Lawrence Toppman

So what's the motivation for the earnest, handsome, well-acted, unenlightening, workaday J. Edgar in 2011?

Hollywood hardly ever pays attention to such people, and the average moviegoer won't either. But Leigh makes an irrefutable claim that their lives matter, and that attention must be paid.

At its best, the movie powerfully indicts our violent history. A montage of bloody U.S. interventions in foreign affairs over the last half-century, most overthrowing elected governments we didn't like, left me shaken.

If movies were still silent, Girl With a Pearl Earring would be a near-masterpiece.

These veterans realize they’re all playing cogs in the director’s plot-twisting machine.

On first acquaintance, Seabiscuit seems to be about anything but horse racing: the disappearance of the American frontier after 1910, our love affair with automotive speed, the passing of a rural way of life, homelessness during the Depression.

As Disney-fied as "Pinocchio," barely challenging the images Americans have treasured for 150 years.

One Fine Day is a fluffernutter. Half of it is as down-to-earth, satisfying, even nourishing as peanut butter. The rest of it is gooey, dense and indigestible. [20 Dec 1996, p.4E]

The film has such an expansive, likeable spirit.

He (Chomet) keeps us waiting for a narrative payoff that will equal that visual splendor, and he makes us think that many small inspired touches will add up to something memorable. But when he opens his hand at last, there's nothing in it.

It's freakishly funny, suddenly tender, gleefully macabre, genuinely scary, and full of a moral – fear turns weak people into bullies – which is dosed out so gently that it never tastes like medicine.

A typical shallow caper film. Just assume the truth is the exact opposite of what's happening.

Will dazzle you while establishing the world in which it takes place. After that, you may wonder whether Guillermo del Toro got amnesia halfway through.

The Coen brothers’ new movie, set in Hollywood in 1951, brings easy laughs but dissipates from memory moments later, like the cheesy films to which it pays homage – or, perhaps, mocks.

Is it too much to ask that he take a risk next time and kill somebody off, however much we’re used to having them in the “Trek” universe?

Like a palate-cleansing sherbet in place of an entre?. It's mildly flavorful going down, leaves us hungry for something more substantial and fades from memory the moment we've finished it.

This seemingly simple thriller has two subtexts, one more overt than the other, that should give pause to people who claim Hollywood is always too left-wing.

The filmmakers do everything they can to balance levity and leavening. The subject says "drama," and the three supporting women deliver well-shaded, understated performances. (Howard shows us how weakness can be just as destructive as malice.)

Super 8 takes its place among the best B-grade science fiction movies of this generation by copying the best of the past 50 years.

For certain movies, the adjectives "formulaic" and "predictable" are complimentary. War Horse is one of them.

This is an extremely simple but likeable film.

The comedy, which verges on farce from time to time, also has the smilingly cynical approach to romance that we identify with the French.

Each major character is complex, none more so than Bill. He's almost Shakespearean in scope.

Deep as a Canadian lake: Below the placid surface, menacing creatures swim around unseen.

The Rookie is "Rudy" in a baseball uniform.

Writer-director Caroline Link (who did the Oscar-nominated "Beyond Silence") adapted Stefanie Zweig's expatriate memoir gracefully, languidly and with full understanding of its heroine.

Howard has never been so grown-up in his handling of tough themes or so inventive in depicting states of mind. Goldsman has never been so down-to-earth or created so touching a character.

For all the talk about passion, the main feeling Youth conveys is self-pity.