Its easy to see why Don Cheadle wanted to play Samir Horn, the hero of the post-9/11 thriller Traitor. Cheadles face is basically a perfect delivery system for woe, sadness and internal conflict. And Samir a deep-cover operative trying to infiltrate a terrorist outfit has to make brutal Sophies Choices roughly three times a day.

Maybe the real Ernie Davis really was this perfect, but the movie plays as if the filmmakers didn't want to offend his family.

Your 12-and-unders will dig it, and it might even serve as a sort of movie-Bookmobile and get them to read a little history, or at least a little Wikipedia. But otherwise it's utterly dispensable.

I'm not sure if parents will be counting out each of Shorts 89 minutes or not, begging for it to end, but I'm guessing 8-year-olds will absolutely love it, because Rodriguez isn't talking down to them or using pop-culture references in place of actual gags; he's making what might be called eye-level children's entertainment.

Jaa's performance as Tien is mostly wordless and humorless.

Ends up being one of those heartbreaking movies that gets off to a promising start but never quite creaks to life, despite everyone's obvious best efforts.

Dramatizes and occasionally overdramatizes Albert's 24-year career. For a while, it's a study of a decent man who puts his life into compartments so he can do terrible deeds.

Starts well, builds drama and then proceeds to fly sort of crazily off the rails.

I just wish the movie wasn't also so monologue-choked, muted to a fault and fond of oversimplifying financial lingo to the point of meaninglessness.

There are several things to enjoy here. The use of motel service-industry code words by the safe-house staff is dryly funny.

There's pleasure to be found in the resolute offbeatness of Henry's Crime. It's nearly as concerned with the play as it is with the heist (and with drawing parallels between the two).

Our Idiot Brother lives in a sort of relaxed in-between place where it doesn't really bite as drama or comedy, but the movie's world-class cast and big heart push it over.

The surfing scenes are gorgeous and overwhelming. But the rest of the film...

Feels like a movie that wants to bare its fangs, but only manages a mild gumming.

Sporadically clever and chilling.

The movie pads the good stuff out with a bunch of mediocre mainstream-thriller junk. It takes too long to get started, it pulls some key punches, its dialogue is deeply uninteresting, it relies way too heavily on endless jump-scares and its finale is pure slasher-flick formula.

The film is competent without being spectacular or thrilling.

Modest in every sense but one: Its cast is huge.

Kind of a drag.

As satire, it doesn't add up -- but it's an admirable, if dull, experiment.

Hilariously, gut-bustingly, mind-blowingly, jaw-droppingly stupid.

The movie never recovers from its cheesy center.

It's just another bland, junior-high-basketball riff on "The Bad News Bears" formula, one that takes every single dramatic cue from the underdog sports-movie playbook.

It's a waste of classic material. Rent "The Incredibles" and see what should have been.

After getting off to a decent, somewhat muted start, Skeleton Key just gets sillier and sillier and sillier until it's yet another one of those stupid, noisy thrillers where everyone's running around in a house, yelling and falling down, and you're mostly wondering why nobody bothered to call the cops.

The leads are just too good to commit fully to something this baldly formulaic. It's sad.

For starters, everything's grimy and humorless in a way that infects even Aniston.

Unfortunately, the dialogue undermines the movie's promise.