It's unfunny at best and borderline-amateur at worst, notwithstanding the desperate efforts of Renée Zellweger.

Not since the thunderous digital onslaughts of "Jumanji" has the big screen seen such too-muchness.

Fitfully amusing.

It's sad to see a promising fantasy turn into yet another industrial-scale fantasy-delivery system that beats up on its audience with mindless intensity and undercuts its own humanity -- and caninity -- in the process.

No cues are needed to understand the plot, which feels computer-generated and barely serves to sustain an hour and a half running time.

The movie is stifling, all right, and depressing in the bargain.

Benjamin Button is all of a visionary piece, and it's a soul-filling vision.

As a PG-rated film opening on Christmas Day under the Disney banner, Bedtime Stories would seem to promise fairly wholesome family entertainment. What it delivers is the glitzy allure of a hotel setting, smarmy double entendres, Ferrari lust, Beverly Hills bling and pneumatic babes -- one of the characters is a surrogate Paris Hilton.

A good chance to see two superb actors having their way with wafer-thin material.

You'd have to be made of granite to resist all the charms of a free-spirited, 100-pound Lab. Yet the production manages, against heavy odds, to make its canine star an incorrigible bore.

Once the plotters plunge into action, though, Valkyrie becomes both an exciting thriller and a useful history lesson.

An absolute stunner, a feature-length animated documentary, from Israel, in which the force of moving drawings amplifies eerily powerful accounts of war, shaky remembrance and rock-solid repression.

Enjoyable enough for what it is, a clever idea developed by fits and starts.

The Class is clearly a microcosm of contemporary France, beset by social and economic tensions. More than that, though, it's a saga of education's struggles in many parts of the modern world. If only the film were pure fiction.

Mr. Smith's latest film is about nothing less than life and death, sin and atonement, and it takes the soggy cake for multiple layers of sentimentality topped by indigestible grandiosity.

Director, Darren Aronofsky, and the writer, Robert D. Siegel, have turned the story of this washed-up faux gladiator into a film of authentic beauty and commanding consequence.

What's never explained is why anyone would do such a dumb remake of Robert Wise's 1951 sci-fi classic.

Doubt leaves none in one respect: John Patrick Shanley was the right person to direct this fascinating screen version of his celebrated play.

It's a meditation, as affecting as it is entertaining, on the limits of violence and the power of unchained empathy.

The cast is superb: especially Kate Winslet, who transcends, by far, the limits of her character's narrow soul. Yet The Reader remains schematic, and ultimately reductive.

In a minimalist film of muted emotions, Michelle Williams gives as lovely a performance as a moviegoer could ask for.

What Ron Howard gets, to a degree that's astonishing in a two-hour film, is the density and complexity, as well as the generous entertainment quotient, of Peter Morgan's screenplay.

Cadillac Records may be a mess dramatically, but it's a wonderful mess, and not just because of the great music. The people who made it must have harbored the notion, almost subversive in a season of so many depressing films, that going out to the movies should be fun.

More than acting, though, Penn's performance is a marvelous act of empathy in a movie that, for all its surprisingly conventional style, measures up to its stirring subject.

Taken on its own terms, Bolt the movie certainly makes the cut.

In a film that has the courage of its absurdity but not much else, Mr. Pattinson gets the best of what passes for style.

[Luhrmann's] movie is all over the map. But what a gorgeous map it is. The too-muchness, like the too-longness, befits the Northern Territory's vastness. In its heart of hearts Australia is an old-fashioned Western -- a Northern, if you will -- and all the more enjoyable for it.

A model of mediocrity.