Adam Markovitz

There's an elemental appeal to watching these animals hunt and play in the Alaskan wildnerness, and the Disneynature team has mastered the art of capturing it.

They're all fascinating 
 subjects - or would be if Jig didn't dance around their personal stories in favor of overheated waiting-for-the-scores suspense.

What saves Immortals as a moviegoing experience is the exuberant, kid-in-a-candy-store virtuosity of its director, former music-video wunderkind Tarsem Singh (The Cell).

As we go deeper into the cave, walls squeezing, water rising, the movie has a narrative pull as sure as gravity.

The movie doesn’t grab you emotionally, but director Atom Egoyan (Exotica) teases apart the case’s details with grim fascination.

Colin Firth smolders as the PTSD-riddled veteran (played in flashbacks by War Horse‘s Jeremy Irvine), and Nicole Kidman cries dutifully as his wife — but they’re both derailed by the movie’s tidy emotional resolutions.

Sarcastic quips and cynical attitudes abound, maybe as a way for the movie's makers to telegraph that they know this is all just so much kid stuff. But if the characters can't muster genuine awe for their adventure, it's a tall order to ask us to do it for them.

Doesn't just wink at De Niro's history, it leans on it, hard.

The cooking scenes are fun, but Samir's reawakening and romance with a co-worker (Jess Weixler) hold about as many surprises as a prix fixe meal.

There's nothing particularly inventive in the plot or grade-school humor, but the movie skates by on the timeless, undemanding charm of watching a tie-wearing bear try to steal people's lunches.

It would make for a pretty ghastly pageant if not for smart, understated turns by Watson and Geoffrey Rush as the charmingly Teutonic couple who rescue both Liesel and a stranded Jew (Ben Schnezter) — not to mention the movie itself — with honorable matter-of-factness.

Director Richard Ayoade (Submarine) gets a huge impact from minimal expressionist sets, but the thin story — loosely based on Dostoyevsky’s 1846 novella — plays like a pale reflection of a more exciting tale.

Why are they fighting again? Never you mind. Just sit tight till the next action sequence (it won't be long), and get ready to laugh - with equal parts scorn and fanboy joy - as Beckinsale strikes another Rodinesque pose under a slo-mo shower of inhuman innards.

All those twangy, homespun observations interrupt and annotate the narrative until Black and MacLaine's scenes start to feel as trivial as reenactments on a true-crime TV show.

What Halloween II does have, though, is Zombie’s claustrophobic visual style; he half-drowns his actors in shadow, then tracks them through windows and around corners like a focused predator. If only we cared about the prey.

Basically a nifty VFX reel in search of a plot.

It’s a rom-com setup lamer than anything in the Barrymore-Sandler canon, but Binoche and Owen tackle it like high drama and eke out a few sweet moments.

A pocket-size supernatural thriller that plays a bit like Agatha Christie's "Ten Little Indians" retold by an unstable Sunday School teacher.

Sit tight through the end credits and you'll be treated to a few off-the-cuff outtakes of the guys doing things much funnier than anything in the film itself.

When the movie occasionally does confront its hero’s foibles, its answers are disappointingly pat.

At best, his poker-faced vignettes nail the icy comedy of war: A man chats on his cell phone, unworried about a tank targeting him a few feet away. At worst, they're totally opaque and unmoving.

Even the best player can only go so far with a bum hand.

Heaven is for Real has lots of sweet, Rockwellian imagery of small-town life and family high jinks. What it doesn't have is dramatic tension.

There's barely a trace of the magic of 1939's "The Wizard of Oz"; the bricks are still yellow, but the road doesn't lead anywhere special.

Underwhelming in the style of most off-brand CG, Alpha and Omega is livened by pretty Rocky Mountain backdrops and leadened by stock characters and the wolves' weirdly prissy behavior.

The exception is newcomer Jenn Proske, who spoofs Twilight star Kristen Stewart's flustered, hair-tugging angst with hilarious precision.

A well-meaning dud.

Worse, he (Reiner) vacuum-seals it all in a patronizingly wholesome package, like an extended episode of "The Wonder Years" with all the wonder sucked out.