In its cinematic incarnation, Sex and the City has lost none of its bawdiness yet gained a more profound sense of soberness. Parker, especially, who in the last season of the show bordered on insufferable in her affected squeaks and shrieks, is allowed to go to very dark places – to be, in fact, quite unfabulous.

While Man on a Mission doesn't precisely neuter Garriott's weirder ways, it does push them aside for a more boilerplate message of the father/son bond.

Isn't much more than a self-indulgent picture about the feeble delirium of a lovesick girl -- lightweight stuff that labors to seem terribly important.

Affectionate but uninsightful biopic.

Rather born to wear a frock coat, Dancy shares the stammer-blush, winning-grin methodology of countryman Hugh Grant, only with more probity and better posture.

Novelty alone does not a good idea make, and in the case of Gnomeo and Juliet, it's rather a disturbing, even fetishy one.

Wanderlust is flawed, too, but for its exploration of financial ruin and alternative lifestyles, it shows once again that Aniston, at the very least, knows which way the wind is blowing.

Luhrmann wants it all – comedy and tragedy, bombast and wet-eyed sentimentality. When it works, his kid-in-a-candy-store giddiness is infectious. When it doesn't – when he goes from silly to turgid in 60 seconds flat – he punctures Australia's proportions down from epic to simply overwrought.

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.

They have some fun playacting at class warriors on the lam – and Seyfriend, it must be said, rocks a killer bob – but it's all just big-budget dress-up in a futurescape that reeks of phoniness.

The actors do a fine, if unsoulful, job, but the real problem with A Love Divided is its unwillingness to unromanticize its heroes.

Makes for a playfully enthralling hour and a half.

Sexy, sophisticated comedy that only occasionally falls short of its admirable ambition: that is, to be a fun, fizzy, razzle-dazzle thing. Straight to the moon, indeed.

Ao relentlessly, gleefully dumb -- without being the slightest bit sardonic -- that you just can't help but guffaw … or groan … but probably both.

The film is by no means a disaster. Possession is prettily performed, prettily put-together. Yet, for a story set so firmly in the center of a fire, LaBute and his players have suited themselves in some mighty flame-retardant threads.

It's kinda funny and pretty cute. Sometimes that's all it takes.

Maybe taking a cue from his namesake dish, that much-maligned Scottish pudding concoction made with sheep innards and root vegetables, Haggis presents a mishmash of genres in this redo of Fred Cavayé's 2008 French film "Pour Elle."

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

Gondry’s well-meaning but too soft, too structure-less picture.

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.

No one would mistake the Benzini Bros. Circus for the greatest show on earth – the Depression-era traveling troupe is a junker compared to the gold-standard Ringling Bros. – but still, a film has to try pretty hard to render lions and tigers and trapeze artists so uniformly underwhelming.

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

There are momentary pleasures, to be sure – a corker of a kiss here, an Otis Redding-backed barroom slink there – but frankly, I'm a little weary of Wong wearing "that same old shaggy dress."

There are significant stretches of talky tedium, more than a few “huh” moments for neophytes – especially whenever anyone starts nattering on about Dust with a capital D – and the ending plays abruptly, but there’s plenty here to hang a franchise on.

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.

In practice, and played as farce, the characters are one-dimensional cutouts kept at a dogged remove. Their miseries are a bore – maybe to Allen, too, who abruptly ends the film, after so much inaction, when it finally catches some dramatic traction.

The film never recovers its initial fizzy-pop charms, owing largely to pacing that turns positively molasses-slow in the second act.

Slight but agreeable picture.