The movie, like the book before it, is an expertly built machine for the mass production of tears. Directed by Josh Boone 'Stuck in Love', with scrupulous respect for John Green's best-selling young-adult novel, the film sets out to make you weep - not just sniffle or choke up a little, but sob until your nose runs and your face turns blotchy. It succeeds.

Those reliable axioms about the taste and expectations of the mass movie audience are not so much laws of nature as artifacts of corporate strategy. And the lessons derived from them conveniently serve to strengthen a status quo that increasingly marginalizes risk, originality and intelligence.

I can't decide if this movie is so spectacularly, breathtakingly dumb as to induce stupidity in anyone who watches, or so brutally brilliant that it disarms all reason. What's the difference?

Pearl Harbor is strenuously respectful of contemporary sensitivities, sometimes at the cost of accuracy.

STARTLING & INVENTIVE...This is not a movie that lets go of you easily.

War of the Worlds is rated PG-13. Much of the earth's population is wiped out, leaving very little time for sex or bad language.

The movie, like the book before it, is an expertly built machine for the mass production of tears. Directed by Josh Boone 'Stuck in Love', with scrupulous respect for John Green's best-selling young-adult novel, the film sets out to make you weep - not just sniffle or choke up a little, but sob until your nose runs and your face turns blotchy. It succeeds.