Plays around with some interesting notions, such as the nature of reality, the nature of humanity, and the nature of spiffy apartments with sleek bathroom fixtures.

Never as much fun as (Woo's) old Chow Yun Fat-starring Chinese pics.

A likable, low-budget high school comedy.

Krueger's comedy doesn't always spark, but its underlying intelligence - not to mention Graham's eyes - shines through.

Williamson's screenplay doesn't match the cleverness of his conceit; it lacks the requisite archness and wit.

Laced with a venomous wit, and turning progressively creepier as it unfolds, writer-director Jon Reiss' movie offers a black-humored study of suppressed rage, sexual gamesmanship, domination and subordination.

Corny and blubbery as it is, still packs an emotional wallop.

Sweet-natured but overdone, over-long film.

Tries too hard to be playful and sensual, wacky and romantic, and comes away feeling fake and prefabricated instead.

A yawning affair that would be a perfectly fine video rental but doesn't really require the big screen.

The film only occasionally comes to life - it's too literal (and literary), too studied, too still.

Long and lugubrious.

It's low-grade Casablanca - an ill-fated love affair, rife with murder and deceit, with World War II as a backdrop and a farewell scene that has something to do with getting to Paris.

Doesn't run very deep, or resonate with profound meaning. But as a thoughtful fable, laced with humor, the picture has its charms.

A bit of a one-joke wonder.

Skarsgard's performance is bold and raw (and reminiscent of vintage Jack Lemmon in its earnestness).

Stripped of its poetry, some of the devices of the tragedy of the Moor come off here as woefully contrived.

Lacks an essential sense of purpose.

Now in his late 40s and hairier than ever, Jeremy seems a simple enough, likable guy, and he has no pretensions about what he does. And no apologies either.

Too freewheeling for its own good, like a Robert Altman ensemble piece without a gravitational core. But Hawke's actors are a talented troupe, and even when things get self-indulgent and fuzzy-headed (and boy, do they!), interesting stuff is going on.

Yes, it's stupid. But sometimes it's stupid with a capital S, and it's in those moments of transcendent idiocy that you can't help liking Saving Silverman. At least, a little bit.

Heartfelt and artfully shot, the movie - with little Rodrigo Noya, wearing big eyeglasses, in the title role - is too sweet for its own good, even as some of its characters do things that aren't terribly sweet at all.

Scott and Davis bring heart-rending sadness and telling detail to their roles, and imbue Secret Lives with something real and true.

Funny and not-funny, slapstick and slapdash, Welcome to Collinwood is a seriously uneven caper comedy in which a bunch of really fine character actors get to act really, really silly.

A meditation on guilt, remorse and redemption -- is unrelentingly heavy.

It's a cinematic feat, an art lover's dream, but as a moviegoing experience, Alexander Sokurov's Russian Ark is something of a letdown.

The screenplay of Open Range, credited to one Craig Storper, is an awesome compendium of cowboy-movie cliches. It borders on parody, and often crosses the border, rustling up a drove of oater aphorisms.

Chan's signature mix of screwball comedy and gymnastic derring-do landed him his own cartoon series a few years back, and The Medallion -- with its bumbling spies and bounding star -- is about as cartoonish as live action gets.

A squirmingly strange and brutal study of sexual power, masochism and mother-daughter madness.

Fans of swooping helicopter shots, alleys filled with backlit geysers of steam, and jump-cut editing that makes MTV look like Ingmar Bergman will relish the intercontinental intrigue and huggermugger that is Spy Game.

Femme Fatale is glossy, glamorous cinema as collage. Maybe all the pieces of a truly good film noir are here, but the filmmaker has opted simply to toss them into the air and let them fall where they may.

Your body's sitting there in the theater, but it feels as if your head is someplace else.

Elevated beyond its cutesy contrivances and mawkishness by some extraordinarily good performances.

While it flirts with "After School Special"-ness, at least has the courage to address racial and cultural cliches with a degree of honesty.

Despite some fine, nuanced acting (it's Lane's movie, to be sure), Unfaithful doesn't get much deeper than a romance novel.

Empire, with its double-barreled shoot-outs, its predictable carnage and conflict, and a rush-job of a resolution, is ultimately just one more urban gangland genre flick.

Christopher Walken has the best moments in the whole thing, portraying the wacked-out auteur of the Gwen-and-Eddie vehicle. Sadly, he's only in America's Sweethearts a few hilarious minutes.

This film is a philosophical musing -- a humanitarian speculation, not a drama about real people, historical figures or not, who seem fully formed.

Invincible works, simply but provocatively, as a parable about the oppressed and the oppressors, victimhood and fanaticism.

As a character study, City by the Sea is engaging. As a police thriller, it's not all there.

A stage-y but likable ensemble piece.

Its grossness knows no bounds, and you'd have to be dead not to laugh.

A wholesome little drama aimed at the pre- and early-teen crowd.

Never going to be remembered as a tying-the-knot screwball classic (it probably won't be remembered past March), but one could do worse.

This In-Laws feels, in the end, formulaic and unnecessary, especially when the original is yours for the renting at the video store.

A harmless and mildly amusing family comedy.

Whether he's smacking into an iceberg or flopping topless onto a sandy beach, DiCaprio is still maddeningly lightweight.

Lightweight, likable buppie romantic comedy.

Clones makes the Frodo-speak of "Lord of the Rings" sound like Noel Coward.

A massive compendium of youth-movie/pedal-to-the-metal cliches. But man, is it fast!

This is an A-list cast toiling on a C-list screenplay.

Too bad Chocolat isn't as seductive as its leading lady.

Brought to the screen with a mix of jaunty humor and jagged violence that should have worked more effectively than it does.

Rourke and Roberts! Dueling kings of B-movie excess and cable-TV schlock, together again on the big screen! Talk about chemistry!

An interesting choice for a Valentine's Day outing, He Loves Me is a weird, bubbly cocktail -- effervescent charm and troubling pathology, shaken together.

But moving across this tableau is Frodo and his gang, and here the trouble lies...Not a one seems believable as conveyed by Wood, who forever looks to be on the brink of a good sob. Likewise, his hobbit sidekick Samwise Gamgee (Sean Astin) is a real wuss.

Perhaps to compensate for the absence of compelling drama and tension (and a few continuity gaffes), Scott has retreated to his TV commercial roots and crammed Hannibal full of busy, art-directed visuals.

This violently comic caper has some spunky charm going for it -- but has a lot of self-consciously hip, studied wackiness going against it.

The perfect film for anyone who likes their headbutting and kickboxing dressed up in gold brocade, frilly collars, and tri-cornered caps. And isn't that all of us?

Gyllenhaal, in the pivotal role, brings a scruffy, boyish charm to the proceedings, but his big scenes with Hoffman and Sarandon are one-sided - he's not in the same league, and comes off as a bit of a cipher.

Plot contrivances, including an ominous cowboy-hatted figure who stalks Bitsey and her tagalong intern (Gabriel Mann), undermine the story's serious political themes.

Although the sequel retains its predecessor's breezy retro spirit, The Mummy Returns is a mite darker and scarier and the effects a little spiffier.

They has a low-budget, generic feel -- but also enough sense to know that unseen menace is a lot creepier than explicit gore.

Hackman's in it a lot, and he is, as almost always, great fun.

Has its effectively nasty, chilling moments -- and it also brings body piercing to new heights of ickiness.

Beyond turbocharged. It whooshes along at warp speed. And still, despite some awesomely choreographed stunts and the two stars' pedal-to-the-metal appeal, the movie seems endless.

Despite its haunting artistry and its winning eccentricities, The Shipping News is a vehicle that's still very much at sea.

Terminator 3 moves at not-quite-breakneck speed, and the shape-shifting, metal-melting special effects aren't exactly spectacular.

Somewhat fleeter and more engaging than its predecessor.

Visually dazzling but ultimately dizzying ride, a trippy suspenser that gets tripped up on its own deja vu voodoo.

Clunky and unsurprising.

Beautiful to behold but lacking in any kind of palpable dread or suspense.

Starts having the same effect as one too many tequilas: the Hong Kong-style stunts, the goofy wisecracks, the foxy presence of Eva Mendes -- all of it becomes blurry and numbing.

An entertaining history lesson. That is, a history lesson that synopsizes and simplifies a complex life and complicated times into easily digestible panels of action, intrigue, martyrdom and sticking it to the papacy.

As a thriller, In the Cut, with its red herring characters and plot twists, turns dopey and predictable. As a portrait of a single woman, burned by love and wary of what's in store, Campion's movie has its trenchant, telling passages.

Fails on a couple of levels. It never really gives you a sense of the psychology, the root causes behind Glass' elaborate frauds... And since we don't know the why, the how becomes considerably less interesting.

It's not just Hollywood convention that gets in the way of the story, it's the lack of depth, heft and heart at its core.

Girl With a Pearl Earring is really about watching paint dry. S l o w l y.

There are chases that feel way too long, and dialogue that feels flat. Affleck and Thurman make a handsome duo, but there's no spark between the actors.

The good thing about The Company is that nothing much happens. The bad thing about The Company is that nothing much happens.

Boasts exceedingly high levels of improbability and an embarrassment of continuity and character shortfalls, but still has a certain bubbleheaded charm.

The best reason to see Along Came Polly is the supporting cast.

Easy to like, and easy to forget.

A modest and obviously heartfelt endeavor.

Terribly slight and a little off.

A tale of disaffection, devastation and epiphanies of the catastrophic kind.

Very slight and, in the early going, slightly annoying, Coffee and Cigarettes is a long-borning Jarmusch project.

Never mind the cool, convincing effects (and they are cool), The Day After Tomorrow teems with illogical action, improbable coincidences. It's pure escapist fare, a popcorn gobbler.

Despite a strong cast and a willingness to lampoon the fundamentals of fundamentalism, Saved! isn't as funny, or as wicked, as it should be.

It's a hokey piece of melodrama in a movie that cheats its characters - and its audience - out of some emotional truth.

Classy but ultimately unsatisfying film.

A handsome-looking movie that's full of the muted greens, browns and grays of the tony Hamptons, director Williams' tale never quite finds its footing.

A pumped-up, plotless montage of extraordinary landscapes, colorful wildlife, and interesting people performing feats of derring-do.

The beautiful Wright Penn has a harder time anchoring the free-spirited Clare in territory that feels honest and true - there's a stagey quality to the actress' performance that goes beyond the stagey quality of her character.

Quite possibly the biggest ego trip ever to play Cannes, or anywhere else, at any time.

As for Duff, she's bright-eyed and bubbly, though her singing talents are nowhere near as awesome as Raise Your Voice's who's-going-to-win-the-big-scholarship plotline requires.

It's a shame about Ray, because Foxx is trapped in a movie that takes the music icon's unique story and turns it into cheesy, sentimental American Dream cliches.

Visually, taking its cues (mostly) from Van Allsburg's Hopperesque art, The Polar Express is eye-popping. Storywise, however, it can be eyelid-drooping.

A downer of a drama.

Not as consistently or uproariously funny as "American Pie," but it does have a Zen zaniness that gives it center as well as edge.

An enjoyable throwback to the way monster movies used to be made.

Like "Mr. Holland's Opus," only in French, with an all-boy cast in white shirts and short pants, The Chorus is the kind of sugary, crowd-pleasing fare that only the most curmudgeonly moviegoer can frown upon.

A loving, dopey documentary about the bird man of a place with a view of Alcatraz.

Flipping his cigarette lighter and snapping deadpan retorts, Reeves plays the demon-hunting detective with Keanu-esque panache.

Has the arc of a Shakespearean tragedy, and all the essential components therein: loyalty and betrayal, conspiracy and delusion, self-destruction.

The dialogue rings tinny in the ear, as if enunciated in the phony arc of a stage light.

Where My Wife was offbeat and original, Happily Ever After gets bogged down in midlife-crisis cliches.

Lost in a time warp of its own doing (or non-doing), Hitchhiker's Guide just doesn't seem terribly original.

For soccer aficionados, Kicking & Screaming boasts some fairly cool play, courtesy of Alessandro Ruggiero and Francesco Liotti, two kids who play "the Italians."

Ma Mere, with its sun-drenched sense of dread and band of reckless, unlikable characters, isn't very good, but that doesn't stop the actors -- especially the intrepid Huppert -- from going all the way.

The film doesn't hold together in any compelling way.

Mr. & Mrs. Smith kicks off with panache and star power - and quickly wears out its welcome.

Cool, clinical and not altogether convincing.

Loses itself in melodrama, caricature and narrative missteps.

Saraband, flat and static both visually and thematically, doesn't begin to approximate the austere beauty of the director's art-house classics.

It's the emotional equivalent of a big shrug.

Stylishly spooky and featuring a hammy, cigarette-sucking performance from Gena Rowlands.

If The Brothers Grimm flies apart like a badly designed airplane (and it does), it still has more going for it than most of the movie fare this summer.

An enjoyably cheesy teen melodrama with a touch of indie edge.

Everything about An Unfinished Life's screenplay is cliched and predictable, but the actors manage to elevate the proceedings above and beyond shameless soap.

A mild and merry romp about family, friends and sexual identity.

A black comedy, a character study, and a thriller, Lord of War lacks the gritty, hell-bent hilarity of David O. Russell's contemporary war pic, "Three Kings."

It's "The Deep" reimagined as an Abercrombie catalog.

It says in the beginning of the film that Two for the Money is "inspired by a true story." Problem is, it's just not that inspired.

It's a harrowing tale, but one that gets phonied up with unnecessary slo-mos, manipulative soundtrack cues, and unrestrained thespianism.

It's all very deep, but in a tricked-up, art-directed sort of way.

Steeped in attitude - a smart-alecky, insider sarcasm that can be pretty clever at times, but also pretty insufferable.

Illuminated by dim candles and the rare glimmer of sun, the movie is grainy, closed-in, and likely to cause spasms of claustrophobia.

The menagerie of mythological beasties in Narnia don't seem quite genuinely, three-dimensionally real.

Hoodwinked may be a poor cousin to the Shrek franchise, but this made-on-the-cheap computer-animated feature still has more style and snarky gags than Disney's recent CG hit, "Chicken Little."

An old-style mob movie based on a real court case and a real character - a colorful character - Find Me Guilty is about loyalty, family, and a bunch of good fellas.

T Bone Burnett's soundtrack has the appropriate twang to give Wenders' Hopperesque tableaux a nice, filmic poetry. But as arresting as the images are, Shepard's clunky, soap-opera banter brings most everything, and everyone, crashing down to earth.

Nunez's dialogue, and the paces he puts this threesome through, just don't ring true. Coastlines is the stuff of pulp, seriously at odds with what the writer-director has always done best. That is, show the inner workings of people, their needs, their fears, their small dreams.

An international caper with James Bond and Tom Clancy overtones - and Austin Powers undertones, too.

Occasionally clicks into full-speed farce mode, but never for long - or for long enough.

This is the slightest and slimmest of sex comedies.

Take "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids," throw some "Antz" on it, and you have The Ant Bully.

The fundamental problem with The Night Listener is the manner in which the boy, Pete, is depicted. Rory Culkin gets the tricky job of bringing the role to life, and he does it well, but it's still a trick. Or is it?

A whodunit, a whydunit, and an excuse for Adrien Brody to mug it up like nobody's business.

It's not easy being macho while you're shivering like a frozen puppy, but Kutcher pulls it off.

Taken for what it is - 'tweenage escapism - Stormbreaker is moderately fun.

Baked and half-baked, Tenacious D does manage to give the term potty humor a new meaning. That's some kind of genius, right?

Nasty stuff. It's xenophobic (message: Americans, steer clear of the Third World); it's photogenic (the Sports Illustrated-likeswimsuit issue beach scenes, the colorful villages, the lush landscapes); it's gruesome (operating table POV shots); and it's violent.

It's earnest, but it feels beside the point. Blood Diamond's real point: box office.

Breaking and Entering is smart and smartly done, as it describes these inter-circling worlds - the well-to-do Brits and the newly deposited foreigners, trying to shake off their homeland tragedies and start anew.

What it lacks, though, is any sense that these people - are real.

Some of the most tasteless and un-PC comedy in the film is also the funniest - Farrelly Brothers-style humor that plays off the Bateman character's physical limitations.

There's more voyeurism going on here, and less insight into a certain culture (the young and the wasted), than the filmmakers would probably admit to, but the performances are scarily real, and the outcome, well, is just scary.

Someone should check Joe Carnahan for performance enhancement drugs. Smokin' Aces, the wild ride of a movie he scripted and directed, is so pumped up, manic and mayhem-packed that it practically shoots sweat off the screen.

The Situation deserves credit for not trying to reduce the events in Iraq to facile equations. There is corruption and cynicism on all sides: the U.S. diplomats and military, the Sunni leaders, the thugs in cop uniforms, the local powerbrokers.

Has a breezy, Altmanesque air, as it tracks the mini-dramas of its crisscrossing characters.

As stories go, The Astronaut Farmer is engaging, even if it serves up a kind of Plains State brand of Rocky-esque hooey.

A roiling, boiling mix of blaxploitation, sexploitation, Tennessee Williams and the Tennessee outback.

TMNT has a cool, noirish sheen. There's an attention to detail in the visuals and sound design that pushes it up several notches above most kiddie fare. It's not art, dude, but it will do.

Dumb with a capital D, Blades of Glory takes its (almost) fleshed-out sketch-comedy idea as far as an ice-skating buddy movie with we're-not-gay jokes and a psycho stalker can go.

In a way, The TV Set suffers from the same syndrome as the industry it's parodying: bland and compromised, it feels as if it's been fine-tuned and focus-grouped within an inch of its life.

This mildly amusing tale of infidelity, blackmail, class differences and corporate greed not only strains credulity - it strains for laughs.

It's not dull, exactly, but neither is it much fun.

It is possible to bring substance, as well as poetry, to the vignette form, but more often Paris, Je T'Aime is merely mundane.

The Hip Hop Project, a documentary about Kazi and the young men and women he mentors, isn't quite as successful as Kazi himself - a Bahamian orphan and teenage street hustler who turned his life around, and got folks like Queen Latifah, Russell Simmons and Bruce Willis to help out him and his project.

Despite all the stock characters and scenarios, Fox and company manage to bring things to life. And cut some hair.

It's not that Fay Grim isn't amusing. It is, in that deadpan, skewed way that indie auteur Hartley's pics always are. But there's not much else going on here.

What's maddening about Angel-A is that Besson is so brilliant with his visuals - and so in love with his two leads and the city they're parading around - that you desperately want the story, and the characters, to make some kind of emotional sense. This, however, does not happen.

Directed in workmanlike style by Underworld: Evolution's Len Wiseman, has its share of wild stunts and spectacular carnage, but it feels pokey and predictable, too.

Sunshine can be seen as a story about science and religion, about the rational mind and the mad. But at a certain point, like a dying star about to pop into eternal nothingness, the movie can't be seen as anything - it just implodes.

Gretchen Mol stars as a 35-year-old virgin deflowered in lusty romance-novel fashion on a trip to Mexico. Her hunky lover-boy's name? Jesus Christ (played by Justin Theroux). The segment? "Thou shalt not take the Lord's name in vain."

With so many good Austen adaptations out there (the Keira Knightley Pride & Prejudice, the Colin Firth Pride and Prejudice, Emma Thompson and Ang Lee's splendid Sense and Sensibility), Becoming Jane seems a bit flimsy by comparison.

Brings too much of EVERYTHING to the table: It's the cinema equivalent of a long, winding, run-on sentence.

Mostly about delivering thrills, and chills, and this it does with moderate success and a bunch of fast, no-nonsense edits.

Even at just 90 minutes, Balls of Fury - with its caricatures of the Asian underworld, with its G-man malarkey and gay jokes (Feng keeps an all-boy bevy of sex slaves) - begins to outstay its welcome.

A bizarre counterculture jukebox musical.

The movie would pour nicely onto a thick stack of pancakes.

Trade comes off like TV-movie sensationalism, sidetracked by distracting backstories and hard-to-swallow plot twists.

As a meditation on the vicissitudes of love, on the need for people to connect, and the struggles that come by both making and missing those connections, the movie is wading-pool deep.

There's a sign on the way into Norway, or at least a sign that somebody from the film crew put up: "On the eighth day, God created baseball." If amen is your answer to that, then The Final Season is the movie for you.

By movie's end, it seems like the only one giving a truly genuine performance is Bianca. Mouth-agape, steadfastly mum.

At times solid and suspenseful, at times dopily implausible and woefully familiar.

The filmmakers' narrative device of framing Quinn's tale as a feature-length flashback doesn't pay off - we get a goody-two-shoes moral lesson at the end, and a look at movie studio aging makeup gone wild.

I Am Legend is essentially "28 Days Later" . . ., or "28 Weeks Later" . . ., only with millions more for special effects, and with nothing approaching the heart-pounding, bloodcurdling power and smarts of the two British-made yarns.

Emily Watson, looking at home in her '40s frocks, plays Angus' mother - coping not only with her son's obsession with what she believes to be an imaginary friend, but also with her own worry and grief about her husband at war.

Much scampering, yelling, quaking and crying is required of the actors, and they acquit themselves well enough, even with oozing fake wounds and prop rebars piercing their shoulder blades.

None of these elements quite come together, and while the clothes and props look authentic, the acting doesn't.

There are winning scenes between Wilson and the three teens as they train in various martial arts (like Mexican Judo - "as in Ju-don't know who you're messing with!") and get tips from clips of "Fight Club" and "The Untouchables."

How do you say "tearjerker" in Spanish?

A larky throwback to the breakneck screwballs of Frank Capra and Preston Sturges. Problem is, it isn't breakneck enough.

Despite Scorsese's efforts to pump up some drama - the director, with his signature glasses and Groucho brows, gets huffy about not receiving a set list - drama is sorely lacking. This is just a concert film.

The special effects are effective, though not terribly special. While director Minkoff pays homage to past masters of the genre, the past masters were better at this game than he.

The best thing about The Life Before Her Eyes, a somber meditation on fate and friendship, is the way it captures the close relationship between two teenage girls.

The romanticized image of the tortured artist - never mind how warranted his or her angst might be - is the stuff of stereotype unless it's leavened with humor, or limned in art. In Fugitive Pieces, neither element appears in sufficient quantity.

The film is just middling. A clever line here and there, a debonair Dempsey wink, a cute Monaghan nod, and another Bill and Monica reference to tie things all together.

One of the problems with the way Mamet resolves Mike's predicament is that it's ridiculously implausible - even in the context of a far-fetched fight story.

Lacking in subtlety and nuance, Broomfield's nerve-jangling movie nonetheless succeeds in showing the war from various vantage points. And from wherever one's standing, the view is profoundly disturbing.

While the production values are top-notch, and the action artfully choreographed, in the end - and quite well before the end - a sense of tedium sets in.

As scripted by Cathy Rabin and directed by Santosh Sivan, Before the Rains is never less than compelling, but never more than adequately realized.

Don't run off before the credits start to roll, though: The Incredible Hulk ends with a jokey cameo by a certain movie star with his own newfound superhero franchise.

Wanted is head-spinning stuff, and it's easy to get caught up in its masterfully manipulated mayhem. Visually, and viscerally, it's pretty awesome.

Goes somewhere the first "Hellboy" never ventured: into the Realms of Tedium.

The movie's too long - and the violence and mayhem are unexpectedly harsh and heavy - but Franco's inspired, looped performance is right up there in the annals of reefer filmdom with Jeff Bridges' the Dude in "The Big Lebowski."

Finding Amanda isn't bad, and there is some smart, jagged humor.

The Rocker can be amusingly dopey, with its "Spinal Tap"-ish lampooning of rock idioms - and idiots.

A dark-and-stormy sci-fi shoot-'em-up directed by McG, T4 has enough hardware and havoc to satisfy the crowd of action junkies and gamers who sped to "X-Men Origins: Wolverine" on opening weekend. (Terminator Salvation is a couple of liquid metal drops' more satisfying, but only a couple.)

What Eagle Eye wants to do is show us technology's dark side: all the stuff that's there to make our lives easier - ATMs, PDAs, iPods, GPS, cell phones, PCs, "smart" houses - turned against us in a vast conspiracy.

While Choke, adapted for the screen and directed by Clark Gregg, is by no means a disaster, it is disappointing - and oddly dull.

Impossibly arty and, at times, narratively incoherent, Filth and Wisdom still has its goofy charms.

An OK sports doc that owes as much to reality TV competitions as it does to the genre of nautical cinema.

A testosterone-fueled road movie that displays the same Apatow-ian obsessions, and raunch, as "Pineapple Express," "Superbad," and "The 40-Year-Old Virgin."

All the running, the hiding, the escaping (from giant moles, from giant Murray) are decidedly less exciting, and compelling, than City of Ember wants to be.

A smart aleck-y kidnapping caper that whooshes around to a thumping electronic beat.

The tiny, intrepid rodent is so cute it's impossible not to ooh and aww, just looking at him. Which is a good thing, because you'll need something to get you through the long stretches of fairytale pastiche that make up this overwrought yarn.

Bedtime Stories does have a comic buoyancy, even as its plot trots on a predictable course. Perhaps the different accents and sensibilities have something to do with that.

Sappy, sentimental and redeemed only by the quiet radiance and fidgety intelligence of its leads, Last Chance Harvey is a fantasy about mopey middle-agers getting a second chance at love.

Offers a gripping mix of sexual heat and nasty menace. It's "Dead Calm" meets "Very Bad Things," with English accents.

An enjoyably goofy hybrid of extraterrestrial sci-fi and Iron Age action, Outlander boasts a super-serious Jim Caviezel in the title role

With visual nods to Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining" and a fairly faithful adherence to the tenor and tone of the Korean scare genre, The Uninvited doesn't startle and shock so much as it lulls you into a series of unsettling, hallucinogenic set pieces.

Where "Run Lola Run" was like a perpetual-motion machine, The International seems to forever be stopping in its own tracks. Tykwer takes coffee breaks to explain the convoluted and dicey plot.

Duplicity zips from one elaborate piece of hugger-mugger to the next. But at a certain point (for me, it was Rome), boredom sets in.

There's a lot of rambling and shambling going on in these overlapping stories, often to the point where Explicit Ills no longer feels like it has a point.

Like Mickey Rourke in "The Wrestler," Malkovich plays a star long past his glory days in The Great Buck Howard, but continuing to do the only thing he knows. The tone of the two films couldn't be less alike, but the story arc of the central characters graphs the same.

A campy homage to those days of malt shops, drive-ins, and saucer-shaped UFOs - you know, the ones that go crashing into nearby buttes, unleashing terrible terrors from another galaxy.

The Spanish actress Marina Gatell is exotic and engaging as a young writer drawn to Lorca and puzzled why he is not drawn to her in return.

There is a lot of shield-your-eyes ickiness in District 9, a lot of violence and gore. What there is not a lot of, however, is humanity - even in the film's depiction of the inhumanity humans are capable of.

Diaz gets her own voice-over monologue, as does Patric - the different points of view functioning like stanza refrains, born in shared familial anguish.

Moderately compelling and clinical. This isn't "Breakfast at Tiffany's"; this isn't even "Klute."

Ultimately, the movie's a bust.

Washington offers another of his rock-steady performances, playing a career civil servant with a couple of secrets of his own, but confident, diligent, ready to go the distance for the city he loves.

At best diverting, at worst an almost self-parodic compendium of French film cliches.

It can be argued that Adam uses Asperger's as a kind of metaphor for the barriers that people erect to fend off strangers, to guard against intimacy. It can also be argued that writer/director Mayer is shamelessly manipulative.

A mix of coolheaded cultural satire and anxiety-inducing workplace and marital shenanigans, Extract is an odd project. It's smarter than most of the comedies out there right now, but that doesn't necessarily make it funnier.

Teeming with socially awkward misfits, Gentlemen Broncos is not without its absurdist charms, although Hess (who co-scripted with his wife, Jerusha) pushes the envelope in ways it doesn't need pushing.

That the film, directed in swift strokes by F. Gary Gray from a screenplay credited to Kurt Wimmer, doesn't really work - unrelentingly grim, unintentionally funny - is almost beside the point. It's a wild concept.

For all the film's gritty verisimilitude, The Messenger is not the great Iraq War movie that Kathryn Bigelow's "The Hurt Locker" is.

Strange and gloomy.

In the wake of the Oscar-winning "The Hurt Locker" - a far better film, and one with a less strident, less obvious agenda - Green Zone arrives looking strangely anachronistic.

A Single Man is like a big coffee table book on grief, loneliness, and loss - and mid-20th-century home design.

Unlike "Caché" and "Code: Unknown," where Haneke's investigations into societal and spiritual despair resonated with poetic force, The White Ribbon doesn't resonate at all.

Olyphant has a cool, amiable vibe, kind of postmodern Jimmy Stewart, while Mitchell brings intelligence and quietude to yet another role that doesn't deserve such consideration.

Charged up with stormy melodrama.

Clash of the Titans is ancient Greece at its cheesiest. It's a big hunk of feta comin' at ya in 3-D.

Gritty and compelling up to a point, but cheaply exploitive as well.

Mediogre at best.

Forte and company have managed to make crude and lewd dunderheadedness laugh-out-loud funny here and there, and that, I guess, is something of an achievement.

Salt offers a sloppy concoction of story elements from '70s espionage classics - the sinister black ops of "Three Days of the Condor," the nuclear dread of "Fail-Safe," the political-assassination scenarios of "The Day of the Jackal."

The Twilight star's line-readings have become like Edward and his bloodsucking kin: They lack a pulse.

Stymied by a clunking script, crammed with expository exchanges and urgent blather.

It's a vivid way to contextualize Hypatia's astronomical musings, but it's kind of out there, too.

Yes, there's a hastily added new ending - an ending that doesn't make sense when you think about it. Not that it's worth the effort

It lacks the resonances of Gilbert's book.

This based-on-real-life tale of artistic aspirations and international politics is packed with more corn than an Iowa silo.

Too long, too busy, too loud, and too reliant on slam-bang stunt work, Red's glib dialogue and sinister government scenarios begin to wear.

If there's a psych ward for motion pictures, It's Kind of a Funny Story should check itself in. Boden and Fleck's film suffers from bipolar disorder: manic and silly one minute, moody and muted the next.

Has an empty, soulless feel.

Mostly The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest belongs to Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist), the tall and intrepid magazine journalist who is determined to clear Lisbeth's name, and who goes about doing so - and making espresso and checking his e-mail - with zeal.

Wild Target is the sort of farce where nothing, essentially, is at stake, even as cars crash (including an original Mini Cooper), bullets rip, and knives get hurled with deadly velocity.

When it works - and it doesn't half the time - it's as if Monty Python were back, putting its merrily imbecilic stamp on the dark world of terrorism.

There's no adroitness, no grace in the handling of the pitching emotions - funny, sad, icky - that such a story presents.

Scott shoots and edits Unstoppable with roller-coaster momentum and an eye (and ear) on that roaring tonnage of steel.

There's a loose, vérité vibe here, and times when both Williams and Gosling root down deep to deliver something resonant and true. But this modern-day kitchen sink drama is ultimately too painful, too labored, to care much about at all.

As Hopkins himself goes wild-eyed and FX-ed with popping veins, The Rite gives up on asking us to take it seriously.

Grisly stuff. The movie, shot in Australia with an Aussie and British cast, makes "127 Hours" look like a walk in the park.

The meaning - and irony - of Kaboom's title doesn't become clear until a beat or two before the end credits roll, and even then it's hard to say what exactly Araki is getting at.

If your idea of a fun night out is to be manipulated by freaky sound effects, jumpy edits, and point-of-view shots of ceiling fans whooshing menacingly, Insidious is the film for you.

For genre geeks, this can be fun - although nothing in Scream 4 is quite as clever as the filmmakers seem to think it is.

Frankly, the wow factor isn't that great.

An elaborate origins story with more datelines than an issue of Condé Nast Traveler (Oxford! Miami! Argentina! Poland!), X-Men: First Class has some fun trying to explain how Professor X, Magneto, and all those mopey mutants came to be.

A raunchy comedy that's funnier to think about than to watch.

Too cute for its own good, Larry Crowne is nonetheless hard to dislike.

The paper's motto is "All the News That's Fit to Print." But all that news doesn't necessarily fit neatly into a 90-minute doc.

Instead of gleaning something from real life, the great minds behind Friends With Benefits slapped their ideas together based on screwball classics, "Sleepless in Seattle" bits, and a keen analysis of Hollywood hackery.

Neither fish nor fowl (nor extraterrestrial), and that's a problem. Craig, handsomely craggy, plays it straight, and like Eastwood's Man With No Name, he doesn't have much to say.

With the exception of a few stakes and crosses jumping from the screen, some bloody sprays here and there, and one creepy, claustrophobic car ride, the 3-D glasses are a hindrance, not an enhancement.

Circumstance is more interesting for its cultural views than for its insights into love, sex, family angst, and rebellious youth.

As remakes go, Footloose is fine, serving up slightly fresher batches of cheese and corn. But why? Why?

It's hard to feel compassion for these Masters of the Universe. I'm not even sure Chandor wants us to, but if he doesn't, then what's the point?

Devoting more time to the setup than to the follow-through, Tower Heist doesn't really build suspense so much as it builds impatience - for the thing to be over.

Most disappointing, Eastwood's decades-spanning portrait reveals little about the man himself.

There are big, jaunty gusts of music, and there are big, jaunty gusts of acting: the Heath Ledger-esque Alexander Fehling pumps up his Johann Wolfgang von Goethe with brash, boyish verve and stormy emoting.

There isn't a real, flesh-and-blood figure in the bunch. Everything about Red Tails - the breaking down of racial barriers, the military achievements, the courage and sacrifice - is diminished in the process.

The Grey, whose clipped title, grim swagger, and lost-in-the-outback themes conjure up visions of that Alec Baldwin/Anthony Hopkins classic, "The Edge," devolves into a predictable man-against-nature, and man-against-fellow man, affair.

The humor and chops are there, but the story isn't quite.

Ready-made for Valentine's Day, The Vow is, like the offerings at Cafe Mnemonic, a total sugar overload.

That's kind of the aesthetic that Stanton is going for: over-the-top pulp. But there's something generic about the digitally rendered Martians, and there's a corniness to the dialogue that keeps the audience from any kind of emotional attachment to the Tharks and Zodangans and their ilk.

Fragmented, dreamlike, a whir of memories and misery, We Need to Talk About Kevin is unsettling, but also somehow unnecessary.

It also smells very much like a movie with money on its mind - not altogether successfully balancing its loftier ideas with a sense of superficial whimsy and Vegas-meets-Wizard of Oz production design.

In some ways, American Reunion is the Charlize Theron indie "Young Adult" all over again: In both, a small-town high school reunion is the setting for a lot of nostalgia and narcissism and nasty behavior.

Lockout is genre all the way. The film wears its colors proudly, but it also, alas, wears out its welcome.

Efron, who wears an "All glory is fleeting" tattoo on his back and a soulful look on his face, gets to be more of a grown-up in The Lucky One than in most of what he's done before.

The chaos and carnage here is just a pumped-up take on a tradition that harks back to Godzilla, and harks back, of course, to the Marvel comics from which all these heros originally sprang.

It's fun to watch Keaton and Kline together, bickering and (of course) bonding all over again.

It's the classic odd-couple buddy movie setup, only it'll pull at your heartstrings, whether you want it too or not. And you won't want it to, because it's sap.

Casting herself (as the proprietor of the local cafe) along with a mix of professional and nonprofessional actors, Labaki tries to get across her give-peace-a-chance message with humor, with song, with melodrama.

It is Rapace, the Swedish actress who gained worldwide recognition as Lisbeth Salander in the original adaptation of "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo," who ends up the true heroine of Prometheus.

A jukebox musical that's astonishingly cornball one minute, winkingly sardonic the next.

An odd and entertaining mix of backstage melodrama, indie verite, and "Showgirls" kitsch, the usual gender stereotypes are upturned.

Don't come to The Amazing-Spider-Man looking for originality.

Oh so slight and forgettable.

Strip away the video-game visual effects, the endless chases and zero gravity shootouts, and Total Recall comes down to this: What is reality?

Unfortunately, David Koepp - the A-list Hollywood screenwriter (Jurassic Park, War of the Worlds) and decidedly less-successful director (Ghost Town, Secret Window) - can't find the right Looney Tunes-ish tone for his immersion into bike-messenger culture.

Little White Lies wants to capture something momentous and meaningful in these people's lives. But ultimately it's hard to care.