Manohla Dargis

The pleasure of Mr. Stone's work has never been located in restraint but in excess, a commitment to extremes that can drown out the world or, as in this film, give it newly vivid, hilarious and horrible form.

The yummy Japanese confection Kamikaze Girls deserves both a better title and an audience to go with it.

Though Edward and Bella reach certain heights in Twilight, notably during a charming scene that finds them leaping from piney treetop to treetop against the spectacular wilderness backdrop, the story’s moral undertow keeps dragging them down.

While Concussion has some fine things going for it, notably science and Will Smith, it lacks the exciting, committed filmmaking that rises to the level of its outrageous topic.

The film’s title, needless to say, has an ironic bite. One of the pleasures of The Merry Gentleman is Mr. Keaton's commitment to that bite, which never registers as cruel or gratuitous, just honest, weary, sad.

Dom Hemingway is a bright, shiny bauble with next to no lasting power.

What keeps the movie from tipping into full-blown exploitation like "City of God," which turns third-world misery into art-house thrills, is Mr. Fukunaga's sincerity. What keeps you watching is his superb eye.

The journey generally drags because the spinning characters, with their tired jokes and familiar melodramas, soon feel so mechanical, like the automated parts in an Almodóvar machine.

Tregenza is the kind of authentic independent who’s always worth seeking out; when he is behind the camera, he holds you rapt from the get-go.

At once frantically overblown and beautifully filigreed, Man of Steel will turn on everyone it doesn’t turn off.

It’s a nice opening for a movie that spirals into nonsense.

Robbie and Elordi hold your attention well enough, though they’re more persuasive apart than when they’re together.

Green Street Hooligans, an accidental advertisement for Alcoholics Anonymous and the somnolent pleasures of cricket that, in the end, is mostly about the pleasures, both visceral and visual, of violence.

Not too long after the knockout opening, all that's left of Snake Eyes are Cage's wild eyes, the dregs of David Koepp's rotten script, and De Palma's restless, anxious camera, on the prowl for something, anything, to hang on to.

Whether she's lying in bed, her gray hair spilling out around her head, or exalting in existence itself during one of several flashbacks, Elizabeth draws you in, which works for the story and simultaneously unbalances it.

There are some promising glints here and there, flashes of mordant wit and obvious ambition. But like too many movies, Ultrasound is better at setting up its story than delivering on its promise, as if the filmmakers were still pitching ideas in the elevator.

Every faded dress looks attentively fitted, each ramshackle house artfully weathered. If the performances are considerably less persuasive it’s partly because Campos shows no interest in the inner lives of his characters. And while Pattinson’s and Keough’s roles are risible, the actors at least show signs of (comic) life.

The movie has its diversions, including Scarlett Johansson's bodacious Janet Leigh and Michael Stuhlbarg's wheedling Lew Wasserman. It's fluff. But while its dim fantasies about Hitchcock and the association of genius with psychosis can be written off as silly, they also smack of spiteful jealousy.

Anchored by its two excellent leads, the movie is sympathetic and, for the most part, unsentimental.

When I watched I Love You, Daddy a second time, the jokes no longer landed; its shocks felt uglier, cruder. But for once a filmmaker seemed to be admitting to the misogyny that we know is always there and has often been denied or simply waved off, at times in the name of art.

Roosevelt was one of the towering figures of the 20th century, but he and his accomplishments scarcely register in this amorphous, bafflingly aimless movie. The story hinges, increasingly to its detriment, on Daisy, a distant cousin to Roosevelt and his wife, Eleanor.

This is one of those sadistic exercises that puts its characters through the wringer without saying anything true or meaningful.

Dark Shadows isn't among Mr. Burton's most richly realized works, but it's very enjoyable, visually sumptuous and, despite its lugubrious source material and a sporadic tremor of violence, surprisingly effervescent.

Has a slamming first hour. As Ian Wilson's camera darts over Charles Lee's spookily atmospheric sets, enigmas sprout like mushrooms.

It’s easy to laugh at Street Kings for its bigger than big emotions, its preposterously kinky narrative turns and overwrought jawing and yowling, but there’s no doubt that it also keeps you watching, really watching, all the way to the end.

Mr. Farrell and Mr. Doyle continue to hold your gaze, even as Mr. Jordan's screenplay sets your mind to wandering. There is, as noted, a wisp of a tale tucked into this film, one that, as the story wears on, becomes ponderously weighed down with melodramatic filler and even some halfhearted genre action.

Wendy has her moments, certainly, but she remains frustratingly undeveloped and uninvolving, despite the clamor and the score’s triumphalism.

See the Holocaust trivialized, glossed over, kitsched up, commercially exploited and hijacked for a tragedy about a Nazi family. Better yet and in all sincerity: don't.

What's disheartening is that an actress as fine as Ms. Linney has to endure the indignity of such excremental nonsense.

Mr. Kormakur sets and keeps up a fast rather than frantic pace that never runs the movie off the rails even when the story nearly does.

Tom Hardy and Tom Hardy are the reasons to see Legend.

What counts in a movie like this are stars so dazzling that we won't really notice or at least mind the cut-rate writing and occasionally incoherent action. Sometimes Mr. Pitt and Ms. Jolie succeed in their mutual role as sucker bait, sometimes they don't, which is why their new joint venture is alternately a goof and a drag.

The director M. Night Shyamalan has a fine eye and a nice, natural way with actors, and he has a talent for gently rap-rap-rapping on your nerves.

They're losers that only a mother, an entertainment manager or a gang of self-satisfied comedy insiders could love.

In the end, what matters is the movie, a brash, often beautiful, sometimes clotted, nakedly personal testament. It’s a little nuts, but our movies could use more craziness, more passion, feeling and nerve. They could use a lot more of the love that Coppola has for cinema, which he continues to pry from the industry’s death grip by insisting that film is art.

Mr. Wyatt’s direction is smooth, although he’s more confident, and the movie more convincing, when he goes for baroque with the story’s excesses.

I liked The Flash well enough while watching it. But thinking and writing about it and everything that has gone down has been dispiriting — real life has a way of insinuating itself into even better-wrought fantasies.

This is, after all, a film in which no one leads life according to script -- but, then, that's also the reason it works.

Because no one involved with Starsky & Hutch actually seems to care about the movie, all Wilson can do is idle in neutral while Stiller frantically shifts gears, looking for an excuse to split.

The film is a snort-out-loud-funny master class of controlled chaos.

A slice of social realism, a wedge of naturalism, a symbolically freighted fairy tale -- at times, London to Brighton feels like all of these combined, which, before it all turns to mush, gives the film the aspect of a fascinating and ambitious pastiche. There’s something provocative about Mr. Williams’s attempt to join together so many conflicting, contradictory influences, even if in the end they manage only to cancel one another out.

When a filmmaker proves as reluctant as Mr. Ávila to speak up about the past, to engage with its full complexity, it can be hard to hear what he's saying.

As high concept and rife with cliché as anything ever churned out by Hollywood, but with worse production values and a load of sanctimonious political correctness.

Few directors can put loneliness on screen as persuasively or capture the eerie quiet of people waiting for something, anything to happen. It's in moments such as these, when all sense of time disappears and all that remains are bodies in motion and Ken Kelsch's limpid cinematography, that you remember just how good Ferrara can be.

The story unwinds with histrionics and homilies, jazz hands and twinkle toes, overly busy camerawork and hookless lung bursters.

Mr. Caine is one of the few reasons to sit through Harry Brown, an exercise in art-house exploitation directed by Daniel Barber and tarted up with self-importance and a generally striking visual design.

For all the highfalutin dialogue and mysterioso goings-on, the only true mystery Hicks and Goldman conjure up is whether the mellifluously voiced outsider is dangling his new friend a little too closely on his knee.

It's good -- when it's not adrift in an absence of meaning.

[Mr. Farrier] and Mr. Reeve see the humor, but they also see the pathos — because it’s all fun and giggles until someone gets hurt.

Taken on the level of spectacle rather than of sense, The Last Samurai affords the sort of fizzy enjoyment that can come with epic movie endeavors, including a meticulously detailed world unlike our own, an excellent supporting cast and some pulse-pounding fights.

The film never comes fully to term, as it were: the visual style is sitcom functional, and even the zippiest jokes fall flat because of poor timing. But, much like the prickly, talented Ms. Fey, it pulls you in with a provocative and, at least in current American movies, unusual mix of female intelligence, awkwardness and chilled-to-the-bone mean.

There is...much to admire in Song to Song and much to argue with, including its ideas about pleasure and women. So go, fall into its embrace, resist its charms, argue. This may not be a film to love, but it is a film to see.

For long stretches, The D Train serves as a commodious vehicle for Mr. Black, who, like the best comic performers, never seems remotely concerned about going too big or risking the audience’s love. He’s a showboat if every so often, more of a steamroller, capable of flattening everyone and everything in his way. Yet he is also adept at conveying emotional and psychological fragility.

Schumacher has gone into the cinematic heart of darkness and emerged with his own peculiar kink on the war movie: Vietnam beefcake.

Mean-spirited vulgarity and homosexual panic.

The joint doesn't jump in the musical Idlewild; it just twitches and stumbles. As much a missed opportunity as a terrible tease.

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 disconnect between what men say and what they do makes Old School funnier than most of its gags and it also invests the movie with curious pathos.

Touches earnestly on heart-heavy issues of loss: loss of memory, of love and, perhaps because of the local angle, of (or rather by) the Chicago Cubs. But Mr. Kinney, a founder of the Steppenwolf Theater Company in Chicago and a familiar face from film and television, never gives his movie a sustained pulse.

Likable, lightweight, absurdist comedy.

In the end, like a lot of genre movies, this one pulls from different inspirations, and so weighs in, by turns, as overly predictable and satisfyingly recognizable (part of genre cinema's one-two punch).

However nifty, Lee's Cubist gambit fails to capture the graphic tension that makes great comic-book art jump off the page and great pop movies jump off the screen with pow, zap and wow!

By literalizing the idea of American military aggression and all that it implies Ms. Nair doesn’t just invest Mr. Hamid’s story with Hollywood-style beats, she also completely drains it of ambiguity.

A movie in search of a theme. Svend and Bjarne aren't bad or uninteresting characters, and certainly the two talented actors playing them are inherently watchable. But there's too little meat on these bones.

A misfired, misguided would-be satire.

A serious film filled with both great and awkward ideas and made as much from the heart as the head.

More begets more and then too much in Mood Indigo.

It has a few scattered laughs, some apparently intentional. But this is thin, unimaginative hack work, and it lacks the deranged seriousness and commitment that distinguishes a pleasurable misfire from bland dreck like this. It is, I am sorry to say, no “Gods of Egypt.”

Mr. Stone builds his case seamlessly but leaves no room for dissent, much less a drop of doubt.

Mr. Mekas makes little attempt to smooth out his transitions between takes or scenes, which only reinforces the intensely personal, even handmade nature of the work.

Jersey Boys is a strange movie, and it’s a Clint Eastwood enterprise, both reasons to see it.

The cinematic equivalent of a Brazilian wax, the movie omits much of the story’s most interesting material to create something that’s been smoothly denatured.

Mr. Marshall can't rescue the film from its embarrassing screenplay or its awkward Chinese-Japanese-Hollywood culture klatch, but Memoirs of a Geisha is one of those bad Hollywood films that by virtue of their production values nonetheless afford a few dividends, in this case, fabulous clothes and three eminently watchable female leads.

What is remarkable is the absolute cool with which LaBute charts his story: The director has the soul of an assassin.

In retrospect, the sheer amount of gush in the movie, all the praise and feverish shouts of bravo, underscores the limits of affirmational documentaries. It is also a reminder that a movie’s meaning is made (and remade) by its viewers, not just its content.

Drowsy in feel and muted in color, Stockholm is lightly amusing and watchable — mostly thanks to Hawke — but never makes the case that this is a story that needed to be told, with or without laughs.

For devotees of cinematic blowouts and dedicated students of screen masculinity (like me), 12 Strong is premium, Grade A catnip. Directed by the newcomer Nicolai Fuglsig, it is generally watchable, if unsurprisingly easier on the eyes than on the ears or brain.

Although what ensues is generally unsurprising and as pro forma down-and-dirty as the genre dictates, it's also on occasion rather affecting.

A movie with its heart and head in the right place. Too bad its aesthetic sensibilities and technical coordinates are not as well situated.

It flounders whenever it tries to weave the real world into its fantasia, partly because it isn't really about anything other than making money, partly because the spy-versus-spy battle doesn't entertain the way it once did.

Style is content in action movies, but when all the style originates elsewhere, it's just plain lazy.

Directed by Rob Reiner from Joey Hartstone’s script, LBJ is a frustratingly underdeveloped vehicle for Mr. Harrelson’s talents as well as an unfortunate missed opportunity.

Cymbeline has been branded a tragedy, a tragicomedy and a romance, and Mr. Almereyda embraces all three categories. The movie is by turns grim, grimly amusing and romantic, sometimes at once.

They drink at the pub, they drink at home. They drink until they pass out and then, after they have had a good vomit, they drink again. If that sounds too disgusting to watch, it almost is.

A cursory, irritatingly facile look at the human cost of globalization.

No Other Choice is easy to admire from one perfectly balanced shot to the next; it is a pleasure to see how Park plays with visual space and deploys some of the more slapstick comedy with sharply timed, Rube Goldberg-style finesse. If only the movie’s tones and moods were as modulated as its two vibrant, often touching lead performances.

Oblivion never transcends its inspirations to become anything other than a thin copy.

What at first came across as a tale of dawning conscience increasingly starts to feel rigged.

What follows doesn't much surprise, since every emotional detail, accompanied by a noisy storm and then a black-out, arrives well in advance of its execution.

About as non-narrative a film as you're likely to see in commercial theaters. This makes it a curiosity and, less charitably, something of a gimmick, but mostly it makes it a challenge.

If you thought Abu Ghraib was a laugh riot then you might love Observe and Report, a potentially brilliant conceptual comedy that fizzles because its writer and director, Jody Hill, doesn't have the guts to go with his spleen.

The new movie is as moth-eaten as the serapes strewn through the 1960 film, but there’s no denying the appeal of the image of Mr. Washington riding a horse, shooting a Colt and leading a posse of vigilantes to save a mostly white Western town.

Wahlberg has turned into one of the most sympathetic and persuasive young actors around, and while his new movie remains safely, even shrewdly, in the middle of the road, he rocks.

One problem is that while Mr. Masset-Depasse frames Tania's status in vague political terms, he doesn't make an argument. Instead he creates heroes and villains in what is, by turns, a prison flick, a psychological thriller and a maternal melodrama.

This banal horror retread involves a couple of critters flailing inside a sticky trap for what is, in effect, the big-screen equivalent of a roach motel.

It's a beautiful message: surely there's no arguing with "Hey, hey, ho, ho, poverty has got to go!" But there is much to argue with, and much to regret, about a film whose director thinks he needs to drop an anvil on our heads when art would suffice.

While there’s much to admire in how Mr. Tucci and Ms. Eve perform Mr. LaBute’s artful, apocalyptic duet, this is one seriously out-of-date tune.

Cassavetes isn't much of a director and he never settles on a mood, which he seems intent on ruining with hiccups of goofiness. But there's an underlying humanity to his scenes, a sense that movies are made by people for other people.

Minor whimsy of a film.

Mr. Rosenthal puts the story’s parts into play well enough, but once everyone and everything is in position that’s more or less where they stay as this slow story downshifts to a crawl.

A twitchy Mr. Hawke builds a persuasive portrait of desperation with little help from the script and despite playing a character who makes so many mistakes he might as well be on a suicide mission.

A pleasantly immersive, beautifully animated, occasionally sleepy tale.

Busy, garish and periodically amusing.

A plodding bureaucratic procedural that features many, many characters strategizing in various spaces with furrowed brows and clenched jaws, mostly in relentless medium close-up.

Adapted from Colleen Hoover’s best seller by Christy Hall, “It Ends With Us” is fitfully diverting, at times touching, often ridiculous and, at 2 hours and 10 minutes, almost offensively long.

With all the mystery and meaning sucked from the story, the filmmakers do what filmmakers often do when faced with their own lack of imagination: they toss a little sex in with the violence.

The cretins rule in Alpha Dog, which has much the same entertainment value you get from watching monkeys fling scat at one another in a zoo or reading the latest issue of Star magazine. Of course a little of that nasty stuff may land on you, but such are the perils of voyeurism.

There is, of course, enormous pleasure in watching Daniel Day-Lewis, an actor of extraordinary sensitivity whose ability to convey a character’s interiority — the delicacy and the violence — can seem almost mystical. The problem is that as Anemone continues, the strength of the actor’s performance lays bare the banality of the writing, and Ray’s grip on your imagination loosens even as Day-Lewis’s remains fixed.

This bit of fluff overflows with so much honest charm it barely matters that it's one in a seemingly endless succession of Tarzan retreads.

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

Kristin Hahn’s script gives Will sassy lines and too many tears, but the filmmakers never give this character a real, searching, complex inner life. They give her problems to solve, hurdles to clear. They turn emotional complexity into affirmations and a potentially transformational character into a you-go-girl cliché.

A pileup of clichés in service to technological whiz-bangery, “Alita” is one more story of the not quite human brought to life with hubris and bleeding-edge science.

The horror of where rationalism can lead (the death camps, for one) hangs over Irrational Man and helps hold you as does Mr. Phoenix, even with some bad writing and Mr. Allen’s narrative laxity and lack of interest in how real people live.

I wish Ms. Parker had let that bee in her bonnet go silent, because the movie that she and Mr. King have come up with is the pits, a vulgar, shrill, deeply shallow -- and, at 2 hours and 22 turgid minutes, overlong -- addendum to a show that had, over the years, evolved and expanded in surprising ways.

Despite its spasms of brutality and a swerve into the macabre, After the Apocalypse is, by comparison with more recent films of this type (the "Mad Max" series), gentle at heart and terribly sincere.

This maximalist approach can tax the nerves, though it has the benefit of keeping you on alert. It’s also pretty enjoyable. Mr. Fuqua, who happens to be surprisingly good with actors, does have a knack for chaos.

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.

Like the filmmaking itself, the violence has no passion, no oomph, no sense of real or even feigned purpose.

For all the director's visual flair, his trademark flashes of gallows humor and his few good moments, there's never a sense that he's made Crash his own.

Part of this movie’s power comes from its insistence that you look at the near-unbearable, that you confront slavery as a crime against humanity rather than the perverse myth of the so-called Lost Cause enshrined in countless paintings, books, films and statues.

Something certainly blows here, but it isn't the archangel's horn.

It's a soulless and dull bit of showmanship, but it sure sounds profound.

A strong filmmaking voice was clearly not called for in an entertainment that has been carefully calibrated for maximum blandness. Mr. Apted is aboard to keep the franchise sailing along or at least afloat, which he does.

The sense of predestination hangs heavily over the movie, but not a sense of life.

A sequel that, until a late, lamentably foolish turn, balances blockbuster bombast with human-scale drama, child-friendly comedy and gushers of tears.

For every few jokes that hit in this story about a recession-battered New York couple finding themselves on a Georgia commune, one sputters and dies.

The Moment lights on substantive subjects throughout, yet partly because it’s about one individual’s ostensible struggles rather than the larger system, its bite is toothless.

The movie keeps you watching and generally engaged.

A testament to movie love at its most devout, cinematic spectacle at its most extreme, and kitsch as an act of aesthetic communion.

The makers of this malnourished teen drama haven't just dropped six letters from the title of Shakespeare's Othello, they have excised everything that gives the original its troubling power -- principally a point but also furious passion.

Wasabi dawdles and drags when it should pop; it doesn't even have the virtue of enough mindless violence to break up the tedium of all its generational bonding.

And so he zips and zags, keeping aloft in a movie that can’t always do the same.

The cast of mostly unknowns is agreeable if unnecessarily bland, not a Spicoli among them.

What follows is consistently watchable and sometimes tense but, despite some twists, largely unsurprising.

It helps that Ms. Lawrence, like all great stars, can slip into a role as if sliding into another skin, unburdened by hesitation or self-doubt. Craft and charm are part of what she brings to this role, as well as a serviceable accent, but it’s her absolute ease and certainty that carry you through Red Sparrow.

Ms. Peirce plays up the story’s religious themes and Carrie’s burgeoning power as she discovers her telekinetic gifts, even as the dread of the female body that deepens Mr. De Palma’s version somehow goes missing.

The tick tick tock of the mortal clock gives the science-fiction thriller In Time its slick, sweet premise.

It’s cute for a while. The stars are pros, and their scenes, often staged so that the characters are within breathing distance of each other, have snap.

Of course, it's terrible -- but did it have to be this bad?

Phony choppers and a startling resemblance to Jon Voight aren't enough to transform Theron into Wuornos, and I didn't buy either the performance or the character for a second.

My hand trembles slightly as I type these words, but the truth is that while watching 2 Fast 2 Furious, the follow-up to the pleasurably cheap-thrills sleeper "The Fast and the Furious," I realized just how much I miss Vin Diesel.

The kind of witless production that should rightly be cluttering the discount bins at your local video store.

The city doesn’t need to be real in a romantic movie, but the feelings must be. Although Mr. Levin tends to embrace clichés and overstatement (Brian’s parents, Arlene and Sam, played by Glenn Close and Frank Langella, are straight out of Yiddish vaudeville), he can also surprise you with delicate touches, a pained look, a wince of recognition.

As demented and entertaining as promised, and a little less idiotic than feared.

The fight is the thing in Man of Tai Chi, Keanu Reeves’s down-and-dirty and generally diverting directing debut.

Calvaire is pompous, but not without talent or shivers.

It's an overly familiar setup played out by overly familiar types but, curiously, what invests XX/XY with its tension is that there's no sense that Austin Chick, the film's capable young director and writer, knows what he feels about any of this.

Achieves a generic period look, but there's nothing lived-in about its rooms, nothing persuasive or necessary about its time and place -- there's no longer even a movie fan's nostalgia to give it some spark, or a reason for being.

Director Peyton Reed gets the film's look and, in moments, its disingenuous innocence, but you have to wonder what he and the screenwriters, Eve Ahlert and Dennis Drake, thought they were parodying. The actors clearly haven't a clue.

Ms. Meyers, whose ambitions are telegraphed by her film's title, which directly invokes George Cukor's lovely 1938 romp "Holiday," has created a cumbersome vehicle by saddling Iris with a flamboyantly glamorous Los Angeles double, Amanda. As played by Cameron Diaz with oodles of charm and not an ounce of persuasion, Amanda doesn’t as much mirror Iris's love troubles as throw them into wincing relief.

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.

Michael Mann’s thriller Blackhat, a story about the intersection of bodies and machines, is a spectacular work of unhinged moviemaking. By turns brutal and sentimental, lovely and lurid, as serious as the grave and blissfully preposterous, it combines a truckload of plot with many of the obsessions, tropes, sights and sounds that distinguish his other movies.

Even Del Toro can't raise the conceptually dead.

Despite his access to both No Wave luminaries and atmospherically battered footage of various bands wreaking havoc at various venues, Mr. Crary never figures out what story he wants to tell.

There's an ugly, jittery beauty to Pusher, a very fine British redo of a 1996 Danish movie of the same title.

Con Air is entertaining in an extravagantly decadent sort of way. It just isn't a movie.

Working with an uneven cast and an undercooked story, Mr. O’Malley hits the horror beats just fine (slam, creak, squeak) without putting a sinister spin on the assorted strange doings. For all the genre exertions, none of this feels the least bit spooky.

A diverting neo-noir, Deadfall brings to mind those dark, old-fashioned entertainments in rotation on Turner Classic Movies that suck you in with their genre machinery, sullen beauties and despair.

The actors are the movie’s great superpower and give it warmth, even a bit of heat, and a pulse of life that’s never fully quelled by the numerous clamorous action sequences.

Zombies, Arnold Schwarzenegger and a certain Terrence Malick je ne sais quoi — what could go wrong? More or less everything in this low-budget head-scratcher and periodic knee-slapper.

Lighter than a meringue and as insubstantial, the French boulevard comedy The Women on the 6th Floor was designed for the gentle laughter it easily earns.

Banks wants to fight a righteous fight. But she is selling stale goods in which adult women spout girl-power clichés and conform to norms that make it very clear what kind of heroines still get to fly high: young, thin, beautiful, perfectly coifed, impeccably manicured and profoundly unthreatening.

Wildly overproduced and filled with fussy flourishes that make even a derelict hallway look like a million bucks, Dark Water fails to rustle up either meaning or meaningful scares.

Too long by half, burdened with shabby F/X and offering up some seriously weird performances, this pricy foray into science fiction is a muddle of miscues and narrative bloat--along with a lot of frivolous fun.

[Mr. Sanders] likes a dark palette and is good with actors, but there’s little here that feels personal, and he mostly functions as a blockbuster traffic cop, managing all the busily moving, conspicuously pricey parts.

As witless as it is formulaic.

Pine and Foster sync up flawlessly, even when the dialogue fails them. This isn’t the reunion they deserve, but it’s nevertheless welcome. In silence and in action, they show you the unfathomable loss that the rest of movie never coherently expresses.

It’s an embarrassment of riches, and it’s suffocating.

Despite the slow start Mr. Condon closes the series in fine, smooth style. He gives fans all the lovely flowers, conditioned hair and lightly erotic, dreamy kisses they deserve.

A quick-sketch routine stretched - amusingly, absurdly, thinly - to feature length.

The director has created a slick, newer-than-new, faster-than-fast entertainment to end all entertainments.

It can be nice to spend time with these actors even when you don’t believe their characters for a single second, and there’s no denying this movie’s easy pleasures... Yet because Mr. Clooney can’t figure out what kind of story this is, he too often slips into pandering mode.

Endearingly ridiculous.

Washington is a likable actor and easy on the eyes, but the character is unproductively one-dimensional and so is the performance, which remains reactive and opaque. Here, at least, he can’t turn an underconceptualized character into one whom you either care about or want to watch gasping and grimacing for several hours.

Mr. Hillcoat wears his nihilism easily and persuasively (his films include “The Road”), so his weird bids at mordant comedy feel as forced as they are ill-considered.

It's a pleasure to watch Lane's delicately lived-in face tremble with feeling -- it's the truest thing in the movie -- but the character's desperation feels wrong, the worst kind of sellout.

Essentially and very effectively a rollicking smash-and-crash chase movie that happens to be surprisingly well acted.

Hit So Hard is the touching story of how and why Ms. Schemel ended up in her own private hell and how and why she made her way out again into the world of sunshine, sobriety and puppy dogs.

A nicely cast, respectable remake.

There’s not much new under the moon here, which makes what the writer and director Richard LaGravenese does with the story all the more notable.

Mr. De Niro owns the movie from the moment he opens his mouth, and is staring into the camera and right at you.

The director Lee Toland Krieger is good with actors, especially in the expression of a low-key, unforced intimacy.

Has many of the virtues of a faithful screen adaptation and many of the predictable flaws.

It is unexpectedly moving and occasionally delightful to spend time with these titans of cinema as they walk and sometimes wobble, delivering words that become meaningful because they’re lucky enough to be spoken by Mr. Redford and Mr. Nolte.

Though there's no doubt that Mr. Stone is as serious as a heart attack when it comes to creating an air of authenticity -- hence the sloppily butchered chickens and authorial defecation -- he never settles on a coherent tone for the movie.

Euro-kitsch of the highest order, which doesn't mean it's necessarily bad, just unnecessary.

Mr. Moodysson has never met a pleasure he didn’t want to punish.

A sly, amusing if underconceptulized and needlessly elliptical inquiry into truth, memory and appearances.

The absurdity of the story in the largely thrill-free thriller Contraband, its hairpin twists and outrageous coincidences, may keep even hungry action fans away. That's too bad because the story doesn't matter. (It rarely does.)

Here, at least, the performers — who include Téa Leoni as Odell’s wife, the very funny Will Poulter as the Leopold son and Anthony Carrigan as a put-upon servant — have the kinds of ductile faces, rubber-band moves and vocal dexterity that can keep even sluggish material moving.

Kitted out in period garb and dubious British accents, the actors throw themselves into this flimsy contrivance with energy, but are badly served by a director focused on flipping switches and twirling knobs. Despite a few early sparks of promise The Brothers Grimm sputters and coughs along like an unoiled machine, grinding gears and nerves in equal measure.

Equal parts appealing and appalling innocence, with a spark of anarchic menace, Mr. Galifianakis is good enough to make you almost forget the movie.

As erratically enjoyable as it is consistently ridiculous, the martial arts pastiche The Man With the Iron Fists is the latest evidence that the vogue for neo-exploitation cinema shows no sign of flagging.

If it drifts with increasing frequency it’s because, well, this finally is just a digitally souped-up, one-dimensional take on Jack and the Beanstalk.

Dreary, claustrophobic drama.

Kidman, who speaks Russian for much of the movie, turns in a technically impeccable performance, but the movie gets far more out of her than she out of it.

Whatever the reason, his riff on Le Divorce follows the original only in broad strokes, hewing to a similar plot with many of the same characters but without the wit, the barbs and the politics.

The humanity of the leads fills up the hollowness, putting flesh, or at least charm and attitude, on their archetypes.

There are intermittent pleasures, including Ms. Campbell, who seems ready to transition to a new career phase playing hard-hitting maternal types with Mona Lisa smiles. Mostly, though, Skyscraper is about the movie’s other, far more towering figure: Mr. Johnson, a performer whose colossal physicality is strikingly complemented by a delicate expressivity too rarely seen in contemporary blockbusters.

That Mr. Posin and Mr. McDuffie have stacked the deck against Nikki would be more irritating if Ms. Bening didn’t immediately make this woman come so satisfyingly alive, breathing believable vitality and at times contradictory emotions into what might have otherwise registered as a blur or cliché.

Noé;, with his Nietzsche-for-knuckleheads nihilism and extreme-cinema ambitions, clearly fancies himself a visionary, but mounting a camera on a roller coaster or putting a story into rewind doesn't make a film formally adventurous or interesting. Conceiving of a gay club as an antechamber to the inferno and sexualizing a woman's rape, however, do make it titillating.

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

At once illogical and insultingly stupid, filled with dead-end twists and the sort of dialogue that makes a mockery of actual adult relations.

The only marginally interesting, if unsurprising, thing about the pricey movie spinoff of the junky children's television show Land of the Lost is that a lot of money has been spent on yet another cultural throwaway.

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.

It’s all blithely formulaic and would be more irritating if the performers — who include Zoë Kravitz and Illana Glazer — weren’t generally so appealing.

Amusing and sleepy pretty much describe this movie.

Only once, in a quick sketch of "Planet of the Apes" -- does the humor seem to spring from pure movie love. In nearly every other respect, the film is so lazy, solipsistic and overpleased with itself it's hard not to believe that this time the Evil Empire has won not just the battle, but the war.

A wonderfully eccentric piece of filmmaking -- to demand it cohere to formula would be to miss the point.

The plot doesn't rate as high as the quality of the bodies in fast, furious motion. What counts in The Transporter isn't the wafer-thin story about smugglers -- it's the way Martin kicks open a door, fends off a couple of axes and uses a perfectly ordinary sport shirt as a weapon.

Mr. Butterfield is one of those young performers whose seriousness feels as if it sprang from deep within. And while he’s an appealing presence, little Ender can’t help feeling like a pint-size psycho.

The point is cleverness and looking cool, though, mostly the movie is about Ritchie’s own conspicuous pleasure directing famous actors having a lark, trading insults, making mischief. There’s not much else, which depending on your mood and the laxity of your ethical qualms, might be enough.

Donner's most calamitous mistake, however, was forgetting to light the screenplay on fire and catapult it from the nearest trebuchet.

An effectively creepy thriller about a 911 operator and a young miss in peril, The Call is a model of low-budget filmmaking.

Witless, soulless, often amateurish and filled with product placements (nice going, Coors), the movie has nothing going for it other than some wasted talent.

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.

Far more troubling than the documentary's lack of data and analysis, its refusal to pose even basic questions -- whether, for instance, the so-called war on drugs is a total farce -- is the sense that these seven lost souls are principally on display for our viewing displeasure.

Mr. Hunnam isn’t yet a movie star, and given current industry trends (big-studio cartoons, superhero flicks, etc.) might never get that chance. His talent is for quiet, unshowy moments, not leading-man grand gestures and important speeches.

Here, after the gunfire dies down, terror at times gives way to a melancholy that can be quite affecting even if the message remains familiar: We have met the zombie, and it is us.

There’s a lot in this story about victimization and agency that Mr. Epstein and Mr. Friedman never satisfactorily address. It’s perhaps inevitable that they seem happier when nothing yet feels at stake, including during the production of “Deep Throat.”

Taken starts in low gear and almost immediately stalls out.

A slag heap of outrageous coincidence and shimmering be-all-that-you-can-be posturing, the film is for all intents and purposes another Top Gun retread, which is why its lies don't register as deeply or offensively as those put forth by films like "Mississippi Burning" -- it's too silly to take seriously.

The Saint works. The reason why it occasionally soars is Kilmer, an actor who’s happiest when burying himself in eccentric characterizations, a trick he performs repeatedly here even as he fills the screen with pure movie-star dazzle.

The story, which starts promisingly only to stop, restart, sputter and come to a wheezing, disappointing puff of nada, proves the least satisfying part of the whole. The finale certainly isn't earned, but all the nasty, tiny jolts throughout the movie do prick the skin nicely.

Sometimes the best reason to watch a movie is because Isabelle Huppert is in it. That’s pretty much true of La Syndicaliste, a tangled if certainly watchable French true-crime drama about dirty political doings in the nation’s nuclear energy industry.

An amiable sequel with not much on its mind other than funny and creaky jokes, and waves of understated beauty.

Feig is an adroit director of comedy and he gives Last Christmas some fizz now and again. But he’s stymied by the romance and the gimmick, and the pairing of Clarke and Golding proves an impossible hurdle, making even the seemingly simplest moments — an intimate walk, a heartfelt talk — feel badly labored.

You don’t have to be a historian to wonder about the timing of the opening or a critic to regret that Mr. Crowe has signed onto a preposterous, would-be sweeping historical romance that’s far too slight and silly to carry the weight of real history.

It’s frustrating what weak tea this movie is because the director, Nia DaCosta (“Little Woods,” “Candyman”), has talent, the cast is appealing, and there’s a lightly gonzo scene that shows you what the other 100 minutes could have been. It’s almost as if the suits at Marvel Studios know it doesn’t matter if their movies are any good.

The director, John Crowley, handles Steve Knight’s snaky script capably, introducing the characters, their backgrounds and the political stakes in bold strokes.

A.C.O.D., an unfunny comedy about a guy mooning over his parents’ divorce decades later, is so eager to please it’s hard to hate. But it’s sluggish even at 87 minutes, clichéd and gives you nothing of interest to look at other than some familiar faces.

As it turns out, Mr. Perry, while busily establishing his economic independence, has been finding his voice as a filmmaker. And here, working with fine performers like Ms. Elise, Anika Noni Rose, Phylicia Rashad and Kerry Washington, he sings the song the way he likes it - with force, feeling and tremendous sincerity.

It’s a bummer to see Ms. Page and especially Ms. Moore — who at this point in her career can usually act her way out of any cliché — so badly stranded by a generic script, credited to Ron Nyswaner, and by a director, Peter Sollett, who can’t figure out how to lift his actors and the material above the bad writing.

What Jackson's Shaft can't do is talk the talk, or much of anything else, in director John Singleton's feature-length insult to one of the more cherished modern screen icons.

Overly familiar industrial product, a big-budgeted entertainment defined by its putatively big concept (apes rule), an underwritten script and a few flashes of Burton's visual genius and gently askew worldview.

A tale about appearances in which not everything is as it seems, Easier With Practice tries to use phone sex as a way to explore contemporary alienation.

Mr. McDonagh’s palette and spleen remain mostly intact, but here he’s neglected to include a story or point.

Mr. Washington is especially strong when he trusts his director, as he did with Tony Scott and does with Mr. Fuqua. Like all great actors, Mr. Washington commits to the performance, but every so often he also breathes fire, imbuing a scene with such shocking ferocity and bone-deep moral certitude that everything else falls blissfully away.

A sly conceptual coup d’art and a deeply sincere exploration of masculinity and its discontents, with a little hot sex thrown in.

Zegler has enough charm and lung power to hold the center of this busy, overproduced movie with its mix of memorable old and unmemorable new songs.

Quirky goes a surprisingly long way before stalling out in Don McKay, an oddball comedy with the knowing, festering heart of a neo-noir.

Nominally a story about sex, lies and faithfulness, Last Night is more truly a cautionary tale about mousetrap narratives.

A confusion of tones, intentions and allusions, Two for the Money lurches from upbeat to downbeat without ever settling into a coherent groove.

It has little bite and not nearly enough laughs or thought.

Fur is a folly, though not a dishonorable one.

Like real indie films, garage bands are by definition rough around the edges, but what separates the true believers from the poseurs is their passion, their commitment -- and not just how cool they look on screen or on stage. A mainstream endeavor tricked out as an indie, Garage Days gives us plenty to look at but no reason to care.

What Mr. Franco does have is Mr. Haze, whose mesmerizing performance gives the movie its ballast and its fitful, nervous energy.

The shaky comedy My Super Ex-Girlfriend must have been a dream to pitch: "Fatal Attraction" meets "Wonder Woman," but funny.

What keeps the film's fragile realism intact are actors who can make even small moments count.

Shot in handsome, often vividly contrasting black and white, "____ Year" weighs in as an attempt at poetic expressionism, a bid to create a visual representation of Colleen's diffuse and fragmented mind. Mr. Archer's narrative ambitions are laudable, and some of his images (the cinematographer is Aaron Platt) are striking, though a lot of scenes also look like glossy fashion magazine layouts come to relative life. These poses and pretty rooms may accurately reflect Colleen's visual aesthetic, the world she inhabits or wants to, but whether hers or Mr. Archer's, it's not compelling.

Forced to compete for kingly favors, the women were soon rivals, a contest that, in its few meagerly entertaining moments, recalls the sisterly love in “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?”

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.

For the most part this is perfectly painless mush. The movie is irrepressibly silly -- what were you expecting? -- but a few hours of Mr. Gyllenhaal jumping around in leather and fluttering his long lashes has its dumb-fun appeal.

Favreau wavers uncertainly between goofy pastiche and seriousness in a movie that wastes its title and misses the opportunity to play with, you know, ideas about the western and science-fiction horror.

Kill or be killed isn’t the official tag line of The Purge: Anarchy, but it fits. It would also make a more suitable title for this satisfyingly creepy, blunt, down-and-dirty thriller, one of those follow-ups that improves on the original.

If Dominik isn’t interested in or capable of understanding that Monroe was indeed more than a victim of the predations of men, it’s because, in this movie, he himself slipped into that wretched role.

The comedy in Alfie is plentiful but bittersweet, and the character's bad behavior pleases more than it repels, principally because the star Jude Law's beauty and easy charm go a long way to softening the edges.

Woody Allen’s latest excursion to the dark side of human nature, is good enough that you may wonder why he doesn’t just stop making comedies once and for all.

You get lost in its thickets because Estes hasn’t wholly figured out how to make toying with time work. But he has a fine cast and a good sense of place, including a feel for the spookiness of emptied-out spaces, and he makes his conspicuously low budget work for the near-claustrophobic intimacy.

Despite her shaky handle on the movie’s ideas and the appealing if uneven performances, Waddington holds your attention with visual beauty and humor.

The sweetheart leads, Josh Zuckerman and Amanda Crew, are easy to spend time with, and Seth Green as an Amish hipster and Clark Duke as an unlikely lady-killer hit every sweet-and-sardonic note with panache.

In his genre pastiche The Good German, Steven Soderbergh has tried to resurrect the magic of classical Hollywood, principally by sucking out all the air, energy and pleasure from his own filmmaking.

Its mood is so muffled and point so submerged, it's difficult to see why Mr. Reeves and the rest of the cast pooled their talents to make a movie about a nowhere man going no place in particular in Buffalo.

Despite the frenetic action scenes, the movie sags, done in by multiple story lines that undercut one another and by the heaviness of its conceit.

The Reckoning isn't great by any means and there are moments during the final stretch when it isn't even good. But for its first hour or so, the story moves at a steady clip, generating enough mystery to keep you guessing and enough atmosphere to keep you interested.

The mood is hermetic to the point of claustrophobia, embellished with a sense of everyday surrealism indebted to David Lynch.

Mr. West sets the scene reasonably well, ratcheting up a sense of unease with old-fashioned shadows and some nighttime scrambling, but he gets lost once he shifts from fooling around in the dark to recreating mass death.

McKay has made “Don’t Look Up,” a very angry, deeply anguished comedy freak out about how we are blowing it, hurtling toward oblivion. He’s sweetened the bummer setup with plenty of yuks — good, bad, indifferent — but if you weep, it may not be from laughing.

A sequel with far less color and cinematic imagination, and many more bells and whistles, including a freakishly special-effected Mr. Bridges going mano a mano in cyberspace with the grizzled real deal. Twice as much Jeff Bridges does not necessarily mean twice as much entertainment - bummer.

A flashy, nasty, on-and-off funny and assaultive sendup of the film industry.

Burns, who made a career out of his mildly charming Irish-American rogue persona, has, with his latest and fourth feature, finally sloughed off the remaining traces of that charm, along with, apparently, the vestiges of a personality.

Hughes visual choices can feel borrowed and clichéd, but his regard for beauty often compensates for his blunders, as does the sturdy, reliable appeal of another story of good and evil, men and women, light and dark, glass and steel, sex and power. As it turns out, there are eight million and one stories in the naked city.

Held together by the blues -- Brown's prose and Howard's performance, Big Bad Love is a mess, but it's a sincere mess, beautifully shot by Paul Ryan and faithfully adapted by screenwriter James Howard.

Less scary than creepy, The Grudge may have lost some oomph in the translation from Japanese to English, and the desire for a PG-13 rating probably muted the violence and perhaps the scares.

Hancock makes for one unexpectedly satisfying and kinky addition to Hollywood's superhero chronicles. Touching and odd, laden with genuine twists and grounded by three appealing lead performances.

Pugilists and philosophers of all kinds converge in Frederick Wiseman's mesmerizing documentary Boxing Gym.

It’s watchable — it stars Brad Pitt — jokey, sometimes funny and predictably stupid.

The result is that what was once insignificant is now insufferable.

Throughout, Russell keeps going and moving, moving and going, but the momentum never builds the way it should, and the big reveal lands flat partly because he never seems taken with the history he’s latched onto or comfortable with its heaviness. Or perhaps it’s the contemporary parallels that make him uneasy and why, again and again, he returns to the faces and filigree that he gets just right.

A premise so patently absurd, so implausible, they might as well have pitched it to the Oxygen channel.

Just as there is something undeniably pleasant about an entertainment like Tristan & Isolde that delivers exactly what it promises, no less, no more.

There’s one man alone, stranded on a seemingly desolate distant planet with only his wits, his fists and his voice-over. That voice-over is mercifully spare, the landscape atmospherically barren and the action nice and tight.

Sails along on a slipstream of pleasant scenery, amusing incident and the boundless charms of its appealing leading men, Jackie Chan and Steve Coogan: It's an unexpectedly buoyant spectacular.

Mr. De Palma can be a director of dazzling creative lunacy, but there's little craziness in this restrained, awkward film. With the diverting exception of Hilary Swank, who plays a slinky degenerate named Madeleine Linscott, the leads are disastrous.

There are good movies and plenty more bad ones and many, many more that fall somewhere in between. And then there are enjoyable absurdities like Welcome to the Punch, which contain evaluative multitudes and which, scene by scene, register as not bad, pretty good and flat-out ridiculous.

The story and the actors make How to Make a Killing easy to drift along with, even if it never coheres tonally, logically or, really, any which way.

Enervating trifle.

The director, Ryuhei Kitamura, whose earlier films include the cult film "Versus," brings nothing new to the samurai-swordsman game other than some styling shorts for the whelps and a miniskirt for Azumi.

For all their foul jokes and embarrassments, the brothers have a talent for creating characters whose goodness, and lack of ironic self-consciousness, shield them against life's insults.

Mr. Miller’s stolid approach — with its waxwork figures, postcard beauty, insistent tastefulness and glaze of politesse — feels far too comfortably of this world to mount a critique of it.

If you tune out the dialogue, which is packed with raunch that has neither rhyme nor story reason, there are passable moments. The interludes of Nick shifting gears as he tries to beat the clock on another pizza run are nicely managed and say something about a character whose talent behind the wheel is a kind of grace note.

The best that the good doctor (Murphy) can do, encumbered as he is by Larry Levin's screenplay and its low joke quotient, is discipline the dog, lay into the lizard and shtick it to the bear.

There's some limited entertainment to be found in a movie as insistently conflicted as The Mechanic, but the accretion of sadism, humorlessness and antediluvian sexual politics is finally more exhausting than enlivening.

Mr. Kwanten, meanwhile, best known for playing the sweet, dim Jason Stackhouse on the HBO show "True Blood," gives Griff the delicate, ethereal affect of a man who's an alien in his own world except when he's running down an alley in a disguise. He's a pleasure to watch.