Lisa Schwarzbaum

The comedic slaps are too limp to leave a mark. Director George Ratliff applied a much clearer eye to "Hell House," his chilling 2001 documentary about a real church.

It is fun, though, 
 to see the younger Hanks play a murderer - it's like seeing Justin Bieber work blue.

The thrilling conclusion to a phenomenal cinematic story 10 years in the telling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part 2 is proof that authentic movie excitement is its own form of magic.

A bouncy, well-built, delightfully nasty tale of resentment, desperation, and amoral revenge that does for employer-employee relations what Danny DeVito and Bette Midler did for the bonds of matrimony in the great 1986 Zucker brothers comedy "Ruthless People."

Following 2009's "Bluebeard," French filmmaker Catherine Breillat continues her unique and psychologically, erotically daring deconstruction of classic fairy tales and the female condition.

It's easy enough to accept the romantic-comedy luck of the two finding each another. It's much tougher, and ultimately useless, to buy everything else about this fairy tale of self-reinvention in a stalled economy.

Dark of the Moon is hardly a fleet production, but here Bay makes his best, most flexible use yet of all the flamboyant bigness at his command: Computer-drawn characters and human actors seem to occupy the same narrative for once.

The result is a portrait that expertly mirrors its subject: Buck is shaped with the same economy, restraint, and unfussiness as the man, to unexpectedly inspiring effect.

Old Holden would call the whole movie phony, and I agree, if you want to know the truth.

For those who wish to decode The Names of Love, there's a sharp commentary on French prejudices, character types, history, and culture embedded in Michel Leclerc's droll autobiographical French comedy.

An 
unexpectedly revealing, disconcerting documentary that benefits from the filmmaker's unmediated approach, his home-movie-
quality visual style, and his controlled use of on-the-fly moments.

Not to get all Dorothy about it, but when it comes to Cars, there's no place like home. The emotional punch of the original is inextricably rooted in the movie's appreciation of off-the-beaten-track America, and all that homegrown vintage car culture signifies.

It's not quite the same thrill as glimpsing the man behind the curtain of the great and powerful Oz, but for journalism junkies, the fascination of Page One: Inside The New York Times is something like that.

The movie's power is undercut by the overemphasized presence of celebrity traveling environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Loving, Playful, and spectacularly well made, Super 8 is easily the best summer movie of the year - of many years.

McAvoy and Fassbender are a casting triumph. These two have, yes, real star magnetism, both individually and together: They're both cool and intense, suave and unaffected, playful and dead serious about their grand comic-book work.

The movie darts, dreams, and sometimes seems to dance. The great Plummer, meanwhile, creates an inspiring, fully rounded man in late bloom, and McGregor responds with a performance to match.

Malick clings to the promise of grace: His vision of the afterlife is a dreamy beach, enhanced by an excellent playlist of fine classical music, and promising the peace that surpasses all understanding. Plus a beautiful sky.

Allen has fun in his imaginary French capital, turning his star-studded cast loose to interpret their characters as they wish.

Nothing in this enjoyably twisty, cool/ hot, genre-grafting Italian psychological thriller by Giuseppe Capotondi is what it seems. And the more you try to solve the narrative puzzle, the more you may want to watch it again - or at least argue about what's real.

Plays more like a teaching tool than a dynamic drama.

Like Bill Murray and Greg Kinnear before him, this funnyman reveals serious acting chops.

Florid, convoluted historical drama.

There's a pomo twist to the whole overeager enterprise, in all its theoretical, film-school charm: Similar to 2010's "Machete," the movie was born from a fake 
 trailer commissioned by Grindhouse directors Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez.

This is high-quality work from a professional (Gibson) who, news reports have suggested, has recently sunk to terrible lows in his nonprofessional life.

Soul-sucking romantic comedy.

This truly intimate film invites viewers to commune as well and feel a profound living connection with fellow humans of 30,000 years ago.

The movie can't be saved from its own vices of manic pacing and tediously pro forma pop culture jokes.

Always the smooth showman, Spurlock avoids answering his own question: Is he selling out or buying in?

Not coincidentally, African Cats opens on Earth Day. Meeting these magnificent fellow creatures might be a fine way to celebrate.

Something is wrong under this big tent. Actually made to resemble a good old-fashioned, crowd-pleasing movie, this cinematic Water for Elephants droops and lumbers like Rosie the elephant herself.

Temperamentally in sync with her "Wendy and Lucy" director, Michelle Williams plays one of the toiling wives. And the actress, with her calm center, compresses the entire history of frontier wifeliness into the concentration with which she gathers firewood and loads a musket.

Some of the riffs are really funny and/or expertly scary. Others have the feel of awfully snappy dialogue crafted by middleaged people trying a little too eagerly to sound like the young people from whose mouths the banter flows.

David Schwimmer directs this smarmy Hot Topic drama with empathy for the craft of acting but less interest in the craft of making a movie move.

Natalie Portman, by the way, is fierce and funny as a babe warrior the brothers meet along the way. She's good with dirty words, too.

Hanna's intriguing, disorienting pleasures - the movie is part poetic dreamscape, part sinister spy saga - lie more in the filmmaking flourishes than in the narrative.

A fine example of Danish filmmaker Susanne Bier's (Brothers) talent for weaving together accessible domestic melodrama and issues of ethical awareness of the world beyond our doorstep.

Among all the chess-piece players on the board, the star is the only one who really builds a solid emotional foundation for his character.

Nothing is new, which is a problem. Nothing is particularly funny or endearing, which is a worse problem.

The music screeches, the actors vamp, the knives and weapons and bombs and fireballs fly around the screen. Meanwhile, the well-prepared moviegoer slips into her or his own private fantasy of a world in which movie effects are themselves locked away in an institution for the criminally insane until such time as those effects are really, truly necessary for the story.

An Orson Welles-size Gérard Depardieu does gallant work as the town's leftist mayor.

The best stuff: Wow, can those kids hoof - and so, even past his half-century mark, can the preening, Chicago-born Mr. F.

Plot leaps that are fun on paper look generic on screen; here's another lawyer movie in which the characters are only as interesting as the actors playing them.

Graeme and Clive, representatives of a nation of nonbelievers in UFOs and big dinner portions, come to the psychic capital of a country that wants to believe, and they're transformed. In Paul, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost do likewise, in celebration of what the Spielbergian cosmos is all about.

Red Riding Hood goes from trite to triter, a plot collapse that overtakes any of the visual prettiness from cinematographer Mandy Walker (Beastly).

Irksome dither of an indie drama.

An earnest, lumpy macramé of a personal nonfiction project.

The cast is tasty, including Vincent D'Onofrio as a friendly fellow Mob guy, Val Kilmer as the head of the Cleveland PD, Christopher Walken as an underworld power broker, and a bunch of character actors hoping for a remake of "The Sopranos."

The movie is also visually magnificent - modestly so. Plus, it's half the length of "Avatar."

With very little modification, the relationship woes of the six chirpy young New Yorkers in this self-absorbed indie could be reworked into episodes of TV's "How I Met Your Mother."

Spirit, animal, and human worlds coexist in dreamy harmony in this remarkable drama.

Somewhere in all the blood (sickening realism is a selling point), a question is posed: When does the one fighting a monster become a monster himself?

The biggest strike against Rango, though - for both the movie and the hero - is that the lizard is so damn ugly.

Xavier Dolan is back with another madly stylish Montreal-made delight.

It is their shared strength as a band of brothers humble before their Christian God - and indeed before the God of Islam - that may stir viewers to an awe that transcends skeptical opinions about religion or politics.

Witless, insultingly derivative, muddy-looking, and edited in the hammering epileptic style that marks so many films produced, as this one is, by Michael Bay.

Facing a diagnosis of Alzheimer's, the older woman enrolls in a poetry class, desperate to find the words to describe beauty before language fails her. She does even better: She herself becomes a kind of poem about what it means to really see the world.

The footage, by Dereck and Beverly Joubert, is stunning.

The movie whips up a big old puree of ingredients borrowed from other cinematic recipes.

A bummer - slack rather than loose, tired rather than fun.

Sweetness makes the raunch in this honestly funny movie even funnier.

The story and setting may be ancient, but under the direction of Kevin Macdonald (The Last King of Scotland), and with a nicely textured screenplay by Macdonald's Scotland coscreenwriter Jeremy Brock, the vigor is fully modern.

Opportunities for bad behavior abound in Waldman's novel - the author's prerogative. Roos, though, hasn't cracked the puzzle of how to explore that behavior on screen in such a way that the characters behave badly in interesting, rather than arbitrary, ways.

At once an unsentimental portrait of the ambitious singer who thought himself bound for glory, and an affecting elegy for a time when song was a form of revolution.

Skarsgard's utter finesse in the role provides a satisfying warmth.

The class warfare in The Housemade feels dated, but there's something nicely kinky in this lusciously photographed erotic Korean thriller by Im Sang-soo.

In his debut feature, the director is wise enough to move his hand-held camera wherever Steen wants to go.

It's also filled with scenes of extraordinary survival challenges. But the result is oddly impersonal and undifferentiated.

Adam is cute and all, but the real strings worth tying are those that bind this sisterhood of sharp, interesting, sexually active women together. Where's THEIR starring movie?