Occasionally interesting, but mostly a paint-by-numbers biography of American artist Jackson Pollock. Star Ed Harris, who also directed and produced, has moments of emotional power, but he never sews them together into a complete and revealing portrait of the man.

The engaging stars of this cross-cultural love story must bushwack through a thick tangle of romantic-comedy cliches before arriving at anything remotely genuine and true, but they do manage to get there. For Sanaa Lathan and Simon Baker, as an uptight black career woman and her laid-back white landscaper, respectively, it’s victory by perseverance more

Watching It Runs in the Family, starring Kirk, Michael and Cameron Douglas, feels a little bit like getting stuck at someone else’s family reunion. The forced arguments and conveniently tragic plot developments in the contrived script are bad enough, but when the Douglases start hauling out pictures of their shared past, we just feel like

Don’t get caught up in the looney logic that governs this death row drama. Instead, appreciate it for its performances: occasionally Kevin Spacey’s as a professor convicted of murder, mostly Kate Winslet’s as a reporter who comes to interview him and above all that of Laura Linney as the murder victim. The Life of David

A hack’s Heathers, New Best Friend follows a college wallflower (Mia Kirshner) who is introduced by three party girls into a world of sex, drugs and bad dance music. Laughably amateurish, the movie boasts robotic performances, a barely there plot and sex scenes that give off more desperation than heat.

The deserving Laura Linney gets a chance to take center stage as a 30-something divorced woman succumbing to a life devoid of romantic love – until she meets a young graduate student (Topher Grace) at the university where she works. The film loses its focus as the complications arise, but whenever the camera is on

Even at his best – Lone Star, Limbo, Sunshine State – independent writer-director John Sayles tends to get preachy. Look out, then, when he decides to take the pulpit. This dull yet hectoring political drama, which follows a gubernatorial campaign in Colorado, is so strident and obvious it makes Fahrenheit 9/11 look like a calm

An experimental exercise from director Gus Van Sant, who wrote the screenplay with stars Matt Damon and Casey Affleck, Gerry follows two friends as they get lost on a desert trail and encounter thirst, desperation and … ? Well, not exactly transcendence, although that’s clearly what the movie is aiming for. Some moments approach such

More cable fare from Hilary Duff, Raise Your Voice essentially spends its entire running time trying to convince Duff of her wonderful singing abilities. She plays a sweet-natured teen who loves to belt it out with her school choir until a series of orchestrated tragedies and plot complications strips her of love for music. For

The same problems I had with E. Annie Proulx’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel – an inert main character, an overdone sense of misery – aren’t solved in this adaptation, which stars Kevin Spacey as a dull doormat who starts a new life in his ancestral home of Newfoundland after the death of his poisonously vindictive wife.