Lisa Schwarzbaum

In a last-minute tweak, the production has also been meaninglessly 3-D-ified - never mind that there's nothing whatsoever 3-D-ish going on. Maybe those clumsy 3-D glasses are meant to let moviegoers mimic the superhero mask-wearing experience?

Tonally scattershot and more than a little heavy-footed.

Comedy has changed. Jack can only give his son-in-law the stink eye so many times before the whole "I'm watching you" pantomime gets stale.

The many fans of the uniquely droll 2003 animation Oscar nominee "The Triplets of Belleville" will recognize the inventive hand-drawn sensibilities of French filmmaker Sylvain Chomet in his loving and lovely new feature The Illusionist.

How Do You Know asks really good questions but doesn't so much answer them as toss the ball from player to player until the clock runs out.

Truer than the John Wayne showpiece and less gritty than the book, this True Grit is just tasty enough to leave movie lovers hungry for a missing spice.

And so by the time the pair admire the Grand Canyon and, Due Date has lost its way, relying on its leading men to lead by charisma alone, even though their characters have nowhere interesting to go besides the happily-ever-after of dull, responsible male maturity.

The telegenic Lomborg is the on-camera "star" of the show, while his angry critics growl on cue.

French mood-and-feeling master filmmaker Claire Denis returns to the Africa of her youth for an intense, mysterious drama exploring revolution and loss.

An old-fashioned romance-and-sickness picture, a publicity-grabbing sex picture, an Apatow-lite horny-boys picture, and a liberal satire on pharmaceutical-industry excesses committed in pursuit of pill sales - all in one.

Damien Chazelle's extraordinary black-and-white retro dream of a feature debut.

Tiny Furniture is proof, against steep odds, that there are no small stories, only small storytellers.

Lest the audience miss a cue, Hooper and soundtrack composer Alexandre Desplat count on the ringing grandeur of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony - the famous second movement, no less - to amp the emotions.

There's also a Disney den of big, comically dumb-looking bad guys who turn sweet when Rapunzel sings to them. Because Happily Ever After never goes out of fashion

Earnestly ersatz down to every spangle, dance move, plot turn, and line of hokum dialogue, Burlesque is a showbiz pic for these American Idol times - a time when we agree to pretend that mediocre mimicry of better artists is good enough to keep us entertained. We agree to pretend that quality is in the eye and ear of the undemanding beholder.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part 1 also bravely faces the future, slipping with expert ease among the thrilling mass of complications (and complicated set pieces) that Rowling throws fans in the final sprint, then guiding the faithful to the fate that awaits everyone in this world, the moment called The End.

Theatrically ambitious, musically busy, and in the end cinematically inert - clearly reflects the authorship of myth-loving director Julie Taymor.

I'm confounded by the fact that, aside from the Pevensie siblings and their nicely obnoxious cousin, absolutely everything and everyone aboard the Dawn Treader looks one-dimensional.

Writer-director Tanya Hamilton's intellectually ambitious debut drama Night Catches Us is all the more notable for setting well-drawn fictional characters in a fraught, real moment in civil rights history.

It's the beaming movie-star intensity of the complicated comic Carrey in the role of the dominant lover and Obi-Wan Kenobi McGregor as the gentle beloved that makes this unfettered, stranger-than-fiction picture pop.

Terry Gilliam-ish territory here, spiked with imagery from Holocaust nightmares and drug trips. Attention, university film clubs: Here's your cult-ready midnight-movie programming.

A riveting and unexpectedly inspiring essay on the peace that comes from shared physical and mental concentration.

Waving a dubious flag of feminist inclusivity, Cole and screenwriter William Ivory turn cartwheels insisting that girl power, even in the 1960s, trumped class divisions.

Damon's how-to-break-the-law lesson - as ludicrous as anything else in this enjoyably zigzaggy exercise in accumulating peril - grants Neeson the fun of experimenting with an American ex-con accent for his one scene.

These guys are not charming; they're horrifying in their ignorance, and they cause real damage. But there's a weird relief to be found in the opportunity to laugh ourselves sick at their expense, if only for an instant.

A serving of "True Blood's" Ryan Kwanten in his native accent is the chief selling point of this picturesque, contentedly imitative Australian Western/thriller/Coen-brothers homage, the feature debut of writer-director Patrick Hughes.

Rachid Bouchareb's intensely dramatized, passionately partisan story of militancy in the struggle for Algerian independence from France after World War II makes effective use of "Godfather" storytelling theatrics.

Perry has taken Shange's feminist word-and-movement portraits of disenfranchised African-American women and turned those howls into...a maddeningly choppy mess of a Tyler Perry movie.