Marjorie Baumgarten

As emotionally devastating as it is, The Hunt is nevertheless rather schematic and pat.

Even though I’m So Excited! doesn’t soar, the film is a fun flight. Maybe it needs a central character in whom the audience can invest themselves instead of flitting among a rogues’ gallery of kooky archetypes.

V/H/S/2 is for gore hounds exclusively.

R.I.P.D. never creates a believable universe, interesting action sequences, or dynamic characters. It’s a paint-by-numbers approach in which the film’s comedy and drama both fall flat.

By the time Turbo reaches the finish line, this new iteration of the fable about pursuing one’s dreams no matter how unlikely they seem joins the winner’s circle without quite nabbing the trophy.

Long after Only God Forgives concludes, only its scuzziness remains. This artistic misfire will forever be knocking on heaven’s door.

Fill the Void is almost more like an ethnographic film than a fictional narrative in regard to our rare observational perspective. Yet Shira also shares attitudes in common with Jane Austen heroines, whose worlds are dominated by their marital prospects and domestic matters.

The Land of Lazy can crown a new king because with Grown Ups 2 Adam Sandler has officially nabbed the throne.

There’s no denying Pacific Rim is the best film of its kind. It remains to be seen whether the film’s epic clawing and clanking satisfies a pent-up demand equal to its ambitions.

The gifted veterans, Redgrave and Stamp, manage to imbue their characters with personalities and physical bearings that transcend the stereotypical. But there’s little else that separates a film like this from the sing-your-heart-out self-actualizations of a teen show like "Glee."

It’s impossible to know how much of Tonto’s story is tall tale or historical fact. The tactic undercuts the film’s attempt at revisionism or at best equalizes men of all races as untrustworthy tellers of of their own history. The Lone Ranger stokes the legend but its smoke signals only add to the haze.

Although the film is never fully convincing about this rock band’s overlooked potential – despite testimonials from the likes of Alice Cooper, Henry Rollins, Jello Biafra, and Elijah Wood – the story of Death sure adds an interesting and virtually unknown footnote to the annals of punk rock.

This is a film you skip seeing at your own risk.

White House Down is amply endowed with enough tension, humor, and calamitous action to ensure it a solid berth in the summer box-office sweepstakes. Channing Tatum comes into his own as a leading man in this picture, proving himself as a beefy yet agile action star and not just the pure beefcake of "Magic Mike."

The problem with The Bling Ring is that it feels as soulless as its young protagonists, and of course there’s little sympathy to be found either for the story’s über-rich victims like Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan.

World War Z comes across as a smart and ambitious horror movie, a bio-disaster film along the lines of "Contagion" or "28 Days Later." It’s nail-bitingly tense at times, although these well-executed moments mix with others that are too much of a murky jumble to follow with any precision.

The film looks good (nod to cinematographer Roman Vasyanov). The images are sharp even when the film’s ideas are not.

Maybe it has something to do with Jewish writers riffing on the apocalypse, but This Is the End doesn’t really know how to end.

After establishing this interesting premise, writer/director James DeMonaco only scratches the surface of its implications before devolving into a creepy roundelay of murders and deaths averted.

As with her other films, when Sarah Polley takes it upon herself to tell us a story, you can bet it’s a tale well-told and one that you’ll want to hear.

Director Leterrier keeps the camera moving and swooping throughout the film as if the Steadicam were another device in the magicians’ tool belt. A clear sense of space and sleight-of-hand is rarely achieved.

As romantic comedies go, Danish helmer Susanne Bier’s follow-up to her Oscar-winning "In a Better World," percolates more than it froths – but that’s a good thing.

Before Midnight surpasses the two previous films in this trilogy in terms of its intelligence, narrative design, and vivacity. It’s a grand accomplishment, and I feel greedy about wanting to see this film series continue.

The performances of these two leads are compelling and the Cheonggyecheon area can almost be seen as another character in Kim’s morality tale. And even if forgiveness is not always possible in the human condition, Pieta allows that expiation of one’s sins is within the realm of the possible.

Renoir is great at capturing some of the details of daily life within this unique household and conveying an Impressionist atmosphere on film, but as far as telling us a story, the film is a washout.

In films by the likes of Michael Bay, Paul Verhoeven, and Guillermo del Toro, machines are shown to be the nightmarish enemies of human beings, so it’s refreshing to find the machines in Trash Dance working in harmony with their human operators.

This chase film combines elements of the thriller and newspaper procedural to create a contemporary saga about political idealism, stone-cold realities, and the repercussions of past deeds on future innocents.

Meticulous and abstruse, Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color is an idiosyncratic film that invites explication but defies total understanding.

What begins as a cute idea grows annoyingly sentimental before it is through.

Although To the Wonder never transported me, personally, to the ecstatic heights the title promises, there is still much here worth one’s engagement.

Exuberant but fairly formulaic.

In The Girl, writer/director David Riker returns to many of the same themes he pursued in his award-winning 1998 film "La Ciudad," which told the stories of four Hispanic immigrants living in New York City. Immigration is still very much on Riker’s mind, although he approaches it from a very different perspective this time.

Evil Dead, however, accomplishes what it sets out to do: Scare viewers silly and uphold a tradition.

Apart from its dramatic predictability, Temptation is a snooze because of its languid pacing and rudimentary camerawork.

It all looks crummy, to say the least, but this is clearly the director’s intent. I’m not fully convinced that the technique delivers the kind of veracity the filmmakers were trying to achieve, although it is a creative solution to an intractable visual problem.

The film’s historical pageantry is fascinating to observe, even though the story is mostly conjecture. Competently directed, the real pleasure in this high-grossing South Korean film lies in its performances, which lighten the regal solemnity with comic warmth.

Come Out and Play is a good example of how to eke out film thrills with a minimum of elements. Makinov should prove to be a filmmaker to watch.

A good concept yields scattershot results in this horror-film anthology.

Spring Breakers is Korine’s most cogent take yet on society’s outsiders.

Melissa Leo has some standout scenes as the secretary of defense, who gets pretty well beaten up for defying her captors, but others, such as Angela Bassett and Morgan Freeman, have little to do but bite their lips and look tense from the confines of their command posts.

Never finding its right tone, Admission uncomfortably founders between the story’s comic and dramatic aspects and leaves behind a lumpy residue that tars its likable leads.

More honest than you might expect a promotional piece such as this to be, but less self-investigative than you might like, you come away thinking there are much greater depths for Snoop Lion to plumb.

The Incredible Burt Wonderstone draws a lot of goodwill from the basic likability of its star performers.

Although there are moments that push the story a bit beyond credulity, Shortland has created something remarkable by forcing us to find within ourselves sympathy for this would-be Aryan princess.

Few are willing to publicly confess their hunger or undernourishment or place it on display. And the problem is kept hidden as long as charitable food banks and soup kitchens continue to disguise the depth of the hunger. A Place at the Table confronts the issue head-on and offers some solutions.

Oz the Great and Powerful vacillates between visual wonders and earthbound duds. Is there enough here to make viewers believe? Most probably. Even though the film has no ruby slippers, we all know there’s no place like home.

The film, however, is short on genuine scares and ingenuity.

It’s not that Happy People is uninteresting – its presentation of previously unknown, distant lives is full of lots of interesting tidbits. It’s just that the one sensibility of which we were previously aware – that of Herzog’s – is indiscernible, as if frozen beneath all this movie’s ice.

More chilling than terrifying, this movie’s predatory aliens are creatures that mostly mess with people’s heads prior to abducting them.

Although Bless Me, Ultima can feel a bit overstuffed, it’s an honest and naturalistic kids’ story about growing up Mexican-American.

Beautiful Creatures is a fascinating amalgam that demonstrates that a movie can be smart and dumb at the same time.

You never really see any of it coming, which is what makes the film such a marvel – and so difficult to discuss.

Love means being helpmates throughout all of life's stages. Death is part of love's bargain, and Haneke lays this fact bare.

The filmmaker has created a haunting movie, one that connects on a visceral level that defies easy explication. The unembellished performances by Cotillard and Schoenaerts exude a raw authenticity that anchor the film's grander melodrama and embed the characters in the viewer's memory.

Stick around through the credits for an extra closing scene that leaves the door of Heather's new home wide open for a sequel.

The film has lots of small moments that make it a worthy effort.

Now that his passion project is out of the way, I look forward to seeing what Chase does next. He's sure to have his editor's pen back in hand by then.

Despite these quibbles, Django Unchained offers an embarrassment of riches (and actors in tiny cameos).

When Murray's around, he's the only hot dog in the room.

To sum it up, there is little that is unexpected in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. Rather than an epic continuation of Jackson's Middle-earth obsession, the film seems more like the work of a man driving around a multilevel parking garage without being able to find the exit.

This film is more a love story about the marriage between Hitchcock (Anthony Hopkins) and his wife, Alma Reville (Helen Mirren), rather than a historically accurate backstage look at the making of this important movie in the Hitchcock filmography and the American psyche.

An exercise in pure sadism, The Collection moves at a clip that leaps over plot holes in its race to elicit fright.

Holy Motors is as individualistic a movie as you're likely to encounter – both in terms of the filmmaker's intent and the viewer's takeaway. Warmth and humor abide within its every frame but, like Carax's dreamer at the film's outset, you must find the key within yourself that unlocks the mysteries.

As with his previous film "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford," Dominik's ideas get the better of his creative handiwork as he throws off his pacing to follow points he has already made.

Life of Pi, ironically, soars when it confines itself to land and sea; when it grasps for the celestial, the film goes beyond its reach.

Although the original Red Dawn was far-fetched, the remake offers little but vicarious thrills.

Mixing faded rock glory with Nazi-hunting and American road-tripping creates an odd hybrid that is completely transfixing, although some viewers are likely to find this film an awkward mishmash. The drama, however, is consistently offset by comic underpinnings, which are well-played by the actors and seamlessly presented by Sorrentino.

A Late Quartet overplays its bass line and loses sight of the melody, making for a movie that is heavy-handed and sluggish. It remains earthbound when it should soar.