Terribly tender, good-hearted picture.

After a sparky first half greatly aided by Kristin Scott Thomas' devilish turn as an unsentimental press secretary, Salmon Fishing grows soggier. It's such a pretty, witty gloss of a picture, it hardly knows what to do with real-world terror, hence the Snidely Whiplash-like limning of Muslim extremists.

Once the film gets cooking, the questions never stop. For instance: When you find the dead body of someone you love, isn’t your first call to the cops?

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.

With all its emphasis on beat, Brown Sugar can't maintain a steady one, yet when it finds it, the film surely soars.

The landscape and the lovers are pretty to look at, but two households divided should really pack more of a punch.

The supposedly epic battle the entire film builds toward – the single action set-piece – is a ho-hummer. Fire and ice, turns out, was an oversell: Think tepid tap water instead.

The terrific ensemble acting and Troche’s genuine, nonjudgmental interest in exploring the weird places wounded people go, both internally and externally, amount to an insulated but moving portrait of the real nuclear family.

Brothers is too depthless to dredge up any tears.

Glory Road really isn't a bad show – it's just an obvious one – and one wishes material of this historical import had received a more refined rendering.

Mostly this is a tense, portentous, and provocative piece.

If anything, The Invention of Lying is too soft for the satirical promise of its premise.

Berger’s low-key, likable ensemble film flares with brilliance in its framing concept.

It’s a little bit silly – as is Dafoe’s Kentucky-fried cowboy mechanic named Elvis – but silly is fun. In fact, one wishes it were sillier still.

Paul is offensive solely for being so underachieving.

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.

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.

Happy Endings is unabashedly sentimental (cheekily couched in a black-comic guise), with Roos acting as a sort of benevolent god over his characters.

The darker stuff begs to be handled less delicately than this dance, and in that respect the director stumbles.

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

Forget life lessons: I much prefer a lemur king doing the robot.

But most damningly, Shut Up Little Man! fails to convey what was so hypnotic about the original tapes, and Bate's decision to re-enact the transcripts with actors seems weirdly contrary to the spirit of the thing.

Ambitious, brutish, ruthlessly unromantic – has the right idea casting its heroine as a Joan of Arc-type crusader and its evil queen a dissertation (albeit first draft) on beauty as the most direct path to power for the disenfranchised female.

Morning Glory had the capacity to be a smarter, tarter picture, though it's not bad as is: well-acted and ingratiating, with at least one howlingly funny sequence.

We have pretty much all the information we need within the first half-hour, which undercuts the supposedly climactic reveal of the contents of Maruge's letter and renders the torturous flashbacks unnecessary for narrative purposes. And not a little bit sadomasochistic, too – an ill fit for a PG-13 family film.

There are just too many damn characters, with the best ones taking a backseat to the dullish love quadrangle.

This is the kind of movie in which every other line of dialogue feels like a metaphor – and from there on, the film seesaws between the uncomfortable extremes of glum and twee: an overwrought dirge keyed to a xylophonic ping.

You can’t read one of Clooney’s endless People profiles without hearing the Cary Grant comparison, but here, he’s all Gable – same rakishness and stubble and tanned-leather basso profundo.