If you could meld the Lord of the Rings pictures with The Matrix, Blade and the Harry Potter films – and watch the result with your finger on the fast-forward button – you might get something close to this Russian import. Writer-director Timur Bekmambetov, adapting a novel by Sergei Lukyanenko, throws enough stylishness against the

Watching Phone Booth – in which a New York City publicist (Colin Farrell) is pinned down by an unseen sniper while making a call – is like examining a newly knit sweater for holes. You spend so much time making sure everything’s seamless that you miss out on the larger work. Director Joel Schumacher and

This may be the first hippie war film, a peace-espousing flower child that gleefully takes up arms. Set during the Crusades, it has as its hero (Orlando Bloom) the knight charged with defending Jerusalem and keeping the peace between Christians and Muslims. Fortunately for director Ridley Scott – whose Gladiator turned bursts of violence into

This geopolitical thriller based on the Tom Clancy novel is so insistent on having a strapping young hero that drama and common sense are sacrificed just to squeeze him in. In an odd casting stunt, Ben Affleck takes over the role of CIA analyst Jack Ryan when Harrison Ford, who played Ryan in Patriot Games

In this well-intentioned attempt to honor American soldiers who fought in Vietnam, writer-director Randall Wallace and star Mel Gibson have created a Saving Private Ryan wannabe, from the melodramatic air of reverence to the trendy dollops of gore. Do Vietnam veterans who fought bravely and honorably deserve our respect? Certainly. But lazily anointing them as

This twisting, turning con movie is so pleased with its own cleverness that an audience isn’t even necessary. Nobody could like the film as much as it likes itself. That sense of self-satisfaction considerably dampens whatever genuine pleasures the picture holds, including a flirty pair of performances from Lucy Liu and Josh Hartnett. Hartnett has

Michael Crichton’s time-traveling novel – about a team of archeologists transported to medieval France – comes to the big screen courtesy of seasoned professional Richard Donner (Lethal Weapon). Never quite thrilling, never quite dull, its overriding virtue is its competence. Paul Walker heads the ensemble cast with his usual easy charm, but the script’s reliance

S.W.A.T., starring Colin Farrell and Samuel L. Jackson as members of an elite police force, dissolves before your very eyes. What begins as a terse, disciplined look at the procedures of a S.W.A.T. unit gets slowly eaten away by summer-movie conventions, with all the silliness and bombast the genre implies. By the end, you’ll think