Michael Phillips

Although Joffe appears to be making a Brighton version of the seductively natty evil we find stateside in "Boardwalk Empire," this Brighton Rock remains muffled, half-formed pulp fiction.

It's sweet, and low-key. It's very '70s in its vibe, which helps when the script veers in and out of formula.

To my taste there's too much of everything. The soundtrack never shuts up with the wind, the murmurings, the shudderings. And while director Nixey has talent, his indiscriminately roving camera tends to diffuse the tension, not heighten it.

The film is a remarkable experience on a purely sensory level, and the best of its archival footage - on the track, in private meetings with drivers before the races, from the white-knuckle, over-the-shoulder perspective of Senna himself - is pure gold.

It's mostly noise and splurch and, as I mentioned, aaaaarrrrggggghhhhh!

Plenty gory, but graced by a jovial sense of humor and an enjoyably guts-centric use of 3-D.

What proved tasty in book form comes across a little more like work in the movie.

Frantic, violent and unrelenting, it is all of a piece, its tightly packed storytelling making cassoulet of its own implausibilities and familiar terrain covering a web of political and institutional conspiracy.

If more of the picture had the inventively grotesque payoff of the scene set at the gymnastics tryout, capped by a female character's inarguably poor dismount, we might have something to puke home about.

The movie ends up being just sharp enough at its peaks to be frustrating in its valleys. But the laughs are there.

Davis is reason No. 1 the film extracted from Kathryn Stockett's 2009 best-seller improves on its source material.

Part Joel & Ethan Coen and part John Millington Synge, this grotty little fairy tale casts a deft line and reels you in. I'd see it again just to hear the drug smugglers argue over the use of the Americanism "good to go."

This sense of unruly behavior is mitigated, deliberately, by the gentleness and odd comic grace of July's presence and voice.

Some comedies have the knack for affrontery and shock value; The Change-Up, written by the "Hangover" team of Jon Lucas and Scott Moore, merely has the will to offend.

While it's effects-heavy, the movie itself does not feel heavy. Consider it a fanciful extension of the recent and very fine documentary "Project Nim."

This is the "Babel" or "Crash" of ensemble romantic comedies, with screenwriter Dan Fogelman mapping out several narrative surprises that throw you for little loops as they're delivered.

The component genre parts coexist, excitingly, without veering into camp or facetious desperation. Alien-invasion aficionados should be pleased. Western nostalgists may be pleasantly surprised. Fans of cowboys-versus-aliens movies, well, it's been a long wait and here's your movie.

A Little Help settles for familiar and modest payoffs. It's not much. Yet Fischer clearly relishes the chance to play someone who's a demurely reckless mess.

The gentle erotic undertow in the friendship of Snow Flower and Lily has been toned down, and replaced by … niceness.

Wysocki is a genuine talent, as is Jacobs, but the subject of Terri remains a pleasant blur.

The most stylish comics-derived entertainment of the year...It's paced and designed for people who won't shrivel up and die if two or three characters take 45 seconds between combat sequences to have a conversation about world domination, or a dame.

I enjoy both Timberlake and Kunis; just this side of manic, they seem right together.

The best material, however, keeps returning to the unstable power dynamic between Q-Tip and Dawg.

One of Morris' swiftest works, yet also one of his saddest, Tabloid reveals among other things what happens when one person's definition of ordinary healthy romance is undone by another's.

It's virtually non-stop action, though director David Yates, who has taken good care of these final four, ever-meaner Potter adventures, does a very crafty thing, following adapter Steve Kloves' screenplay.

Project Nim is practically irresistible. The story keeps getting odder and richer and more complicated.

Cleverly structured, Horrible Bosses works in spite of its cruder, scrotum-centric instincts.

Unlike a few other well-drilled young actress-singers we could name, such as the one whose name rhymes with "Riley Myrus," Gomez knows how to relax on camera.

It's the neediest movie of 2011, and one of the phoniest.

A work of ineffable soullessness and persistent moral idiocy.

Timberlake is not afraid to make himself look like an idiot. He is, in fact, already the comic actor Diaz may yet become: a looker who knows how to use his looks to get away with murder.

Lasseter's sequel smooshes the vehicular ensemble of the first "Cars" into a nefarious James Bond universe, heavy on the missiles and ray guns and Gatling guns and electrocutions. Sound peculiar? It is peculiar.

Maybe this review is more about me than about Conan O'Brien, but I really couldn't get past the odor of self-congratulation emanating from nearly every scene in Conan O'Brien Can't Stop.

The Trip isn't much, but it's more than enough.

Green just isn't the superhero color this year.

For some reason I was under the impression Jim Carrey already made his penguin movie. Doesn't it seem like it?

The glibness of Wiesen's freshman effort wouldn't be a problem if the wit was there.

Those receptive to Godard's sense of humor will find Film Socialisme an elusive yet expansive provocation. Those less receptive will find it elusive, period.

If the key performances in Beautiful Boy were any less honest, the film's half-formed suppositions would undo it utterly.

Isn't merely joke-funny. It's texture-funny.

Just cute enough for some tastes, too cute by half for others.

Abrams knits together the ordinary stories of the mill town's inhabitants in a way that feels dramatic without showing their contrivances too obviously. And his casting of Courtney and Fanning was fortuitous, though Abrams' banter for the supporting kids grows tiresome in that "Goonies" way.

Berge is a meticulous and intriguing host, though one gets the feeling he's relaying, very selectively, only so much of the messier side of his life with Saint Laurent. So be it.

This may be the most overtly Christian mainstream picture since "The Passion of the Christ." Unlike that one, though, Malick's comes with a generosity of spirit large enough to get all sorts of people (including non-believers) thinking about the nature of faith and what it's all about.

Still, the deadliest single element in this film can be traced not to Bacon's character, but to composer Henry Jackson, whose music seems determined to kill us all with waves of dramatic nothingness.

Led by Wilson and Cotillard, the ensemble makes the most of the material that works, and makes the best of the rest of it.

Hangover II is more like a spitball meeting, a series of ideas that might, in theory, be good enough for a sequel, than it is an actual movie.

The wastrel Sparrow ends up both overexploited and underpowered in this fourth outing.

I've seen the fabulously acted Italian thriller The Double Hour twice now, and for all its intricate manipulations, it stays with me for a very simple reason: The love story at its bittersweet heart is played for keeps.

The film is not for the frantic of spirit. Its steady rhythm and even-handed tone threaten occasionally to stultify. But little things mean a lot in this universe, as they should.

The results go only so far. Yet already Ferrell has come a long way as a seriocomic screen presence.

Wiig's natural and savvy instincts to go easy, and let the audience come to her, serve her and Bridesmaids well.

The film works because the screenwriters, Elizabeth Hunter and Arlene Gibbs, have a knack for juggling a dozen-plus major characters without succumbing to the obvious class-warfare gags every 90 seconds.

Director Jodie Foster's film reasserts the feverish, defiant, often gripping talent of actor Mel Gibson.

The last 25 minutes of Thor aren't much better than the first. But that hour in between - tasty, funny, robustly acted - more than compensates.

The cast's newcomers mix and mingle with ease with the hardened alums of Disney and Nickelodeon TV series.

The cave exists to provoke awe in mere mortals. The camera pauses at one point to take in a stalagmite reaching up to touch, nearly, a stalactite and the inevitable association is with Michelangelo's Adam and the hand of God.

It is a film of many ploooooches, meaning: stake in the chest? Ploooooch goes the sound effect. Yank it out again: ploooooch. Wipe. Rinse. Repeat.

As if by deliberate and vaguely sadistic design, Hoodwinked Too! Hood Vs. Evil leeches the fun clean out of the first "Hoodwinked" (2005).

Incendies is no mere riff on a Greek mainstay. It is its own entity, delicate and fierce. Already I've risked making it sound like homework. It's not; it's an enthralling drama of survival.

Writer-director Silver, who trained in documentaries, appears flummoxed by the challenges of getting the audience inside the heads of these young men.

It's too bad Spurlock settles for so little here, beyond the surface gag.

Like "The Notebook," but with an elephant, the unexpectedly good film version of Water for Elephants elevates pure corn to a completely satisfying realm of romantic melodrama.

Potiche is very "Touch of Class" and "House Calls" in its comic vibe and trappings, and if you're old enough to remember those Glenda Jackson rom-coms, you'll probably respond favorably to Potiche.

This movie is crushingly ordinary in every way, which with Rand I wouldn't have thought possible.

Heartbreakingly average, director Robert Redford's The Conspirator errs in the way so many films do, especially films about unsung pieces of American history. It focuses on the wrong character.

The movie isn't dull, exactly; the problem lies in the other, antsy direction.

It's fun to see that charming underreactor Neve Campbell, looking about 20 minutes older, back as Sidney Prescott.

Are the results funny? In the margins, yes.

Wilson does amusingly steely work, while Page goes bonkers, giving her gleeful nut job one of the more memorable horselaughs in recent American film history.

Hanna presents the problem of the well-made diversion that is, at its core, repellent.

An exhaustingly pushy, phallocentric and witlessly smutty spoof of early '80s medieval fantasies such as "Krull" and "The Beastmaster."

His (Schwimmer) film deserves some attention for the remarkable performance from Liana Liberato as Annie.

Nicely acted by all and photographed in creepy, cold, under-lit tones.

Source Code is a contraption, no doubt. But it works.

I didn't laugh much, nor did my 10-year-old companions, but nobody had their soul crushed by the experience. This is the film industry's Hippocratic oath: First, crush no souls.

Snyder must have known in preproduction that his greasy collection of near-rape fantasies and violent revenge scenarios disguised as a female-empowerment fairy tale wasn't going to satisfy anyone but himself.

The film offers plenty of good screen company along the way.

The script avoids going full-bore as satire. Where it goes instead lacks a purpose, a reason for being, beyond the usual name-checking of "The X-Files" and the like.

I couldn't help but feel this adaptation needed more of the thing for which Jane herself yearns: a sense of freedom. At their best, though, Wasikowska and Fassbender hint at their well-worn characters' inner lives, which are complex, unruly and impervious to time.

Almost all of it works as wish-fulfillment fantasy.

The cast is not the limitation here. The limitation, and I found it to be a drag on this aggressively audience-pleasing indie, relates directly to its premise.

Seyfried's a good actress, but all the art direction in the world can't make this version of events the stuff either of dreams or of nightmares.

On the whole, I'd rather be on Pluto, which isn't even a planet.

Original, it's not. Exciting, it is. This jacked-up B-movie hybrid of "Black Hawk Down" and "War of the Worlds" is a modest but crafty triumph of tension over good sense and cliche.

Take Me Home Tonight, believe me, you've already seen.

It is, for what it is, a work of considerable care and craft. And it's completely soulless.

What's striking about the picture, I think, is its lack of violent threat.

It's secondhand, vaguely resigned material. And while Sudeikis has some talent, he's not yet ready to co-anchor a feature comedy. He's no Ed Helms, in other words.

I found the mythology of I Am Number Four vague and sloppy.

Sleek and, until a stupidly violent climax, very entertaining, Unknown is the opposite of "Memento."

Offers only one point of interest beyond the breasts of its second female lead: Aniston's barely disguised disdain for her material.

Chabrol's final picture was designed with Depardieu in mind. It's a small work. Yet it's so pleasurably well-made, so obviously the work of major talents in a comfortable groove, why carp about the scale or ambition of the project?

Modest in every way, the screenplay by Phil Johnston is enjoyable in the telling even when the details smack of contrivance.

The Eagle becomes more interesting the further north it travels.

The acting's very strong throughout, though few would argue that the final half-hour satisfies either as suspense, or narrative, or social observation.

Here and there an image of spectral beauty, assisted by the 3-D technology, floats into view and captures our imagination. But the script, which really should've been called "Sanctimonium," has a serious case of the bends.

For many, this central performance will be more than enough. For others, the film will simply be too much.

For an hour The Rite, as scripted by Michael Petroni, delivers the expected, but with panache.

What's remarkable about the remake is its nastiness.

The result is a brisk trot through a story that is, at heart, a tough slog.

The movie version of that life, directed by Richard J. Lewis, gives the adaptation an earnest go. But the script lacks juice.

You've seen worse. The film industry is capable of better.

Extremely moving, exceedingly droll, flawlessly voice-acted.

For all the warmth emanating from the film's core, thanks to Broadbent and Sheen, I don't know if Leigh has ever made a crueler picture.

Chomet himself has written the gentle waltz theme and other music. The piece glides by, effortlessly.

Too much. Too numbing. Too coy. And ultimately too violent.

Unexpectedly sour, The Dilemma barely qualifies as a comedy.

It's Williams you never question, who makes every detail and close-up and impulse natural. She's spectacularly good.

My God is this script predictable. Each relapse and betrayal shows up announced, and then announced again, a little louder, by the dialogue equivalent of an aggravating doorman.

Rretains what made it work on stage, chiefly a disarming sense of humor amid the grimmest sort of personal crisis, and a pair of juicy leading roles.

The cast is enjoyable, with Jason Segel (as Gulliver's lil' pal, Horatio) and Emily Blunt (the local princess) a witty cut above for this sort of thing.

A small but, in its way, daring picture.

The sole memorable scene involving a little Focker in Little Fockers, though memorable doesn't mean amusing, involves Ben Stiller's male-nurse character administering a needle full of adrenaline to his dyspeptic and unhappily aroused father-in-law Jack Byrnes, played by Robert De Niro.

The biggest change from the '69 "True Grit" is the best thing about this formidably well-crafted picture. Portis's narrator and heroine, 14-year-old Mattie Ross, runs the show this time, not the one-eyed marshal.

The actors, predictably, are superb in roles shaped by screenwriter David Seidler, and directed by Tom Hooper. Yet they are unpredictably superb as well.

Yogi Bear gives cheap hackwork a bad name. Which is a shame, because hackwork made this industry.

It's relaxed without being sloppy, or patronizing, and in particular Witherspoon and Lemmon - sorry, make that Rudd - bring charm to burn.

She tackled "The Tempest" on stage, years ago. On screen I wish she'd (Taymor) adapted it with a freer hand, and then directed it with a more considered one.

An off-center but exceptional boxing film I prefer in every aspect, especially one: It feels like it comes from real life as well as the movies.

Moderately funny though immoderately derivative.

The results impart that "trapped" feeling all too well. It's a sullen affair, dominated by a grim visual palette that intrigues for about 30 minutes.

The pathos really are shameless, arriving with killing regularity and false humility.

The runaway train thriller Unstoppable is one of Tony Scott's better films.

Its dramatic vexations are at war with Denis' prodigious visual skill. And the fight, ultimately, rewards the viewer.

They put the "obvious" in "obvious."

Dwayne Johnson leaves his lovable self behind in the violent but bland Faster.

Monsters is a sharp little low-fi monster movie operating from a tantalizing premise.

The Dawn Treader doesn't so much reinvent the "Narnia" franchise as do what's needed, and expected, with a little more zip than the previous voyages.

Bright and engaging, and blessed with two superb non-verbal non-human sidekicks, Tangled certainly is more like it.

The choicest dialogue in Burlesque provokes the sort of laughter that other, intentionally funny films only dream of generating.

The movie is full, assured and extremely wry.

Surely the gentlest American film ever made about home-grown revolutionaries.

A facsimile of a masquerade of a gloss on "Charade," and on all the lesser cinematic charades that followed in the wake of director Stanley Donen's 1963 picture.

With that kind of financial imperative it's something of a miracle the Potter films have been, on the whole, good. One or two, very good. One or two (the first two), less good. This one's good.

Is Black Swan high-minded? I'm happy to say: No. It is extremely high-grade hokum, which is to say it offers several different and combustible varieties.

Their (The Brothers Strause) effects are pretty good, on a fairly limited budget. And that's about all you can say for Skyline.

127 Hours never calms down. You suspect you're only getting half the truth of what this ordeal must've been like.

If the romantic comedy Morning Glory clicks with audiences, the McAdams factor surely will be the reason why.

Aiming for a piece with the raw impact of "Precious," on which he served as executive producer, he (Perry) ends up with 134 minutes of misjudged intensity.

Liman's sensibility isn't sophisticated enough to tease out the nuances of what must be a pretty interesting marriage; the movie is more about texture and surfaces and surface tensions.

Larsson's leading characters have less to do in this wrap-up chapter. As Larsson wrote it and screenwriter and exposition-condenser Ulf Rydberg adapted it, it's a rather wobbly blend of courtroom drama and loose ends tied, albeit rather leisurely.

Demons of mediocrity, be gone! Here we have a shrewd sequel a touch better than the original.

This is an inspirational true story worried less about turning dramatic screws than earning its feeling through character.

It's easy to watch.

Morgan and Eastwood are scrupulous in keeping their notions of the afterlife as general and inoffensive as possible. They have no religious or spiritual worldview to sell. As I say: Many admire this film to no end. I found its use of recent tragic events, including the London underground bombing, to be more than a little cheap.

Genuinely odd in its mixture of bluntness and indirection, screenwriter Angus MacLachlan's study in biblical temptation is saved from its own heavy-handedness by a fine quartet of actors.

It's hard not to like it. And in both senses of the phrase, America keeps asking for it.

The cast is excellent, particularly Riley and Morton and, as Joy Division’s brash manager, Toby Kebbell. He’s a great character, bitter and hostile and a scoundrel: a born manager of talent destined to tear itself apart.

Though uneven and less witty than the first two, Toy Story 3 delivers quite enough in two dimensions.

Sidelined by a script that plays like an imitation of another era’s artifacts. It’s an oxymoron: a mild screwball romance.

Wine may be sunlight held together by water, as Galileo said, but Bottle Shock is held together only by Alan Rickman.

It's a seriously withholding action comedy, stingy on the wit, charm, jokes, narrative satisfactions and animals with personalities sharp enough for the big screen, either in 2-D or 3-D.

Only the architecturally refined bone structure of Kristin Scott Thomas' face rescues Keeping Mum from full-on tedium.

The performances and Marcos Siega’s direction put a pleasing sheen on the material.

Despite my McConaughey resistance I got more guilty chuckles from Ghosts of Girlfriends Past than "Failure to Launch" or "Four Christmases."

I enjoyed these characters more when they were rich, rather than obscenely rich, when their self-involvement and life crises had one foot on planet Earth -- and when they weren't all gussied up like Mae West in "Sextette."

This one may be soft and derivative. But the actors establish a groove and stay on-message.

50 percent good and 50 percent close.

Just the same auld same auld.

The Last Airbender (they couldn't use the series' "Avatar" title because another film got there first, without all the bending) is more about marshaling extras and interpolating tons of computer-generated effects and keeping the factions straight. It's a tough sit.

It's the knockabout biblical lark Mel Brooks never got around to making.

The first 90 minutes of Avatar are pretty terrific - a full-immersion technological wonder with wonders to spare. The other 72 minutes, less and less terrific.

Haneke’s vision is gripping. The craftsmanship, classically shaped narrative and icy visual beauty cannot be denied.

A buddy cop film in which one of the cops continually quotes dialogue espoused by fictional cops, in everything from "Heat" to "RoboCop," and not once is it funny.

It's a vivid ensemble experience, and the acting is wonderful.

Despite the proficient technique, after a while you may feel you're watching a particularly scenic snuff film.

The best of it is a riot--a "Bad Boys II" fireball hurled with exquisite accuracy at a quaint English town peopled by Agatha Christie archetypes.

A breezy diary from a pair of first-time farmers, as well as a wry rebuke to a nation devoted to eating cheaply but not necessarily well, King Corn makes its points without much finger-wagging.

Ritchie, who shoots and cuts everything in RocknRolla like an ad for a particularly greasy brand of fragrance for men, delivers the beatings and killings in his trademark atmosphere of morally weightless flash.

Sloppy, grimy but quick on its feet, which puts it ahead of certain other (“The Hangover”) R-rated comedies (“The Hangover”) we’ve seen this summer (“The Hangover”).

Too often the film itself simply shuffles the postcards of Tibetan scenery, Buddhist rituals and the Tibetan people (many amazing faces on view, to be sure).

A half-silly, half-earnest indie with the soul of a John Hughes-era sex comedy.

Cooper is the reason to see the film, which was photographed by Tak Fujimoto in the dour tones he brought to a more flagrant realm of evil, and FBI detective work, in "The Silence of the Lambs."

A worthy film on a great, tragic subject.

The acting's so true, and Bahrani's so observant, you find yourself caring about everyone onscreen.

The result is a mixture of unified atmosphere and lived-in character study, and while Vasiliu’s role is not as indelible as that of her co-stars, Marinca’s Otilia and Ivanov’s steely abortionist are just about perfect.

Like the "Bourne" franchise to which Noyce's film is indebted, Salt is a combination of pursuit, evasion, name-clearing and a reversal or two.

The style is brash, and it works. Tucker and Epperlein illustrate Yunis' account of his eight-month imprisonment, much of that time spent at the notorious Abu Ghraib compound, with literal illustrations--pages seemingly torn out of a Frank Miller graphic novel.

It’s dumb but quick and dirty and effectively brusque, dispensing with niceties such as character.

Small but sure, the film is like Alejandro himself: quick on its feet, attuned to a harsh life’s hardships and possibilities.

The original was a very good thriller. The new one is simply a good one.

Red starts repeating itself and spinning its wheels and looking for an ending, well before the ending arrives. The actors have considerable fun with it, though.

While Streep has a tiny bit too much fun with some of her character's excesses, she's awfully good. So is Hoffman, who walks a fine line between obvious guilt and possible innocence.

There’s nothing wrong with All About Steve that a rewrite couldn’t fix, as long as the rewrite involved a different writer, a different character and a different story.

The way Lawrence captures a young woman's fear and resolve, often non-verbally, well … this is a considerable talent well on her way to a great career. It's for performances like this that moviegoers find themselves taking a chance on a title that doesn't have a fast-food tie-in.

The Good German is just stiff. When Soderbergh tries one of those patented swoop-in-on-the-diagonal moves at a key dramatic moment, the effect is comic. And at that precise moment, the story starts dying a slow, oxygen-deprived death.

It's a procedural, often absorbing, rarely surprising, about a briefcase bomb and a near-miss. Yet there's no question the film feels dodgy and vague when it comes to the personalities and ideology of the men onscreen.

When Ferrell and Hoffman do their thing together, a charming bit of whimsy becomes something more. It becomes really, really funny.

Watching Heather Graham, Tom Cavanagh and a stridently adorable Alan Cumming do their wide-eyed, moony thing in the romantic comedy Gray Matters raises the question: Is it possible for a filmgoer to be twinkled to death?

After last year's black-hearted "No Country for Old Men," the Oscars may well be in the mood to embrace a fairy tale sampling every imaginable genre, with a note of triumph accompanying even the worst suffering, capped by the snazziest ending money can buy.

Jackie Chan co-stars in Morita's old role of the humble maintenance man who coaches the Bullied One. The older Chan gets, the simpler and truer he becomes as a performer.

State of Play isn't a kinetic fireball like the second or third "Bourne" installment; like its protagonist, it's defiantly old school, "Three Days of the Condor" bleeding into "All the President's Men."

A tart, brilliantly acted fable of life’s little cosmic difficulties, a Coen brothers comedy with a darker philosophical outlook than “No Country for Old Men” but with a script rich in verbal wit.

For the film to be truer to the school’s reputation, it would have had to dig a little deeper.

It's well-crafted, but I wish the film showed us an additional dimension or two of the central figure, who once said the great challenge in writing, any kind of writing, is "to write the same way you are."

The film's tone is utterly indistinct, beyond fatuous adoration of its subject.

Nothing in director Paul W.S. Anderson's schlock drawer--prepares you for the peppy, good-time nastiness that is Death Race.

Katyn will not join Wajda's list of masterworks. In its final flashback, however, when we're taken back to the forest and the details of what really happened, we see what we must see, the clear-eyed way we should see it.

A rich and surprisingly old-fashioned musical biopic, The Runaways has neither the bloat nor the blather of your average Hollywood treatment of stars on the rise.

Beowulf is all right as far as it goes, and it goes pretty far for a PG-13 rating: Dismemberment, “300”-style blood globules comin’ atcha, and a digitally futzed and, for all practical purposes, completely naked!!!

The harder this assault weapon went at my tear ducts, the more duct tape I wrapped around them as a defensive measure.

Swift, vicious and grimly imaginative, the zombie film 28 Weeks Later exceeds its predecessor, "28 Days Later," in every way.

Bone-dry but completely assured, both in its visual strategy and its wry deconstruction of the workplace comedy genre.

The film is half rutting goat, half preacher.

Only Sarah Paulson, as the Spirit's doctor and sometime lover, seems to be in there playing the scenes as if she were a human being in a comic book superhero scenario, as opposed to a comic book character stuck in a cruddy movie.

For visual noise by the ton, Emmerich is my kind of hack, the pluperfect blend of leaden self-seriousness and accidental-on-purpose self-satirist.

I truly wish Dear John were a better, less shamelessly manipulative movie, but a couple of the actors got me through it alive. One is Amanda Seyfried.

Many, I suspect, will fall for The Prestige and its blend of one-upsmanship and science fiction. I prefer "The Illusionist," the movie that got here first.

Stupid, predictable and fairly funny.

The film is perfectly mediocre, which is heartbreaking, not heartwarming.

If one thing holds the picture back, it’s the self-conscious album-cover aesthetic of Sebring’s visual approach.

Matt Damon narrates, and I do wish the narration didn't end on such a generalized, throw-the-bums-out note, over footage of the Statue of Liberty.

It is a fine little old-school thriller.

I enjoyed parts of Street Kings but I didn’t believe one thing about it, and I couldn’t get past Reeves’ unsuitability to his role. He may someday play a cop on the edge convincingly, but the edge needs to be sharper than this.

The stories we hear in 24 City belong to its specific place, but they are universal.

To be clear: The odds are in favor of you hating it. I hated a lot of it when I saw a barely dry work-in-progress print, 163 minutes long, at the Cannes Film Festival. It’s 19 minutes shorter and better now, though “better” is relative when you’re dealing with a whatzahoozy such as this.

Amuses and unnerves in equal measure.

Caine and Law may not be playing human beings, but Pinter’s sense of humor is at least more interesting than Shaffer’s. Caine in particular appears to enjoy honing his cold-eyed stare.

Unnervingly good, Little Children is one of the rare American films about adultery that feels right--dangerous, hushed, immediate.

The film may be slight, but it is not stupid, and director Robert Cary keeps both stickiness and shtickiness at bay.

Despite honorable work from Theron, Robb and Stahl, Sleepwalking makes good on its title in a not-so-good way.

Does not know when to quit. Nor does it extract much fun from a cockamamie story provided by George Lucas.

It's less a western than a loping buddy picture.

It's not for all tastes; it requires some patience. The more your own job involves absurd, time-consuming bits of minutiae, the more familiar (and amusing) it'll seem.

Typical of a pretty good Sayles movie. There are few, if any, heroes and villains.

It's unlike any other war film, in any language.

Everything about Kung Fu Panda is a little better, a little sharper, a little funnier than the animated run of the mill.

How big a bastard can Woody Allen build a screenplay around and still generate a modicum of audience goodwill? The answer: not this big.

Who would have believed a film with this much skin and reckless, life-threatening excess could end up a rather dull muddle?

For the record: Josh Duhamel brings some welcome exuberance to the role of the goofball suitor, Hobart. Like Oh, he's fun to watch. This is something never to be underestimated

Damon is becoming one of the truest, most reliable actors of his generation. And Eastwood has more films in development, proving, at 79, that 79 is just a number like any other.

Destined to be remembered as the one that handed the screen Harry his first kiss. Like much of the film, the smooch comes and goes briskly, without a lot of fuss.

The results fall short of the grown-up comedy about seven-year itches it could've been, asking the Hamlet-like question: to scratch or not to scratch?

The script of Shrink, written by Thomas Moffett, plays like "Crash" without the angst or the perpetual racial conflagrations.

I greatly prefer this cleverly sustained and efficiently relentless remake to the '73 edition. It is lean and simple.

It's not just the sound of crickets you hear watching this movie. It's the sound of dead crickets.

Kathy Baker, as Burden's elegantly sodden mother, shows the only sign of interpretive life in this stiff-jointed enterprise. She has about five minutes on screen; she's lucky that way.

But by the end, when Gandolfini and Sarandon sing their sweet, hesitant little duet, it’s clear Turturro knew where he was going all along.

What you’re left with, finally, is the pleasure of a wily director’s company. In much the same way John Huston defied convention and predictability in the third act of his directorial career, with films as odd and fresh as “Wise Blood” and “Prizzi’s Honor,” Lumet is doing the same, right now.

It's a serious drag to see how Ritchie has turned Holmes and Dr. Watson into a couple of garden-variety thugs.

More happens in Eclipse than in the previous "Twilight" zone, "New Moon," and yet it's duller

Most of this doc is content to wander through Franken's recent show-biz resume, to no particular end.

Howard, playing an inspirational and resourceful man up against long odds, really is an inspiration.

Fairly inventive and exceedingly manic.

The Wrestler works for the same reason "Rachel Getting Married" works. The way they're acted, shot, edited and scored, both films deploy a loose, rough-hewn documentary style to great dramatic advantage. The corn isn't hyped. The performances click without going for the jugular.

The best thing about the film is Viggo Mortensen’s performance. A stealth talent of many shadings, Mortensen has a way of fitting easily into nearly any period, any milieu.

The Chinese locations ache with beauty. And when Watts and Norton focus, intently, on Maugham's often dazzlingly vindictive characters, The Painted Veil really does feel like a story worth filming a third time.

Making her feature-film directorial debut, Grant is going for an everyday conversational texture and a sense of life's curveballs. But the results wander and you never really believe them.

As is, it's worth seeing, but you may get frustrated at the way Dellal raises provocative questions about ancestry and prejudice, only to lose them in the shuffle of so many mini-portraits of musicians, getting to know each other and each other's foreign yet familiar musical language, on a long 16-city tour.

Ferrell may well shoulder the blame for Land of the Lost, even if he doesn't deserve it. He did, however, willingly participate in this coarse, sloppy big-screen version of the old Saturday-morning time-warp adventure.

By the time Perfume arrives at its ridiculous mass orgy, staged at the gallows where Grenouille is supposed to meet his end, you really would rather see him meet his end than endure a ridiculous mass orgy.

It's labeled a "true-ish story," and the results are cheeky fun.

Is the movie itself good? Half-good, I'd say - the second, more openly sentimental half.

Clooney remains as game as ever, but the way he and McDormand push the energy here, you feel the strain. Pitt, just floating through, comes off best. He doesn't judge the moron he's playing; he just is.

After the fourth electrocution gag, the 10th smack in the face and the 12th assault on a wee rodent crotch, we could all use something quiet.

I prefer my horror with a chaser of wit, and Severance, a modest but very lively British import, serves it up in harsh but high style.

It is a film, often breathtaking without settling for being pretty, filled with nervous silence.

Human-spirit cliches and all, the movie accomplishes job one: It moves. It also has a choice soundtrack, spiced by the likes of Missy Elliott’s “Shake Your Pom Pom” and Digital Underground’s immortal “Humpty Dance.”

Garcia's calm, steady guidance behind the camera, along with his nicely finessed faith in a very good cast, makes Mother and Child a fuller and more satisfying example of this storytelling style than we've seen lately.

It's all very "Scarface"--the De Palma remake of "Scarface," not the Hawks original. In other words, it doesn't feel modern at all. It feels about a generation late and 400 years short.

Veers perilously close to the concept of poverty tourism.

The movie bumps along from low-grade scare to scare, and it's not lousy, mainly because Virginia Madsen prevents it from being so.

While Lunacy leaves you with the impression that Svankmajer is more expressive with cutlets than he is with his atypically human-dominated dreamscape, some of the images are doozies.

Fundamentally Blades of Glory works; it's full of laughs both subtle and ridiculous.

By the end of Lake of Fire, you know full well you’re in the presence of a deeply conflicted filmmaker, bound to make all sides uneasy, even enraged.

Near the end, we hear Cobain reveal his disdain for adults who “can’t even pretend, or at least have enough courtesy for their children, to talk to one another civilly.” A painful and unexpected moment.

Nina Paley's delicious Sita Sings the Blues finds solace in autobiography and an animated gold mine in the caverns of an ancient Sanskrit epic.