Repetitive and ultimately a victim of its own hysteria, the U.K. indie is nonetheless an impressive exercise in high-tech gothic style, with a convincingly deranged Lee Evans.

The comedy star's legions of fans will welcome the cheerfully crude proceedings as a return to silliness after several earnest, lower-key character turns. The melange of Middle East diplomacy, action absurdity, sexual healing and, when in doubt, hummus, wavers between muscular and middling. It's a surefire hit.

Wavers between would-be satire and romantic drama, inhabiting neither mode convincingly.

Woody's back on solid ground with his first memorable pic of the new millennium.

As a depiction of youthful resilience, the film works, but Max's trials and tribulations might have had more dramatic impact with a trained actor in the role.

This culture-clash romantic comedy, scripted by Elizabeth Hunter and Saladin K. Patterson, goes exactly where you'd expect, but helmer Lynn, a comedy vet, gets it there with such infectious energy that you don't much mind the story's predictability.

The culture-clash procedural, which brings the small-town teen to big bad Hollywood, feels more perfunctory than inspired.

Oscar-nominee John Hawkes' convincing portrayal of real-life "crop artist" Stan Herd is the exceedingly quiet center of an exceedingly nonabrasive film that has all the dramatic energy of plants growing.

In this well-intentioned celebration of nature and traditional ways of life, giant-screen images feel generic when they should inspire wonder.

Offers proof that the Korean animation industry is poised for the big leagues.

At its plainspoken best, the U.S.-and Thailand-shot film is an eye-opening history lesson more than an atmospheric thriller. It's nonetheless chilling as it exposes the machinations between countries with no official relationship.

Meredith has woven together a half-dozen portraits of contemporary lives-on-the-edge in this quietly searing drama.

A slow-moving, never-igniting tale of calendar-crossed lovers that grows less convincing as it proceeds.

The impact of the quietly observant film builds until the unlikeliest of elements - an old Broadway tune, an empty garage, a conversation about fenders - detonate with long-buried emotion, anguished and tender.

For all the personal ties to the material, the film too often reaches for broad-strokes inspiration in a way that feels generic.

Every triumph registers low on the emotion meter, and most of the supporting characters are two-dimensional at best.

Awash in nostalgia, "Lions" combines a gentle coming-of-age story with swashbuckling fantasy. While it lacks a necessary tension in its establishing scenes and might be too soft for those who prefer grittier fare.

With charm to spare, Valentin fuses nostalgia and humor in an episodic story whose ultimate focus is the birth of a writer.

All elements click in "Sun," a shimmering, deeply felt film.

It buzzes along for a while, the promising plot innovations inviting suspension of disbelief, before by-the-numbers implausibility, over-the-top valor and unsavory contrivances take over and the line goes dead.

An affecting portrait of a young widow and her two teenage daughters.

The film’s first half is a slog as Chism sets up the minefield for Wade, with every (fully visible) mine certain to explode.

How About You is not without its moments of insight, but its emotional arc is a straight line from A to B, a path made all the more obvious by the heart-tugging score.

Sour, joyless affair.

Among the willing cast, only Jacinda Barrett and topliners Josh Lucas, Kurt Russell and Richard Dreyfuss manage, just barely, to suggest a third dimension to the script's cursory character sketches. But that won't matter to audiences craving a disaster thrill ride.

Flawed but imaginative film.

Full of incident but nearly devoid of dramatic tension, The Children of Huang Shi is a based-on-fact saga that has lost much of its power on the long road to the screen.

Young director Marek Najbrt, commendably, is not interested in wringing easy tears from the European experience of World War II. In the handsome drama Protektor, he brings a cool, noirish slant to a story of Czech artists and intellectuals as they accommodate and to a lesser extent resist the German occupiers.