Lou Lumenick

With cheesy-looking effects including a ride on the backs of giant bees and dubious literary references, Journey 2: The Mysterious Island comes dangerously close to giving books, never mind 3-D, a bad name.

Chico and Rita beguiles first and foremost as a bebop romance that evokes a bygone era as well as, or maybe even better than, "The Artist."

There's little sense of the Carol Channing beneath the overdone makeup - if there is one.

Would the Mayans have predicted the end of the world in 2012 if they'd known it would inspire not only "The Tree of Life'' and "Melancholia'' but an endless supply of more dreary depictions of end-times like this one?

It's an exciting, charming and often quite funny family film.

Erstwhile boy wizard Daniel Radcliffe works no magic as a grieving lawyer in The Woman in Black, a creaky haunted-house story that's strong on creepy atmosphere but woefully deficient in the scare department.

A well-acted, well-directed (by TV veteran Anthony Hemingway) popcorn movie with great aerial battles and solid dramatic scenes that hold your attention for two good hours.

Latifah, a formidable actress who's almost always better than her movies, easily dominates this hokey cross between "Glee'' and "Sister Act.''

The title It's About You is something Kurt Markus claims Mellencamp told him when he commissioned the film. With the elder Markus' self-important, egotistical narration rarely shutting up, it was a fairly prophetic remark.

It's sad to see Quaid in sloppily directed (by Martin Guigui) dreck like Beneath the Darkness less than a decade after the performance of his career as a closeted married man in "Far From Heaven.''

This is a look at the joy, confusion and heartbreak of adolescence that's both culture- and locale-specific and, at the same time, universal.

About as artistically profound as those framed 3-D photos of the Twin Towers emblazoned with "Never Forget'' that are still for sale in Times Square a decade after 9/11.

Genuinely charming, treacle-free family films are tough to find these days, so I'm happy to heartily recommend We Bought a Zoo as heartwarming holiday fare that even jaded adults can share with the kids.

Thankfully, Tintin is Spielberg at his most playful and unpretentious.

It really couldn't have been easy for Jason Lee ("Almost Famous") to keep a straight face while saying, "I'm not in this for the money.''

The film also wastes the coiled intensity of Jeremy Renner, as the newest member of the IMF team with a none-too-compelling past. Bird does keep audiences guessing whether Renner is the only leading actor in Hollywood who's even shorter than Cruise.

In this pretentious art-house downer version of "The Bad Seed," the only surprise is that the folks didn't ship the little monster off to the looney bin before he reached puberty.

It also boasts a killer breakout performance by comic Patton Oswalt as a former classmate who becomes Theron's unlikely co-dependent and sometimes co-conspirator.

A little humor would have helped leaven a movie that is frankly often very difficult to watch.

A root canal seems a more pleasurable way to pass two hours than this interminable vanity knockoff of "Traffic" about troubled Angelenos.

Literally the kind of movie they just don't make anymore, Michel Hazanavicius' French-sponsored charmer The Artist is a gorgeous black-and-white love letter to silent Hollywood with old-fashioned English intertitles and just a single line of audible (English) dialogue.

Gorgeously photographed by Peter Suschitzky, A Dangerous Method presents a vivid portrait of pre-World War I Europe that's at a considerable remove from the types of madness usually seen in Cronenberg's films.

Brilliantly playing doomed '50s sex bomb Marilyn Monroe, Michelle Williams gets under the skin of the troubled yet vulnerable icon in a way no one else ever has.

O'Grady is very good, but she can't make the hard-to-watch Rid of Me dramatically credible.

Good enough to almost overlook a so-so ending.

Expertly mixing tears and laughs with the sort of alchemy not seen since "Terms of Endearment," this superbly written, directed, acted, and yes, Oscar-friendly movie perfectly captures the blackly comic insanity that can overtake a family forced to confront an impending death.

Nutty Danish provocateur Lars von Trier -- long one of the most annoying filmmakers on the planet -- turns out one of the year's most emotionally resonant art movies.

It's pretty sad if you're a comic and Al Pacino is the funniest thing in your movie.