Kyle Smith

It’s amusing but trifling; busy but at times inert. It hints at an emotional payoff but is too wary of actually going there.

The documentary’s director, Linus O’Brien (son of the show’s creator), interviews fans and outside experts to piece together the still-amazing story of how “Rocky Horror” caught on.

Notwithstanding some clunky moments, Mr. Ansari not only engineers up-to-the-minute twists on the musty Hollywood angel movie, but decorates his story with clever dialogue and wicked observations about street-level existence in the City of Angels.

The film is smartly structured, and many viewers will happily cue up a repeat viewing to savor all of the matters that were not as they seemed the first time. The many puzzles and secrets and fakeouts keep things mostly amusing for two hours, and as with the first “Knives Out,” the cast is strong.

Mr. Gaffigan’s feel for his perpetually disappointed character keeps us invested in him while Mr. West devises some insightful moments and a climax whose emotional content nearly matches its tricksy element.

Expert dramatists know how to develop suspense from the intricacy of details even when the end result is known to the audience, and Mr. Frears does so in the rousing final third of the film.

Reining in his famously discursive dialogue, and designing a clean, punchy plot, Mr. Allen limits himself to suggesting one big point with one big twist, which he makes emphatically, even wickedly.

Taken strictly as drama, the film is tartly written and superbly acted, at least until it takes that polemical turn in its final stages. I’ve seen and heard enough about Trump to actively, if ineffectively, avoid content relating to him, but most of The Apprentice held me in thrall.

Priscilla is gorgeous and at times intoxicating, but like Ms. Coppola’s previous efforts, it could do with less woolgathering and more character development.

Approaching the glum realities of aging with an often deft and even lightly comical tone, the Spanish-language film Calle Málaga is a pleasing character study of an elderly lady who is more resourceful than she appears.

The dystopian sci-fi drama Vesper is a gallery of astounding images set in a weirdly enticing future. The new world it depicts is both primitive and advanced, full of richly detailed flora and fauna representing strange new species that came about after mankind experimented heavily with genetic engineering as society crumbled to dust.

If Armageddon isn’t quite what happened economically to the U.S. in the 1980s, Armageddon Time is nevertheless a sincere effort to wring meaning out of memory.

Though the metaphor becomes somewhat strained as the film goes on, the religious implications of Narvel’s pursuit give the story considerable heft as Mr. Schrader beautifully balances outer tranquility with inner tumult.

The Miracle Club may not be a miraculous cinematic achievement but it does a fine job of dramatizing the healing power of forgiveness.

Boy Kills World should have stuck to gonzo comedy and been 15 minutes shorter. But Mr. Mohr exhibits the kind of flair for comic action that makes him an obvious choice to direct a big-budget Hollywood superhero epic.

If “Brave New World” isn’t an event film, at least it’s competently executed, without resorting to played-out gimmickry such as skipping across the multiverse. And it gives the audience plenty of analogues for real-world problems.

Following closely the standard playbook for biographical movies of the kind that television smoothly produced in the ’80s and ’90s, Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody may score low on creativity and originality but it’s effective throughout.

Mr. Novak comes up with so much funny dialogue and so many intriguing ideas that I mostly forgive the creakiness of his plotting. The basic mechanics of the whodunit seem to elude him, and he leaves important matters dangling at the end. But questioning the failings and prejudices of his tribe (Mr. Novak grew up in greater Boston, went to Harvard, worked in Hollywood, and has also written for the New Yorker) has provided him with a wealth of material.

Ex-Husbands is more a poignant reflection than a fleshed-out story. It doesn’t pretend to offer solutions to the various predicaments it considers. But Mr. Pritzker has a sagacious understanding of our various stumbles and humiliations, how we prove unable to make a marriage work or even communicate effectively with our children or parents.

Rangy in tone, style and theme, it has so much going on that a single viewing hardly seems sufficient to absorb it all. Whether it’s a masterpiece or a hodgepodge will be a matter of some discussion; the reach is evident but the grasp is a little shaky.

Instead of a theme park, it’s more of a cathedral—solemn, sober, beautiful and forbidding. Greig Fraser’s photography and Hans Zimmer’s score are full of majesty.

It’s nice to know that Team Pixar can still recognize the importance of fun. Though Lightyear isn’t as funny as the original “Toy Story,” nor as emotionally potent as “Toy Story 2,” and hence probably won’t be rewatched nearly as many times as those two classics, it’s a plucky and rousing little sci-fi saga.

As a document of Liza’s triumphs, talent and temperament, though, “Liza” is, like its subject, disarmingly sweet and completely lovable.

Though on the surface Slingshot looks like a space-exploration thriller with many cinematic forebears, it makes elegant use of misdirection.

It’s a lot of fun, but nothing special, another in a long line of semi-comical fight movies.

Those too young to remember Jackson will get what they want, which is a fantastically effective introduction to the talent.

While the subject has been the province of clichés and exaggeration, the movie’s points are well-crafted, despite a wild Hollywood ending at odds with this indie offering’s otherwise gritty appeal. As it decries a social problem it adds layers and surprises. It can’t be dismissed as an overwrought message movie.

As Mamie Till, the previously little-known actress Danielle Deadwyler gives an astonishing performance, shimmering first with tenderness and later with the kind of agony no mother should ever have to contemplate, much less bear.

Being more ambitious than most films in the horror genre, Halloween Ends also perhaps falls on the wrong side of the divide between being scary in a fun way and being distressingly plausible.

The doctors and nurses who care for America's wounded troops on the battlefield and in hospitals get their due in Fighting for Life.

Although the film is, by design, an unwatchable mess on one level and its one joke about 8 mm filmmaking would play better as a music video or a TV commercial, there's no denying the crazed dedication to detail.

Yet merely “playing with concepts” doesn’t quite add up to a film, and The Family Fang, adapted from Kevin Wilson’s novel, feels like an extended therapy session.

The Spandau Ballet documentary Soul Boys of the Western World has all the kooky clothes, zippy songs and ’80s optimism you could ask for in a film about a group that had only one big US hit (but several in the UK). Why do I find it hard to write the next line? The band wasn’t that great.

Provides a different take on its subject than many of us are accustomed to: Nelson Mandela is no Martin Luther King Jr., and he was far more radical than even Malcolm X. If you’re under the impression that his ideas got him imprisoned for 25 years, think again: It was his bombs.

Destined to enchant the slumber parties.

Suggestion: When making a film called Run Fat Boy Run, how about hiring a fat boy?

A supernatural take on "Death Wish" meets "Faust," Heartless is an uneasy mixture of B-movie shocks, social commentary and sentimentality that shows a potent imagination at work.

There's a geyser of ambition in the visually stunning The Fountain, but the story of a thousand-year quest for the Fountain of Youth eventually trickles out.

For a kiddie adventure, the movie, based on the Jeanne DuPrau book, has a pleasingly moody, eerie quality.

The dialogue isn't ridiculous, and sometimes it's witty: A cynical cop (Donnie Wahlberg) doesn't buy Jamie's theory that the doll had something to do with the murder: "The mystery toy department is down the hall. This is the homicide department."

Shailene Woodley, already a subtle and rangy actress, easily carries the film as Hazel.

On the one hand, Black Book has the artiness of subtitles, the dramatic weight of history, and the desperate heroics of Jews hiding from Nazis. On the other hand, it has Paul Verhoeven.

Any movie that finds a plausible reason to give Lindsay Lohan a nun's habit and a machine gun is worth your attention.

Good grindhouse fun until a last act that's like a meeting of a psychoanalysts' convention.

Although the payoff is creepy, it takes a little too long to arrive -- and when it does, it's about as worn-out as the movie's title.

Just when things should be getting exciting and complex, they become repetitive and predictable. Subtext becomes hint becomes statement becomes declaration. For once, Pinter is a little too easy to understand.

Final Destination 5, which, despite its lowbrow story, turns out to be one of the fastest-moving films of the year, is a suspenseful and macabre exercise in dread for the absurdly cosseted.

An entertaining but routine rock flick.

First-time writer-director Andy Muschietti, an Argentine discovered by Guillermo del Toro, relies too much, especially in the early going, on horror clichés (sudden loud noises and jagged blasts of music), but he does make the tension hum.

Rio 2 is not what I would call Amazon prime, but it’s got enough silly songs and daffy critters to keep the little ones happy.

It has a pleasing smallness -- it's cinematic chamber music -- that almost makes you overlook its inability to really explain its subject.

Honorable, worthy and windy, Fences is essentially a PBS episode of “Great Performances” that is inflated for the big screen without ever quite belonging there.

Arch, wry and dry, with its exquisite wallpaper and impeccably blocked fedoras, Married Life is bracingly malicious noir for a while, a sort of gray-flannel-suit take on the Coen brothers' "Blood Simple." Every character seems morally capable of anything.

In the end, the movie (executive produced by the late Wes Craven) degenerates into a routine, though ably constructed, horror flick.

The Wave, competent as it is, lacks the heart-rending power of the similar 2012 tsunami movie “The Impossible.”

Quotable, controversial, anarchic, charismatic and handsome (in an ugly way), the zany avant-garde rocker Frank Zappa had everything one needs to be a star, except talent.

It has a certain commitment to its cause, and by that I mean it supplies the necessary flayings, slayings, beheadings and, um, a be-nose-ing, all of it dancing to the tune of those amusingly stilted He-Man declaratives - King James Bible cadences applied to comic-book visions. It knows it's a B movie, and gets on with it.

A wet, red chunk of pulp that knows what it is and doesn't care.

It isn't every day that one witnesses, via a camera mounted with the driver, some of the final images in a man's life before he crashes into a wall at enormous speed. Whether you'll feel good about yourself after watching is up to you.

On the M. Night Shyamalan scale of stupid endings, The Prestige isn't as bad as "The Village" but it's comparable to "Unbreakable."

It is a better option than the third "Santa Clause."

Willis is at his relaxed best this time.

An uneasy mix of Richard Linklater and Abbott and Costello, Prince Avalanche is an oddment, but one that brings some small, peculiar pleasures.

A boldly original undertaking: It's the first movie ever to come up with the idea of remaking "The Truman Show."

A Most Violent Year is a small picture, but each brushstroke is laden with detail and craftsmanship.

Melding a morality play with a glossy soap, Italy’s Human Capital is a fairly successful balance of entertainment and ideas.

At times Halloween II dances on the line between alarming and disgusting, and it doesn’t all hold together — I couldn’t figure out what the goblin banquet was doing in this movie. But if it was meant to freak me out, it worked.

Maybe the Midwest isn't actually like this, but if it were, would that be so bad?

This is grim, bleak material that at times is monotonous, but its woe feels authentic.

In To Rome With Love, Allen approaches the leitmotif in a strange, oblique and interesting way. I fear, though, that the Italian entry in his "Let's Go: Grab Some Euro-Film Subsidies" period will be remembered as being forgettable.

Buzzes around in random menace for an hour until its third act, when - zzzzzt! - it flies straight into the zapper.

That's My Boy is pretty raunchy, and by "pretty," I mean "amazingly," as in Howard Stern- or Seth MacFarlane-style gags.

The film has enough funny lines and weird situations - some comedy business with a sex chair lovingly constructed by the Clooney character is the highlight - that it could age into a cult film like "The Big Lebowski."

Alfred Molina gives a warm and engaging performance as an occupying British soldier.

Borrowing a few tricks from Martin Scorsese, the film isn’t a slavish imitation but an engrossing and grounded drama. It’s a pity, then, that director Federico Castelluccio, best known as Furio of “The Sopranos,” can’t deliver a powerful conclusion.

All three segments are heavy on blame-America speeches, which may be a fair snapshot of Iraqi opinion, but it's strange how fond Longley seems to be of Saddam Hussein.

One of the pleasures of films about being stuck in a place -- "The Wicker Man" is maybe the best example -- comes from the skill with which the writers keep their protagonist locked in his box. On this test, The Last Exorcism pretty much flunks.

Thanks to an unexpected twist and a clever motivation lurking in the back story of the super-villain, G-Force has enough going on to more or less maintain grown-up interest, and there's plenty to please the kiddies.

The film is elegantly done, mainly because it wisely expends most of its energy on Alicia Vikander’s face.

It's fine for kids, though, and it doesn't try too hard.

This is a one-joke skit that trots in a straight line, and your enjoyment of it will depend entirely on how many times you need to see gonzo sheep rip out human entrails.

Hitler didn’t actually snub Jesse Owens at the 1936 Olympics, but the story is too good not to tell, so Race tells it anyway — adding the (true) detail that Owens was snubbed back home. By someone called “the White House,” because this supposedly truth-telling movie can’t bear to spell out the words Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Not many surprises are in store, but the film’s affection for the dramatist is pleasing.

The best Parisian action movie of the week is District 13: Ultimatum, a serviceable thriller with a lefty message.

So what starts out as fascinating sci-fi becomes just fi, and winds up pulp fi.

All of this is secondary, even tertiary material, even if much of it is interesting and even wrenching to behold.

What begins as an alert and witty barbed satire degenerates into a senseless bloodbath in the black comedy Sightseers.

The insult comedy is sometimes brilliant.

This Michael Mann-directed film is full of Michael Mann-isms, many of them familiar from, and done better in, “Heat.”

Stretched both timewise and for plausibility.

I love the series, but Jason Bourne is the worst of the five.

The film's attempt at a sort of beautiful anguish works best in its middle section. It takes far too long to get going, and it doesn't have much of an ending.

Among the year's ultraviolent pulp movies, "Sin City" was prettier and "The Devil's Rejects" more focused.

"Babe" was a classic because of its gentle simplicity. Charlotte's Web, with its insistently "magical" theme music, an overbearing climax and a trough full of bad jokes, is merely adequate.

The film is occasionally heavy-handed, and the priest character is almost absurdly saintly, but there is an awful power to scenes such as one in which the Europeans are evacuated on trucks.

The movie has enough big-city wickedness and merry cruelty to keep things skittering unpredictably.

Though thin on story, the film shows poise and vision, using bleak cinema-realité techniques with chilling effect. Campos promises to be heard from again.

The movie is at its best when Gekko gets back into the game, with his impish smile and his perfect hair.

Its characters are likable enough to settle in with for a pleasant hour and a half.

On a technical level Buried is impressive, at times blisteringly suspenseful.

There can only ever be one Bad Lieutenant: Harvey Keitel. In Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, Nicolas Cage, pretend tough guy (Malibu accent, long floppy coiffure, nervous smile), is more like the Bad Used-Car Salesman.

France's friendship dramedy Little White Lies is such a blatant rip-off of a far better American movie that it could have been called "Le Big Chill."

The gorgeous heartache of songs by the group Belle and Sebastian gives God Help the Girl its dreamy appeal, but thanks to a poky story line it essentially amounts to a series of music videos.

The atmosphere is convincing - there is an "Eight Mile" desperation to Raya's plight - but nothing makes sense.

The chatty killer and the nervy atmosphere are both so depraved that the film, though it contains hardly any explicit violence, is like stepping into a blood Jacuzzi, and there is a biblical severity to the ending.

This one-sided documentary, told entirely by supporters, paints Swartz as a hero pursued by malign forces.

Gritty visuals and a strong central performance elevate the routine crime story at the heart of Sweden's Easy Money, a sort of mash-up of "Goodfellas" and "The Great Gatsby."

Possibly the least sexy vampire flick ever to crawl out of the crypt (it never occurs to anyone that biting someone's neck is kinda intimate; the act is strictly utilitarian), but it's unusually detailed in its imagining.

For short stretches, the movie has a touch of surreal "Office Space" brilliance, but it's broadly acted, its characters are thin, and the production values are ragged. Still, it's hard to resist its goofy hostility: "You're like the drummer from REO Speedwagon. Nobody knows who you are."

As familiar as the costumes and decoration are, the conflicts are unsettlingly vivid and strange.

Though a bit stiff in the joints and acted by an undistinguished cast amid TV-movie trappings, this low-budget adaptation of Ayn Rand's novel nevertheless contains a fire and a fury that makes it more compelling than the average mass-produced studio item.

Beautifully photographed and acted, with a somberly affecting tone, the film, by Derek Cianfrance, is nevertheless marred by severely contrived elements.

The script, narrated by Queen Latifah, is so embarrassingly dorky (it was co-written by Kristin Gore) that it's like Fred Rogers gone hip-hop.

Reflective but only mildly engaging dramedy.

I won't reveal the twist -- but the marketing crew is aware that their only chance of selling this non-mind-blowing documentary about the people you might meet on Facebook is by promising a big surprise.

Fascinating though it is, the movie is thin on historical materials.

A clever setup that harkens back to “You’ve Got Mail” and “The Shop Around the Corner” doesn’t quite pay off in India’s warm-hearted comedy-drama The Lunchbox.

It’s photographically yummy, heaving with sun-dappled vistas and four-star dining. The boys float around a bit in the sea and enjoy homemade pasta while trundling out their impressions of, say, Marlon Brando.

The beginning and end are classics.

Demolition, written by Bryan Sipe is, like director Jean-Marc Vallée’s previous films “Wild” and “Dallas Buyers Club,” a tale of interior repair sought through obsessive and near-penitential acts, but it’s stranger and at times more interesting than those other two.

Despite the pace, though -- pedal, have you met my friend metal? -- Ninja Assassin still has some of its best stuff left at the end, when the master returns to demonstrate his extra-special, super-most-deadliest technique.

It's all a gorgeous error, a bonfire of overreach.

Morris is likely to disappoint liberals in The Unknown Known by failing to take down an apparently weak target.

It’s adequately visionary, it’s routinely spectacular, it breathes fire and yet somehow feels room-temperature.

The movie putters along as softly as Wendy drives. Despite its lack of narrative horsepower, though, its character sketches are pleasing. And amusing.

It's got enough going on to sustain five blockbuster thrillers. That is its blessing and its curse.

A black-and-white fantasia shot against a bright backdrop of famous sites, and it has potential to be a cult hit on its dreamy-hipster look alone.

Any Christian movie dealing in miracles is likely to be too sweet for some but this one is gently moving rather than pushy about its religious elements.

There's plenty of smash, thunder and brawl for the kids. But in taking a bit of Hulk and a bit of Superman while re-imagining Excalibur as a hammer, Thor amounts to putting new horns on old ideas. And the screenplay sounds like the lyrics of Spinal Tap.

This serviceable remake sticks fairly closely and smartly to the same plot, with the same scary objects and even the line, “They’re here.”

An intriguingly Hitchcockian premise gradually takes on a preposterous air in the art-world noir The Best Offer.

I kept hoping the meaning would click into place, but it never quite did.

Wilkinson's reflective and regretful searcher, burdened by secrets, is also touching, as are Dench and Nighy's creations, so it's easy to cheer them on as they inch toward revelations and rebirth.

Like Provence itself, Auteuil is in no hurry to get anywhere, reveling instead in the southern region's brilliant light and whispering crickets. His tangy accent and evident fondness for his character make the picture enjoyable enough as it plods along, and the final act wraps things up on a fulfilling note.

The film’s mix of elements of “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation” and “Bad Santa” is amusing.

Cédric Klapisch’s film is meandering and cutesy, but his characters are endearing and every so often he comes up with a deft insight, such as how this city’s streets are like a flayed zombie.

As a French Resistance thriller, Free Men is so-so, but it is driven by a mischievously interesting idea: that Muslims and Jews have more in common than they normally allow.

It wouldn't be right to say that, half an hour after Kung Fu Panda 2 ended, I was starving for laughs again. In truth, I was starving pretty much all the way through.

Though far too long for its wisp of a plot, this stylish film has a nerve-cinching grip that makes it more alarming than most horror flicks, let alone most movies about a couple having a tiff.

A decent football movie, just about good enough to be the 40th best episode of "Friday Night Lights" . . . which has aired 39 episodes.

Bad Moms is like “Sex and the City: The Sneakers-and-Minivan Years,” a good-natured girl-power comedy that balances a bland sitcom structure with some weird and hilarious moments.

This is one horror film that could make the syllabus at Bob Jones U. The way the squid blasts its tentacles into doe-eyed girls seems designed to steer your daughters away from sex until they're about 40.

Funny and promising as the first act is, the entire second act is pretty awful, as the script chucks in one tiresome, unlikely gag after another.

A disarming but low-impact documentary that amounts to an odd dual biopic, Shepard & Dark can feel a bit like intruding on a conversation between two old friends.

The big new addition in Shrek the Third is Justin Timberlake as the high school-age future King Arthur, but if Timberlake contributed a song to the soundtrack it would have to be "WhinyBack."

Despite the underlying wretchedness, though, the characters exude a sense of having so little interior life that none of this, or anything else, fazes them. That’s disturbing, too.

Ted 2 has so many mo–ments of crazy brilliance that I laughed a lot, if infrequently. Is a ballplayer who whiffs four balls but knocks the fifth one 500 feet worth watching? I say yes.

You certainly get your 20 bucks worth of spectacle out of Alice Through the Looking Glass. So breathtaking are the landscapes, so whimsical are the creatures, so marvelous are the marvels that I wanted to give a standing ovation to whoever signed the check to pay for all this. Expensiver and expensiver!

Annabelle is mostly a grab into the Great Big Bag O’ Horror Clichés: sound-bombs of shrieking violins explode randomly, doors slam unbidden, rocking chairs creak by themselves, machines suddenly whir to life.

The movie is just a situation salad, at least until the end, when things start to pull together a bit.

The movie jogs along nicely without ever getting a case of the stupids; far from being a bloated “John Carter,” it’s just a pared-down yarn of survival: “Die Hard” on a planet.

The film is primarily interested in the music that accompanied this turmoil, which is a bit like covering the American Revolution with the focus on the wigs Washington and Jefferson wore.

You may protest that this is just a splattery feature-length sketch, and you’d be absolutely right. Why not have a laugh at this absurdly trite concept? I’ll take the cheesy breeziness of “CVZ” over the frowny somberness of “World War Z” any day.

A chipper documentary sure to please seniors.

Run All Night is routine in its contours, occasionally sloppy in its editing and filled with the usual implausibilities.

Director Alfonso Cuarón has a vision so mesmerizingly terrible that it alone - at least, for those who enjoy a gorgeous nightmare - is reason enough to see the film.

An interesting failure, not a fascinating one.

A fulsomely, aggressively modest no-star picture, it’s a plotless, pointless two-hour hangout.

Soulful though the film is, melodrama gradually sneaks in, and then it takes over.

The highlight is a meta touch: A funny on-screen résumé is posted each time we meet a new character.

Picture "Raging Bull" with a sleazy prep from the Brooklyn hipsteropolis of Williamsburg, and you'll get the idea of The Comedy, a character study that tries to make the revolting compelling.

This digitally tricked-out fairy tale makes for a reasonably engaging kids’ fantasy, but at best we’re talking about a junior varsity “Lord of the Rings.” It’s March. What did you expect?

Looking at the Mexican drug wars from both sides of the border, Cartel Land is punchy and vital but not particularly informative.

It's good-natured myth-making cut into kid-size pieces.

A movie that won’t knock you out with originality but may charm you with its wit.

Don Cheadle has a fine time jiving through Talk to Me - accent, please, on the middle word. It's a black "Good Morning, Vietnam."

It may be impossible to make an uninteresting documentary about Hunter S. Thompson, but is it unfair to ask Gonzo for more Hunter and less Jimmy Carter?

Familiar elements such as a dark family secret, a ghost and a Ouija board start to seem trite after a while, and the third act is a little ridiculous, but debut writer-director Nicholas McCarthy does a lot with a little and seems fully prepared to handle a big-studio horror project.

Doesn't do enough with a righteous premise.

A sun-splashed noir that loses its appeal in the last act.

Slightly radical in portraying high schoolers as human beings of normal niceness and intelligence. That means this winsome comedy is a little low in the stakes department, not to mention predictable, but it gets an “A” for charm.

As always in Veber's films, the predictability is part of the fun.

Despite all of the hideous critters Hellboy encounters, there is a hint that things are considerably weirder elsewhere.

For rock fans, hearing many Led Zeppelin and U2 classics on a theater sound system is worth the price of a ticket.

If Top Five doesn’t go deep, though, it is intermittently very funny.

Freaked-out funky weirdness starts to happen all around him (Rockwell).

Fly Away is more situation than story, though, and the Germann character's welcoming, almost saintly vibe doesn't fit.

Baseball movies tend to be lyrical, deeply felt, aggressively metaphorical and (consequently) terrible, but Trouble With the Curve has something most others lack: Eastwood's superb, cruel sense of humor, which reaches all the way back to "Every Which Way But Loose."

Struggles to maintain a sober, evenhanded tone about an utterly ridiculous story.

In the House promises to be a social satire with a flash of Hitchcockian menace, but gradually it turns into a routine thumb-sucker on reality versus fiction.

Although the script works in a couple of pages of collegiate-level ethical debate about "the question of German guilt," what the movie is really interested in is the question of German sex. So think of it as "Schindler's Lust."

I enjoyed the visual effects used to create some hellish creatures and the amusing nods to "The Exorcist" - cranial rotation, even a spooky staircase. But the movie slips in the last act.

Unfortunately, director Jessie Nelson (“I Am Sam”) gradually turns the script into marzipan.

Frears has a lot of fun with the bad tempers and high spirits of this crew of adrenaline junkies, and though the story falls a little flat, the script is sprinkled with dry wit.

It turns out that constraint is really what the show is all about, or to put it another way, I'm disappointed that they turned my horny-teen comedy into a gross-out comedy.

Somewhere on the axis where David Lynch, Paul Thomas Anderson and Joey Bishop intersect, a man in a Salvation Army tuxedo wanders the Mojave Desert supplying anti-comedy to every cocktail lounge and prison in his path. This is Entertainment.

Soulfully directed by Michael Cuesta ("L.I.E."), Roadie is short on narrative momentum, but it's a perfectly attuned character study of this rock relic and his middle-aged sorrows.

The mild British wackiness is more droll than funny, but the movie is a pleasant cup of tea.

This jagged blob of a movie features a solo dance in the 1930s scored to the Sex Pistols' "Pretty Vacant," several scenes of a rich Manhattan woman chatting with the ghost of Wallis Simpson and a Sotheby's auction that draws a crowd reaction of the kind associated with "Family Feud." Yet I found the movie fascinating. Except for the boring bits.

Initially, this low-budget film writes a lot of checks on the First National Bank of Whimsy, but I was astonished when none of them bounced.

Smith’s appeal, just, holds together a thin plot upon which Bennett, who wrote the script, and director Nicholas Hytner have loaded gimmicks.

It has a dogged all-night charm and a sense of who its audience is.

No matter how good Blethyn is at playing up the sweet hurt of a woman who is well on the decline but never made it in the first place, your admiration for her shrieking-and-drinking breakdown scenes is likely to be tested after about the fifth go-round.

The film is well shot and edited, backed with a bouncy hip-hop soundtrack and full of pep.

For gays who remember the nightmare, Sex Positive may be too depressing to watch. But the movie strikes a cautionary tone for a younger generation that, it says, isn't taking the HIV threat seriously.

Stieve and Glosserman may yet strike a vein: This thing screams out for a Hollywood remake with, say, writers from "The Simpsons."

The script depends heavily on familiar stand-up comedy bits, but it's full of sharp wisecracks and slacker charm.

Loaded with dazzling ideas that don’t ultimately pull together.

Any prison-break yarn that includes Arnold Schwarzenegger delivering the line “You hit like a vegetarian” is OK by me.

It’s told in a woefully pedestrian way, with talking-head footage forming the bulk of this slow-to-develop film. Still, it’s a creepily fascinating tale.

In Listen Up Philip, the tiny fury of Jason Schwartzman suggests his “Rushmore” character is now 15 years older and a middling Brooklyn novelist. His deadpan misanthropy is good for some acerbic laughs in a movie that starts appealingly but gradually comes to seem closed and stuck.

This is one of those nature documentaries that’s pretty much solely interested in being entertaining, and so is cleverly edited to look like the linear story of a mother (dubbed Sky) and her newborns (Scout and Amber).

I do get a chuckle out of movies with wildly inappropriate behavior, rude language and ultramayhem, especially when they involve children, but Kick-Ass 2 sometimes felt like being trapped in a room with the funniest guy in seventh grade.

This strange and eerie noir is more a collection of knockout scenes than a fully realized story.

Ex Machina offers plenty of intriguing style but a spotty story line.

Long on atmosphere and less sentimental about poverty than “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” the film carries a potent charge of authenticity.

Ends up feeling familiar.

To really pull off Greenberg would require a lead performance from a master actor. The actor it stars is . . . Ben Stiller.

The gags vary - a tattooed-breast mystery kinda sags - but there are lots of laughs.

Phoenix, who was so subtle in “Her” and brilliantly tortured in “The Master,” has lapsed back into the shouty bombast style of his “Gladiator” days, but his efforts to make the character seem layered are to little avail, especially given that Gray waits until the end to try to make him a tragic figure instead of merely a sleazy one.

La La Land deserves credit for high spirits even if it’s essentially a collection of glamorous throwback music videos for so-so songs.

This is a useful primer on what went wrong — and right — in 2008.

Even when scary, Murray is somehow funny, too, and he steals the show as always.

Rookie filmmaker Michael Maren’s script isn’t deep, but it’s heartfelt without being sticky, suggesting that the best way to deal with aging parents is to savor every tender frustration while you can.

As a spooky midnight movie, The Wolfman is worth curling up with.

Some documentaries are a fervent search for truth; others are a fervent search for snickers. This one is the latter, providing via interviews and old film clips a Greatest Hits for Bush haters.

The paranoia is as thick and luscious as that Reddi-wip, and it's served from both left and right.

The film is sober, honest and serious about an important subject.

Lakeview Terrace holds your interest, though the bad faith on all sides makes it something of an endurance test.

In the end (which continues into the credits), I was left thinking McDonagh can do better than this, and yet I was slightly more agog with admiration than peevish with frustration. Most of all, I wanted to see the film again.

The second half, though, is chilling, as the trio’s actions come into sharp, painful focus. Too bad Reichardt has no ending.

Yet what makes this movie is the digital effects. It's got all the heart of a demolition derby.

The film makes little sense (the couple refuses to ride subways, but Metro-North is OK), but it's a diverting conversation piece/freak show.

As the two coaches head for a faceoff in a climactic live TV interview, writer Morgan starts to seem like a rip-off -- of himself.

Don’t expect the real dirt on “Saturday Night Live” from the doc Live From New York! The movie is fun, but it’s a cinematic coffee-table book.

Turing’s tale needs to be more widely known, and while The Imitation Game may not be a great film, it is an important one.

Doremus can’t quite make the emotional breakthroughs rewarding enough to justify the slow buildup, but the icy beauty of the film makes it worth watching.

Except for the rock soundtrack, these movies could be silent - and probably should be.

I liked that The Wolverine (which saves a nifty twist for a surprise scene in the middle of the end credits) turns down the volume on the usual din of colliding mutant superpowers.

Mostly, this frantic film is yet another attempt at “Spinal Tap” silly. At times it goes for the heart of “Almost Famous,” and its sense of rock is that of a barely acquainted observer.

Swank's character, Erin Gruwell, is a real educator who, in the years following the Rodney King riots, coaxed her students into writing about their bullet-riddled lives.

Visually dazzling, intermittently funny.

A snarly Euro-thriller with crust under its fingernails and bad breath. It doesn't care if you like it, which is why I kind of do.

For a 90-minute movie, Margaret has a thin story. So it's unfortunate that it runs 2 1/2 hours.

The shamelessness with which Star Wars: The Force Awakens replays the franchise’s greatest hits is startling. To put it another way, it’s a satisfying meal — but it’s $200 million worth of leftovers.

Carlyle gives a quietly engaging performance as a Golden State farmworker with a secret in the likable indie California Solo.

The film, then, places a heavy hand on the scales of justice as it winds up with a fuzzy plea — an implied demand for a second, federal civil rights trial for the cop, who got a light sentence. But the shooting wasn’t a racist one.

A reasonably uplifting kids movie if you don't think about it too much. I get paid to think about things too much, and effective as the movie is, it nevertheless left me slightly put off.

Like warriors themselves, you will be left to sort through a jumble of emotions: pride and sorrow, bitterness and gratitude. [09 Feb 2007, p.43]

Though the film, based on a Ron Rash novel, doesn’t quite deliver on all its grim portents, debut director David Burris creates a neo-Faulknerian atmosphere of indelible sin in a story that rises above cliché. As Wyle’s character puts it, “The South was never one thing.”

Mostly a routine love story elevated by one of the year’s most magnetic performances.

Tina Fey is adorable as a gulag guard who yearns to sing, but even better is Ty Burrell as a Clouseau-like Interpol inspector.

Buscemi is appealing as always, but the movie, is only sporadically funny.

An appropriately respectful and dignified biopic.

It's a shame that, after nearly 40 years of writing about rock, Cameron Crowe is receptive to the clichés of the genre.

If you can overlook Andie MacDowell's Mitteleuropa accent as a Jewish Holocaust survivor (I know: big if), the cinematic roman a clef Mighty Fine has some quiet charms.

If you're old enough to pluck gray hairs, you may find yourself rubbing away a few tears.

Although it has affecting moments, the film can't quite decide whether it's about aging or about the effects of war on the home front.

Quiet, sober and tense, the movie makes some interesting points -- contrasting the frenzied hookups of the two men with the butcher's rote, dismal lovemaking with his wife as their bodies are carefully hidden under sheets -- but it lacks the emotional firepower of "Brokeback Mountain."

Doesn't have as much behind-the-scenes juice as you'd hope.

An honorable, sober but completely unnecessary take on the Dickens novel, Great Expectations serves as a fine introduction to the story but won’t excite those familiar with previous versions.

Cusack shows that he can still play the sensitive-but-fun guy until the ladies sigh and the men take notes.

Green rules the picture with her nutty stare and her willingness to get nasty in a hot sex scene, but the movie’s main weak point is the Greek general Themistokles.

As frightening as it intends to be, but not enjoyably so.

The Hunger Games may be derivative, but it is engrossing and at times exciting. Implicitly, it argues that "The Truman Show" might have been improved by Ed Harris lobbing fireballs at Jim Carrey, and it's now clear what "American Idol" was missing all those years: a crossbow for Simon Cowell.

Life, Animated oversimplifies the situation, contriving to use endless clips from Disney movies to make a case that movie magic really can better people’s lives. Unfortunately, by the end of the movie it’s clear that Disney can’t help Owen negotiate sex, breakups or many other challenges he faces as an adult.

A chilling pulp movie told with a pavement-eye view of the dregs of humanity.

Kim Basinger gives one of her strongest performances in Even Money, a kind of "Crash" fueled by gambling instead of racism.

Watching it is like being the only non-stoned person in the room as someone tells a long, long story.

At last, someone has figured out that there might be laughs in teens trying to lose their virginity.

The Boy and the Heron, while typically bursting with imaginative elements, is also narratively tangled and a bit confusing, and falls far short of Mr. Miyazaki’s best work.

Just when this thing seems dead, though, the movie picks up considerably, and the much-better second half nearly redeems it. I give the credit to an experienced conjurer of the unexpected triumph: Peyton Manning.

The film is at its best in the way it keeps building the stakes of the character clash, thanks in large part to the virtuosity of the two lead actors.

“F1” is a fun, exciting, predictable popcorn picture so formulaic it even contains a reference to formula in its title.

It was one of the last moments when the balance between 1940s-style uplift and what became known as cinema’s American New Wave still held; within a few years, boomer culture simply subsumed all else. “Desperate Souls” does a fine job of exploring the tectonics of that shift.

There is injustice here, but Mr. Hallström doesn’t push too hard on the theme; instead of interjecting what’s happening in the script, he simply allows us to experience Af Klint’s dignified frustration.

Aptly enough considering its title, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is two pictures in one: a dead section set with the living and a lively part that takes place among the dead.

Messy as it is, Deadpool & Wolverine is the first MCU movie in several years that’s mostly enjoyable.

Jack Black and Paul Rudd are nearly always enjoyable, even when working with less-than-scintillating material, and each has a boyish streak that’s exactly the right register for this exercise in silliness.

“Sound of Hope,” like its predecessor, is a big-hearted film made with a homespun sincerity that comes as a refreshing surprise at the multiplex these days, though it has the gauzy, simplistic feel of a cable-TV movie.

At its best, “Furiosa” is like a more fun, less ponderous and mysticism-free “Dune,” with every pedal properly to the metal. But it’s closer to numbing than enthralling, like a long ride with no shock absorbers.

At its best it’s entertaining in a quaint, late-’60s way, which makes it a pleasant summer surprise.

Caligula is still far from great, but it has risen to the level of an enjoyable, intermittently campy soap about ruthlessness, with one or two affecting moments.