Michelle Orange

The vehicle may get a little jacked up along the way, but its passenger arrives in style: The kid's a star.

If you're like me, and you find yourself retreating to a safe place in your mind whenever human beings are being graphically decapitated on screen, you'll spend the majority of Centurion, horror maestro (The Descent) Neil Marshall's Roman bloodbath, on psychological lockdown.

Well-paced, well-performed and full of visual wows, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader bobbles a hectic story by stopping just short of committing to its grounding themes. Its hardly sacrilege, but it does seem like a shame.

Bichir - who played Fidel Castro in "Che" - resists the pathetic impulse, bringing dignity and distinction to a man who wakes up every morning knowing it's not just his burden but his job to be invisible.

It's all rather casual - not unengaging, exactly, but lacking a narrative energy all its own.

The film's delighted affinity with Ungerer's well-turned perspective does lend an advertorial slickness to what might have been a more challenging study of a fascinating and famously elusive subject.

Despite this careful (and successful) depiction of a warm and decent person, Perry the pop star remains stubbornly two-dimensional.

As it is, The Devil's Double, a handsome and occasionally dazzling thriller with at least one dynamo performance from its star, is ultimately dominated by its style.

Though the movie is largely vanilla in its pleasures, film lovers will eat it up.

An earnest and occasionally poignant attempt to penetrate Rebney's potent man-on-fire image and explore the impact of becoming an Internet sideshow.

Watching True Legend, a wuxia film crossed with classic vaudeville, it's hard to figure out who's borrowing from whom anymore.

Inter-chimp and territorial fighting are facts of nature, but the extreme anthropomorphism of Chimpanzee makes what is natural feel bizarre.

Embedded in The Lie is a sharp look at the moral limbo of a complacent life, the self-defeat of committing by halves, the self-interest of false equivalencies - but only the shallowest attempts are made to chip its themes out.

You'll have to hang on to something to get through the hairpins in The Perfect Host, a chamber piece hostage thriller black comedy undone less by its twists than by the stretches of bad road between them.

Wilson's unflappable, deeply sympathetic affect and aging golden-boy visage have a very Jack-like smoothing effect on the story's rough patches.

It's still a kick to watch Kathleen Turner don a housedress and trade soothing pieties with Richard Chamberlain. The Perfect Family feels like it could have been more than that, but I suppose counting its blessings is the more Christian thing to do.

A pleasant dramatic caper that wears out its welcome, The Concert is the houseguest who sings a little too loudly and too long for his supper, tone deaf to the line between charm and imposition.

What ultimately makes the film compelling is the extent to which it uses the shared language of cinema to telegraph the caustic feelings of a people toward their own history.

In its own way and to its own detriment, William Friedkin's splattery, southern gothic return to the screen seeks to amuse as well as shake and stir.

Fright Night glides into its first climax with some funny touches but without building much structure or suspense.

A few shots of full frontal and an actual devil to point to are poor substitutes for exposure and depth of character.

Has just enough genuine warmth to compensate for the coolness you might feel toward its generic trappings.

A companion film to "Days of Glory," Rachid Bouchareb's 2006 feature about Algerian soldiers who fought for France in World War II, Outside the Law is another historical drama with a heavy heart and a knack for genre.

The story's obvious and various potential is left to stand on its own, and the scares are largely uninspired.

On the whole Bel Ami is highly watchable.

As a character study Solitary Man, like Ben, has no center. What he amounts to is a pretty consistent set of attitudes and behaviors which, while shocking, are not all that interesting.

The main and most enjoyable difference between the second installment and the first is the greater opportunity the latter provides Cassel to sketch some dimension into the coded mythologizing of his character.

I'd say you had to be there, but over the course of Magic Trip we learn that the majority of the people who were there didn't want to be there.

Because the film is overproduced and unconvincing in telegraphing its several gestural themes, its excellent lead performances get lost in what feels like an aesthetic tug of war over what a movie should be, and do.

The goof on New York's awful elite only gets grimmer and less viable as the film goes on.

A film so tightly rigged that even its star's centrifugal charms can't keep you fully checked in.

More helpful is Ice Cube's endearing performance as an aged sparring partner of Leon Spinks and Muhammad Ali who provides cover and advice for Kevin as he tries to hold onto both his wits and the ticket.

Perry weaves together not just the individual stories but their arcs, sustaining the emotional tenor across the progress of nine lives.

Best in show is the final chapter, by "Jesus Camp" directors Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing. "Can A Ninth Grader Be Bribed To Succeed?" is as straightforward a title as the others are oblique.

Despite an admirable mastery of both Russian and French, Mikkelsen has no shot at making a proud (Russian!) musical genius a believably lovesick puppy.

Rao's ultimate achievements - including a balanced, doleful tone and moments of city symphony elegance - are undercut by the arrangement of her characters into narrative castes that cross paths but can't quite connect.

As Mr. Albert Nobbs, Close wears a discreetly waved cap of cropped ginger hair and the bright, blank expression of a small animal caught mid-nibble.

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."

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

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.

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.

Insofar as Ushpiz succeeds in putting the most provocative, salient, and damning aspects of Arendt's work into a lucid context, she exposes the limits of her own approach.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Disappointingly ordinary film.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Dark and queer enough to catch your attention but lacking the story power to hold it, Metropia is an aesthetic in search of an author.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

"Mandela" is not without the capacity to move.

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

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 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.