Melissa Anderson

Sentimental and pandering.

Straining for "teachable moments," the film has one noteworthy, unintentional function: to remind us that though LGBT rights are continually evolving, the laws of kitsch remain immutable.

Unremarkable, thinly sketched characters, many adorned with creative careers or hobbies, populate the romantic dramedy Save the Date, yet another unfocused movie about generic relationship quandaries.

Yet it's not entirely forgettable. I'll long be haunted by Dennis Quaid's manic performance as a palm-greasing dad who seems to be under the influence of bath salts-tweaked-out acting that matches the camera movements.

Screeches and scrambles from scene to scene with manic sitcom energy, much like the cherished pet hamster of one of its characters.

Fifty years after her death, the actress's corpse is still being picked over with ever-diminishing returns, as evidenced in Liz Garbus's garish, misguided documentary.

Audiard himself might have benefited from a simple reminder of left from right; his rudderless film confuses a pileup of preposterous, sentimental scenarios with genuine emotion.

It's about as exciting as watching David Blaine play Stratego and makes you miss the power of the first four films all the more: the uncontainable yearning of the Bella-Edward-Jacob triangle.

Director Sean Baker, co-writing his fourth feature with Chris Bergoch, does some deft balancing of his own: His genuine admiration for these two women extends to their idiosyncrasies, yet they never become fools, whores, saints, or coots.

Reteaming with Silverstone, the alpha matchmaker of "Clueless," for Vamps, Heckerling uses the actress as the mouthpiece for her complaints about how dumb everyone is today. The writer-director's nostalgia feeds the laziest type of cultural critique: never piercing, just grumpy.

Charlie Is My Darling captures the quintet at their most impossibly vernal and beautiful.

A film that puts too much faith in the appeal of its garrulous, aimless leads.

Hawkes and Hunt nobly tackle the physical demands their roles require.

Bestiaire is, most profoundly, about the dynamics of looking, an exercise in studying gazes that are either unidirectional or, superficially, at least, reciprocated.

Unclassifiable, expansive, and breathtaking.

Making a kid "the old-fashioned way" becomes the plot engine for the second time this year - after Jennifer Westfeldt's "Friends With Kids" - in Gayby, a comedy that, much like the perfunctory p-in-the-v it depicts, gives about 30 seconds of pleasure before going limp.

What's riveting and attention grabbing in Jarecki's recapitulations of failed policy are some of the talking heads he has assembled, including "The Wire" creator David Simon and historian Richard Lawrence Miller.

In Davis's case, marveling at yet another fine performance doesn't stop you from wishing that her first leading role was in a worthier vehicle

Now 79, the man with the snow-white ponytail in the radio booth hasn't flagged; as one of Fass's contemporaries says, "He can let someone go on and on and on."

The outsize ideas, creativity, and spirit of this birdlike, unconventional-looking woman - called "my ugly little monster" by her mother, Vreeland resembles John Hurt in a jet-black wig - still dominate a project occasionally lacking the same attributes.

Millions of lives have been saved - and extended - as the result of a tireless cadre of advocates who, as Eigo states, "put their bodies on the line."

"Beautiful clothes on good-looking people just moving across the stage" to the sounds of Barry White and Al Green. "It was the presence of these African-American models that really animated the stage," notes Harold Koda of the Met's Costume Institute-- a sentiment that fashion historian Barbara Summers expresses more memorably: The crowd was "peeing in their seats because these girls were so fabulous."

Reveals itself to be a project of few interesting ideas.

10 Years is an uncommonly magnanimous project, kind not only to its stumbling characters but also to audiences tired of films pruned of unruly emotions.

Hoariest of all are the exhortations to make distinctions between "fiction" and "life."

Watching this taciturn man grow close to mother and child - close enough that he experiences twinges of jealousy and abandonment toward the end of Las Acacias - is one of the most satisfying spectacles in a movie this year, a time-lapse of emotions rendered perfectly.

A funky, nonfiction tribute to the great avant-garde saxophonist Ornette Coleman, Ornette upends the staid portrait-of-the-artist formula, and it tinkers with and discards the conventions of the bio documentary just as its pioneering musician subject exploded those of jazz.

Of sole interest is Benoît Magimel's Vincent, who sheepishly confesses a same-sex attraction to one in the cabal; his moments on-screen provide the only break from this slog.

The forebear's underwritten melodrama has been supplanted by Tyler Perry–like soap operatics and much jawing about the Lord, riots in the Motor City, marriage proposals, and maternal heartbreak and disapproval.

A sprawling mess of multiple romantic triangles in which all the angles are obtuse.

The zippy screwball energy - and fantastic roster of cameos - that mitigated the fratty humor of Broken Lizard's last movie, the restaurant send-up "The Slammin' Salmon," is missing here, resulting in generic, feeble laffs and an ending as sticky as the pilfered substance.

An unadorned, unsentimental portrait of a marriage, Yi Seung-jun's documentary Planet of Snail celebrates the daily life of an exceptionally collaborative couple.

The pleasure of Jacquot's film is in watching various strains of discreet, heated, and deluded passionate attachment performed.

A riot of technical tricks, Daisies shifts between color, black-and-white, and tinted images and includes a scene in which the two Maries, wielding scissors, essentially turn themselves into paper dolls.

Crucially, the variety of interviewees in Hubbard's doc - men and women of different races and classes - underscores just how diverse ACT UP was in its heyday.

There are enough unexpected delights, such as repurposing "Video Killed the Radio Star" during a critical moment between Margot and Daniel, to keep us interested in their drawn-out, teasing, tantalizing courtship.

In trying through incessant narration to make a six-year-old a prolix sage, Zeitlin can't avoid falling into sticky sentimentality.

It's dispiriting enough to witness Kunis still waiting for a comic lead role worthy of her. But the usually nimble Wahlberg - who at least has one great moment rattling off "white-trash girls' names" - suffers the most, playing second fiddle to a knee-high Gund knockoff.

The animation studio's first film with a female protagonist, a defiant lass who acts as a much-welcome corrective to retrograde Disney heroines of the past and the company's unstoppable pink-princess merchandising.

Americano, which Demy also wrote and stars in, is an ambivalent, occasionally touching work of homage to his parents, yet one whose clumsiness only underscores the superiority of their directly quoted films.

El Velador still sharply conveys what life is like in a traumatized nation.

As Alex Ross Perry's "The Color Wheel" - another micro-budgeted sibling story - shows, a film about relentlessly repellent characters is much more fascinating, if not courageous, than one that tries to explain, redeem, or forgive them so easily.

The definitive postcolonial cult-movie musical.

An incompetently structured film that pits hippies against squares with the usual wearying results.

Matching the precision of the film's title, remembrances of things past-whether destructive or salutary, quickly mentioned or dilated upon-are shaped by just enough exacting detail.

When isn't it a good time to show a movie tracing the development of a kind, charismatic yellow Labrador retriever from frolicsome puppy to devoted seeing-eye companion to weary senior?

Proceeds as a tedious, clumsy diddle, constantly reminding viewers how much progress has been made since the Victorian era.

Unconvincing, flawed matriarch Mendes and junior showboat Ramirez appear to be acting in entirely different movies.

The playfulness of Rivette's sublime female-buddy picture, recalling the fun of "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes," would inform Susan Seidelman's "Desperately Seeking Susan" 11 years later. But its greatest descendant is David Lynch's "Mulholland Drive," another film about two women erotically attached, a house with a secret, and transformation.

There is exactly one unexpected moment in the otherwise drearily predictable The Five-Year Engagement that, though little more than a throwaway line, at least adds a bit of political reality to puncture Nicholas Stoller's limp, hermetic comedy of deferred nuptials.

Thoroughly researched and packed with phenomenal archival footage, it's a rousing tribute to a mesmerizing performer that forgoes blind hero worship.

The handsome pooch is also the only appealing aspect of the latest tale of privileged boomer pulse-taking from Lawrence Kasdan.

Enduring a day-long session of couples' therapy is more fun (and flies by faster) than this film.

L!fe Happens is a blonde-brunette buddy comedy with a charmless cast (Rachel Bilson plays the third roomie, a Christian virgin) and banter as flat as Deena's favorite no-strings imperative, "Bone and bolt."

Impersonally directed by cinéma du look pioneer Luc Besson, The Lady was written by first-timer Rebecca Frayn, whose script has all the elegance and nuance of Google Translate.

Often drolly, coolly morbid, Post Mortem also operates just as effectively in a more nakedly direct register.

The Hunter is too many films in one.

Until the potent concluding scene, the humor and shallow profundities of We Have a Pope pivot on the cuteness of geriatrics, especially when they're spiking a volleyball in slo-mo.

Like its title, Turn Me On, Dammit! is a jokey pseudo-provocation.

The Island President also shows how the most high-minded idealists inevitably become deal-makers: The toothless agreement eventually ratified in Copenhagen - which calls for but doesn't require CO2 reductions - is lauded by Nasheed as "a very good, planet-saving document."

Like the pacing of the novel, the film, even at almost two and a half hours, moves briskly, continuously drawing us in.

The Wise Kids suffers from a theater workshop-y tendency to rest too long on pauses and silences to convey dramatic heft. But the blunder is ultimately overshadowed by Cone's excellent young actors, particularly Torem, burrowing deeply into her character's zealotry and anguish about being left behind.

Tautou, playing workaholic widow Nathalie in Delicacy, gives off a sexless, cutie-pie charm - not as aggressively as she did in "Amélie," but still gratingly. The actress, therefore, is perfect for this dainty, inconsequential romantic dramedy.

Though these mismatched cops bounce well off each other, Tatum, in his first comedic lead role, is the better performer, both more riotous and affecting.

More an intriguing premise than a successful film, the Malmö-set Sound of Noise, about a group of "musical terrorists," quickly loses its novelty and becomes about as bold as a Swedish production of "Stomp."

What's left to be said about Marcel Carné's towering intimate epic of early 19th-century love and the lives of performers, often heralded as the greatest French film of all time?

Just as Friends With Kids compares unfavorably to Westfeldt's earlier effort, her cast members' previous projects further highlight this film's shortcomings.

"There's a midget in the oven!" is about as inspired as the dialogue and set pieces get in this queasy-making entertainment.

The abundant charm of first-time actor James Rolleston, playing the 11-year-old of the title in Boy, doesn't quite save the aimless, nostalgia-woozy second feature from Taika Waititi (2007's Eagle vs. Shark).

An affectionate look at a self-destructing maniac and his supporters that bluntly reveals Liebling's total abjection without mocking him.

The sentiment, just like the repeated shots of Jacky lying in the fetal position in a tub, shadowboxing, and erupting into a bestial 'roid rage, typifies the film's habit of flattening an idea rather than developing it.

Too limp and scattershot to warrant anything stronger than indifference.

The film is endurable owing solely to Johnson, a veteran of bad kids' movies whose sense of when to dial up the charm in such a generic, soulless entertainment remains impeccable.

Every shot and edit in Wiseman's film also suggests without over-explaining, allowing a viewer to lose herself in pleasure.

If director James Watkins's second film is about as scary as the haunted house your big cousins made in the basement, Radcliffe, as widowed lawyer Arthur Kipps, at least gives a moving portrayal of grief.

Dori Berinstein's desultory, fawning profile of the nonagenarian performer devotes many of its padded 88 minutes to Channing's greatest success, playing the title yenta in "Hello, Dolly!"

While rooting for the marine mammals (and wishing for more footage of them - and even of their animatronic incarnations), your heart will also go out to the cast, stuck even more pitiably in syrupy manufactured crises.

Making even more appearances than the rodent is the Big Gulp; the lady bounty hunter is constantly consuming junk - though at least when Heigl is snacking, she isn't talking.

Produced by his youngest daughter, Gina, this profile of Harry Belafonte, foregrounding the 84-year-old actor and singer's political activism, is a moving if occasionally wearying hagiography.

Forget "Son of Brazil": This syrupy origin story/biopic on the nation's beloved reformist president, whose second term ended in 2010, should be titled Mama's Boy.

Dalle, with a mouth that could devour the world, unravels inexorably but with decadent dignity, and Chiha's singular film never relies on cliché in its examination of illness, disappointment, and abandonment.

Speaking of camp, the diva battle teased in the trailer for Joyful Noise between its two stars, Queen Latifah and Dolly Parton, flatlines, as do most of the movie's jokes.

Filmed during the months leading up to the 2009 presidential election in Iran, The Hunter still seethes with fury - and anticipates the blood that would spill after the vote.

The played-out scenarios in Olnek's first feature, such as Jane's sessions with her therapist, are soon outnumbered by inspired silliness, like tears shed over a revolving dessert tray in a diner.

The first 10 minutes of Dee Rees's funny, moving, nuanced, and impeccably acted first feature, in which coming of age and coming out are inseparable, sharply reveal the conflicts that 17-year-old Alike (Adepero Oduye) faces.

Pina gives us the supreme pleasure of watching fascinating bodies of widely varying ages in motion, whether leaping, falling, catching, diving, grieving, or exulting. Wenders's expert use of 3-D puts viewers up close to the spaces, both psychic and physical, inside and out, of Bausch's work.

Conveying, with a light touch, important lessons for kids on the necessity of civic engagement, the perils of edit-ad conflicts, and the need to honor difference, Miss Minoes is also an ailurophile's dream, featuring a fantastic array of tabbies, calicos, and Birmans that always hit their marks.

Close's prosthetic makeup renders her face too immobile, a marked contrast with her unfixed accent; both highlight the pitfalls of a star's idée fixe. It's a shame, because the material - based on a novella by George Moore published in the 1927 collection Celibate Lives - deserves better.

With a name that not even the PR team at Smokefree America could dream up, Victor DeNoble emerges as the hero of Charles Evans Jr.'s mostly muscular documentary on the 1990s campaign to expose Big Tobacco.

In a career that began nearly 60 years ago, Agnès Varda has shown an extraordinary gift for capturing the theatricality of the mundane, particularly in her documentaries.

A movie so excruciating that it makes its predecessor, "Valentine's Day," seem like "Nashville" in comparison.

Sharp and precise as its tableaux might be, though, Sleeping Beauty never burrows into the brain, and its tenuous provocations fizzle out quickly.

The Artist is movie love at its most anodyne; where Guy Maddin has used the conventions of silent film to express his loony psychosexual fantasias for more than a decade, Hazanavicius sweetly asks that we not be afraid of the past.

Terrified of alienating those who were raised on the originals, The Muppets panders to them instead, constantly blasting or restaging Top 40 hits from the past three-plus decades, continuing the cheap strategy that worked well on YouTube two years ago with the Muppets' cover of "Bohemian Rhapsody."

Hoping to distract us from the zero ideas found in his film, Levinson demands that his cast act loudly and unbearably, a task for which Demi Moore, as the second wife of Ellen's first husband, is perfectly suited.

"I think their marriage was a mystery to everyone," an Eames worker notes - an observation true of every couple that you'll wish the filmmakers had explored more deeply.

Tomboy astutely explores the freedom, however brief, of being untethered to the highly rule-bound world of gender codes.

Aided by an excellent ensemble cast, director Xavier Durringer and his co-scripter, Patrick Rotman, don't refrain from showing this truly repellent side of Sarko during his rise from minister of justice in 2002 to the highest elected office.