The Universal Studios brand famously adorns the best Hollywood monster movies. Now two men named Lee have joined forces to reinvent the monster movie and the comic-book movie in one collective stroke... 
Brush aside the pratfalls, cheap-shot fat jokes, and creative variety of crotch attacks, and what's left? Not a lick of emotional sense. 
Plays like a giant warning to get out of town before Cheaper by the Dozen 2 opens. 
[Afield] from its off-Broadway origins, but the intimacy afforded by the camera and...most of the original cast occasionally restore the emotional vitality of the piece. 
Wright's ability to evoke sympathy for even the marginal characters--partly by exercising ingeniously economical staging to catch them in private moments--distinguishes this Pride & Prejudice. 
The utterly charming dance-history doc Ballets Russes traces the legendary ballet company from its 1909 inception to its 1962 dissolution. Clearly, the Ballets Russes, in its various incarnations, re... 
Far more manic than funny, Chicken Little tries to spin the kiddie standard about a little chick convinced the sky is falling into a depressingly "hip," Shreky-green comedy act. 
Myla Goldberg's novel Bee Season becomes one of the fall's funkiest pictures, as directed by Scott McGehee and David Siegel. A husband, wife, teenage son, and 11-year-old daughter comprise the appare... 
On the evidence of Jumanji and its sideways sequel Zathura, children's author and illustrator Chris Van Allsburg has a thing for exorcising childhood trauma by elaborately laying waste to family home... 
Writer-director Shane Black's Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang. Black wrote the influential buddy-cop movie Lethal Weapon and the underlooked The Long Kiss Goodnight, but also overkilled with the profane The Las... 
Triumphant coming-of-age drama (complete with horses!) [aimed] at little girls and their captive-audience fathers. 
Feature films about sexual harassment are hardly a dime a dozen, so Niki Caro's North Country—gawky though it may be at times—comes as welcome. 
Benjamin Morgan's provocative debut Quality of Life is a true San Francisco movie. Shot and edited in the Mission District, this fly-on-the-wall drama about graffiti writers makes brilliant use of lo... 
Mysterious daddy issues, a color scheme that washes everything in fluorescent urine and lime-green Jello, and....editing so jittery it'll send you into rapid eye movement. 
[Jerks] every tear in the "chick-lit" book...but the fertile combination of Hanson, Grant, and the stars allows blossoms of truth and humor to spring up out of the mulch. 
Charming...inspired....ridiculously entertaining. 
A theatrical movie infused with the energy of live TV....Good Night, and Good Luck. reminds us that, when played right, journalism is a dangerous game. 
A movie for young people, and they're welcome to it. Anyone older than teenage already will have seen every joke in Waiting... in more finely crafted, funnier movies. 
Primarily, Into the Blue displays plenty of priceless booty (and the treasure is impressive, too...). 
Kirn's sharp-tongued novel would suggest an Alexander Payne film rife with arch satire, but Mills ultimately goes for a more deeply affecting emotional study. 
Affectionate retro fun that coasts on soul sounds of the '70s and Cosby Kids-styled camaraderie. 
Glennie and Reidelsheimer prove equally adept at tapping into found sound and transforming it into art. 
[Burton paints] death as a (literally) more colorful plane of existence than life, the ultimate subversive joke in a movie full of them. 
Painfully predictable romanticized crap, but dealing as it does with mortal tragedy—death, brain-death, and loss—it's also unscrupulous and exploitative. 
A veil of censorship frustrates Milani, but also inspires her to clever means of skull-penetrating overstatement and subliminal understatement. 
Can be voyeuristically interesting...[but] James fails to justify this for-hire, backfired vanity project in an age glutted with reality TV. 
Provides a useful contrast to good dramas....Redford and Freeman should have invested their chops elsewhere. 
If the memory of the film flits away soon after viewing, the comic beats are amusing. 
Soft in the middle, and none of Cho's stories here take on an epic scope....[Yet] the comedienne remains endearingly naughty. 
Transporter 2 has the narrative skills and libido of a newly pubescent boy. 
Sing, muse! Sing of a century-hence future when we shall all/Drive impractically bulky cars and pay through the teeth/To hunt dinosaurs on a TimeSafari to the past! 
Iglesia's comic cautionary tale observes the monsters created by "every man for himself" attitudes. 
Here's a rare one: a novel adapted to film by the author himself. Sijie Dai wrote Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress in 2000, and shortly thereafter directed his own screenplay. Though the film... 
A terrible script, pedestrian direction, and acting that's mediocre at best signify that Eternal...[is] ready-made, moderately sexy fodder for late-night Skin-emax. 
Nothing is less shocking than a movie that's constantly trying to shock....more bite than bark, but it's all dog. 
Wes Craven banishes the memory of Cursed to bring us a lean thriller that's just right for armrest-gripping. 
Valiant is sadly boring, and while its rote mechanics may function nominally on children, it's going to be a long 76 minutes for the adults. 
Dude, I am bummed. 
May I humbly suggest you go to a concert or have sex instead? Heck, do both. 
We're spared the sounds [of Treadwell's death], but haunted by our own mental image, one more example of the individual's capacity to create his own reality. 