Joe Williams

This is rich material that Moretti mines for both superficial absurdity and deep pathos.

The iconic actor may be too gruff for sainthood, but Murray still retains a secret stash of soul.

The good news is that Ed Helms doesn’t wake up in a Tijuana brothel with an amputated leg and a donkey in the room. The bad news is that you’ll wish he had.

Raises more questions than it can answer in its travelogue format. It's because the premise is so intriguing and the drama is so compelling that the result is so confounding.

Like Ernest Borgnine, Philip Seymour Hoffman is an unconventional leading man with an Oscar on his mantle, and his bittersweet Jack Goes Boating has elicited comparisons with "Marty."

Presented as a stand-alone film, but without an explanation for the protagonist’s physical and emotional injuries, it’s a head-scratcher. As with Joe’s sexual compulsion, scratching can’t cure the itch.

We need to have a dialogue about the wages of war in the remote-control era. But it’s hard to spark a good dialogue with movies whose dialogue is so bad.

As a diversion, Babies is like a wind-up toy that will tickle anyone with a pulse. As a documentary, it's like a cache of home videos that will frustrate anyone with an inquiring mind.

The documentary ends on a hopeful note, as Indians themselves have taken control of their image.

Strikes an uneasy compromise between liberty and justice. It marches at an efficient pace, but there's too much collateral damage to believability.

Although there's a skeletal story, A Cat in Paris evokes a mood instead of a moral. Like a cat nap, it gives us a brief, refreshing dream with little to remember.

Some may scoff when the boys exhibit traits and interests derived from the biological parents they never knew, but The Other Son is such a disarming feat that cynics will get left at the checkpoint.

Out of the Furnace is hot air.

Second verse, not as good as the first.

Even more than most versions of Anna Karenina, this chamber piece is heated by two combustible characters, not by the winds of war and peace.

A bait-and-switch comedy. It poses as a naughty "no-mance" about friends who use each other for casual sex, but at the moment of truth it goes limp.

Summer Wars has engineered a truce between the familiar and the fantastical.

To keep serious cinema from going extinct, this could be sold as "The Hunger Games" cross-bred with "The Lorax," but it's better and more mature than either of those hit movies.

Fans of the franchise will greet Les Misérables as a feast for the senses, but the rest of us are left with crumbs.

Hot Tub Time Machine isn't a good movie, but like a bubbling bath it keeps pounding at us until our resistance wears down.

It’s a measure of the movie’s success that we never stop to question how or when the trickery is employed.

With a greater emphasis on sex than violence, Spring Breakers is a more enjoyable guilty pleasure than “Natural Born Killers” and just as acute about our cultural devolution. For all its seeming stupidity, its masterstroke is making us complicit in the corruption of its young stars (who include the director’s own wife).

Notwithstanding some allusions to "Lady and the Tramp," the characters and their comic high jinks are nothing special, but the the getaway gives us spectacular 3-D images of the city.

World War Z, based on a novel by Max Brooks and directed by Marc Forster ("Quantum of Solace"), has a relatively plausible perspective on mass catastrophe. It deserves comparisons to Steven Soderbergh’s brainy “Contagion.”

L'amour fou means "crazy love," but we don't learn anything crazy about these devoted lovers.

Megamind falls flat.

It's as if there's a missing reel of film that could tie the story together and give it the emotional impact it takes for granted.

Judged solely in comparison to its corporate cousins, Iron Man 3 is a defective model. It’s lightweight but slow, padded with cheap jokes to disguise how hollow it is.