Ultimately, as is made overwhelmingly clear, this is a film about forgiveness. So allow us to extend the same grace to some clunky writing.

At its best, “The Lost Bus” offers a testament to people’s courage, solo or in groups, when faced with nature’s deadly chaos (albeit a chaos intensified by human-caused climate change). At its worst, it reduces the biggest fire-related calamity in recent memory — 85 deaths, about $16 billion in damage and an area five times the size of San Francisco burned to the ground — to an effective but impersonal disaster movie.

Adapted by Craig Lucas from his Broadway play, "Prelude" is worth watching for the human interaction, and for the pleasure of watching a love story with engaging partners.

The story manages to put a smile on your face from time to time, despite the gloom of its humor. It avoids happily-ever-after almost as strenuously as it works to remind us: You’re not in Hollywood, hon, but Hampden.

Eternity might start out strong, but its plot eventually runs out of steam.

In the end, “Rental Family” is a movie that gives viewers a lot to ponder — about loneliness and family, about the importance of truth and the comfort of white lies — even if the delivery mechanism proves imperfect.

If you go for this kind of fare, you’ll have a good time. If you don’t, you’ll probably find it off-putting.

Goodbye June is a sweet but bland Christmas film that relies too heavily on its talented cast to make up for its narrative shortcomings — a surprising choice for actress Kate Winslet’s directorial debut, until you take note of who wrote the screenplay.

The resulting film offers a unique and revealing — but fundamentally incomplete — perspective on the ongoing war in Gaza.

This month’s Statham movie is titled “Shelter.” And as these things go, “Shelter” is more Shake Shack than it is McDonald’s. It resembles his other genre movies in the basic form and idea, but it’s a much more high-end and satisfying version.

What comes through in "Backbeat," along with the amphetamine-fueled adrenalin of Hamburg, is confusion, bruised feelings and the dawning understanding that life isn't just fun and games -- and neither is rock 'n' roll.

For all its visual delights, however, Coraline remains more an engaging spectacle than a connective drama. That is chiefly because of the writing. Director-writer Henry Selick doesn't reach for the kind of universality that would enrich the movie.

More thoughtful than its cookie-cutter marketing campaign implies, and better than its awful title promises, "Love Happens" is the rare Hollywood romance concerned with emotions other than love at first sight.

Does 9 rival last year's "Wall E" as the best post-apocalyptic "cartoon"? The short answer is Nein. 9 is, however, a visual stunner.

A movie that soars whenever Child is on the screen and sags when Powell shows up.

Admittedly, this is the stuff of lurid adolescent distraction, not great cinema. Jennifer's Body is strictly a niche item but provides a goofy, campy bookend to "Drag Me to Hell" on the B-movie shelf. Watch it, forget it, move on.

May be one hundred percent sap, but its spirit is anything but cloying, thanks to persuasive performances, most notably from Rachel McAdams.

Yes, Knowing is creepy, at least for the first two-thirds or so, in a moderately satisfying, if predictable, way.

The kind of stunning and contentious work of art that will leave a lot of folks speechless.

Thirst is good, insolent fun for about two-thirds of the way, before it stumbles and drowns in a pool of its own excess. Still, you can't help but admire a horror movie that prompts us to wonder how vampires with a surplus of blood got by before the advent of Tupperware.

It's frenetic to the point of crazy while achieving a mark that barely exceeds mediocre.

Within this structurally baggy weepie, at least two perfectly good movies fight to break free, one a provocative legal thriller, the other a melodrama.

A clinically adequate, occasionally above-average art house film. In certain moments, it has all the subtlety and illumination one should ever need.

Refreshingly free of the hyperbole of special effects...Ong-Bak will win no scriptwriting awards, but Jaa is definitely the real deal.

In the end Monsieur N. could use a little less cloak-and-dagger and more of what made "The Emperor's New Clothes" work, i.e., heart.

Intriguing, oddly banal and ultimately deflating.

Satisfies and disturbs in just about equal measure.

It's hardly the best film in the world but you can have fun with it.

A medium-boil good time, mostly for its humor.

Might provide a much-needed fix for Mac's most ardent fans, but they'll have to wait for a star vehicle that fully exploits the range of his comic gifts.

Manages to be a diverting and funny character study, at least most of the time.

Well shot and edited, Death of a Dynasty is hardly a comedy classic, but it's frequently on target.

The pleasure is entirely like eating cake made from cake mix. It's not like you don't know how it's going to turn out, or how it tasted the last time you ate it.

Plays like a piece of mediocre music, gorgeously rendered.

There's something that never quite works about the film.

On the Outs has its rewards, especially in the mesmerizing performance of Marte.

It's doubtful that Depp's off-kilter interpretation will have any discernible effect on the movie's success. But it remains the movie's most disappointing aspect.

Vaughn can motormouth like a machine gun, spraying men, women and children with manic, rat-a-tat outbursts of toxic insincerity. It's often dirty, yes. But it's also manic and inspired.

A slight but sure-footed, live-action comic fantasy.

Sure, Balzac meanders at too leisurely a pace. But the actors are charming; the story sweet

The first 60 minutes of this black comedy are brilliantly sustained, but then director and co-writer de la Iglesia loses his way.

Unfortunately, a good deal of Touch the Music"is devoted to vacuous interviews with Glennie, who seems positively incapable of saying anything substantial. Nor is most of the music very good.

Fellowes has brought intelligence and control to the eternally vexing question of whether the right thing is always the good thing.

It doesn't open up much new territory, except to eschew much of the dark, frank sexuality that has characterized such recent sexual coming-of-age movies as "Mysterious Skin." Instead, Bardwell offers a cheerful, if sometimes strenuously earnest, take on a subject that seems overdue for a lighthearted touch.

You leave the theater feeling moved by a mother's courage, sickened by the crime and a little frustrated, wondering if this unquiet moment in our history will ever rest easy.

If Loggerheads sometimes feels too forced, it features some unforgettable performances, especially by Hunt, an accomplished comedienne who makes an impressive debut as a dramatic lead here.

Most revelatory here is Malli, who defies the stereotype of submission and subservience and emerges as a woman of self-possession and substance. (The earthily beautiful Bat-Sheva Rand infuses the character with a generous dollop of her own zaftig sensuality.)

The movie goes off the rails only when the filmmaker inadvertently legitimizes the Protocols' loony philosophical heirs by interviewing a New York medical examiner and a widow about the remains of one of 9/11's Jewish victims.

It's clear this sequel (directed by Darren Lynn Bousman) doesn't have the same smartness (I speak relatively) of the original. Nonetheless, "Saw" fans can still look forward to involuntary incineration, wrist and throat slashing, bullets through brains and the bashing of someone's head with a nail-festooned club.

What's so good about the movie is Gyllenhaal's refusal to show off; he doesn't seem jealous of the camera's attention when it goes to others and is content, for long stretches, to serve simply as a prism though which other young men can be observed.

Unfortunately, for all its good music and admirable vocal impersonations, Walk the Line slides -- very, very slowly -- downhill.

Although "Pluto" has a rollicky, endearing air, it's cooler than Jordan's other films.

Memoirs of a Geisha is everything you'd expect it to be: beautiful, mesmerizing, tasteful, Japanese. It's just not very hot.

At first blush, there's something vicariously liberating about Brosnan strutting through a lobby dressed only in Speedos and cowboy boots. But it also feels false. The actor seems to be theatrically slumming before his return to suave form.

It seems almost disrespectful to weave in a provocative re-creation of the killings -- somehow a massacre of unarmed innocents that shocked the world should be more than just fodder for ginning up the tension at the end of a commercial movie.

The movie is content to be a kind of middling expression of human decency: It's never either terribly funny or terribly dramatic, but Latifah's quiet solidity and common sense root it in ways that larger, louder pictures never achieve.

Ultimately, La Scorta is a tight, competent but rather inconsequential thriller. It's diverting, but thin. (Review of Original Release)

The first two-thirds of Joyeux Noel are strangely inert, but the film ends with a moving and surprisingly sophisticated meditation on the definition of moral duty.

Though we were wooed by Diesel -- notwithstanding that rug -- we were less enamored with the film's scraggly script. Find Me Guilty is a courtroom drama (much of the dialogue is culled from court transcripts) without a whole lot of drama going on.

As a satire on Tobacco Inc.'s outrageous ability to market carbon monoxide as the elixir of life, this movie should be packing more nicotine.

The film's unforgettable stars are the beauty academy's students, women who have survived tribal warfare, Soviet invasion, Muslim tyranny, American bombs, patriarchal families and even Western good intentions with extraordinary grace and fortitude.

The script is adroit: It doesn't force the humor, and it steadily keeps track of Jim's growing maturity.

What might have been a fascinating, intimate portrait turns into something much less compelling when Clark tries to impose a sex-and-action-packed narrative on the proceedings.

The first section of Three Times is fabulous; the second is fascinating if remote; and the third a jangly, modernist mess.

It drags a bit and suffers from not enough Rudy.

A Prairie Home Companion tries to embrace the spirit of that longtime radio series but suffocates the very qualities that make the original show so special in the first place.

An enigma inside a conundrum inside an escargot shell, the French puzzler La Moustache will delight some people even as it annoys others.

Make no mistake: The War Tapes is not an overtly political film. It appears to grind no partisan ax nor score either red or blue points. Whether viewers support the war or not -- or find themselves somewhere in the mushy middle -- this documentary won't fit comfortably into the pigeonholes of their preconceptions.

No, it's not a great movie. It is, however, an interesting one.

Of all ironies, "Strangers" occasionally takes a step in the direction of the after-school specials it's trying to twit; you'll catch it trying to make you feel warm and fuzzy about Jerri.

The movie attempts to paint too large a canvas.

American director Jim Sonzero has taken the same campus setting and plot and added some rationale by "science-fictioning" it.

There's too much slow-mo and too many music cues, but there's a low-key buzz to Wahlberg's scenes with Greg Kinnear.

And though brilliantly acted, it's not. For some reason, the director and the writer (Paul Bernbaum) have chosen an exceedingly awkward path into the materials. They break the narrative into two strands and play them off each other in cheap and easy ways for insubstantial effect.

Sketchy but often entertaining.

Say this for Confetti: It's a crowd-pleaser. If, that is, the crowd is composed of people who have never seen a movie by Christopher Guest or a TV show starring Ricky Gervais.

All the King's Men hasn't been directed so much as over-directed, although the result, when you make an effort to filter out all the film school pyrotechnics, is an honorable run at Robert Penn Warren's classic novel.

It's handsome, well-populated and offers beautiful scenery and settings. But "House of Flying Daggers" it ain't; maybe "House of Fallen Arches"?

Often funny (just listen to Becky fulminate against Harry Potter), but it's also a scary.

Volckman and Miance are undoubtedly superb draftsmen; what they need is a writer of comparable skill.

With a slick visual style similar to "Monster House", Open Season trots out tropes that recent animated classics have done with more wit and smarts.

This dame is as sick as a sick dog on a hot day, if still always perversely amusing, and the story is constructed as a survivor's ordeal, not a colorful picaresque.

Cocaine is the most aggressively edited film in years: It pounds, it churns, it spurts, it spray-paints.

Cornish provides a counterbalance for Ledger's authoritative presence, turning what could have been just another heroin movie into a flawed but engrossing parable on love and sacrifice.

Works far better as journalism than as drama. One weakness is that poor Linklater has to keep bringing in guest explainers, who lay out one policy or another but have nothing whatsoever to do with the story.

For all its contrivances, Breaking and Entering has its finger on the pulse of contemporary London life and possesses its share of fleeting delights, chief among them the sublime Robin Wright Penn as Law's live-in girlfriend.

It offers a sort of Chinese food poignancy, the kind that may seem satisfying at the time but ultimately leaves us hungering for more, for something authentic.

Miller is key to the film's success, with his earnest, sweet-faced looks and evident dark side. He plays Obree with just the right understated intensity, a believable competitor who fights back fiercely with his wits and a few tight-lipped words.

Short is a professional choreographer, and his dancing seems unstuck in time. How he can break his movements down to such small elements, keep them so precise and in such rigorous rhythm, yet keep the whole thing on track and moving forward with Nureyev's beauty and discipline is something to see.

The central story, in which Helms has to make up his mind whether to attend his sister's funeral, is too limited a conflict to hang a movie on. Ultimately, audiences will have to satisfy themselves with the collective presence of these actors and the movie's obviously good-hearted intentions.

The dour, downbeat story eventually spirals into grisly Grand Guignol and contrivance. Still, Gordon-Levitt is superb, and Jeff Daniels delivers a wry and wily performance as Pratt's blind roommate.

The films are bloody, stupid and buoyant in a kind of infantile way, celebrating mayhem, flesh and gore. Planet Terror is by far the livelier.

Directed by Davis Guggenheim ("An Inconvenient Truth"), the movie is heavy on hokum but easy to like, thanks to the spunky Schroeder.

What compels then isn't the overwrought plot, but the simpler things, the dynamics between the actors, the avuncularity between old pros Costner and Hurt and the class condescension between Costner and Cook. It has a fascinatin' rhythm.

Essentially, Chuck & Larry is an oafish chance for audiences to laugh at gay-bashing jokes and then feel morally redeemed for doing so -- courtesy of an obligatory wrap-up scene that reminds us that homosexuals are humans, too.

An uneven, sophomoric and only fitfully funny omnibus of skits, The Ten is one of those silly-on-purpose ensemble exercises that must have been wildly fun to make.

The picture almost beats its theme to death -- the first hour is enough -- but the imaginative designers dreaming up a cleaner future end this Cassandra cry on an upbeat note.

On the technical side, The Invasion has several first-rate, terrifying action sequences and grips totally from start to finish. But a subplot involving the Russian Embassy doesn't really pay off, and the relationship between Kidman and glum paramour Daniel Craig (another doc) isn't much.