Audiences have stuck with Cameron Diaz through a lot – the There’s Something About Mary rip-off The Sweetest Thing, even Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle – but In Her Shoes pushes the star’s likability to the limit. That’s partly the movie’s point – this is meant to be a tale of betrayal and reconciliation between sisters

An awkward attempt to mold the Imax documentary-travelogue format into a traditional movie narrative, China: The Panda Adventure ends up failing at both aims. Maria Bello stars as real-life Ruth McCombs-Harkness, who traveled to China in 1936 to fulfill her late husband’s dream of discovering wild pandas. The result is a nature film without much

When it’s not burdened by trying to be a cautionary parable about the dangers of the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle, this fact-based drama makes some interesting observations about stardom – what it looks like, who has it and why everybody seems to want it. Mark Wahlberg certainly has it, which is why his performance as

A landmark in terms of science-fiction style and influence, The Day the Earth Stood Still boasts a wavering, theremin score (by Hitchcock regular Bernard Herrmann), a shiny, disc-shaped spacecraft and even a robot named Gort. Yet it deals in these sci-fi cliches with an amazing artistry. That score is delicately employed, the special effects still

It’s hard to say which is worse, this romantic drama’s annoying first half, in which Charlize Theron plays a perpetually perky free spirit who cracks the shell of a selfish advertising executive (Keanu Reeves), or the baldly manipulative, tear-jerking climax. Put together, it’s like watching a manic-depressive crash and burn.

Gwyneth Paltrow suffers beautifully again as the depressive daughter of a dying, delusional math professor (Anthony Hopkins) in this adaptation of the stage play she performed in under returning director John Madden (Shakespeare in Love). It’s all very earnest and weighty – with some nice on-location filming at the University of Chicago – but I

This begins as a provocative exploration of class divisions, as a car accident between a hotshot attorney (Ben Affleck) and a poor divorced father (Samuel L. Jackson) escalates into a dangerous feud. Then, as the two men continue to disrupt each other’s lives in increasingly frightening ways, the movie becomes an even more interesting consideration

David Duchovny makes an awkward writing-directing debut with this drama about an artist (Duchovny) recalling his turbulent adolescence in 1970s Greenwich Village. Anton Yelchin is maddeningly idiosyncratic as the artist as a young man – he has the mannered, halting speech pattern of a nervous stand-up comic – while Duchovny’s wife Tea Leoni provides the

Rarely has a bad idea – in this case, remaking a 1950 tear-jerker with Queen Latifah in the Alec Guinness role – arrived on screen with its obvious badness so intact. Everything that sounds wrong about this project is. Latifah plays a mousy department-store salesclerk who embarks on a European vacation when she is diagnosed

Another foreign import founded on the belief that a good meal can solve anything. As it follows an uptight German chef (Martina Gedeck) who runs her kitchen with the rigid precision of a military canteen, the movie doesn’t quite have the joyous effervescence of Like Water for Chocolate or Babette’s Feast. The pleasure, then, comes