Although "Hitchhiker" starts out a total gas, it doesn't have enough fuel to sustain the ride, ultimately amounting to little more than some amusing gags strung together in search of a story.

In the end, A Tout de Suite leads to not much more of a point than one woman's loss of innocence.

It's not brilliant by any means, but bright enough to light up an overly familiar feel-good story.

A little less conversation, a lot more action, please.

Revenge was supposed to be the one that really socked it to us, about Anakin's almost biblical fall from grace. But the movie never rises to its powerful occasion.

Plays more like a philosophical debate than a war drama.

Lords of Dogtown isn't a cop-out, but rather an ever-so-slight concession to commercialism.

Checks in somewhere between a delight and a diversion.

A good as the performances are, and as dutiful as Nolan has been in preserving the Kane legacy in Batman Begins, there's something joyless about the enterprise.

The movie made almost no sense whatever to me. I literally could not follow it, even as I was dazzled by it.

Land of the Dead is fairly intense. Intensely gory and violent, that is, as has come to be expected from the genre. It's just not very frightening. Not half as frightening as, say, last year's "Dawn of the Dead."

It gets duller and duller as it turns out to have used up all its amusing tricks in that first 30 minutes.

This "Four" ain't so "Fantastic."

Although it's often difficult to discern amid a schematic plot and overheated, sanctimonious denouement, an undeniable reality underlies Cronicas.

The best thing about The Island is this: Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson, buffed and dressed in sparkling white, wondering how and when to kiss each other.

The best thing about this psychological exploration is its star, Courteney Cox.

It's all ultimately made watchable by the exceptional cast ... and a story that, despite some unsavory racial undertones, holds the audience's interest even when it veers toward the downright silly.

It takes what could be called the Chinese equivalent of chutzpah to make a movie with three of the world's most beautiful and talented women -- Gong Li, Maggie Cheung and Zhang Ziyi -- and to be more interested in the male character.

For all its well-drawn lines between good and evil, Four Brothers is ultimately passive entertainment.

This is a movie for people more interested in the subject matter than its dramatic presentation.

In a textbook example of the have-it-both-ways ethos of self-loathing narcissism, Carell has succeeded in creating a character of old-fashioned decency in a movie that otherwise flouts it at every turn.

A mite too hard to follow for most of the kiddie crowd who'll want to see it.

If you saw "21 Jump Street" back in the '80s, or any of a number of shows featuring cute and cuddly cops, you pretty much know where this flick is heading.

Mary McDonnell, as Nat's patient wife, provides too-brief clarity as Nat goes off the rails, finally taking the movie with him.

The film can't get its rhythms right, fluctuating wildly between comedy and pathos.

The film, therefore, is like a child's view of these events, untroubled by complexity, hungry for myth and simplicity.

It canters along, content to follow the Rules of Cute and Fuzzy Horse Movies.

You keep expecting Shopgirl to get funny or sad or poignant; it never does. It just starts, then it's over.

Takes the story one more crank toward the literal. When the thing hits the bird, it turns out, guess what, it is a piece of the sky, the sky is falling. It's like saying: McCarthy was right! Sheesh, revisionist history: It's everywhere!

Co-directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel, whose visual schemes lent a hypnotic aura to their previous collaborations -- "The Deep End" and "Suture" -- don't find the right balance of story and image this time.

In all, it's not too bad and it's not too long.

Onstage, Rent is a series of power surges, but in the movie the songs leave you flat.

The storyline is so familiar ("Cheaper by the Dozen," et al), the audience can practically call out scenes ahead of time.

With the exception of a few enjoyable action scenes, such as when Aeon and fellow operative Sithandra (Sophie Okonedo) flip and backflip their way across a lethal garden of bullet-spewing trees and spikes disguised as blades of grass, Aeon Flux is surprisingly draggy.

As the movie's tag line has it, it's based on a hell of a story. Too bad they didn't just tell it.

The movie Casanova, starring Heath Ledger, not only fetters the randy Venetian in political correctness, it condemns him to dwell inside the modern equivalent of a bad Shakespeare play.

The New World is stately almost to the point of being static and thus has trouble finding a central story around which to arrange itself; it's not quite the thin dead line, but it's close.

If I had to sum up Tristan & Isolde for a term paper, I'd say it's like "Braveheart" without the face paint, "Shrek," except the Lord Farquaad character is a sweetheart, and "Freaks and Geeks" because James Franco is so hot, even in Orlando Bloom-y ringlets.

The movie is tentative, dramatically speaking...The most powerful moments come at the end -- documentary excerpts of Steve Saint, the son of one of the missionaries, and his friendship with Mincayani, the man who killed his father.

Imagine settles disappointingly for rom-com cliches. It doesn't even bother to explore its own premise.

It's pretty elementary.

This would have made a fascinating film if Freedomland were one movie. Instead, it turns into several movies, none fully realized. What could have been an unusually smart police procedural becomes a sprawling, overwrought melodrama that itself morphs into a sort of spiritual romance.

Not surprisingly, everything feels begged, borrowed and stolen from other better movies, from Quentin Tarantino's exclamation-point violence to the slo-mo bullet trajectory shots from "The Matrix."

Fake or not, Unknown White Male doesn't live up to its tantalizing potential.

Aquamarine is better than nothing for its woefully underserved audience.

Another gate-crasher at the let's-do-a-mediocre-update-of-Shakespeare party.

With its brilliant cast, its creative pedigree, Don't Come Knocking seemed as close to a sure thing as possible, but it only proves the sad truth that there's no such thing as a sure thing.

Its title may ring with pun and promise, but Stoned is a flat riff on Jones's short life. You'll get the highlights but no sense of what made him special -- or what really haunted him.

The animation is first-rate...But the story needs to catch up to the magic. Otherwise, what's the point?

Slither purports to be a "horror comedy" but in embracing the hybrid, it falls flat, never committing full-out to mining for giggles or gasps.

There's just too much death, it comes too quickly, it has no moral import, it becomes ultimately meaningless. It's not that hyper-violent movies are axiomatically a bad thing, it's just that this particular example is so laden with shootings that it becomes somehow tedious.

Adult humor in kiddie films -- of which there is plenty in The Wild -- is not only welcome but, for many adult viewers, essential.

Nothing much happens here, and even less is resolved. You could make an argument that that's how life is, unresolved, but as a film, it makes for frustrating viewing, particularly when plot threads with the potential to bust open the story are left hanging.

Unfortunately, the message is made clear within the first 10 minutes, leaving us with about 80 minutes of thematic repetition.

Ejiofor was a revelation in "Dirty Pretty Things" as a Nigerian doctor forced to live illegally in London. Though he's charismatic as the husky-voiced Simon, he never transcends the movie's pandering agenda.

Days of Heaven leaves one wanting more: either a totally revolutionary approach to pictorial storytelling or traditional dramatic interest....It may be artistic suicide for Malick to continue his style of pictorial inflation without also enriching his scenarios. If he doesn't, he's likely to be remembered not for his undeniable pictorial talent but for his eccentricity. [5 Oct. 1978, p.B10]

A religious feel-good message, first and foremost. As for drama, well, it's a distant second. For the right audience, however, this reversal of priorities will work just fine.

The most controversial thriller of the year turns out to be about as exciting as watching your parents play Sudoku.

Hoot may be warm and fuzzy with its adorable owls, triumphant kids and inviting Florida groves. But its forced, innocuous humor is unlikely to amuse anyone but the very young -- and the extremely forgiving.

Ratner makes a hash of the story and characters his predecessor brought to such complex, sympathetic life, delivering a pumped-up exercise in mayhem, carnage and blunt-force trauma.

The biggest disappointment in the film, however, is Piven's Adam. This film idealizes his character too much and thereby jettisons any case for serious respect.

Though the movie, made for $7,000, can claim the romantic mantle of "guerrilla filmmaking," its herky-jerky camcorder style, jump-cut editing and sustained takes soon wear out their welcome. And dramatically, it's not always convincing.

Its hackneyed themes prevent the sci-fi flick from feeling like anything more than well-directed mediocrity.

A masterpiece of mediocrity,

The movie is intermittently amusing, particularly when the American human part of the cast (Breckin Meyer and Jennifer Love Hewitt) are off-screen, the longer and farther the better.

Is it funny? Now and then. Stupid? Very. Racist? Possibly. Ugly? Profoundly. Wild? Undeniably. Singular? Completely.

The net effect is one of frustration and will surely send Cohen compleatists back to their record collections for relief.

The key question the film raises: Is what happened to the Tipton Three an outrage? It allows us to draw our own conclusions strictly on an eye-of-the-beholder basis.

Unfortunately, screenwriter Sam Catlin and director Danny Leiner make the unexpected mistake of being too subtle.

A lot of the film is illuminating; a lot of it is pointless.

What do we want in a sequel? Just a little taste of the original or a triple serving piled high? Dead Man's Chest opts for the latter. This Disney movie isn't a follow-up to the first "Pirates of the Caribbean" so much as its empty-calorie clone.

Even Posey -- who brightens most movies she's in -- fails to stir the movie's unresponsive tectonic plates.

Farrell appears to be a rarity in undercover culture, a vice cop who goes on the lowdown as an Irish beatnik. Oh, that's a good disguise for South Beach. As for Foxx, he's still channeling Ray Charles through squinty eyes and a kind of shaky head. They have zero chemistry.

Will entertain the kids; not so much the grown-ups.

Comedy, of course, is a complicated dance between rhythm and timing, but Talladega Nights drags where it should be crackling and popping.

It telegraphs its emotions loud and clear, but somehow they don't reach us.

The movie's highest level of artistic expression was the ingenious Internet campaign that catapulted it to culture phenom months before it even opened. The thing itself turns out to be pretty much an afterthought, cheesy and not very well worked out.

Tatum, the hunky object of Amanda Bynes's fancy in "She's the Man," and an engaging basketballer in "Coach Carter," is the best thing about this uninspired formula-thon.

Rather than taking viewers on a twisty, provocative journey through a mazelike meditation on appearance and reality, The Illusionist finally just sits there, looking like a very well-produced pilot for PBS's "Mystery!" series. It's a sophisticated snooze.

Trust the Man quickly begins to feel hopelessly derivative of other, better movies.

Good message, mediocre movie.

Pereira goes in for lots of time shifts and split screens, piling on the contrivances like so many costume baubles when a single string of pearls would do.

Lives up to Tarantino's imprimatur, both in its cheesy grind house aesthetic and its occasional forays into brilliant, bravura filmmaking.

The movie is a feast of miscalculations. It turns out that neither a bat nor a ball make for an enchanting child's companion, lacking as they do the ability to move or express emotion.

Instead of a crackling good movie in which "The Longest Yard" meets, say, "The Bad News Bears," director Phil Joanou instead decided to make Gridiron Gang a lugubrious tutorial on the importance of being a winner.

A British black comedy, saves its best for last -- and God bless Maggie Smith for, well, being Maggie Smith -- but that requires sitting through a frustrating, uneven hour of sluggish preamble.

While the music slops and churns and the ground-level bathos rises, the aerial stuff is occasionally stirring.

Clearly enamored with the endearing brand of drawly sarcasm for which Thornton has become known, the filmmakers aren't sure whether to paint Dr. P as an uncompromising villain or a mischievous teddy bear. The upshot is that Dr. P's most menacing aspect is Thornton's rather obvious hairpiece.

Kettle of Fish, starring Matthew Modine as a commitment-skittish saxophone player, is a warm-spirited romantic comedy, but it tends to have a squawky pitch.

A movie that can be smart-funny and astutely topical. But if what you're expecting is a start-to-finish laugh fest, beware: This picture takes some detours and never really figures out what kind of movie it wants to be.

There is but one reason to sign up for Driving Lessons: to watch Rupert Grint -- Harry Potter's redheaded pal Ron Weasley -- squaring off with Julie Walters, Queen of the English Scenery Chewers.

Sweet Land is as empty and beautiful as the picturesque Minnesota terrain it's so clearly taken with.

Director Phillip Noyce has made a serious movie that switches to almost popcorn entertainment.

If Simon's desire to feed the better angels of our nature is admirable, it would be nice if he could do it with better movies.

As skillful an artist as Range clearly is, he has gone to an awful lot of trouble to make a painfully obvious point about threats to civil liberties in a post-9/11 world.

Although the film shows many photographs and videos of his performances, it never allows a particularly coherent assessment of any of them.

There's a problem: This romance isn't developed enough to be truly satisfying -- it's fat-free SnackWell's when you want Godiva. It's not the original story we signed up for -- or thought we did.

A documentary on the F-word that manages to amuse superficially until it moves into its seventh hour, at which point it grows wearisome.