Lou Lumenick

Perhaps the most fascinating vintage footage...depicts what happened in 1961 when the city sent police into Washington Square Park to stop the longtime Sunday practice of singing without a required permit.

To put it as positively as possible, there's never a dull moment in this flick - and that's not something you can take for granted at this time of the year. At the same time, though, there's rarely a believable moment in the script.

A cartoonish 1940s shoot-'em-up that's impossible to take seriously.

O'Brien also provided the lethargic direction and collaborated with Messina on the cliché-infested script, which is long on booze-filled confessions.

The tin-earned dialogue and haphazard plotting are more reminiscent of Tarantino's frequent collaborator Robert Rodriguez.

Anything following that spectacular sequence is bound to be something of a letdown - especially when it ends up playing like standard-issue Hollywood melodrama.

The acting is OK, but none of the leads has the kind of sizzle that might have turned this into something as special as another film set roughly in the same era, "Diner.''

It's worth seeing the movie for Hathaway alone.

Like the fictional Clarice Starling in "The Silence of the Lambs,'' Maya is a consummate professional who brilliantly performs her job in an often hostile work environment.

Piles on enough eye candy and action sequences to please fans, plus more humor than the three "Rings" films - even if it only occasionally achieves the trio's grandeur.

Nuanced work by the great John Slattery ("Mad Men") as an emotionally distant dad isn't enough to sustain more than sporadic interest in Brian Savelson's underwritten, slow-moving indie, which plays distressingly like a photographed off-Broadway drama.

Half as long and twice as much fun as the self-important "Lincoln," Roger Michell's charming sex-and-politics comedy Hyde Park on Hudson is basically a frothy tabloid take on presidential history. And for my money, that's a good thing in a season filled with puffed-up prestige pictures.

There's nothing you haven't seen before - and better - in Deadfall, which would seem to appeal mostly to fans of snowmobile chases.

The extra money has bought a professional crew for scripted sequences, in which Jonathan and his mother too often mug for the camera.

Slicker than most attempts to document Monroe's successes and tragic trajectory, but even her own words don't provide much more of an insight into what made this troubled icon tick.

Even at his best, Sharma doesn't have sufficient acting chops - or enough Hanks-like charisma - to hold the screen alone for more than 70 minutes with the CGI Richard Parker (as well as a zebra, a hyena, an orangutan and a rat who quickly become food for the ravenous tiger).

Ultimately fails to make its case that five teenagers were sent to jail for a crime they didn't commit solely because of institutional racism.

With much help from an exasperated off-screen prompter - the only other performer in this small gem - Plummer's Barrymore shows flashes of glory as he delivers bits and pieces of various Shakespearean roles.

As cleverly adapted by Tom Stoppard, this is an Anna Karenina that's pretty much guaranteed to polarize audiences.

Jennifer Lawrence's smart, funny and altogether masterful performance as a troubled widow in David O. Russell's Silver Linings Playbook simply blows away the competition in this year's race for the Best Actress Oscar.

It's a must-see for Daniel Day-Lewis' charismatic, subtly shaded performance as Lincoln - and an even richer one by Tommy Lee Jones.

Walken was largely typecast in quirky roles as a result of playing the title character's brother in "Annie Hall," so it's something of a delightful irony that 35 years later, Walken finds his most rewarding role leading a terrific ensemble in what amounts to one of the best Woody Allen movies that Allen wasn't involved in making.

The Oscar-winning director of "Rain Man" - whose last film, the abysmal documentary "PoliWood" never went much further than the Tribeca Film Festival - demonstrates he can make a shakycam found-footage horror movie every bit as fake-looking, clumsy and unscary as your average college student working on a $200 budget.

That 20-minute white-knuckle sequence - which includes Washington's character, Whip Whitaker, flipping the plane upside down to pull out of a tailspin - is by far the most effective part of director Robert Zemeckis' first live-action film since the underrated "Cast Away" 12 years ago.

Like with any great singer, it's often the telling pauses of the man born Anthony Benedetto that say the most in The Zen of Bennett.

The surfing sequences are some of the best I've ever seen in a film, and the re-creation of Jay's climactic battle to ride El Nino-driven waves is real white-knuckle stuff...But neither Curtis Hanson ("L.A. Confidential") nor the fellow veteran director who replaced him when Hanson took ill, Michael Apted ("Gorillas in the Mist"), can do much with the hokey sequences on land.

The posthumous campaign to polish Michael Jackson's tarnished reputation continues apace with this Spike Lee infomercial, commissioned by Sony and the money-grubbing Jackson estate to promote the 25th anniversary of his 1987 album "Bad.''

The sort of enigmatic movie that many critics embrace because it's open to endless interpretation.