Keith Phipps

For much of The Patience Stone, Farahani is the movie, and as she shifts from fear to despair to anger to emotions she’d never previously considered, her magnetic presence goes a long way toward putting a human face on the film, more successfully than the material around her.

For all its simple politics, clanging dialogue, and underwritten roles—only Damon’s natural, and deepening, ability to suggest unspoken disappointment gives his character dimension—Elysium works, though never as well as it should.

Kormákur lets his stars balance the buddy-movie levity with just enough dramatic weight to keep it grounded, and his directing style seems like a conscious corrective to the disorienting cutting and obvious CGI effects that have come to dominate Hollywood action films.

Sometimes it’s fascinating, but just as often, it’s frustrating: It’s a film without a net, and it tends to land with a thud.

Shamelessly exploitative, but never entertainingly so.

There’s a strain of gross-out humor—most bodily fluids make cameos—that doesn’t mesh well with the rest of the movie. But more bothersome is a tendency The To Do List shares with its heroine: mistaking checking items off a list for progress.

For all the memorable dialogue and elegant camerawork (courtesy of Javier Aguirresarobe), it’s Blanchett’s movie, and her performance tells yet another story, that of a woman losing control.

With The Conjuring, [Wan] once more turns the familiar terrifying, making it easy to fear what’s behind that closed door, or under the bed, or just around the corner, making a creaking noise that doesn’t sound quite right.

It’s light and loose in ways that Almodóvar hasn’t let himself be in decades. Unsurprisingly, it’s also a lot of fun, a relentlessly entertaining lark that, like its setting, soars into the clouds, then discovers it doesn’t really have a way to get down.

It also has enough nutty energy and oddball touches - "The Wire's" Andre Royo shows up as a gun-toting, faux-hawk-sporting badass - that it's never boring. Dumb, gross, gratuitous, and overly familiar, sure. But never boring.

If only the emotions of the performances, the themes of the story, and Wright's cinematic virtuosity synced up more often. A lopsided abridgement that speeds through the plot doesn't help.

Skyfall doesn't forget it has to be an exciting spy film above all, but from its first scene, it ratchets up the drama in ways that have little to do with action.

Lincoln is built around a magnetic Day-Lewis turn, and the film is a memorable, sometimes stirring look at how even the most righteous bill must struggle, and even cheat, to become a law. It demands a bigger stage than the one it's given here.

Directing his first live-action film since 2000's "Cast Away," Robert Zemeckis paces it brilliantly, slowly ramping up the energy from hungover lethargy to coke-fueled confidence, while creating undercurrents of dread as Washington hits his stride.

It doesn't help that the characters have so little to them. Weston plays Moriarty as such an unfailingly good, temptation-free kid that he only needs a halo floating above his pre-Raphaelite curls to complete the picture.

Measured scene by scene, the film isn't always successful, and its transcendent moments make it easy to wish it could reach that elevated pitch more often. But Cloud Atlas is the sort of work where the big picture matters more than the details. It's an imperfect film of great daring and tremendous humanity, a work of many stories, but a singular achievement.

While Seven Psychopaths sometimes hits the philosophical shallows, its pleasures still run deep.

Only the finale threatens to undo all that hard work. Though well-done, the last act leans less on the facts of the case than on Hollywood contrivances, heightening the tension with embellishments that feel at odds with the methodical, deliberate film leading up to them.

None of it is particularly novel or exciting.

It's an intense, uncompromising take that restores some of the shock that made Wuthering Heights so notable when it first appeared.

It's taken a while for Kane to make it to the big screen, maybe because fantasy barbarians and long-ago kings have more immediate appeal than pious, slouch-hat-wearing men with poor senses of humor, but Solomon Kane gives it a go anyway. The results suggest a compelling movie could be made from the material, even if it isn't this one.

In Trouble With The Curve, Eastwood plays a reminder of an older way of doing things, a professional whose likes the world won't see again once he's gone. The role isn't much of a stretch.

Dredd, a second attempt at making Judge Dredd a movie star, overcorrects, veering in the opposite direction with a dark - literally and otherwise - nearly humorless bit of ultraviolence distinguished largely by a fondness for spurting CGI blood.

While Bachelorette is admirably free of the normal formulas governing movies that revolve around women and wedding dresses, it doesn't offer anything more satisfying in their stead.

It's a potentially creepy setting that would give an innovative director a chance to do a lot with a little. Unfortunately, Lincoln isn't one of those.

There really ought to be a lot more movies like Hit & Run, but only if they're just a little bit better.

The film spends so little time developing its characters, apart from all that expository dialogue, that it's like asking audiences to care for paper dolls. And Sparkle never delivers on the promise of its most famous song by giving viewers something they can feel.

As Pattinson nears the bottom - both of his fortune, and to all appearances, his sanity - Cronenberg has to take the film somewhere, emptying out into a confrontation between Pattinson and a disgruntled former employee (Paul Giamatti) that never fully ties together all that's come before.

The Odd Life Of Timothy Green attempts to stage a modern fairy tale in Middle America. But in spite of an abundance of earnestness, the pixie dust needed to create magic remains out of the film's reach.

Fortunately, it's funny enough that it doesn't have to be subtle. In fact, subtlety would just get in the way.

Klayman captures the earlier parts of that story so compellingly that the finale's "to be continued" quality ends up playing into the film's unspoken goal: raising awareness of one man's ongoing attempts to better the world through art.

In spite of some prominently featured green slime and power-beam weaponry, it won't make anyone forget "Ghostbusters" anytime soon.

The Amazing Spider-Man, helmed by "(500) Days Of Summer" director Marc Webb, doesn't put its own stamp on the material, which feels warmed-over in ways that don't help.

Viewers who dislike movies in which all drama hinges on one character withholding information from another for no reason beyond the need to keep the plot chugging along should stay far away from People Like Us. The film does have its charms, but getting to them means seeing past a Buick-sized contrivance.

Like "The Girlfriend Experience," Magic Mike doubles as an of-the-moment film about life in a down economy, so much so that it would play like a bait-and-switch if it didn't just as thoroughly deliver as a movie about stripping.

This time out, Shelton seems to be playing the part of someone who doesn't know how to finish what she started.

Adrien Brody delivers a colorful turn as a braided-and-tatted drug kingpin who thinks his pet toad talks to him (funny animal, check!), but High School is otherwise a tedious sludge through the same gray corridors where the same old gags wait around every turn.

Bravely or stupidly, both A Little Bit Of Heaven and its heroine charge on as if the introduction of terminal cancer didn't change things that much.

Mostly The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel stays focused on the cutesy, low-stakes personal journeys of its English characters, characters it would be hard to care about if they weren't brought to life by actors who give the film substance and gravity it doesn't otherwise know how to earn.

Tasked with meeting the many requirements necessary for any Avengers movie to work, Whedon checks off all the boxes, then sets about creating new expectations for what a big superhero movie ought to be.

That's a lot for any film to unpack, and "The Last King Of Scotland" director Kevin MacDonald deserves a lot of credit simply for keeping the narrative coherent.

As a pretty, low-stakes bayou romance The Lucky One works well enough. When asked to carry any kind of dramatic weight, however, it collapses.

It's an exercise in metafiction that, while providing grisly fun, never distances viewers. And it's entertaining, while asking the same question of viewers and characters alike: Why come to a place you knew all along was going to be so dark and dangerous?

The film alternates sloppily executed sex gags with sentiment, as did its predecessors. And it's all just slightly more endearing and amusing than it has any right to be.

In spite of a promising start, an unconventional setup, attractive photography, and game lead performances from Ewan McGregor and Emily Blunt, Salmon Fishing quickly turns into exactly the sort of wet cardboard box of a movie its title suggests.

There's probably a graduate thesis to be drawn from this, about what audiences want from horror films, and ways to make viewers uncomfortable with their own voyeuristic desires, but that doesn't make the thrills any less sour, or the end any less exploitative. (Or worse, dull.)

Rather than trying to overwhelm viewers by overloading the senses, John Carter's effects strive to create something new using as their foundation a book that's fired imaginations for the past century.

It's crude in every sense: The film looks like shit, the characters are boors, and it's as sloppily put-together as the home movie it pretends to be. Project X's commitment to its crudity almost redeems it, though.

It's thin material, to say the least, and manipulative to boot, putting women, children, and a SEAL father-to-be in jeopardy in ways more about servicing cheap thrills than any larger point about the perilous state of the world in 2012.

It's unashamedly escapist, but a turn for the serious as The Vow nears the finish line only underscores its essential silliness and what a poor job the film has done making it seem like its characters need each other for reasons beyond looking good together.

Without Radcliffe at the center looking scared out of his wits, The Woman In Black would seem even slighter than it already does.

As played by Ralph Fiennes in his own cinematic adaptation of the play, Coriolanus' military genius makes him a figure of awe, but it's his near-absence of empathy that makes him terrifying.

The aerial sequences look an awful lot like X-wing-versus-TIE-fighter battles and the effects have the same not-quite-solid feel of the Star Wars prequels. When the heroes crash, they go up in blazes of digital glory that seem just as artificial as the plotting that brought them to their fates.

To create his disarmingly earnest film, Spielberg draws from the past. Its tone is humanistic and its technique classic.

It's an odd, unsatisfying combination that moves from mopey drama one moment to a reaction shot of a monkey smacking his forehead in exasperation the next. By the end of the film, viewers might understand the monkey's feelings all too well.

Ritchie has made a film that's so busy, it starts to become boring.

As Cruise clings to the side of the building using malfunctioning equipment, and a sandstorm looms in the distance, the question shifts from whether Bird can direct an action film to whether there's anyone out there who can top him.

After establishing an atmosphere of nearly unbearable dread, Alfredson keeps thickening and chilling it.

Outrage is compelling to watch until it becomes exhausting.