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.

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.

As vivid as many scenes are, there are just as many that seem taken directly out of the Cute Irish Movie notebook.

The sexual frankness is refreshing. As Suzette and Lavinia banter, their dialogue often suggests how "Sex and the City" might sound 20 years hence.

McDormand is the best thing about Laurel Canyon. She's also the most unfortunate victim of a film that seems unable or unwilling to give even its most intriguing and compulsively watchable character her due.

It's a warm, if pallid, romantic comedy that may not do much more to burnish Lopez's reputation, but will certainly not bruise it.

He has a knack for creating vivid characters even in the briefest of vignettes in his live act, many of which are taken from his life, growing up poor in Greenbelt.

No matter how much fun it is to watch -- and for hard-core movie fans, it is often enormous fun -- there's a certain relief when it stops and we're popped back out to our banal, one-track lives.

Jagged, unrelenting, claustrophobically intimate.

Consistently absorbing -- thanks in large part to strong performances from the actors -- but not particularly rewarding.

Some viewers will miss the warmth and boisterous family dynamics of its predecessors.

Will probably appeal only to the most committed of Leigh fans.

At the movie's thoroughly expected conclusion, a visual joke has a bedraggled cat licking at the icing on a wedding cake, but it's really Melanie who gets to have it and eat it, too.

Will probably appeal most to hard-core fans of Japanese animation and its wide-eyed style, both visual and philosophical.

Unfolds as a series of meticulous tableaux vivants, but like those parlor pastimes, it lacks physical verve and a compelling emotional charge.

The film is ultimately too self-regarding, too smug to be transcendent itself.

Even within what often looks like a self-indulgent exercise in humiliation, pain and gratuitous gore, there is no denying the moments of genuine and powerful feeling in The Passion of the Christ -- some of which, by the way, evoke Jesus's most profound teachings of Jewish principles.

This is a carefully conceived, thoughtfully orchestrated effort in taste and restraint that ultimately is too restrained and tasteful.

For real sparks keep a look out for Jared Harris in a supporting role that injects a mildly diverting note of corporate intrigue into an otherwise unsurprising procedural.

A movie that feels written rather than lived; from "The Catcher in the Rye" to "Rushmore," it's a story we've seen in better versions before.

Isn't about history or war, or people and their problems, or anything of substance or meaning. It's a movie about other movies. For all its visual bravura and occasional bursts of antic inspiration, it feels trivial, the work of a kid who can't stop grabbing his favorite shiny plaything.

Antichrist finally embodies the contradiction of von Trier: He's a gifted, even visionary, artist mired in his own pulp pretentiousness.

It succeeds only fitfully. Toggling between Stark's impish goatee and Iron Man's full-metal body condom, and amid so many generic fireballs, kill shots and earsplitting thumps, bumps and crunches, the film finally collapses under its own weight.

The result is that Revolutionary Road is a hard movie to love. Plenty of people will appreciate the hopelessness, but they might wish for a little less emptiness.

Often astonishingly beautiful, but in a way that's the problem: You wonder what visionaries such as Tim Burton or Michel Gondry might have done with the material. As it is, "Benjamin Button" is little more than "Gump" by way of "Dorian Gray." It plays too safe when it should be letting its freak flag fly.

If anything, it's worth watching as yet another example of Lynch's extraordinary collaboration with Dern. It may be overstating things to call her performance heroic, but it's nothing if not brave, as she dares to embody Lynch's most brutal impressions of Hollywood -- not as a dream factory, but as the place where dreams come to die.

Still, if for the most part Death at a Funeral is as tame as the tasteful parlor where most of its action takes place, it manages to explode one taboo, in casting mostly black actors in roles originally played by whites.

Jigh class briefly gives way to high camp, which then itself dissipates to an anticlimactic thud.

Often seems less like a fully realized film than an illustrated story, its paragraphs reduced to neatly contrived set pieces.

If anything, Fever Pitch will give Bosox fans one more chance to relive, in big-screen glory, those fleeting, flavorsome days.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Aquamarine is better than nothing for its woefully underserved audience.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Things take a nasty turn in the film's bilious third act, suggesting that Guest's deepest gift -- his expansive humanism -- stops at the studio gates.

Jack Black and Kyle Gass bring characters they created for the HBO program "Mr. Show With Bob and David" to the big screen with mixed success, depending on the age, gender and degree of inebriation of the filmgoer.

This drab exercise in glum piety slumps where it should soar, sapping the story of its mystery and transcendence with an overriding sense of literality.

Even with Hudson's triumphant arrival and an overall fizzy mood of singing, dancing, pop nostalgia and camp, Dreamgirls is an uneven crowd pleaser.

If Broken English occasionally falls prey to a bit too much self-conscious lethargy, it's still a welcome chance to see Posey at her flighty, edgy best.

High-grade cheese, the sort of highly pitched melodrama that in the 1950s would have been the stuff of a lurid, lavishly staged Douglas Sirk picture.

A throwback to 1970s blaxploitation flicks, with a Latin accent, Illegal Tender would be a brassy, sassy guilty pleasure if it were more, well, pleasurable.

First-time director Chris Gorak is no Rod Serling, and in his hands the enterprise tends toward the lurid, especially after his nifty third-act twist.

When the tone goes from daffy to dour in the course of a harrowing plot point, the story becomes more forced than fierce.

It's all too zany and madcap and Woody Allen-redux to be remotely credible, but Ira & Abby turns out to be witty and winning, in large part because of its cast.

Reese Witherspoon paces and cries through Rendition in a performance that does as much a disservice to her talent as the movie does to the issues it raises.

Filmgoers haven't seen a family this neurotically enmeshed since the last Diane Keaton movie.

The movie doesn't offer much new to anyone familiar with Carter.

Little more than a sleek, stylish stunt.

Lush, extravagant, sad and touching, Love in the Time of Cholera still feels weirdly insubstantial when all the febrile passion has abated. Like a fever it breaks, passes and is forgotten.

The best part of Walk Hard, oddl enough, is the music. I might not care to see Walk Hard" a second time, but I can't wait to hear it again.

Possesses its share of modest laughs, many of them delivered by Ted Danson as Bridget's bemused husband. But director Callie Khouri (best known for writing "Thelma & Louise") doesn't bring the dash needed to make this a comic heist on a par with "Ocean's Eleven."

Katherine Heigl makes an official bid for America's Sweetheart in her sophomore effort, 27 Dresses, a romantic comedy that -- despite her undeniable, apple-cheeked appeal -- sags like a day-old bouquet.

Ice Cube and Tracy Morgan are the nominal stars of First Sunday, but it's Katt Williams who steals the show in this by turns trite and mildly amusing B-comedy.

From its very first scene, Untraceable isn't the sophisticated, brainy thriller it so nearly could have been, but just another movie about a serial murderer.

It's difficult to know whom to root for.

For the uninitiated? Man, it's a bummer.

Owen Wilson phones it in with Drillbit Taylor, a by-the-numbers teen comedy.

For those who crave mannerisms and shtick and like their jokes set up and knocked out with plenty of arrows and quote marks, Baby Mama may fall flat. But audiences alive to the modest charms of its take on female friendship will be rewarded with at least a few quiet chuckles.

This is a movie guaranteed to please crowds, if only because it insists on their affection so strenuously.

Thank heaven for Judi Dench, whose M provides Quantum of Solace its sole quantum of peppery brio.

Baghead provides a diverting showcase for actors you may never have heard of but who deserve a shot at fame and fortune.

Pirouettes along a beguiling but treacherous line between horror and whimsy.

It's lame, corny, Ed Woodishly amateurish -- all of which is as lovable as the big lug himself.

Epitomizes the best and the worst of what animated filmmaking has become in an era dominated on the one hand by ever more sophisticated computerized imagery and, on the other, by the grasping, increasingly grating desire to be hip.

Although the new version, which stars Keanu Reeves, is likely to make audiences pine for the meta-irony of "Mystery Science Theater 3000," it's not a complete failure.

Exerts an unmistakable appeal, thanks to an absorbing story and fine performances from Morris Chestnut and Taraji P. Henson.

That none of the protagonists earns the audience's sympathy is more likely a failure of the real-life characters rather than the actors, who deliver fine performances -- especially Rhys, who seems to be channeling Richard Burton channeling Dylan Thomas at his most manipulatively loutish.

Has bells and whistles, superb technical sophistication and dazzling visual effects, sound, fury and Reese Witherspoon. What it doesn't have is heart. Like so many vehicles that have popped out from the DreamWorks Animation snark tank, Monsters vs. Aliens is too clever by half.

Yi's self-regarding, ironic tone makes the whole thing feel like a setup, designed more as an indie-chic calling card than a sincere inquiry.

If parents feel like they've seen much of Shorts before, its celebration of mayhem and restless, thrill-seeking vibe will absorb young viewers, especially as the boredom of late summer begins to set in.

A choppy and occasionally unsure film, one that doesn't achieve the superb tonal control of "The Ice Storm," but that certainly doesn't represent an unqualified disaster on a par with Lee's first attempt at the western, "Ride With the Devil."

Exhibits the weaknesses and the strengths of what has become a nearly foolproof formula for keeping viewers engaged.

Creation is fatally weakened by an excess of pathos; in a Darwinian universe, it would be quickly swallowed up by a leaner, fitter movie.

It resides in that cinematic middle ground of not-bad, not-great, just okay.

If Quitting isn't worthy of affection exactly, it's worthy of respect.

Whether the entire production comes off as classy or cloying depends entirely on the viewer's mood.

At once daring and hackneyed, absorbing and off-putting, a triumph of one sort and, more lastingly, a failure of another.

May not be perfect but must be given credit for all that it does right.

This is a downbeat, indulgent and self-consciously quirky little movie.

Both lead players are appealing and attractive enough to make an otherwise tepid movie at least un-excruciating.

Possesses an undeniable heart. The bad news is that it will still be buried underneath layers of stale Sandlerisms tomorrow, and the next day, and the next.

Only fitfully funny, and it makes up for what it lacks in genuine humor by overdosing viewers with outrageous sexuality and outsize stereotypes.

Paints an often grave but sometimes hilarious picture of a hugely powerful network.

Rather than sparkle and dance, it plods.

At once belabored and muddled movie, whose dreamy visual style and daring sexual material can't elide glaring inconsistencies in tone, plot and logic.

It's perfectly palatable family fare for a long weekend.

One of those cinematic curiosities that almost always fade quickly, but that will usually find a devoted cult audience once it hits that peculiar Elysian Field known as the aftermarket.

Firmly ensconced among the forgettables in Stiller's career, a generic romantic comedy of the one-from-column-A, one-from-column-B variety.

At its best, Woman Thou Art Loosed conveys the unfathomable meaning behind those words.

A fascinating, vexing, indulgent, visionary, pretentious, mesmerizing pop culture curio.

Modestly amusing teen summer comedy.

An uneasy mix between "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" and the "The X-Files," and one not nearly as smart as either.

A thinly written, hoarily cliched story that serves mostly as connective tissue between the movie's chief draw, its dazzling dance sequences.

Threatens to become a serious movie, but they're quickly overwhelmed by another indecipherable rampage or outsize visual effect.

The skits that comprise Coffee and Cigarettes aren't fully realized short pieces as much as riffs or fragments; their appeal is mostly in their stars.

The movie has been made with consummate carelessness but with occasional moments of knowing humor.

Has its modest charms.

Good points aside, In Good Company is a bland, occasionally phlegmatic pastiche of cliches and dull encounters.

The best thing about all of this is Bettany.

An unobjectionable if uninspired updating of a classic family story for the minivan generation.

A thoroughly unnecessary but nonetheless satisfying adaptation of the cheeseball 1980s TV series.

Micmacs brings an infectious note of caprice to the old-fashioned caper film.

Its pedagogical tone perfectly suits it for viewing in classrooms.

Never quite breaks out of its talky inertia.

Unfortunately, Provoked possesses the tiny production values and schmaltzy music of a prime-time special, despite its ensemble of terrific actors.

Dans Paris will delight aficionados familiar with its myriad references, and there's no denying the appeal of Duris and Garrel. But once the source of the boys' primal wound is revealed, the whole enterprise comes to feel as mechanical as the Bon Marche window display that serves as one of the film's plot points.

An emotional thriller that is by turns contrived and impassioned.

For all the energy and personality of its subjects, Planet B-Boy tends to drag, especially toward the competition finals.

It's impossible to tell whether the film's ending is happy because it's happy or because it's ending.

A slight, modestly funny comedy.

Siegel's depiction of the film's supporting characters too often borders on caricature. By the movie's strained, overheated climax, it's clear that Siegel, in his directing debut, is less interested in his protagonist as a character capable of transformation than as a human petri dish of futility and pathology.

"Everything is achievable through technology," a character says more than once in Iron Man 2. Not so.

Garca brings his finely calibrated sense of drama to the subject of adoption, which he handles with characteristic restraint and insight -- at least until the film's maudlin, too-pat finale. That sharp melodramatic turn is a shame, because so much of what has gone before in Mother and Child is of real quality.

Funny? Scary? Entirely logical? It all depends on your point of view, of course, and "What's the Matter With Kansas?" isn't likely to move viewers one way or another.

An action thriller that adamantly refuses to deliver action or thrills, instead engaging in a brand of arty, self-conscious formalism rarely seen outside repertory theaters or cinema-studies classrooms.

Even with all this talent and earnestness, though, Nowhere Boy still feels indulgent, slight and almost instantly forgettable.

Say this about Stone: When it's good, it's very good. And this twisty, atmospheric drama is at its best when Edward Norton takes center screen as the title character.

Even Mary Tyler Moore's sunny but vulnerable Mary Richards or Tina Fey's Liz Lemon seem more fleshily real than Becky.

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

Restless is saved from movie-of-the-week soppiness by its plucky lead actors; by now we assume (correctly) that Wasikowska will infuse her character with lucid, clear-eyed warmth.

Any resemblance to last year's breakout comedy hit "Bridesmaids" is purely intended in a film that seeks the same kind of liberated raunch but too often succumbs to talky, edgy-for-its-own sake glibness.

Like Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton before him, Helms plays a lamb trotting hopefully through the abattoir, blessedly unaware of the blades hanging just above his head.

As affectionately as Taylor has brought The Help to the screen, and as gratifying as it is to watch Davis and Spencer bring Aibileen and Minny to palpable, fully rounded life, their narrative, like "The Blind Side" a few years ago, is structured largely around their white female benefactor.

With its contrived setups, preposterous coincidences and calculated sentimentalism, Crazy, Stupid, Love seems beamed from the same alternate reality as "Larry Crowne." We might enjoy the ride while we're on it, but it will seem like a visit to another planet once we're home.

The weakest link here is Heard, who possesses the icy cool of Kim Novak but whose character never quite comes into fuller focus than as a hyper-sexualized object of desire.

A movie sure to reward the filmmaker's most die-hard fans, while doing little to quiet critics who found his work self-conscious to the point of insufferability.

With Anonymous, director Roland Emmerich gives us "Shakespeare in Luck." Make that "Dumb Luck": In this alternately entertaining and wildly ham-handed speculative romp.

There's a lovely moment with Mirren and John Hurt that helps send Brighton Rock toward its final note of tenderness. With so much style to burn, Joffe handles the tinge of Greene-ian ambivalence just right.

Somehow, the comic chemistry never seems to ignite in The Big Year.

With its shambling, felicitously contrived structure and Fellini-esque climax, it's some kind of Jungian slacker fable.

Between this film and last summer's "Horrible Bosses," Aniston's coyness - starring in explicit movies without having to be explicit herself - seems to be becoming her stock in trade. It's not a particularly commendable one, and Wanderlust does little to disprove that she's still a star more suited to TV rather than the big screen.

A frantic, occasionally funny, finally enervating bricolage of special effects, explosive set pieces, sardonic one--liners and notional human emotions, this branch of the Marvel franchise tree feels brittle and over--extended enough to snap off entirely.

All the God-talk and philosophical musings about morality and "meeting our makers" aside, Prometheus is primarily about delivering those visceral, terrifying jolts. That it does so without generating the taut suspense and moody atmosphere of its antecedents qualifies as one of its greatest failings.

There are times when Our Idiot Brother possesses a loping, genial sweetness. But it lacks conviction, and it doesn't hold a beeswax candle to such similarly themed films as "You Can Count on Me" and "Momma's Man."

Tends toward the broadest possible takes on slapstick, sophomoric sexuality and post-"Hangover" raunch.

Can a performance be too good? Meryl Streep disappears so uncannily into former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady that her performance overpowers the movie it's in - a perfectly executed triple axel that renders everything else just featureless ice.

The Watch takes the same ethos of male bonding, obsession with sex and sardonic violence that has proved so profitable in recent years on yet another summer spin. The tires may be in need of changing pretty soon, but for now the jalopy still runs.

Trouble With the Curve presents viewers with a frustrating change-up: What promised to be a modest, refreshingly unforced little comedy turns out to be low energy to a fault.

Childlike, fetishistic and painfully literal, Luhrmann’s experiment proves once again that it’s Fitzgerald’s writing — not his plot, his characters or his grasp of material detail — that has always made “Gatsby” great.

A generic, fitfully funny mainstream comedy that doesn’t nearly get the best from its name-brand players but doesn’t qualify as a desecration, either.

With visions of "The Public Enemy," "Bonnie and Clyde" and even "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford" dancing in its head, the Prohibition-era drama Lawless winds up being equal to none of them -- even if it holds its own as a modestly respectable genre exercise.

Killing Them Softly possesses a modicum of swagger and style, even as it perpetuates some of the crime genre's more tedious cliches, from slow-motion savagery to facile cynicism.

Maybe the best way to describe Beasts of the Southern Wild is faux-k art. Even Hushpuppy's name suggests an author more interested in the folk- and foodways of a culture-with-a-capital-C than the people who comprise it. Too often, she and her peers are presented as curios to be exhibited rather than as fully realized -- if resolutely un-mythic -- human beings.

Dogs and the women who love them form the warm and gooey center of Darling Companion, Lawrence Kasdan's fitfully amusing comedy-drama.

The film also begins to feel like a case of a director getting to revel in the very thing he's reviling.

Like a gel cap in a sip of orange juice, the psycho-pharmacological thriller Side Effects goes down easily, even if its long-term impact turns out to be barely dis­cern­ible.

Scrappy and unsubtle where "We Were Here" is elegant and nuanced, How to Survive a Plague isn't nearly as formally beautiful as its predecessor.

Compliance is an extraordinarily assured, well-made drama, signaling a promising career for Zobel, an adroit filmmaker with a talent for taut pacing and staging. But it also fails its first test, which is that the audience believe every word of it.

Celeste and Jesse Forever engages in Bridget Jones-like comedy of mortification, sending its heroine down a path of self-discovery that ultimately seems more cruel than revelatory.

Despite their Everyman appeal, Damon and Krasinski don't create much by way of emotional investment, instead becoming mirror images of their most mild-mannered, white-bread selves.

Never lets viewers fully inside Erik and Paul's world, a reticence that isn't helped by the actors' fey, restrained-to-a-fault performances. That and a frustratingly episodic structure make what might have been a raw and inspiring portrait of commitment and boundaries a surprisingly uninvolving, arms-length enterprise. Keep the Lights On lets go just when it should be holding you tighter.

It's Walken who grounds every scene with the kind of watchful honesty that has become his brand in late-career.

For all his creepy tendencies, Hitchcock is portrayed mostly sympathetically in Hitchcock, in which Sir Anthony Hopkins plays the corpulent British auteur with a combination of hauteur and playfulness.

Olympus Has Fallen at least possesses the frisson of timeliness amid otherwise hoary action-movie cliches.

At Any Price finally hinges on tragedies, reversals and moral ambiguities of Shakespearean proportions, but they’re delivered ploddingly rather than as the intricate parts of an inevitable whole. At Any Price ultimately suffers from the very phenomenon it laments: Like Henry Whipple’s farm, it feels more mechanistic than organic.

Intriguing, if uneven, thriller.

Still breaks the first and only commandment of remakes: Thou shall at the very least do justice to the original, or thou shall not be made at all.

To watch Mr. & Mrs. Smith, which continually sacrifices its potential for sophisticated fun on the altar of style and physical stunts, is to realize how far we've come from the great movies of, say, George Cukor or Howard Hawks.

It's like a ferret on crystal meth that belatedly discovers ecstasy, and it's a tiresome trip either way.

Canadian director Atom Egoyan delivers a rare misfire with Where the Truth Lies, a shockingly fatuous murder mystery with pseudo-intellectual pretensions.

When a Stranger Calls never manages to convey the primal, almost atavistic terror that has earned John Carpenter's movies and the "Scream" franchise their places in the teen horror canon. The most lasting psychological effect of this pulp non-classic will most likely be limited to a deep pathological fear of Architectural Digest.

One of the most eagerly awaited cinematic projects of 2006, which may be why it lands with such a curious thud.

But despite doing its best to jiggle, giggle and ogle its way into a niche somewhere between "Heathers" and "American Pie," it becomes just another forgettable pastiche of sight gags and pop-culture references.

Although audiences will admire the film's do-it-yourself energy and commitment, Poster Boy finally collapses of its own contrived weight, deflating just when it should soar into madcap -- or at least thoughtful -- satire.

The premise -- a roundelay of New Yorkers looking for connection, or to escape it -- feels tired, and Mitchell's portrayal of sex as the ultimate vehicle for transcendence, self-knowledge and healing, while conveyed with authentic sweetness, seems shockingly naive.

Falls as flat as a bottle of corked Bordeaux.

It's a sprawling experiment in philosophical time travel and metaphysical noodling. And it's an earnest, magnificent wreck.

Aside from Cedric's admittedly appealing persona -- he's always watchable, even in dreck like this -- there's absolutely nothing to recommend The Cleaner.

Parading through most of the movie in a cutoff T-shirt and bikini briefs, Ricci takes the stereotype of the oversexed farmer's daughter to gothic extremes; Jackson's character, named Lazarus, is similarly drawn with oversize strokes.

Sandra Bullock is a disheveled, grumpy, adorable mess in Premonition, a psychological thriller that was no doubt pitched as "Medium," only longer and brunette. Or maybe "The Eternal Sixth Sense of the Spotless Groundhog Day."

It's a depressing little kingdom, even when Gordon tries desperately to goose the drama with the requisite "Eye of the Tiger" riffs and some junior high-level palace intrigue.

A yawn and most unforgivably features some appalling arrangements of the Beatles' best-loved songs.

But for all its passion and topical currency, the movie plays too often like a college colloquium. And it ends on an unsatisfying note, with each character's choice, whether fateful or fatal, hanging in a confounding limbo of indeterminacy.

Falters when it falls into exploitation (Irena's flashbacks to scenes of depraved sexual torture) and fatal contrivance.

The kind of bland, generic, high-concept midsummer comedy that drives a critic to the thesaurus in search of new ways to say "vapid."

Why this movie -- a rushed, wildly uneven, tonally jumbled caricature -- and why now?

A slick, earnest, ultimately inert adaptation of the eponymous book of the Bible.

Mac manages to find some moments of comedy within a movie that often feels like it's going into extra innings

Silly? Contrived? Vapid? You bet. Put more simply, "The Prince & Me" is . . . cute.

They succeed in presenting a compelling series of dots, to use the current parlance, but they don't succeed in connecting them.

Put delicately, this is one long sit, made all the more so by a turgid story, a dour visual palette and uninspiring action.

If listing the cast of Love Actually is exhausting, it's even more tiring to watch it.

If Shutter Island, a gothic thriller starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo, were put to a free association test, the word most likely to come to mind would certainly be "weird."

Michael Caine delivers a stunning performance in Harry Brown, a rancid little revenge fantasy that probably doesn't deserve him.

A dog-frequency movie: enjoyable only to those tuned in to its particular register.

There's very little that's even kind of funny in It's Kind of a Funny Story, which can't accurately be described as a comedy but isn't a true drama, either.

A jagged little pill of a movie from baby boomer avatar Edward Zwick.

This fitfully funny but mostly dull misfire defines exactly where the line can be drawn between truly subversive humor and lazy cynicism.

As it is, the audience must content itself with baby poop, naughty words and the female anatomy at its pneumatic extreme, while Bateman and Reynolds's search for transcendence continues.

One of the weaknesses of The Sitter is that Hill doesn't develop much comic chemistry with the children.

As this sloppy, scattered, utterly synthetic piece of Hollywood widgetry unspools, it becomes increasingly clear that the romantic tension at play exists mostly between the men in question.

Rock of Ages gets too mired in plotty cul de sacs, manufactured setbacks and numbers that are all staged as show-stoppers. In the words of the Journey song that serves as a climactic singalong, it goes on and on and on and on.

Eventually MacFarlane's formula -- consisting of filthy, ethnically offensive jokes, scatological humor, tacky pop culture references and random cameos -- begins to wear thin.

Man on a Ledge has its diverting moments, but by the time it has reached its too-pat final twist, it turns out to be a title desperately in search of a movie.

Dark Shadows doesn't know where it wants to dwell: in the eerie, subversive penumbra suggested by its title or in playful, go-for-broke camp.

Anne Fletcher's lifeless comedy about an overbearing mother and her exasperated adult son, has no flawlessly delivered punch lines. It doesn't even have a hangnail.

It's a bloated, shockingly tedious trudge that manages to look both overproduced and unforgivably cheesy.

All of it makes for a rollicking, outsize tale of overweening ambition and palace intrigue, but J. Edgar instead plays it safe in a turgid, back-and-forth series of tableaux that look as if they were filmed from behind a scrim soaked in weak tea.

Conceived and directed by Madonna, W.E. is a gorgeous mess.

That Winterbottom has delivered a dud makes Trishna all the more disappointing, a rare unsatisfying swerve from an otherwise reliably provocative career.

Director Scott Hicks lavishes good taste and sunsets on a story that - devoid of genuine tension, conflict or combustible chemistry between its two stars - just prettily sits there.

First-time director Anne Sewitsky may intend Happy, Happy as a Chekhovian chamber piece or romantic bagatelle, but her smugness about racism - and her glib symbolic resolution of the conflicts she raises - suggests an ambition that far outstrips her ability, at least for now.

It's a curio, ripe with dreamy atmospherics and intriguing mysteries, but little else.

Slick, sick, self-consciously stylish and defiantly shallow, Gangster Squad is one of those movies you can't talk about without invoking other (often better) movies. A lot of movies.

A strange little movie. Unsure whether it wants to be a quirky, sad-eyed indie pixie or a brassy, raunchy broad, it veers uneasily between the two, never quite settling into a comfortable or recognizable groove.

Jack Reacher is a wildly ill-advised miscalculation, with Cruise's virtually unstoppable appeal butting uncomfortably against Reacher's alternately cocky and downright crude cynicism.

Gerwig remains one of the most captivating new stars to hit the big screen, but she's still looking for a movie that deserves her.

Safe Haven is one of those Valentine’s Day confections that satisfy your sweet tooth until you get to their weird, off-putting center. The problem with movies is that you can’t put them back in the box.

Both assaultive and tiresome, A Good Day to Die Hard barely registers on the action movie Richter scale. It goes bang, it goes boom, and then it blessedly goes away.

Not good enough to qualify as classic Gothic horror, not nearly fun enough to qualify as great B-movie camp.

It's in these vignettes that Away We Go begins to feel less like an authentic exploration of identity than a condemnation of the very community the couple pretends to crave. No one, it turns out, is good enough for Burt and Verona.

An overlong, visually incoherent, mean-spirited and often just plain awful Spider-Man 3.

Seems fatally out of tune, with every staged encounter falling as flat as the protagonist's hot-ironed bob.

But by the time Willis's character saves this considerably long day, it's filmgoers who will no doubt feel like prisoners, as a movie that promises to be a taut nail-biter devolves into the kind of silly, overblown climax parodied so beautifully by Robert Altman in "The Player."

It feels like a retread of several better movies, with a nastier, more bitter edge.

This romantic melodrama ... doesn't even get to first base.

Indeed it looks as if this otherwise straight-to-video endeavor, which was made in 2003, is being released only to cash in on Bernal's of-the-moment-ness in Hollywood.

A predictable and outlandishly contrived take on the Pygmalion myth.

For all its stylishness, verve and moments of visual poetry, the relentlessly punishing slapstick and overall cruel tone left me cold.

As a director, Solondz seems to have his own locked-in fate -- to favor caricature over compassion -- and his movies are the worse for it.

Whether it's the sight of Reynolds squeezed painfully into a football uniform or the endless footballs-to-the-crotch and tired gay jokes, The Longest Yard has the feeling of mutton dressed as lamb.

Until the last 20 minutes or so of Rock School, the actual playing, while often startlingly good, is kind of boring.

Heights is nothing more than a second-rate version of several much better movies, all of which are available on DVD and video.

Regardless of the cute little hats and clam-diggers she wears, it's impossible to believe Kidman as a breathless ingenue; that relentless drive and steely Kidmanesque determination keep jutting through the cotton in flinty, sharp-edged shards.

It's a bold exercise, an interesting experiment, but a movie it ain't.

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

The satirical edge has been dulled in a film that is dominated, and ultimately swamped, by its star's mannered, pixilated performance.

9 Songs inadvertently proves just how limited experimentation for its own sake can be.

Outlandish, uneven, preposterous and often maddeningly morbid.

For anyone to enjoy this starchy, contrived exercise in vanity and product placement, it's best not to have read the book. In fact, it's best not to have read ANY book.

The fact that there's nothing wrong with it -- that there's nary a scenic detail or scrap of dialogue or performance that isn't utterly on the nose -- is precisely what's wrong with it.

May look good cavorting prettily on deck, but ultimately it deserves to walk the plank.

Shockingly inert.

The stars of First Descent aren't particularly memorable, or even likable. At their worst, they come off as cocky, self-absorbed Peter Pans; at their best, they're sweet but shallow.

Most of the humor in The Pink Panther derives from Martin's silly French accent, especially when he tries to pronounce the word "hamburger." But zat joke, she ees not funny. And The Pink Panther ees, how you say, ze real dog.

As a comic actor, Allen's palette is limited to varying degrees of beige. He is not only boring, he's obnoxious and narcissistic. Where's the ASPCA -- the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Audiences -- when you need 'em?

Artistically, You, Me and Dupree is a mess. Technically, it's an abomination. Spiritually, it's a void. Commercially, it'll probably be a big hit.

A grisly, often cynical piece of work whose joyless, aggressive spirit is made even less appealing by its soulless visual style.

Creepy, creepy, creepy -- and not in a good way.

Rarely has an actress exuded such blank nothingness as Simpson, a one-woman vapid delivery system who sucks the energy and joy out of every scene she's in, like some freakishly well-endowed black hole.

The two main characters are so shallow and self-involved -- not to mention the friends, family members and sundry apparatchiks they lug around with them -- that the two hours of Flannel Pajamas begin to feel like real time.

Winds up answering the question of what "Shrek" hath wrought, and between its plastic-looking visuals and cynical attitude, the news isn't good. Lacking the genuine wit and humanism of that film and any number of forebears, this one deserves its dumpin'.

What the filmmakers try to play for laughs -- a mom and her daughters chatting about orgasms while shoe shopping -- isn't funny, it's creepy.

What it possesses in heart and goodwill, it sorely lacks in narrative skill and artistic depth.

John C. McGinley from "Scrubs" gets to strut some of his comic stuff as the deranged builder, but he's the only passable feature in a property that should be condemned.

A piece of holiday cheese that even Harry & David wouldn't touch.

Trudging nobly under a mantle of impeccably earnest intentions and a fussy, too-quaint-by-half production design, Honeydripper lags and drags to its utterly predictable end. There's not a spark of spontaneity or soul about it.

One part Joseph Campbell hero quest, one part multi-culti morality tale, one part live-action "Flintstones" cartoon, 10,000 B.C. is finally every part just plain nuts, from a hike featuring more ecosystems than an Al Gore documentary to a wacky climax set amid pyramids that -- you'll e-mail me if I'm wrong -- wouldn't have been built for another 7,000 years or so.

An inert, sloppily written melodrama as grim and featureless as its frozen Midwestern setting.

Chances are, after they've passed the two-hour mark, viewers will share the same collective, if unspoken, wish: Go, Speed Racer. Go.

A film that, in attempting to ridicule the Bush administration, finally just settles for being ridiculous itself.

The question is why the time, talent and treasure of such energetic and even gifted artists have been marshaled in such a disgusting and trivial genre exercise and what viewers are supposed to get out of it. Isn't life hard enough?

Could be filed under "wacky misfire."

The movie winds up a casualty of schmaltzy, patronizing sentiment on the one hand and overweening ambition on the other.

A singularly vulgar piece of work.

Pride and Glory would be risible if it weren't so reprehensible.

As Crossing Over makes its patronizing points, by way of two-dimensional characters and billboarded plot points, it recalls other, better movies that dealt with the same subjects far more deftly.

Sloppy compendium of filthy jokes and lowbrow sight gags.

A retread of material already thoroughly plumbed by Martin Scorsese.

Attal, who resembles a young Robert De Niro, seems as addled as a director as his character is as a husband, throwing all manner of distractions onto the screen in order to divert the audience.

By the film's self-congratulatory final shot, Stevie has become less a portrait of a sorry young man's difficult life than the story of auteurist arrogance and self-deception run amok.

In a summer of surprisingly self-serious comic book movies" Lara Croft "stands out as being particularly humorless.

It's piddling -- a hangdog little comedy with not enough laughs...its spirit rattles around inside it like a marble in an oil drum.

So cheesy and cheap that it almost attains high camp.

Has the tired, over-baked feeling of a script that never quite worked but was tinkered with until every ounce of spontaneity or life was hammered out of it.

A stunningly inert piece of cinema, a movie that basically boils down to serial shots of people talking to each other.

Sylvia plays it safe, and in doing so it becomes little more than just another domestic melodrama devoid of life and, of all things, poetry.

Gator never emerges as anything but a blatant and outspoken -- and virulently brutal -- jerk.

The frightening myths about adoption that run through Like Mike make even its happiest endings a little bit creepy.

Should have been a smart bit of cinematic froth but instead sinks like an overworked souffle.

Another soundtrack-driven, disposable, not entirely objectionable teen movie.

The loudest, trashiest, stupidest, cheesiest celebration of ritualized male aggression of 2004.

Never gels into the smart, tightly orchestrated cat-and-mouse game that it promises to be.

At once listless and overheated, giddy and utterly zipless, the current incarnation lacks not just the savoir-faire of its stylish predecessor but also the sex appeal.

It's a remarkable, if appalling, spectacle of self-abasement. But of course, that's Sandler's specialty.

An extraordinary collective act of moral and physical courage is relegated to a backdrop for a mushy, synthetic family melodrama.

An endless, virtually laugh-free pastiche of Aaron Sorkin by way of Aaron Spelling, Chasing Liberty features Mandy Moore trying so strenuously to be the next America's Sweetheart that she almost pops a vein.

Sadly, the filmmakers haven't given viewers enough context or information about their protagonist to know whether he's utterly free or utterly unmoored -– or to care very much either way.

A movie that sags and drags under the weight of poor pacing, execrable writing and largely unlikable characters.

A boilerplate melodrama whose good guys and bad guys are so baldly drawn they could have been conceived by Friz Freleng.

Dragged down by a paper-thin story, the predictable number of fight scenes executed at equally predictable intervals and stock, unmemorable characters.

One part historical drama and one part futuristic adventure, Timeline resembles a "Star Trek" episode by way of "Scooby-Doo."

Belabored, ostentatious, overlong behemoth.

As little as there is to recommend in Scooby-Doo 2, it must be noted that the human cast has done an uncanny job of inhabiting their two-dimensional characters.