A decent football movie, just about good enough to be the 40th best episode of "Friday Night Lights" . . . which has aired 39 episodes.

I kept hoping the meaning would click into place, but it never quite did.

For a kiddie adventure, the movie, based on the Jeanne DuPrau book, has a pleasingly moody, eerie quality.

Although the script works in a couple of pages of collegiate-level ethical debate about "the question of German guilt," what the movie is really interested in is the question of German sex. So think of it as "Schindler's Lust."

I enjoyed the visual effects used to create some hellish creatures and the amusing nods to "The Exorcist" - cranial rotation, even a spooky staircase. But the movie slips in the last act.

It's fine for kids, though, and it doesn't try too hard.

It's got enough going on to sustain five blockbuster thrillers. That is its blessing and its curse.

Thanks to an unexpected twist and a clever motivation lurking in the back story of the super-villain, G-Force has enough going on to more or less maintain grown-up interest, and there's plenty to please the kiddies.

Stretched both timewise and for plausibility.

Freaked-out funky weirdness starts to happen all around him (Rockwell).

For gays who remember the nightmare, Sex Positive may be too depressing to watch. But the movie strikes a cautionary tone for a younger generation that, it says, isn't taking the HIV threat seriously.

Possibly the least sexy vampire flick ever to crawl out of the crypt (it never occurs to anyone that biting someone's neck is kinda intimate; the act is strictly utilitarian), but it's unusually detailed in its imagining.

Halloween II, writer-director Rob Zombie's completely unsettling but incompletely satisfying continuation of his 2007 reboot, offers up a rush of fiercely imagined nightmare images. Be warned: It's one of the most gruesome films of the year.

For rock fans, hearing many Led Zeppelin and U2 classics on a theater sound system is worth the price of a ticket.

A chipper documentary sure to please seniors.

Despite the pace, though -- pedal, have you met my friend metal? -- Ninja Assassin still has some of its best stuff left at the end, when the master returns to demonstrate his extra-special, super-most-deadliest technique.

It's all a gorgeous error, a bonfire of overreach.

The film makes little sense (the couple refuses to ride subways, but Metro-North is OK), but it's a diverting conversation piece/freak show.

Though thin on story, the film shows poise and vision, using bleak cinema-realité techniques with chilling effect. Campos promises to be heard from again.

As the two coaches head for a faceoff in a climactic live TV interview, writer Morgan starts to seem like a rip-off -- of himself.

Alfred Molina gives a warm and engaging performance as an occupying British soldier.

Although it has affecting moments, the film can't quite decide whether it's about aging or about the effects of war on the home front.

Although the payoff is creepy, it takes a little too long to arrive -- and when it does, it's about as worn-out as the movie's title.

There can only ever be one Bad Lieutenant: Harvey Keitel. In Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, Nicolas Cage, pretend tough guy (Malibu accent, long floppy coiffure, nervous smile), is more like the Bad Used-Car Salesman.

As a spooky midnight movie, The Wolfman is worth curling up with.

The film is primarily interested in the music that accompanied this turmoil, which is a bit like covering the American Revolution with the focus on the wigs Washington and Jefferson wore.

Buscemi is appealing as always, but the movie, is only sporadically funny.

The best Parisian action movie of the week is District 13: Ultimatum, a serviceable thriller with a lefty message.

Quiet, sober and tense, the movie makes some interesting points -- contrasting the frenzied hookups of the two men with the butcher's rote, dismal lovemaking with his wife as their bodies are carefully hidden under sheets -- but it lacks the emotional firepower of "Brokeback Mountain."

To really pull off Greenberg would require a lead performance from a master actor. The actor it stars is . . . Ben Stiller.

An entertaining but routine rock flick.

Doesn't have as much behind-the-scenes juice as you'd hope.

Mostly, this frantic film is yet another attempt at “Spinal Tap” silly. At times it goes for the heart of “Almost Famous,” and its sense of rock is that of a barely acquainted observer.

Reflective but only mildly engaging dramedy.

One of the pleasures of films about being stuck in a place -- "The Wicker Man" is maybe the best example -- comes from the skill with which the writers keep their protagonist locked in his box. On this test, The Last Exorcism pretty much flunks.

Any movie that finds a plausible reason to give Lindsay Lohan a nun's habit and a machine gun is worth your attention.

If you're old enough to pluck gray hairs, you may find yourself rubbing away a few tears.

At last, someone has figured out that there might be laughs in teens trying to lose their virginity.

Although the film is, by design, an unwatchable mess on one level and its one joke about 8 mm filmmaking would play better as a music video or a TV commercial, there's no denying the crazed dedication to detail.

I won't reveal the twist -- but the marketing crew is aware that their only chance of selling this non-mind-blowing documentary about the people you might meet on Facebook is by promising a big surprise.

The movie is at its best when Gekko gets back into the game, with his impish smile and his perfect hair.

On a technical level Buried is impressive, at times blisteringly suspenseful.

A supernatural take on "Death Wish" meets "Faust," Heartless is an uneasy mixture of B-movie shocks, social commentary and sentimentality that shows a potent imagination at work.

Maybe the Midwest isn't actually like this, but if it were, would that be so bad?

Though a bit stiff in the joints and acted by an undistinguished cast amid TV-movie trappings, this low-budget adaptation of Ayn Rand's novel nevertheless contains a fire and a fury that makes it more compelling than the average mass-produced studio item.

Fly Away is more situation than story, though, and the Germann character's welcoming, almost saintly vibe doesn't fit.

There's plenty of smash, thunder and brawl for the kids. But in taking a bit of Hulk and a bit of Superman while re-imagining Excalibur as a hammer, Thor amounts to putting new horns on old ideas. And the screenplay sounds like the lyrics of Spinal Tap.

Even when scary, Murray is somehow funny, too, and he steals the show as always.

It wouldn't be right to say that, half an hour after Kung Fu Panda 2 ended, I was starving for laughs again. In truth, I was starving pretty much all the way through.

The film's attempt at a sort of beautiful anguish works best in its middle section. It takes far too long to get going, and it doesn't have much of an ending.

Final Destination 5, which, despite its lowbrow story, turns out to be one of the fastest-moving films of the year, is a suspenseful and macabre exercise in dread for the absurdly cosseted.

It isn't every day that one witnesses, via a camera mounted with the driver, some of the final images in a man's life before he crashes into a wall at enormous speed. Whether you'll feel good about yourself after watching is up to you.

It has a certain commitment to its cause, and by that I mean it supplies the necessary flayings, slayings, beheadings and, um, a be-nose-ing, all of it dancing to the tune of those amusingly stilted He-Man declaratives - King James Bible cadences applied to comic-book visions. It knows it's a B movie, and gets on with it.

A snarly Euro-thriller with crust under its fingernails and bad breath. It doesn't care if you like it, which is why I kind of do.

A reasonably uplifting kids movie if you don't think about it too much. I get paid to think about things too much, and effective as the movie is, it nevertheless left me slightly put off.

It's a shame that, after nearly 40 years of writing about rock, Cameron Crowe is receptive to the clichés of the genre.

For a 90-minute movie, Margaret has a thin story. So it's unfortunate that it runs 2 1/2 hours.

It has a pleasing smallness -- it's cinematic chamber music -- that almost makes you overlook its inability to really explain its subject.

Fascinating though it is, the movie is thin on historical materials.

Soulfully directed by Michael Cuesta ("L.I.E."), Roadie is short on narrative momentum, but it's a perfectly attuned character study of this rock relic and his middle-aged sorrows.

This strange and eerie noir is more a collection of knockout scenes than a fully realized story.

This jagged blob of a movie features a solo dance in the 1930s scored to the Sex Pistols' "Pretty Vacant," several scenes of a rich Manhattan woman chatting with the ghost of Wallis Simpson and a Sotheby's auction that draws a crowd reaction of the kind associated with "Family Feud." Yet I found the movie fascinating. Except for the boring bits.

As a French Resistance thriller, Free Men is so-so, but it is driven by a mischievously interesting idea: that Muslims and Jews have more in common than they normally allow.

The Hunger Games may be derivative, but it is engrossing and at times exciting. Implicitly, it argues that "The Truman Show" might have been improved by Ed Harris lobbing fireballs at Jim Carrey, and it's now clear what "American Idol" was missing all those years: a crossbow for Simon Cowell.

An appropriately respectful and dignified biopic.

Wilkinson's reflective and regretful searcher, burdened by secrets, is also touching, as are Dench and Nighy's creations, so it's easy to cheer them on as they inch toward revelations and rebirth.

If you can overlook Andie MacDowell's Mitteleuropa accent as a Jewish Holocaust survivor (I know: big if), the cinematic roman a clef Mighty Fine has some quiet charms.

That's My Boy is pretty raunchy, and by "pretty," I mean "amazingly," as in Howard Stern- or Seth MacFarlane-style gags.

In To Rome With Love, Allen approaches the leitmotif in a strange, oblique and interesting way. I fear, though, that the Italian entry in his "Let's Go: Grab Some Euro-Film Subsidies" period will be remembered as being forgettable.

Familiar elements such as a dark family secret, a ghost and a Ouija board start to seem trite after a while, and the third act is a little ridiculous, but debut writer-director Nicholas McCarthy does a lot with a little and seems fully prepared to handle a big-studio horror project.

Gritty visuals and a strong central performance elevate the routine crime story at the heart of Sweden's Easy Money, a sort of mash-up of "Goodfellas" and "The Great Gatsby."

Like Provence itself, Auteuil is in no hurry to get anywhere, reveling instead in the southern region's brilliant light and whispering crickets. His tangy accent and evident fondness for his character make the picture enjoyable enough as it plods along, and the final act wraps things up on a fulfilling note.

France's friendship dramedy Little White Lies is such a blatant rip-off of a far better American movie that it could have been called "Le Big Chill."

It turns out that constraint is really what the show is all about, or to put it another way, I'm disappointed that they turned my horny-teen comedy into a gross-out comedy.

Baseball movies tend to be lyrical, deeply felt, aggressively metaphorical and (consequently) terrible, but Trouble With the Curve has something most others lack: Eastwood's superb, cruel sense of humor, which reaches all the way back to "Every Which Way But Loose."

Initially, this low-budget film writes a lot of checks on the First National Bank of Whimsy, but I was astonished when none of them bounced.

In the end (which continues into the credits), I was left thinking McDonagh can do better than this, and yet I was slightly more agog with admiration than peevish with frustration. Most of all, I wanted to see the film again.

Visually dazzling, intermittently funny.

Picture "Raging Bull" with a sleazy prep from the Brooklyn hipsteropolis of Williamsburg, and you'll get the idea of The Comedy, a character study that tries to make the revolting compelling.

Carlyle gives a quietly engaging performance as a Golden State farmworker with a secret in the likable indie California Solo.

Frears has a lot of fun with the bad tempers and high spirits of this crew of adrenaline junkies, and though the story falls a little flat, the script is sprinkled with dry wit.

This is grim, bleak material that at times is monotonous, but its woe feels authentic.

First-time writer-director Andy Muschietti, an Argentine discovered by Guillermo del Toro, relies too much, especially in the early going, on horror clichés (sudden loud noises and jagged blasts of music), but he does make the tension hum.

Funny and promising as the first act is, the entire second act is pretty awful, as the script chucks in one tiresome, unlikely gag after another.

This digitally tricked-out fairy tale makes for a reasonably engaging kids’ fantasy, but at best we’re talking about a junior varsity “Lord of the Rings.” It’s March. What did you expect?

Willis is at his relaxed best this time.

Soulful though the film is, melodrama gradually sneaks in, and then it takes over.

In the House promises to be a social satire with a flash of Hitchcockian menace, but gradually it turns into a routine thumb-sucker on reality versus fiction.

What begins as an alert and witty barbed satire degenerates into a senseless bloodbath in the black comedy Sightseers.

Everyone's Hero, a tame CGI cartoon for the simple-minded: the very young, the very old and Yankee fans.

Some movies present their whole story in a two-minute trailer, but Gridiron Gang says it all in its poster.

A buffet of dumb and degrading stunts halfway between Looney Tunes and Abu Ghraib?

Since they seem like real people we want them to work out their differences. In the second half, their story is nearly lost in favor of lots of documentary footage of the actual protests. This stuff was pretty ho-hum to look at two years ago, and it hasn't gotten more interesting with age.

To kill 80 minutes, the movie has to pad itself with several dull speeches and stagy moments. The worst? How about when the five men, who have ample reason to fear each other and are facing a life-or-death reckoning, whistle "Ode to Joy" together like a bunch of Whiffenpoofs?

The minimalist style keeps the suspense warm. The movie is unusual among teen horror flicks in that it largely avoids the usual cheap thrills and bursts of scare music. Instead, it carefully repeats isolated images and sound bites until they take on a shivery power.

As the movie's feet get stuck in its own misery, it made me appreciate "Trainspotting" all over again - its wit, how it moved, the way any outcome for its characters seemed possible.

Has the kind of soulful subject matter that will strike some as profoundly emotional, but it gets a flag for roughing the tear ducts. This isn't football - it's cornball.

As DJ, Columbus Short eases his way through the movie without trying to impress us too much, which is welcome, but he's also a little bland around the edges.