Keith Phipps

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.