Dana Stevens

This is the kind of summer movie that softens your brain tissue without even providing the endocrine burst of pleasure that would make it all worthwhile.

It's Depp as Barnabas that holds the movie together. The story may be less than coherent and some of the minor characters washouts, but when he's on-screen, there's energy and humor and that foppish sex appeal that (as in the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie) reminds you why you once liked Johnny Depp.

Because it pulls off the tricky feat of combining multiple pre-existing Marvel franchises into a reasonably entertaining and tonally coherent whole, The Avengers will likely be hailed as a kind of thinking fan's superhero film, the way Whedon's recent "Cabin in the Woods" functioned as both a horror movie and a critique of same.

Where "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" frolicked on the beach, this amiable but underachieving comedy just sort of blobs on the couch.

The thoughtful and leisurely paced Marley is an exemplary music documentary in almost every way - but the area in which it falls short is an important one. Like a surprisingly large number of films about musicians (whether biopic or documentary), this one is curiously resistant to letting the audience hear its subject's songs in their entirety.

Though its story may sound formulaic on paper, please take my word for it: Monsieur Lazhar, written and directed by Philippe Falardeau, is a sharply intelligent, deeply sad, and not remotely sappy film about both teaching and collective grief.

It's often funny and smart, but seldom deeply involving, and practically never scary.

Director Gary Ross' adaptation, co-scripted by Collins herself, isn't quite as crackingly paced as the novel, but it will more than satisfy existing fans of the trilogy and likely create many new ones.

It's deeply committed to its own weird conceit, diminishing returns and all.

21 Jump Street isn't a wild, fresh reinvention of the movie-cliché-spoofing genre - this isn't "Airplane!" we're talking about - but it's also not a drearily overfamiliar retread of it.

In spite of my general distaste for Friends With Kids, let me cast my vote on the side of those who liked the ending. I wish more of the film had had that scene's fresh mixture of casual banter and breathless intimacy, instead of sounding like half-remembered dialogue from a movie we've all seen too many times before.

This middle section, in which both Carter and the audience get a crash course in the politics, history, and theology of the Red Planet, is the movie at its most imaginative and most fun.

It's particularly exciting to get to see an inventive underground work like This Is Not a Film in the wake of Iran's first-ever Oscar win for Asghar Farhadi's great film "A Separation." It's becoming clear that the blossoming of Iranian cinema, which has been going on now for at least 20 years, is too strong a force for the government censors to contain.

Wanderlust is about two or three script passes away from being a consistently funny, dramatically coherent romantic comedy.

It's Schoenaerts' magisterial presence that carries the film. In between bursts of convincingly horrific violence (including a fight in an elevator that makes Ryan Gosling's in "Drive" look like a schoolyard tiff), Schoenaerts also shows himself capable of moments of great subtlety and delicacy.

The ultimate praise given to sports movies is always, "Even if you don't care about sport X, you'll care about these characters," and that's certainly true of Undefeated (I don't, and I did).

At times this gritty, intermittently gripping police drama feels like a follow-up to "The Messenger" - not just because of the thematic overlap (both films deal with grief, substance abuse, and self-destructive masculinity), but because Rampart's main character, the cynical, drug-abusing cop played by Woody Harrelson, might be the long-lost twin of the alcoholic Army captain Harrelson played in the earlier Moverman film.

If, on the other hand, you're not above acknowledging the trans-historical creepiness of a good dusty windup-doll shelf (Come on! It includes one of those hyper-realistic monkeys playing the cymbals!), this pokey, modestly budgeted thriller isn't without its shivery delights.

Albert Nobbs is the rare double drag king bill you could plausibly take your grandmother to. It's genteel, well-crafted, mostly sexless and frequently dull - a movie that, like its title character, never quite dares to let itself discover what it really wants to be.

I pretty much loved this movie from start to finish - risible implausibilities, insufficiently explained premise and all. An admirably spare survival thriller, The Grey (nice title!) abounds in qualities that are rare in movies of its type. It's quiet, contemplative, and almost haiku-like in its simplicity.

It finds a way to make the play's rich, dense literary language (just before the climactic battle, one character accuses another of "breaking his oath and resolution like/A twist of rotten silk") sound as terse and urgent as the dialogue in a tightly plotted action thriller.

Though Carano isn't without a certain glowering charisma, her flat line readings and apparent discomfort with dialogue-heavy exchanges make her seem like a refugee from a different, schlockier movie, the kind of low-budget, straight-to-video MMA rock-'em-sock-'em that might pop up on late-night basic cable and charm you with its rough-hewn amateurism and animal high spirits. As Haywire's long-seeming 92 minutes limped by, I found myself wishing I was watching that movie instead.

The kind of middling-but-watchable heist thriller that, days after seeing it, already feels like something you caught half of on a plane two years ago.

Asghar Farhadi's A Separation serves as a quiet reminder of how good it's possible for movies to be.

The Iron Lady is, to put it kindly, a shambles.

Was The Adventures of Tintin a movie that I personally vibed with? Not really. It felt overstuffed and busy, its charm a little calculated, its outsized budget a tad too ostentatiously on display. But it's a rollicking yarn told with scads of invention and energy, not to mention a technical marvel of the first order.

Fincher is a master of mood and atmosphere, but this chilly, efficient movie never transcends the shallowness of its source material.

Stiff, talky, and airless, a textbook example of that not-always-true cliché about the unfilmability of theater.