Dana Stevens

Whereas the original was a work of speculative science fiction - a chin-stroking fable about evolution in the nuclear age - this revisiting of the Planet of the Apes myth is an animal-rights manifesto disguised as a prison-break movie.

A dumb, by-the-numbers romantic comedy. Yet I kept finding small things to enjoy in it, mainly because of the two hard-to-hate leads.

Captain America isn't a masterpiece, but it's a solidly crafted, elegant adventure movie that held my attention from start to finish and sent me out into the street energized instead of enervated.

Tabloid is the perfect movie for that night when you can't decide whether to see something low- or highbrow. It's seamlessly and satisfyingly both.

It's always hard to predict how a work of art will age over time, but I have the feeling that, like its three young leads, the Harry Potter series will turn out just fine.

I'll be forever grateful to this movie for introducing me to Nim's story, a tale so powerful and suggestive that it functions as a myth about the ever-mysterious relationship between human beings and animals.

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.

This script - a collaboration between Hanks and Nia Vardalos, the writer and star of "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" - would need multiple punch-up sessions to attain mediocrity. Roberts and Hanks aren't just prevented from playing their A games; they're never even taken off the bench.

Marveling at its grotesque gigantism doesn't make this two-and-a-half-hour-long movie any less dull.

From time to time, Bad Teacher gestures vaguely at the movie it could have been. Diaz slouches and snarls effectively through the early scenes. It isn't till we realize her redemption will be unsatisfying that the character starts to curdle.

It's sweet-spirited, visually delightful (if aurally cacophonous), and it will make for a pleasant enough family afternoon at the movies. But we've come to expect so much more than mere pleasantness from Pixar that Cars 2 feels almost like a betrayal.

The film spends too much time wringing its hands over the all-too-evident fact that journalism is in crisis, when it could be documenting that crisis from the inside.

Even by the standards of the current run of mediocre comic-book movies, this one stands out for its egregious shoddiness.

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.

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.

Submarine isn't a perfect film, but it's a terrific first one.

These ludicrous but endearing moments of bro-bonding are all that sets this otherwise stock-issue superhero movie apart from its mass-produced brethren.

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.

The middle section of the film, in which we follow Jack's childhood in a series of fragmented memories from birth until about the age of 12, is as astonishingly precise a rendering of the way the world looks to a child as I've seen on film.

A trifle in both senses of the word: a feather-light, disposable thing, and a rich dessert appealingly layered with cake, jam, and cream.

For a series so steeped in supernatural mumbo-jumbo, Pirates of the Caribbean displays remarkably little sense of wonder.

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

See it because it's f---ing hilarious.

All the rest of Thor's 113 minutes felt so synthetic and overfamiliar that those brief flashes of spontaneity stood out like Morse code messages from another, better movie.

If you're interested in the history of the human race-if you're a member of the human race-you owe it to yourself to see this movie.

Yes, this is the kind of movie you could imagine seeing with your grandmother at a suburban mall, but does everything have to be edgy and dark and genre-reinventing?

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

This is a grippingly original work, with gorgeous cinematography by Christopher Blauvelt, and the first hour or more achieves something like greatness.