The purpose of Freedom Writers seems to be twofold. First, it’s designed to showcase Erin Gruwell and “sell” her philosophy. This movie is an unapologetic feature-length commercial for Gruwell’s attack on the educational abyss she discovered in Room 203 of a Long Beach, California high school. Second, it’s a vehicle to hopefully provide another Academy Award-winning performance opportunity for Hilary Swank. But Swank just never becomes Erin Gruwell. She comes across instead as a spokesperson employed to lend a credible and trusted face to a product. Inadequate and facile in some of its parts, Freedom Writers is not a complete dud; it just does not fulfill the promise of all the advertising and hype.

Because Letters from Iwo Jima’s story is revealed through a collection of homeward-bound letters written by three or four Japanese soldiers—rather than, say, through an actual story—the narrative never becomes truly cohesive, instead producing episodic, stitched-together vignettes. And there’s nothing wrong with that, I suppose; it’s just that there’s also nothing particularly right about it, either. It’s too bad that Ken Watanabe (as Kuribayashi) and Kazunari Ninomiya (as Saigo) are sadly and nobly left to fight more than one losing battle onscreen.

Happily N’Ever After—a short, sweet reworking of Cinderella—would have made a more appropriate TV special than a full-length cinematic release. While the funky little reworking of the fairy tale is kind of fun and light-hearted, the writing, the characterizations, and the animation simply don’t stand up well in a theater setting. And while children may find the newness of the story entertaining, the characterizations are rather stilted, and much of the humor seemed to fly right over the heads of the children in the audience, without being funny enough to catch the adults’ attention, either.

The pleasures of Miss Potter are few and simple, but they are sublime; and that is a propos of everything about this film and the true story that inspired it. How much does one need to know about the movie’s plot? As the film begins, Beatrix Potter pauses beside a rock wall to sketch; in voiceover, the successful author ponders the thrill and mystery of the first words of a new story: “You can never quite tell where they’re going to take you.” As true as these very words are, they also serve as a warning: don’t go into Miss Potter thinking you can see where this is all headed; the film’s simplicity is deceptive.

You shouldn’t expect a bullet-proof plot or a great deal of character development from some movies; Code Name: The Cleaner is clearly one of them. Cedric the Entertainer is first and foremost a comedian. Here, the movie is mostly a vehicle to stitch together comedic scenes. And while it doesn’t always work as well it might, director Mayfield manages to pull things together often enough to provide decent entertainment. If nothing else, you have to admire Cedric’s willingness to be the butt of his own jokes. The bottom line… you could probably do worse than The Cleaner. But don’t expect much more than that.