District 9's City of God meets War of the Worlds hybrid proves overbearing and under-convincing.

Bateman reliably tickles in his signature role of a square who can’t catch a break, and Wiig once more delivers subtly funny character work in a tricky role.

Tony is as much an archetype of the American father as Homer Simpson, only just smart enough to be perpetually miserable.

In working to keep the audience off-center...Desplechin artfully makes the well-worn family-weekend plot endearing again.

A serially bold experiment in audience engagement and the ability to produce feature-quality genre entertainment...on a weekly television budget.

Musters only a few lackluster laughs...[but] has one trump card: it’s a kid-friendly, “PG” film that celebrates museums.

Rude, raunchy and given to comical violence, the show sets out to offend delicate sensibilities and to get tough ones laughing their asses off. Abandon political correctness all who enter here.

Whether you're talking about an empire or a TV series, it doesn't get much bigger than Rome.

Because Costello is himself so hugely talented as an eclectic songwriter and performer, because his taste is so impeccable, and because he is such a cultural magpie...Spectacle is a wholly addictive musical program for the ages.

Series creator Bill Lawrence has always toggled between the zany and the emotional, and the eighth season is no exception.

The action sometimes conjures a thrill-ride's breathtaking quality or, in other words, Terminator Salvation's only hope of redemption with audiences.

Keaton proves as endlessly clever and athletic as his screen surrogates...chock-full of hilarious sight gags, including bits of business that incorporate moving trains, cow-catchers, a bear (and bear trap), and a misbehaving cannon.

Guaranteed to entertain actual "clerks" and those who have outgrown slackerdom to look back in bemused fondness at wasted time.

Smith has made a film with the potential to improve gender relations—without sacrificing his profane style.

Just creative enough to keep kids glazed over with nominal interest, but it won’t challenge them much...

Undeniably manipulative, not only in its plot, but in its dramatization of it.

One of the seminal films of the 1990s...just as darkly funny, epic, and psychically wrenching as ever.

Ribbing for your pleasure, Brüno is crafted to cause a flurry of varied reactions, even within a single viewer.

For everything else that's come down the road, nothing has been better to Stallone than his baby, Rocky.

Does Chris Columbus owe somebody a favor?

Has enough crisp sight gags, character moments, frantic mayhem, and musical interludes...to box the family crowd into a state of punch-drunk love.

A labor of love...so it's appropriate that the film should also be about love, the spanner in the works that allows humanity to triumph over machinery.

Usefully, it provides counter-balance to its own doom-saying with numerous suggestions of how to deal with the corporatization of food.

'A remake and a hostage picture! Can both the good guys and the bad guys use Sony laptops?' Yes, they can.

Comes close to the pantheon of so-bad-they're-good horror movies, but as they say, no cigar.

Boreanaz and Deschanel keep the series percolating with their oil-and-water opposites shtick, defined less by chafing annoyance and more by mutual respect...naturally, these opposites attract.

Branagh's ambitious take succeeds as a cautionary tale about true monstrosity: hubris and man's inhumanity to man. But one man's operatic style is another man's unintentionally comical excess, and ...Frankenstein certainly tempts fate...

Mike Nichols' underrated 1994 hybrid not only of wolf and man, but also of satire and horror...an eccentric film that may well be regarded, decades hence, as a movie classic.

There is no escape from The Village: you're living in it.

Remains a powerful tone poem about America at a cultural crossroads.

Thrilling, funny, and romantic; it elevates popcorn adventure to art...defines the ideal use of star power....[and] marries deadly intrigue to out-and-out delight.

The pairings of Margaret and Henry, and Helen and Leonard, attempt to cross fault lines widened by class, and the tragedy of Howards End is in the absolute necessity and absolute inefficacy of doing so at their moment in history.

Acknowledges the best and worst of family, love and marriage with admirable equanimity.

Raimi puts his pent-up energy to good use in Drag Me to Hell, an unpretentious horror hoot that's scary and funny in equal measure.

Part of Boris’ worldview seems to be to excuse the movie in which he stars. Try not to overthink it, Allen seems to say: just enjoy it.

Though there's definitely an audience for the story's increasingly sunny sweetness, the film sparks to life pretty much only when the estimable duo of Bullock and Reynolds bickers.

The movie equivalent of a fling that you won't entirely regret but won't ever want to see again.

There’s no shortage of anatomical jokes, scatological jokes, and fart jokes, toilet humor being the last refuge of a spent comedy writer.

Every week...an action-packed chase story, a Fugitive-styled slice-of-life-on-the-run, a thoughtful short story ruminating on a science-fiction concept...a tragedy-tinged psychodrama about one's pre-written role in humanity's bleak fate...

One of the most important films in the history of popular cinema, and film fans must never forget the incredible achievement it was in 1937.

With admirably funkiness and bold flavor, Hill has made the anti-Blart...but at a time when we've seen seven mass shootings in a month, do we really need the comedy version of Taxi Driver?

It's more than a movie; it's an American rite of passage.

A single-camera sitcom about idiots living in 'flyover' country...the Coen Brothers film Raising Arizona is a clear—and acknowledged—inspiration .

A period piece that may play well with those who hate period pieces.

The adventures that happily disturb the slippers-and-newspaper routine emerge as surprising crosses of science-fiction comedy and the thrills and spills of Hitchcock.

Its dull colors and folk-rock soundtrack...attempt to achieve the oft-chased feel of '70s cinema--in this case, Hal Ashby or Mike Nichols. It's a game try, but the transparently schematic result too often gets under the skin in the wrong way.

Theirs is, in their own words, 'A story,' 'All mixed up,' and their self-construction mimics that of their true Creator, the ever-experimental auteur Jean-Luc Godard.

Abrams and co-creators Alex Kurtzman & Roberto Orci...chiefly credit the work of David Cronenberg for sending them into their own 'Videodrome' playground of body-threatening, science-gone-wrong invasiveness.

Looking back on a time when music mattered, it's all good—at least as seen through the lens of documentary filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker...

Impeccable performances...crack timing...Horror plaudits aside, Shaun of the Dead is out in front as the funniest comedy of the year.