Michelle Orange

Heavy with pop allusions and references to other crime underworld movies, including The Godfather and Chinatown, Zootopia is impressive in its visual conception and scope: At once straightforward and densely layered with wit and incident, it manages a lively clip and the odd fresh joke.

Directors Jason Sussberg and David Alvarado present a study of two eccentrics without pushing too hard against their premise.

The assessments offered in 21 Years manage to feel like too little arriving a little late.

Generation War seeks the epic, creating multiple, lavishly realized worlds and moving with confidence between them. What it finds of both history and its individuals is less complete.

"Mandela" is not without the capacity to move.

With some focus and critical perspective, The Source Family might have documented more than a spectacle of its time.

It's not that The Watch is terrible – it's not not terrible, but there are sufficient diversions and more punitive ways to spend your evening – but that it's one of those smoke bomb comedies that seems to disappear even while you're watching, leaving no trace of itself behind.

The latest from brothers Mark and Jay Duplass (who co-wrote and directed) seems to expose the limits of a certain kind of realism by stretching them one man-child too far.

There's enough froth along the way to keep the memory of Will Ferrell's recent "Casa Di Me Padre" close at hand.

Girl in Progress feels a little trapped by its own conceits: It plays with the idea that all rebellion is in some sense performed and makes a caricature out of the immature, attention-hungry mother, but it never liberates its characters from their molds.

It would be a real shame, with this much money and this many effects artists, if there were not a few purely visual wows. Wrath manages exactly two, and not where you might expect.

A movie about childhood nightmares that plays too much like an actual, incoherent nightmare to make a good movie, Intruders is a psychodrama divided against itself.

For a movie with a comedic premise this simple – essentially: can you believe we made a movie with a premise this simple? – Casa de Mi Padre can feel pretty exhausting.

Rather than beginning with the assumption that there is no possibility of our coming to know that kind of suffering exactly and using imagination and insight to truly take us inside the Lvov Jews' plight, Holland makes the base conditions of their confinement a narrative as well as aesthetic priority. And frankly it's boring as shit.

Unfortunately, outside of the proxy satisfaction it will give those who are dying to see the grim reaper let loose on the set of a very special episode of "Glee," the pleasures of Don't Go in the Woods can't quite compensate for its straggly bits.

Number of chipmunks who speak fluent chola when necessary: three. Number of Spider-Man/Pepe Le Pew mash-ups I can't really get into: one.

There's something immobile at the center of The Lady, a kind of Botoxed biopic with an unlikely director - Luc Besson - manning the syringe.

The film is being released in both 2- and 3-D, and from what I could tell the 3-D version is still almost 50-50. What use is made of the technology is hardly worth the effort, unless you've always wanted to experience a cascade of cheesies in 3-D.

The result is the double shrift of a thinly sketched background and a story that has trouble standing up on its own.

Tainted by a script (by Jon Lucas and Scott Moore) so risibly broad it makes "Wedding Crashers" look like Bergman in the Hamptons.

Like the recent "Perrier's Bounty," The Guard feels like it might play better at home than overseas.

Like the Inuit and their many words for "snow," Jake has a thousand squinty faces and they all mean "Bugger off."

Though the picture is lovingly and often quite strikingly shot and styled, there are too many dangling and swiftly clipped threads for the film to amount to more than another tasteful Sunday matinee set against one of the worst atrocities of the 20th century.

The scenes between the young actresses are the film's most compelling: Both first-timers, Manamela and Makanyane are possessed of extraordinary faces and plain attitudes.

The film is so busy rifling through genres that it fails to develop a coherent flavor of its own.

I found myself forgetting The Art of Getting By as it unfolded, as though the Looney Tunes art department were two steps behind the characters, rolling up the scenery like so much carpeting.

Despite its tai chi pace and genre-friendly characters, it's almost impossible to tell what's happening in the intriguing, intractable Road to Nowhere.

Portman is also a producer of Hesher; it is the first of her new company's films. It's not too tough to see what might have drawn a producer to the project: The story's mix of the mythical and the mundane has become an indie staple, and Hesher's edge might have proved artful instead of shredding everything in its path. For any actress, however, the part of Nicole is embarrassingly thin.

Because his character is never clear, Manolo's choices lack emotional interest and narrative urgency.

Despite heavy-handed characterizations, Devine and Bassett make their stake in the union felt, and it's anything but superficial.

As an insult comic, Madea has gone the way of her low-hanging bosom. There's little pleasure in watching her go off, and Perry's direction is reliably drab: Sitcom setups dominate, with strange blown-out lighting occasionally swapped in for the flat tones of a WB soundstage.

The puffy high tones of medieval fantasy punctured by the flatly vulgar and colloquial - is the film's central comic vein, one McBride taps it like it's never been tapped before.

Though the film concerns events contained within the roughly 50 square blocks of the East Village, it suffers from the narrative equivalent of urban sprawl.

A concerted effort to make a scary movie without spilling a drop of blood, Insidious is earnest to the point of suffocation about scaring you silly.

Beastly manages to show you all the ways it might have worked by missing every available mark, sometimes by the gaping expanse between Alex Pettyfer's ears, sometimes only by the feline curl of Vanessa Hudgens' smile.

It goes down like a canned but genial '80s comedy: Without fanfare or much nutrition; part of your balanced breakfast.

It's tailored more to a gamer's eyes and expectations than a moviegoer's. On the whole the scenes play like levels, with one connecting in only the most basic way to the next.

Just Go With It attempts to merge farce and romantic comedy with the Sandler sensibility, and the result is a story that evades where it should engage and a whiplash tone that dispirits when it should delight.

The Dilemma is bad in a way that seems to parody all the ways in which a film like, say, "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" was good.

Disappointingly ordinary film.

This latest is grim stuff: Little Fockers hardly bothers with finding a reason to exist, although one might assume a focus on the abiding hilarity of life with small children. That assumption would be wrong.

On the whole the film is not much fun to watch. A job is a job, though; Yogi Bear did little to make it more than that.

Though based on the Hemingway novel published 25 years after his death, Hemingway's Garden of Eden feels more like the result of an ungodly alliance between Harlequin house writers and the cut-and-paste masterminds at A&E Biography.

The film presents the rare instance of a true story that has been fictionalized and yet seems bent on cleaving to its least useful facts.

Somewhere in there is a little blonde girl and her dreamy princeling, but damned if I could see them through the dreck.

It's difficult to get a firm grip on most of what Disco and Atomic War, constructed in a mish-mash collage style, has to offer.

It's hard to tell what Wild Target is offering, besides the pleasure of its company.

Chastain, an incandescent redhead with a heart-shaped face and round, shining eyes, does more justice to the part than it deserves.

Like the recent and only slightly less fantastical "Never Let Me Go," Inhale manages little more than a gesture toward untying its bundled moral knots.

The story is so bounteous that Goldwyn can't quite get a grip on it.

The writing and directing debut of Italian actress Marta Mondelli, is a classic example of a director who wanted to make a film but lacked a story that demanded telling.

Straining for a timeless, family-friendly tone, Allen winds up with something closer to an unironically -- i.e. absurdly -- wholesome rehash of "Leave it to Beaver."

The disappointment here doesn't have much to do with Wong doing America--he's been doing America for years, even in Chinese--but with Wong doing Wong, and not up to his own standard.

Mostly it's frustrating; the film is an episodic jumble that runs hot and cold not in some implied thematic synchronicity with its subject's character but as part of a misguided approach that assumes the audience will find whatever Mesrine does, in whatever order and with whatever emphasis, inherently fascinating.

Kári relies too heavily on the fleeting rewards of situation for the film to come together as an involving story.

Over-narrated by Kiefer Sutherland in full "this is extremely important and also very, very cool" mode, from its first self-important minutes Twelve seems as if it can't possibly be serious. Would that it were not.

Defiantly unwatchable if occasionally transfixing, the film is essentially the home movies of three marauding burnouts.

Peepli Live opens out slowly to encompass several factions of Indian society, including the press, local, state, and federal politicians, and the shady elements binding them all together. It's a meticulously engineered design that a show like The Wire took several years to execute; here the strain shows within the first half hour.

The degree to which they are willing to share their bodies with the world, seeming to reach out for it with each impossible extension, drawing it in with every reeling arabesque, suggests a desire for engagement that is visceral, human, and true in all the ways this film is not.

The film’s most impressive feat may be bringing a cartoon character to life while turning actual humans into 2-D cutouts.

While Survival of the Dead does its best to work up a decent allegorical bent -- this time involving territorial pissing matches within a country under siege -- its power is diffused (and frankly, confused) by its execution.

Despite these two actors' decent - and occasionally very charming - performances the film stacks the odds of the audience caring about Heigl and Duhamel against a narrative vacuum that favors eye candy and cheap effect over emotional logic.

Though he lavishes praise on his subjects for being hyper-masculine and free-thinking, Stone is downright girlish in his devotion, scoffing at charges made against the leaders rather than examining them.

Based on a true story which director Marco Amenta explored 12 years ago in documentary form, The Sicilian Girl feels powered by unfocused preoccupation, rather than by a more compelling creative ambition.

Mirren tricked out in mid-70's pimp wear -- ahead of her time, she even brandishes a cane -- has a certain charm, but novelty alone can't keep Love Ranch's tiresome tropes and plodding storyline from dragging the film down through the Nevada dust.

At 84 he describes himself as being kept alive by young women's laughter and infernal baby-talk, marking off perhaps his final, groaning aspirational standard. Almost makes me feel sorry for those men still trying to keep up.

Designed to be both essential history lesson and costume weeper, Princess Kaiulani comes up short on both fronts: Deadly earnest intentions and lack of dramatic gumption ensure that the story of Hawaii’s favored daughter remains under-told.

The disconcerting thing is how easy it is to fool viewers into being satisfied with not being involved, or even entertained - as long as they can RELATE.

A film loaded with interest that somehow fails to be interesting, La Soga is inspired by true events and not much else.

Relies almost entirely on its tunnel-vision, single-player style for its scares. It’s a strategy that stalls out halfway through, which means it works for twice as long as it should.