Joe Morgenstern

Todd Graff's would-be inspirational film lift their voices in song that makes you smile, and squander their voices on dialogue that makes you cringe (but also smile in oddly pleasurable disbelief).

Some movies keep you in a state of suspense. Zoolander 2, a dud glitter-bomb of a sequel, eventually leaves you in a state of suspended animation, with eyes glazed over and brain in sleep mode.

The film as a whole operates in Mr. Anderson's patented, semi-precious zone of antic and droll. It's not as if the filmmaker has gone off the rails. He's just not solidly on them.

What the film does sustain, and quite remarkably, considering its serious theme, is a delicately comic tone. That’s due in large measure to the screenplay by Frank Cottrell Boyce.

Offers plenty of modest pleasures.

What's troubling about the film's technique is its lack of context; we must take Yuris, who speaks serviceable English, pretty much at his word. What's troubling about his story is its ring of truth.

Mr. Maquiling's gotta learn more about dramatic arcs, but he has an infectious interest in how the world looks and works, and he can make you laugh unexpectedly. I look forward to his next film.

The finished film afflicted my own mind with an unwilling suspension of belief. I couldn't connect with it on any level, despite Sam Rockwell's terrific performance as an emotional desperado who wants only to be loved.

Unexpectedly thoughtful, as well as touching.

Mr. Cuarón directs with a hand that's as sure as it is deft. The music is terrific, though I can't say the same for the fusty subtitles, and Adam Kimmel's cinematography bathes the movie's cheerful absurdities in a beautiful glow.

His (Takeshi) sense of style is very much in evidence here, and so is his sense of humor.

It’s a gentle, often funny meditation on advancing age and the fragile joys of youth.

A spectacular record of rehearsals for a show that wasn't to be.

It's easy to speculate that the loving Cleo and the frequently absent Johnny are stand-ins for Ms. Coppola and her own famous father, but Somewhere needn't be seen as a film à clef. The movie stands on its own terms as a slow-burning drama of life in a Hollywood purgatory where you can not only check out but leave.

Disney’s new live-action version is for the most part beguilingly good, even though it’s no replacement for the studio’s 1950 animated classic.

The plot has an intriguing twist, and the production, in addition to Mr. McKellen’s commanding presence, has fine work by Laura Linney as Holmes’s housekeeper, Mrs. Munro, and by Milo Parker as Roger, Mrs. Munro’s son. The boy is vividly intelligent, ferociously angry and a force to be reckoned with.

What's good in the film, which was shot superbly by Matthew Libatique, is so good - so exuberant and touching and sweet - that you want the whole thing to be perfect, but Ruby Sparks is a closed system that gradually turns in on itself. There isn't enough of someone else.

A visionary film with dramatic myopia.

A leisurely and quite lovely drama that honors the conventions of gothic ghost stories without the slightest stain of self-irony.

A daring and unstable mélange of styles--working-class realism, deadpan fantasy, shameless buffoonery. At times it falls flat, or fails to rise. More often than not, though, it's a heartbreaker.

In Hollywood’s franchise game, sequels are seldom the best they can be. This one isn’t, but it’s pretty, perfectly pleasant and good enough.

World Trade Center shows us many things we already know, though with impressive flair, then plunges underground for an unconvincing drama based on a multitude of facts. It's upbeat, all right, but badly off kilter.

It's loud, raunchy, semicoherent and stuffed to the bursting point with heavy weaponry and car chases, most of which involve a red, cocaine-covered Prius that's been pressed into service as a police car. But Adam McKay's comedy of chaos, which he wrote with Chris Henchy, can also be very funny.

The actress gets immeasurable help from the writing: Lisbeth's anger is matched by her intelligence and her physical prowess, which enables her to administer as well as absorb pain in megadoses. But none of it would register without Ms. Rapace's singular combination of eerie beauty and feral intensity. She's a movie star unlike any other.

How, then, does "In Good Company" turn out for the better in spite of itself? No mystery at all. Whatever the fate of old media, or new media, for that matter, winning performances are here to stay.

Seldom has a film presented such a richly ambiguous juxtaposition of modernity (among the toys showered on the boy is a really cool radio-controlled helicopter), ancient mindset and, to be sure, possible miraculousness.

The brute force of Terminator 3 is relieved, I'm happy to say, by Claire Danes's winning performance as John Connor's reluctant accomplice (whom the production notes describe, not inaccurately, as an "unsuspecting veterinarian"); by many of the special effects, which don't seem obsolete at all, and, yes, by the sinister trix of the Terminatrix.

Strangely, though, there isn't enough for one movie, and the first clue to why lurks in the title's ampersand, a sort of linguistic duct tape holding together two stories that never really function as one.

Once Captain America goes off to war in his endearingly silly suit, however, the movie starts to lose its vibe.

Diane Keaton has the crucial role, and she makes the most of it.

A high school comedy that is sharply observed and often terrifically funny, yet oddly misconceived.

I won't pretend that I had a great time watching G.I. Joe: Retaliation.

The book’s climax has been changed, somewhat awkwardly, but the movie doesn’t go soft in the end. I prefer to think it goes tender.

Peterloo starts slowly, takes its time and sometimes tries one’s patience. Don’t expect heartwarming domestic stories. The people are vivid and the acting is superb; as always, the director and his cast have collaborated on the screenplay through improvisations that coalesce into a working script. But the search for understanding — of the massacre and the events leading up to it — is more structural than individual.

Yossi spends much of its 84 minutes with a passive hero. This older Yossi is a vestige of the man he once was, an overweight and hollow-eyed vestige who drags himself through his daily rounds and solitary nights. Mr. Knoller's performance is admirable, and Yossi does find new reasons to embrace life. But his rebirth comes only after a very long requiem.

It's hard to imagine spending $120 million on a film starring a computer-generated mouse -- an actor who barely demands a byte to eat -- but if that's how much it takes to provide innocent enchantment for the global hordes, so be it. This sequel beats the original paws down.

It grows repetitious, both in its account of Crane's ritual behavior and in clumsily written -- and stolidly directed -- scenes between Crane and Carpenter, two men acting out their own unacknowledged sexual drama.

Mr. Keaton’s performance is fascinating from beginning to end, and the movie around him is entertaining in fits and starts. Ultimately, though, it’s a tough sell, a biopic with an uncertain tone that doesn’t know what to make of its subject.

It’s an efficient retelling of a tale about a young Chinese woman discovering her power — affecting at times, occasionally quite lovely, but earnest, often clumsy and notably short on joy.

Ken Loach better watch out. From the start of his illustrious career his name has been synonymous with left-wing politics expressed in remarkably fine, consistently serious social-realist dramas, most of them set in England or Scotland. Now he has gone and directed a comedy from a script by his longtime collaborator Paul Laverty, and it's so delightful that his fans will be clamoring for more.

Gets lots of mileage from a combination of high spirits, scorn for the laws of physics, readily renewable energy and an emphasis on family values-not those of the nuclear family, but of hell-raising, drag-racing outlaws who genuinely care for one another.

The violence wears you down. Like one of its nutso characters, Seven Psychopaths has a death wish.

Stylistic debts abound: the Coen brothers, Roger Deakins, the bleak, gothic landscapes of Terrence Malick's "Badlands" and Richard Brooks's "In Cold Blood." Through it all, though, is the original and memorable spectacle of violence expressed and repressed by the desperate hero.

The point of the film is vacuous materialism, but the way these larcenous children return the camera's impassive gaze suggests that no one is home behind their beautiful faces and dead eyes.

If the plot turns out to be a convenience, the pleasure lies in what the co-stars bring to it.

It's overextended and exhaustingly comic.

The casting is perfect in concept, and occasionally fulfills its promise, but in a notably imperfect film that’s afflicted by a benumbing score and dreary songs.

All the pieces would seem to be in place for an effective film, but the direction is zestless, the pace is more often laggardly than leisurely, and the lead performances are surprisingly lifeless, although Mr. Isaac manages to make a virtue of his scammer's deliberate vagueness.

What's not fine is the dead zone occupied by the monster of the piece, Tom Cruise's veteran rocker, Stacee Jaxx.

The BFG has fizz to spare. It’s an effervescent charmer.

Details like these are delightful. So is the notion of Stonehenge as a transport hub to another temporal plane, and the spectacle of Alex and his dauntless cohorts in tin armor they’ve bought in a souvenir shop. What’s destructive, and eventually benumbing, is the kitchen-sink clutter of fantasy, reality, wish-fulfillment and glib enchantment. To say that the film lacks simplicity would be an oversimplification.

The film, directed by Tom Hooper (“The King’s Speech”) is beautifully visualized and steadfastly interesting, yet I kept wondering why I didn’t feel more involved in it.

I like Mr. Gordon-Levitt a lot as an actor, and I wish him only the best in his future work as a filmmaker. There is, however, the matter of this particular movie, an overheated disquisition on the pleasures and limitations of masturbation.

Much of the action is interesting, and surprisingly well grounded in science...Yet the script works few variations on its basic idea until the climax, which is crazily out of scale -- the urban-traffic equivalent of a nuclear holocaust.

I'm still smiling as I recall Jess, the soccer star-to-be, standing behind her straitlaced mother in the kitchen and casually bouncing a head of lettuce on her knee.

Morgan Spurlock has come up with a terrific idea-a movie about product placements that depends completely on product placements for its financing.

The movie, directed by Rupert Goold, is a conventional but perfectly serviceable showcase for its star, who sets the whole thing on fire every time she launches into a Garland classic in her own voice.

This drama, directed by Pablo Trapero, is violent, and unconcerned with easy redemption. That makes it hard to watch, though fascinating for its performances, and the bottomless corruption it portrays.

Talladega Nights may be brash, unbridled, even unhinged, but its cornpone humor is rich in parody, and its craftsmanship is superb -- smart writing, shrewd direction, precisely calibrated performances (whether the calibration calls for delicacy or broad-gauge burlesque), inventive language, inspired silliness and all-but-flawless timing.

Charlotte Rampling is the best reason, though far from the only one, to see Swimming Pool, a mesmerizing mystery, plus a wonderfully sensuous fantasy.

The action looks impressive, even when nothing much is happening beyond local explosions or shattering glass, and the drama turns, affectingly, on a mysterious female sniper with a partitioned soul.

The whole movie seems to be on fast-forward, with crushingly brainless dialogue, hollow imagery and no way of slowing down the febrile action or making sense of the chaotic plot.

The film, playing in theaters, is very long, relentlessly intense, murmured more often than spoken, and photographed, by Greig Fraser, with a glowering gorgeousness that must be seen to be felt. It’s also enthralling and tailored to our time, an extended rumination on finding one’s moral compass in a world of all-encompassing evil.

Instead of creating the kind of texture and narrative flow that allows characters to reveal themselves gradually and fully, the film devotes increasing attention and lots of clumsy plotting to the question of litigation—can anything be gained by making someone pay for an irretrievable loss?

Josephine Decker’s screen version of the Jandy Nelson young-adult novel, which was adapted by the author, embraces excess as an expression of the heroine’s mercurial spirit. Sometimes the results are excessively excessive, blithely blissed-out or simply clichéd. Mostly, though, they’re funny, affecting and endearing. And daring.

Grungily stylish and often funny, at least for a while, though all of the caveats and contradictions that apply to Tarantino films apply here: One man's--or boy's--stylization is another's profane, unrelenting and tedious brutality.

This debut feature left me in a state of movie euphoria. Who could have guessed that such a discomfiting premise would blossom into a deadpan-hilarious and yet deeply affecting story about a singular glitch in the human condition?

Only Le Carre fans with tin ears and clouded eyes will fail to note the film's sour tone, crude performances and drab look.

A movie you can't readily get out of your head.

The buddies’ adventures are dramatized delightfully, but a case could be made for the movie’s real subject being scenery, and, particularly, water.

It's the set pieces that mark the film as something special: swirling crowds at a casino in the opening sequence, Trudy's ordeal by trailer trash, a climactic firefight that puts lightning in the shade. Very impure, and very impressive.

The film is long and sometimes harrowing, but also enthralling.

My advice to "Hobbit" fans is not only to see this one, but to see it as I did, in 3-D projected at the normal rate of 24 frames per second. The film will also be shown in what's called High Frame Rate 3-D, at 48 frames a second, but that made the last installment look more like video than a regular movie. Smaug is scary enough without a turbo boost.

This small-scale film has more outsize ideas than it could possibly manage. Yet Mike Cahill's debut feature exerts a gravitational pull out of proportion to its size through powerful performances, a lyrical spirit, a succession of arresting images and a depth of conviction that sweeps logic aside.

It is marvelously funny - a screwball comedy with more layers than a pearl - and visually sumptuous.

This hugely elaborate production is supposed to be the reboot of a foundering franchise, but rebooting a computer wipes the silicon slate clean. In the movie, what's old is old again.

Since Mr. Stone is a prisoner of his penchant for pop-psychologizing on a cosmic scale, his movie has the astounding effect of absolving President Nixon of personal guilt for his crimes and misdeeds without bothering to explain what he did wrong. [21 Dec 1995, p.A12]

Marshall — a terrific performance by Chadwick Boseman — comes off at the outset as full of himself to overflowing. In other words, here’s an irreverent movie with a quirky ring of truth.

The film takes itself frivolously when that's appropriate--some of it is charmingly silly--and seriously when, as is often the case, all sorts of good surprises are unleashed.

An exciting caper, though sometimes a trying one, with great dollops of self-parodying dialogue that will test your loyalty to Mr. Mamet's way with words.

Why, in our drum-thumping, ritually trumpeting time, did so little fanfare precede the opening of a movie with so much to recommend it? This is grand entertainment.

The worst part of Ms. Zellweger's plight is that she, along with others in the cast, has fallen victim to a first-time feature director whose vocabulary doesn't seem to include the word "simplicity."

Most of those hardships are familiar to movie lovers; that's a reductionist view of a serious and ambitious production, but it is, after all, a movie on a screen. (And a movie with a dreadfully clumsy ending.)

The music is shamelessly entertaining, and the warmth of Morgan Freeman's narration conveys the possibility that, for all the imminent peril, the lemurs of this enchanted forest still have a fighting chance.

We can all use more magic in our lives, and that promise is fulfilled quite delightfully at first. But extravagant creatures of digital descent can’t sustain a story that does little more than set the scene for a long string of sequels.

Either way, though, Mr. Assayas, whose previous work has ranged from the tossed-off beguilements of “Irma Vep” to the docudramatic brilliance of “Carlos,” has created a small but special diversion that fairly vibrates with stylish performances and flies in the face of marketing fashion — a talkie with an abundance of good talk.

The summer's first action epic does exactly what it's supposed to do, more clearly than "M:i:I," and more likeably than "M:i:II."

It’s overstuffed, and essentially empty.

Taken on its own terms, the film is beautifully crafted, a sequence of events, many of them stirring, along a road to redemption that intersects with a winning group of high-school kids on a losing basketball team.

Puzzle is less puzzling than exasperating. What’s good is exceptional — a meeting of minds, and then more, between two jigsaw-puzzle prodigies — while the rest is perfunctory or lifeless.

I defer to no one in my admiration for Ms. Pike and her fellow cast members, but it’s no fun watching them soldier on through this heavy-handed and mean-spirited charade. I Care a Lot is a good title for the film that might have been. In the film that is, you can’t find anyone to care about.

Untold billions are laundered in The Infiltrator, while Pablo Escobar’s Medellín cartel moves mountains of cocaine into U.S. markets. But the drug of choice here is acting, and the highs in this hurtling, often violent thriller are doubly intense, since two of its stars play flamboyant double roles.

I found this sequel deeply slumping, not to mention unnecessary, unmagical and often unfunny. The misuse of talent is what slumped me the most.

The movie perseveres with affecting, sometimes startling candor, and eventually delivers on its promise by confronting the dark fears and furtive hopes of a couple no longer young.

The star, as solo practitioner, does a terrific job of holding our attention when we're not taking in surreal vistas of a deserted Manhattan that are fascinating in their own right. Still, zombies are zombies, and this nasty lot, mostly digital creations of variable quality, keep draining the distinction that the movie seeks and occasionally finds.

It's not a great film, but there's something to be said for a cool-button treatment of a hot-button issue.

The movie's distinction, however, lies in two lovely performances, and in the passion and pain of parallel lives--both girls suffering at the hands of men, both struggling to understand the brutality of the world they must share.

The fault lies not with Ms. Jones, an appealing performer, but with Gareth Edwards, who directed doggedly from a delight-free script by Chris Weitz and Tony Gilroy.

What’s unusual, and admirable, about the film is its close concern with colonialist machinations that make Seretse and Ruth the pawns of implacable power. What’s unfortunate is that Ms. Asante’s direction and Mr. Hibbert’s script aren’t up to the dramatic task; the pace grows slower as the couple’s plight deepens.

Rather than belabor the what that was chosen—the silly lather the story works up—I’ll reflect in my turn on how fine “Last Night In Soho” turns out to be when its co-stars are fully engaged in their eerily mysterious dance of identity.

Joseph Levy's sneakily stirring documentary opens up feelings you would never have expected from the premise — a portrait of three American restaurants.

Mr. Yang’s story unfolds with decreasing velocity; in the latter stretches patience is required, though amply rewarded.

The butler, Cecil Gaines, is a fictional creation, an African-American Forrest Gump who bears special witness to the civil-rights movement while serving on the White House staff under seven presidents. The contrivance is stretched to its breaking point over a running time of 132 minutes; some of the episodes cross a different line from almost plausible to downright silly. That's not the whole story, though.

This is a modest film, and an affecting one.

What's on screen, though, is a cautious approach to cinema wizardry -- broad, colorful strokes and flash-bang effects that turn J.K. Rowling's words into a long, cheerful spectacle with a Muggle soul.

Jim Jarmusch's Dada meander, shot by Christopher Doyle, is empty and excruciating -- that's really all you need to know.

Bring Zoloft and a tank of oxygen to Closer, an airless, ultimately joyless drama of sexual politics.

The more I thought about it, the less I liked what it turned out to be -- a vague promise unkept.

Reese Witherspoon is funny and touching as the scrappy Kansan who befriends the bewildered arrivals, and the movie's three Lost Boys, no longer lost or boys, are intensely appealing.

Mr. Washington is splendid, as always. So is Forest Whitaker as James Farmer, Sr.

Puss made his debut in "Shrek 2," then did time in the two decreasingly funny sequels. Now he's got a movie of his own, and not a moment too soon.

Ms. Bening is the only reason to see the movie, but a compelling reason. Just like Julia, she prevails over lesser mortals with unfailing zest.

It’s always rewarding to see her (Bening) in action, even though her latest movie, Film Stars Don’t Die In Liverpool, doesn’t measure up to her performance.

Jindabyne started with a bad idea and the finished film doesn't do well by it.

The effort shows in all three performances. Spontaneity is in short supply. The comedy seems willed, the solemnity mechanical, the dialogue rhythms awkward and self-conscious.

The production’s shrill insistence on scandal-mongering as the poison of our political process is trivializing, too. Given the profound currents and countercurrents that have transformed — and menaced — the news media in the last few years, this story plays like quaintly ancient history.

Smart, funny and authentically terrifying. It's a comedy that explains how network television succeeds in being so horribly awful.

Stylish, highly accomplished and, thanks to its severely restrained palette, mostly off-putting.

A grim disappointment for grown-ups, and far too violent for young kids. I found it to be clumsy, misanthropic and intractably lifeless.

When bad movies happen to good people, the first place to look for an explanation is the basic idea. That certainly applies to My Week With Marilyn, a dubious idea done in by Adrian Hodges's shallow script and Simon Curtis's clumsy direction.

All of it amounts to a been-there-done-that-better recapitulation of Mr. Spielberg's career.

Katniss has remained, in Jennifer Lawrence’s portrayal, a vividly vulnerable creature of flesh and blood surrounded by sci-fi extravagance of variable quality.

I Love You Phillip Morris is tragedy, or something close to it, decked out in comedy's clothes.

From time to time the movie grabs you (though the music keeps repelling you). Taking stock and letting go-of superfluous things, of worn-out love-is a strong theme. But the progression of the script is like Nick's self-help program. We're familiar with the steps.

A case of good works done well.

Edges have been softened, harshness has been transformed into happiness sprinkled with eccentricity. And the paradox, of course, is that we're glad to be seduced. As Disney films go, this is a good one.

Plays like "Norma Rae" on blood thinners. The movie is by no means bloodless; every once in a while a stirring scene comes along, though it's seldom a scene labeled as stirring by William Ivory's formulaic script and Nigel Cole's insistent direction.

In the new film beauty is sought, and seldom found, in glitzy surfaces. Enchantment is chased, and never captured, in extravagant set pieces that owe less to fairy-tale tradition than to Cirque du Soleil grandiosity.

This prequel draws new energy from supersmart casting, plus the shrewd notion of setting the beginnings of the X-Men saga in the early 1960s.

This new “Alien” prequel is mostly a gore fest, which may be great news for gluttons of the genre.

As a piece of summer entertainment, this strenuously upbeat prequel to Pixar's "Monsters, Inc." passes with vibrant colors and will, of course, excel at the box office...But as an offering from Pixar, the studio that set the platinum standard for contemporary animated features, it's an awful disappointment — and one more reason to worry about Pixar's future under Disney ownership.

Scurlock's documentary serves up cautionary tales of epic abuse, though the overall tone is faux cheerful and sometimes genuinely entertaining.

It is not a good sign when a film keeps evoking superior examples of its genre. And a worse sign still when the genre itself seems more remote from current concerns than it deserves to be. Such is the case with The Courier.

A hugely ambitious sequel, joyous and genuinely complex, that’s charged with dramatic and musical energy to the very last frame.

The Matador has its dull patches, one of which is relieved by Hope Davis's endearing presence as Danny's wife. But what fun it is to watch Julian losing it, and Pierce Brosnan nailing it. He's worth the price of admission and then some.

The story has the hollow ring of artifice, even though Ms. Hawkins shrinks quite remarkably into the physical aspects of the role and opens up its spiritual dimensions.

Ingeniously scary.

Pleasing moments don't add up to a feature film, even though this one strives desperately for substance and coherence by slathering its slender story with treacly family values.

The film as a whole feels audacious and original, a case study of violence begetting more of the same, and Mr. Eisenberg is ideally cast as the soul of fearfulness, as well as the embodiment of mixed motives that include courage, lust for power and revenge.

Cadillac Records may be a mess dramatically, but it's a wonderful mess, and not just because of the great music. The people who made it must have harbored the notion, almost subversive in a season of so many depressing films, that going out to the movies should be fun.

Ali nails its subject's anger and courage, but not his lilt; his swaggering boasts but not his sly self-irony; his power but not his grace; and his inner turmoil but not the outward joyousness that has made us come to love him.

Breakfast on Pluto, with an impressive cast that includes Liam Neeson and Brendan Gleeson, deploys its whimsy in many ways, all of them cloying.

This debut film by Filippo Meneghetti, streaming on major digital platforms, is elevated by the beauty of its performances, and by its masterly technique, which would suggest a filmmaker at the height of his career, not someone directing his first feature.

Tetro turns out to be not one movie but, at the very least, two--a Fellini-esque (or Coppola-esque) concatenation of drama, dance and opera (with a nod to Alphonse Daudet), and a modest, appealing coming-of-age story that involves Maribel Verdú (from “Y Tu Mamá También”) as Tetro’s girlfriend.

The film as a whole has the gravitas of a really thoughtful rock video.

Coco is played by Audrey Tautou, and she's phenomenal--self-contained, tightly focused, sparing with her smiles, miserly with her joy, often guarded to the point of severity, yet giving off a grave radiance at every moment she's in front of the camera.

Superb as Ms. Kruger is, there’s nothing she can do to keep the taut, heartfelt narrative from going off the rails.

A treat that becomes a chilling enthrallment, one of those closely observed dramas you love — for its intimacy, calm authority and mystery — even before you begin to get what it’s really about.

Elegant and sometimes inscrutable.

Two dramatic problems beset Roman Polanski's darkly handsome new film of the Dickens novel. The boy is as passive as ever, and bleak in the bargain -- instead of glowing like the Oliver of the musical, he takes light in -- while Ben Kingsley's Fagin and Jamie Foreman's Bill Sikes manage to make villainy a bit of a bore.

Most powerfully about what violence does to the soul: Joe is almost dead to the world, and to himself. Not quite, though. This harshly beautiful film is equally about his regeneration during the course of a journey that amounts to a parable of humanity trying to climb out of the pit of endless slaughter and retribution.

"Could be worse" isn't exactly a ringing endorsement of Pacific Rim, but my head is still ringing, and hurting, from long stretches of this aliens vs. robots extravaganza that are no better than the worst brain-pounders of the genre.

Merits admiration as an ambitious debut feature, though the impact of its splendid cast is blunted by the awkward structure of its screenplay.

Blissfully funny, terrifically intelligent and tender when you least expect it to be.

While the movie is dreadfully clumsy or sentimental around the edges, there's no denying the strength of Mr. Gibson's performance or the power of the savage combat, a 90-minute sequence that's even more graphic than the horrific firefight in Somalia in "Black Hawk Down."

What's worse, some mysterious movie curse has turned the three once-lively adventurers into wood.

You may harbor doubts as well, but the story on the whole appears to be true, and the integrity of the documentary suffers little, if at all, from its co-directors’ decision to illustrate some of the more extravagant aspects of the lovers’ journey with charmingly sleazy clips from commercial potboilers that Shin, who died in 2006, had made in South Korea.

Why didn't Mr. Jordan spend more time grounding his self-enchanted script in some semblance of reality? Unlike "Splash," this film finally goes plop.

Entertaining and improbably endearing.

The Rover, is anything but lively, though it's long on menace, often violent and consistently fascinating.

I might have liked About Adam more if its supposedly irresistible hero -- and the movie itself -- hadn''t been so smirky.

The best way to see Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow -- if you see it at all -- is as an interesting experiment that failed.

More than a deadpan comedy about oddball losers. This dork has his day, and this story has its touching subtext -- growing pains relieved by unlikely hope.

One difficulty with this film is that Doug is the least vital of the three main characters; he has mastered mildness as a second language. Another is the zone in which the film operates, equidistant between droll and dull. If that's a comfort zone for you, Cold Weather may be worth a look-see.

The movie does well to shine a light on the venerable struggle, but its beam is narrow, and often pallid.

The film is clearly not for everyone; sometimes it wasn’t for me. But it’s steadfastly nonjudgmental and wonderfully tender toward two searchers for new versions of old-fashioned love.

The film gives no reason for optimism in the urban warfare it portrays, but its heart, head and sharp eye are in exactly the right place.

A slow and lugubrious film about the impact of adoption on the lives of three women.

The structure is sheer contrivance — three narratives intricately interlocked — while the plot amounts to a convenience store of variably credible, or borderline incredible, strands. Yet the film is impressive all the same.

The cast is the main attraction in Francois Ozon's witty, even touching 8 Women.

Before Wanted reaches the end of its wild course, the violence that's been nothing but oppressive becomes genuinely if perversely impressive; the ritual carnage becomes balletic carnage (railroad cars included); the Walter Mitty-esque hero, Wesley, played by James McAvoy becomes a formidable enforcer of summary justice, and Mr. McAvoy, most memorably the young doctor in "The Last King of Scotland," becomes a certified star.

These young men and women aren't in it for the money, or the glory; they only want to save lives and heal wounds. That's another kind of glory.

The film doesn’t give Ms. Larson enough good stuff to fulfill her role’s potential. Her Captain Marvel is an appealing character who becomes an impressive one, wrapped in a shimmering aura of blue and white energy. What’s missing, though, is what helped make “Wonder Woman” an exemplary figure of female empowerment two years ago: unforced warmth, along with strength, and flashes of delight.

In spite of the film's surface allure -- no, not the leather, the period evocation -- and a fine performance by Gretchen Mol in the title role, Bettie is in bondage to a shallow, black-and-white script.

It's a privilege to watch peerless actors at the peak of their powers.

Prometheus, in efficient 3-D, places most of its bets on the wonders that today's visual artists and technicians can work with digital tools. This tale of an interstellar search asks cosmic questions about the meaning of life, but comes up with lame answers in a script that screams attention-deficit disorder.

Renoir is so beautiful, and so intelligently conceived, that you keep waiting, in vain, for a bit of fire to break out in the narrative.

The pursuit is manipulative and repetitive.

By all wrongs, though — beginning with a single-minded script and clumsy direction — a movie with a compelling story to tell turns into a blunt-force polemic that can’t stop hammering its message home.

The whole thing devolves into such highfalutin silliness that it’s impossible to care what happens to whom. In Mr. Guadagnino’s previous film, “Call Me By Your Name,” the tone was romantic, and sustained to the very end. In Suspiria, style stomps fun into submission.

It's formula stuff, to be sure, but full of feeling for the sweep of the past as well as for the unsettled, yearning present.

It’s all B-movie stuff, though sporadically entertaining and occasionally witty on the intertwined subjects of bedevilment and in-laws.

From early on my strong desire was for this horribly pretentious phantasmagoria to be over.

I disliked it at first — the camera is as jittery as the characters — and kept disliking it until I realized that I’d been drawn in, if not exactly captivated. The film itself is alive with random energy that foreshadows a surprise ending without blowing the surprise.

The writing and direction, by Robert Budreau, range from pedestrian to lethargic — not a good thing when the subject is passive more often than not.

The script is somewhat predictable and the pace is leisurely, but Ms. Judd makes Lucy's choices seem momentous, and Ms. Adams gives us several beautiful scenes.

I know this sounds like great fun, and some of it is, but there's nowhere near enough good stuff to fill the 114-minute running time.

The film, for all its visual felicities, comes to life only sporadically.

It’s a movie in which too-muchness ends up being not-enoughness, since the script lacks a vital center. But the premise remains appealing. If you have to travel by air, being 5 inches tall makes a seat in economy a throne.

The world didn't need a superficial big-screen adaptation of a rich, dense book that's about, among many other things, the passage of time. The perplexity is why the film is so lifeless and remote.

Mark Ruffalo is yet again a revelation in Infinitely Polar Bear, and he’s not the only one. This is a first feature by Maya Forbes, yet many of its accomplishments put far more experienced filmmakers in the shade.

The story's literary underpinnings are hilariously represented by the denizens of a seedy writers' retreat situated near Tamara's old house, which she has come back to reclaim after her mother's death.

Between the two performances there's not a false note. Between the father and son there's an unbreakable bond. Though civilization has ended, love and parental duty shape the course of this fable, which is otherwise as heartwarming as a Beckett play shorn of humor.

An attractive, intelligent film that's intractably at odds with itself.

Spellbinding on its own terms, a modernist fable with a madly romantic soul.

Ambitious and uneven.

Watching this mélange of journalism and dramatic license can be enthralling and maddening at the same time, because the ring of truth, which the film has, is not the same as the truth, which remains unknown.

A bright little screwball comedy that speaks for the vitality of new movies.

Mr. Rudd, whose overall performance as the former con-man Scott Lang is fairly pallid, confines himself to genial winks and nods in a film that will surely be popular, given Marvel’s marketing might, but one that’s woefully short on coherence and originality.

As smart as this film is about image-making in the age of all-pervasive media, the theme threatens to wear thin until Katniss comes to a new and moving awareness of her power, not just as a figurehead fashioned and elaborately feathered by political consultants but as a source of authentic inspiration to her shattered nation.

Where to Invade Next is documentary filmmaking gone wrong, a churlish polemic that uses the tools of propaganda to construct its world view. The film itself is an invasive presence, wreaking havoc in the realm of truth.

Loosely organized but still fascinating.

Blissfully silly, triumphantly tasteless and improbably hilarious.

There's simply too much stuff for a two-hour feature, and three writers, including Tony Gilroy, haven't figured out how to boil it down into a readily comprehensible narrative, or how to solve the problem of an ending that goes blah rather than bang.

Costner has never been further from the lively, engaging actor he can be, or at least once was.

Mannered, episodic and slow.

The director was Baltasar Kormákur, a gifted filmmaker from Iceland who shouldn’t be blamed for a case of industrial filmmaking gone wrong — the culprits in elaborate clunkers like this are usually the producers and the studios.

Thanks to the redundancy, though, Blood Diamond is dramatically diffuse, and at least 30 minutes too long. Thanks to Mr. DiCaprio's raffishly dashing soldier of fortune, the movie is worth watching all the same.

Head, shoulders, funny bone and brain above the competition. It's the best comedy I've seen this year.

The good news here is Mr. Odenkirk’s performance, not to mention his endurance in strenuous action sequences that must have taken a real-life toll on his physique; he certainly doesn’t look computer-generated.

In a film that has the courage of its absurdity but not much else, Mr. Pattinson gets the best of what passes for style.

It misses the point to ask, as some have recently, whether he’s still able to have fun at the age and status he has attained. Sure he is. He must have had great fun making this immense Tinker Toy of a movie, but there’s a fundamental mismatch between artist and material.

I wish I could report the arrival of an impressive movie, but this one, for all its ostensibly big ideas about mathematics and wounded minds, struck me as an elaborate pretext for a synthetic love story.

The most horrible thing about The Lodge, a horror flick set mostly in a snowbound vacation house, is that it’s no fun.

The whole film feels charmingly insubstantial, just as it’s meant to, with beautiful settings, amusing people and, for philosophical context, a classic Woody Allen one-liner: “Socrates said the unexamined life is not worth living, but the examined life is no bargain.”

Lavishly produced -- overproduced, actually -- and persistently unexciting.

The movie commits the sin of boredom, partly because Ms. Martin is exceedingly inexpressive.

The video-game sequences are impressive, but you know that a 'toon is in big trouble when its most powerful theme is planned obsolescence.

Parts of the drama play out on its star’s face, and they’re the best parts, because there’s no one better at portraying a good man’s self-doubts and a frightened man’s courage.

Anna and the Apocalypse does have its singular moments. On the whole, though, I’d say don’t bite.

A mismatched-buddy movie that's endearing, funny and affecting in equal measure.

For him (Schneebaum) it's a journey of stunning rediscovery. For us it's the discovery of a brave soul.

A good subject has been ill-served by Ms. Greenwald's cliched script and clumsy direction.

Meticulously crafted and beautifully performed.

What brings Monsters down from its extremely low perch is a conspicuous lack of monstrosity.

Compelling as the subject may be, its abstract nature would challenge the most skillful of dramatists, and Mr. Niccol’s script seldom rises above slogans, argumentation and standard-brand domestic tension.

Mr. Franklin has always been easy with quicksilver moods -- and Mr. Washington is terrifically appealing as a fool for love who loses his cool as he learns about fear.

Lee's journey of the body and soul is something else. Maggie Gyllenhaal makes it strangely touching, a revelation.

Here, it is saying in effect, are old-fashioned conventions that still have life in them, but to appreciate them we need to approach them playfully. That worked for me, from the understated start to the overwrought finish.

With its exuberant images (cats, oodles of cats), quaint Victorian settings, damask palette, odd camera angles and old-fashioned screen proportions, The Electrical Life of Louis Wain might have been too clever by more than half, except for its startling tenderness and depth of feeling, and the brilliance of its starring performances by Benedict Cumberbatch and Claire Foy.

Ms. Levy's film gets to say affecting things about the mysteries of identity, and the ironies of ancient enmity. If we can assume, from the nature of the premise, that Joseph and Yacine will soon accept their situation and become friends, we can also assume, from the course of history, that the Israelis and Palestinians will continue to resist doing the same.

Affecting, even touching, provided you can put up with its sclerotic pace.

Devolves from an electrifying character study into a disappointing tale of trackdown and revenge.

A handsome, absorbing debut feature by the fiction and television writer Henry Bromell.

The story is impenetrable, with more betrayals than you can give a damn about, and the frigid tone borders on self-parody, with frequent excursions to the wrong side of the border. As strong and formidable and commandingly tall as Ms. Theron is, she can’t rise above the gloom.

This latest iteration of the Tolstoy classic was clearly the product of audacious thinking, stylishly applied. Still, the thinking was as wrongheaded as it was hollow-hearted. Yet another elaborate production chases its audience away.

The film itself is fairly slight: I'm not sure what it adds up to. Still, I enjoyed every moment of its beguiling saga of a depressed teen named Craig.

The filmmakers can't keep the strands of their clumsy plot straight, but they create brilliant images and manipulate them with blithe abandon.

This "Les Mis" does make you feel, intensely and sometimes thrillingly, by honoring the emotional core of its source material.

How bad must a movie be to be good fun? How dumb to be smart? (Or, in the case of "Dumb and Dumber," how pretend-dumb to be surpassingly smart?) Whatever the case, Hot Tub Time Machine doesn't make the cut.

To make silk purses from turgid passages, Mr. Scott does what he always does, gooses them up with every trick in the big-budget book.

The sweet spirit that made last year's "Elf" such a success has curdled considerably.

J. Michael Straczynski's disjointed script manages to ring false at almost every significant turn (Collins' psychiatric-hospital stay has grown into a latter-day version of "The Snake Pit") and Clint Eastwood's ponderous direction -- a disheartening departure from his sure touch in "Letters From Iwo Jima" and "The Bridges of Madison County" -- magnifies the flaws.

Against all odds this panoply of punishment is almost thrilling, even though it's raging bull of a different kind.

For a while Green Zone generates genuine excitement, as well as plenty of provocation--a fatuous surrogate for Ahmed Chalabi, a pervasive scorn for American planning--but then goes off its own reservation into a won't-fly zone of awkward preachments and hapless absurdities.

The director and co-writer, Niels Mueller, has also done his work well, but the film feels insubstantial at 95 minutes, even though -- or maybe because -- it bristles with borrowed ideas and unavoidable associations.

Mixes whiffs of Woody Allen and Federico Fellini with Mr. Farmanara's distinctive, mordant wit.

Has its flaws, but it's better, as well as darker, than the first. It's also longer, by nine minutes, but hold that protest to the Kidney Foundation; the time flies, albeit in fits and starts, like players on a Quidditch field.

There’s plenty to enjoy in the film, starting with a pair of affecting performances by Clémence Poésy and Laura Birn, and ending with a perverse twist on the notion of blissful parenthood.

Meant to evoke such distinctive examples of the genre as “Shock Corridor,” “The Snake Pit” and, on a much grander scale, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” And it’s also safe to say that whether or not you enjoy Unsane — I didn’t, for the most part — there’s a terrific scene in a padded cell.

At least Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day has the good grace to go wrong quickly, you don't have to sit there squirming with doubt.

The script is dead in the water, and most of the misanthropic repartee rings resoundingly false.

Crude as its build-up may be, the movie pays off with unexpected delicacy.

The production eventually succumbs to motion overload-so many characters darting off in so many directions that the ending turns unfocused, even flat. But watching them go by is great fun, and there are worse things than a movie that can't stop moving.

Mr. Paine's follow-up lacks the conspiratorial drama of its predecessor, which blamed the EV1's death on the oil industry and the auto industry, tied as they were to the future of the internal combustion engine. But his new documentary is fascinating in its own right.

The pace is deadly slow, the style old-fashioned and the acting devoid of spontaneity. These are skilled actors, but the writing is so threadbare — an important character from the novel has been eliminated — and the direction (by Thomas Bezucha, working from his own adaptation) is so lacking in nuance that genuine dramatic energy gets lost by the wayside during the road trip to North Dakota.

Mr. Del Toro is a fearless actor, and his Jerry, a heroin addict lurching toward redemption, is the heart and soul, as well as the haunted, rubbery visage, of a story of grief and loss that would be fairly lifeless without him.

This enjoyable shambles of a sci-fi thriller, directed by Marc Forster in impressive 3-D, stands on its own as a powerful vision of planetary chaos.

Split reworks some of the themes Mr. Shyamalan developed in the 2000 “Unbreakable” — weakness and strength, unstoppable power, a sense of emergent destiny. The film contends that people are purified by suffering. Having suffered through the screening, I’m still waiting for my purer self to kick in.

Joan Allen, for whom the role was written, combines severity, which she has often played before, with such levity and verve that she lifts the whole film on the wings of Terry's wrath.

More unfortunately still, the elements of the story fit poorly, like a Tucker decked out as a sexmobile.

It's not only fresh and unassuming, but a film that serves, very nicely, the severely underserved audience of young girls.

It's a cheerful trifle tossed off by the Coen brothers in their self-enchanted mode, an approach to comedy that shrugs off comedy's cardinal rule -- Don't Act Funny.

The Matrix Resurrections is a recycling dump of murky effects, indifferent action and a crazily cluttered, relentlessly repetitive narrative.

A guaranteed downer that's devoid of any upside, and free of dangerously entertaining side effects.

This attractive, superficial stab at biography, with Renée Zellweger in the title role, is more concerned with a lonely woman's quest for acceptance and love than with an author's worldly achievements.

Shocking as it may be, One Child Nation needs to be seen. It’s a document that deepens our understanding of the totalitarian state that China was, not that long ago, of the enormity of the inhumanity that the central government visited on its most vulnerable citizens.

The experience is interesting, in a flattened way.

Youth in Revolt is basically an absurdist ramble, but a terrifically likable ramble.

As a thriller it’s efficient, if formulaic, and technically proficient, if undistinguished.

The film is beset by incoherence and implausibilities that are perplexing, given the close relationship between the Wachowskis and the director, Mr. McTeigue.

The children's real world, or what passes for real in a fantasy, could hardly be more inviting, for reasons that are hardly mysterious: the strong performances, under Mark Waters's accomplished direction; the smart, bright language, much of it taken from the books; the stylish cinematography, by Caleb Deschanel.

I wish I could be more enthusiastic about Prince Caspian, an honorable and attractive adventure for children and families. But scenic beauty and spirited action can't conceal its dramatic defects.

Still, the essence of the film lies in the athletes' towering charm, and the nature of their journey.

The neutral news about “Solo” is exactly that, its dramatic neutrality. Time ticks by at a drifty pace while lots of action of no great consequence grinds on.

The third iteration of a franchise that began so well becomes a hollow hymn to martial gadgetry. The suits and story clank in unison.

What's been carefully filtered out of the film as a whole is the tumult and passion of Robinson's life.

The most disturbious part of Disturbia is how engaging this teenage thriller manages to be, even though it's a shameless rip-off of "Rear Window."

When the film finally gets around to monsters on a rampage, you'll get both more and less than you bargained for.

A snapshot, to be sure, but scattershot as well.

Killer Joe is, at bottom - and I mean bottom - ugly and vile, not to mention dumb and clumsy.

This is a special film whose delicate tone ranges from tender to astringent, with occasional side trips into sweet.

The director, Steven Soderbergh, and his large, cheerful cast have managed to make the least possible movie that still resembles a movie.

Instead of scintillation, the movie gives us a succession of discrete set pieces, as if the action takes place in rooms but not in the halls connecting them.

Abe is played by Noah Schnapp, from “Stranger Things,” and he’s irresistibly charming. Abe the movie is charming too.

The root problem is repetitiveness, the seemingly endless cycle of progress and relapse that causes heartbreak in real life and induces déjà vu in audiences — even dejà déjà vu, since there’s repetition within the already familiar pattern. The mosaic structure is simply, though not successfully, an attempt to hold our attention.

It’s easy to see why Mr. Burton, an influential imagist in his own right and a collector of Keane paintings, was attracted to this saga of contending Keanes, and the result, photographed by Bruno Delbonnel, is a study in yummy colors and period design. But I watched wide-eyed with dismay while the film turned as lifeless as the paintings.

When movie lovers are looking back on the best of 2001, they will still be marveling at the beauty, intelligence and seemingly effortless mastery of Ms. Blanchett's performance.

A conspicuous comedown from the best of Mr. Macdonald’s films — “The Last King of Scotland” and “Touching the Void.” Still, the craftsmanship is impressive, Ben Mendelsohn’s Fraser provides plenty of psychopathic villainy, and Mr. Law invests his character with more passion than the writing deserves.

I’ve gone on about the creatures because there’s so little to say about the humans, who, in their turn, have little to say about the creatures, because the writers haven’t written enough lively dialogue.

Nothing to write home about, though nothing to stay home about either, especially if you're a dyed-in-the-polyester Powers fan.

Affecting but formulaic.

When a feelgood formula is fleshed out artfully, going along with it can feel very good indeed.

Before long, though, things take a turn from simplicity to sententiousness, then to surreal silliness, and finally to a mano-à-mano contest, on a parched desert floor, over which man gets the best close-ups.

Comes to the screen missing subtle cues and crucial connections.