Keith Uhlich

It never feels as if we're watching a brand-name cash-grab, but instead as if we're participating in an endlessly imaginative afternoon of play.

Belvaux's tension-building setup is stellar; the follow-through, less so.

The good news is that the film's stylistic excesses don't negate the many fascinating aspects of Nim's story.

Writer-director Nick Tomnay needlessly convolutes what should have been a taut, focused two-hander with flashbacks, alternate realities and too-clever-by-half reversals.

Though both lead actors are able to coast for a while on their natural charm, it's evident by the soppy finale that their "Sleepless in Seattle" and "Pretty Woman" salad days are long past.

All the problematic aspects of the Hollywood bad boy's filmography - reactionary rah-rah patriotism, sneer 'n' drool female fetishization, callously detached bloodletting - remain in soul-shattering force.

There is no depth or resonance to anything we see and hear-everything is as it seems, no more, no less, and the reactionary superficiality dulls the senses. General Orders No. 9 strains for elegiac profundity and ends up as bad, backward-looking poetry.

It's an equally insightful and excruciating journey, with our quip-ready protagonist perpetually caught between two modes: eager-to-please caffeinated and near-breakdown frustrated.

The razzle-dazzle can't distract from the monotonously overstuffed spy-film plot.

The falsely euphoric close is a big misstep - Pulitzers, it would seem, are the ultimate Band-Aid. What was that old adage about printing the legend?

Whenever this Lantern returns to terra firma (too often), its imaginative flights are ground down under the Warners overlords' demographic-pandering heels.

That One Lucky Elephant ultimately comes down on the side of anthropomorphizing Flora and her kind is extremely disappointing - a little clear-eyed ambivalence would have helped the film feel more focused and less like patchwork.

This fascinatingly knotty movie never becomes a facile screed against the powers that be. Instead, it plays as a more relaxed and leisurely requiem for a slowly vanishing way of life, with sounds and images-a time-lapse contemplation of the cosmos is in the running for scene of the year-that are as mesmerizing as they are subtly pointed.

It's just another franchise nonstarter to toss in the superstore superhero deal bin.

As to the movie's three sections, the best comes first, as an eclectic "cast" of characters (among them philosopher Alain Badiou and musician Patti Smith) pontificate their way around a lavish Mediterranean cruise ship.

A movie with an unflinchingly tough heart.

The film's commitment to representing the harsh truths of an unfortunate historical moment is admirable, but it tends to grate rather than illuminate.

The Tree of Life enthralls right from the start.

For an animation studio that too often specializes in the frivolous and glib (begone, Shrek series!), the move to the dark side is refreshing.

This is prime Woody Allen - insightful, philosophical and very funny.

The kids pick up the filmmakers' lyrical slack more often than not, but this ode to the power of verse could really use a redraft.

As engrossing as it is maddening, Pierre Thoretton's documentary on the sale of Yves Saint Laurent's extensive art collection is perched somewhere between a sanded-edged official portrait and a keen examination of affluence run amok.

That T.J. and his family willingly allow this headbanging psycho(analyst) to move into their cluttered, dankly lit abode-the emotional damage is palpable, yo!-is just one of the film's many eyebrow-raising contrivances.

By the time Nick decides to have an emotionally purgative yard sale-the primary holdover from the short story-all the adult ambiguities have been traded in for facile Indiewood profundities.

Though it holds your attention all the way through to an enigmatic, spiritually tinged climax, the movie leaves you wanting more than the Vega Vidals' secondhand artistry is able to provide.

Two monologues-one in which the Hobo compares himself to a bear, the other a Travis Bickle–like screed delivered to a roomful of increasingly distressed babies-are damn near Shakespearean. It's a shame the performance is contained in a Z-movie patchwork that's a bit too knowingly repugnant.

Fortunately, Teegarden and McDonell make up for the hand-me-down plotting with a sweet, unaffected chemistry.

The film isn't blinded by Candy's beauty and celebrity; it digs critically, if still empathetically, beneath.