliber cast can make much more out of it.

It's a hugely entertaining slice of sunbaked Gothic.

No two ways about it: The screenplay is derivative. But the location adds a little novelty to the standard-issue running and screaming.

The first full-fledged Indian musical coproduced and distributed by a major Hollywood studio, this fanciful love story takes its unlikely inspiration from Fyodor Dostoevsky's short story "White Nights."

Amazingly, many of Jack's and Ina's letters survived and -- read aloud by Dutch actors Jeroen Krabbe and Ellen Ten Damme -- serve as the thematic thread that runs through Ohayon's film.

Documentary filmmakers Sean Fine and Andrea Nix Fine found an ingenious way to tell their story in a film that is as unflinching as it is uplifting.

To call Christian's film unpolished is an understatement.

The rhythms of Charlotte's mannered, artificial dialogue are better suited to stage than screen -- each segment started life as a one-act play and overall the film works better as a conversation starter than drama.

Its vivid sense of place and time make it compulsively watchable, even at a running time of two and a half hours.

This candy-colored animated fable is an awkward mix of corny bee puns, clever sight gags, kid-friendly action, adult-centric workplace angst and Seinfeld's distinctive navel-gazing wit. And what's up with those four-legged bees?

More than any previous film on the subject, Braun's documentary offers an answer to a common question, perfectly phrased and answered by Cheadle himself: "What can I do? More than nothing. A lot more than nothing."

Thirty years down the line, not everyone looks as they once did, so even fans will have trouble putting names to aged faces. Newcomers, meanwhile, will feel hopelessly shut out.

Cusack makes a half-hearted attempt to connect with Coleman, but chemistry is fatally absent and small wonder: Dennis is a unsettlingly strange creature who could well be from another planet.

The true star of this nerve-racking family crime drama, shot with a minimum of fuss by Ron Fortunato, is playwright and first-time screenwriter Kelly Masterson's deft script, which carefully develops each fatally flawed character and tells their stories in achronological flashbacks that seamlessly fit together like a jigsaw puzzle.

Well-acted first-feature.

Watching Binoche dithering about an American comedy takes some getting used to, but she's a believable soul mate for the hangdog Carell. The rest of the family, however, has got to go.

The minutiae of Carter's book tour isn't always enthralling, but his personality drives the film: pious, stubborn, devoted to his wife, curious, professional, warm and yet slightly removed from the fray, conciliatory, meticulous, self-effacing, funny, decent, intellectually rigorous and firmly committed to his positions.

The film rings so consistently false that it's more likely to induce snickers and eye-rolling.

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.

The trouble is that if you haven't seen the other entries in the cycle, or don't have all the characters committed to memory, you'll have trouble figuring out who anybody is or, in the end, what any of it is supposed to mean.

If not exactly dull, Hopkins' stream-of-consciousness rant is nonetheless self-indulgent and crammed with bits of business that never add up to anything much.

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

Mark Boone Jr. makes a vivid impression as eccentric loner Beau Brower, and Danny Huston is mesmerizing as the leader of the shrieking, slashing, wallowing-in-gore bloodsuckers. They effortlessly eclipse the rest of the cast.

We're treated to endless scenes of women getting slammed, thrown and clothes lined, while men's genitals are grabbed, groped, stroked and tasered. It's all just as painful as it sounds.

Fans of Lehane's Kenzie-Gennaro books will lament the fact that starting with the fourth book means losing the couple's extensive backstory, but the essence of their fragile, damaged bond comes through even if you don't know what shaped it.

With his carefully controlled pacing and superb use of sound, Sarkies draws the viewer deep into the experience of a town caught completely off-guard by a kind of violence they could never have expected, and won't soon forget.

Taut, powerfully acted political thriller.

It's hard to watch two fine actors working themselves into a lather for so little reward.

The supernatural plot elements are developed so unconvincingly that the story seems to be about people ruining their own lives by believing in stupid superstitions, so it’s a shock to realize the ghostly goings-on are meant to be taken seriously.

Allen Loeb's first produced screenplay is an unvarnished treatment of death and its aftermath that's unusual for a Hollywood film.

Formulaic film recounts the tumultuous birth of Israel.

Often rings painfully true, but would have benefited from judicious editing.

History gets short shrift from screenwriters William Nicholson and Michael Hirst -- starting with the not insignificant fact that in 1585, Elizabeth was 52 years old – but Kapur is clearly more interested in spectacle and soap opera than dusty old facts.

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.

Gosling is the film's salvation: He really is good enough to make this underwritten fantasy feel as though it amounts to something. But it doesn't.

The result is unfortunate: Pinter can't find emotional depths that just aren't there, but dispenses with most of what made the original entertaining in the search for them.

Schroeder's film is a fascinating character study in contradictions and in the end Verges remains loathsome, oddly charismatic and willfully enigmatic.

Perry certainly loves his divas -- the best parts are written for Scott and the wonderful Smith.

Phoenix gives a nice performance as a man caught between loyalties but blind to the realities all around him, but Gray's screenplay is filled with clunky, Dr. Phil-sounding aphorisms that stop the movie cold.

Homey but not especially interesting trips down the Ellis and Cheney family lanes.

A romantic victim to the end, this Ian Curtis is all that worshipful fans could ever hope for.

Fortunately, no amount of optical wizardry and quick-change trickery can disguise the fundamental power of Harper's performance, a revelatory turn that's truly transformative in every sense of the term.

Painfully cliched. The music is throbbing and the leads are cute, but there's nothing here viewers haven't seen before.

It feels as though everyone involved was having a rollicking good time, and while the film itself is wildly uneven, Lin and company get in a few pointed jabs at Hollywood fatuousness and self-delusion, cultural stereotypes and '70s fashions.

Through the hard-won experiences of these families, Karslake shows that Scripture and homosexuality are not mutually exclusive, and with the help of a number of academics and theologians, shows how the Bible has been misread, particularly during the 20th century.

The movie's film-studentish navel-gazing wears thin long before its over.

The results feel slack – sometimes funny, but slack.

While Gilroy deploys the occasional exploding car, the film's climax is all words -- angry, carefully sharpened words -- with the stopping power of large-caliber bullets.

Bar-Lev also explores the freakish popular appeal of child prodigies, the family dynamics that come into play when a child's celebrity and earning capacity overshadows the adults', and the remarkably conflicted and contradictory admissions drawn from Brunelli about Marla's work.

Though stylishly produced, this clumsy parable will probably engender more boredom than sequels.

Neither Ketchum nor the filmmakers take an exploitative approach to the material; their focus is the way the youngsters' petty cruelty erupts into murderous sadism.

Does find a spot closer to the middle than most.

Filmmaker AJ Schnack's hauntingly beautiful film is a bold and successful attempt to recover the human being who disappeared under the heavy mantle of "face and voice of a lost generation," and whose life has been increasingly overshadowed by his sensational early death in 1994.

The trouble with this precious fable isn't that the Whitmans are self-absorbed ninnies: It's that they aren't characters at all.

The story's incredible coincidences, lazy cynicism and easy ironies recast a real-life horror story as easy-to-dismiss melodrama, complete with sequential "happy" endings.

Many of the script's observations sound as though they were lifted directly from the pages of Baxter's book, and they're too platitudinous to impart much wisdom to anyone who's been in and out of love at least once in his or her life. But it's nice to see these ideas played out by a fine cast.

All that charm is wasted in careless scenes that don't make much sense and the whole thing feels slapped to together with chewing gum and spit.

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."

Lee has perfectly captured the details, textures, sights and sounds of a China caught between East and West, occupied by an ancient enemy and quaking on the eve of an earth-shaking revolution.

Outsourced is a sweet, good-natured surprise that takes the cliches out of an overworked genre and makes them seem almost fresh and entirely charming.

And if the film's 11th-hour CGI effects aren't entirely convincing, the notion that oil itself is haunted by the restless spirit of every once-living thing that time reduced and mingled into the earth's black blood throws off a primordial chill.

Like everything else about this insulting romantic comedy, the Jessica Alba/Dane Cook love match is degraded by vile jokes, a boorish attitude toward women and a smutty tackiness not seen since those stupid nudie-cuties of the 1960s.

Flawed but refreshingly intelligent.

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.

I like Amanda Bynes movies…and I’m a dork!

Maybe the life was edited out of it in the two years between shooting and release, or maybe Dominik was simply overwhelmed by the outsized myths of the West, but the film only comes to life after James' death, when Ford quite literally takes center stage.

Neither trite nor pandering, and that's what makes the film better than most of its peers.

If the film ultimately amounts to little more than a middle-aged coming-of-age story, it's richly imagined and filled fanciful touches in keeping with its passionate subject.

Chinese director Ann Hu follows-up her tepid 2000 debut "Shadow Magic" with another luscious historical drama that, thankfully, is a lot more interesting. The plot is no less melodramatic, but here melodramatics work along with the film's theme, not against it.

And yes, that is Salma Hayek in the chorus line of sexily sinister nurses, perhaps repaying Taymor for lending her dramatic credibility with "Frida."

This charming tale of a quartet of Australian orphans who share a life-altering holiday in the 1960s should appeal to sentimental adults old enough to wax nostalgic over their own adolescences.

Frankly, it's dumb, but no dumber than "Transformers."

An icily seductive parable about family, power, unconventional justice and the perils of answered prayers.

The result is a beguiling and often poignant pageant of outsider musicians, but the broken heart of this extraordinary film comes directly from Zobel's own personal experience.

Though the portentous title is taken from the Old Testament -- Elah is where little David took on Goliath -- the film's concerns are painfully timely and forcefully articulated.

A stale rehash of Woody Allen-style "he's a neurotic Jew, she's a flaky shiksa" gags.

Wood is excellent, but this is a career highlight for Douglas. His depiction of the manic Charlie stays surprisingly grounded and prevents the story from being a naive celebration of mental illness as a kind of freedom that it so easily could have become.

It goes without saying that the humor is vulgar and juvenile.

Cinematographer Alain Dostie's stunning, painterly cinematography is the best -- and perhaps only -- reason to endure this stunted epic.

Regardless of the artistry involved (though the street-level anxiety of post-9/11 New York is far better evoked in Jane Campion's underrated "In the Cut," The Brave One ultimately never really strays from the same moral low road as "Death Wish."

This gripping documentary sheds light on the frightening totality of Hitler's vision for a Germanic Europe, and the extent to which he and his Nazi thugs were no better than common thieves.

The nerve-racking wait at the Contention hotel is no longer the film's centerpiece, but the deeper characterization gives Bale an opportunity to once again sink his teeth into a complex role, and offers a reminder as to why the notoriously difficult Crowe is sometimes worth the trouble.

Not even the always reliable Diane Lane can save this one.

By turns awe-inspiring and deeply human.

Based on the story of Milarepa (1043 - 1123), who renounced the violence and vengeance of his early life to become a revered Tibetan Buddhist saint, lama Neten Chokling's directing debut ends on a frustrating spiritual cliffhanger.

The trouble is that Turturro's reach considerably exceeds his grasp.

It's funny without being toothless, adrenaline turbocharged without being mean and utterly deranged in the best sense of the word.

If anyone is to blame for this bomb it's Forte: He wrote the thing, and one would assume he's the one responsible for those uncomfortable silences where jokes are supposed to be.

A dismal misfire that attempts to make black comedy out of the adventures of war correspondents and the dirty business of international politics.

The cumulative evidence that genocide could not have occurred without the cooperation of the German army is overwhelming.

None of it really adds up to much but it's smart, low-key fun -- terrible title and dangling preposition notwithstanding.

The film is preposterous on so many counts that it's hard to enumerate them.

The final confrontation is a slow-motion, De Palma-esque massacre in a hotel lobby that begins and ends in the amount of time it takes for a high-flying can of Red Bull to hit the floor. Breathtaking.

First-time writer-director Ryan Shiraki's crude, gross comedy of campus sexual errors might push boundaries better were it not so painfully unfunny.

Zombie delivers a scary horror movie immediately recognizable as his own -- something that will come as a welcome relief to fans who've diligently sat through seven "Halloween" sequels in hopes of one day reliving the original's terrifying magic.

This good-natured genre piece gets the job done while sneaking in a couple of pointed observations about contemporary Latino immigrant life.

There are nice touches, particularly in Venora's performance and Timothy Kendall's editing, but the film's maudlin edge illustrates the dangers of directing your own material: There's no one on hand to tell you when what you think is "just enough" is actually way too much.