Ann Hornaday

Might provide a much-needed fix for Mac's most ardent fans, but they'll have to wait for a star vehicle that fully exploits the range of his comic gifts.

Even within what often looks like a self-indulgent exercise in humiliation, pain and gratuitous gore, there is no denying the moments of genuine and powerful feeling in The Passion of the Christ -- some of which, by the way, evoke Jesus's most profound teachings of Jewish principles.

Volckman and Miance are undoubtedly superb draftsmen; what they need is a writer of comparable skill.

Within this structurally baggy weepie, at least two perfectly good movies fight to break free, one a provocative legal thriller, the other a melodrama.

At the movie's thoroughly expected conclusion, a visual joke has a bedraggled cat licking at the icing on a wedding cake, but it's really Melanie who gets to have it and eat it, too.

He has a knack for creating vivid characters even in the briefest of vignettes in his live act, many of which are taken from his life, growing up poor in Greenbelt.

No matter how much fun it is to watch -- and for hard-core movie fans, it is often enormous fun -- there's a certain relief when it stops and we're popped back out to our banal, one-track lives.

There's too much slow-mo and too many music cues, but there's a low-key buzz to Wahlberg's scenes with Greg Kinnear.

McDormand is the best thing about Laurel Canyon. She's also the most unfortunate victim of a film that seems unable or unwilling to give even its most intriguing and compulsively watchable character her due.

Most revelatory here is Malli, who defies the stereotype of submission and subservience and emerges as a woman of self-possession and substance. (The earthily beautiful Bat-Sheva Rand infuses the character with a generous dollop of her own zaftig sensuality.)

Make no mistake: The War Tapes is not an overtly political film. It appears to grind no partisan ax nor score either red or blue points. Whether viewers support the war or not -- or find themselves somewhere in the mushy middle -- this documentary won't fit comfortably into the pigeonholes of their preconceptions.

The dour, downbeat story eventually spirals into grisly Grand Guignol and contrivance. Still, Gordon-Levitt is superb, and Jeff Daniels delivers a wry and wily performance as Pratt's blind roommate.

Manages to be a diverting and funny character study, at least most of the time.

Unfortunately, for all its good music and admirable vocal impersonations, Walk the Line slides -- very, very slowly -- downhill.

Fellowes has brought intelligence and control to the eternally vexing question of whether the right thing is always the good thing.

What might have been a fascinating, intimate portrait turns into something much less compelling when Clark tries to impose a sex-and-action-packed narrative on the proceedings.

If Loggerheads sometimes feels too forced, it features some unforgettable performances, especially by Hunt, an accomplished comedienne who makes an impressive debut as a dramatic lead here.

For all its contrivances, Breaking and Entering has its finger on the pulse of contemporary London life and possesses its share of fleeting delights, chief among them the sublime Robin Wright Penn as Law's live-in girlfriend.

With a slick visual style similar to "Monster House", Open Season trots out tropes that recent animated classics have done with more wit and smarts.

Will probably appeal most to hard-core fans of Japanese animation and its wide-eyed style, both visual and philosophical.

The film's unforgettable stars are the beauty academy's students, women who have survived tribal warfare, Soviet invasion, Muslim tyranny, American bombs, patriarchal families and even Western good intentions with extraordinary grace and fortitude.

This is a carefully conceived, thoughtfully orchestrated effort in taste and restraint that ultimately is too restrained and tasteful.

An uneven, sophomoric and only fitfully funny omnibus of skits, The Ten is one of those silly-on-purpose ensemble exercises that must have been wildly fun to make.

Often funny (just listen to Becky fulminate against Harry Potter), but it's also a scary.

Unfolds as a series of meticulous tableaux vivants, but like those parlor pastimes, it lacks physical verve and a compelling emotional charge.

On the Outs has its rewards, especially in the mesmerizing performance of Marte.

Say this for Confetti: It's a crowd-pleaser. If, that is, the crowd is composed of people who have never seen a movie by Christopher Guest or a TV show starring Ricky Gervais.

Will probably appeal only to the most committed of Leigh fans.

The sexual frankness is refreshing. As Suzette and Lavinia banter, their dialogue often suggests how "Sex and the City" might sound 20 years hence.

Some viewers will miss the warmth and boisterous family dynamics of its predecessors.

It's a warm, if pallid, romantic comedy that may not do much more to burnish Lopez's reputation, but will certainly not bruise it.

Jagged, unrelenting, claustrophobically intimate.

Consistently absorbing -- thanks in large part to strong performances from the actors -- but not particularly rewarding.

The movie goes off the rails only when the filmmaker inadvertently legitimizes the Protocols' loony philosophical heirs by interviewing a New York medical examiner and a widow about the remains of one of 9/11's Jewish victims.

It doesn't open up much new territory, except to eschew much of the dark, frank sexuality that has characterized such recent sexual coming-of-age movies as "Mysterious Skin." Instead, Bardwell offers a cheerful, if sometimes strenuously earnest, take on a subject that seems overdue for a lighthearted touch.

A movie that soars whenever Child is on the screen and sags when Powell shows up.

The first two-thirds of Joyeux Noel are strangely inert, but the film ends with a moving and surprisingly sophisticated meditation on the definition of moral duty.

The film is ultimately too self-regarding, too smug to be transcendent itself.

Admittedly, this is the stuff of lurid adolescent distraction, not great cinema. Jennifer's Body is strictly a niche item but provides a goofy, campy bookend to "Drag Me to Hell" on the B-movie shelf. Watch it, forget it, move on.

As a tasteful take on a minor novel, Metroland is genteel enough, but it lacks the urgency and scope of a must-see movie. [07 May 1999]

Pirouettes along a beguiling but treacherous line between horror and whimsy.

With its shambling, felicitously contrived structure and Fellini-esque climax, it's some kind of Jungian slacker fable.

At once daring and hackneyed, absorbing and off-putting, a triumph of one sort and, more lastingly, a failure of another.

An unobjectionable if uninspired updating of a classic family story for the minivan generation.

Never lets viewers fully inside Erik and Paul's world, a reticence that isn't helped by the actors' fey, restrained-to-a-fault performances. That and a frustratingly episodic structure make what might have been a raw and inspiring portrait of commitment and boundaries a surprisingly uninvolving, arms-length enterprise. Keep the Lights On lets go just when it should be holding you tighter.

The visual and performative elements are polished enough in Live by Night, but it lacks any sense of urgency.

Trouble With the Curve presents viewers with a frustrating change-up: What promised to be a modest, refreshingly unforced little comedy turns out to be low energy to a fault.

Master might be a horror film, but its scariest elements are off screen, in the form of the persistent social realities that inspired it.

If Fennell doesn't quite stick the landing -- if her story of striving, sexual obsession, class resentment and revenge ultimately feels puny and predictable -- she certainly has fun getting there.

Jack Frost can't possibly straddle its emotional shifts between morbidity and sheer nonsense. [11 Dec 1998]

Ferrell and Hart have a genial, easygoing chemistry and Get Hard manages to score more than a few good points about facile assumptions and toxic hypocrisy.

Dogs and the women who love them form the warm and gooey center of Darling Companion, Lawrence Kasdan's fitfully amusing comedy-drama.

Read like a long, anguished prayer, but on screen it looks an awful lot like blasphemy.

As a blithely likable blunt instrument, Heads of State gets the job done, justifying its anesthetized mayhem with a sweet-natured message about the importance of friendship, international alliances and institutional continuity.

Whether the entire production comes off as classy or cloying depends entirely on the viewer's mood.

Both lead players are appealing and attractive enough to make an otherwise tepid movie at least un-excruciating.

The Hollars drives inexorably to a conclusion that feels as manipulatively mawkish as it is impossibly tidy, typical of a genre that too often tries to have it both ways. It turns out that happy families are all alike, even when they’re a little bit sad.

Its arresting visual design aside, Cafe Society is upper-middle-late-period Allen, a modestly diverting ditty that will never go down as one of his greats. (But, as most can agree, Allen at his most middling is still better than many hacks at their best.)

Let's get it out, loud and clear: Jerry Maguire is not a sports movie. It's a stealth chick movie, wrapped in a swaddling of jock stuff so that it gets through guy radar without setting off the missile defenses.

For all of the virtuosity of Redmayne and Vikander’s performances, and for all its sensitivity and aesthetic appeal, The Danish Girl is content simply to present the ambiguities and contradictions of Lili and Gerda’s story, rather than delve into their gnarlier corners.

Magic Mike XXL tries mightily — if unsuccessfully — to match its predecessor’s stature as a camp classic, the epitome of trashy summer fun for the whole pansexual, polymorphously perverse, omni-libidinous family.

High-grade cheese, the sort of highly pitched melodrama that in the 1950s would have been the stuff of a lurid, lavishly staged Douglas Sirk picture.

Partridge is such a fatuous, superficial figure that the trick is to make him palatable enough to sustain interest for more than an hour. The filmmakers meet with uneven success.

Alternately fascinating and disappointing biopic about French scientist Marie ­Curie.

Ewing and Grady insert vignettes featuring a young actor playing Lear as a 9-year-old, wandering an empty theater and trying on his analog’s signature white hat. The conceit might have sounded artful on paper, but it doesn’t work on film.

The most controversial thriller of the year turns out to be about as exciting as watching your parents play Sudoku.

What starts out as an invigorating odyssey winds up becoming an enervating series of postures.

Even at its most glancing and superficial, Together offers a diverting attempt at capturing recent history, in all its maddening contradictions and compromises, recriminations and rages. It reflects a time when all we had was each other, for better or — way too often — for worse.

It’s possible to see why McDonagh’s fans love his quirks and clever structural feints (the war of wills in “Banshees” often plays out like variations on a theme), as well as his characters’ willingness not to be liked. But what they find at the end of the filmmaker’s rainbow is less likely to be a pot of philosophical gold than prosaic self-satisfaction.

For all of its foodie appeal, however, Ramen Shop is a wispily sentimental enterprise, full of perfunctory transitions, maudlin plot twists and awkward time shifts between past and present.

One of those cinematic curiosities that almost always fade quickly, but that will usually find a devoted cult audience once it hits that peculiar Elysian Field known as the aftermarket.

There’s no doubt that Villeneuve can make a movie; he’s developed a strong cinematic voice. It’s tantalizing to imagine what he could do with a really fine story.

Paris Can Wait is a modest, genteel piece of cinematic escapism, a silky testament to sensuality as impeccably tasteful as it is utterly undemanding.

This version may not break new ground, but it revisits familiar territory with a vibrant sense of style and welcome restraint. It exemplifies the kind of respectable and utterly unnecessary remake that now defines the Hollywood business model.

By turns giddily coy and disarmingly frank, the movie doesn’t know if it wants to be a kinder, gentler Apatow or go full Farrelly.

It's all too zany and madcap and Woody Allen-redux to be remotely credible, but Ira & Abby turns out to be witty and winning, in large part because of its cast.

For the uninitiated? Man, it's a bummer.

A modestly funny, little bit dark, occasionally knowing, not entirely cynical comedy that, to the extent that it succeeds at all, does so thanks to James Marsden.

The Little Hours seldom rises above a clever but lightweight one-liner.

Like its own protagonists, Kick-Ass 2 can’t decide what it wants to be when it grows up: a vessel for unhinged vengeance and destruction or a meta-critique of those same impulses. In going for both, it winds up being neither.

The net effect is one of frustration and will surely send Cohen compleatists back to their record collections for relief.

With visions of "The Public Enemy," "Bonnie and Clyde" and even "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford" dancing in its head, the Prohibition-era drama Lawless winds up being equal to none of them -- even if it holds its own as a modestly respectable genre exercise.

Well, it's better than "The Phantom Menace."

Little more than a sleek, stylish stunt.

Go For Sisters is worth the time if only to witness the terrific chemistry between Hamilton and Ross, the latter of whom delivers a break-through performance as a woman of uncommon, almost regal, composure, even as she struggles to stay on the righteous path.

Directed by Antoine Fuqua with an occasionally puzzling combination of restraint and stylization, Emancipation turns a potent image into a pageant of spectacle and suffering.

In a textbook example of the have-it-both-ways ethos of self-loathing narcissism, Carell has succeeded in creating a character of old-fashioned decency in a movie that otherwise flouts it at every turn.

Try as it might to entertain serious notions of manhood, evil and original sin, Prisoners works most effectively as Hollywood hypocrisy at its most sleek, efficient and meretricious. It’s stylish, high-minded hokum.

Even Mary Tyler Moore's sunny but vulnerable Mary Richards or Tina Fey's Liz Lemon seem more fleshily real than Becky.

There’s attentive scrutiny here, and a surfeit of playful style, but precious little genuine curiosity or interest.

Even Lawrence’s magnetic powers can’t keep Mother! from going off the rails, which at first occurs cumulatively, then in a mad rush during the film’s outlandish climax.

As alternate history and a showcase for a fine Neeson characterization, “Mark Felt” offers an intriguing if incomplete view of a man who remains inscrutable, 40 years after the fact.

Siegel's depiction of the film's supporting characters too often borders on caricature. By the movie's strained, overheated climax, it's clear that Siegel, in his directing debut, is less interested in his protagonist as a character capable of transformation than as a human petri dish of futility and pathology.

Garca brings his finely calibrated sense of drama to the subject of adoption, which he handles with characteristic restraint and insight -- at least until the film's maudlin, too-pat finale. That sharp melodramatic turn is a shame, because so much of what has gone before in Mother and Child is of real quality.

Tends toward the broadest possible takes on slapstick, sophomoric sexuality and post-"Hangover" raunch.

With its contrived setups, preposterous coincidences and calculated sentimentalism, Crazy, Stupid, Love seems beamed from the same alternate reality as "Larry Crowne." We might enjoy the ride while we're on it, but it will seem like a visit to another planet once we're home.

Like a gel cap in a sip of orange juice, the psycho-pharmacological thriller Side Effects goes down easily, even if its long-term impact turns out to be barely dis­cern­ible.

Exhibits the weaknesses and the strengths of what has become a nearly foolproof formula for keeping viewers engaged.