Mick LaSalle

Sabotage cannot be called a good movie, not with a straight face. But as an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, it has something.

This society makes no sense except as a metaphor. The social layout of Divergent was supposedly devised so as to maintain peace, but putting people into airtight factions guarantees conflict.

Consists of long stretches of boredom, banal dialogue and contorted metaphors, interrupted by flashes of ugliness. See it if you want to be put off of sex for a month - longer if you're older, and perhaps for years if you're very young.

Though overlong and formulaic, two things keep this street-racing movie of interest all the way to the finish line. The first is Aaron Paul ("Breaking Bad"), a sensitive actor in his first major movie showcase. The second: some extraordinary racing sequences.

All this is interesting, or interesting enough, depending on how you feel about Elaine Stritch. If you're a particular fan, this documentary is a must-see. But for everyone else, a little of Elaine's personality goes a long way.

John Lennon once said that because he was an artist, if you gave him a tuba, he could get something out of it. The Face of Love presents us with Annette Bening and Ed Harris playing the tuba. They get something out of it - they get everything there is to get and more - but it's not enough.

That perception of Fiennes and Gustave is central to the whole enterprise. Without it, the movie just breaks off and flies away. But with it, The Grand Budapest Hotel becomes something wonderful.

The Lunchbox is better as an experience than as a memory. When you're watching it, you can still believe it might actually be heading somewhere.

"300" was an innovative and imaginative action film, but the follow-up, 300: Rise of an Empire, is nothing but a disappointment.

An entertaining film, but also an uncompromising one. It is harsh and not particularly hopeful, and it presents a situation so tangled and contorted, with so many interests in collision, that a lasting peace between the Israelis and Palestinians seems a distant prospect.

After a devastating opening, the movie gets sluggish here and there, but it remains interesting throughout, not just culturally, but as a piece of drama.

Thanks to him (Neeson), I not only enjoyed Non-Stop, but I'd watch it again. Particularly on a plane.

Actually, the only truly obnoxious thing about 3 Days to Kill is that the violent scenes are more congenial than the family scenes, because the teenage daughter (Hailee Steinfeld) here is presented as a sour, nasty brat.

If you think of Pompeii as a ride, a conveyance for special effects, and not anything resembling an emotional experience, indifference can almost be a good thing.

Here is a culture in which female strength, having no outlet, must become distorted or lethal. In Therese and her aunt, we find two manifestations of the same disease.

It is partly a failure, but mostly it succeeds, and the film's aspiration is so enormous that that's enough for a moving experience.

Daring and gutless at the same time. It's daring in that it's a romantic movie that's willing to be coarse. It's gutless in that it refuses to paint any of its characters in a negative light, even temporarily.

RoboCop is no canned remake of the 1987 action film. It's a reimagining that responds to everything that has changed in American life over the past 27 years, addressing new threats and exploiting new anxieties.

The reversion to formula takes a pleasing comedy and drops it down a notch, but That Awkward Moment is still very easy to like.

Stranger by the Lake has no rating, but if it had, it would earn an NC-17 ten times over.

The film depicts a treasure hunt, only in the sense that the movie has to have a running story. But it doesn't really trade on suspense or adventure, and in the few places Clooney pushes it that way, it doesn't feel right.

This is win-win for everybody, but it's too win-win - a setup that short-circuits drama, that shoehorns a situation into a precooked formulation: He's a real prisoner and she's an emotional prisoner, and each offers the other the possibility of freedom.

It's a lovely film that grows along with the characters. At first, it seems like a pleasing but inconsequential comedy. But it deepens as their connection deepens and opens up into a place of poignancy and insight.

Gimme Shelter is an attempt at something grand, and though it doesn't get halfway there, it covers some ground.

August: Osage County was a three-hour play that felt like two hours. It has been made into a two-hour movie that feels like a month.

Lone Survivor, from start to finish, is a tale of disaster, of bad luck and bad communication, perhaps even faulty planning, though that's hard to say. So the movie loses the common touch of average folk trying to get by, while also losing some of the pleasure of watching a crack unit at work.

The documentary is exclusively about Ullmann and Bergman as human beings and about how they got along.

Very good at pointing out the social difficulties surrounding the Dickens-Ternan relationship, the power dynamics within it and the lasting effects of it.

Caught in the Web is of little interest as entertainment, and if it were set in an unimportant or overly familiar country, it would be entirely forgettable.

The Past makes conventional movies feel artificial. Watching the characters interact in this movie feels like "Here is real life," and real life just happens to be strangely compelling.

Elba's performance is commanding and physically meticulous. As he ages through the film, he takes on the stiff gracefulness of the elderly Mandela, so familiar to us from news footage.

If, while watching The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, you start wondering why Ben Stiller is acting strange, the answer comes during the closing credits: "Directed by Ben Stiller."

The story is too slender for its two-hour running time, and the pace is lugubrious, as though everyone in front and behind the camera were depressed. But the biggest obstacle is the protagonist (Joaquin Phoenix), who is almost without definition.

It is the best and most enjoyable American film to be released this year.

The Coens, with this film, are like people who fly all the way to Paris on vacation and then eat at McDonalds every night, because that's what they know. Why bother making the trip at all?

American Hustle is David O. Russell's best film, one that finds him in that ideal zone of spontaneity and complete control.

The film is too intelligent and well-crafted to dismiss and too good to hate. Some people will love it, and at worst, most people will like it a little.

Results are all that matter, and the result here is that The Desolation of Smaug fails in almost every way, as a story, as an adventure, as a piece of art direction and as a visual spectacle.

Only when it makes the claim for Page as a pivotal figure in American culture does it overstate the case and become tiresome.

It's dull in the precise way that life can be dull. To watch it is like sitting in on a staff meeting, listening to people talk on and on and on. Professors are used to talking nonstop, and in a few cases in At Berkeley it's rather astonishing to hear them repeating the same ideas over and over, instead of just coming to a point and stopping.

It shambles and ambles, seemingly without focus or pattern, from one thing to the next. Yet at the same time, it's predictable, not from moment to moment, but in its outlines.

Oldboy is an immersion into pure twistedness. The purity of its twistedness is its saving grace.

Black Nativity is a just-OK feature film that, as an hour-long television special, could have had the makings of a classic.

Homefront has craft and humor behind it, but not much in the way of inspiration. Think of a dessert with lots of calories and no nutrition.

Philomena is a wiser movie than it seems, with much to say about justice and forgiveness and the healing of wounds over time. Actually, it says next to nothing about any of those things, just implies its messages with a light hand.

An authentic piece of Americana. There's no lying or condescending from this director. Nebraska feels pure.

Best in its first hour, when it concentrates on the politics and the specific horrors of Panem. It becomes more conventional in the second half and loses steam, but it's always heading somewhere.

Drama is as much about perspective as it is about events, and the angle provided by How I Live Now turns out to be self-defeating.

The resulting film has some wrong notes and touches of preciousness, but mostly it's a moving and effective presentation of life under Nazism, as seen from an unusual angle.

It's not all bad. It's just part bad: It suffers from cliches and corniness, from the same kinds of scenes played over and over, and from more false endings than the last "Lord of the Rings" movie.

It's good nonetheless, an artfully arranged account of Hemingway's current life, mixed with footage shot by her late sister Margaux for a 1983 documentary about the family.

As good as The Motel Life is for the actors, that's how bad it is for the viewer.

The limits of Dallas Buyers Club are the limits most true stories come up against, which are the facts. A good story lands and reverberates. In real life, stories have a way of just stopping and leaving you a bit unsatisfied. The latter is what happens in this movie, but perhaps that couldn't be avoided.

Bigger is not always better. Thor: The Dark World pumps up the action and special effects and loses some of the human element that made the original "Thor" something charming and unexpected. True, this sequel gets better as it goes along, but that's a very steep climb just to arrive at not bad.

It's a gallant battle against flawed material, and Hirschbiegel fights it to a draw.

Despite its general intelligence and worthy performances, Kill Your Darlings makes it difficult to see how the Beats ever caught on.

Last Vegas is an entertaining movie with a lot of integrity, and it gives all of its actors - all heavyweights and Oscar winners - real moments to dig in and play something.

Make no mistake, Blue Is the Warmest Color constitutes a breakthrough, in addition to being the best film of 2013.

12 Years a Slave has some of the awkwardness and inauthenticity of a foreign-made film about the United States. The dialogue of the Washington, D.C., slave traders sounds as if it were written for "Lord of the Rings." White plantation workers speak in standard redneck cliches. And yet the ways in which this film is true are much more important than the ways it's false.

Both women are excellent, and they, as much as the movie's whodunit elements, hold the viewer until the finish.

There is history as it's remembered, and then there's history as it happened. This documentary gives us the latter, and it's a true education.

It's possible there has never been anything like it. It contains memorable dialogue, vivid characters and several superb scenes, and yet it still manages to be wrong, a complete miscalculation.

It's a tepid, quiet and uneventful film, directed almost in slow motion, with no narrative propulsion and with a succession of very similar scenes. The actors speak softly and pause a lot. And in the background is the steady hum of the soundtrack.

Director Doug Hamilton was given extraordinary access from the very beginning, so that we see Green Day composer and lead singer Billie Joe Armstrong having some of his initial meetings with Broadway director Michael Mayer, who conceived the show.

In a way, the new Carrie is almost too easy to enjoy. Everything discordant and all the nagging weirdness and strange feelings surrounding the original have been smoothed down, and what we're left with is a well-made, highly satisfying and not particularly deep high school revenge movie.

Not entirely successful or appealing - not exactly a delightful evening in the company of scintillating characters - but interesting all the same.

So chalk Escape Plan up as a pretty good action movie given an extra edge by the intelligent use of its two main actors.

As a movie, Escape From Tomorrow is at best pretty good, but the way it was made makes it something unique, possibly memorable.

That's a lot of talent and star power at play here, made all the more conspicuous in that they don't really get much to work with. Not only is the movie just so-so, but the parts themselves aren't much.

Rarely do two lines go by without Fellowes changing something, always for the worse.

This is an intense and complicated story, and the film doesn't rush it. It lets it unfold and build, methodically.

The chief virtues of Parkland are journalistic in the best sense.

Runner Runner is less than mediocre, but it's not repellent, which means that to watch it is to root for it - and to be disappointed.

See Gravity in theaters, because on television something will be lost. Alfonso Cuarón has made a rare film whose mood, soul and profundity is bound up with its images. To see such images diminished would be to see a lesser film, perhaps even a pointless one.

A sturdy and sophisticated crime drama from the Philippines that takes a pretty gruesome situation and enriches its presentation with lots of human detail.

The fortunate thing about for Inequality for All is that, for all its good information and useful insight, it also has an appealing person at its center: Robert Reich, the economics expert and Berkeley professor who was also the labor secretary under Bill Clinton.

Neither does it help that, despite the wit and literacy of Enough Sad, its form is straight out of a teen romance: A cool kid starts dating someone less cool, and then engages in some elaborate deception that, if found out, will threaten the progress of young love. The funny thing is, if Enough Said were converted wholesale into a high school romance, the characters' behavior might ring more true.

Don Jon deserves praise for wearing its message lightly and yet for daring to present such a lecture in today's Internet-drenched environment. Gordon-Levitt may be blithe in discussing pornography, but his movie nonetheless asserts that porn is addictive and destructive, that it intrudes on intimacy, and that it short-circuits the capacities for interaction and also, ultimately, for pleasure. That's a serious subject and a committed viewpoint, handled with wit and intelligence.

This is a special movie. For almost 20 minutes, Drinking Buddies does almost nothing to indicate where the story is going or whether there is even going to be a story. And yet everything onscreen is interesting, because of the truth of the emotion and the specificity of detail.

Any director who sees Short Term 12 will want to cast Larson in something. This movie puts her on the map.

In addition to Bana and Hall, Jim Broadbent is outstanding in a couple of scenes, as a government official, watching from the sidelines and offering warnings and advice. Broadbent is somehow menacing, pathetic and persuasive all at the same time.

The pleasures are intermittent but can be located: Jennifer Coolidge, as Jane's travel companion, is funny even when the script isn't, and Feild is a nice stand-in for Colin Firth in the Austen hero department.

The chief asset of Ain't Them Bodies Saints is Rooney Mara, who gets more interesting with every movie.

The result is an original picture, not entirely successful, but successful enough, and delightful in its ability to surprise viewers, and juggle tones and keep every ball in the air. The World's End has the aura - and this might only be an attractive illusion - of something imagined whole, in a burst of inspiration, rather than as something labored over.

For starters, it's a movie to make you happy to see the next movie written, directed and starring Lake Bell. She has an engaging presence and has a distinct comic sensibility.

At its best, it's a good picture, and at its worst, it's almost good.

A weird mix of the refreshing and the dispiriting, Kick-Ass 2 is appealing in its brutal honesty and repellent in its honest brutality.

A nice idea for a movie, but has a mostly silly script and some of the craziest and most laughable casting imaginable. But the movie's main challenge is a simple one: It is very difficult, next to impossible, to build a movie around an inert, inactive character.

Even if a quarter of what Boreman claimed was true, she had a lot more coming to her than a sympathetic hearing and much prettier actress playing her onscreen. She practically deserved an apology from the male sex, and that, in a way, is what this movie is.

The film provides an intelligently imagined future world.

Original, truthful and moving.

Get past the comedy and there's something almost weird at the movie's core - a deep cynicism about family and a longing for family, both at the same time.

Blanchett in Blue Jasmine is beyond brilliant, beyond analysis. This is jaw-dropping work, what we go to the movies hoping to see, and we do. Every few years.

It's a complete mess, the spectacle of filmmakers blowing up their movie and everything in it, because they can't think of anything else to do.

About halfway through Red 2, in the midst of all the laughs and action, suddenly Anthony Hopkins shows up, and he doesn't care one bit that nobody is going to notice his acting in a movie like this. He's going for the Oscar anyway.

A strange movie, in that it has the atmosphere of a comedy and some extreme characters set up to be comical, but there are really no funny scenes.

Ugly, gore-strewn and, ultimately, ridiculous.

The To Do List is a romantic comedy with no romance and little comedy, but with an ugliness of spirit that's surprising and unrelenting.

The Wolverine shows that, while originality would be nice, a little novelty and enthusiasm in the presentation of the familiar can be quite enough.

The problem is the script, which, in scene after scene, contains no surprises.

The movie is modest in its ambition and powerful in its reverberations.

The temptation arises to say something nice about Grown Ups 2 just because it doesn't cause injury. But no, it's a bad movie, too, just old-school bad, the kind that's merely lousy and not an occasion for migraines or night sweats.

If this is the best we can do in terms of movies - if something like this can speak to the soul of audiences - maybe we should just turn over the cameras and the equipment to the alien dinosaurs and see what they come up with.

It represents 2 1/2 of the longest hours on record, a jumbled botch that is so confused in its purpose and so charmless in its effect that it must be seen to be believed, but better yet, no. Don't see it, don't believe it, not unless a case of restless leg syndrome sounds like a fun time at the movies.

There may be better examples of cinematic art in 2013, but for a good time at the movies, it's hard to imagine anything beating this action extravaganza, from director Roland Emmerich, about a very Obama-like president.

Don't believe the weak coming-attractions trailer. The inspired pairing of Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy makes for a successful action comedy.

The latest in the wonderful "Before" series does three important things: It breaks out of the courtship formula, yet retains the series' quality, and it moves the lives of Celine (Julie Delpy) and Jesse (Ethan Hawke) forward in ways that are satisfying and believable. True, a romance you once envied might now be a relationship you'd not want to be in, but as long as Celine and Jesse are still talking, there's hope.

Exciting, truly harrowing and smartly directed apocalyptic thriller from Marc Forster ("Monster's Ball"). It's the scariest zombie movie in many years.

This is a pretty good action movie that justifies bringing back the Superman franchise -- a dubious proposition to begin with -- by taking the plight of the superhero seriously. Henry Cavill is charismatic in the lead role, Amy Adams is an ideal Lois Lane and, as the villain, Michael Shannon does the best Michael Shannon impersonation you've ever seen.

This vaguely funny film is also the saddest and most depressing movie of 2013.

Jaden is not ready for his solo spotlight, and the film is the same action over and over. Another bad movie from Shyamalan.

It's stupid but glorious -- Dominic (Vin Diesel) and his crew of high-spirited street racers are hired by an FBI agent to hunt down an international terrorist in London. Ridiculous and entertaining from start to finish.

If the first "Hangover" movie were this awful, there never would have been a Part Two. This is a joyless, unfunny mix of comedy and drama, a complete waste of time, with exactly one good joke in the entire movie. It comes in the first minute. After that, you can leave.

Full of humor, some exciting scenes and some intelligent parallels between the world of the film and the political and moral issues facing us today.

The good news about Baz Luhrmann's adaptation of the Fitzgerald masterpiece is that he doesn't use the novel as a mere pretext for his own visual invention, but genuinely tries to capture the Fitzgeraldian spirit, and for the most part, despite some vulgar lapses, he succeeds.

Violent and nonsensical, with story elements in contradiction, it is lifted up by the efforts of the actors, who try to put a human face on the blockbuster machinery and almost succeed.

Most of this huge-cast extravaganza is a botched farce. When that doesn't work, it turns sentimental. The presence of liked and familiar actors helps make it watchable, but there is no disguising that this is a weak, badly constructed comedy. At least it's short.

After a slow start, this is the rare film that gets better as it goes along. The story, about two scientists working in a post-apocalyptic New York, deepens and builds an intense rooting interest. The action sequences are too much out of a video game, but this is intelligent science fiction -- and it benefits enormously from Tom Cruise in the lead role.

One of the rare films that directly responds to and expresses modern anxieties, this debut feature from director Henry Alex Rubin interweaves the stories of three sets of people, whose lives are upended through various bad things that happen over the Internet -- including bullying and identity theft. A fascinating and riveting thriller.

A superior sports movie, dealing honestly with a great American story.

This remake of the 1981 horror classic starts well, but it soon degenerates into tiresome shock gore that overstays its welcome, despite the film's modest run time. Jane Levy as a heroin addict going through withdrawal is the one bright spot.

Sally Potter's twin interests - in grand world movements and in the grand internal movements in people lives - are effectively brought to bear in Ginger & Rosa, her best film of the decade.

Everybody in Admission is funny - Tina Fey, Paul Rudd, Lily Tomlin, Wallace Shawn - but they're not funny in Admission.

It's that wonderful, totally unambitious yet satisfying thing, a really good movie.

The result is a movie that, like the book, is episodic and has dips in energy but has more than its share of glory and illumination.

Two things hold back Don't Stop Believin' as a documentary. The first is that it presents the world of Journey and the people in it through such a lens of love and light that it begins to seem like a publicity film...The second flaw is that it leaves out vital information. It doesn't, for example, answer the big question, "What happened to Steve?"

The movie reveals itself as not merely dull, but pointless.

All Upside Down has is its love story, which despite the undeniable appeal of Sturgess and Dunst, never ignites. So the movie is like a huge package, wrapped in gold leaf, but containing a 10-dollar toaster. Fine. It's a toaster. It works. It's not garbage. But who can pretend it's not a disappointment?

The movie is pleasant. It's reasonably funny. But the one who gets the real laughs here, the hard laughs, is Carrey, who plays the kind of role he should be playing - a complete lunatic.

The Call might not be a classic for the ages, but for a Friday night? For a movie to take people out of themselves? And to make them marvel at the viewing experience that just happened to them? This one is hard to beat.

That's why the more you like the Judy Garland film, the more you might appreciate Oz the Great and Powerful. Appreciate. Enjoy. Admire. Be glad to see. Have fun with ... But as for love - well, love will be harder to come by.

In the end, probably the best way to watch Emperor is to pretend that the Supreme Command of Allied Forces in Japan after World War II was Tommy Lee Jones. If you do that, the movie works surprisingly well.

The movie has a certain integrity and creates an interesting atmosphere, largely thanks to the soundtrack, of all things, which gives most moments a dreamy undertone.

Bernal is quite good as the young media specialist - it's always surprising to see how strong a presence he is in his Spanish-language films and how he all-but disappears in his American films. Is it a matter of the roles or the language? The jury is still out.

Until this film, these Shin Bet directors had never consented to an interview. Now that they've spoken - and have said the unexpected - we can only wonder if their words will have an influence.

Not the usual action movie. It's too odd for that. Based on a true story, it has the weirdness of real life, which is good. But also like real life, it has that funny way of not making much sense or being all that enjoyable.

In the end, that just might be the takeaway from the "Up" series, that a 28-year-old, say, has more in common with another 28-year-old than with his own incarnation at 70. Who knows? There are mysteries of life captured within the frames of this film that are eluding our grasp. We're still too close to it.

That was probably writer-director Roman Coppola's main responsibility in "Charles Swan," to give the audience a character worth watching. Get that right, and everything else falls into place. Get that wrong, and the audience finds out just how long 84 minutes can be. The answer: really long.

Beautiful Creatures has its metaphysical cosmology worked out, and it gives it to us in doses big enough that we understand its rules and believe in its world, but not so big that it starts to get cute or that we stop caring.

It has a weak story that provides no tension, feeling or interest. Its opening action sequence is just a long, drawn-out dud, filmed by director John Moore in the worst modern style of quick cuts and smeary, jittery photography.

As for the story, it's in some ways inevitable, but it has enough barbs and curves to keep it new. The smartest touch is that the young lawyer is, as a moral entity, a work in progress.

Every single thing wrong with John Dies at the End might have been avoided had John died at the beginning, along with all the other characters, transforming an awful full-length movie into a harmless five-minute short.

Identity Thief is not only not funny. It's negative funny. It's short on laughs, but it will disturb and annoy.

It's a gripping, maddening and thoroughly satisfying thriller, made with artfulness and integrity. Soderbergh sees things in his actors and gets things from them that other directors don't.

There's one really good idea at work in Warm Bodies, which is to take "Romeo and Juliet" and mash it up with a zombie movie.

The thing most people will take away from Stand Up Guys is that it contains Al Pacino's best performance in years. So if you don't think Al Pacino still has it in him, this is a welcome chance to be proved wrong. But here's something interesting. Stand Up Guys also contains Christopher Walken's best performance in years. In addition, the film is extraordinarily well cast, and the acting, even in the smaller roles, is more than noteworthy.

A good action movie, whose title expresses what is, more or less, a recurring motif. It also gives a sense of the film's general attitude toward life. It's a film with no ambition but to get viewers' pulses moving. It does that, and with a fair degree of wit and style.

Quartet is buoyed by the Scottish charm of Billy Connolly, as a lovable flirt and extrovert - he is a delight and also a locus of truth in every scene he's in.

The movie equivalent of an idiot who, to avoid scorn, starts acting like an even bigger idiot, so as to get in on the joke, too...It takes everything and nothing seriously, depending on what the filmmakers think they can get away with at any given moment, and the result, while not painful to watch, is ridiculous.

Mama is skillfully made, and although Chastain is the best thing in it, she's not the only thing in it.

It's never boring, but it lacks a cumulative impact.

Amour is also unforgettable and one of a kind, two hours of torment that, in the end, you will probably not regret.

Josh Brolin plays the leader of the gangster squad as a kind of dedicated dunce, which is appropriate considering their clumsy antics. Ryan Gosling has more nuance as his right-hand man, but Emma Stone is completely out of her element as a slinky film noir heroine, a walking anachronism.

One of the most innovative and best made films of the past year. Every now and then, even Dick Cheney gets to like a great movie.

The first half of My Worst Nightmare contains some of the best comedy and the biggest laughs of the season, and the second half ... eh.

Not Fade Away is a movie by a filmmaker who treasures his memories, cares about social history and relishes getting it right.

Promised Land is a fine place to start appreciating Matt Damon, who always makes it seem as if everybody else is acting and he's just going through the movie being natural.

Fans of Les Misérables wouldn't have minded if the movie were different, but better, or just as effective. The screen version demanded some reconception, some vision to make sense of its existence. Instead, we're left with a film that is conscientious in all its particulars and yet strangely and mysteriously dead.

The most consistently entertaining movie of 2012. It's 165 minutes long and shouldn't be a minute shorter, a film of surprises, both in story and in casting, and of moments of agonizing, teased-out tension. The dialogue is dazzling.

A tough movie about tough people for a tough audience. So prepare to get roughed up a little.

An average action film, made slightly better by Cruise, and more bizarre by Herzog, and more watchable by Pike, but still within the average range, a silk purse that still says oink.

The real problem with This Is 40 is its lack of truth, that Apatow wanted to express something about married life, and it eluded him. After all, no less than Kierkegaard once said that the actual dynamics of marriage are beyond the scope of art, and he was the best movie critic of the 19th century.

If one person survives and 6 million are killed, or one person gets out and 3,000 are crushed, it's not really a happy ending - or even an adequate representation of the larger event. This is precisely the challenge that The Impossible faces and never quite overcomes.

There are laughs throughout, but Guilt Trip isn't joke-happy. The humor is light and well observed, as when Mom keeps playing the audiobook of "Middlesex," and the son gets uncomfortable hearing about anything sexual in front of his mother.

Worth seeing, both for the ways it's timeless and for the ways it encapsulates an era.

The only way Bill Murray could seem less like Franklin D. Roosevelt in Hyde Park on Hudson is if the movie showed him winning a marathon.

If you loved the earlier films, these are moments you will hold on to, but they're very few, and they're not enough.

A small and not particularly ambitious movie, but it's pleasing and exceptionally well made. It was directed by Stephen Frears, and while it's not up there with his best - "Dangerous Liaisons," "The Queen," "High Fidelity," "Cheri" - Lay the Favorite lavishes the same attention on the personal, on relationships, and, like most Frears films, it puts a woman at the center of the story.

It is probably unlike any movie you've ever seen, and in ways both bad and good. It is, by turns, inept and brilliant, shockingly amateurish and inspired. To see it is to sit there for long stretches amazed at how clumsy, fake and misguided it is. But then, five minutes later you might easily be riveted and moved by its awkward brilliance.

As a movie, it's not much. But it's the best showcase for his charm that Butler has ever had.

The Collection is bloody, disgusting and ridiculous, but the one thing it's not is horror, not real horror, not in the sense of tense or scary. It's not cinema, either. It's not even fun.

Brad Pitt is in ecstasy here, despite the cool demeanor throughout. This is an actor who is never better and never happier than when he gets to be seedy, slick his hair back and wear a leather jacket.

Hitchcock isn't ambitious or complicated. It's simple, does what it sets out to do, and gets out before anyone even thinks about checking the time. More movies should be made in its image.

It's a slow-moving fable, with enough story and substance to make for one amazing Imax short. Instead the material is stretched beyond its limits into a long, repetitive and often stagnant 127-minute feature film.

Unfortunately, the characters are so programmatic, the premise so ridiculous and the situations so far-fetched even if you accept that premise that no energy can be built, and the little that's there can't be sustained. Red Dawn is a vigorous but pointless exercise.

As a movie about mental illness, Silver Linings Playbook is more lightweight than lighthearted. But thanks to Lawrence, it does one good thing most movies don't do. It actually gets better as it goes along.

You will look in vain for some definite logic to Holy Motors. You could see it as a metaphor for the actor's life, or a story about the desire to transcend the self. Anything you decide is fine.

You know there is something seriously wrong with Anna Karenina when you start rooting for the train.

Worst of all, in promoting its hero's eccentric journey as a voyage of healing, the movie replaces emotional precision and intellectual honesty with syrupy sincerity and insistence. It turns boring and cute and begs us to love it.

The Details has a light tone, but it's anything but light in purpose. It's committed and passionate, one of the most perceptive and morally persuasive movies of 2012.

Skyfall is a different kind of Bond movie, one that works just fine on its own terms, but a steady diet of this might kill the franchise. One Skyfall is enough.

The experience of watching Daniel Day-Lewis in this role is nothing less than thrilling. This is Lincoln. No need for a time machine, there he is.

For those willing to enter this world and pay attention, A Late Quartet provides distinct and uncommon satisfactions.

The plane crash in Flight must go down as one of the strongest single scenes of 2012: It's extended, detailed, technically and emotionally realistic, and beyond that, it reveals character.

The Sessions is moving. At times, it's even erotic, which is unexpected, to say the least. It sends viewers out of the theater with a heightened sense of the physical and a real feeling for all the things that sex means in human life.

So at the very least, audiences will come away from Chasing Mavericks with a deeper understanding of surfing and an appreciation for surfers.

Despite some weaknesses, a sense gradually emerges in this film- not just an idea, but a strong feeling mixed with an idea - about the dance of good and evil over time.

This is human drama at its most intense and universal. This is the rare film that can change the way you think and see the world.

The movie is achingly slow, and by the time it's over, the story is about where it should have been after about 45 minutes. Then it ends just as it gets good, or as it's starting to.

Director James Ponsoldt knows what his job is here. He keeps the camera on his lead actress and doesn't cut away. For Winstead, Smashed is the doorway to great things.

The bottom line with Andrea Arnold's Wuthering Heights is that the writer-director has taken Emily Brontë's tale of undying passion and rendered it passionless.

There is one thing interesting about Alex Cross, and if you miss this, you've missed the whole movie. It's not the story - it's worse than mediocre. It's not the lead actor - nothing wrong with Tyler Perry, but as an action star he's no Vin Diesel. And it's not the dialogue, which has a clunker every other scene. It's the direction. Notice the direction. Alex Cross is a good example of what a seriously talented director can do with a heaping pile of garbage.

What makes Middle of Nowhere a break-even proposition, rather than something to avoid, is that it deals with an aspect of life and with characters rarely seen in movies.

Is it a comedy if the audience laughs or is it a comedy if laughs were intended, irrespective of whether they're generated? Excuse Me for Living qualifies under the second definition.

Compared with other movies, Seven Psychopaths is clever and inventive enough to be considered a weak success or a modest failure, the kind of effort that usually gets damned with the faint praise of "not bad."

The pure mechanics of Here Comes the Boom land it in an enjoyable, if forgettable, space.

Taken 2 is like a textbook on how to make beautiful, successful and highly satisfying junk-food cinema. When it's just a plot point, the information gets tossed out as fast and as forcefully as possible. Time is lavished only on the things that matter.

The movie has a saving grace in that it breaks formula. Its concerns are not the usual movie concerns, and it takes what might have been a standard plot in some unexpected directions.

Butter is a misfire. At 90 minutes it feels inflated, and though clearly intended as funny, it's difficult to locate, except in the most general terms, the focus of the movie's satire, and there's not a laugh to be had.

A movie whose main virtue was its honesty ultimately lands in a place that feels canned and unsatisfying. But on the way there, Backwards isn't so bad.

The casting is carefully considered, as well, from Willis, whose Old Joe is even more dangerous than Young Joe, to Emily Blunt, who goes American this time and plays a young mother with a winning warmth and vulnerability.

For sure, this is a cause movie - sometimes it even feels that way - in favor of charter schools and against the teachers unions. Still, Won't Back Down is reasonably fair in its approach.

If it were just a middling effort, The Master would be a lot less frustrating. But the latest from writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson has greatness in it - two extraordinary performances, intuitive and revealing photography and scene setting, and a distinct directorial sensibility that hovers between sobriety and satire. Yet all those virtues are undermined by a narrative that goes all but dead for the last hour.

This documentary is not just interesting, but timely.

At its best, the film uses fishing as a window into the internment experience. At its worst, it uses the internment story as the backdrop for a documentary on trout fishing.

An agony of bad plotting and whimsical, lifeless scenes.

Little White Lies is never boring, always watchable, always reasonably rewarding. It's just that, when it's over, 2 1/2 hours seems too big an investment for just pretty good.

How many doubts can Lee possibly cram into one motion picture? Red Hook Summer has almost too many to count: moments that go clunk, followed by others that go clang; actors who talk as if reading their lines off cue cards or rehearsing them for the first time; and set pieces that lie there.

Hillcoat and Cave give us more than an action story. They create a world.

A hard, funny and realistic movie about the future.

There's not really a movie there, nothing that sustains itself from scene to scene and nothing that's worth watching from beginning to end.

It's extremely funny, one of the funniest films of 2012, with a particularly winning style - far-fetched, extreme and nonstop.

It's as if he has been trying to express something, or to make his own particular kind of good movie, for 10 whole years. Now he has.

Sparks' strengths include not just a powerful voice but also a radiant niceness, and that becomes part of the story.

Here's the thing: This movie would be easy to mock as maudlin and self-important, but there's something about it that can't be dismissed. The monologues may be theatrical and presentational - director Anne Emond made this film when she was 29 and too young to be subtle.

Easy Money takes its time telling us how all the fortunes of all three men intersect, and the movie's failing - or at least its significant imperfection - is that when the stories and lifelines do converge, the results just aren't satisfying.

The Bourne series ended with the last installment, and now comes a 135-minute death rattle called The Bourne Legacy. It's a peculiar movie, both over-plotted and under-plotted, encumbered by layers of detail and yet with no details invested in or developed.

It's not much of a comedy - even Steve Carell, as the therapist, plays it straight here. But it's very effective as a cautionary tale.

The big disappointment of The Babymakers is that it doesn't come close to being worthy of its two stars, Paul Schneider and Olivia Munn.

The hardest thing to describe is tone, but it's the thing that most sets Killer Joe apart and makes it one of the most interesting and satisfying movies of the year so far.

The Well Digger's Daughter is old-fashioned in the best sense, almost cozy in its conventions.

As far as formulaic, empty and disappointing comedies go, The Watch is far from the worst. About every seven or eight minutes, perhaps a dozen times over the course of the picture, the movie generates a medium-size laugh. Not a big laugh.

A movie about the power of the imagination really becomes a movie about a certain element of surrender - about the release of power - that is practically a requirement for loving somebody.

The word "delightful" is thrown around so much that it often means nothing. Movies that truly have the capacity to delight - that amuse and lift the spirits and create a warm feeling - are rare. Romantics Anonymous is one of those rare delights.

The subtitle of Hardy's novel was "A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented," and that's the approach taken here.

Moments are stretched. Every recollection must be illustrated by a flashback. Character motivations shift on a dime, and if you understand even half of what's going on - not generally, but specifically - you'll be doing better than most.

The resulting film has the integrity and the ugliness of the truth. It's not true because it's ugly; no, it's ugly because it's true.

For about an hour of its running time, The Magic of Belle Isle seems like a tiresome, sentimental and slow-moving story about a grumpy old man redeemed by the sweet spirit of a rural town and by the nice family that lives next door. But no, it's even worse than that.

Other films about Marie Antoinette have had their moments, but Benoît Jacquot's Farewell, My Queen is the first to give a real sense of what it must have felt like to live inside that palace as the walls were caving in.

Nobody Else But You takes a novel concept and a willing leading lady and squanders both through drab, lifeless storytelling.

As it stands, her music gets under your skin and makes you feel good - and the movie makes you feel good about Katy Perry.

Suffice it to say, the issues here are bigger than one woman's story.

This is the second-best Spider-Man movie yet made. In the previous trilogy, only "Spider-Man 2" surpasses it.

If it falls short of greatness, it's not by much - and it could end up growing with the years. At the very least, it is exceptional and one of the best and most original pictures to come along in 2012.

Yet here's what's strange: As awful as To Rome With Love is - and the awfulness is unmistakable - it is, as an experience, not unpleasant. You will probably see several better movies this year that you will enjoy less. It's a mess, but it's Rome. It's a mess, but it's Woody Allen.

The impressive thing that Oslo, August 31st does is that it somehow relates what Anders is going through to the city of Oslo in general. Anders is not a metaphor for Oslo - that would be cheap and silly. Rather, he is just one more story in the naked city, and we see him against the backdrop of other people, having quite different lives.

In terms of story and emotional power, Brave comes up short.

Instead of getting smirky and campy and blowing out the joke in the first few scenes, Grahame-Smith and director Timur Bekmambetov straight-face it. They ask themselves, well, what would it be like if the main struggle of Lincoln's life were with vampires intent on taking over the new world? And they answer the question as realistically and soberly as they can within this loony framework.

This movie is not recommended for people who need to know what's going on. The Woman in the Fifth, an English and French language film from the Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski, is watchable and enjoyable, but it's fairly impenetrable, and it gets more peculiar as it goes along.

Lister is quite funny and engaging. It's just too bad that some of that screenwriting wit couldn't have been shared with the movie's protagonist.

It's brisk and assured and never begs the audience's indulgence. No time is wasted. The movie is, at every moment, either funny or pushing the story forward, or both.

It's monumentally coarse and vulgar, aimed at the mentality of a 14-year-old locked inside his father's liquor cabinet, and nothing about it is funny, least of all Adam Sandler.

There's no music to tell you what to think. It's just three good actors and one director's merciless powers of observation.

What distinguishes Pattinson in the role is the sense he conveys of someone roiling and churning beneath a surface that is almost, but not quite, calm.

Try as it might, the movie is hardly profound, and the murky atmosphere and the leaden pace drag things down.

Some of the elements in the film are inexplicable and some are undeveloped, but there are a handful of nicely crafted set pieces.

If For Greater Glory were a person, it would be wearing two different socks. It is a scattered mess, as earnest as a folk song, but like a folk song that goes on for two hours and 23 minutes. Not only does it never justify its epic length, it gets even the small things wrong.

Suffers from a problem in its rhythm. It's not that its pace is too slow, but that it's too regular, and this lack of syncopation makes it feel slow.

There is no denying that every time Gyllenhaal steps into a frame she takes a sleeping movie and wakes it up.

The style is documentary-like, in that it feels like life and that anything might happen. There is also a nice sense of being in the midst of the action and right there in the room with the characters.

Whores' Glory, is as sad a film as you can possibly see. To experience it is to be haunted by the bleakness and ugliness of prostitution, the hopeless trap of it, and the defeat of love that it represents.

So you get comments from the likes of Paul Rudd, Adam Carolla and Judd Apatow, all trying to be funny, but not one says anything remotely amusing or worth hearing.

Elles has about half of a story stretched to feature length, and it manages to end just as a good story might have been kicking in. But that is often the way with foreign cinema: The Europeans know how to do sex, but we know how to do stories.

You should have the opportunity to experience the movie the way I did, in complete ignorance, enjoying its every weird turn.

In the end, What to Expect, isn't an inspired movie, but a manufactured one, but one with some laughs and some moments. Plus, it has Chris Rock, who gets to liven things up as the ringleader of a beleaguered fathers' group.

A useless film in every possible way.

There are times, not too many, when the movie drags. But when you consider all the pitfalls avoided, and all the laughs and pleasures it provides along the way, Dark Shadows is a satisfying and skillful effort.

One's enjoyment of The Fairy depends a lot on knowing why it's worth seeing. It's a comedy with two or three big laughs, but it's not side-splitting. Nor does it have a particularly compelling story. Its appeal is rather in watching people who have devised their own original style of comic performance and have taken it to a rare level of refinement.

In the long history of bad movies about bad illnesses, A Little Bit of Heaven just might be the worst.

A rare reminder from movies that the grand emotions are not only for the young and the middle-aged. They're the sweetness and torment of life until the last light goes out.

The story has its moments, and yet there is something about this tale of a serial killer's patterning his crimes on Poe's most gruesome works that doesn't completely satisfy.

For the most part, The Five-Year Engagement has charm and emotion.

The name of this documentary is Surviving Progress, but that's only because "The Sky Is Falling and We're All Gonna Die" wouldn't fit on a marquee.

There is no diverting from strict chronology, no point the documentary wants to make that requires moving forward and back through time. It just inches ahead, one year to another, sometimes one day to another. By the middle, each time a year changes, it's a relief.

Though it is funny - at times, laugh-out-loud funny - this comedy is by and for adults.

You can almost say it simulates an experience of brain injury in the audience: Nothing adheres, nothing connects. It's just nonstop cuteness, poses and emptiness - with nothing logically following from one moment to the next. It would be exaggerating to call it torture, and yet why split hairs?

The Lady is a portrait in moral and physical courage, a sort of analysis of what constitutes greatness.

Most of the time Lockout is pleasant enough, not something to recommend to a friend, but enjoyable in the moment. Guy Pearce has a lot to do with that, as the most impervious action star imaginable.

It's just not enough to say that The Three Stooges is the death of comedy. Rather, it's the death, burial, putrefaction and decomposition of comedy. It is where comedy, once alive, ends up as dust blowing in the wind, like something out of a really bad Kansas song.

To my eyes, the whole thing looks sad, like something people might cling to in the absence of religion - or a kind of religion in itself, minus dogma or salvation, but with lots of people standing around dressed like total goofballs.

The movie is harsh, nasty and vulgar like you wouldn't believe. And often, it's hilarious.

It's a strange film, very original and very good. Just by virtue of the subject matter, it can't help but be erotic, and yet eroticism is not the movie's purpose.

Rachel Weisz - in what has to be the performance of her career, and there have been lots of good ones - plays an intelligent woman in the grip of a lust that's too big to handle or suppress. She can either ride the tiger or be devoured.

This is a movie in which whole sequences consist of nothing but guys fighting stiff computer images. Such scenes would be boring even were they done well, but these scenes aren't done well.

Cleverness won't carry it. Nothing less than overarching vision is required; otherwise, the audience will laugh for 10 minutes and then start to check out. And that pretty much states the problem of Mirror Mirror.