Manohla Dargis

A feature-length talkathon built on a sketchy premise, some unpersuasive psychology, a pinch of politics and strong star turns from Liam Neeson and James Nesbitt, the appeal of all those words runs out long before the director Oliver Hirschbiegel turns off the spigot.

Like Mr. Lee's hit-and-miss effort ("Bamboozled"), Mr. Willmott's alternative history takes its inspiration and its rage from an America that has come both a long way and not nearly far enough. But while the filmmaker's anger is palpable it's not very inspired.

The sparks fly fast and persuasively — Rae and Stanfield make sense right away — and you’re soon cozying up with the couple while they share stories and increasingly heated looks in a dimly lit restaurant. The writer-director Stella Meghie understands that you want to see these two beautiful people get together, and she smoothly delivers on your own romantic (and romance genre) longings.

Increasingly, reviewing the latest Woody Allen movie has taken on the feel of a dreaded ritual, an annual excursion into careless filmmaking, desperate shtick, and vainglorious misanthropy disguised as cuddly neurosis.

It's possible that two actors other than Samantha Morton and Jason Patric might do justice to Cecilia Miniucchi's story about two badly matched Santa Monica, Calif., parking enforcement officers who stumble and grope into a relationship. But it's hard to think of a better match for the stubborn idiosyncrasies of Ms. Miniucchi's visual style and worldview than these two.

Ho-hum until it takes a turn toward the fascinatingly weird, the movie is a welcome declaration of artistic independence for Burton...Watching him cut loose (more recklessly than his flying baby elephant) is by far the most unexpected pleasure of this movie, which dusts off the 1941 animated charmer with exhilaratingly demented spirit.

The story’s ellipses and graceful structure are certainly admirable, but what elevates One Fine Morning is the texture of Sandra’s emotions, the revelation of her character, the hunger of her embrace, the wildness of her mouth, the stillness of her sated body, and the love that she gives and will movingly embrace once more.

Less gore is more here, and what a relief. The Woman in Black isn't especially scary, but it keeps you on edge, and without the usual vivisectionist imagery.

A story as creaky as the sub that gives the film its name.

It's no great surprise that after a tough beginning, Saved! soon starts to sound a lot like the inspirational TV movie (with Valerie Bertinelli).

A formalist experiment that soon devolves into a mannerist indulgence.

The jokes do wear thin, and the setup does too, but it’s nonetheless worth noting what a couple of crafty thieves can do with elbow grease, some spare change and the kind of deep movie love that never dies.

As the documentary repetitiously circles its subject and piles on greater numbers of clips — more than 50 movies are dropped into the 20-minute final chapter (“Dig”), hosted by the director David Lowery — whatever points Philippe is trying to make have been hopelessly lost.

If in Bresson's films nothing ever seems out of place or superfluous it's because he strove to find the essential truth of the image. Not an image or sound is wasted -- or offered up in self-glorification -- and from such seeming simplicity there arises a world of feeling.

Save for Ms. Davis's, however, the performances are almost all overly broad, sometimes excruciatingly so, characterized by loud laughs, bugging eyes and pumping limbs.

The dirt bikes and their exuberant operators are the saving grace — and joy — of the sincere if overstuffed drama Charm City Kings.

While much of the unlikely charm of the Farrellys' newest comedy, Stuck on You, comes from its conceptual purity, much of the film's humor comes from its blissful impurity.

What Michôd never manages to make clear is what we are to make of this version’s nationalism, its glorification of war, its ambivalence toward corrupting power and its selective, finally misguided attempt to brush off Shakespeare.

A horror flick that’s serviceable enough to make you occasionally giggle or flinch, yet is also so aggressively unambitious that it scarcely seems worth griping about.

Kusama is still figuring out how to balance form and pulp, but she has a singular unapologetic idea about what women can and cannot do onscreen, one she lets rip with verve and her superbly unbound star.

The less ticklish bad joke of Scream 2 is that self-referentiality has its limits.

There is very little fun in The Ice Harvest, which wouldn't pose a problem if the film had some fleshed-out ideas to go along with the booze, the booty and the recycled plot points.

This tough, crackling thriller from director Gary Gray is one of those rare action movies with something on its mind other than moviestar sneers and incessant big bangs.

What's most frustrating about the movie isn't that it thinks so little of its heroine that it can't let her figure out the moral of her own story, but that it thinks so little of us as to suggest that, after a couple millennia of human struggle, it's indeed possible to answer the unanswerable.

Mr. Partridge never figures out how to complicate his version and its voices, or maybe doesn’t want to. He softens Lamb and Tommie with tears, safe hugs and averted looks and, once they land in the countryside, mires them in sentimentality.

Buoyed by Ms. Johansson’s presence, Mr. Besson keeps his entertainment machine purring. He may be a hack, but he’s also a reliable entertainer.

The most interesting thing about The Good Shepherd is how hard the filmmakers work not only to demystify the agency, but also to strip it of its allure, its heat.

The spirit of the law will be upheld (this being Hollywood), but only after everyone has had plenty of nasty fun (this being Hollywood).

It's no surprise that Imamura has directed the best film in September 11, which is doubtless why the producer saved it for last.

[Mr.Tillman] does lovely work here, particularly with the actors, even if his insistent ebullience can feel like a sales pitch.

It's a shame no one gave the three voice stars of this appealing animation -- Ray Romano, John Legui zamo and Denis Leary -- a shot at the script.

One problem is Jimmy and his mother's dialogue, which continues in the same clichéd vein as the opening scenes of him alone yelling and yammering into his cell.

A grave and disappointing failure, as much of imagination as of technology.

The fight sequences are models of spatial coherency and escalating tension, and they grab you wholly, turning a movie into a full-body workout. That feeling dissipates whenever the fighting stops, the story cranks back up and somebody calls someone else “bro,” which happens too often.

Chandor handles the action scenes smoothly, making it easy to gloss over what the movie is saying, trying to say or accidentally saying. He maintains the kind of accelerated pace that gives your eyes a workout, and pads the story with an inviting camaraderie that brings you into the group.

Less savvy propagandists than Mr. Moore, the Celsius 41.11 filmmakers apply their thesis with a trowel.

There isn’t much going on other than the spectacle of its busily spinning parts, which might be tolerable if the first two hours weren’t so unrelievedly unmodulated, with everything synced to the same monotonous, accelerated pace. This hyperventilated quality initially serves the story and Chazelle’s concept of the era’s delirious excess, but the lack of modulation rapidly becomes enervating. After a while, it feels punishing.

Mr. Plummer stumbles beautifully, poignantly and often, leering and searching through a haze of memory or, with concern edged with panic, calling for "a line, a line" much as Richard III calls for a horse.

Everything in Matchstick Men moves and looks right, from John Mathieson's cinematography to Tom Foden's production design, so it's puzzling that the film fizzles rather than fizzes.

(Hayek's) performance is far from a disgrace, but it lacks gravitas and soul, a sense of passionate purpose, a hint of obsession. The best Hayek can do with her lovely face is cloud it with worry, but the face of Frida Kahlo demands anguish.

Barbieri is a natural filmmaker, with an eye for film space and a gift for pacing. Both of his leads are wonderful, but it's Picoy who will break your heart.

With In the Pit [Rulfo] isn't advancing any totalizing theory, a treatise on transportation or an argument about alienation; he is, rather simply and elegantly, revealing the secret human face of a seemingly inhuman world.

The film is imperfect, periodically if unsurprisingly sentimental, overly tidy and often very moving.

Good enough in patches to make its distracting star turns, storybook clichés and stereotypes harder to take than they would be in a less enjoyable movie.

The problem is that while there are dance performances scattered throughout The White Crow, as well as interludes with a sweaty Rudy practicing and striving, the offstage scenes tend to feel like filler, the bits stuck between the barre and the theater.

Its cast aside, the movie sounds and narratively unwinds like the previous installments, but without the same easy snap or visual allure.

But while the Pietà imagery startles, it makes increasing sense as the story builds around it. Because as Hideaway deepens and evolves, you understand that the image of Mousse cradling Louis is a manifestation of her love: this was how she held him, with a tender love that in its depth was itself holy.

Neither the screenplay nor the direction has the requisite depth to turn the banality of one unremarkable life into the stuff of Chekhov, much less of Mr. Payne.

Respect succeeds in doing exactly what is expected of it. You may argue with this or that filmmaking choice and regret its overly smooth edges, but it does give you a sense of Franklin as a historical figure, a crossover success story and a full-throttle, fur-draped diva.

In its milieu and parallel story lines, the film suggests a bantam "Short Cuts," but for better and for worse, this is Altman without the razored edge. Cholodenko elicits appealing performances from her ensemble, but she never pushes their characters anywhere there isn't an easy out.

There isn't much else to the film beyond slapstick antics and professional gloss, but the results are diverting enough, in great measure because it's essentially a scene-by-scene remake Mario Monicelli's 1958 satire, "Big Deal on Madonna Street."

Immaculate doesn’t try to reinvent anything but instead cheerfully embraces the familiar, which is part of what makes the movie enjoyable.

Like most of his movies, Capitalism is a tragedy disguised as a comedy; it’s also an entertainment.

The bigger and truer stars of this enjoyable, sometimes accidentally entertaining movie are the five horses that take turns playing Secretariat.

Though the car chases have grown more banal as the franchise has started to run on fumes, the smackdowns have retained their zing.

The French filmmaker Simone Bitton takes a measured look at the barrier in her documentary Wall, a film that considers hard-core political realities alongside agonizing personal truths.

For much of the movie, Junn is a one-dimensional grump who pulls this schematic if unfocused movie down with each frown and harrumph.

What’s most striking about Extract, beyond the scarcity of jokes and absence of actual filmmaking, is its deep well of sourness, which at times borders on misanthropy.

Neither an atrocity nor a revelation, The Brown Bunny is a very watchable, often beautiful-looking attempt by Mr. Gallo to reproduce the kind of loosely structured mood pieces that found American and select foreign-language cinemas of the 1960's and 70's often at their most adventurous.

Mr. Forster, who previously directed “Monster’s Ball” and “Finding Neverland,” has been soundly defeated by The Kite Runner. Despite the film’s far-flung locations (it was shot primarily in China), there is remarkably little of visual interest here; the setups are banal, and the scenes lack tension, which no amount of editing can provide.

By turns intimate and expansive, Transit is a thrilling, at times harrowing labyrinth of a movie.

A lovely drift of a movie, Go Go Tales commands your attention even as it lulls you along. Conspicuously inspired by John Cassavetes's "Killing of a Chinese Bookie," among other touchstones, it is a sincere and inspired meditation on art and creation, but in a loose, funny key.

More of a sketch than a fully developed portrait.

Mr. Michell whips the camera around too much and cuts into his scenes too quickly, but he pumps juice into this thin story and, together with his performers, keeps a movie going that might otherwise crash-land.

For all Mr. Boyle’s labors Trance principally comes off as a showcase for his brio, a spirit that animates all his choices, visual and otherwise.

Lust, Caution -- a truer title would be “Caution: Lust” -- is a sleepy, musty period drama about wartime maneuvers and bedroom calisthenics, and the misguided use of a solid director.

A movie of epically assaultive noise and nonsense.

As is often the case with movies of this type, the real stars are the special-effects team, which does some admirably disgusting work.

Notes on Marie Menken shines a quavering if welcome ray of light on a largely forgotten figure in the American avant-garde film scene of the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s.

A provocation, a coup de theatre and three hours of tedious experimentation.

By the time Rachel Weisz, as a scientist called Dr. Marta Shearing, showed up in a lab coat, I stopped trying to parse every plot twist and just went with the action flow.

Mr. Damon’s performance helps keep the movie from sinking under the weight of its artfully constructed horrors.

It's exasperating -- a near-parody of bad French comedy.

The problem is that Mr. Vaughn has no interest in, or perhaps understanding of, violence as a cinematic tool. He doesn’t use violence; he squanders it.

Saturday Night is a movie made by fans, but because Reitman assumes that his viewers are fans, too, and because he’s racing against the clock, he gestures at instead of digging into the show, its humor and history.

There’s something irritatingly self-satisfied about Funny People, which explains why, though it glances on the perils of fame, it mostly affirms its pleasures.

For his atmospheric debut as a feature director, the actor Matt Dillon has cast himself as a guy in need of saving. It's a nice fit.

Given the stakes, it’s hard not to wish that Mr. Gandini had been more ambitious: at 85 minutes, Videocracy can only scratch the surface. Even so, after watching it, you realize that even a cursory look at Mr. Berlusconi is crucial to understanding an age in which celebrity is now the coin of the realm.

The movie is generally watchable, even at its slowest and ugliest, simply because the actors are solid even when their characters are repellent.

While “Raiders” transcends its inspirations with wit and Steven Spielberg’s filmmaking and “Romancing” tries hard to do the same, The Lost City remains a copy of a copy.

Mr. Alfredson directed the second movie as well, and his work is again essentially functional, limited to clumsy action sequences and television-ready conversations. He doesn't prettify the violence in either movie, which might be unintentional but makes them feel more honest than the first did.

It's the brilliance of The X-Files to have turned Mulder's paranoid style into a function of cool. Mulder and Scully aren't just beautiful, smart, well-armed and seemingly impervious to the banalities of everyday life, such as cheap haircuts and ruinous love affairs--they're cool.

The director Yan-Ting Yuen revisits the country's recent past to explore the history and legacy of one of the strangest byproducts of totalitarian madness: the revolutionary spectacular.

There’s nothing surprising in Spectre, the 24th “official” title in the series, which is presumably as planned. Much as the perfect is the enemy of good, originality is often the enemy of the global box office.

Here, the message is the moviemaking and the unparalleled joy you get from a film that can carry you off so completely, making you forget about everything save for the beautiful lies in front of you.

An uncharacteristic if unsurprising dud.

A dreamy, elliptical neo-noir about a cop turned killer turned something else altogether.

Sliding into theaters on a river of slime and an endless supply of good vibes, the new, cheerfully silly Ghostbusters is that rarest of big-studio offerings — a movie that is a lot of enjoyable, disposable fun.

In most movies, something happens; in Archipelago, many things happen, quietly yet meaningfully.

The visual choices in the movie, including all the close-ups of Gary’s face as it lightens and darkens, help create the sense that something deeply personal is at stake.

The movie is a trifle, and it knows it. Mostly, though, Wolfs, written and directed by Jon Watts, is an excuse for its two leads to riff on their own personas, which can be faintly amusing and certainly watchable but also insufferably smug. It’s insufferable a lot.

It’s impossible to tell if the filmmakers don’t trust the audience or simply don’t have the chops, guts or heart to do this story justice.

In the end, the best thing about “The Many Saints of Newark” is that it makes you think about “The Sopranos,” but that’s also the worst thing about it.

Spiked with energy and attitude, the nonfiction movie Fightville takes a fast look at a few men who, for pleasure and sometimes profit, like to smack and take down other men while practicing mixed martial arts.

Every so often there's a suggestion that a police state may actually be a lousy idea, but this thought dies even faster than the disposable characters.

One reason filmmakers like Mr. Nolfi seem attracted to Philip K. Dick's work, beyond the brilliance of its ideas, is that his unembellished writing style leaves them room to make the stories visually their own.

To watch Ms. Foster storm through a phony airplane for an entire movie has its very minor pleasures - given the numerous close-ups, you can study her lovely face at your leisure - but there is nothing here to feed the head or fray the nerves.

Blind Mountain is a reminder that art sometimes keeps the truth alive far better than the news.

Warm Bodies is an improbable romance sweetened with appealing performances and buoyed by one of the better cute meets in recent romantic comedy.

It’s clear that Damon and McCarthy have thought through this man in considered detail, from Bill’s plaid shirts to his tightly clenched walk. The character looks as if he hasn’t moved his bowels in weeks; if anything, he feels overworked, a product of too much conceptualizing and not enough feeling, identifiable humanity or sharp ideas.

Sandler smirks a good deal less than he did in his last two movies, and with a couple of acting lessons, he might develop into a screen presence.

A serviceable, watchable movie.

Picks up where the early François Truffaut and his comrades-in-cinema left off -- with a playful, liberatory style, and a song (actually, a few) in his heart and on his actors’ lips.

Patty Jenkins is behind the camera again, but this time without the confidence. Certainly some of the problems can be pinned on the uninterestingly janky script, a mess of goofy jokes, storytelling clichés and dubious politics.

Working again with Diego Martínez Vignatti, the cinematographer for "Japón," the director doesn't just seize our attention; he commands it - forcing us into a world of terror and beauty.

There is another body of war at issue here, however, and it’s this body that throws the documentary off kilter and eventually off course: Congress.

It’s an interesting exercise and, for the most part, a passably diverting one.

Goddard keeps everything smoothly, ebbing and flowing as the characters separate and join together, but at some point during this logy 2-hour-and-21-minute exercise you want something more substantial than even Hemsworth’s admittedly mesmerizing snaky hips.

The joy of this unassuming, generous film is that it never sells out its characters' desires or ours.

Despite Miller’s talent and feverish enthusiasm, and the gravitational pull of his stars, the movie’s colorful parts just whir and stop, a pinwheel in unsteady wind.

Although its black-and-white visuals catch the eye, The Last Sentence soon loosens its hold on your attention by flooding the story with mind-numbing, uninteresting details while real history slips through the cracks.

An Officer and a Spy is well-crafted; Polanski’s movies generally are. Its contribution to cinema’s role in historical storytelling, though, seems largely as an allegory about Polanski.

Burger knows how to shoot and this is one feature where the dingy digital imagery arguably makes sense, but it's too bad he didn't work harder at finding something more original with which to test his talent than the JFK assassination and the gimmick of the phony nonfiction film.

Trimmed to an hour, and tucked between a documentary on snails and an episode of Coronation Street, writer-director Mark Herman's Brassed Off could prove lively watching indeed. As it is, however, his pedestrian if sweetly well-meaning inspirational about a coal-mining town done in by Thatcherism is too long, too laborious and 15 years too late.

A charming, uncritical, often entertaining jumble, the documentary was written and directed by Leslie Zemeckis.

Watching Ramis struggle with his two stars is like watching someone try to juggle lead weights.

Mr. Wain, who made a delightful comedy with “Role Models” and a cult favorite with “Wet Hot American Summer,” has opted to deliver a series of hit-and-miss sketch-comedy bits rather than a fully realized movie that might have gutted contemporary rom-com clichés rather than just weakly aping them.

It’s always nice to see characters break free, but you need to care whether they do. One insurmountable problem with this story is that Iris just isn’t interesting enough and certainly not developed enough either as a character or in terms of the performance.

Nasty, brutish and as cuddly as a crusty old sock fished out of a sewer, the beaver or the beav, as I like to think of him, owns the film.

If the cast is distractingly pretty, the performances are also quite fine and, in the case of Gordon-Levitt, exceptional.

Closer in texture and consistency to individually wrapped American cheese than good, tangy English cheddar. But even humble plastic-wrapped cheese has its virtues and so does this film.

Like some other contemporary films that try to stitch together a small army of characters into a community of sorts, Happy Here and Now feels like a symptom in search of a cure.

Jude is an interesting, admirably unorthodox filmmaker who likes to push his viewers. Here, he simply punishes us.

Tells the depressing, often ridiculous and generally enraging story of how and why Mr. Chong, an extremely laid-back and genial camera presence, ended up doing time in the minimum-security Taft Correctional Institution in Taft, Calif.

The Lucy in Being the Ricardos is scarcely interested in messy politics. Mainly she plays the role of the jealous, suspicious wife and harridan star who everyone really does love even if she’s a bitch. That shortchanges and flattens Ball, despite Kidman’s efforts.

If I could write sonnets, I would write one about Ms. Hahn, whose timing — she finds depths in that little pause before a joke crests — can turn laughs into howls.

While Celeste and Jesse is decidedly conventional in most respects, it's pretty swell as an exploration of a relationship between a man and a woman that's no longer predicated by mutual desire.

Hippocrates unfolds pretty much like an average episode of “ER,” though with more French flag waving and less storeroom romancing.

Everything looks professional if undistinguished.

Almut’s ambitions give her spark and grit, and they make the character appealingly contemporary, as does Pugh’s vibrancy and emotionally charged performance. The actress handles the shifting periods and deepening drama adroitly, even when the filmmakers begin selling out her character.

The whole thing is kitsch of the most pricey sort, and it's a good guess that it will be a smash.

The 3-D is necessary to the film only in so far as it keeps your eyes engaged when your mind starts to wander. Stripped of much of the original poem’s language, its cadences, deep history and context, this film version of Beowulf doesn’t offer much beyond 3-D oohs and ahs, sword clanging and a nicely conceived dragon, which probably explains why Mr. Zemeckis and his collaborators have tried to sex it up with Ms. Jolie, among other comic-book flourishes.

Squint and you can sometimes make out the bigger, more complex stories in White Boy Rick, including those of a great city violently brought low; of fragile communities left to fail and rot; and of a legal system that seems permanently broken. Too often, though, the movie traffics in genre clichés and the usual suspects.

The bittersweet paradox of this franchise is that while the stories have grown progressively less interesting the special effects have improved tremendously, becoming at once more plausible -- when Spider-Man swings through the urban canyons he finally looks almost real -- and more spectacular.

What the movie ends up in desperate need of is a sense of life made real and palpable through dreadful, transporting details, not a life embalmed in hagiographic awe.

Ms. Rozema tries to build tension and sustain interest by thickening the atmosphere and layering on details rather than big incidents. Yet while she creates intimacy as well as interiority by visually closing in on each sister...the movie lacks urgency.

Topped with that messy salt-and-pepper wig that frames and obscures his scowling, searching face, [Harris] invests Beethoven with a violent turbulence that sometimes floods the room but mostly stays coiled inside, where it seethes.

Mackenzie does nice, tight work now and again, mostly in more intimate sequences, but too many scenes drag, and his fetishistization of violence proves numbing.

It’s a kick to see how effectively Ms. Phang has created the future on a shoestring even if she hasn’t yet figured out how to turn all her smart ideas into a fully realized feature.

A solid yet fleet French thriller about a society kidnapping and its shockwaves.

Amnesia, Mr. Schroeder has said, is a story partly based on his mother, who refused to speak German, so perhaps it’s no surprise that it’s strongest when it focuses on Martha, a character Ms. Keller inhabits gracefully.

Better than the usual three-stage journey of courage, heartbreak and redemption. In this case, the triumph of the human spirit comes with a small bitter chaser.

Ms. Miller has attempted to elevate a small Oedipal story about two damaged souls into a grandiloquent epic, Shakespeare by way of Bob Dylan. She misses by a significantly wide mark, largely because she loves her monster too much and his victim too little.

Although the digital dinos look great, especially the clumsy stegosaurs, Spielberg and screenwriter David Koepp have failed to absorb the single most important lesson from the movies they've looted: If your people aren't interesting, at least make your monsters memorable.

Mr. Eastwood doesn't just shift between Hoover's past and present, his intimate life and popular persona, he also puts them into dialectic play, showing repeatedly how each informed the other.

An overlong, undercooked comedy of manners about how, yes, indeed the rich are different.

The joke of it is, for all the pricey bangs and booms, the whiplash cinematography and the editing that turns film space into cubistic tableaux, a Bruckheimer-and-Scott partnership is only as good as its screenplay, and this one is a mess.

The great surprise of Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere — a solid, very likable, very affecting drama about an anguished period in the life of the young Bruce Springsteen — is that it doesn’t shy away from soul-deep pain.

Unearthing even the roughest gems serves a programming purpose, but in this case it has also led to a theatrical release of a movie that looks like a muddy second-generation Xerox and contains all the emotional and intellectual appeal of cold tea and soggy toast.

A movie that's nearly as good as its publicity campaign.

Schadenfreude carries a delectable tang no matter the language, and as the history of Hollywood shows, stories about pretty people behaving badly remain reliably alluring.

Despite Mr. Shannon and Mr. Spacey, who appear to be having a fine time working off each other, the meeting is anticlimactic.

With her ductile physicality and undeniable charm, Witherspoon remains acutely present even when everyone else -- director, writers and cast -- has checked out.

The movie love can make it hard to hear the human pulse beneath the noise (it's there, if faint), much less see if there's anything new going on.

Serviceably, at times awkwardly, directed by Mandie Fletcher, the movie skews softer than the series at its barbed best, partly because the celebrity culture that once provided such rich material has become just another ratings opportunity for the Kardashians.

A soulful romance, an existential action flick and something of a miracle movie — the appealing slow-burner Salvo hovers at the crossroads of genre.

A drowsy comedy about a handful of kids grooving and roller-skating, Roll Bounce has heart and good vibes but little else to recommend it.

Abigail and her Asian friend’s own “forest” is filled with overburdened metaphors and quivering emotions, quirks and tics and even regulation Malick-like twirling. Some of this is pretty; none of it sticks.

Zendaya and Pattinson are both enjoyable to watch, but she’s given too little to do and he’s given too much.

Good zombie fun, the remake of George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead is the best proof in ages that cannibalizing old material sometimes works fiendishly well.

Like too many short documentaries, it can't do justice to its complex topic or finally to those of us watching. Because, while Surviving Progress puts forth a lot of general advice (stop the deforestation of the Amazon), it offers little in terms of real, practical, graspable solutions. People need hope; moviegoers do too.

Fiennes peels David in layers, unraveling this man until you see his hollow interior.

There is so much talent on display in Park Chanwook's Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, it is a drag that the film never rises to the level of its director's obvious ability.

Like many sequels, this one ramps up everything, including the body count. The fight sequences here are well-staged, shot and cut, more elaborate than in the earlier movie and at times gleefully grisly, with skewered and barbecued flesh.

There’s more flab than muscle packed on this galumphing franchise reboot, which, as it lumbers from scene to scene, reminds you of what a great action god Steven Spielberg is. Too bad he didn’t take the reins on this.

While it can be seen as an environmental horror movie (if you must), Rubber doesn't dig down but instead merrily rolls on, as Mr. Dupieux plays with narrative and form. In one wonderful cinematic coup the tire spots a crow and shifts toward the bird so that it's framed in the tire hole, an angle that turns the tire into a camera. Point. Click. Explode.

Amusing if unfocused documentary peek at some of the more engaged fans (and opportunists) circulating in the Harry Potter world.

More disturbing, yet another robot, or maybe two, seems to have written a Hollywood script and hijacked a major studio production. Given the film's assembly-line screenplay and mechanistic storytelling, no other explanation seems viable. Certainly no one with a heartbeat or taste would blow so much talent, time and resources on such rubbishy writing.

This movie is finally only about Isabelle Huppert and Gérard Depardieu, and that’s enough.

While Dalíland occasionally edges into caricature, its take on Gala’s role in the marriage, her temperament and feverish attention to money is happily more complicated.

Like the film, the characters mean well and look good. But they're so deeply immersed in their own heads that they can't see the world for their needs.

The movie isn’t especially well made, yet because Tucker is such a gloriously rich figure — immigrant turned runaway mother turned vaudevillian turned superstar — she renders its formal and aesthetic shortcomings (mostly) irrelevant.

While watching Werner Herzog’s My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done you might be tempted to murmur, “My Werner, My Werner, What Have Ye Done.”

It reminds you that today’s horror movies still owe a great debt to Val Lewton, the producer of cheapie classics like “Cat People” (1942) and a virtuoso of shadows who realized that audiences could be entertained if the characters they watched looked like them. “Unfriended” doesn’t have Lewton’s poetry. Yet the filmmakers understand that one way into an audience’s head and nervous system is to fill the screen with the kind of “insipidly normal characters” (as the critic Manny Farber described Lewton’s) you’re happy to see shiver and scream.

For a film about the struggles of a black man in America, The Banker spends an awful lot of time on a false white front.

There are a lot of horses but absolutely no sense in The First Saturday in May, a glib, lazy documentary about six trainers on the proverbial road to the 2006 Kentucky Derby.

While desperation and a critique lurk under all these garish surfaces, neither emerges because Ms. Biller, finally, adores this milieu too much to tear it apart.

Ironclad alternately feels, plays and sounds like an abridged television mini-series and a feature-length video game.

Man From Plains isn’t about engagement; it’s about disengagement from Mr. Carter’s critics and his more provocative beliefs. It’s also about legacy building.

The best cheap thrill to come out of Hollywood in ages -- it's a shot of tonic for the current blockbuster bloat.

All that counts in The Accountant 2 is that it’s adroitly paced, unburdened by narrative logic (there are almost as many coincidences as corpses) and buoyed by its well-synced, charismatic leads.

Until the director Frank Darabont decides that he’s saying something important instead of making a nifty horror movie, The Mist isn’t half bad.

Mostly, as so often with these types of empty entertainments, you are left to wonder why companies that hire so many fine actors to run around under latex and foam and have the best technological wizardry money can buy seem to spend so little attention to the screenplay.

A cold, funny number about the erotics of money and the seduction of death.

In the main, Mr. Palm sticks to the usual biopic formula: a chronological account of a heroic individual told through talking heads, still photographs and film clips. Mr. Palm's principal deviation from this formula is that some of the interviews take place in moving cars.

Few filmmakers love movies as intensely; fewer still have the ability to remind us why we fell for movies in the first place.

Stuffed with playful character actors and carpeted with wall-to-wall tunes, the film makes for easy viewing and easier listening.

The film is neither about the Holocaust nor about those Germans who grappled with its legacy: it's about making the audience feel good about a historical catastrophe that grows fainter with each new tasteful interpolation.

Fitfully engaging, finally exasperating.

During the ensuing narrative unpleasantness and visual incoherence (meaningless choker close-ups, pointless slow motion), Hayley subjects Jeff to a range of torture, all in the name of, well, what? Despite the two fine performances, it's hard to say.

[Ms. Shawkat] and Mr. Arteta, a sensitive observer of life’s everyday churn (his credits include “Beatriz at Dinner”), do some lovely work in a movie that reminds you that sometimes all you need in realist fiction is a glimpse into another person’s being — but with heart and intelligence, good craft and technique.

The director Kevin Macdonald asks Galliano questions in “High & Low,” but the answers are largely self-serving and unsatisfying in a movie that, for the most part, plays like yet another installment in a highly publicized redemption narrative.

The story shifts and lumbers toward redemption that Earl doesn’t earn and that sentimentalizes a movie that is never especially good and often teasingly offensive but also fitfully entertaining and willfully perverse.

The infinitely silly, unconscionably entertaining action film Unleashed earns most of its juice from the martial-arts star Jet Li.

What they give us is the chance to win, not with righteous morality, but with an old-fashioned swagger that says, much like the film itself, Hey, we may be stupid, but we rock.

It isn't just that there's something unsettling about a film that aestheticizes a crematorium; it's that there's something trivializing about the very effort.

It doesn’t aspire to art-house significance, just to white-knuckled entertainment.

The downer here is that Lowery doesn’t seem to know what to do with his stars, performers who are never better than when they’re just doing what they do best — you know, acting.

Whether through craft or constitution, Mr. Norton invests Walter with a petty cruelty that makes his character’s emotional thaw and Kitty’s predicament all the more poignant.

Loving Jackie Chan has always been easy, which is why it would be nice if he could find better material in which to bask in his long-sought American stardom or, alternately, ease into bad movies as effortlessly as his co-star.

There's delight to be had from watching Burton conjure up one fantastical Edward-inspired scenario after another.

A delicately funny tale about everyday surrealism.

It’s not especially tart and is undeniably over-padded, but its charms and ingratiating likability remain intact.

More than anything else, Ask the Dust feels like a compendium of desires - for a city, for a woman, for youth.

Washington is unsurprisingly the primary reason to watch “Equalizer 3,” which is basically a showcase for him to smolder, swagger and light up the screen as he wanders a tiny, wildly beautiful town on the Amalfi coast.

Enjoyable, unabashedly trivial caper flick.

Best appreciated for its sustained creepy vibe and sporadically arresting images, Heartless moves from one outré moment to another, from one self-conscious allusion to the next ("Donnie Darko" and "Taxi Driver"). It doesn't go anywhere special or much of anywhere, though it goes there in appreciably icky style.

Mr. Turturro’s musical choices in Fading Gigolo tend to feel, like so much here, generically applied instead of meaningfully coaxed from some essential, lived-in truth.

Whatever the case, you may not buy his happy endings, but it's a seductive ideal when all of God's creatures, great and small, buxom and blond, exist in such harmony.

The results prove disappointing, simultaneously over the top and underwhelming.

That character, or rather Ford, or really the two of them together are the main arguments for seeing “Dial of Destiny,” which is as silly as you expect and not altogether as successful as you may hope.

It doesn’t add up to much, despite the appealing young cast and the handsome cinematography that brings texture and visual interest to every grubby corner.

Despite its unsettling political resonance, “Wicked” is finally most convincing as a story of an intense, soulfully nurturing female friendship.

While the movie is a conceptual pip filled with quotable laughs and gentle pokes at religious faith at its most literal, it also looks so shoddy that you yearn for the camerawork, lighting and polish of his shows.

There's so much that's right in it that its blunders are all the more frustrating.

Certainly the fictionalized brood in All Good Things is equal to the Friedmans in terms of dysfunction, and they're loaded.

The movie lurches from the improbably silly to the drearily so, while the characters remain so emotionally and psychologically divorced from life that they might as well be zombies or sitcom stick figures.

Life is suffering, as the Buddha said (including in Hardy's emotionally grinding novels), but it's more complex and contradictory than the ginned-up realism Mr. Winterbottom delivers here.

Mr. Matsumoto, as if realizing that viewers might need to wake up, stuffs a ball gag in a child’s mouth and throws in some reflexive nonsense involving an old director and some critics who seem to be watching the same movie you are. They think it’s terrible and finally it’s hard to disagree.

While Paul seems great conceptually, he's not particularly interesting or surprising.

It’s almost always pleasant to hang out with old friends, particularly when no one overstays their welcome. The good news about “Spinal Tap II” is that everyone involved seems to have understood the assignment, which makes for a genial 83 minutes of soft jokes and jowls.

It’s a lot of hooey and might have been at least tolerable if the movie had been rougher, meaner, tighter, and if the filmmakers — the writer is Nicolaas Zwart, the director is Miles Joris-Peyrafitte — had never watched a Terrence Malick movie.

Although Mr. Pawlikowski often shows Mr. Hawke in medium and long shots, the actor draws you close. There's anguish in Tom's face that speaks of a terrible fragility and that leavens the story's mysterioso proceedings with a real, recognizable humanity.

An entertainingly ridiculous update of Mary O’Hara’s 1941 children’s novel, “My Friend Flicka.”

The three leads remain watchable, but only the sourness in Jake’s face when he moves into Justine’s house hints at the kind of true and complex emotions that, bromide by bromide, this movie insistently denies.

It's possible that Maggie Gyllenhaal will never become a major star, but there isn't an American actress in movies today who holds the screen with as much deep-seated soul.

The plot hinges on Jenna's horrified realization that her adult self is a witch, but 13 Going On 30 -- works foremost as a vehicle for its rising star.

The director Susanna White makes a lot of strange choices, including the dark, fussy visuals best described as stained-glass noir. As an Expressionist choice, it doesn’t make much sense. Then again, neither does much of Our Kind of Traitor, which has loads of twists and all the ritualistic pessimism you expect, but none of the political and moral outrage that might have elevated this genre story into a le Carré one.

Doesn’t add anything substantively new, though it has been nicely directed by Neil Armfield, known in his country for his theater work, and features striking performances from Heath Ledger and Geoffrey Rush.

It would be something to see Mr. Bateman go authentically dark (perhaps not that dark), but it’s also enough just to watch him as he widens his eyes, furrows his brow and shows off his excellent timing.

In his true-life film about four brothers who robbed banks out West during the late teens and early '20s, Richard Linklater seems to achieve the impossible: He makes Ethan Hawke bearable.

The actors certainly look as if they’re having a good time, and if you’re in the right mood, you might too.

Etched in acid, stoked by wrath, it is one of those big-ideas novels that fits perfectly in human hands, where it can be savored over time or wrestled with page by page. But big ideas don't always size down for movie screens.

Mr. Burton, whose artistry is at times most evident in its filigree, can be a great collector when given the right box to fill, as is the case here. He revels in the story’s icky, freaky stuff; he’s right at home, which may be why he seems liberated by its labyrinthine turns and why you don’t care if you get a little lost in them.

Doesn’t have the original’s wooden performances, puffy clothes and hairdos or its amusingly crude special effects, but it does share its blood lust.

Waititi’s playfulness buoys Love and Thunder, but the insistence on Thor’s likability, his decency and dude-ness, has become a creative dead end. The movie has its attractions, notably Hemsworth, Thompson and Crowe, whose Zeus vamps through a sequence with a butt-naked Thor and fainting minions.

The Fall Guy is divertingly slick, playful nonsense.

If only the whole thing were as funny as an Albert Brooks movie.

It’s a tough, difficult story that, anchored by Guinevere Turner’s script, Harron recounts with lucid calm, compassion and intelligent interpretive license.

It’s sweet, sentimental, almost inevitably touching if not especially persuasive, brushing against the thorns in each man’s life without drawing blood.

Nasty, brutal and unforgiving, A Walk Among the Tombstones is one of those rare contemporary cinematic offerings: intelligent pulp.

A passably amusing romantic comedy with a laugh-strewn script that's almost undone by the hard sell of an enterprise that drills every emotional beat into your head.

There’s something irresistible about watching two people fall in love, even in contrived, sniffle- and sometimes gag-inducing films like Last Chance Harvey.

All setup and no payoff.

Instead of delivering buckets of guts and gore, this ghost story offers a strong sense of time and place, along with the kind of niceties that don't often figure into horror flicks, notably pictorial beauty, an atmosphere throbbing with dread and actors so good that you don't want anyone to take an ax to them.

As is often the case when ambitious young filmmakers have murder and profit on their minds, Mr. Alvart is finally less interested in the nature of man than in the cool stuff you can do with a camera, which he tosses about the set, swooping it up and down and all around, without rhyme or reason.

Filled with ideas and some nice acting, particularly from Mr. Mackie and Mr. Robinson, both of whom hold the screen easily, Mr. Evans has crammed a great deal of thought and a lot of obvious feeling into his first dramatic feature.

Pleasurable, daffy if at times daft.

A competently made, moderately diverting variation on a genre standard.

It doesn’t always make sense tonally and intellectually, but the whole thing is energetic, handsome and stocked with enough expert, appealing performers to hold your interest through the rougher, less coherent passages.

The overall results are generally pretty, mildly diverting, at times dull and often familiar, despite a few unusually sharp, brief departures from Disney’s pacifying formula.

Even Phoenix, an actor who can make an incestuous-minded Roman emperor seem sensitive, can't smooth over political nihilism this unsavory.

With this role, Watts is reminding us that she can hold the screen by herself and without saying a word tell you everything you need to know about a character — and all the while looking fantastic.

Here, a contemporary French white woman who yearns for liberté, égalité and fraternité is as much a prisoner of her circumstances as women were once upon a time and still are in some cultures, though truly it's all the clichés in this film that make her a captive.

Die Another Day is only intermittently entertaining but it's hard not to be a sucker for its charms, or perhaps it's just impossible not to feel nostalgia for movies you grew up with.

As Mr. Philibert continues to pop in and out of different studios, in and out of the building, flitting from one face to the other, it feels as if he were searching for a story that never emerges.

The comedy is situational and confessional, the flat one-liners mixed in with more memorable physical comedy. The scripted lines rarely zing, sing or sting (some seem improvised), but when the performers fall down or screw up their faces, you get to watch them fill in their characters with something like real feeling.

Still, despite the visual clumsiness and the production's tattered seams, I found myself rooting for this movie anyway, partly because Lindsey and Ben make a nice fit, as do the actors playing them, partly because the Farrellys bring so much heart to their movies, and partly because Ms. Barrymore inspires more goodwill than any other young actress I can think of working today in American movies.

Both Ms. Marjanovic and Mr. Kostic are very fine (like the rest of the cast they deliver their dialogue in Bosnian) and they navigate the contradictions of their characters' feelings, the flashes of hate, the surrender to desire, with delicacy.

The loggerhead turtle is a threatened species, and one day all we may have left are its computer-generated analogues. Its fight for existence is plenty dramatic already, and is a story worth telling honestly.

It just might be that America's favorite jackasses, having played around with sharks in their last big-screen effort ("Jackass Number Two" of course), have this time actually jumped one, and in 3-D no less.

This upscale Harlequin fantasy film works much the same terrain as Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows, a '50s weepy about an affair between an older woman and a younger man, though without an iota of its wit or intelligence.

The women make The Family Stone, especially Ms. Parker, whose nimble performance is reason alone to see the film: not since Philippe Petit has anyone walked a tightrope with such finesse - and in high heels, no less.

Rather than steep his story in dread, ideas or something, anything, fresh and different, first-time director Eli Roth just pours on the blood, along with some recycled surrealism and plenty of giddy movie allusions.

Radioactive, a thoughtful, very watchable fictionalized portrait of Marie Curie, tries hard to nudge the halo off its subject. Given her endeavors and accolades — including two Nobel Prizes — this simple, humanizing effort proves tough but also feels necessary.

Adams is a performer whose emotional transparency can make her characters seem unguarded and appealingly vulnerable, and the movie works as well as it does in great part because of her.

A deeply conventional story about truculent or orphaned boys and the gentle soul who finds himself by shaping the tots into a chorus.

Nicely directed, the film version proves refreshingly free of the customary blights that affect most modern children's movies, notably adult condescension. But, man, is it mean.

In the end, what makes Q such a deceptively tricky literary creation — his averageness — is the very thing the filmmakers struggle with, partly because movies of this commercial scale and bottom-line ambition rarely know what to do with ordinary life.

Depp's performance reminds us that, yeah, it's only a movie -- just not a good one.

Zoom, crash, repeat with squealing, burning and flaming tires — it’s all predictably absurd and self-mocking, and often a giggle when not a total yawn.

The British comic turned actor (Paul Kaye) appears in almost every scene and he carries that weight admirably. He manages the very neat trick of keeping you interested in a character who doesn't merit our affection but earns it nonetheless.

Non-Stop doesn’t make any sense, but that’s expected, uninteresting and incidental to the pleasures of a slow-season Liam Neeson release as diverting as this one.

The film is consummately professional but phlegmatic, a slow fizzle.

The net effect of the messy bedroom sheets, the marital squabbling and lachrymose, emotional bloodletting is to turn a tragedy into an atmospheric backdrop for three isolated souls, all of whom might have started out considerably less lonely if the movie had a firmer grasp on the world in which they live.

If Mr. Cruise doesn't work in Valkyrie, it's partly because he's too modern, too American and way too Tom Cruise to make sense in the role, but also because what passes for movie realism keeps changing, sometimes faster than even a star can change his brand.

Drive-Away Dolls only snaps alive when the ever-reliable Domingo is on camera and — with just a few hushed words and his trademark charisma — he inevitably draws you in with the promise of a movie that never materializes.

Mr. Ritchie tends to flaunt his wares like a store clerk, fawning over the clothes, chairs and cars, and his usual rabbity pace slows to a tortoiselike crawl whenever the actors deliver a lot of words, which gratefully isn’t often. His talent, as he proves repeatedly, is making bodies and cars crash through space.

The vogue for retro-horror, particularly the stripped-down shivers of 1970's slasher flicks, continues apace in this nasty little piece of work from Australia.

The good news is that the minions are more (unconsciously, if perhaps also strategically) in touch with their anarchic side than the typical onesie-wearing crusader, which suits the directors Pierre Coffin and Kyle Balda’s well-tuned sense of the absurd.

Despite its A-movie aspirations, as the chases continue and the plot holes widen, Unknown quickly settles into the familiar B-movie comfort zone.

Directed by Koji Masutani, this speculative, provocative, frustrating and finally unpersuasive historical gloss races quickly and all too lightly over the major political crises that John F. Kennedy faced during his aborted presidency.

Frank & Lola proves more about him than her. That’s partly because of the story, partly because the writer-director Matthew Ross doesn’t have a full handle on it or his actors.

Spike Lee lost his nerve -- there are moments here, too, when it also seems like he lost his sense.

Without question, the whole thing's absurd -- this is, remember, about a guy stuck in a phone booth -- but for its first 40 minutes or so it's also mildly entertaining, fueled by the nuttiness of the setup and Schumacher's energy.

It's no great surprise that the best part of The Anniversary Party is the acting, even if Leigh and Cumming don't always direct themselves as well as they do some of their co-stars.

Consciously or not, coherently or not, Maleficent tells a new kind of story about how we live now, not once upon another time. And it does so by suggesting, among other things, that budding girls and older women are not natural foes, even if that’s what fairy tales, Hollywood and the world like to tell us.

It’s a theme as familiar as life. The five women, all perfectly cast and almost perfectly played.

Ms. Robinson and Ms. Howell have kitted out their movie handsomely, but there’s not enough story here or enough anything else, namely a persuasive psychological portrait of Claire, to make up for that lack.

What’s missing here is the sting of revelation, something less comforting than the story’s melodramatic turns and more worthy of Ms. Winstead’s performance, which is as natural as life.

There’s nothing wrong (or incorrect!) about either Wright’s desire to please or the righteousness, and at times you can sense a bit of anger wafting off the screen, even if Wright and Powell mostly seem to be having a very good time.

No matter how seriously everyone works to make the CIA impossibly sexy, the illusion that these pencil pushers are incarnations of Bond, James Bond, is difficult to sustain.