Is Gary Winick atoning for his sins? If “Bride Wars” was an acid spill -- and that’s putting it generously -- then Letters to Juliet is like the safety shower in your high school chemistry class, delivering an unsubtle blast of sanitized sentimentality.

There are kernels here of a thoughtful and provocative picture, but they never pop – or POP!, for that matter.

For better or worse (and I'd argue the latter), the aliens are as monolithically evil, unformed, and un-individuated as characters as Native Americans once were in the earliest of Westerns.

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

Short to short, it’s a Russian roulette.

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

Screenwriter Dean Georgaris gets a hell of a pass here – the story is canon, and, in terms of emotional wallop, does all the heavy lifting for him – but he still manages to gunk up the works with dialogue that is dull-witted at best and outright howling at its worst.

What's translated to film feels like a rough draft, with bullet points at beginning and end, demarcating Lola lost, Lola found. And in the middle? A vast, vague maw.

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.

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.

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.

A succession of shrill overacting jobs.

Clearly the film is archly trying to connect the dots between Rove and the supreme mishandling of Iraq – and a compelling case might be made – but it isn't made here.

The film restages the greatest hits of the show's many musical numbers, to greatly diminished effect, with lackluster choreography and all the narrative appeal stripped away.

For every zinger, there are two flat jokes around the corner.

The fictionalization of their journey is simply not that engrossing, nor are their alter egos, with their tightly scripted character arcs.

The exceedingly silly Super Troopers is an earnest, mostly funny spoof.

The space prison set-pieces get the job done; only in the film's terrestrial bookends does this nuts-and-bolts action film show its rust.

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

Franklin injects life into a flat format and has in the process done something nearly unheard of in Hollywood as of late: He's brought class back to the genre film.

Sturgess, saddled with a caddish character, is less compelling, but he does provide the film's only spot of unloosed, raw emotion. Everything else feels too precisely and too compactly assembled for much impact.

Fletcher demonstrates, as with her second film, "27 Dresses," that she can put together a funny, able romantic comedy that is a cut above, but no more. Still, those leads are awfully likable, the Massachusetts-for-Alaska landscape rather picturesque, and if The Proposal doesn't reinvent the wheel, merrily we roll along nonetheless.

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.

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

Cornpone caricatures abound (witness "Hoedown Throwdown," in which Miley sunnily urges us to "pop it, lock it, polka dot it"), but so do worthy messages about responsibility – to family, community, even Mother Earth.

It's like 90 minutes of teasing foreplay, and then, just when it's about to get really good, your partner rolls over and goes to sleep.

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

Until Hollywood stops being a boys club, and America graduates beyond short pants and its embarrassingly pubescent attitudes toward sex, I suppose one can only hope that all male adolescent fantasies will play as goofily sweet as this one.

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

It IS consistently funny. Its trash-can humor is tasteless, no doubt, but hey, that doesn't make it unpalatable.

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.

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

The jokes hit about half the time – the best bits have an off-the-cuff feel – and it’s pocked with the kind of rom-com clichés that are practically written in stone (screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna's script for "The Devil Wears Prada" was far sharper).

“Caution: Contents may induce brain bleed.” That is, if you think too hard on the logic and mechanics of its time-travel conceit.

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.

Fact is, good looks will go a long way in masking mediocrity, and Hollywood Homicide capitalizes on that fact doubly so: Co-writer/director Ron Shelton’s latest boasts two pretty faces, and all across the country, mothers and daughters sigh alike.

The cast seems to have been assembled primarily for its blinking resemblance to the stars of the original Eighties TV series about a renegade group of former Army Rangers now for hire.

As a portrait of what happens to a family when its glue disappears, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close wrung a bucket of tears out of me.

The Greek myths, of course, will endure. The same cannot be said for Singh's silly, self-serious, instantly forgettable, and inaptly named Immortals.

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.

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

Silly, predictable, and, dare I say it, oddly endearing, Hackers is the first film I've seen in a long while that annoyed me so much I actually enjoyed it.

Even though She’s Out of My League ends exactly where you think it will, it does so without ever having actually gone anywhere at all.

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.

That's the ultimate cheat in this pleasant, but trifling affair: Allen has cheated himself out of an actress (Leoni) that could have been Diane Keaton's heir.

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.

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.

No film that requires a woman to jump in water and dogpaddle toward a man has the "sisterhood's" best interests at heart.

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

And then there's the overacting. And then there's the hamminess of the script. And then there's

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.

Far more interesting than Juli and Bryce's banal budding love is Reiner and co-scripter Andrew Scheinman's sensitive exploration of how parents shape their children.

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.

It runs the stopwatch on a chase sequence to a comical extreme and takes way, way too long to take its final bow, in the process burning off any residual goodwill.

It’s just too much drama for one modest film to service adequately. In an effort to cram it all in, scenes abruptly jump from one to the next with nary a smooth transition in sight, relationships evolve far too quickly, and certain subplots drop out of the mix only to resurface, jarringly, much later.

Bill Condon (Dreamgirls, Chicago, Gods and Monsters) takes over the directing reins for these final two parts; his most noteworthy contribution to the series so far is a terrifyingly staged birth scene that should turn the teen fan base off of sex altogether … which is precisely what this whole dumb, punishing series has been gunning for from the start.

Irritating throughout, Love Me if You Dare turns positively appalling in its last half hour, with the inevitable final showdown producing an image that continues to curdle my stomach days later.

It's a rattling, heartrending performance (Moore) in, yes, a long, hard slough of a film – one that is well worth the journey, if not a repeat trip.

What it needs is a little more dirtying down. What it needs, in short, is less New York, and more Alabama.

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.

Hall Pass has half the right idea: Scratch out "Hall," and just … pass.

The stripped-down title gets at what we're really here for: the cars. Are they fast? Check. Are they furious? Yep.

It comes as no surprise that the film is less about fandom as it is about the community fans create with one another – who else to turn to when the object of your affection, your enduring obsession, blows big chunks? – and Fanboys, a likable, shaggy picture, pays nice tribute to that community.

Fails because it takes itself so seriously, and because it is itself so seriously dull. Soderbergh's straining to give us a wink -- come on, guys, this is fun -- but really it just feels like some awful eye twitch -- a spasm of yawning self-indulgence in a mostly captivating career.

Hedlund's got a hell of a voice, rotgut-ragged, and whether he's crooning or wooing, whatever he's selling, and no matter how cornpone, I'm buying.

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.

A lightweight, intermittently engaging comedy.

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

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.

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.

Two Eighties genre staples – Disease-of-the-Week and Poppin' the Cherry – meet, shake hands, and mostly play nice in this sweet, if overly earnest feature.

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.

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.

As the film's central focal point, Simpson (who also co-wrote the script) is an awful zero – you could hardly imagine a more uncharismatic lead – and his embarrassing swings at big emotion in the climax prove the final blow to a film already hobbled by mawkishness.

There is much to recommend this earnest and enraged film.

If Affleck stumbles, Smith's script does nothing to catch his fall. Surprisingly, Smith's truest talent – that of writing – is Jersey Girl's weakest link.

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.

The film goes by in a wash of uninspired action and unmemorable comedy.

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.

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.

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.

The film's best stretch, wherein each American gal is romanced by an international lover, faintly recalling the Fifties' sudser "Three Coins in the Fountain."

I have never doodled during a movie before in my life, but holy hell, Parker's two-hour running time takes a lifetime. Plenty of time for mental doodling, too.

Two hours pass painlessly enough, thanks to the affability of its trio of leads, Hathaway, Andrews, and Elizondo.

Big, dumb, and fun.

In short, the actors deserve a big round of applause -– especially Affleck, for finally wiping the smug look off of his face (OK, 80% smug-free); Garner, for her dead sexy mix of attitude and adrenaline; and the grunting, googly-eyed Farrell, for … well, for being "fookin’" nuts, I guess.

It's a botched job through and through, made all the more distressing by Bullock's recent announcement that she's throwing in the romantic comedy towel for a while.

All told, either you get it or you don't. Film critics and senators with election prospects don't. Kids in the mood to laugh at stupid shit for 87 minutes do. I'll toss my hat in the latter ring with glee.

The twentysomething talents behind Mystery Team are still in the comedy minors, but this nerdy, nutty, perfectly pitched first swing suggests there are major things to come.

It's a shame if the controversy surrounding Bubble Boy distracts people from what a smart, subversive, and genuinely good-hearted film it is.

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

Hopelessly old-fashioned then, but not the aggressively bad picture you might have anticipated.

Instantly forgettable but good-natured all the same.

Vacant and pointless.

It's a Big Idea movie that comes out only half-baked.

The jokes just aren't there, which makes it very hard for the stars -- who are trying very, very hard -- to really make a dent.

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