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.