Joe Williams

I Am Love is easy to savor but tough to swallow.

Although this stylish and ominously paced vehicle starts with a full itinerary, it never makes a vital connection.

The fiery finale is good enough to leave the legions smiling. But when a movie is expected to lift an entire industry, "good enough" shouldn't be good enough.

In skewering the neuroses of New York bohemians, Durham has left us too little to care about.

The double deception of suppressed personality and repressed sexuality could have been the basis for a rewarding character study, but after Albert meets a kindred spirit and dares to dream of a happy ending, her denial and naivete become too much to swallow.

Draining most of the blood, sweat and tears from a true story, this music-minded movie capably covers a song we’ve heard a hundred times before.

To their credit, the creative team has retained the handmade look and unruly spirit of Maurice Sendak's bedtime fable; to their discredit, they haven't added enough narrative or emotional dimension to make it an effective movie.

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.

The premise is pure formula.

Like other so-called "mumblecore" movies, including Bronstein's own "Frownland," this is an unnervingly intimate glimpse of dysfunction, with a shaky-cam aesthetic and seemingly improvised dialogue.

It's a pleasure to watch Ryan resurrect her trademark persona, a mix of perkiness and pique, as she flounces around the room. But it's shaded with a middle-age desperation that's half real and half chick-flick shtick.

While it may not be a smorgasbord of red herrings and red meat, Flame and Citron is often chilling.

This quasi-horror film has the great director's usual craftsmanship and a stellar cast, but ultimately it's an infuriating trick that makes its most provocative ideas disappear.

It’s admirable, but Monuments Men just poses on a porous foundation like a statue.

The movie looks like it was made for broadcast television, the place where words and pictures go to die.

The actress and the aviatrix are a match made in heaven, but surrounding the soaring performance is a movie that's mostly earthbound.

It's funny but (sorry, ladies) unrealistic that Jake continuously sneaks away from his young wife to canoodle with Jane. Baldwin is a blast, but the role requires him to indulge in indignities such as a naked webcam conversation.

Like a taxidermied owl, Stoker is lovely to look at, but in the end it’s hard to give a hoot.

There's some laughing gas left in the cupboard, but this series may require an infusion of new blood to last until "American Funeral."

This movie may be sickly sweet, but it's harmless; and as a handcrafted antidote to a toxic toy story like "G.I.Joe," Paper Heart has healing properties.

Although the outcome is as predetermined as a prix-fixe menu, the storytelling is as smooth as goose-liver pate through a pastry nozzle.

The CGI effects are a familiar sort and so is the heroic-quest motif. The principal virtue in this modest entertainment is that the young characters act like real teenagers.

It's a credit to the cast and to the worthiness of the idea that this overlong movie works at all. But those of us who already know that racism is bad could use a little more challenge and a little less help.

Strange hybrid of science lesson and Saturday-morning cartoon.

While Green is force-feeding us this hard-boiled hokum, he doesn’t distract us with many memorable images, as he did in his earliest films.

The best excuse for watching The Gunman is Penn. His first mainstream leading role in a decade is worthy of comparisons to Matt Damon in the “Bourne” movies; yet it’s also disappointingly shorn of the humor and humanity of which this great actor is capable.

Hit and Run isn't a catastrophe, but it leaves loose ends and a more adventurous map by the side of the winding road.

The difference between McKay and Efron is like the difference between a Broadway spectacular and a high school musical.