A movie like this needs a suave, amoral villain, so here's Paul Bettany.

Suffice to say that Shawn Levy, director of the "Cheaper by the Dozen" movies, is no Blake Edwards; for every finely tuned slapstick fillip, there's a ton of messy, family-friendly buffoonery.

Ice Age: The Meltdown is pure sequel product that should make children and undemanding grown-ups happy even as it lacks anything resembling storytelling inspiration.

An acceptable but uninspired simulacrum: an overly faithful multiplex translation of a very, very popular airport novel.

Maybe it's the era we're living in, but the new film is as much fun as a shroud.

Very broad and very silly, it's a doodle of a comedy -- a one-joke idea (fat guy goes luchador) padded out to feature length by Black's willingness to do anything for a laugh.

The film is very near a comedy, and I'm not sure that's on purpose.

Time to Leave is an unintended litmus test for lovers of foreign films.

Monster House is the first horror comedy made exclusively for fourth-graders.

Scoop is distinctly minor Allen, with less weight to it than one of his old humor doodles in The New Yorker.

The movie has a pleasing skinned-knee innocence that makes you wish everything else about it wasn't so shoddy.

It very much wants to be "Garden State" five years down the line.

A good-natured but terminally mild British mockumentary.

I'm not the first observer, or even the second, to liken the star's (Penn) portrayal of fictional Louisiana governor Willie Stark to the late John Belushi's impersonation of Joe Cocker.

One walks out of Man of the Year aching for the squandered opportunities.

Turns out to be rather less than the sum of its headlines.

Unknown is punchy and entertaining. Maybe not the sort of thing you'd want to spend $10 plus a mortgage for popcorn on, but a nifty surprise on DVD several months from now -- or on pay-cable on-demand right now.

The film squeezes out its feel-good messages like toothpaste from a tube.

If you're young, the film may intoxicate you. If you're older, it may make you relieved you're no longer young.

This is no corporate project made to squeeze a few more dollars from a fading cash cow. No one else has been asking for another "Rocky," other than maybe Burt Young . No, this is a rarer beast -- an auteur sequel -- and it's so wrapped up in its maker's personal mythology and psychic needs that it becomes a hall of mirrors to which we're given a slack-jawed ringside seat.

The immediate problem with making a movie based on Potter's life is that it doesn't seem to have been very interesting.

There's a funkier and more interesting movie in Maureen, a character played by Juliette Lewis. Maureen is a single mom, a massage therapist, and a dimwit California follower of every new-age theory out there. She's a nasal, needy wreck, and Catch and Release is torn between adoring her and making ruthless fun of her.

Aside from pretty people behaving cutely, there's just not much here, and even devoted Francophiles may nod into their cafe crèmes.

It's a doughty movie, stuck halfway between Masterpiece Theatre and Classics Illustrated, but, to his credit, gifted journeyman director Michael Apted understands he's playing the long game.

The movie is this year's "RV," a rolling tent show of suburban male anxieties: castration, obsolescence, dismissive offspring, fears of gayness. LOTS of fears of gayness. Unlike "RV," though, Wild Hogs is funny. Eventually.

Leave it to the French to take the joy back out of sex. The high-minded erotic drama Exterminating Angels has heat but little light; it speaks of pleasure while treating it as a dirty word. The cast huffs and puffs but the exercise, sadly, remains academic.

The movie trades the paranoia of modern omni-cam culture for a tighter, more personal drama, and while it sticks with you, you feel the missed opportunity like a phantom leg.

It's a charming disappointment that retains the elements that make the writer's novels so good without ever bending them into cinematic shape.

The movie's fodder for tweener girls with indiscriminate Nick TV addictions, but there's just enough wit on display to make you realize it could have been worse.

An intensely unpleasant killer-thriller mystery.

The movie isn't THAT bad -- it's just made-for-TV historical treacle that has somehow found its way to the big screen (and barely that; if you want to be moved or outraged by the film, you'll have to travel to Danvers or Revere).

Buried somewhere within the bipolar extravaganza that is The Invasion is an awfully good movie that got away.

Genocide is hard to decorate with the trimmings of dark farce. The Hunting Party wants to get at political truths through audaciousness, but it keeps bumping into that problem of taste, only to back down.

Lust, Caution is a disappointment coming from director Ang Lee, but it's a watchable one, and it rattles around in your head for a long time after you've seen it, as much for what it does right as for where it goes wrong.

Old story, new beat: That sums up Feel the Noise, an acceptable if resolutely average low-budget drama set in the New York/Puerto Rican musical melting pot known as reggaeton.

There's a great movie to be had in the notion of a busybody whose advice keeps blowing up in his face, but Dan in Real Life merely sets it up and walks away.

The movie is decent and heartfelt, and it eventually settles into some sharp diamond action, but the small-town homilies are dropped like an anvil. If you thought 1993's "Rudy" was too spare and unsentimental, Final Season is for you.

The new version is a shiny piece of hardware that might as well be called "Sleuth 2.0," and it's exactly what you would expect from Pinter: very clever, extremely cold. Maliciously entertaining, too, until the halfway point, when you suddenly start wondering why anyone should care.

The Mist doesn't provoke further thought; it provokes active annoyance at being punished in the service of a pulp morality tale with pretensions.

At its best, the movie's crazy in unexpected and poetic ways; at its worst, merely preposterous.

Often as noisy, dippy, and enjoyable as 2004's "National Treasure," and when it's not, it's just another sequel, more absurd than most.

Heavy metal, alt-pop, southern rock, orchestral swells, wailing Middle Eastern tunes all vie for our attention, but none of this noise drowns out the sound of good intentions twisting themselves into an impotent knot.

How can you tell the target age for Superhero Movie is exactly 13 1/2 years? Because most of the jokes are Internet-related.

The final act of Dark Matter is grim but unconvincing, and the shortfall leaves an ugly, exploitive taste in your mouth.

Bra Boys uses reenactments to make the case that Jai acted in self-defense, but the tactic comes off cheap and unconvincing. Worse, the director never bothers to talk to anyone outside the tight coterie of insiders. Why should he when his brothers' freedom is at stake?

The movie demands you be a glutton for sensation and then has the nerve to ask why you're not hungrier.

The film itself suggests a sketch video on Ferrell and McKay's "Funny or Die" website, padded out to the dimensions of a character comedy.

The movie looks great at least, and the cast includes such stalwarts of Italian cinema as Claudia Gerini and Pierfrancesco Favino.

In the new comedy Hamlet 2, Coogan comes perilously close to wearing out his welcome. It's actually a pretty fascinating sight.

Most useful and enlightening as a historical tour through the major crises of the Kennedy administration.

The chief culprits are Townsend's TV-movie characterizations and a very muddled message.

Disappointing not for what it is but what it could have been.

The problem with Flash of Genius isn't that the subject is dull but that the movie is.

Ultimately, the problem with An American Carol is the problem with far too much political discourse in this country, left or right: It highlights the worst excesses of the opposition for the sole purpose of discrediting the vast middle.

Everything in this good-cop/bad-cop action drama is shrouded in gray and attended by wailing. This isn't a feel-good genre, granted, but does it have to feel this bad?

For all its unforgivable blandness, "High School Musical" opens young audiences to the charms of this most transporting of movie genres.

Something has been lost in the translation, and it's not just the script.

Depressingly predictable in its dialogue and dramatic beats, Defiance is most interesting as a study of unlikely leaders.

Hotel for Dogs is agreeable Saturday afternoon multiplex piffle - friendly, formulaic, completely harmless.

You've seen New in Town before, and you've seen it done better. Still, it's a sweet-hearted bit of anemia, pleasant and obvious, and there are a few honest laughs to it.

The new film's not only almost double the length of the original, it's four times as ambitious - a sprawling, surrealist, ultimately disturbing portrait of a society lurching uncertainly toward democracy. What's really on trial in this movie? Just the Russian soul.

Gigantic plays like a Sundance movie with half the nouns removed; fetchingly cryptic for a while, it's ultimately just obscure.

The movie itself is petrified meatloaf. It's a body-transference comedy in the vein of "Big," "Freaky Friday," and other candidates for Turner Classics.

Writer Peter Harness has based his screenplay on his own childhood experiences, but personal doesn't necessarily translate to fresh.

Ghosts is better-than-average McConaughey swill, but not by much - that's its pleasure and its curse.

An overly muted and cautious piece of work. Watching it is like seeing a man ease out onto the limb of a tree, constantly testing its strength.

iIf you can ignore a ridiculously overbearing soundtrack - a big if - the film's a pleasant bauble. Still, those coming in cold may be forgiven for thinking they've wandered into "Atonement" remade as a farce.

Panettiere, I’m sad to report, is a dud as the title character, a supposed wild thang who never rises above the level of runty, obnoxious mall chick, down to the roll-on tan.

A sweet, splattery bit of in-jokery; if it’s not actually a good movie, on some level you have to admire the chutzpah of a film set in 1850s Ireland but shot on Staten Island.

Essential viewing for builders, graphic designers, visual artists, and other optically inclined folk, but it’s a bit of a slog for the uninitiated.

As such things go, it’s not bad: slick and proficient, The Stepfather 2.0 gets the adrenaline pumping, but the original has the brains.

There are good performances and fleeting moments of exquisite moviemaking, but the experience as a whole is an evolutionary dead end.

An effective, no-frills gruel-a-thon if that’s your cup of Swiss Miss, and it explores such burning questions as: What happens if you’re dumb enough to leave your bare hand on a metal safety bar overnight?

Where Burton and his screenwriter, Linda Woolverton, go astray is turning this new 3-D version - a sequel, really, about a grown Alice returning to the psychic dreamworld of her childhood - into a fantasy adventure that looks like every other CGI epic out there.

What’s missing is the assurance of tone that a Lumet would provide.

The result is a curious hash: warmly funny in the comic scenes and shamelessly sentimental during the sad bits, of which there are many.

Youth recedes, the body decays, life is a compromised thing: These are truths. But they're not fresh truths, and Moss's riverdogs are hardly the first to have discovered them.

Wonderful characters, these three, and The Hard Word never figures out what to do with them.

For the record, Rare Birds doesn't even fly as a birder's special, since Tasseter's Sulfurious Duck is a fictional species. Now, if they'd seen a Eurasian Wigeon, then we'd be talking.

Still as moth-eaten as a Bengal tiger rug on the floor of a London men's club.

This isn't a movie -- it's an author in love with the sound of her own voice.

You may have to be from Iceland to take dialogue like ''You can't freeze love like a gutted fish'' with a straight face.

It's an actor's film, all right -- peppered with rich supporting performances but unconvincing in the telling.

The movie is both stunning on the level of visual pageantry and curiously inert as cinema.

Explicit yet consistently unerotic. It's also intensely sad, capturing everything about these people except the high they ceaselessly chase.

As a credible love story, though, the film never leaves the runway. If you're a fan of these actors, you may want to look up Jet Lag when it comes out on video, or catch it on an Air France flight while flirting with the passenger in the next seat.

This payback-revenge storyline, told mostly at night with minimal dialogue, is tense but familiar, and Bruno's quick-draw costume changes are fun to watch.

The movie looks great and sounds better, and its status as a pioneering work of cinematic eye candy seems secure. For one thing, it's hard to imagine ''Moulin Rouge'' without it. As a movie about recognizable human beings, however, One From the Heart remains a failure.

Dawdles amiably and can't quite decide what it wants to be.

The question that has to be asked is: Why? The original six-part BBC ''Singing Detective'' remains one of the signal achievements in the history of television -- really -- and its release on DVD this past spring puts it easily within reach of the curious.

Thriller fans might remember a terrific 1987 B flick called ''The Stepfather.'' One Hour Photo is that film, directed by an art student.

Gets better -- more rambunctiously astute -- as it goes, and its comic engine sputters into fitful life when Bernie Mac arrives on the scene.

Adding to the general air of ''What the hell?'' is Australian pop singer Natalie Imbruglia as Lorna, the beautiful superspy who falls for our hero. With Lorna's help, Johnny discovers that Sauvage is plotting to take over the British throne -- the Battle of Hastings wasn't good enough, it seems.

One of the most lazily scripted, poorly structured, smugly stereotyped star vehicles in recent memory. Bizarrely, this seems to be the point.

Note that it took six writers to come up with the script for The Jungle Book 2. Note that Rudyard Kipling isn't one of them.

The premise of Agent Cody Banks is more than a little bizarre.

Those who love police overkill, guns, jingoistic race-baiting, guns, macho smugness, and guns will be well served.

The film's final scenes are among its silliest, unfortunately.

Barrels along on a diverting enough sugar high, but in the hangover that follows you may wonder where the wonder was.

In a better movie -- a much better movie -- LaBeouf might make the same sort of impact Dustin Hoffman did in ''The Graduate.'' But the kid's young. There are movies to come.

Hoffman confessed he was drawn to the role because ''this was a guy who didn't know how to feel, and I found that fascinating.'' His challenge is our frustration

Doesn't have the gonzo wit of ''Re-Animator'' or ''Evil Dead 2,'' nor is it flat-out terrifying like ''The Texas Chainsaw Massacre'' or even a zombie-come-lately like this year's ''28 Days Later.''

It's ''Hannah and Her Sisters'' with all the emotions and half the artistry.

Flatters its audience by dividing the grown-up world into mean idiots and nice idiots, which might be interestingly subversive if the movie had anything on its mind. Instead, it's just a Hollywood crash course: Heist Films 101.

Isn't a first-date movie. As a third -date movie, though, it's just about perfect.

Benton has laid bare a great author's creaky plotting only to deliver a melodrama with bookish pretensions.

Does have the enclosed, slightly overheated feel of a family theatrical.

The only victims in Paid in Full are the dealers and their families -- and the only word for that is one this paper can't print.

A pleasant puff-pastry throwback to Sandra Dee movies, ''Bye Bye Birdie,'' and other pre-Beatles effluvia.

Invites us to both hate King David and admire his style, and there will probably be some hand-wringing about that.

Isn't just lame; it's neutered.

To answer your first question: like a cross between Shrek, the Frankenstein monster, and a Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robot.

Contains more than its share of implausibilities and absurdities.

Story lines don't come any clammier.

Beautiful to look at and acted with full and tempestuous conviction, it still seems to be taking place in an apartment far across the way.

Everything about this curio is claustrophobic.

So appallingly slipshod in all the usual departments is this sequel to the engaging martial-arts comedy Western ''Shanghai Noon'' that you're tempted to cite its makers for contempt.

The loosest, silliest, broadest thing the Coens have yet committed to celluloid, and that includes "Raising Arizona," one of this critic's favorites.

In sum, a big, honking tutti-frutti sundae of a movie that nonetheless is shot through with authentic feeling.

The people who've made White Oleander appear to have spent a lot of time worrying about the audience. They should have told the story and let us take care of ourselves.

It is spectacularly average. Neither an inspired reimagining nor a painful dud,

Primarily a one-man show for Darroussin, and the actor, a longtime pro in the French film industry, comes through with a scarifyingly believable portrayal.

The movie ends with a sentimental vision of unity that, admittedly, warmed this weary moviegoer's heart. If that vision was earned, I might even have melted.

Will parents be able to sit through Kangaroo Jack without plunging sharp sticks into their eyes? The short answer? Yes. Barely.

At one point in ''Praise,'' Godard mentions that the Bois de Boulogne, the Parisian park, is all that's left of the French forests from the time of the Roman conquest. In Praise of Love, glowing like an ember, is all that's left of genius.

Like many of us who cherish the safe harbor of old movies, Rose and Cary mourn the fact that they don't make 'em like they used to. If they'd paused to ponder why not, they might have a better movie.

You have an overstuffed story line, sloppy filmmaking, a general thinness of conception (if you've seen "Sister Act," you've pretty much seen The Fighting Temptations), and a lead performance that starts out obnoxious and becomes actively grating.

What you might call conditional whimsy, predicated on the audience overlooking so many plot implausibilities that it might get tuckered out from all the charity.

An opaque kidnapping drama that features three expertly crafted performances operating on three different planets.

Skips lightly along the sewers of human depravity as if the trip alone was worth the telling.

Weaver's randy, impatient, very funny performance is the main reason to see Imaginary Heroes.

The main, if not only, reason to see The Machinist is for Christian Bale's title performance, and even then you have to be a fan of hardcore martyrdom in the service of craft.

Deeply, proudly average..."Mean Girls" it's not; a plastic butter knife has more edge. But sometimes it's nice to know your kids won't cut their fingers.

Like everything in this humorless new genre, "Chronicles" comes with its own snap-together mythology.

Even older kids will understand that Pixar does it so much better, not because of their computers but because of an intelligent attention to script and character and craft. If the people running Disney don't understand that much anymore, maybe they should turn out the lights and go home.

Zemeckis and Hanks really seem to think they’re giving us a Christmas movie for the ages and a technology that will change cinema forever. They’re wrong on both counts. The Polar Express is merely a marvelous toy that has somehow become convinced it has a soul.

What this dystopia doesn't do is shock. In truth, Code 46 traffics in notions of speculative social fiction that are so familiar by now as to feel disconcertingly normal.

Wants to be as shocking as its title, but it doesn't have the nerve.

A stylish, watchable, very familiar future-cop action thriller. What was once original is now almost completely derivative.

At its intermittent best, Troy suggests a primitive pro-wrestling smackdown with epochal consequences. At its worst, it's a throwback to the ham-fisted sword-and-sandal international coproductions of the early 1960s: "The 300 Spartans" with better sets. Barely.

The film's meta-fey title alone is an example of why some people adore Anderson and why he drives others absolutely crazy.

One of the prime laws of the multiplex states that any action or horror movie series will devolve into ritualized violence, self-mocking camp, and egregious silliness by part three. Blade: Trinity is right on schedule.

What a waste.

Stitched together from so many other movies that it plays like an attack of multiple déjà vu. Stray bits of “Star Wars,’’ “Pirates of the Caribbean,’’ “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,’’ and “Robin Hood’’ pass by like flotsam, and the overwhelming tone is good-natured but alarmingly generic.

All thing considered, MacGruber’ is a lot better than it should be. That still doesn’t mean it’s all that great.

The film eventually collapses under the weight of its no-budget arrogance, but it goes some interesting places beforehand.

Involving and sometimes comically bleak but never fully convincing as drama.

There's an interesting movie in here, too, about the isolation of Indian brides brought to a new country by strange new husbands and mistreated, but Provoked rarely ducks below its glossy surface to go there.

Ideally, it would give you a sense of an entire people knocking the planet off its axis with a shake of their hips. If only El Cantante were that movie. Instead, it's a curiously sludgy cross between a Doomed Star biopic and a J. Lo vanity project.

The film's a minuet fetishistically repeated until either the audience or the lovers go crazy. I'd say it was a tie.

The film's case against overdevelopment needs to be, and could be, aggressive, airtight. It should play to the unconverted. Instead, The Unforeseen gives us . . . poetry.

If this is daring in theory, it's a failure in practice. Exactingly well-made, the movie is grueling and unpleasant in the extreme - that's the point - but it's also working from a specious premise, that film-school Brechtian devices can bring on mass enlightenment.

Elsa & Fred does graze against an interesting idea: that the vitality of our youths lives on in the prison of aging bodies.

A structural mess that turns contrived just when it should be hitting home.

If Ten9Eight brings NFTE to the attention of you, your child, or your school administrator, that’s probably all that matters.

The filmmaker’s uncertainty shows itself in drably functional camerawork and an over-reliance on Christophe Beck’s tasteful piano-and-violin score.

The man inside that legend has yet to come into focus 40 years on. Morrison wanted the world and he wanted it now, and he got it. What When You’re Strange can’t admit is that he had no idea what to do next.

After a long run of baroquely plotted crime dramas like "Layer Cake'' and "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels,'' it's a little depressing to come across a vigilante drama whose sole twist is its protagonist's advanced age.

Even the portrayal of the Hasidic community comes to feel like window-dressing, welcome for its exoticism but never truly understood.

In its refusal to connect the dots, Wild Grass is playful unto tediousness, and between Azéma's overly cutesy performance -- all Harpo Marx hair-frizz and popped eyes -- and Mark Snow's painfully (purposefully?) banal lounge-jazz score, the movie functions as a theoretical irritant rather than a film.

Stands to delight small children while probably causing their parents' heads to cave in.

Everyone in the film is an uninteresting grotesque.

Ends with a curious whimper instead of the bang it has been pointing toward; the filmmaker's reverence for his heroine seems to bind his hands.

"The Expendables" trotted out the concept this summer, and it was good dumb fun - a nudge-nudge wink-wink '80s movie on steroids. RED is more self-consciously wacky, more stridently in your face, and more disappointing.

Well intentioned on every level, the movie is successful only on some, and it falls flat when trying to visualize the innards of the poem itself.

Life as We Know It gives bland and predictable a good name.

All three actors come at this gloomy, borderline-preposterous tale from different directions; that they meet up at all - and they do - is a tribute to sincerity and craft.

It's off-putting, rude, misshapen, and more often than not hysterically funny. The second half, sadly, is an ear-splitting train wreck.

Fair Game takes one of the more shameful sub-chapters in modern US politics - and turns it into a strident, condescending Hollywood melodrama.

Haggis finally finds the movie's groove late in the game, and the escape sequence itself is hectic, suspenseful, and enjoyably ridiculous.

Glib, fast-paced entertainment that barely leaves a mark - which, given the subject, is just plain wrong.

The only reason to see Leaving - and it's not a bad reason at all - is for the sight of Kristin Scott Thomas in a rare happy mood.

A comparison to Baz Luhrmann is useful: Where Taymor self-consciously aestheticizes pop vulgarity, a movie like "Moulin Rouge!" just dives right in.

Real satire must be savage, and Four Lions, for all its daring, finally doesn't dare enough.

A muscular Australian B-movie down to the thin characters and boilerplate dialogue.

A well-made, reasonably diverting night at the multiplex that will seem overly familiar to everyone except teenage girls.

It's a surprisingly joyless mash-up of every bit of fanboy flotsam floating around in its maker's cranium.

That Prom plays as pleasantly and inoffensively as it does is due to the performances, particularly McDonell as the rebellious Jesse.

To press the point, there is absolutely no need for a fourth Pirates of the Caribbean.

Formulaic enough to suggest that franchise would be B level at best, a TV series at worst. But it's also just good enough to make you want to watch it, anyway.

The bottom line: Any movie that gives Jonathan Winters work is doing something right.

It's an enjoyably demented meta-finale, the rivals showing what they could do if they ever bothered to actually do it.

The carnage is cartoonishly graphic, but the onlookers watching through binoculars from a nearby sandy bluff are impressed.

An important film, on an important subject, that has had the life beaten out of it by Robert Redford, a man who should know better.

The Sitter pushes the envelope with such sloppy gusto that you have to give in occasionally, and its comic timing finds its rhythm about every fifth joke.

The Rum Diary has been retroactively Hunter S. Thompson-ized. And not for the better.

A sweet-natured, terribly unthreatening drama about redemption and renewal, and it may matter more to the man who made it than the audiences who see it.

Little kids, of course, will swallow it whole without thinking twice.

Watching Melancholia is like being stuck next to a brilliant depressive at a dinner party. The food is exquisite, the conversation scintillating, and the longer you sit there the more trapped you feel in another man's all-encompassing gloom.

It's predictable fluff, sometimes pleasantly so, at others times irritatingly.

A comparison to Carver's original story - called "Why Don't You Dance?," easily Googleable, and all of 1,600 words long - is instructive.

Monogamy sets up a nifty idea that it doesn't follow through.

Well-mounted and expertly played, Winter in Wartime is a class act that lacks only focus and originality to raise it above the ordinary.

Hot gospel singing and earnest family squabbles are all that distinguish Joyful Noise.

For all the talk, there's not a lot of chess here, and the game remains stubbornly on the level of metaphor. You don't feel rooked, exactly, but by movie's end you're more than ready for the check.

Where Mia and the Migoo triumphs is in the art department alone, with rich brown charcoal outlines, majestic pastel washes that give depth to the landscapes, and riotous colors that are more vivid than the story line.

Watching Prometheus is like opening a deluxe gift box from Tiffany's to find a mug from the dollar store.

The only laugh to be had in Total Recall, a ripsnorting sci-fi action extravaganza that starts well and works its way down to average, is in the opening credits, where we learn that the movie's primary production company is called Original Film. Really?

Just a limp, jokey family film that wants to have its fairy tale magic and its hip irony, too.

It's pure plastic product from plot line to the pro forma 3-D to the tidy moral lessons - ersatz family entertainment as disposable as it is diverting. It made me want to go read a book.

ParaNorman is supposedly for kids, but it's really aimed at their snarky older brothers, and it illustrates the limits of the new family creepshows.

It's just another happily idiotic Will Ferrell comedy, ably directed by Jay Roach ("Meet the Parents," "Dinner for Schmucks") and tossing its bawdy jokes at the side of the barn.

Like Jolie's public persona, Blood and Honey is both strong and headstrong, equally invested in grit and glamour with a hazy understanding of the line separating the two.

Which is precisely what’s missing from Oz the Great and Powerful: that sense of emotional journey.

The Mighty Macs sticks so closely to the underdog-sports-movie playbook that it's practically generic.

W.E., her second effort after 2008's "Filth and Wisdom,'' tries awfully hard. In the end it tries our patience.

Machine Gun Preacher is crude and ham-handed from its ridiculous title on down, but it still gets to some interesting places.

It's the sort of thing you'll either find enchanting or an excellent reason to reach for the Scotch.

The Way is a good, cheap vacation. At times, you wonder if Estevez isn't creating a cracked therapeutic remake of "The Wizard of Oz.'' He's got the nerve and the heart, all right. I'm less sure about the brains.

The problem with Hysteria is that it keeps patting itself and us on the back for knowing better.

Trishna should move the soul and engage the tear-ducts, yet it passes by as distant as it is lovely. And the blame must fall on the movie's star, Freida Pinto.

It can't be easy to turn one of the most stirring human rights dramas of the past quarter century into stultifying screen pageantry, but director Luc Besson and writer Rebecca Frayn have managed the trick with The Lady.

As documentaries go, it's an able introduction that doesn't make its subject nearly as relevant to our current discontents as it could.

What it is is watchable, a thoroughly professional piece of Great Man hackwork that lacks the invention and spirit of its obvious model, "Shakespeare in Love.''

As the implausibilities and conspiracies and double-crosses pile up, Broken City paints itself into a corner. A plot can be confusing as long as the filmmakers themselves don't seem confused, but that's not the case here.

The hair is funny, in part, because not much else is. “Burt Wonderstone” is a lazy, underwritten imitation Will Ferrell movie.

Something to see and little to remember, an acrid character study undone by narrative implausibilities and its own lack of purpose.

Mostly, though, Being Flynn is memorable for the sight of a once-great actor rousing himself to a performance the movie itself isn't prepared to handle.

Carell's performance is enjoyable but safe, and while he and Knightley play well enough together, there's no genuine chemistry - no zap to convince us these two deserve to be the last lovers on Earth.

The issue is contentious, messy, prone to wishful thinking. Some see a corporate plot to privatize schools. Others see a last chance to save them. Won't Back Down is on the latter side, obviously, and it has the boilerplate urgency of a TV movie that has been blessed with a high-end cast.

The movie never fully clicks.

The first Guy Maddin movie that feels as if it got only halfway out of the director's head and onto the screen.

The Hunter becomes turgid with corporate conspiracies, hired assassins, and offscreen tragedies, and the appealing leanness of the early scenes gets lost.

It does give believers and those tottering on the edge something to chew on, and it steadfastly refuses to demonize everybody else.

Both provocative and muddled, the film's a moody, passive-aggressive tract that's buoyed by superior performances and sunk by its own uncertainties. An alternate title might be "The Joylessness of Sex."

Robert Pattinson isn't all that bad in Bel Ami. He just isn't right.

A well-intentioned indie that tries to be a "real" version of a Hollywood romantic comedy and ends up feeling more ersatz than ever.

People Like Us is neither optimal nor prime.

Before this urban revenge melodrama falls apart in a clatter of plot absurdities and pretensions, it has its loopy charms.

An earnest, extremely grueling, prodigiously crafted true-life drama that takes one of the worst natural disasters in recorded history and reduces it to a bad day at Club Med.

Sensitively written, nicely shot, expertly acted, and intelligently ambiguous, Nobody Walks still manages to send you out with a shrug.

It's both achingly affectionate and a terrible mess.

Of the two French films opening in the Boston area today - "Beloved" is the other - Little White Lies is the less ambitious, more watchable, and ultimately more annoying.

An amiable if not especially urgent celebration of the life and work of Wayne White.

All this manic invention is great fun for a while, until Tai Chi Zero falls apart on the rocks of the eternal verities: story, acting, direction.

The results are exactly as patchwork as that sounds, with sequences of rowdy, sacrilegious invention punctuated by long spells of tedium.

To truly appreciate Wagner & Me, a BBC documentary getting a spotty theatrical release in this country, you have to cherish the music of Richard Wagner with the same quivering intensity as host Stephen Fry.

The director’s first real misfire, a meditation on love and lost paradise that starts with breathtaking assurance and slowly crumbles into self-parody.

You’ve seen pieces of this movie in “Psycho,” “Silence of the Lambs,” and 2004’s “Cellular.” Still, the early scenes in the Hive give The Call a needed novelty: It’s a workplace drama, and the work is responding to other people’s desperate worst-case scenarios.

Director/co-writer Ariel Vromen has made a grimly passable crime drama in the sub-“GoodFellas”/“Sopranos” vein, and if you’re looking for something to order up on a slow Saturday night, it’ll do.

With Trance, story becomes just another element in Boyle’s commercial pop-Cubism, and the results are nearly fatal.

The film’s so formulaic your 6-year-old will be ticking off the plot points as they lope by.

Almost but not quite as obnoxious as its title. Little kids will love it. You’ll need a hazmat suit.

Young children and adults with high pain thresholds will enjoy the movie during its brief pause on the way to your On Demand menu.

2 1/2 hours of tumescence disguised as a motion picture.

Jennifer’s Body falls into the dispiriting category of dumb movies made by smart people, in this case a glibly clever writer and a talented director who think a few wisecracks are enough to subvert the teen horror genre.

Starts off mildly ridiculous, ascends to the full-blown ludicrous, and finally sails boldly off the edge of the absolutely preposterous.

Slightly better than it should be. For Tucker Max, this possibly represents a triumph.

Jarmusch has come up with a dud.

JUST worth your children's time, and hardly worth yours.

Bewitched presents a phony and cynical look at how Hollywood might make or remake a television show. It's as grating, laughless, and narcissistic (though, to its credit, not as cruel) as that new Lisa Kudrow show-within-a-show-within-a-show, "The Comeback."

In Undead, sadly, rigor mortis has set in.

The top-secret message this pigeon is carrying reads ''Wait for the DVD."

Dreadful.

Aggressive visual invention is rarely its own reward, and this movie does nothing to better the odds.

Teenage boys will be in heaven. All others: Check, please.

A glorious disaster.

Noisy, silly, gratingly upbeat, and piously sentimental, 'Cheaper by the Dozen 2 is what passes for wholesome family entertainment these days. It's the sort of movie to send small children and grandparents out of the theater hugging each other and strong men in search of bourbon.

One aches to think what the great "Looney Tunes" directors could have done with this material.

All the pieces are in place for an incisive tale of Brit-pop ego and madness, but filmmaker Stephen Woolley -- a celebrated UK producer ("The Crying Game") making his directing debut -- lets the story get away from him.

How's the movie? Technologically incredible, aesthetically pretty hideous, and narratively lumpy: Kids who aren't cynics (i.e., 9 and under) will roll with it.

RV has teeth -- more teeth than the last few Steve Martin films, anyway -- but it's terrified to bite down, knowing that the paying audience would feel it more than anyone.

Zwigoff's overdue for a turkey, in other words. Art School Confidential is it.

Handsomely shot and with a likable lead in Kuno Becker, it also suffers from a script so outrageously generic you could buy it at Costco.

Generic teen dice-and-slice with interior design by way of ''Saw." The movie's tight and reasonably well shot, though, and there are flashes of nasty invention between the ritual guttings.

The biggest unresolved question here is why we're paying $9.50, plus popcorn, for something we can presumably get at home for free.

A noisy and lazy stopgap movie that goes absolutely nowhere and takes 2 1/2 hours to get there.

Speaking as both a parent and a critic, I do believe I'd rather drive rusty railroad spikes through my eyes than have to sit through one more computer generated family film about talking animals. The bad news for Hollywood is that after seeing Barnyard my kids feel the same way.

Pure Saturday matinee kiddie fodder and this close to going straight to DVD.

Earnest and predictable, Crossover deserves more than the horselaughs that will probably greet it in theaters -- but not a lot more. The movie is harmless, which is both its strength and its weakness.

The Covenant is dopey, formulaic stuff for the Friday night fright crowd. Worse for them, it's never remotely scary.

It achieves something previously thought impossible: It renders Billy Bob Thornton unfunny.

Even a fan, however, might prefer the excellent, recently released concert DVD "Pixies: Live at the Paradise in Boston" to this tepid behind-the-scenes experience.

The result is movie goulash: made with love, impossible to digest.

The bad news, for those looking forward to The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause with anything like enthusiasm, is this: Bernard the Elf is history.

As B-level suspensers go, though, The Return isn't actively awful -- just slow and cursed with a lead who acts with her t-shirt.

There's a great movie somewhere in The Good German, but it's buried under three tons of run-amok formalism.

Silly, obvious, clumsy, and just gruesome enough to keep jaded genre fans from angrily throwing popcorn at the screen.

Factory Girl is not, strictly speaking, a bad movie. It's something worse: an irredeemably banal drama about some of the most protean, contradictory creative forces of the 1960s.

Primeval is a hoot if you're in the mood, though, and it gets points for trying to stuff a little globo-think into the minds of Friday night mayhem fans (who will probably rebel, since only one skull pops like a grape).

The Messengers is textbook, and the course it's teaching is HSL: Horror as a Second Language.

Ghost Rider is the kind of movie that's great stupid fun as long as someone else is buying the tickets.

And that dog -- or, rather, that digitally enhanced replicant -- is just plain creepy.

The dialogue is brightly self-conscious, and sometimes it clicks. Just as often it curdles into an entitled whining.

Faced with a limited location and concept, Renfroe points his camera everywhere: The movie's seriously overshot, never settling for one angle when five would do.

Too many cliches and not enough energy have come along for the ride.

An overstuffed turkey that's entertaining for all the wrong reasons.

Watching the movie is a little like picking up issue #42 of a comic book after you've skipped the first 41: There's an entire back story mythos hovering in the background like a phantom limb.

Innocuous amusement for 5- to 8-year-olds and other people stuck in the anal stage of development.

The film is low budget but puffed with self-importance, and it offers proof that Hollywood filmmakers should probably steer clear of topics that actually matter.

Hobbled by its vaguely insulting comic-book version of the '60s and by a humorlessness that can only come from talented people convinced they're creating work for the ages.

Sydney White makes "Mean Girls" look like Shakespeare.

The producers - Fox Films and the usually reliable Walden Media - have tried to gin up the story for multiplex audiences. They've succeeded in making a movie for no audience at all.

There have been plenty of movies adapted from video games before, but Hitman may be the first one that actually feels like a computer wrote and directed it.

The result is a movie that's both clever and stupid - an interesting feat.

Not good enough to take seriously and, sadly, not bad enough to be any fun.

The movie's chief audience, consequently, will probably be gullible and young, responding to the cliches only because they haven't seen them before. They have a word in Vegas for these people: Suckers.

In Made of Honor, the leads are beautiful and everyone else is a freak. So where does that leave us?