It’s quite watchable date-night cheese – the kind of movie you can simultaneously snort at and enjoy.

The Vow is agreeable enough. It may be puddin’-headed but it’s not soul-crushing.

Ready-made for Valentine’s Day, The Vow is, like the offerings at Cafe Mnemonic, a total sugar overload.

It’s pleasant enough as a date movie, but that’s all.

The Vow represents that most welcome kind of Valentine’s Day offering, focusing on the feelings that bring couples closer.

The romantic drama The Vow looks like the kind of annual Valentine’s Day staple that arrives just as calls start flooding flower shops and chocolate bonbon displays invade your local CVS.

It may appeal to the most rabid fans of tearjerk romances like “The Notebook,” but it’s a hard-to-swallow, maudlin tale.

This is a movie that leaves you wanting more. To care more, to cry more, to love more.

When they are on the screen together here, there is enough physical charm and emotional warmth to distract from the threadbare setting and the paper-thin plot. But those defects ultimately get in the way of the stars and leave you wondering: Is this a romance about neurological impairment or a neurologically impaired romance?

The Vow is a sopping hankie of a romance for women who love to suffer and the men who love them.

Haywire comes close to achieving Soderbergh’s goal of creating “a Pam Grier movie made by Alfred Hitchcock.”

Paring down narrative and character concerns in favor of a breathtaking application of pure thriller technique, Soderbergh’s latest picture is a lean, efficient exercise tossed off with his customary sangfroid and wickedly dry sense of humor.

Where faux-empowering “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” confines sexual power play to the old rape-revenge matrix, Haywire is a real war-of-the-sexes tournament, briskly paced with a tickling sense of black humor.

There’s no deeper meaning to Steven Soderbergh’s thriller than what meets the eye, yet its lustrous surfaces offer great and guilt-free pleasure.

In terms of its title, Haywire doesn’t quite go there; it’s more “Haywire-ish.” But it’s eccentric, and the on-screen violence is sharp and exciting – brutal without being either subhumanly sadistic or superhumanly ridiculous.

Disarmingly laid back for this kind of fare, with a jazzy musical score (courtesy of David Holmes) and a sleek, straight-ahead style, Haywire may not make much sense plotwise, but it’s a rollicking 90 minutes.

The pleasure of this small, eccentric movie is the natural way Carano hurts people – by, say, walking partway up a wall and climbing onto a man’s back, by sprinting toward the camera and flying into the human target standing in the foreground.

This is one of the director’s mainstream efforts, although his penchant for the offbeat and oddly artistic has not been completely reined in. But there’s plenty of unsparing, bone-crunching violence to dismiss the idea that Soderbergh is making an art film in disguise.

One of the reasons Haywire is such a pleasure to watch is that its director, Steven Soderbergh, doesn’t overplay the film’s hear-me-roar subversions.

A vigorous spy thriller that consistently beckons the viewer to catch up with its narrative twists and turns. Bordering on convoluted, it works best when in combat mode.

It put a smile on my face that never left for 117 minutes.

With their inspired, absurdist taste for weird, peculiar Americana-but a sort of neo-Americana that is entirely invented-the Coens have defined and mastered their own bizarre subgenre.

With their inspired, absurdist taste for weird, peculiar Americana-but a sort of neo-Americana that is entirely invented-the Coens have defined and mastered their own bizarre subgenre.

The movie is as visually inventive and wildly eccentric as the Coens’ earlier movies, but it lacks the emotional maturity and moral clarity of 1996′s “Fargo.”

Watching it amble along is enough of a treat, since the Coens populate this story with oddballs and bowling balls of such comic variety.

Watching it amble along is enough of a treat, since the Coens populate this story with oddballs and bowling balls of such comic variety.

The movie is as visually inventive and wildly eccentric as the Coens’ earlier movies, but it lacks the emotional maturity and moral clarity of 1996′s “Fargo.”

Some may complain The Big Lebowski rushes in all directions and never ends up anywhere. That isn’t the film’s flaw, but its style.

This is a comic amusement park ride – a wildly uneven movie that offers tremendous pleasure for the moment, even if it doesn’t stand up well to post-screening analysis and scrutiny.

This is a comic amusement park ride – a wildly uneven movie that offers tremendous pleasure for the moment, even if it doesn’t stand up well to post-screening analysis and scrutiny.