Ed Park

The only drama is in waiting to hear how John Malkovich's reedy consigliere will pronounce his next line.

Shark Tale's shallow plot and leagues of padding put it fully in the shadow of last year's animated underwater offering, the nifty, heartfelt "Finding Nemo."

Efficient, suitably anonymous chiller.

Works best as a rapid-fire series of sight gags and absurd remarks.

Family goes easy on the schmaltz, and the catastrophes have the puncturing feel of real life.

The only possible surprise in The Tuxedo would be an extended demonstration of what was once Chan's trademark, the daffily choreographed kineticism forbidden of late by either his own age or the scruples of story editors.

Less a romance than a feature-length plug for 'N Sync and its personalities -- and so, like all ads, not meant for "conscious consumption." Which opens the blissful avenue of sleep.

The situation -- a mother-daughter mind-body switcheroo -- is as enduringly appealing as it is absurd, and the comedy flows therefrom.

Hardly a nuanced portrait of a young woman's breakdown, the film nevertheless works up a few scares, particularly a tense call-number hunt in the library stacks.

Lighthearted if shy of a lark.

Stateside's real-life frame allows the complexities of mental illness and military service to lose dramatic tension, resulting in a desultory home stretch of group therapy, tears, and reconciliation.

The multiple story lines can feel choppy, but the dialogue has snap, and the pants' powers never distract from the teenagers' emotions.

Ham-handed to start, with a fondness for cochlea-crushing decibel levels, National Treasure gets more entertaining as the preposterousness rises.

A flatland of lowest-common-denominated retro-collegiate wackiness.

Preachy and humorless, Eban and Charley shocks only by the quality of its numbing solipsism.

If nothing else, Sophie Fillières's Ouch! is a secret pop culture index.

As a dirtier Deepak, Mistry is blankly sweet, suitable for his role as Subcontinental Rorschach.

But mostly the film is just hectic and homiletic: two parts exhausting "Men in Black" mayhem to one part family values.

Kurt Russell is terrific as coach Herb Brooks, psychological tactician out to redeem his being cut from the 1960 U.S. squad, the last one to beat the CCCP.

The low-key animation, featuring little that could not have appeared in its '50s predecessor, is all the more affecting for being so pristinely preserved.

As rich in incidental detail as it is narratively diffuse.

Culkin broods and freaks out ably, but Igby's snotty, dysfunction-derived malaise remains off-putting, mostly because his lines aren't half as clever or empathic as Steers would believe.

Several sharp jolts give the doc its dramatic shape, and one episode in particular, caught with a neighbor's lens, will make you gasp with grief.

The most blatant rip-off is of the "Rushmore" soundtrack. But Ralph Walker is no Max Fischer, and his monomania gets dull fast.

Syd's (Chris Evans) emotional tailspin is embarrassingly banal, and his assertion that "everybody here hates me" quickly applies to the audience as well.

Posner's dishearteningly unsophisticated treatment itself rings false.

To this viewer and reader, the decade-old juggernaut is as deeply felt as it is flawed, dense and illogical and laudably "weird."

In the rare moments when a rifle, grenade, howitzer, bayonet, dagger, fist, land mine, or flamethrower isn't being deployed, the film pushes its melodramatic plotline with soap operatic shamelessness.