Spends too much time on unconvincing romantic-comedy contrivances to be consistently engaging. Throughout the uneven film and its mixed bag of performances, the compelling point of focus is Diane Keaton's smart, funny, spot-on natural portrait of the formidable Stone matriarch.

While the 1977 Fun With Dick and Jane was a reasonably diverting sendup of conspicuous consumption with a subversive if not always razor-sharp comic edge, the new version... replaces smart performances with tired shtick.

A small-scale character piece that genuinely likes its protagonists: an overweight teen girl and an overage delivery guy. But for all its quirky touches, the comedy cleaves to formula in its depiction of how they challenge and change each other.

With the exception of a few unpredictable moments from Zooey Deschanel and Will Ferrell, Winter Passing finds only cliche as it reaches for profundity.

Neither good nor so-bad-it's-good, Perry's odd oeuvre has an allure all its own.

Feels padded in some places, truncated in others. It also feels too respectful, especially when its subject is such a deep thinker and questioner of authority.

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

For more than half the film's running time, it's an engaging one. Centering on the boys' hardscrabble formative years, first-time director Breno Silveira delivers an assured first hour before losing grasp of his material.

The film clicks briefly when capturing the silliness of XXX concerns, especially in script-development scenes. But whatever hilarity might have prevailed on the set doesn't translate to the screen. Intrusive music and last-act contrivances do nothing to lift the flat tone or allow the film to earn its intended emotional payoff.

Furiously crossing and double-crossing, the two main story lines never quite fuse or comment on each other.

An inert and muddled mash-up of romantic comedy and theater of stupid cruelty.

A frequently charming, if ultimately slight, coming-of-age tale.

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

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

Finally, a postfeminist multicultural musical extravaganza for 8-year-old girls. Is Bratz not the most totally stylin' movie ever? Grownups won't think so, but for their daughters who share a "passion for fashion" with the dolls that are giving Barbie a run for her money, it will be the event of the season.

Cute and cartoonish rule the day, and teens and tweens will be the film's chief audience.

For all its playful touches and neat-o nostalgia for nondigital entertainment, the whimsy feels forced.

The cast's evident delight might be enough for some moviegoers, but with so much talent and so little modulation on offer, audiences subjected to the onslaught could reasonably expect a higher laughs-to-torture ratio.

A light touch keeps the film from being an ordeal, but the story's trajectory is as predictable as the setup is contrived.

This inspirational sports drama unfolds in such generic fashion that it feels contrived more often than it rings true.

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.

Yet another Hollywood romantic comedy that's all but devoid of romance and laughs.

Though the intended hilarity is forced and flat, there's a sweetness to the silliness.

A lifeless period romance of the cutesy-cantankerous persuasion.

Very much a lesson, and a repetitive and uneven one at that, GhettoPhysics succeeds at least as a conversation starter.

Mumblecore meets Arthur Conan Doyle in the ambitious, if not always satisfying, Cold Weather.

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.

Amid the would-be and actual laughs, the screenplay tries to drum up drama, but every disagreement and tension is treated superficially and summarily resolved.