J.R. Jones

It's a hokey heart-warmer that works.

The fun hardens into Fun after he's (Mr. Incredible) lured out of retirement and imprisoned in a remote island compound, though the sleek computer animation is spellbinding as usual.

This is marginally better than most, with a few offbeat comic ideas, a reliably droll performance from Vaughn, and, as the parents, four watchable old troupers in search of a fat paycheck.

This begins to get interesting in the home stretch, as the woman's chronic deception begins to catch up with her, but for the most part it's an extended Geritol commercial.

Long, heavy, and not particularly edifying Holocaust drama.

Proof positive that comedy is hard, this debut feature by Hue Rhodes offers a wealth of skilled players and admirably offbeat gags yet seldom manages to generate any laughs.

So much has been written about the show's emotional importance to single women that I can't possibly add anything, except to say that, in both its TV and movie incarnations, the empty materialism and sincere longing for love always manage to cancel each other out, leaving behind nothing but what this started out as--a sitcom.

The key scene -- is typical of the film's fanciful narrative approach but also its grating pretentiousness.

McGee has taken Hitchcock's idea of the MacGuffin to such an extreme that the plot becomes a set of nesting dolls with nothing at the center, but the players conjure up a smoky mood of existential sadness.

Broomfield, whose celebrity exposés are known for their intrusiveness and innuendo, lost me with his gentle shower scene between an Iraqi woman and her husband; even if it wasn't invented, is it really any of our business?

Like the earlier film, this one has an airless quality, much of the action taking place in the hushed and colorless offices of "the Circus." But whereas the dank tone of "Let the Right One In" served to heighten the moments of poignance and shrieking horror, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy begins to seem phlegmatic after a while.

Alexander Payne has won an Oscar for best adapted screenplay (Sideways), but you'd never guess that from this clumsily written drama: characters keep explaining things that their listeners would already know, and the first couple reels are so thick with expository voice-over that you may think you're listening to a museum tour on a set of headphones.

Three decades of skyrocketing income inequality have soured the comedy of Arthur's astronomically expensive self-indulgences.

The chills are functional at best and the attempts at pathos negligible.

Proves that a movie can be true to life and still seem utterly preposterous.

Lately, most of Dustin Hoffman's roles have been grinning crackpots or talking animals, so accepting the 71-year-old actor as a romantic lead who could fetch the likes of Emma Thompson requires some suspension of disbelief.

A relatively mindless thrill ride that would have made the old NBC execs grin from ear to ear.

It often seems precious and overconceived, its accumulating crosses and double-crosses as devoid of consequence as a child's backyard game.

The project was produced in association with National Geographic World Films, a relationship borne out by the movie's cultural detail, rich earth-toned cinematography (by Falorni), and almost complete lack of dramatic tension.

Unfortunately, as in many such big-screen comic books, the backstory beats the hell out of the present-tense plot.

Like the incessant ringing of cowbells in the first two segments, the film may either hypnotize you or drive you stark staring mad.

As usual with Stallone's Rocky sequels, the schmaltz is unbearable, but the fight is plausibly handled, and Stallone's sincere sadness at growing older makes this an unexpectedly satisfying conclusion to the series.

Visually and dramatically it works well - it's Shakespeare by way of "Black Hawk Down" - but as an allegory of modern-day geopolitics it doesn't really go anywhere.

Claudel commits the cardinal sin of withholding the full story until the very end, when it spills out in a histrionic scene between the two sisters and largely exonerates the older one.

Though it easily surpasses most American action flicks, it suffers from the old commercial imperative of making the protagonist a nice guy, something Refn has seldom bothered with in Europe.

Bong's opening and climactic scenes, in which the old woman bops around to a dance tune amid a vast field of yellow grass, are typical of the movie's cockeyed poetry.

This is the usual cartoon of hound dogs, roadhouses, antebellum mansions, and Civil War reenactments. Aside from that, it's not a bad date movie.

You'd have to be a real curmudgeon not to enjoy a show with Ruth Brown, Mavis Staples, Solomon Burke...

There's a lot less here than meets the eye.

Director Bob Clark teamed with nostalgic humorist Jean Shepherd for this squeaky clean and often quite funny 1983 yuletide comedy, adapted from Shepherd's novel In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash.

Whenever writer-director Oren Moverman moves past these scattered and admittedly voyeuristic moments into the lives of the two soldiers, the movie drifts into received wisdom and unconvincing romance.

It's nice to see a high-concept comedy with such a generous concept.

Producer Ismail Merchant died in 2005, but Merchant Ivory's stuffy tradition of quality lives on.

Naturally, age and infirmity are a major subtext of Shine a Light (and, really, any movie featuring Keith Richards). No matter how cadaverous the Stones appear, they keep climbing onstage, and I’ll miss them when they’re finally gone.

As bad-taste comedies go, this is more clever than gross.

Never really delivers on that promise, mainly because its scenes of two brilliant men discussing the nature of the subconscious can't compare with Cronenberg's visual rendering of that subconscious in earlier movies.

After she's forced to confess, director Marc Rothemund doesn't have much to do but marvel at her heroic defiance, and the film is overtaken by its talkiness, claustrophobia, and polarized morality.

Stiller plays a monster, and when Gerwig goes for him, declaring that she sees his tender side, the development seems like a fond indulgence on the part of writer-director Noah Baumbach.

The cluttered narrative leaves little room for character development, though director Niels Arden Oplev does manage to accommodate plenty of gratuitous torture and rape.

The project reeks of commercial calculation, which is just tolerable until Walker, in search of a story arc, follows two chorus members with serious illnesses into the hospital.

It’s one thing to make a movie filled with mayhem and then implicate the audience for watching it; it’s another thing entirely to come back ten years later with the same movie, hype it with a marketing campaign, and try to implicate the viewer again. One nice thing about America is that you can’t be tried twice for the same crime.

This low-budget sci-fi item was produced by some of the Brits who made "Shaun of the Dead" and "Hot Fuzz," including their writer and director, Edgar Wright, but it hardly compares, despite Nick Frost's brief appearance as a mangy pot dealer.

The gender-bending comedy of Billy Wilder and Blake Edwards gets a teenpic makeover in this 2005 debut feature by Martin Curland.

It never conjures up any coherent drama of its own, focusing instead on the historical destiny of Bernal's beefcake messiah.

This incredibly odd Japanese horror feature (1977) is like a Hello Kitty backpack stuffed with bloody human viscera.

Winterbottom and screenwriter Tony Grisoni were clearly motivated by conscience, but I can't help thinking that Stephen Frears's "Dirty Pretty Things," a much more conventional and contrived movie about third-world refugees, will have a greater social impact than this murky art-house item.

Emotionally charged but not entirely honest documentary.

The scenes between husband and wife are spectacularly awkward and arresting, though the movie grows more dubious the nearer the guys get to their shooting session in a local hotel room.

Inception delivers dazzling special effects and a boatload of stars, but it sags and eventually buckles under the weight of its complicated premise.

The torture is strictly for kicks, which spoiled this for me, but less skittish viewers may enjoy this as a stylish and tightly wound genre piece.

Yu's portrait of Darger, which clocks in at 82 minutes, skims over the only aspect of his life that commands respect: his craft.

The drama is hampered by a vague screenplay that takes its sweet time explaining the characters' past and never specifies the nature of the boy's palsy and apparent retardation.

Anthony Peckham's script is formulaic, woodenly reverent, and devoid of real dramatic tension.

Snippets of the band's brutally percussive music punctuate the endless encounter sessions, which expose the musicians' boundless self-absorption (the 9-11 attacks come and go without so much as a mention) and cowed obedience to their psychological guru.

Former FBI agent Robert Hanssen is now serving a life sentence for his long career as a Russian and Soviet spy, but this rote thriller implies he should have done prison time just for being Catholic. As played by Chris Cooper, Hanssen is a humorless asshole who commits treason because the bureau won't give him an office with a window, and the screenplay scores countless easy points off his religiosity, which masks a weakness for sex tapes and sleazy chat rooms.

The aerial dogfights are thrilling, but the script seems to have been written by Snoopy.

Donzelli, a busy actress in France, directed this drama from a script she wrote with Elkaim, which may explain why the parents become the center of the movie while the ostensibly suffering boy never takes shape as a character.

Eastwood is still a primal force on-screen, but his unusual practice of shooting scripts as written, which served him well on "Unforgiven" and "Million Dollar Baby," here leaves him exposed to Nick Schenk's familiar situations and awkward dialogue.

At 116 minutes, it's a test not of speed but endurance.

Sleekly tooled but eminently forgettable thriller.

Cheerful mess of a pulp-fiction parody.

The climactic sight gag is lifted from Monicelli's movie like a diamond from a jeweler's window.

Singer draws heavily on the 1978 hit that launched the Warner Brothers franchise, with Brandon Routh dully impersonating Christopher Reeve as the Man of Steel, Kevin Spacey getting all the good lines as the villainous Lex Luthor, and stock footage of Marlon Brando proving that death isn't always a good career move.

Like her previous feature, "Look at Me" (2004), this relationship drama is mature and intelligent, but the character conflicts are so decorously handled that after a while the whole enterprise begins to seem more like a good waiter than a good story.

No one breaks into song, but this fact-based legal drama about a battered Anglo-Indian wife on trial for murdering her husband is infected with a fatal strain of heaving Bollywood melodrama.

Pretty dispensable, though it has one of the best homosexual-panic gags I've ever seen.

Glodell seems to be reaching for the nihilistic buddy romance of a movie like "Mean Streets" (1973), but without the serious intent; despite all the roiling emotions, this begins to feel like a pile-up of macho fetish items and stylistic affectations.

The deft physical comedy is a pleasure, though the leering chauvinism becomes more embarrassing as the movie progresses. Mel Brooks never had it this good.

A tolerably warm bath of postcollegiate self-pity, salted with irony and self-mockery.

Michael Webber's documentary "The Elephant in the Living Room" (2010) makes such a powerful case against private ownership of exotic wild animals that this portrait of circus owner David Balding and his beloved elephant Flora seems sentimental by comparison.

Undeniably well executed.

Never lives up to the hilarity of the opening, partly because the large-scale production smothers the gags but mostly because those gags are so easy to smother.

This French kidnapping drama drags on for so long I'd have paid the ransom out of my own pocket just to wrap things up.

The episodic structure prevents any real momentum, but Byatt and Fothergill give a visceral sense of the sea's violence and vividly capture the riot of color to be found on the ocean floor.

Whether the character is supposed to be a stand-in for Cody, who grew up in the western 'burbs of Chicago and has since won an Oscar, is more than I can say, but the movie suffers from the sort of self-pitying fog that can envelop a writer when he dives into his own malaise.

Warmly and gently handled, though the central story, detailing the personal politics between him and the six childlike monsters, steadily loses steam.

This absorbing documentary by George Hickenlooper (Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse) spends too much time on the celebrities in Bingenheimer's life for its analysis of fame and fandom to rise above the banal.

The characters' undiluted self-interest will seem one-dimensional to all but the worst cynics.

Americans desensitized to senseless violence may find the subject matter almost banal, and the interspersed news footage of armed conflict from around the world feels like a rhetorical device. But the coldly telegraphic structure--a series of 71 blackouts following the four strangers to their deaths--yields some striking moments.

Scenes of harvested frogs provide an apt metaphor for Brazil's miserable have-nots, so apt that Kohn can't resist beating it to death.

There are strong turns by Michael Caine as Alfred the butler and Tom Wilkinson as a ruthless crime boss.

Jayasundara dispenses with conventional story pacing to alternate long, static scenes with moments of revelatory lust or violence; as a press release states, the movie is "composed of uncanny set pieces portraying sex, death, and waiting," though its aesthetic achievement may lie in making all three feel like the same thing.

The real problem, however, is the male protagonist and his foul inner life: Almodovar's impressive recent work has focused on the rich emotionality of women, and though the film provides an interesting take on gender and submission, this sort of nastiness just isn't his thing.

Like Nicole Holofcener's "Please Give" (2010), this turns on the friction between an unusually altruistic character and the self-centered people around him, though screenwriters David Schisgall and Evgenia Peretz never pursue their premise into the sort of moral comedy that so distinguished the other movie.

Joel and Ethan Coen wrote the story, using the ancient gag of the toxic Santa as a vehicle for their patented brand of misanthropy; Zwigoff and company wring some laughs out of it, though the tone is uniformly mean and vulgar.

The strain to pull all this together becomes more evident as the movie progresses, and the three-way musical finale, a rickety acoustic run-through of “The Weight,” hardly lives up to the stars’ reputations.

Helms's screen persona-the stiff-necked nerd who triumphs through sheer doggedness-is heavily reminiscent of Harold Lloyd's, though Lloyd was handsome and endearing enough to succeed as a romantic lead.

You don't have to get too far into Kazuo Ishiguro's brilliant 2005 novel Never Let Me Go to realize it's hopelessly unfilmable.

The September Issue fixates on status and professional one-upmanship; if you want to see a movie that actually treats fashion as personal expression--in other words, art--keep a lookout for Anne Fontaine’s forthcoming biopic "Coco Before Chanel."

With its one-liners and welter of double-crosses, it should settle on the video shelf between "Intolerable Cruelty" and "Mr & Mrs. Smith."

Solondz has grown so possessive of his characters, in fact, that he's begun to guard them jealously from any one actor.

The new jokes all seem like discards from a Rob Schneider comedy, but for the most part director Peter Segal (Anger Management) and screenwriter Sheldon Turner play a good defensive game, sticking close to the original film's story.

Fans will dig the abundant performance video and commentary from Henry Rollins and Ian MacKaye; everyone else should steer clear of the mosh pit.

I'd have preferred less personality stuff and more hard information about the current technical and commercial challenges, but if polishing these guys' egos is the only way to make them do the right thing, then so be it.

Fascinating and troubling documentary.

The plot, though, is recycled from the Vince Vaughn comedy "Fred Claus" (Santa's duties are assumed by a goofy relative, in this case son Arthur) and the old Rankin-Bass special "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" (Arthur goes on a rogue expedition with a couple other misfits).

The early scenes of Greene misbehaving on the air are pretty funny, thanks mainly to Martin Sheen as the apoplectic station manager. But I was bummed out by the movie's trite VH1 cartoon of the black power era--especially coming from Kasi Lemmons, who made her directing debut with the hauntingly ambiguous "Eve's Bayou."

Its numerous ancillary characters are so closely observed that even those without speaking parts register as people, in a manner than blurs the line between strangeness and intimacy.