Short to short, it’s a Russian roulette.

Most devastating to the film’s effectiveness is its inability to convey that one essential to the story of Amelia Earhart: the tangible pleasures of flying.

Everything that was sharp in the original text has been rounded and buffed.

I’m all for ambiguity, but Dear Frankie’s multiple dangling threads indicate incoherent storytelling, not profundity.

As is, it's simply too much information crammed too haphazardly into a running time that at times borders on interminable.

This isn’t Nicole Kidman’s first dalliance with witchcraft, and it is one of Bewitched’s unfortunate achievements that it actually makes one pine for Kidman’s 1998 dud, "Practical Magic." That witch at least had some sass; this cardigan-clad witch, alas, is an altogether more benign being, and by "benign" I mean boring.

Myla Goldberg's novel about spelling-bee fever, a family in chaos, and religious/mystic exploration arrives on the screen with all its faults intact, but few of its charms.

Much of the original film's geniality – and all of its pro-environment stumping – has gone missing; what we have instead is a watered-down likeness that curiously turns disaster flick in its too-scary third act.

As the songs pile up and the plot putters along, Romance & Cigarettes wears thin, like a moral for the titular addiction: Sure, there’s the sweet dream of that first drag, but a whole pack’ll do a body bad.

Perhaps there was some confusion – should we play this as a lark or a lesson in geopolitical unrest? – or maybe there was some studio involvement to defang the politics; whatever the case, the noncommittal Charlie Wilson's War treads a good-natured but yawning in-between.

Book of Secrets isn’t so much a romp as a long trudge through American history factoids and conspiracy-theory gobbledygook. Cool car chase, though.

This British rom-com is all soft and plodgy, a by-the-numbers redemption tale that careens uncomfortably from sentimentality to stomach-turning sight gags.

Kit Kittredge is a dutiful bore. Still, I couldn't help but wonder if, in the face of all-out market collapse, it might serve a dual purpose as primer for kiddies on economic depression – because food stamps always taste better with a side order of spunk. Or is it pluck?

It’s a curiously inert, workmanlike production: a whole lot of pomp and incircumstance.

Mancini's character boils down to a lot of self-loathing and unresolved mommy issues – which is as tedious as it sounds.

Once spoiled by the gossamer disquietude of Kim Jee-woon's original Tale, it's difficult to view this Americanized version in anything but the blandest light.

There's some funny stuff here that doesn't involve degrading its female protagonists, and the cast, by and large, is appealing.

The only thrill here comes from the adrenaline kick of the chase. Alas, it's an empty, Pavlovian kick at best.

The misfits, as ever, must take a back seat to the morality, and the result – while in no way migraine-inducing – traffics in rote truisms.

A decent enough spot of silliness.

The opening montage is a jazzy, grabby thing, artfully layering the kids’ auditions to mimic the frenzied pace of the day. But that freneticism never really goes away, nor does the staccato timing.

The first act is very nearly unbearable, leaden and doomy and generically plotted.

Leaves me wanting to watch Tomei and company in something more worthy of their abilities.

After two hours of Vera's pretty but wet-blanket direction, it's too late to ignite any fireworks, even in the hands of such capable actors.

To say the least, the chemistry is lacking; equally unconvincing is the all-British cast’s attempts at American accents.

The resultant film is all surface and plush, with nary a hard edge or demanding note. Despite the movie's well-intentioned heart, its head is out to lunch, neglecting its responsibility to provide these powerhouse actresses with a script half as smart or compelling as they.

It doesn't have the bite to be satire, the pratfalls to be broad comedy, or the wit to pass as a comedy of manners. What does that leave? The French cinematic equivalent of motivational coaching, and -- just like Pignon -- something spectacularly unspectacular.

Warmed my heart about as much as the cold cream Angèle slathers all over her wrinkling clients.

A clever idea that never stretches beyond just that -- a caterpillar that never blooms into a butterfly.

In all his misguided enthusiasm, Parker has mustered enough bluster to fill up a zeppelin, blowing harder and harder, for something more and more fanciful. But with so much hot air, the bubble is bound to burst, and so it does in Parker's blundering adaptation.

The whole thing still reeks of voyeurism -- and not the fly-on-the-wall voyeurism of a vérité doc, but rather the dirty-old-man-in-the-peep-show-booth kind. Might as well just wait for it to hit late-night cable.

The movie scores some laughs, all of which come from the expert Giamatti.

Undone by Blanchett's dull, wooden delivery. She's the pap that kills the pulp the rest of the film is bellowing out to be.

It's all pretty goofy, which I assume is the point, but it's also pretty dull.

When the boys are tossing balls around and bopping in time to Notorious B.I.G., they -- and the film -- are right-on.

There are flashes of wit and flair here, including two stylish sequences detailing the French obsession with food and scarves, but they are but brief respites from the film’s near-pathological drear.

Midway through, there’s a truly riotous set-piece involving Bruiser’s gay love affair with a Great Dane, but not even a Chihuahua in leather bondage gear can zest up a franchise that has degraded from sleeper to snoozer.

Instantly forgettable but good-natured all the same.

The soundtrack is a boisterous blast from the past, and there's a quiet pleasure to watching Zoe and Daly let their composure loose like scrambled eggs, but there's little else to hold dear here.

There's something good-natured, even sweet about this well-meaning affair.

Either you like your movies to be, well, movie-like: imitations of life, with musical accompaniment and artificial lighting and tracking shots and looped dialogue; or you like them to be re-creations of life, sans the artifice. The King Is Alive clearly falls into the latter camp.

It's a nice, friendly kind of love, but hardly an inspiring one.

Starts out as a lark, but veers into grittier, more emotionally complex territory -- just like a real relationship -- that the film doesn't have the chops to sustain.

When The Company owns up to what it is -– a performance piece -– it’s glorious. Everything else -– the window-dressing of a fiction film -– just gums up that gloriousness.

In the end, we know Andie and Ben will kiss and make up -– how could too alliteratively aligned pretty people not? -– but first we must wade through the protracted and wholly unwarranted period in which both huffs about the other’s deceptions.

Their travelogue-ready romance is utterly doofy but not disagreeable, and this sort of wish-fulfillment fantasy will strike the right chord with Moore’s fan base of preteen girls.

The film's "never grow up" refrain plays like a broken record, until, in an abrupt (but not unexpected) turnaround at film's end, it fixes itself.

The climax, like the film itself, is big, loud, and looks cool enough, which is what we’ve come to expect from summer movies … but not from Robert Rodriguez.

Little more than a constant and occasionally pretty imaginative sex show.

Not a man, but the romanticizing of him. A lot of jive-shit.

The bland script and direction are spruced up by a likable cast.

The script negates anything heartfelt with its flippant, almost vulgar tone.

There's just no reconciling the film's ambivalent message. Newell hangs a modern sensibility on a supposed period piece, and hangs his film in the process.

In terms of a pre-teen instructional, Sleepover offers throughout a laudable emphasis on the importance of friendship, but parents may rightfully flinch at a protagonist who is ultimately rewarded for breaking all the rules.

A lightweight, intermittently engaging comedy.

A film that is long on atmosphere, but short on smarts: Plot points are easily unraveled 20 minutes in advance (no fun sleuthing for the audience here), the ending is an unsatisfying pastiche off too many horror tropes, and it would take a week to plug all of Gothika’s gaps in logic.

In manipulating its many disparate characters to bump into each other and set plot lines in motion, Intermission walks a fine line between clever and contrived, with the scale tipping more often toward contrived.

The trouble with retooling fairy tales to jibe with our more enlightened times is that too often the fun gets stripped along with the offensive parts.

Bruce Almighty attempts to blend both sides of the actor – comedic and dramatic – and while Carrey achieved that balance quite wonderfully in "The Truman Show," Bruce Almighty doesn't so much straddle the fence as impale itself on it.

Although the transvestites’ plight – mishandled, misunderstood, and/or misappropriated – is meant to supply Connie and Carla's emotional core, one never gets the feeling of anything stronger than an at-shoulder-length's sympathy from this film.

Perhaps the more appropriate question to put to this remake would be "What the hell’s the point?"

Doesn't do much to further distinguish Lehmann's career. As for those of us waiting for the year's first worthwhile date movie, the wait continues.

Knoxville, in his first dramatic role, does what he can with script and direction that aggressively eschew any insight into Kaufman's grief.

Grace and Johannson's courtship has all the heat of a wet wipe and, worse yet, leaves Quaid offscreen for long stretches.

The ideas are there, hints of genius, but no one ignites them. Add Osmosis Jones to that list of universal enigmas, and, more specifically, how the Farrelly Brothers could have done so little with so much.

Sure, it's nifty enough to see dust particles swirling or hands swooshing at you, but mostly the 3-D muddles the invention and exquisiteness of the film's raison d'être: the dancing.

Frankly, I don't like to be bullied, and bullying is exactly what Knight and Day – overly cute and overconvinced of its own cool – does best.

Alexander's script considers context anathema, leaving us to wonder, among other puzzlers, why these two jerks are friends to begin with – and, perhaps, on what bad breakup or neglected childhood one may blame the film's dispiriting misanthropy.

They’re not all hideous, the men who sit for interviews with a graduate student (Nicholson) and unload their dirty laundry. Sometimes they’re just feckless, or crass; some are even pitiable.

The camera may dive deep, but the content skims mere surface.

A lot of gunk: dance-offs, sing-alongs, awkward exes, and a dirty-talking White blasting through, I'm afraid, the last bits of her novelty. That again?

There's nothing that feels like real rage, nothing that even remotely approximates the spiritual decimation of a termination.

It's hard, as a viewer, not to shudder in tandem with Lisa – this isn't a love match, it's two would-be motivational coaches swapping slogans.

This is no more (but no less?) than what we have rather oddly come to expect from Neeson in his late period (Taken, The A-Team).

Bell steals every scene she's in, and her abrupt dismissal feels all the crueler for so much charisma wasted: She shoulda been a contender.

Kiddos: I'm sighing, too, but only from relief it's all behind us now.

Wimpy Kid's filmmakers have gone off-book, so to speak, to inflect Greg with a surprising cruel streak.

Wouldn't it make more sense on basic cable? Plum screen incarnate (and film producer) Katherine Heigl got her start in TV, on Roswell and Grey's Anatomy, and her public persona – a combination of prickliness and adoration-seeking that has famously grated on viewers' and critics' nerves alike – has historically played better there.

For a comedy, The Sitter is frightfully spare on full-bodied laughs.

Still, once you accept Paul W.S. Anderson's entirely unnecessary adaptation on its own terms (nonsensical, underachieving), it has its limited charms, which include a snigger-inducing alphabet soup of accents, a standout rooftop swordfight, and British comedian James Corden as the Musketeers' put-upon manservant.

As an unsparing portrait of disaffection among the small-paycheck, faux-creative class, The Future is rather astute … which isn't to say it isn't also bang-your-head-on-the-wall annoying.

The Big Year's biggest disappointment is its inadequacy in elucidating the passion of the birder. What ardency, and what an exceptional, impenetrable world they move in. I for one wanted a better look at it.

Perhaps Sucsy was overwhelmed by his immersion in such colorful and outré material; he's chosen for his followup, the I Can't Believe It's Not Nicholas Sparks weepie The Vow, the cinematic equivalent of a lie-down.

Amusing but never rousing, this fourth installment in the Ice Age cartoon franchise comes fretted with freezer burn.

This is fussy filmmaking, overly made-up (the costume mandate seems to include the buzzwords "coffee filters," "croquembouche," and "Day-Glo paint") and bereft of wit.

By film's end, you'll wish they tossed Allen in the rainforest and left him for the leopards to snack on.

If A Thousand Words' formula seems familiar, that's because writer Steve Koren has tripped down this quasi-metaphysical path before in "Bruce Almighty" and "Click."

There's nothing here for the viewer to do, no kinks to work out, no double-crossings to anticipate, not even a half-hearted flail at figuring out how Danny ticks.

This film adaptation feels like YA, with cat’s-cradle love matches, soft-focus sexuality, and a main character who never satisfactorily makes the transition from page to screen.

Luhrmann has always had a knack with the fever of passion, but here he only catches high fever’s empty gibberish.

Fine to look at, but good luck feeling anything.

Liberal Arts is not unlikable: There are some intelligent observations about how humans woo, and the film is so suffused with sincerity you want to give it a pat on the head just for trying so hard.

It’s clear this director sees carnage as nothing more than an opportunity for music-video production values.

He is meant to be brooding, I think, but Tatum’s vague features read more “meathead” than anguished young lover. He has to carry the film, but he’s the least interesting thing going on here.

I’m told Bella’s helplessness is true to the spirit of the novels, but so what? It’s almost 2010 – let’s get hip, people.

A stiff drink or maybe some pharmaceutical assistance might have made me overlook the film's sour tone, or the unremarkableness of its direction.

This one has the feel of being penned on rolling papers, with room to spare.

What this really comes down to is the film's central lie. Made of Honor pins its hopes on a character who acts utterly without honor, and on an actor who has only two settings – sensitive or smarmy. The smarm wins.