Amy Biancolli

The protagonists and their idle dreams of a fiery wasteland may well be nihilistic. But the movie - with its stunning cinematography and lingering aftertaste of old-school heartbreak - most assuredly is not.

It's a celebration of nerd pride in all its many-feathered glory.

Good story, great characters, a setting plucked from history - and a multiracial, multigenerational ensemble cast stacked with fabulous actresses. But the thing that makes The Help such a rousing crowd-pleaser is its generous helping of baked goods.

Crisp, acid-tongued and sharply acted, it's the sort of exercise in tangy Celtic cynicism that's become one of the Emerald Isle's most reliable exports.

The film is often funny and even more frequently vulgar, exploiting every last chance for raunch in the full-chassis exchange of two grown men. The only thing missing: male nudity.

In its most touching moments, the film achieves a kind of sad and waltzing rhythm all its own. In its least, it's precious and plodding; the metaphoric link between grief and housework drags like a mop on a bathroom floor.

Some of the film is imaginatively put together. But the melodrama feels forced - manipulated by filmmakers hell-bent on teaching its main character a lesson or two about life and the need to seize it.

What matters most in this sad, sobering movie is not what anyone says; it's what goes unsaid for most of the running time.

What distinguishes Cap is his humble backstory, which involves neither hairy gods nor hot-dogging test pilots but a kid from Brooklyn who just wants to fight for freedom.

After watching Project Nim, a distressing portrait of a misguided 1970s language experiment, you'll be glad you're not a chimp in a cage. But you might want to revoke your membership in the human race, which comes across as a narcissistic, hedonistic, self-absorbed, neglectful, anthropomorphizing and arrogant bunch of hippie-dippy know-it-alls.

The epic and impassioned close that the saga deserves, a sweeping Wagnerian finish that's taut with suspense and wet with emotion.

A Better Life isn't an instant classic, but it tells its story with a simplicity and compassion that other urban dramas would be wise to emulate.

Its urban devastation knows no peer. Robots smash into each other with steely ferocity, and the humans - well, they do a fine job providing comic relief.

Most of the cast doesn't know what to do with their shallow characterizations and lackluster dialogue. The best lines were harvested for the trailer - so if you've seen that, you've seen it all.

The movie turns lighter and less morose as it rolls along, which is good for viewers who prefer a bit of honey to offset the bitter taste of hormones.

There are pros and cons to this Green Lantern, a half-campy, half-compelling adaptation of the superheroic DC comic books.

It looks like an exploding art project - but fails to capture the books' childlike voice and charm.

Ayoade is well known to British viewers for his role as a coddled nerd in the sitcom "The IT Crowd," so it's fair to expect laughs from his directorial debut feature. But much depends on your mind-set; U.S. audiences could have trouble with the movie's less-than-sunny worldview.

A minor but sometimes touching documentary.

Uneven, occasionally silly, true, but it's also an improvement over 2006's "X-Men: The Last Stand."

Is it good bad? Nah. It's just bad. It's so bad it makes "Machete," the other movie based on a mock trailer from "Grindhouse," look like high-gloss Kubrickian satire.

This dark and seedy follow-up to 2009's blockbuster comedy has a quite a retro message - suggesting that civilized men carry inside them a monster, a "demon" within, that requires constant taming.

For all of its brutal flashbacks and heavy-handed devices, The First Grader works best when it works quietly.

Nostalgia for the Light is a strange and stunning work of art: a poem disguised as a movie about astronomers in the Atacama desert of Chile.

A film of great hilarity, humanity, idiosyncrasy and grade-A, eyebrow-singeing raunch.

A crappy 3-D conversion job mars this otherwise competent, energetic and cheerfully hambone Marvel adaptation from director Kenneth Branagh.

In style and structure, it mimics an old-style studio effort, a culture-clashing comedy of manners that's tinged with melodrama and filmed in a smart progression of medium shots.

As a runner, the robber is dogged; as a robber, the runner is efficient, explosive and fast.

Some movies are in-between and inoffensive and harm absolutely no one. Prom is one of those.

Like its protagonist, Ceremony is as smart as it is exasperating.

May be Disney's most pointedly feminist effort since "Mulan."

A road trip into the heart of that bumpiest of territories, the adolescent id.

The humor's a little strange, and the action's a little frenetic, but all of it whooshes past in a swirl of tropical color and pseudo-South American bonhomie. Gorgeous scenery meets oddball characters and mild ethnic stereotyping.

The film about violence and retribution is a tough piece of work, subtle in some ways, obvious in others, viscerally affecting throughout.

The chief problem with Your Highness is its lack of imagination - its misuse and overuse of language and visual riffs that are only marginally amusing at best.

Rubber has its share of jollies, at least when it isn't boring us to death with the fourth-wall-busting monkey business. Although I appreciate Dupieux's efforts at satire, the audience-interaction subplot goes nowhere fast.

Rendered nearly unwatchable by overblown close-ups and an unrelenting shaky-cam.

The effect is an endearing and plainspoken clarity that stops just short of naturalism; the people in his movies don't seem real, exactly, but we end up caring about them as though they were.

Rodrick Rules has a brighter comic edge than its predecessor - and a bit more spunk.

The story gets away from itself as it barrels forward. The tiny bit of sense it makes at the beginning is quickly sacrificed in a conclusion so facile, illogical and cheap that it could use a dose of NZT itself.

A smart, juicy entertainment, but it's the kind of straight-up legal drama that hinges entirely on crafty storytelling and across-the-board solid performances.

An artfully depraved piece of South Korean torture porn directed by Kim Ji-woon, is a skillful serial-killer thriller in keeping with the likes of "Saw."

Catherine Hardwicke's prettified movie is a strange adaptation because it supplants the woodsy horror of the original fairy tale with two new elements: a romantic triangle and a witch hunt.

It is, all in all, off its rocker. But it's gorgeous.

Every last joke in the movie - verbal gags, visual gags, musical cues, camera moves - is crushingly literal.

This is a terrible movie. It has no business being as terrible as it is, because it boasts a perfectly acceptable horror premise and a perfectly acceptable cast.

Best reason to stay home and rent "Disturbia": I Am Number Four is a little better and makes loads more sense than "Eagle Eye." But neither has the sass and pluck of "Disturbia."

As weird as it sounds.

Through it all, Tatum tries like crazy to Act. His eyes pinch. His brow scrunches. Most of all, he clenches his jaw, little creases of muscle flexing below his ears as he labors to emote.

In creating his modern homage to the classic film, Im has twisted all the heated melodrama into a satiric - and in the end, surrealist - attack on the terrors of the polished upper class.

If the movie packs a weaker punch than the original, it has less to do with the action sequences than the script (by Edmond Wong, son of Raymond, who wrote the first), a flimsy affair with subpar villains.

For all the hellfire histrionics and well-timed jump scares, there is actual, admirable intellect behind The Rite.

Solid performances, and a sincere faith in the dignity of the average working stiff, save it from getting too preachy.

This is a remarkable movie: lovely, slow-paced and almost silent, rich with pathos and deft comic gestures.

Despite bursts of hilarity and an A-list cast, this is a dark, difficult, weirdly existential film - like some seriocomic spin on "I and Thou."

A tough slog through emotional swamplands. It's murky when it needs to be clear. But Hedlund is the big news here.

Baughman and O'Hara's documentary spews out so much information in just 111 minutes that the movie would have benefited from a longer run time and tighter focus.

This is the first Focker installment not directed by Jay Roach, who did a good job balancing the yuks with the more outrageous gross-outs. That comic-revolting parity shouldn't be much of a challenge for "American Pie's" Paul Weitz, and yet the skeevier bits aren't especially funny.

The film is confusing and awkwardly timed, and it drags.

This sequel is also goofy, also eye-popping - see it in Imax 3-D if you really want to fry your optic nerve - and also weakly scripted. And yet the sheer size of the thing works against it: The effects are absolutely spectacular, but they blow the goofy-cheesy quotient straight through the roof.

Megamind, it turns out, is a villain to root for.

Narrated by Lomborg, the movie uses lecture excerpts, clips of terrified schoolchildren and interviews with (mostly) like-minded scientists to get his points across.

Once it gets rolling, Unstoppable doesn't pause for breath.

An arty, ruminative and slow-paced film that's being marketed as a big ol' alien-invasion flick. Just don't expect an invasion flick.

The King's Speech is a warm, wise film - the best period movie of the year and one of the year's best movies.

There aren't that many songs this time - just a handful, reprised ad infinitum. You get to sing most of them, so I'm sure you've noticed how bland they are.

The third and most uneven film adaptation in the series.

This one is a long, archetypal journey that screeches to a halt a few stops short of its destination.

A tonally confused, fitfully entertaining film about a pathologically two-faced man.

It's still a spirited look - well written, beautifully acted, full of uplift - at lovably cheeky heroines on the march for a little respect.

Spitzer was undone by his zipper, but as Client 9 makes clear, he was also undone by his refusal - or inability - to make nice with some of the state's most powerful characters.

"Hornet's Nest" isn't the best of the three (that would be the first film, "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo"), but it's the most challenging.

The title promises a film that never really materializes: something nastier, smellier, more nihilistic than the skittish morality tale at hand.

A first-class genre entry stacked with dandy performances and some crackerjack action to boot.

Gluck also directed "Fired Up!," another teen charade with lots of quick-witted verbal raunch. Easy A does a few things better.

This is one helluva drama, with one helluva star turn by Jennifer Lawrence as Ree.

A fine, fun remake of a movie that updates, transplants and reimagines the original without sacrificing its heart or goofy charm.

Vast, beautiful and meticulously detailed.

At its simplest, "Fire" tells of Mikael's efforts to exonerate Lisbeth. At its most baroque, it explores a vast web of sex trafficking and deep-rooted conspiracy that goes back decades and touches on Lisbeth's inflammatory background.

Another innocuous film about another unusual girl.

Eisner has almost nothing on his mind, no political rumblings, nothing behind the urge to upgrade vintage trash.

Melissa Rosenberg's screenplay is faithful enough to Meyer's soap-operatic inclinations, but I kind of wish it weren't.

A typical vehicle for Ferrell's atypical humor.

In Step Up 3D, what's going on is: nothing.

A compact British drama that does more with only three people and a few modest settings than most movies do with computerized bloat and a cast of hundreds.

You can't fool me. I know it's actually a parlor game.

A movie about an obese Harlem teenager who's raped by her father and abused by her mother. It's depressing, devastating, harrowing and repulsive. But there are lyric flights of hope interspersed among that raw naturalism, and that's what makes this movie amazing.

Perrier's Bounty puts on a pretty good show: fast, foul, corny, strange.

Handily beats back the evils of boredom.

For Kline's performance alone, The Extra Man is well worth seeing.

The acting is immaculate; the editing is seamless; the imagery is blunt.

This is a handsome, conventional biopic, as fluent and polished as its subject matter.

It's a remarkable film: A gritty, gut-churning, crime thriller based on a true story. Its greatness lies in its unwavering fidelity to human nature and the unstoppable laws of the wild.

What joy it is to watch the man (Douglas) slime himself on camera.

It's harmless.

An imperfect, fascinating film about an imperfect, fascinating man.

It does for hit men what "Up in the Air" did for frequent-flying corporate terminators, minus the comic tang.

Visually, Jonah Hex is an orgy of overstatement: rapid edits, garish colors, harsh light.