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.