Amy Biancolli

There are moments of genuine pathos, genuine humor, genuine surprise. As much as the film adheres to the strictures of the standard comic-book movie, it also pops with a knowing, loving, Whedon-world jokiness that keeps everything barreling along.

If the characters weren't so well drawn, if the effects weren't so convincing, and if the upshot weren't so ghastly, the moral component wouldn't carry any weight. But Trank tells his tale with an emotional and visual crispness that gives the superhero genre its best crack at naturalism so far.

There's nothing dark about Arthur: It's as bright and twinkling as a Christmas tree, decked with warmth and humor.

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

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

Some films are harder to watch than others - not because they're bad, which makes for a different sort of painful viewing, but because they touch on areas of such profound moral discomfort that the mere act of watching makes us feel complicit. We feel like gutless witnesses to a crime. And that's what makes Compliance such a hard thing to stomach.

This is better than any of the "Twilights." It features a functioning creative imagination and lots of honest-to-goodness acting by its star, Jennifer Lawrence.

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.

The best scenes are filmed inside the cruiser, dashboard shots that face inward instead of out, catching Gyllenhaal and Peña in moments so playful and true they make all other buddy cops look bogus by comparison.

Such are the timeless joys of the books (and now the movie), this sparkling absurdity and knack for buckling swash under the worst of circumstances.

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.

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.

Given the number of real-world cults that have ended in major bloodshed, there's some irony - and no small narrative coquetry - in any drama on the subject that ducks out so pointedly at the finish.

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.

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.

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

Like most ruckuses, it is frequently loud and not always intelligible.

Many scenes in Outrage are crisply filmed and stylish enough, as serial assassinations go. But the film doesn't add up to much.

The less-good stuff: the pirates, who are so blandly and predictably drawn that they sap all the personality out of Peter Dinklage (as an ugly ape skipper), which isn't easy. And the plot, which just barrels forward with very few surprises.

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."

A typical vehicle for Ferrell's atypical humor.

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.

The combative, off-putting Dark Horse features many of writer-director Todd Solondz's usual preoccupations: misery, complexity, stunted emotions, misplaced dreams.

Doesn't require anyone to love metal, or even like it. It only requires us to laugh at it - and other exemplars of bloated '80s pop, from Starship to Journey - and it does so with a campy and attitudinous spirit that's hard to resist.

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.

What makes this whole thing work is, first of all, Wilee's ride, an elegant machine that lacks any gears or brakes.

Any movie that features a character calling herself Fat Amy has a pretty firm grip on irony. It helps that Fat Amy is played by Rebel Wilson ("Bachelorette," "Bridesmaids"), my favorite eccentric Aussie practitioner of lip-curled comic timing.

Another innocuous film about another unusual girl.