Though the filmmaking is playful at times, the film is essentially 90 percent message, 10 percent movie.

Skips right past depressing on its way to apocalyptic.

In its loose, ramshackle, gleefully profane first half, Role Models suggests "School Of Rock" with Tourette's, or the original "Bad News Bears" without the baseball.

Boogie Man doesn't delve too deep into its subject's private life, beyond some cheap psychology positing his brother's horrible early death as the root of his winner-takes-all philosophy. But then, Atwater's work was his life.

Ember is seldom riveting, but it's consistently compelling, and its uncompromising literal and metaphorical darkness renders its climax enormously satisfying.

In a stunning lead performance, Goldblum stars as a brilliant, apolitical jester.

A very pleasant surprise, Next Day Air is the rare crime comedy that does justice to both sides of the equation.

Carlos Cuaron's otherwise terrific new comedy Rudo Y Cursi barely survives its third-act "Goodfellas" descent into seedy coke-and-crime drama.

Delivers pretty much exactly what its audience wants and expects: big, dumb, campy fun so deliriously, comically macho, it's remarkable that no one in the cast died of testosterone poisoning.

Bennett never lets us forget that his character is in profound pain, even while attempting to perform oral sex on a transsexual blow-up doll. It's a daring, sweet performance that almost single-handedly elevates The Virginity Hit from a standard Superbad knock-off into a film that feels raw, painful, and real.

Hatchet II is distinguished both by a funky, frisky sense of humor, and gore of great quality and quantity.

It's easily the most painful comedy of the year; in the sadomasochistic world of Knoxville and friends, that isn't criticism so much as high praise.

Well-acted and artfully (though conventionally) made, The Way Back tells a compelling story, regardless of whether it's based on truth or a fabrication.

Paul is a little sloppy and a little sappy, but the filmmakers' passion for their subject matter carries it over the occasional rough spot.

Director Craig McCall approaches Cardiff with something approaching awe, though his subject views his accomplishments with the good-natured humility befitting a proper English gentleman.

Never as edgy as it imagines itself to be. Bangkok may swallow innocents whole, but director Todd Phillips has a lucrative franchise to protect, so the film's flirtation with the comic abyss gets compromised into something that looks more like a rock-solid mainstream comedy with a prominent dark side.

Teacher underutilizes a smartly cast-against-type Timberlake and the perpetually winning Segel, but Diaz ultimately earns a rooting interest in the unlikely redemption of her scheming opportunist.

In the film's funniest scene, a coked-up Day rocks out to The Ting Tings' "That's Not My Name" in a car in a state of ecstatic frenzy.

Madden's dark, moody, complex exploration of guilt and identity taps into a rich vein of moral ambiguity, but the filmmakers should know that in the face of unspeakable Nazi evil, the romantic problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans.

The new Burke & Hare offers many pleasures, chief among them the return of the Landis of old.

The Weird World Of Blowfly at times recalls "The Wrestler," only instead of schlepping his aging body from city to city to don outrageous costumes and wrestle, 69-year-old soul-music legend Clarence Reid schleps his hunched-over frame to gigs where he performs X-rated parodies and scatological ditties as incorrigible proto-hip-hopper Blowfly.

As usual, Corben's style is caffeinated and a little rough around the edges, but he's a tenacious journalist, and his yen for sensationalism gives Limelight an irresistible tabloid pop.

Kwapis fills small roles with great character actors like Stephen Root, Andrew Daly, Kathy Baker, Tim Blake Nelson, John Michael Higgins, Rob Riggle, and James LeGros, all skilled at making a lot out of a little.

As with "Black Dynamite," many of Casa De Mi Padre's sharpest, most inspired gags riff on the source material's ingratiatingly amateurish production values and exuberantly incompetent stylistic choices.

Jeff begins with its protagonist discussing a Hollywood movie and ends by embracing the worst excesses of commercial American filmmaking, but there are enough moments of magic and wonder in the interim to make it worthwhile.

The film is largely redeemed by an unexpected emotional resonance befitting a Steven Spielberg production.

Ted is never stronger than when Wahlberg and MacFarlane's Ted hang out, riff, and luxuriate in an easy friendship, but as it lurches to a conclusion, Ted unwisely devotes far too much of its time to a plot it would be better off ignoring.

As charming as it is winningly modest, but it's so incredibly slight a stiff wind would knock it into a different hemisphere.