Michael O'Sullivan

The fate of these birds, which, the film tells us, could live into their 40s, becomes as engrossing as many a human drama.

A glorified infomercial in defense of the holiday that contains about 15 minutes of actual content padded out with almost an hour of filler.

So maybe some of this is hilarious. Heck, maybe all of it is. It will not be everyone’s cup of tea, and it was not mine.

Rosewater doesn’t hector, nor does it giggle about the issue of press freedom. It’s an impressive and important piece of storytelling.

Listen Up Philip makes literary talent seem less like a blessing than a curse.

The tale, from Brazilian writer-director Daniel Ribeiro, is told with such tenderness, such intelligence and such aching honesty that it takes on the weight of something far more significant than puppy love. Like its subject, first kisses and best friends, it’s hard to forget.

It’s a movie that’s as fun to watch as it is funny. But the real appeal of Big Hero 6 isn’t its action. It’s the central character’s heart.

A gorgeous, magical and melancholy fantasia about the joy and pain of human existence.

Heedless of purpose, Horns charges full speed ahead anyway, ramming its high-concept hooey down your throat until the only heat you feel is from indigestion.

The film is not without its pleasures. Kidman and Firth lend the pulpy material a certain prestige, even if Strong comes across as simply another plot device (and a perplexing one at that).

A lovingly laid-back documentary about the charms, liquid and otherwise, of the traditional Irish watering hole.

1,000 Times Good Night has moments of both startling violence and breathtaking beauty.

Though Ouija starts off evoking a nicely eerie atmosphere of dread, it ultimately goes too far, making the liminal space between the spirit world and this one all too eye-rollingly literal.

As a storyteller, Amalric is a master of manipulation, first leading the audience in one direction and then another. The Blue Room is a hall of mirrors, reflecting every detail but making it hard to know where you stand.

Rudderless is a competent, well-acted melodrama, yet in scope and ambition it has the modest and serviceable scale of the small, not silver, screen.

The Book of Life may use state-of-the-art animation, but it derives its strength from the wisdom of antiquity. It only looks new, but it’s as old as life (and death) itself.

It’s engaging and watchable, even as it marches toward a seemingly suicidal climax. Yet the complex dynamic between Wardaddy and his men is far more fascinating.

Watching Addicted is like eating Cheese Whiz straight from the jar. There’s no nutritional value. It’s kind of embarrassing. But it does satisfy a base craving for cheap, immediate sensation.

Despite the story’s familiarity, its star manages to turn its many tropes into a winning formula.

"Him” and “Her” make for a remarkably powerful film experiment, retaining the insights into relationships of “Them” while filling in many of its invisible storytelling fissures.

In viewing the same tale retold from two mutually exclusive vantage points, we become aware of how “Him” and “Her” deepen and enrich certain aspects of the story, adding contrast and, at times, contradiction, to the whole.

The film isn’t awful. There are moments of handsome cinematography and occasional effects that both frighten and impress.

Despite the film’s heavy-handed effort at vindication, Renner manages to deliver a performance that is complex and satisfyingly contradictory.

20,000 Days on Earth isn’t so much a portrait of the artist as a middle-aged man, looking back on his life, as it is a meditation on the art of storytelling.

The film is amateurish on almost every level.

Despite its deficiencies, Annabelle is not without a modicum of verve. It has its unnerving moments, but they’re outweighed by the sheer stupidity and predictability of the story.

This adaptation of Agota Kristof’s 1986 novel is impossible to take literally, yet too obscure to read between the lines.

There are no surprises here, only blandly reassuring homilies.

The story of The Boxtrolls, in lesser hands, might have turned out only so-so. Under Laika’s loving, labor-intensive touch, it takes on a kind of magic.

The shadow of its past informs the latest incarnation of “Rigby,” a deeply moving, beautifully acted and ultimately mournful meditation on the gulfs that open between people, especially when tragedy falls like a cleaver.

Take Me to the River includes just enough history of the civil rights era to lend it gravitas. The color-blind recording practices of studios like Stax were an anomaly at the time and are well worth noting. But it’s the music people will want to hearken to.

Tusk seems to harbor no grander ambitions than to create a gross-out gag.

As incomplete as the narrative is, The Maze Runner delivers on almost every other level.

Wetlands has only a sketchy plot, based largely on Helen’s dreams, fantasies and childhood memories. It isn’t terribly clear where the movie — or its hedonistic heroine — is going, but getting there is one wild ride.

Pay 2 Play makes no new revelations... The difference with this movie is that it actually means to inspire hope.

It’s a lazy piece of work, even by the low standards of Hollywood horror movies.

Duplass and Moss are so good, and their reactions to the frankly nutty circumstances of the film are so plausible, that the preposterous premise of the story hits home both conceptually and emotionally.

Jealousy is less cynical than it sounds. While certainly no love story, this dry-eyed tale feels achingly, maybe even exhilaratingly alive.

Life of Crime feels like a rambling car ride through the countryside with friends. The scenery is great, and the passengers are diverting, but you keep wondering where the driver is headed.

Rich Hill doesn’t just make you feel like you know these boys; it makes you care about them.

Ironically, When the Game Stands Tall isn’t about keeping gridiron glory in perspective, but about blowing it out of proportion.

In addition to “pervert” — which Wojtowicz makes sound like a badge of honor — the film offers many other seemingly contradictory assessments of Wojtowicz, mainly from his own mouth: troll, Goldwater Republican, McCarthy peacenik, crazy man, crook, romantic. He was all of those things and more, as The Dog makes vividly obvious.

[A] captivating and meticulous new film by Alex Gibney.

It’s a movie about exploring the vast, “dark continent” of the ocean’s deepest places (to quote Cameron, who produced and narrates the film) that ends up feeling claustrophobic. Much of it was shot inside a metal sphere the size of a fitness ball.

The final destination of A Five Star Life is well worth the wait, but the service is so slow that some viewers may check out early.

Franco’s hand-held camerawork draws the story forward as unfussily as a shepherd leads a sheep, and yet with a kind of ghastly grandeur. This is functional filmmaking more than it is flashy. But there is, at its heart, a single virtuosic performance.

The sense, in the first half of the film, that love and contentment are attainable dreams slowly gives way to the more existential notion that happiness is really just a fairy tale.

It manages the trick of being both an unironic sci-fi action-adventure flick and a zippy parody of one. It’s exciting, funny, self-aware, beautiful to watch and even, for a flickering instant or two, almost touching.

The film ends with an ambiguous, yet powerful conclusion. It doesn’t answer the question it raises, yet the way it’s asked keeps it echoing in your head. Except that Cahill can’t seem to leave well enough alone.

As the movie makes clear, none of these conditions are reversible. Music isn’t a cure for anything. But it does seem to be a key to unlocking long-closed doors and establishing connections with people who have become, through age or infirmity, imprisoned inside themselves.

Although the cast is uniformly fine, Hoffman shines in a role that demands not showmanship, but a kind of complexity and contradiction that can be rendered only through the kind of dull character details that he excelled in, accumulating them from the inside out.

Segel and Diaz are gifted and game comedians, with a lot of audience appeal. But Lowe clearly upstages them, consummating their Sex Tape — and making you want to roll over and have a cigarette — while there’s still one reel to go.

Though the setting is a retreat from the world, where not terribly much happens, within its confines Lorenzo gets an eye-opener about both human frailty and interconnectedness, courtesy of someone even more troubled than he is.

The film defies one of the fundamental rules of capitalism: Exploitation of the proletariat may be well and good, but don’t execute them all. At the same time, “The Purge: Anarchy” obeys a cardinal law of Hollywood: Shoot first and ask questions later.

Code Black is a powerful and quietly damning film. While training his lens narrowly on the heroic workers in a single emergency department, McGarry has made a broad indictment of a system that is badly in need of surgery.

It’s a thoughtful and workmanlike portrait, but a less than profoundly moving one.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes works both as allegory and action-adventure film. The internecine conflict between apes mirrors the troubled history of our own race.

The absence of legal details makes the movie something of a cheat. It offers few insights about the case from the official side, let alone about the machinations of Ai’s legal team.

The question at the heart of Deliver Us From Evil, a garden-variety serial-killer thriller tarted up as an exorcism drama, is not whether good will triumph over evil. Rather, it’s this: What in God’s name possesses good actors to make dreck like this?

“Restrepo” felt like the story of how boys become men. Korengal feels like the story of how strangers become family.

Violette mostly avoids the pitfalls associated with movies about writers by limiting the scenes of Violette scribbling furiously in a notebook.

If you have a shred of idealism left, it’s hard to watch Citizen Koch without a mounting sense of despair and outrage over the influence that money has come to wield over modern elections.

Ozon has created a monster that he can’t seem to let go of. Isabelle doesn’t just frighten her mother (and us). She seems to terrify Ozon, and I’m not sure I want to know why.

A sprawling yet engrossing documentary.

The Signal has visual style to burn. And it takes good advantage of the current state of paranoia arising from our surveillance culture and the pervasive mistrust in government. On paper, this sounds like a good formula. If handled well, it could really pay off.

It does exactly what its subject didn’t do: toe the line.

It’s a richly engrossing drama, so long as you understand that it’s aiming for the head, not the gut.

As agenda-driven as Documented is, it also is a deeply engrossing self-portrait.

The real problem with A Million Ways to Die in the West is one of editing. There are a million jokes in it, but only 500,000 of them are funny.

Even if you’ve never heard any of this back story — let alone anything about Mine That Bird — the outcome of the film is never seriously in doubt. That leaves filmmaker Jim Wilson in the predicament of having to entertain us by showing how the horse and his handlers get their act together. Unfortunately, 50 to 1 never really does that.

Puenzo has a knack for plumbing the heads and hearts of teenage girls. The director coaxes a mesmerizing, unmannered performance out of Bado, who is making her feature-film debut.

The first half of Cold is tense and suspenseful, albeit in a conventional way; the second half is sickeningly compelling. It’s hard to watch and hard to look away from.

Days of Future Past is, in itself, as intoxicating as a shot of adrenaline. It’s what summer movies are meant to be.

There’s nothing terribly profound about Chef. But its message — that relationships, like cooking, take a hands-on approach — is a sweet and sustaining one.

The Double retains all of Dostoevsky’s central themes. Madness, alienation and the loss of identity swirl around the film’s edges like film-noir fog. At the same time, the filmmakers inject a much-needed dose of dark humor into the tale.

Fortunately, the monsters are actually kind of a kick. And isn’t that why you go to see a movie like this anyway?

Fed Up isn’t so much a warning to the ignorant shopper or a tip for the unimaginative chef as it is a rallying cry. It succeeds in firing up the choir. Whether it will convert the complacent is an open question.

The story’s message may not be the most original one in the world — put down your device and make eye contact — but it’s fun to watch it unfold in a world that, while far from realistic, feels real enough.

There’s a far more interesting movie taking place alongside this more than slightly silly one.

For No Good Reason rambles too much for its own good, compared to more traditional documentaries. The most rewarding parts of the film feature Steadman simply talking about his influences (Picasso, among others) and his youthful goal of changing the world through art.

Visually, Brick Mansions is a duller and more conventional film than “District B13,“ which was, if nothing else, a sourball-flavored form of eye candy.

The film is less deeply affecting than merely admirable. It’s a good, slick and well-intentioned film that wants so hard to be an important one that the slight feeling of letdown it leaves is magnified.

The real trouble with Transcendence is that it just isn’t all that scary — at least not in the way that it wants to be.

Though writer-director Richard Shepard (“The Matador”) knows how to spin a yarn about the vicissitudes of fate, Dom’s adventures make for a pretty thin garment in which to cloth such an outsize antihero.

Nicolas Cage delivers what may his best, most nuanced performance yet in the gritty, hypnotic and deeply moving Joe.

Oculus director Mike Flanagan has crafted a satisfyingly old-fashioned ghost story that, in its evocation of shivery dread, is the most unnerving poltergeist picture since “The Conjuring.”

As haunting as it is haunted, The Missing Picture leaves viewers’ heads rattling with ghosts.

Berry’s performance, although less campy and histrionic than the trailer makes it look, is still outsize in proportion to the material, which feels slight and insubstantial despite its basis in a true story.

Its charms, and they are both subtle and many, emanate like perfume.

Bening and Harris are great actors, and they fill their roles as completely as they can, given the limitations of the soggy and implausible script by Matthew McDuffie and director Arie Posin.

Trinca delivers a marvelously unfussy performance, rendering her complex character gradually, along with the effects of the opposing forces that tear at her.

Sabotage doesn’t exactly glorify violence, but it certainly does get off on it.

Salva certainly gets points for creative repurposing. Much of what transpires in Dark House has been seen before, just not all in the same movie.

It plays out with all the suspense of a thriller. Assisted by acclaimed editor Walter Murch, Levinson wisely shapes the story not around the hardware, which was plagued by malfunctions and other delays, but around the people tasked with making the LHC run.

Director Neil Burger (“Limitless”) has crafted a popcorn flick that’s leaner, more propulsive and more satisfying than the bestseller that inspired it.

Elaine Stritch’s strength, along with the film’s, comes from her honesty. She is herself, even when — maybe especially when — she knows she’s being watched.

The films are highly entertaining and highly disturbing, in the latter case for both the right and the wrong reasons. While admirably delineating moral decay, which eats away at one character like a virus, the movies never really get at the seed of evil.

Adler nicely harnesses the mounting volatility of this situation, which builds to an intense if tragic conclusion.

The Prime Ministers: The Pioneers is hampered by a static structure that relies too heavily on a single voice.

The self-conscious affectation of the film would be funny, were it not so smug.

By visual standards alone, the characters, rendered in eye-popping 3-D, resemble nothing so much as Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade floats. They’re just as lifeless and inexpressive, too.

Collet-Serra, who directed Neeson in “Unknown,” has a knack for keeping things lively and moving forward. There are moments of humor, gripping action and real terror.

If you go in with the right attitude, there’s a fair amount of fun to be had from In Secret, considering it’s a musty French costume drama done in plummy English accents.

3 Days to Kill feels like two very different movies, neither of which is particularly good.

Like Father, Like Son grows on you, subtly and over time. Just as with the unexpected realignments forced on its characters, it may be difficult to fall in love with the movie, but eventually you do warm up to it.

Tim’s Vermeer makes a convincing case that Vermeer could have painted the way Jenison says he did. It also makes a pretty powerful ancillary point: that some people are both geniuses and geeks.

There are so many things to like about The Lego Movie: a great voice cast, clever dialogue and a handsome blend of stop-motion and CGI animation that feels lovingly retro, while still looking sharp in 21st-century 3-D. But the best thing about this movie... is its subversive nature.

If it touches on notions of scientific arrogance and the question of what makes us human, it ultimately does so lightly, and with a mix of eye-popping action and loopy good humor.

Compared to the “Fast and Furious” films, Hours is a chamber piece, but Walker wrings real pathos out of his instrument.

Gimme Shelter has a lighter touch than you might think. Yet there are times when its attempts at wringing drama out of real life are more strenuous than is strictly necessary.

It’s more silly than scary.

The film is an effective, even heartwarming, tale of one man’s commitment to teaching that playing by the rules is more important than winning.

The film feels claustrophobic at times, and stagy. It helps that the supporting cast is uniformly good.

What’s missing here is something, or rather, someone, to care about.

Many thematic ingredients come together in Farhadi’s rich stew of a story: jealousy, resentment, betrayal, forgiveness, healing. The filmmaker stirs them, with the touch of a master, into a dish that both stimulates and nourishes.

This sharp left turn takes the films’ mythology in strange and not entirely satisfying new directions, including a crazy time-travel element.

Despite Page’s excellent voiceover, “Bettie Page” suffers from embarrassingly choppy editing and a parade of stock film clips used to illustrate episodes recounted by its subject.

The second part of Peter Jackson’s “The Hobbit” trilogy goes a long way — and at 2 1/2 hours, I do mean long — toward righting the wrongs of the first movie, which was even longer.

By the end of this troubling film, the cognitive dissonance that it highlights — between the theoretical glorification of the illegal Mexican drug industry and its actual cost in blood — is jarring. It’s an important film, but Narco Cultura is also maddeningly hard to watch.

The film is probably of interest only to those viewers who, like Gondry himself apparently, already have an obsession with Chomsky.

In general, Lee directs with less visual verve than Park. Anchored by Brolin, who brings an almost simian physicality to his portrayal, this Oldboy feels simultaneously less showy, less nightmarish and less epic than the original.

Isn’t Statham’s best — or most brutal — work, but it’s not bad.

The Armstrong Lie is thorough, fair and thoughtful. It may not, however, close the book on the scandal.

Starbuck was a funny and warm-hearted trifle. So is Delivery Man.

Levine brings a lot of visual style to “Mandy,” in addition to coaxing subdued, believable performances from his young cast.

Concussion suffers from a chilly detachment that feels all too clinical, when all we want, like Abby, is connection.

Thrillingly told, compellingly acted and beautifully shot.

Hiddleston steals the show here, making wickedness and treachery look a heck of a lot more fun than virtue.

In this tale of longing, loss and regret, it isn’t always possible to know who’s deluding oneself, or someone else. But then, it isn’t always possible to know that in real life either.

If for some reason you find yourself in a theater watching the martial arts adventure Man of Tai Chi...feel free to take a nap during the non-fight sequences.

Capital is too cynical to ever really suggest that redemption is possible. Not that anyone watching will even care.

Van Dormael has crafted a saga that, even at two-plus hours, is endlessly, enormously watchable.

Ender’s Game is more than a parable about bullying, or a disquisition on the concept of the “just war.” It’s also a rousing action film, especially in Imax.

In structure and concept, the film resembles the faux-documentary “Borat,” with the distinction that the cameras here are all hidden. And that is where the film falls down and can’t get up.

God Loves Uganda clearly lays the blame for it at the feet of the American evangelical movement. The movie doesn’t really argue its case, preferring to stand back, in quiet outrage, as the representatives of that movement are shown with the match in their hands.

A mesmerizing documentary.

The plot itself is predictably divorced from reality, containing more holes — and smelling staler — than month-old Swiss cheese. All of which means that Stallone and Schwarzenegger end up having to do all the heavy lifting.

It’s as affecting as drama as it is effective as horror. It wrenches, even as it unnerves.

Because The Summit jumps around in time and because the events on the mountain happened over two days and at locations often far apart, the already garbled chronology of deaths is made even more confusing.

There’s some fun to be had, as long as your idea of fun includes being grossed out.

Under the direction of George Tillman Jr., these two young performers exercise remarkable restraint, never milking the material for unearned tears.

It’s exhausting. It’s also not particularly funny or engaging.

It’s a compelling, even stirring, tale.

It’s surprisingly wise, funny and affecting, thanks in part to a sensitive script, and in part to a strong ensemble cast.

The film is less a look into the Fed’s head than a presentation of its history, going back even farther than its creation in 1913, in response to a series of early 20th-century banking panics.

Populaire is a mostly delightful and entirely unironic throwback to the kind of film they stopped making about 50 years ago.

A bustling, overly busy mess.

The movie is about so much more than politics. Growing up, growing disillusioned, gaining wisdom — these are the themes of Levitt’s slight but eminently watchable film.

The message of The Ultimate Life could be summed up on a greeting card. Or rather, 12 greeting cards.

Despite the marquee names and their obvious talent, the film feels like a made-for-TV movie. It’s slight and episodic, with a weirdly scrupulous ambivalence about its subject, whom it seems torn between loving and loathing.

The film’s counterintuitive success is largely due to Derbez, who demonstrates why he is beloved, both south and north of the border.

The Artist and the Model isn’t about much, other than female beauty. That theme is not exactly controversial. Chalk the tameness of the subject matter up to the period in which the film is set.

It’s a fascinating inside look, made all the more thrilling by Marking’s access to actual Pink Panthers.

It’s a wonder how Cutie and the Boxer, in less than an hour and a half, manages to say so much about love, life and art. Movies twice as long are often half as eloquent.

One thing the film does do, if only inadvertently, is offer insight as to how we have gotten to this state of affairs.

The film is so thick with Jobs’s career highlights and lowlights that there’s little room for insights.

The odd and disturbing thing about the film is just how comfortable [Mancini] — and we — have become putting moments on camera that, once upon a time, were meant to be shared between two people.

A refreshing summer cocktail of action-movie staples, The Wolverine combines the bracingly adult flavor of everyone’s favorite mutant antihero — tortured, boozy X-Man Logan, a.k.a. Wolverine — with the fizzy effervescence of several mixers from the cabinet of Japanese genre cinema: noirish yakuza crime drama, samurai derring-do and ninja acrobatics.

It’s upsetting and scary to watch the footage of orca attacks collected in Blackfish, a damning documentary about the treatment of the animals by marine parks.

Part drug comedy, part psychological drama, the movie is slight, but only superficially so. As the closing credits role, we’re left not with a sense of a day at the beach, but of what might be swimming out there, in the dark of the abyss.

Whatever your belief system, this much is gospel: Movies like The Conjuring are less about the battle between God and Satan than the battle between the silly and the scary.

It’s an informative, if slightly unstructured, narrative, yet it plays more like a horror story.

It’s nice to be reminded of what old people look like, since they are, at least in movies these days, ever more invisible.

The joke seems to be that in 2013, it’s hard to teach an old bloodsucker new tricks. Still, Byzantium has a few moves that might surprise you. They have nothing to do with blood, but everything to do with the heart.

It's a gorgeous and, believe it or not, riveting documentary . . . about sheep.

Despite its plentiful and playful sexuality, this dose of Spanish fly is anything but exciting.

The Look of Love also is filled with acres and acres of naked flesh, but it’s the storytelling that keeps you engaged.

Elemental speaks to the importance of protecting the natural elements: water, air, earth. It’s a beautifully filmed piece, even when it’s showing us white clouds of pollutants billowing out of a smokestack.

To refuse to call A Hijacking a thriller is not to say it isn’t thrilling, in a dryly cerebral way. Writer-director Tobias Lindholm has a point to make, and he makes it pungently.

It’s a story of standing out and blending in, sometimes at the same time.

On one level, The Attack is a mystery, but not the kind you think. It’s obvious from the start who detonated the bomb; the only question is why. It’s a question that probably cannot be answered to the satisfaction of anyone living outside Israel or the occupied territories.

Crystal, 65, and Goodman, 61, are a long time out of college, but they somehow manage to carry off the callowness of youth.

The film is a documentary, pure and simple. But the movie, by director Rick Rowley, plays out like something of a murder mystery.

In the end, its somewhat equivocal message — that nuclear power might just be the lesser of several evils — is more convincing than you’d think.

As usual, Marling is a pleasure to watch for the psychological complexity and contradictions of her character. This time, the story almost lives up to the performance.

The people of 2022 may “release the beast” by slaughtering their fellow Americans. In 2013, that’s still what we go to the movies for.

You can’t blame Will Smith for wanting to give his son a leg up in the business. Maybe one day Jaden will have his father’s career — and his ability to carry a movie. For now, it’s a little premature to ask him to bear the weight of this soggy, waterlogged “Earth” on his skinny shoulders.

Enormously visually appealing, even if the story itself is almost unrecognizably bloated.

To make matters worse, this third “Hangover” is dull.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist will likely make some people mad because of the way it holds the United States responsible for the repercussions of its actions in the world. Like Changez himself, the film has a complicated relationship with the superpower.

The whole thing is played for laughs that almost never come. To be sure, the film has its moments, but they’re few and far between.

It’s an engrossing, if complicated and twisty, story, with plentiful sci-fi action and a provocative subtext about the nature of the human soul. At times, however, the balance between those two things feels off.

There’s a little too much happening in the film’s violent, frenetic conclusion, which involves the retrieval of fractured memories, the confession of betrayals and so many narrative loops within loops that the film’s big reveals never make perfect, deeply satisfying sense. Maybe it’s not supposed to.

At its core, The Company You Keep is a good, solid thriller about a fugitive trying to clear his name. But it’s a much more interesting movie at the edges.

Clocks in at close to two hours. It feels much longer. By comparison, Malick’s World War II epic “The Thin Red Line” tipped the scales at a whopping 170 minutes. But at least that 1998 film had people shooting at each other. There’s no such excitement here.

More stomach-churning than soul-chilling. The list of on-screen atrocities includes attacks by nail gun, electric carving knife, chain saw, shotgun, crowbar and chunk of ceramic from a broken toilet tank, used as a crude bludgeon.

It’s a mushy and unsuspenseful melodrama.

It’s silly and a bit sappy, but it works, in a crowd-pleasing way.

A more accurate title would be “Inept, Inadequate and Insipid Comedy.”

Just good, goofy fun, for a generation too young to have met Bamm-Bamm.

How on earth is it possible for one film to be so tiresome? Spring Breakers isn’t deadly dull despite all the nudity and violence, but because of it.

Admission is not especially funny. The trailer can’t seem to make up its mind. On the one hand, it looks like a satire of academia. On the other hand, it could be a gentle rom-com. In truth, it’s neither.

In Upside Down, writer-director Juan Solanas takes the gimmick about as far as it can go, rendering the metaphor of longing and separation in effective, and richly visual, terms. If anything, however, he goes too far.

Stoker plays out like a Kabuki “Macbeth”: gallons of style slathered on a story you already know by heart.

Too scary for very young children, yet too silly for most older fans of director Bryan Singer’s earlier forays into the Superman and X-Men franchises, “Jack” seems designed to appeal to a very narrow, and possibly illusory, demographic: the mature moppet.

The problem, as “Table” shows, isn’t that the next meal never comes. It’s that when it arrives, too often it is filled with empty calories.

The movie builds a moderate, if less than monumental, level of spookiness, regardless of your ignorance. It’s a workmanlike piece of suspense.

Snitch is protein-and-starch filmmaking at its utilitarian -- and belly-filling -- best. Johnson brings the steak; Bernthal the sizzle. The father-son drama is served up as sauce on the side. But as long as the beef isn’t too overcooked, who needs the A1?

His screenplay for Beautiful Creatures is sharp and witty, considering the needlessly complicated source material. His cast is stellar, and the chemistry between his young stars magical. But too much of rest of the movie, like Thompson’s monstrous mother, is an unholy mess.

Cute without being especially clever, Warm Bodies is almost as pallid and as brain-dead as its zombie antihero.

Parker the movie, like the man, delivers exactly as promised.

Movie 43 is a near masterpiece of tastelessness. The anthology of 12 short, interconnected skits elevates the art form of gross-out comedy to a new height.

There's something dead and rotting at the center of Mama, and it isn't the ghost of the woman who lends the horror film its title.

In writer-director David Chase's heartfelt delivery, this same old tune somehow comes out sounding fresh.

It's hard to know who exactly Parental Guidance was made for.

Cirque du Soleil: Worlds Away has plenty of eye candy... What the movie lacks, unfortunately, is coherence.

The film is studded with many tiny, lovely moments.

Overlong, unnecessarily sex-obsessed and downright nasty at times, This Is 40 feels haphazard and unfinished, despite a few moments of laugh-out-loud humor.

The film's title suggests the wry irony of hindsight: We've come a long way, baby, but we're not there yet. Any Day Now could do with a little more of that astringent humor and a little less sap.

There's more waiting than lightning in Waiting for Lightning, a nonetheless watchable-enough documentary about the preparations leading up to professional skateboarder Danny Way's historic 2005 attempt to sail over the Great Wall of China on a skateboard.

There's a powerfully creepy sensibility to Deadfall. But the way it handles the messiness of families -- a universal message given vivid metaphorical life in the blood and guts it leaves in its path -- is finally rewarding.

Dull and repetitive, even by the standards of an already repetitive genre.

The relationship is the best thing about the film, which otherwise feels hopelessly sad and tawdry.

Ultimately, the problem with this Red Dawn is the same problem with the first one. Despite the more realistic battle scenes, nothing in it feels more fateful than a football game.

Thoughts become things. That's the message of Rise of the Guardians, a charming if slightly dark and cobwebbed animated feature about how believing in something makes it real, or real enough.

Chasing Ice aims to accomplish, with pictures, what all the hot air that has been generated on the subject of global warming hasn't been able to do: make a difference.

For those with no vested interest in this protracted and supernatural soap opera, but who do care about cinema, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn -- Part 2 will be, unsurprisingly, a silly and somewhat cheesily made waste of time.

Sean Penn makes a striking screen presence in This Must Be the Place, a smart, funny and original road movie by Italian director Paolo Sorrentino ("Il Divo").

A quietly brilliant study in cognitive dissonance, The Flat is a documentary look at Holocaust denial, but not the kind you might think.

Emphasizes action and eye-popping visuals over emotion.

Watchable, if cliched.

There's lots of extraneous plotting -- which, however fact based, is handled in such a pre-fab manner that it feels phony.

Simon and the Oaks is not merely the story of two boys from opposite sides of the tracks. It's also a larger meditation on life's hardships and what endures: love, art and civilization.

A martial-arts ad­ven­ture with more video-game and comic-book DNA than the traditional kung fu flick, Tai Chi Zero is good, if empty-headed, fun.

Moving without being melodramatic, War of the Buttons is a tale of the worst -- and the best -- that people of all ages are capable of.

Smashed never really rises much above the level of a dramatic public service announcement. That's not so much because of its tone, but because what it's announcing isn't exactly news. Alcoholism is a disease. Alcoholics aren't bad people. Quitting is hard.

Alex Cross isn't meant to be analyzed too deeply. The title character probably sums up the best strategy for appreciating the film's modest pleasures when he says, "Don't overthink it; I'm just looking for a bad guy."

They're enough to elevate the film above its somewhat by-the-numbers plot and add a little juice to its slightly sluggish forward momentum.

There's nothing terribly surprising about Special Forces, a moderately gripping action flick about a group of commandos on a mission to rescue a pretty blonde who has been abducted by the Taliban. Nothing, that is, except that it's French.

The hero of Sinister is almost unaccountably dumb. So, unfortunately, is the movie.

When the jokes work, it's for a simple reason: The four actors playing the couples are seasoned veterans of film comedy (although each is more than capable of handling dramatic roles, as well).

The movie itself is a tad overheated. In the lurid, swampy, yet almost perversely engrossing follow-up to director Lee Daniels's "Precious," the temperature is set to "sizzle." Ironically, it could have used a little more time in the oven.

It's great fun.

The movie Vulgaria is not one for the kiddies. Then again, the description "for mature audiences" doesn't seem right either. The Hong Kong comedy, a broad, cartoonish -- and decidedly filthy -- satire of moviemaking is as sophomoric as they come. It's also pretty funny, in an unapologetically over-the-top way.

Entertaining enough for the trick-or-treat crowd, but a bit more bite wouldn't kill it.

For the most part, it works brilliantly.

Hello I Must Be Going isn't heavy lifting, to be sure. But it's still worthy of a little end zone dance.

It's the story of changing chefs and changing seasons. It looks at food as not just something that nourishes our bodies, but as something that enriches our lives and our relationships.

10 Years doesn't completely avoid the road-not-taken theme. It does, however, neatly navigate around many of the potholes, finding a novel and nuanced approach to addressing the ways that our mistakes make us better, wiser and more human.

It's powerful stuff, but I almost felt like I needed an intermission.

Refreshingly free of hot air.

A solid and subtly moving portrait of the people of Burma.

A workmanlike, if treacly and overblown, piece of propaganda. Its effectiveness depends entirely on the degree to which you already believe its talking points.

The question isn't whether Toys in the Attic is any good. The question is: good for whom?

"Bridesmaids" may have been crude, but it also said something about female friendships that felt true. Bachelorette feels like it's about four women who, not even all that deep down, can't stand one another.

By the time it glides -- not lumbers -- to the closing credits, it's also amazingly moving.

D'Souza makes it all sound almost plausible, but only if you're predisposed to believe that Obama hates America. It's bashing, all right, but with a velvet-gloved fist.

In the end, what mars "Timothy Green" most is its middle-of-the-road approach. Its appealingly quirky, fairy-tale-like center is so coated with sugar, it cloys. It's not that "Timothy Green" is odd, but that it isn't odd enough.

The only artwork by Ai that Klayman's film dwells on at any length -- aside from the iconic "bird's nest" stadium he helped design for the Beijing Olympics, and then denounced as tasteless -- is "Sunflower Seeds." Created for a 2010 exhibition at London's Tate Modern, the installation featured 100 million hand-painted ceramic sunflower seeds spread out on the floor.

Known for comedy, Rogen and Silverman are the film's most delightful surprises, and their performances shine.

It's the flaws that Kurtzman builds into People Like Us that make it interesting.

A giant disappointment. It's as bustling as its titular city's piazzas, but it goes nowhere.

Both terribly silly and a lot of fun.

As happens with many time-travel films, this one ultimately paints itself into a bit of a narrative corner.

That's My Boy is radical only in its extreme laziness.

It's like "A Midsummer Night's Dream" in the Catskills.

It's just that Pattinson's performance is so enervated that his Georges Duroy comes across as something of a cipher. He's not quite alive, yet also clearly not dead, given the amount of sex he has. He's undead, or at least uninteresting.

It's a kid's Cirque de Soleil, for a lot less money.

The lens through which the The Intouchables was filmed may be too rose-colored for some people's taste, but the window that these talented performers throw open -- a window onto the strange and touching friendship between two very different men -- is crystal clear.

It's cute. So is the movie. If it never rises to greatness, it may be because it's also a fairly formulaic romcom.

If it weren't so shocking, it would be a lot funnier.