It plods along dutifully, with the occasional zigzag into contrivance, tidy coincidence and outright preposterousness.

Clearly Oz sees Housesitter as a screwball caprice, but the Muppeteer-turned-director delivers a stale couple's counseling movie. The message -- if your partner is a deluded liar, then you might as well be too -- must have been thought up by Pinocchio.

The film is deeply flawed, and sodden with sexual moralism. But amid Hollywood products pasteurized from demographics and screening groups, the idiosyncratic vision of Ken Russell is a refreshing breath of foul air.

The film suffers a bit for its slowness. But once you get used to the fact that this is not “World War Z,” it has its small pleasures, which are both cerebral and emotional.

Cannery Row is expendable and creaky, a lavishly mounted antique.

Even as he reinvents, Aja invents. He's clearly working on a big budget for his first American film and has been told he can do anything he can think of. Visually, the movie is wildly alive, full of sure touches.

“Murder” may lack urgency, but it does have style. The sets, the costumes and the vistas are stunning.

It can take a miracle to create a movie that's fun for kids and their parents. Luckily, Nanny McPhee has a little magic up her sleeve.

It's formula-packed business as usual. In fact, it's double-packed, triple-packed, more.

Johansson capitalizes on her cast’s innate chemistry. An accomplished performer herself, she is unsurprisingly an actor’s director. She guides the story with tenderness — perhaps to a fault, because even the most capable directing of a talented cast can’t save this movie from its central premise.

Electric Dreams can be trusted to provide some idle amusement, particularly from "users" cautious enough to keep both their demands and levels of resistance set at low-to-modest -- probably the ideal setting for summer moviegoing in general, come to think of it.

The script of Three Amigos (Martin's collaborators were producer Lorne Michaels and singer Randy Newman) plays like it was slapped together by a few friends with a tape recorder enjoying a charming weekend at the beach. You can't tell one amigo from another, the gags are silly (a "singing bush") and far between, the dialogue full of inane wordplay. Sample: "We could take a walk and you could kiss me on the veranda." "The lips would be fine."

Although Lee briefly engages in some fascinating ideas linking the vampire’s existence to cultural empowerment, preservation and survival, he squanders that potential in leaden soft-core cliches that usually wind up with him ogling the female form.

There doesn't seem to be much purpose to it except a half-baked notion that the histrionics of the mentally insane (or a moviemaker's idea therein) are eminently cinematic. They aren't.

How do I hate thee? Let me count the ways.

All dancing and hugging and no good.

The 20th-anniversary sequel to the groundbreaking horror film-and the sixth in an increasingly awful series about the bulletproof murderer Michael Myers-is a styleless and predictable affair.

Another Kevin Williamson triumph, a smart, sharply drawn genre film with a moral center and a solid cast of young actors to hold it.

Insipid, by-the-numbers romance.

A spoofy paean to cheerfolk that has more bounce per flounce than most tales about teen queens.

What really reaches us is the collective presence of the cast, most of them monks and other acting amateurs. They seem uniformly imbued with inherent grace and effortless spiritual bearing. And their smallest of gestures exude the kind of un-self-conscious gravitas that constitutes all fables.

Stewart’s unexpected casting here, in a frothy action comedy, injects the movie with a shot of much-needed unpredictability. Of all the Angels, she works the hardest, ensuring that the movie isn’t forgettable.

A bucolic sex comedy in which Nicholson the director indulges Nicholson the star an orgy of coy monkey-shines in the role of a scruffy outlaw who enters into a marriage of convenience with a demure young woman who owns a ranch and a goldmine - expires right before your eyes from a terminal case of the feebles. Goin' South is the most flat-footed comedy to collapse on the screen since Nickelodeon.

The Amateur may be off to a rocky start as a spy franchise, but it scores one for the IT crowd.

The comedian’s wryly clownish antics as the preening, not-especially bright owner of several fast-fashion stores are in service of a story that feels sloppy and overly broad.

Did the original “Super Fly” need to be remade? Not really. The new film is a decent example of the barrage of reboots storming theaters lately, but that’s all it is: decent.

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

Dark, dank, damp, grim, dingy and dour, Dark Water is a tasteful but unremitting bummer.