Dana Stevens

The narrative scheme, the brooding period atmosphere, the understated score (by David Byrne) and the precision of the acting also make the story seem more interesting than it is.

For better or worse, it’s a Brontë adaptation for the era of Instagram and TikTok, second screens and viral memes.

Los Angeles Plays Itself, in spite of its length, is rarely tedious, an achievement it owes mainly to the movies it prodigiously excerpts.

Especially when Baymax is onscreen doing his adorable-puffy-robot thing, Big Hero 6 qualifies as a better-than-average kids’ movie with enough cross-generational appeal to make it a fine choice for a family weekend matinee. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that this film was designed to function as a starter kit for future Marvel aficionados.

Scene by scene, 50/50 can be both amusing and moving, with the tightly wound Gordon-Levitt and the boundaryless Rogen forming an oddly complementary pair. But as a whole the movie never quite coheres, seeming to skitter away at the last minute from both full-body laughter and full-body sobs.

Like Christopher Walken or Marlon Brando, Mr. Pacino frequently uses his gifts to make mediocre movies more interesting. Everything else in The Recruit may be tiresomely predictable, but he, at least, is not.

The skills on display in Freestyle are too varied and idiosyncratic for one movie to contain, but this one at least offers a heady, rousing education in an art form that is too often misunderstood.

Lovely though it is to look at, it does not reveal very much. Sampling the works of three prominent directors in one sitting may be what gives anthology films like this one their appeal, but the experience is often more frustrating than fulfilling.

As fizzy as the first, but not quite as refreshing. The pleasurable, eye-popping sense of surprise has diminished, and the teasingly referential attitude shows signs of fatigue.

Mining the incest prohibition for laughs in what's essentially a light romantic comedy is a bold move, and for the first two-thirds of the movie, it works surprisingly well. But as long as the Duplasses are willing to go there, I can't help but wish they'd gone a little further.

Both entertaining and empty: an emotional shell game that leaves you feeling cheated even though, on the surface at least, everyone is a winner.

The sharks are scary, and the ocean is vast and indifferent, but the most effective parts of Open Water, which is ultimately too modest to be very memorable, evoke a deeper terror, one that can chill even those viewers who would never dream of putting on a wet suit and jumping off a boat.

Being Julia may not make much psychological or dramatic sense, but Ms. Bening, pretending to be Julia (who is always pretending to be herself), is sensational.

Smart, sincere and sloppy film.

The first hour of Candyman does a bang-up job of mixing such audience-teasing popcorn thrills with trenchant, if sometimes too flatly stated, social critique. But by the last half-hour, there are so many themes, plotlines, and flashbacks in play that the movie’s message becomes muddled, and the forward momentum slows.

Cianfrance’s gift for allowing his actors to create relationships — with one another, with the camera, and with the stark landscape that surrounds them — makes The Light Between Oceans an unusually captivating romantic drama, at least until that last-act slide into self-sabotaging bathos.

A disjointed, sometimes fascinating mélange of moods, associations and effects.

The movie can -- indeed, should -- be intellectually rejected, but you can't quite banish it from your mind.

Lan Yu is like a less dizzily gorgeous companion to Mr. Wong's "In the Mood for Love" -- very much a Hong Kong movie despite its mainland setting.

If I had a child near Dre's age, I'd drag him or her out of "Marmaduke" and into The Karate Kid--but not before requiring an at-home screening of the still unsurpassed original.

The movie is so small and emotionally constricted that it gives Hoffman too little room to explore his range.

As drama, Stage Beauty is both timorous and ungainly, words that might also describe Ms. Danes's performance.

Superfluous though it may be, The Honeymooners is not so bad.

There is a lot of violence, but not much action; a plot involving vengeance, jealousy and double-crossing, but not a great deal of suspense.

The general talent and dedication of the ensemble mitigate the script's occasional lapses into sentimentality and noisy confrontation.

The film's resolute indifference to fashion makes it, perhaps paradoxically, a refreshing piece of old-style entertainment, accompanied by a whooshing, trembling score by Edward Shearmur.

Skyfall leaves you wondering whether this incarnation of the character has anywhere left to go. It's the portrait of a spy at the end of his rope by an actor who seems close to his.

Though its story is fuzzy, the acting and direction in Final give it an air of quiet, dignified ambition.

The result feels like a sketchbook, both in a good and bad sense; it's alive and spontaneous and surprising in some parts, underdeveloped and shapeless in others.

It’s fine to walk out of this movie not quite sure what Tarantino was using his story’s proximity to this real-life tragedy to say; that’s part of the ambiguity inherent in making art. But it’s dispiriting to suspect that part of why he wanted to stage a Manson-adjacent story was because the accoutrements — the period cars and costumes and neon signs, the glowering barefoot hippie girls, the acid-laced cigarettes and glowing movie marquees — were just so cool.

Despite its impressive attention to craft—including exquisite motion-capture work by the groundbreaking digital-design studio WETA—Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes never fully establishes its reason for being.

A seriously flawed movie wrapped around two nearly perfect performances.

For what it is -- a big, expensive, occasionally campy action movie full of well-known actors speaking in well-rounded accents -- Troy is not bad. It has the blocky, earnest integrity of a classic comic book, and it labors to respect the strangeness and grandeur of its classical sources.

A sensitive adaptation full of beautifully judged performances that nonetheless fails to maintain the essential appeal of its own source material: the quietly feminist retelling of one of the most retold lives in history from the perspective of a woman who was central to that life, while figuring almost nowhere in the record of it.

McQueen clearly wants to broaden the archetype of stiff-upper-lip Englishness into something more inclusive. It’s a worthy message, but one that sometimes seems to take precedence over the characters and story rather than emerging organically from them.

That they're English and elderly apparently makes their antics screamingly funny to people who would turn up their noses at similar humor in a film like "Scary Movie."

Mr. Murphy is not given much to do in this sloppy, good-hearted sequel, so he graciously allows himself to be upstaged by all manner of animatronic, celebrity-voiced talking animals.

The main problem with Such a Long Journey is its storytelling. There is simply too much happening.

Narrative coherence is perhaps not among the film's virtues, but its loopy, cluttered story is part of the fun. And a clearer, simpler plot might have required the sacrifice of some delightful grace notes and visual marvels, like the elastic-necked geisha or the one-eyed ambulatory umbrella.

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.

Mr. Kang is a gifted choreographer of bloody chaos, but he has enough range and imagination to strew a few interludes of haunting tenderness amid the shell casings and ketchup packs.

Unquestionably minor, perhaps deliberately so, but it is nonetheless intermittently delightful.

Unfortunately, the rest of the movie does not live up to Mr. Russell's performance.

Especially if you’re watching with children, you could spend a perfectly lovely afternoon diving into Luca’s refreshing blue-green waters. But unlike the two fish-kid buddies at the movie’s center, you may not emerge from the experience transformed.

Mamma Mia! is in essence celebrity karaoke night.

A loose- jointed, not especially memorable comic caper with some lovely moments of humorous invention, many patches of clumsy writing and a few game performances.

Benny Safdie’s first solo film, to its credit, explores different psychological territory. Rather than entrapping us in Mark’s roiling brain, he seems to be purposely walling us off from both the character’s and the actor’s interiority.

In general, and in spite of its deft use of archival video clips and interviews, Giuliani Time offers a superficial reading of recent New York history, zeroing in on the headlines while often missing the context.

Careening from bathos to bromance to naked sexytime, the movie is like a mashup of three or four different movies, at least two of them fairly unpleasant. And yet Love and Other Drugs is so sincere and unjaded about its mystifying purpose that it keeps our gaze fixed on the screen for the full two hours.

The time is right for a breezy, captivating New York romantic comedy. Sidewalks of New York is not an especially good movie, but it will do.

Leconte's visual instincts are so impressive that they outstrip his story, leaving us flushed and dazzled, but also, as after a long night of champagne and baccarat (to say nothing of other irresponsible pleasures), hungry, tired, and homesick.

Watching Jackass 3-D was like being plunged into a Hieronymous Bosch painting of hell, yet this very reaction attests to the franchise's primal, diabolical power.

Moves nimbly from behind-the-scenes comedy to melodrama, with occasional stumbles into pop psychology and film-noir violence.

The resolution of these characters’ arcs, and of For Good’s several other subplots, feels unsatisfying, rushed through and at the same time too fussed over. But any sense of disappointment that Wicked: For Good doesn’t quite live up to the first movie pops like a big pink bubble the moment Erivo and Grande unite one last time to sing the showstopping duet “For Good.”

There’s something to admire in the pedal-to-the-metal commitment of their project, and certainly Uncut Gems is the product of an uncompromising vision. But I found the result to be claustrophobic and, finally, dull, with scene after scene that hammers home the same point we understood from the very beginning: that Howard is a lost soul, fated to run both his business and personal life into the ground.

If Affleck and Driver at times appear to be on loan from a different, dopier movie, possibly one involving Monty Python, they both have such a cape-swooshing, mustache-twirling good time that it’s hard to blame them for going all in on their characters’ villainy.

It doles out information so arbitrarily that you are robbed of the twin pleasures of figuring out clues and figuring out you've been fooled.

Unlike most movie love stories, Closer does have the virtue of unpredictability. The problem is that, while parts are provocative and forceful, the film as a whole collapses into a welter of misplaced intensity.

Front-loaded with inspired gags, and the first half-hour is both sneakily and explosively funny, raising expectations that are never quite met.

Its subject matter is intrinsically upsetting.

Brooks has given us the rare contemporary rom-com that's by turns (if intermittently) thoughtful and funny, and that doesn't feel focus-grouped, cynical, misogynist, or mean. It seems ungenerous not to cut such a generous movie a break.

The sheer scale of the production, and the size of the venue, make the film interesting to watch.

This rough-edged parody feels both distinctive and handmade, and for those reasons alone it’s a hard movie to hate, even when it temporarily loses its comic footing. Anyway, as romantic comedies down the ages have taught us, hatred is just a latent form of love.

If Asteroid City had kept its focus more tightly on these two troubled families, it might have turned into the most emotionally truthful movie Anderson has yet made. Instead the story widens out to include a sprawling cast of less complex, if often amusing, secondary characters.

At 137 minutes, The Northman can feel ponderously crammed with both mystic visions (however hauntingly rendered) and Mel Gibson–grade sadistic gore. Somewhere around the two-hour point, the endless bone-crunching battle scenes—while impeccably choreographed and breathtakingly shot in fluid long takes—start to become existentially wearying and even morally suspect.

Ms. Lazin succeeds in conjuring his presence and in showing how smart and likable he could be, but the film's perspective is frustratingly limited.

If only the results weren't so respectably dull.

The picture is saved from mediocrity by Mr. Raimi's smooth competence, and by the unusually high quality of the acting.

Hathaway and Ejiofor seem excited to play edgier, less nice people than they often get the chance to, and the early scenes of them locking horns in their claustrophobic (if posh) flat generate enough energy to carry the movie almost all the way over the finish line.

A hallucinatory tour de force of color, perspective and scale, virtually encapsulates the history of Japanese animation.

Too much seriousness can be fatal to a picture like this one, since it impedes the efficient delivery of dumb laughter and easy thrills.

Age of Ultron, then, shows what happens when an unstoppable force (Joss Whedon’s imagination) meets an immovable object (the Disney/Marvel behemoth). And the result is, indeed, paradoxical: a crashy, overlong, FX-driven blockbuster that’s capable of morphing, Hulk-to-Banner style, into a loose-limbed ensemble comedy about collaboration, flirtation, and friendship.

His passion is infectious and his enthusiasm for environmental causes commendable, but the movie’s metaphysical and sociological aspirations sometimes come off as cringe-inducingly similar to those that might be expressed by a white lady running a healing-crystal shop in a seaside town.

It's a bit like "The Sixth Sense," but without the melodramatic comfort of the supernatural.

Somehow, in spite of the stunning vistas and some witty and affecting moments, the story seems to unfold at a distance; the human drama is diminished by the setting rather than amplified by it.

The story, touching though it is, does not quite have enough emotional resonance or variety of incident to sustain a feature, and even at 85 minutes it feels a bit long. The premise, too, is a little thin.

Even in the film's weaker stretches, the fierce presence of Tilda Swinton made it impossible to tear my eyes away.

While far from a great movie, nonetheless effectively dramatizes a position that has been argued, by principled commentators on the left and the right, for several years now: that the abuse of prisoners, innocent or not, is not only repugnant in its own right.

For all the hype and the inevitable box office bonanza, Terminator 3 is essentially a B movie, content to be loud, dumb and obvious.

Super 8 is at its best when it dwells in this secret childhood empire, and at its worst when it juices up its essentially simple story with increasingly senseless action set pieces.

By the time the great vampire showdown finally got started, I was good and done with Breaking Dawn, Part 2. But the big action scene is so campily over the top - with one twist so unforeseeable - that it sent me out on a burst of grudging goodwill.

None of it is quite believable -- the film is too studied, too forward in its conceits to be entirely satisfying -- but Mr. Eckhart and Ms. Bonham Carter approach their roles with intelligence and conviction.

The action and humor are enough to make an hour and a half pass quickly and pleasantly.

By the end, instead of feeling stirred to a high pitch of anxiety and excitement, you may feel battered and worn down. But not, in the end, too terribly disappointed.

For the most part, Three Thousand Years of Longing reads not as an unintended allegory of contemporary race relations but as a thoughtful, melancholy, and sometimes mordantly funny celebration of the time-and-space-collapsing power of storytelling.

The Promise occupies a curious landscape somewhere between opera and cartoon.

The filmmakers try to balance pointed, often incisive satire and unabashed sweetness, with results that are sometimes bracing, sometimes baffling and quite often, and in unexpected ways, touching.

Though I found Hereafter meandering and occasionally sentimental, I couldn't help but admire Clint Eastwood's ambition in taking on-headfirst-the greatest fact of human existence.

Even as the story accrues preposterousness, the action moves along crisply, and Tatum and Foxx hit a nice buddy-movie vibe.

Nevertheless, I’m So Excited (in Spanish, the title is Los amantes pasajeros, meaning both “the fleeting lovers” and “the passenger lovers”) looks fabulous, talks dirty, and sometimes makes you laugh, which is really all you can ask of a fleeting lover.

Even knowing what's likely to come-the doors opening on their own, the skeptical characters scoffing at metaphysical explanations, the unheeded warnings from paranormally gifted guests-doesn't make it any less nailbiting to watch.

The brusque realism of Kragh-Jacobsen's style -- his careful suppression of style -- allows a surprising sweetness to emerge.

I found myself curiously willing to overlook Admission’s weaknesses, or even to reinterpret them as strengths — couldn’t those inconclusive endings be seen as a refreshingly un-rom-com-like embrace of life’s open-endedness and complexity?

Reasonably well-executed thriller. It suffers not from awkwardness or silliness, which would make it more fun, but rather from its air-brushed, expensive pretentiousness.

The feel-good movie of the year.

Though the director's jet-set fantasy world of rugged jewel thieves and sailboat races, triste cabaret singers and sybaritic pleasures may feel dated and more than a little decadent, it is a nice enough place to visit.

I Want You Back is a sometimes underwhelming vehicle for Day and Slate’s considerable comic talents, but it’s a pleasure to spend two hours in their company.

As a life lesson for teenage girls, Twilight (excuse the pun) sucks. As a parable for the dark side of female desire, it's weirdly powerful.

Works best as a bang-and- boom action picture, a loud symphony of bombardment and explosion juiced up with frantic editing and shiny computer-generated imagery.

In essence, it's a ragged collection of bits and sketches cobbled into about a dozen plots, most of which call upon the cast to do a lot of tongue and neck-spraining French kissing.

Immerses you in violence and agony, but it may leave you with a curious feeling of detachment.

Tight, sober and strangely comical.

Through two viewings of Jackie, I was never able to pin down whether it was Portman’s performance or Larraín’s way of framing it that left me emotionally shut out.

Bronstein expertly infuses the audience with Linda’s negative emotions, as if we were the ones hooked up to a feeding tube. But as I wrote just last week in a review of Benny Safdie’s first solo-directed feature The Smashing Machine, I’m not sure that simply being drawn into a troubled protagonist’s frenetic mental state constitutes the highest aim of cinema.

The one-liners are clever enough and the physical comedy and pop-culture goofing sufficiently dumb and broad to make Undercover Brother, a reasonably pleasant experience.

From an aesthetic and technical perspective, her achievement is laudable, but there’s something underfurnished about this movie, a lack of historical, intellectual, and thematic richness. For all its elaborate design and carefully calibrated mood, it comes down to the tale of a randy fox in an impeccably preserved Greek Revival henhouse.

A thin, pleasant teenage heist comedy with a chewy nugget of social criticism buried inside it.

It's not heaven, exactly, but after the purgatory of the late summer movie season, it may be close enough.

It is a beautifully made film - decorously composed, meticulously acted, cleanly photographed. But all of these qualities make it seem complacent and hypocritical when it wants to be honest and brave, and sentimental rather than emotionally daring.

The movie is a little claustrophobic -- a marathon of conference calls, frenzied pointing and clicking, and office pep talks.

Some of the scenes are like mislaid puzzle pieces, and they snap into place only when all three movies have been seen and absorbed. This makes watching any one of the episodes both more interesting and more frustrating than it might otherwise be, since a portion of dramatic satisfaction is always withheld.

A slight, amusing documentary.

An average romantic comedy put together with enough professionalism to keep your cynicism momentarily at bay, featuring good-looking actors who also, in this case, seem like pretty nice people.

Once you accept the utter and profound inconsequentiality of Rock of Ages, there's much to enjoy in it, from Zeta-Jones' capable hoofing (as a dramatic actress I find her deadeningly dull, but the woman can dance) to Giamatti's sly performance as a calculating, gray-ponytailed rock impresario.

Has a ghoulish wit. It's not as cheekily knowing as the "Scream" movies or as trashily Grand Guignol as the "Evil Dead" franchise, but like those pictures it recognizes the close relationship between fright and laughter, and dispenses both with a free, unpretentious hand.

From a technical standpoint, Taking Lives is competent and sometimes even impressive. It is cleanly edited and nicely shot -- at times as cool and rich as a York Peppermint Pattie. Beyond that, there is not much to say.

I was onboard with the gentle charm of Safety Not Guaranteed until these last few scenes, when the genuine trauma suffered by these characters - especially Kenneth, whose paranoia and isolationism seem like symptoms of real mental illness - gets glossed over in an unconvincingly Spielbergian happy ending.

This may be the coach's story, but to the extent that Coach Carter is interesting rather than merely inspirational, it's because of the team.

Even though Love's Labour's Lost is, in showbiz terms, a turkey stuffed with chestnuts, you wouldn't trade it for a pot of gold.

Mr. Belvaux's sensitive, generous way with actors suggests that, with more discipline and less gimmickry, he might have made a single masterwork, and After the Life provides the best support for this assessment.

An easygoing exercise, impossible to dislike but not especially memorable, engaging but finally derivative:

The storytelling is choppy and abrupt, and the filmmakers rely heavily on voice-over narration to announce themes that are never brought to dramatic life on screen. Mr. Ledger, his heartthrob charisma camouflaged behind a heavy beard, gives a stiff, hesitant performance.

When every character is always operating at maximum loathsomeness, it can be difficult to recalibrate your disgust-o-meter. I suspect this sense of moral vertigo, and the resulting nausea, is part of what Cronenberg is after, but his skill at evoking those states in the viewer doesn’t make the experience of watching Maps to the Stars any less sour.

Joy the movie never cohered, for me, into a story with forward motion. The minute the film begins to find its footing in one tonal register, it switches to another.

There's no buildup, no narrative arc, just one scene of comically debauched partying after another.

That minute and a half of still photos packs in more dense, economical laughs than all the laborious gross-outs and chase sequences that came before. Maybe The Hangover Part III should consider restricting itself to the slide-show format.

While it’s frequently moving and occasionally thrilling, the gears sometimes grind audibly on the shift in between.

Mr. Miike is best known in the United States for horror films like "Audition" and "Ichi the Killer." Gozu, for all its extremity, is a more relaxed, less disturbing picture. Its dreamy disconnection is reminiscent of David Lynch's "Mulholland Drive," but it is, if anything, even more hermetic and dissociated.

Finds a sprawling, vivid middle ground somewhere between documentary and myth.

I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the screen during Warfare, even if they were sometimes half-covered during those many cutaways to lacerated flesh. But leaving the movie, my main sensation was relief that that brutal viewing experience was over, rather than reflection on the meaning of the Iraq War, on the experience of war itself, or on the success or failure of this particular attempt to represent it.

The Wackness may not have much that's new to say about being 17--it's a fairly standard coming-of-age drama with a couple of noteworthy performances--but it's a definitive compendium of trivia about 1994 (by Levine's lights, the best year ever).

Every so often a movie comes along that's bad in such original and unexpected ways that it inspires an almost admiring fascination

If this particular franchise’s material feels at times a bit thin to be spun out even to two hours, it may be simply that three solo movies per Avenger is more than enough. But this weekend, if the lure of an air-conditioned summer blockbuster summons you like a sacred Asgardian hammer, you could do worse than this Easter egg–colored, classic rock–scored frolic.

If the latest escapade is not quite as sparkling as its predecessors—in 2021, the second entry briefly surpassed Citizen Kane as one of the highest-rated movies on Rotten Tomatoes—it retains their warmhearted and cheekily funny spirit.

Follows a formula, but the formula, when applied with skill and intelligence, as it is here, is pretty much foolproof.

Sully can feel like a dutiful, hagiographic slog, even though its actual running time barely tops 90 minutes and both Hanks and Eckhart give warm, understated, funny performances in the only two roles developed enough to qualify as real characters.

By the end, after an hour and a half of wondering -- sometimes amusedly, sometimes impatiently -- just what this strenuously unconventional movie is supposed to be, you discover that the answer is as conventional as can be.

All of this makes the movie pleasant, but not very memorable - a pale mirror image of "Shopgirl," which touches on some similar themes.

The performances, even those by trained actors like Mr. Ramirez and Ms. Majorino, have the hesitant, blinking opacity that some directors look for in nonprofessional casts. Their awkwardness is charming, and part of the point of the movie, but it also makes for some dull stretches and thwarts your ability to regard the characters with sympathy rather than mere curiosity.

If you're amused by jokes involving male genitals, female pubic hair, flatulence and dismemberment, it should be a big hit.

Lacks both the intellectual rigor and the soulful sublimity of "A.I.," but it nonetheless allows some genuine ideas and emotions to pop up amid the noise and clutter.

Where the book is sinuous and oblique, their film is galumphing and heavy-handed, its rare flights of lyricism stranded between long stretches of outright risibility. And yet there's something commendable about the directors' commitment to their grandiose act of folly.

In short, The BFG seems perfectly self-sufficient in its bookness, in no need of the lavishly cinematic bear hug Steven Spielberg bestows upon it here.

Ms. Silverman is a skilled performer, and Jesus Is Magic is occasionally very funny, but don't be fooled: naughty as she may seem, she's playing it safe.

If you see Okja, and I hope you do, stay for the final credits. It’s not often that a stinger scene pops up at the end of a movie, not to pre-sell the inevitable sequel, but to leave you with something to think, wonder, and worry about.

A sometimes enthralling, sometimes exhausting tour de force.

Except perhaps for Lux, who, like The Virgin Suicides itself, is a hothouse flower perishing for want of sunshine and fresh air.

At a certain point, Mr. Carruth's fondness for complexity and indirection crosses the line between ambiguity and opacity, but I hasten to add that my bafflement is colored by admiration.

Though at times Rosewater is clearly the work of a first-timer still finding his voice, Stewart is indisputably a real filmmaker.

Though it wears out its welcome in one dreary stretch midway through, Weird: The Al Yankovic Story (which premieres on the free, ad-supported streaming service the Roku Channel on Friday) is an appropriately goofy tribute to its subject and co-creator: a movie parody about the life of a parodist.

Scene by scene, there’s nothing not to enjoy about this lushly animated ode to exploration, teamwork, and pluck, especially if you’re a parent of small kids on the hunt for a fun family outing. But for all its verve and polish, Moana 2 seems more like a consumer product, in some subtle but unmistakable way, than the first film did.

More amusing than annoying. It is not as maniacally uninhibited as "Old School" or as dementedly lovable as "Elf," but its cheerful dumbness is hard to resist.

Clouds is about the dumbest intelligent movie I've ever seen.

I certainly can't support any calls for boycotting or protesting this busy, trivial, inoffensive film. Which is not to say I'm recommending you go see it.

One seriously sick little blockbuster.

There’s something sour and strained about this movie that’s at odds with the usual Muppet ethos of game, let’s-put-on-a-show cheer. Maybe that’s because of the inordinate amount of screen time spent on the rivalry between two villains who are as uninteresting as they are unpleasant.

Sensation, not sense, is the point of this exercise, and what it lacks in originality it makes up for in effective if cheap moments of fright and dread.

Reasonably good fun, even if, in the end, it's not really very interesting.

For all the film’s best intentions — and a finely tuned performance from the ever-better Woodley — for me The Fault in Our Stars never entirely found its way out of Sparks territory.

For his part. Mr. Freeman shows himself, once again, incapable of giving a bad performance.

The film has its creepy, suspenseful moments -- but it shrinks a rich, strange story to the dimensions of an anecdote.

There's a little more sex than you'll see on WB, but mostly there's an atmosphere of brooding psychodrama and erotic cruelty that falls somewhere between "Cries and Whispers" and "Say Anything."

For all the talk of artistic and amorous passion, the film is trapped in snobbish inertia; its idea of period drama amounts to a kind of highbrow name- dropping.

Depp's witty, spare performance gives the picture a poignancy -- a depth of feeling, if you'll allow the pun -- that Mr. Demme's hectic direction and the hurried script by David McKenna and Nick Cassavetes don't quite earn.

Unfortunately, that sharp-eyed domestic comedy is dwarfed by the far less well-written supervillain crime plot that surrounds it.

Even his fans may find themselves frustrated, since the film observes Mr. Franken closely without generating much insight into him.

The parts of Get Rich or Die Tryin' that feel most genuine have to do with friendship and family, rather than with criminal intrigue. But the movie ultimately lacks an emotional core. It will certainly make 50 Cent even richer, but it wouldn't have killed him to try a bit harder.

What ultimately brings down The Boxtrolls isn’t the film’s willingness to wade into grimmer, more gruesome waters than your average kids’ animated adventure. It’s the failure to anchor its often misanthropic story in a character or relationship strong enough to offer a glimpse of redemption—a place of respite in an ugly, cheese-obsessed world.

It boasts (nearly) all the elements of a perfectly fine, even very good, movie, without ever quite becoming a movie at all.

Holds together in spite of its flaws.

Nothing is particularly believable here, but there are still a few moments of silly, sinister fun.

Surprisingly enough, it often soars to heights of not bad.

It's as if the director, Andrew Fleming, and the screenwriters, Nat Mauldin and Ed Solomon, set out to make a movie that would be mediocre in every respect. If so, they have completely succeeded.

Unfortunately, these actors are subject to Mr. LaBute's usual dramatic method, which is to cobble together a preposterous moral outrage and then wave it in front of our faces, asking us to believe that it is a window, or even a mirror.

If these developments sound slight and meandering, so is the movie. Everything Must Go has a spacious, under-inhabited feeling.

Sandwiched between the musical numbers are an eclectic assorment of cameos, including Willie Nelson, Queen Latifa and Elton John. The funniest one comes during the closing credits, when the rapper Xzibit testifies that the Country Bears were a formative influence on hip-hop, certainly something the Eagles could never claim.

The most memorable element of The Winter Soldier, besides Redford, is probably Scarlett Johansson, whose dryly funny Natasha at times comes perilously close to being … a well-developed female character?

The script (by Jeremy Garelick and Jay Lavender) strains hard after a few easy jokes, and the whole movie feels dull and trivial.

Despite across-the-board bravura performances (especially by Philip Seymour Hoffman and Paul Giamatti as dueling campaign managers), The Ides of March somehow remains static and lifeless, like a civics-class diorama.

A day and half after walking out with a sensation, primarily, of physical relief—at two hours and nine minutes, Pain & Gain makes for a long, loud, relentlessly assaultive sit—I find that my thumb is wavering at half-mast. I’m still not sure whether to mildly like or mildly hate this movie.

After a while the movie spins its wheels, unable to find much emotional traction in the icy bleakness.

The problem lies in the calculating pretentiousness of using human misery to make shallow entertainment seem serious. It's worth comparing Spy Game with "The Tailor of Panama," John Boorman's far superior exercise in post-cold-war spycraft.

There's a curious mismatch between the surface of the movie and what lies beneath it. Wong's technique is layered and detailed like a couture gown, but the story it hangs on is as generic as a seamstress's dress form.

Unfortunately, The Invisible Circus, which follows Phoebe as she retraces her dead sibling's steps from Paris to Berlin to the coast of Portugal, doesn't so much illuminate Phoebe's confusion as share it.

Horrible Bosses doesn't quite qualify as a black comedy. Without the conviction to follow through on its own macabre premise, this underachieving little movie washes out to a muddy grayish-brown.

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.

The inexplicable use of split screens and multiple images does little to bolster the power of the speakers' testimony. If anything, the technique is distracting. Material as emotionally and intellectually challenging as this requires no gimmicks at all.

Like Lou Ye's "Suzhou River," a Hitchcock homage similarly set in Shanghai's demimonde, So Close to Paradise offers an intriguing and sometimes self-canceling mixture of emotion and style.

Possession is in the end an honorable, interesting failure. It falls far short of poetry, but it's not bad prose.

While there are some genuinely dazzling moments of visual bravura, the marriage of flatness and depth that Mr. Aramaki attempts doesn't quite work.

Michael Fassbender's portrayal of Brandon, the rootless Manhattan sex addict in Steve McQueen's Shame, may lay claim to this year's title of most outstanding performance in a mediocre movie.

In casting about for new sources of fear, Marebito achieves its own level of mediocrity.

This Brighton Rock doesn't live up to the greatness of the novel (or even, really, the very-goodness of the 1947 movie), but it doesn't betray Greene's book either, which may be all a reasonable reader and filmgoer could ask.

Polished and bouncy without being overly mawkish or unduly obnoxious. Above all, it is short.

Less a movie than an extended re-enactment from a History Channel documentary, the movie is stagey, preachy, and long on exposition.

It batters you with novelty and works so hard to top itself that exhaustion sets in long before the second hour is over.

Feels more like a thought experiment than a fully developed story.

A peripatetic comedy about two comedians on a jaunt around the north of England, alternately amuses, bores, and annoys, just like its two hilariously intolerable protagonists.

The plot of Antitrust is intricate and uneven, overloaded with twists and not very jolting surprises.

If Remember the Titans is corny, it's unabashedly, even generously so.

The movie seems to love its main character without bothering to understand her.

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

Outfoxed will inevitably be discussed in the same breath (or with the same hyperventilating rage) as Michael Moore's ''Fahrenheit 9/11,'' but it lacks both the showmanship and the scope of that incendiary film.

The format and the purposeful blandness of the script make Jordan seem remote, more icon than human being.

Has occasional moments of heat, but not much warmth. And while it is pretty enough to look at, real beauty eludes it.

Its fidelity to its characters’ view of the world -- although they are presumably college graduates, they seem never to have read a book or expressed an opinion -- is more a liability than a virtue. The Puffy Chair is as modest as their ambitions and as narrow as their curiosity about the world beyond themselves.

I spent much of Vice trying to work out why the same narrative strategies that worked so well in the raucously entertaining "The Big Short" suddenly felt smug and even propagandistic.

This disdain for women is not incidental to the film; it is integral to the fantasy Mr. Brewer is selling, which is that pimping is not as hard as it looks.

It’s Pitt’s wry presence, and his playful relationship to his own movie-star persona, that provides a still center amidst the CGI-smeared chaos and keeps this train from (metaphorically at least) going off the rails.

Elizabethtown is a long, lurching trip to nowhere in particular, but Elizabethtown is a place where you wouldn't mind spending some more time, though perhaps under different circumstances.

In the end Amen is neither as moving nor as illuminating as it should be. It suffers especially when compared -- as is inevitable, given the closeness of their release dates -- with "The Pianist," Roman Polanski's movie about a Polish Jew during the Nazi occupation.

Its cheery inoffensiveness, though, is in some ways disappointing.

Neither Alex Murphy’s internal moral conflict nor the larger, vaguely satiric portrait of a global culture dependent on high-tech law enforcement seem to be the main point of this Robocop remake, which raises the question of what is meant to be the point.

There is no way a feature-length movie could do justice to such bounty, and Walk the Line settles for the minimum.

The real surprise, given the secondhand material, is that not everything proceeds by rote in Murder by Numbers.

The most curious thing about this magical-realist fable...is how thin and soft it is, how unpersuasive and ultimately forgettable even its most strenuous inventions turn out to be.

It reminds us that Italy is beautiful, that Fascism was a dreadful nuisance and that Sean Penn is a great actor, deserving of better vehicles than this vintage lemon.

Together, Mr. Lee and Mr. Green have a daft comic energy, and they are assisted by game performances from the rest of the cast.

This thin, floppy comedy never quite became the high-spirited summer sex romp it clearly set out to be. I haven’t quite figured out yet why The To Do List doesn’t work, when so many elements within it seem to.

Despite the rococo obsessiveness of its special effects and its voracious sampling of past horror movies, Van Helsing is mostly content to offer warmed-over allusions and secondhand thrills.

An adequate piece of children's entertainment, though it seems better suited for home viewing...than for the big screen.

In a late scene in House of Gucci, one character labels another “a triumph of mediocrity.” That paradox and others like it might be applied to the movie itself: It is a glamorous slog, a fabulous bore, a pointlessly bespoke bit of silliness.

The glacierization of half of the world's inhabited land is contemplated with barely a hint of horror. In fact, it looks kind of cool.

While nothing in the movie - least of all the two main performances - is especially fresh or original, it does have a few decent gags and amusing moments.

Carefully sets itself up as an obvious, transparent morality play, and then just as deliberately refuses the easy payoff. This is both impressive and a little disingenuous: the film is in effect congratulating itself for refusing to offer a neat and tidy view of life without offering much else.

The painfully literal ending struck me as a somewhat risible disappointment, and though I admired the movie’s imagination and ambition, I can’t say I ever entered wholeheartedly into its story.

The usual double-crosses and convolutions ensue, but the narrative is so haphazard that the whole thing -- both the caper and the movie that contains it -- seems to have been hastily improvised.

Pretty much pure boilerplate: a reasonably well-executed throwaway that, when you finally get around to seeing it in its proper setting, will make you glad you decided to travel by air instead of by sea.

It has a bright young cast and a clever, eclectic soundtrack, but the tone veers unsteadily from mockery to preachiness, and the story loses its breath, hopping from one clumsily paced scene to the next.

Both stupefyingly bad and utterly overpowering; it can elicit, sometimes within a single scene, a gasp of rapture and a spasm of revulsion.

The movie turns out to be a predictable and somewhat sentimental lower-depths love triangle, but Ms. Braga almost makes it work.

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.

Inspiring, but also, as a film, a little tedious, without enough narrative or exploration to justify its feature length.

Tomorrowland is a highly original, occasionally even visionary piece of sci-fi filmmaking, but that doesn't necessarily make it a good movie.

Until its unbearably hokey ending, acquits itself reasonably well.

Ultimately The Switch can't escape the constraints of its own formula.

It's such a disappointment that The Descendants isn't a better movie than it is. In this soap opera disguised as a comedy, Payne, who was always a master at balancing sharp satire with an essential humanism, has traded his tart lemon center for a squishy marshmallow one.

The best moments come when Mr. Smith and Mr. Lawrence are permitted to pause from their action-hero duties and run their funny, unpredictable mouths.

The movie's curious capacity for self-erasure makes it a tough one to write about; less than 24 hours later, I recall it with all the clarity of something I half-watched on a plane with a hangover in 1996.

It is hard to feel much warmth toward people whose most salient feature is their disconnection from reality.

Uncanny singing animals aside, a secondary effect of the film’s commitment to zoological verisimilitude is to place the voice actors in a relatively powerless position. It’s a strange choice to assemble an all-star cast from various walks of celebrity—actors, pop singers, rappers, comedians—and then make their only contribution a verbal one.

Stumbles from restrained, fine-edged realism into blunt and muddy melodrama.

There are some scenes that display impressive technical cunning, and others that show an astute regard for the emotional capacities of his able cast, but On the Run amounts to a sullen display of skill in a dubious cause.

His (Culkin's) performance is earnest and brave, but also mannered when it should be un-self-conscious, and awkward when grace is called for.

Chloe remains engaging for longer than any movie this schlocky and overwritten has a right to be. But the movie loses what little goodwill it's managed to build up by the last act, which feels clumsily grafted from a completely different film.

Jasmine attains the paradoxical state of being fascinatingly tiresome. The same pair of words might be used to describe Blue Jasmine, which, whether you like it or not, surely counts as one of Allen’s more unexpected films of the past decade

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

Beneath its stylistic and structural quirks, Big Bad Love -- is a self-indulgent celebration of self-indulgence.

The movie keeps you at a distance; it is visually sweeping, and the history is fascinating, but the drama is rarely stirring.

Many American viewers may take Haneke at his word and walk out midway through this grueling ethics exam of a movie. But much as I may resent the facile polemics of Haneke's shame-the-viewer project, I have to respect the way that he nailed me, trembling, to my seat.

Works best when it sticks with the gentle humor and pathos of its literary source.

For all its tasteful spareness and eerie, diaphanous mood, Blue Caprice feels, in the end, insubstantial. It’s a true-crime story that illustrates little about the crime in question and a character study whose characters, even when haunting, remain stubbornly opaque.

The fact that Marry Me contains anything so formulaic as a third-act separation montage should spell out clearly what you’re getting in for.

Mr. Shyamalan never gives us anything to believe in, other than his own power to solve problems of his own posing, and his command of a narrative logic is as circular -- and as empty -- as those bare patches out in the cornfield.

Whatever beliefs they may hold about other people’s humanity, I’m glad these women finally received justice from the network that wronged them. I’m just not sure that translates into wanting to spend two hours in their company.

A Slipping-Down Life has a worn, scruffy feeling. It gazes lovingly at vintage clothes and battered old cars as if they were the visible signs of authenticity, wishing that its morose, disconnected inhabitants could somehow be touched with the same elusive quality.

The disaster sequences themselves — of which there are many, placed at regular intervals but disconnected from the story, like operatic arias — have a dreamlike and weirdly exhilarating quality that’s quite different from the plodding wham-bam destruction of the average action blockbuster.

To the disappointment of this once-enthusiastic ogler, Magic Mike’s Last Dance fails to capture the eponymous magic of the first two very different but both delightful movies.

Mr. Swofford's book has earned a place alongside the classics of military literature, but Mr. Mendes's film is more like a footnote - a minor movie about a minor war, and a film that feels, at the moment, remarkably irrelevant.

Looper felt to me like a maddening near-miss: It posits an impossible but fascinating-to-imagine relationship...and then throws away nearly all the dramatic potential that relationship offers. If someone remakes Looper as the movie it could have been in, say, 30 years, will someone from the future please FedEx it back to me?

Conventionally described as a political thriller, but The Interpreter is as apolitical as it is unthrilling.

It never pretends that it's anything more than trashy, cheesy fun. But even trash -- especially trash this expensive -- should at least be well made. Sure, it's easy on the eyes, but would a little brains be too much to ask?

Ms. Polley is a naturally subtle actress, and part of her appeal lies in an unusual ability to seem at once forthright and enigmatic, but this time she comes off as a bit smug.

It's hard not to admire Zeitlin's ambitious vision, his do-it-yourself aesthetic, and the commitment of his cast and crew - a kind of utopian collective whose jobs often overlapped, as the local, nonprofessional actors collaborated on set-building and other technical tasks. But that doesn't mean the result of their labor is exactly what you'd call a "good movie."

A thin and unsatisfying concoction that somehow manages to make one of the richest and most durable sources of culture-clash comedy into an occasion for dullness.