Ella Taylor

Saving Mr. Banks does end in tears, but they're Disney tears, as befits a movie about Disney made by Disney. Which doesn't mean you shouldn't see this beguiling piece of pop storytelling, built on half-truths whipped into shape for a storybook ending that never was.

Enjoyable and forgettable in equal measure, the lovably cheesy Australian movie Bran Nue Dae is a must for children bitten by the musical-revival fever, for all who heart American Idol, and for anyone who came of age in the late 1960s - and is willing to hear the beloved pop standards of their youth massacred for a new age.

The Way, Way Back isn't exactly memorable, and strictly speaking it would do just fine on a small screen. But unlike the glib "The Descendants," which is also about, it's smart, funny and moving about human weakness.

Another Year is a stacked deck of a movie that draws a harshly unforgiving, sometimes smug line between boomers who've made good and those who've fallen by the wayside.

Nobody's idea of "Mr. Holland's Opus," but it winds up in a similar place, more or less.

It's a fun fact that actor Forest Whitaker traces his roots to the Igbo tribe, but that belongs in another film. Re-emerging speaks for itself as an uplifting portrait of an exuberant subculture that doesn't just practice its faith — it revels in it.

Even the “good” Holocaust stories are chased by heartbreak, as we learn from this straight-ahead documentary.

A labor of love hobbled by a stubborn desire to eke its delicate love story out of a premise that all but sits up and begs to be treated as a political thriller.

Leconte, as always, means to explore the gray areas between sexual espionage and love, and there remains something powerful about the fantasy of being listened to, without judgment.

Waters directing, from a perky script by Heather Hach and Leslie Dixon, is bouncy and assured enough to give a cheeky lilt to what otherwise might have been an earnest PSA for intergenerational peace, love and understanding.

Where Lehane's novel seethes with emotionally charged subtext, Eastwood's workmanlike direction feels static -- fatally tasteful, embalmed in gravitas -- while his sporadic efforts at dramatic heightening come off as vulgar cliché.

The movie is a sharply observed if formally bloated addition to the canon of visceral tales from the Baltimore city - if "tale" is the right word for a movie that puts so much energy into the avoidance of plot.

A capable, if modest, charmer.

Late Marriage, though hardly dispassionate, assiduously avoids passing judgment on any of its characters, all of whom are desperately trying to bend the world into conformity with their own narratives and superstitions.

The movie remains fragmented, elliptical and overplotted to the point of being hard to track. Still, it's worth hanging in for the finish, a birthday party for Gus (David Duchovny), the producer of the film and the one person they're all linked to. Then Soderbergh pulls off a delicious trick, a gesture of pure, tender, unabashed movie love that makes up for everything.

Deftly blending disrespect and good nature, Fred Claus is a gas.

Charmingly irreverent.

Subtlety was never Taylor Hackford's long suit, but that's an asset in this mischievously fortissimo poke at lawyering and capitalist competition.

Genuinely touching.

Brilliant, goofy, vindictive, incoherent and compassionate, Summer of Sam begins as a work of startling ambition, spins out of control, and finally limps to a bland halt.

Mercifully, the supporting cast saves the day by grasping clearly that in a comedy of manners you have to act mannered, though not to the point of situation comedy.

Zellweger looks like a big movie star roughing it à la Paris Hilton, and as if this weren't distracting enough, the hills are alive with big acting names from both sides of the Atlantic who pop up as help or hindrance to Inman's pilgrim's progress while straining, with variable success, for credible Southern twangs.

Teems with ideas both literary and existential, which might make it unbearably precious, were it not redeemed by woozy charm and some serious acting from Will Ferrell.

When all is said and done, Roos treats his characters and his audience to an unblushingly sentimental, conciliatory ending of the kind that ordinarily makes me feel as though I'm being played for a sucker. I wept on demand and went home happy.

And though at over two hours the movie is too long and too slow, de Caunes sustains a sense of mystery and ambiguity to the end of what is both a satisfying character study and a stately quasi-thriller for amateur historians.

Full of last-minute surprises, this willfully slippery movie seems to make the case both for mixing it up and sticking to your own kind. Which is all of a piece with the sensibility of this wonderfully ambiguous filmmaker, a visionary of our changing times.

Perfectly pleasant, very good-looking, modestly funny, dispiritingly unoriginal variant on the nerd-with-a-dream recipe that's been clobbered to death in animated films for at least a decade now.

Though this graceful film is a minor addition to the canon of Middle Eastern cinema in which nothing and everything happens, Bal is still a beauty.