Brannaman is a fascinating character, but Buck is so tightly focused that only avid horse lovers will find it appealing.

It's not so much a miscalculation of his audience by Burton as it is a disregard. What lingers after Frankenweenie, far more than its stunning technique, is a sad suggestion of solipsism.

Gyllenhaal is particularly unsuited to this role, his saucer eyes flashing from calm to crazed.

A rambling depiction of a junkie's descent into zombitude.

Oddly enough, though Land of the Dead is more clever and grand than Romero's early classics, it is not as haunting.

The tone is surreal, at once visceral and clinical, making Bronson an unsettling experience: savage, disturbing, and yet somehow fascinating.

The sequel is a dizzying succession of pranks, Candid Camera-like sketches, and, that old crowd-pleaser, the boys actively courting their own grievous harm. This is what you get when a generation grows up watching far too many "Roadrunner" cartoons while sitting on the couch eating bowl after bowl of Lucky Charms.

The Woman in Black has lovely period atmosphere. Unfortunately, it doesn't have much else besides atmosphere.

The plot and dialogue are still stilted and stupid, but that only proves that Justin Lin, who has directed the last four F & Fs, has his priorities straight.

Like "Man on Fire," the previous collaboration between Washington and Scott, Déjà Vu is stunning but poorly paced, a film that manages to be both captivating and frustrating.

Heights manages to make the lives of all these beautiful people seem quite tedious. Despite their accomplishments, the only thing they seem suited for is hailing cabs.

For sci-fi action fans, it's an instant classic. For everyone else, it's a dark, bloody mess.

Freeman and Hoskins lend the film a level of artistry it doesn't really deserve. Unleashed has a vivid concept, but savagery and sentimentality make strange costars.

This hotly anticipated film delivers on the premise of its celebrated title. But it offers little more in terms of suspense, originality or enjoyment. Mostly, it lays there on the screen like a big lazy boa.

The Express eventually reaches its triumph-of-the-human-spirit climax, but it yanks too hard on the heart strings during the long journey there.

A formulaic and fuzzy feel-good movie.

Invention - a mash-up of two Jim Carrey comedies, "Liar Liar" and "Bruce Almighty" - flirts with being a one-gag pony. Shocking sincerity loses its comic impact after a while.

If you can stomach the hard-R rating, this is a smart, sexy and funny sprint.

Hemsworth looks a good deal more like NFL receiver Jeremy Shockey than he does the immortal Avenger.

Part of Me is Perry's visually spectacular testimonial to her own indomitable determination to follow her dreams. The fact that the film lends itself to some really colorful Pinterest pages is merely a bonus.

All that's missing is the spirit and the anarchic humor of the sitcom created by Mel Brooks and Buck Henry. The result is an overdressed, carefully stitched scarecrow of a comedy.

Like "Jumanji," Shorts runs out of momentum before it's half over. That leaves it treading slapstick and killing time until its strained and preposterous big finish.

An engaging if transparent tearjerker of the first water.

The aquatic and surf scenes are spectacular. The story, a clichéed climb to inspiration. Soul Surfer is more parable than plot.

Completely unhinged, a garish and gonzo walk on the wild side.

This is a straight-up gangsta film, yo. Spare us the phony redemption.

Curiously, despite Johnson's imposing physique, it's the kids who do most of the smashing and grabbing, right up until the climax, when it's all-hands-on-neck.

At one point, Statham chases down a sports car while pedaling madly on a kids' bike. Pathétique!

One caveat: The film has more blood-splatter than a dozen zombie movies. If you can handle that, Doomsday's drunken mash-up of futuristic and feudal is surprisingly satisfying.

It's like a bath of stale testosterone as these Hollywood tough guys from the '80s swap references to their most famous movie lines. Their individual entrances are the primary pleasure of The Expendables 2.

Hit & Run is a pleasant enough diversion - but more of the PPV persuasion.

Part of Glee's charm has always been its innocent amateurishness, its just-folks aura. The live show clings to that conceit - with some pyrotechnics thrown in.

Sly can still fill a too-tight polo shirt at 66 - in the same way Jack LaLanne did in his later years. But no amount of movie magic can make him pass for a lethal and nimble juggernaut.

In mood and in content is just SO 20th century.

This remake is about half of a very likable film. But in movies (as in auto races) it isn't how you start, it's how you finish. And Herbie should have kept something in the tank for the late going.

Thanks to director Roger Kumble's breathless pacing, Just Friends manages to outrun most of its flaws. And its likable leads - the coolly clownish Reynolds and the feline-faced Smart - fill this empty Christmas stocking with glee.

The script is a stupid mix of Teutonic tongue twisters (say hello to Herr Schniedelwichsen), hoary German cliches (from phallic sausages to U-boat spoofs), and bad slapstick.

OK, they squeezed one more lap out of this franchise. It's been a fun ride, but it's time to shut things down. If you get my drift.

Succeeds because the action is supercharged in a style that recalls Mel Gibson's apocalyptic classic, "The Road Warrior." The characters are more than cartoonish, and the plot grips the road. But it's Diesel who provides the nitro injection

Surrogates, which borrows tone and content freely from "I, Robot," is all windup and no pitch.

An unusually atmospheric outing. Splatter fans may be disappointed, because Nakata isn't interested in a body count.

Yep, it's all fun and games until someone gets brutalized repeatedly. Before you can avert your eyes, it's Katie, bar the door and break out the chain saws.

It's hard to understand what Malevolence is doing in theaters. If ever a movie deserved to go directly to DVD, it's this dreary horror treatment.

If you actually sit through this enervating ordeal, you'll swear that time is Frozen.

The whole thing is rather insipid. But Thomas makes it smoother and more palatable than it deserves to be.

There is a funny movie to be made from the outrageous egos and excesses of rap music. Death of a Dynasty is not that movie.

Fortunately for us, they number these Final Destination scarefests. Otherwise, it would be impossible to tell them apart.

A sturdy and cohesive representative of what tends to be a flimsy and tawdry B-movie genre. It even has a moral: People who live in wax houses shouldn't start fires.

The problem is that these stoic warriors infect Act of Valor with more wooden acting than you'd see at a ventriloquism school.

You would think any movie with the word "salmon" in the title would have to be funny. Think again.

Vilely violent, Saw 2 is the Phnom Penh of splatter movies.

There's not much to this movie beyond a slick procession of dark, gleaming violence. But Selene lovers would pay good 3D money to see her fight a parking ticket.

Judy Moody has some enjoyable ingredients. The cast, for instance, rocks it, especially young Aussie actress Jordana Beatty as the title character, a bottle rocket with unruly red hair.

Appalling sequel.

Rarely has a film so equally balanced macho and nacho, but Wrath does leave us with a few valuable lessons: a.) fratricide is a nasty business, best left to the Greeks and b) fighting fire with fire may sound good, but it turns out to be a really stupid idea.

When remaking a popular film, you must remember this: First, do no harm to the original. Arthur accomplishes this, with Russell Brand slurring his way neatly through the title role.

So achingly empty, it's nearly existential.

A monster chiller sequel that is visually spectacular but rather overburdened with story.

The whole project is a cloying, artificial mess. The slapstick comedy doesn't bite, and the formulaic sentimentality doesn't grip.

If Stealth were a recruitment film for aircraft-carrier duty, one would be tempted to say, "Mission accomplished." As a feature film, it's a washout.

Dopey but resourceful yukfest.

Doom is, to its detriment, a remarkably faithful re-creation of the massively popular video game. In other words, it's a dark, violent, nerve-wracking, trigger-giddy waste of time.

BMH2 is a harmless, genial outing, a comedy that is amusing without ever rising to the level of funny. You sit through the film with a smile on your face, waiting for the laughs that never come.

A strident and shocking jumble, Shadowboxer suggests what you might come up with if you decided to inject John Huston's dark 1985 film, "Prizzi's Honor," with Oedipal overtones.

The left hand doesn't know who the right hand is shooting in State Property 2, Damon Dash's prodigiously muddled thug-life sequel.

With his beard and '70s clothes, Reynolds looks like Val Kilmer playing Jim Morrison. Before things go precipitously south, he gives an endearing performance that proves he's ready for far more substantial roles than Van Wilder.

A brazen, earsplitting, eye-popping, oddly satisfying action extravaganza, though it veers wildly off-target in its second hour.

This isn't a movie, it's an animatronic theme-park ride - an artificially processed, easily digestible treat for kids.Ho, ho hum.

Get the soundtrack; wait for the movie to come to CMT.

This one is so bad that even Ed Norton couldn't get this mess to move through the sewer.

You want to cut Cop Out some slack because it's just so darn eager to please. So let's grant that it will make a reliably fun companion when it's on cable 10 times a week.

The acting is better than the script deserves and Lexi Alexander's cut-to-the-hearse direction lends the film considerable kick.

Faced with the script's weak humor and feeble stabs at irony, Schwartzman and Stiller turn it way up, setting the dial at "hammy."

The film would be a moth-eaten mess without the wisecracking animals. Not that it's funny with them.

A vast disappointment.

Can be described as whatever is the opposite of a Christmas classic.

An extremely broad and sometimes crude comedy.

This insipid take on the teens-in-peril formula, with a snake-bit ghoul chasing kids around the bayou, is truly a fangless task.

As a cinematic experience, it's like being locked in a coffin for an hour and a half.

The story and the humor get progressively skimpier than an Ipanema bikini.

It would be inaccurate to say there are plots in New Year's Eve. There are a number of setups, and these get shuffled through faster than a card dealer in Atlantic City.