Kimberley Jones

That's the ultimate cheat in this pleasant, but trifling affair: Allen has cheated himself out of an actress (Leoni) that could have been Diane Keaton's heir.

It comes as no surprise that the film is less about fandom as it is about the community fans create with one another – who else to turn to when the object of your affection, your enduring obsession, blows big chunks? – and Fanboys, a likable, shaggy picture, pays nice tribute to that community.

The Girl Who Played With Fire's chief frustration is in how removed Salander and Blomkvist are from each other.

It's hard, as a viewer, not to shudder in tandem with Lisa – this isn't a love match, it's two would-be motivational coaches swapping slogans.

It's all pretty goofy, which I assume is the point, but it's also pretty dull.

Scorsese’s outsized presence in the documentary – its very framework built around his relationship to Powell and Pressburger – ends up jamming an immovable object between viewer and subject.

Sugar is a curiosity – too somber for a picaresque, too arm's-length for much emotional effect – and while it's interesting, it's never truly absorbing.

On film, goosed along by Thomas Newman’s jaunty score and a generically weepy power ballad co-written and performed by Hanks’ wife and producing partner, Rita Wilson, the effect is hollow, placating. They’ve turned themes of great love, loss, and the will to keep going into … easy listening.

Product placement aside, there’s an admirable, even sweet, message about fellowship and misfit pride shot through the whole script, and Vaughn is rather touching as a kind of cuddly uncle figure to his fellow interns.

Fletcher demonstrates, as with her second film, "27 Dresses," that she can put together a funny, able romantic comedy that is a cut above, but no more. Still, those leads are awfully likable, the Massachusetts-for-Alaska landscape rather picturesque, and if The Proposal doesn't reinvent the wheel, merrily we roll along nonetheless.

What I learned from Monrovia, Indiana is that I – personally – am bored by mattress shopping, City Council arguments over fire hydrants, and high school band concerts I am not obligated by shared DNA to attend.

There are no hard answers in Room 237, a feature-length, sporadically engaging exploration of the latter (The Shining).

Why do I feel like a bummed-out tourist gone home with dashed hopes? “I was promised a new-millennium mindfuck, and all I got was this crummy pick-the-bodies-off horror.”

Chbosky surrounds his hurting characters with the cinematic equivalent of a hug circle – which is sweet, but rather antithetical to tension-building.

If anything, Daniela Forever feels overly familiar. Calling to mind other life-of-the-mind films, it suffers by comparison, falling short of the wowee-zowee visuals of Waking Life, the satisfyingly intricate mechanics of Inception, the soulfulness of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

What it needs is a little more dirtying down. What it needs, in short, is less New York, and more Alabama.

Although the filmmaker’s presence in her own film is never remarked upon, I imagine she felt compelled by a feeling of kinship with the artist; Dyrschka, a first-time feature director, is the first filmmaker to profile af Klint, which is a notable achievement. But I don’t think we’ve had the definitive film portrait yet.

What surprised me about Petzold’s latest is how ultimately straightforward, even slight, it felt upon conclusion, even with certain questions left aggravatingly open-ended.

This Native American romantic comedy, which won the Audience Award at the 2001 Austin Film Festival, arrives in theatres four years late but seasonally right on time.

Life at least deserves a nod for supplying the mostly dramatic actress with her first starring comedic role.

The very best animation can excite the senses and inflame the imagination. But Chico & Rito's charmless line drawings just made me wish the film was live-action instead.

The elements are all here for something spectacular – and in brilliant bursts, Jeunet really gets it – but in the end, all that potential is sunk by a terminally confused tone and milquetoast pairing of lovers. Pity that.

A certain inevitability hangs over The Mother – as if any of this could end well – but if Kureishi's framework is perhaps predictable, his knotty, complex characters are not.

I suppose when you make a movie, however tangentially, about Viagra, you're required to insert at least one scene of its side effects, but the broadness with which Zwick plays it out is like a stake to the heart of the film's hard-earned but fast-lost authenticity.

In his short career (The Station Agent, The Visitor), McCarthy has established himself as a craftsman of conventionally quirky pictures that are ENTIRELY about ingratiating themselves with the audience.

It's a nice, friendly kind of love, but hardly an inspiring one.

The camera may dive deep, but the content skims mere surface.

The filmmakers no doubt had a hell of a time whittling the material down; unfortunately, what they came up with was something long on the mundaneness of GovWorks.com and short on the personalities behind it.

Frozen can count in its favor visual grandeur, two energetic young women as co-leads, and a couple of plot twists that place the film a cut above your average princess fare.

It’s worth a watch to see these two reliably comic actors do some heavy dramatic lifting and tenderly spot for each other.

Morris has found a real character in McKinney, but to what end, I couldn't say.

In terms of a pre-teen instructional, Sleepover offers throughout a laudable emphasis on the importance of friendship, but parents may rightfully flinch at a protagonist who is ultimately rewarded for breaking all the rules.

Roberts, wearing that beatific half-smile of hers that suggests inner peace and wisdom before she's even begun her journey, is too open-faced with her emotions to signal the complexities of Gilbert's distress – over her divorce, her control issues, her rootlessness, and inability to live in the moment.

Inelegant but not uninteresting, Ramen Heads is a bronze contender at best.

If I may presume: Thatcher probably would have preferred more action, less talk.

When the action shifts to Bill’s childhood home – an islet along the Thames, downriver from the legendary Shepperton Studios – some of the magic of that place rubs off on Boorman’s picture: It becomes lighter on its feet, moves with the breath of life and not just the strength of memory.

Size matters, too, in Live From New York!, a portrait of SNL at 40, but in inverse: 82 minutes isn’t nearly long enough to consider every angle – or even many angles – of a cultural institution.

The familiar faces inject instant warmth, but I’m not sure it’s entirely earned. By the time Jay Kelly arrived at its last line – buffed to a bland sheen, as if the whole film was reverse-engineered to land there – I had cooled considerably.

Mostly Legend just lurches.

When The Company owns up to what it is -– a performance piece -– it’s glorious. Everything else -– the window-dressing of a fiction film -– just gums up that gloriousness.

It's impossible to shake the feeling that these are merely actors -- albeit good ones.

Wimpy Kid's filmmakers have gone off-book, so to speak, to inflect Greg with a surprising cruel streak.

Liberal Arts is not unlikable: There are some intelligent observations about how humans woo, and the film is so suffused with sincerity you want to give it a pat on the head just for trying so hard.

This film adaptation feels like YA, with cat’s-cradle love matches, soft-focus sexuality, and a main character who never satisfactorily makes the transition from page to screen.

The film holds its twists too close to the chest, and there's little to chew on till the ambitiousness of its plotting is revealed late in the film.

Starts out as a lark, but veers into grittier, more emotionally complex territory -- just like a real relationship -- that the film doesn't have the chops to sustain.

It doesn't have the bite to be satire, the pratfalls to be broad comedy, or the wit to pass as a comedy of manners. What does that leave? The French cinematic equivalent of motivational coaching, and -- just like Pignon -- something spectacularly unspectacular.

Ambrose owns this crawlspace between being fierce and being fragile. But she can't escape the fact that her role is underwritten; the script suffers from an excess of subtlety.

If you shy away from that sick feeling in the pit of the stomach that comes when watching good people make bad decisions, then best to steer clear of Manito, a low-budget indie that reaches near-Greek proportions of tragedy brought on by lousy decision-making.

It’s a lot, but also very little: The action amounts to multiple variations on “try not to get wet, or caught out” to push along a plot that dispenses the usual life lessons about being brave and valuing friendship.

Undone by Blanchett's dull, wooden delivery. She's the pap that kills the pulp the rest of the film is bellowing out to be.

I suspect a second viewing would uncover more information embedded in the mise-en-scène; had Trance – tonally a jumble and disorienting to the point of distraction – rewarded the audience with the pure perfection of a Keyser Söze-like reveal, I’d be more inclined to make the return trip.

Chalamet embodies Dylan in a quite literal sense; he’s clearly studied the tape and does a more than passable mimicry of Dylan’s voice and performing style. Problem is, it’s an intentionally opaque characterization, in a film overcrammed with musical performances – onstage, in the studio, on the bed noodling on a new song – which basically means half the movie is like watching pretty good karaoke.

Something is terribly amiss when the American actors sound like English is their second language.

Everything that was sharp in the original text has been rounded and buffed.

Teetering toward made-for-TV in its facile depiction of Walter’s many wives and veering tonally from too broad to totally mawkish (the score wants to arm-wrestle tears out of you), The Friend is all soft edges.

If A Thousand Words' formula seems familiar, that's because writer Steve Koren has tripped down this quasi-metaphysical path before in "Bruce Almighty" and "Click."

Perfectly passable film.

Ultimately Hedges’ film, like the turkey, comes out underdone.

This one’s not going into the conspiracy thriller pantheon, but for the duration of its tense, terse 112 minutes, it scratches the itch.

Gilroy zings the film with tantalizing bits of absurdity (one wonders, wistfully, what the Coen brothers would have done with this material), but too often he returns to his darker, more ponderous instincts.

Digging for Fire fails its title’s own promise: It has the capacity for startling insight and artistry, but mostly it’s just a toe listlessly pushing dirt around.

I’m coming down harder than I meant to. If you’re a fan of the series – and I am – you’re still going to fan. (There’s no entry point for newcomers; it’s too in medias res.) The scenery is lush. There’s ever the pleasure in Steve and Rob’s company. I just wanted to feel by film’s end like I’d arrived somewhere new. Like the journey had been pulling me somewhere inevitable but still enlightening.

Trumbo certainly has pep. Theodore Shapiro’s jazzy score doesn’t just boast a tom-tom – you could choreograph it with pom-poms. Maybe Roach worried that general audiences wouldn’t cotton to a yellowing story about the Red Menace, so he ginned it up with a jazz-hands idea of midcentury Hollywood, with everyone mugging like it’s a lobby-card photo shoot

There's nothing that feels like real rage, nothing that even remotely approximates the spiritual decimation of a termination.

Failed feminist statement or not, Coyote Ugly is a likable, if confused film.

Early Man is wanting: of a cleverer narrative, of memorable characters. It’s not bad, necessarily. It just feels like an early draft of a better movie to come.

Hard truths: Popstar’s jokes land pillow-soft.

Amusing enough, but weirdly joyless.

As is, it's simply too much information crammed too haphazardly into a running time that at times borders on interminable.

Perhaps there was some confusion – should we play this as a lark or a lesson in geopolitical unrest? – or maybe there was some studio involvement to defang the politics; whatever the case, the noncommittal Charlie Wilson's War treads a good-natured but yawning in-between.

It's unclear if Van Sant intends to inspire guilt; here, as elsewhere, he is exasperatingly abstruse. And in this striving to not say too much, he ends up not saying much of anything at all.

Amusing but never rousing, this fourth installment in the Ice Age cartoon franchise comes fretted with freezer burn.

The subject itself – the musicians, the music – and the spirit of the thing – one son’s obvious devotion – transcend the film’s technical shortcomings.

As an unsparing portrait of disaffection among the small-paycheck, faux-creative class, The Future is rather astute … which isn't to say it isn't also bang-your-head-on-the-wall annoying.

Grace and Johannson's courtship has all the heat of a wet wipe and, worse yet, leaves Quaid offscreen for long stretches.

A romantic comedy, too, but this time the romance is between two women, and one of them, truth be told, is a dud.

The final conflict is so protracted as to comfortably accommodate a bathroom break. Don't worry. You won't miss anything you haven't seen before.

It has a basic goodness of heart that counteracts, if not entirely cancels out, the film's broadness and busyness.

Sausage Party glints of greatness, but this is half-cocked comedy at best.

An actor most at home playing devilish, Keaton’s got the last-reel Machiavellian shrug down cold. But neither he nor the filmmakers do much to illuminate the neural pistons fired from brain to bodily shrug.

It's unclear where the buck stops in terms of creative authority – at one point, Clayman complains that "the only thing I feel in control of is the money" – which renders OC87 at once a remarkable achievement, and a fatally compromised film.

The story – two guys, one girl, much deceit – is eternally contemporary. Sometimes gigglingly so in the hands of ever-erratic Joe Wright (Anna Karenina, Atonement, Pan), who injects horny, corny musical theatre-kid energy into this latest iteration of Rostand’s doomed love triangle.

Perhaps Sucsy was overwhelmed by his immersion in such colorful and outré material; he's chosen for his followup, the I Can't Believe It's Not Nicholas Sparks weepie The Vow, the cinematic equivalent of a lie-down.

It takes only moments into the film, when star Timothée Chalamet first opens his mouth to sing, to discover Wonka’s two fatal errors: The songs are not good, and the guy singing them is even worse.

The story, alas, is colorless and flat: a terribly earnest picture of two sad people looking for somebody or something to jump-start their battery.

Goldstein, better known for his comic work and coming off a wincing dramatic arc on Shrinking, has limited range but nestles into his sweet spot here, a combination of smirking and sincere, and the underrated Poots is magnetic. The script – witty, anemic – only gestures at her character’s chronic depression, but no matter. Poots bodily fills in the blanks, transforming an underwritten part into a complex, rounded person. She’s an original.

Best yet is Liev Schreiber playing Spassky, big as a Russian bear and as ice-cool as the country’s signature 80-proof spirit. Is it unpatriotic to wish this was his movie, not the twitchy American guy’s?

It runs the stopwatch on a chase sequence to a comical extreme and takes way, way too long to take its final bow, in the process burning off any residual goodwill.

The film's "never grow up" refrain plays like a broken record, until, in an abrupt (but not unexpected) turnaround at film's end, it fixes itself.

It’s not like Monsters University is a bad movie. It’s just not a terribly interesting one.

Feels like a Fincher film: It possesses the same smarts, the same visual panache, the same violence. But not the same heart.

Genial and unbothered, Confess, Fletch never climbs higher than mere adequacy.

Little more than a constant and occasionally pretty imaginative sex show.

Warmed my heart about as much as the cold cream Angèle slathers all over her wrinkling clients.

In manipulating its many disparate characters to bump into each other and set plot lines in motion, Intermission walks a fine line between clever and contrived, with the scale tipping more often toward contrived.

The film is less successful at exploring the chinks in her armor – the stuff that makes her human, and a person of interest. Chastain is great – she’s always great, right? – and the brittle braininess she radiates is the film’s crowning seduction.

The movie lumbers on some more, reiterating the obvious and relying on overfamiliar imagery. Audiences have a long year to wait for Part 2. Would it not have been better to leave them breathless than heaving a sigh?