Mary Pols

This is a big, often quite scary action movie, with tons of creepy computer-generated imagery that's right up there with Voldemort in terms of physical nastiness, although less powerful emotionally.

Cotton is that rarity in the horror genre: a genuinely intriguing character.

I finished Larsson's novel with the uncomfortable sense it used a good mystery as an excuse to dwell on sadism and perversity -- an aspect only exacerbated on screen.

The dreariest thriller of the year.

My pregnancy lasted 41 weeks and five days, involved morning, afternoon and night sickness and culminated in 25 hours of labor capped off by an emergency C-section. Yet all that seems like a walk in the park compared with the 100 minutes I spent watching Jennifer Lopez mug her way through The Back-Up Plan.

Director Rodrigo Cortes intends us to feel trapped, twitchy and unhappy and at the same time, wildly grateful we're not actually in the box like Paul. I could do without that kind of guilt trip from a film.

The movie is ridiculously over the top, inelegant and so defiantly ?crazy?that it works, reminding you how fun gore and creatures that go bump ?(and? grind) in the night can be. It's a sci-fi horror film, but no actual ?comedy?has made me laugh as much this year as Splice.?

The film skips along pleasantly, supremely confident in its own cuteness and utterly unapologetic about how shallow or contrived it might be.

That Greenberg has merits is undeniable. Gerwig, a funny mix of Kate Winslet and the joyfully ditzy young Diane Keaton, should end up a star. Stiller dials back his own schtick and deserves to be taken seriously.

Yet he just kept going and going, and the slick, proficient Knight and Day is proof that you should never count Cruise out.

It's rare to see an ensemble movie like this, so loaded with talented actors, in which virtually all of them get an opportunity to make an impression. Affleck is the boss and the star, but he knows how to share.

What's lacking is the sense of emotional balance and urgency that the original Terminator, though just a B movie, was blessed with--the quality that earned it fans in the first place.

One of those shaggy-dog stories that you keep hoping will get sharper, smarter, cooler, more worthy of its star. Buscemi may not be exactly celestial, but he still deserves better.

Remarkably, thanks to this documentary, we hope for the sake of this smart, vibrant, apparently good-hearted woman, that the invitations keep coming.