Owen Gleiberman

Sparkle is never more than an overheated mediocrity. The one thing it isn't, however, is dull.

The movie should have been called Diary of a Wimpy Forrest Gump. It's genuinely soft-hearted (you're all but guaranteed to cry) but mush-brained, too.

Red Hook Summer has some fantastic gospel numbers, but as drama it's a casserole that never comes together.

The film comes off as an elaborately didactic and overheated lecture.

Perhaps the best thing about the film is that it doesn't let those other players in the political process off the hook: the voters.

This one is somberly kinetic and joyless.

360 has a circular structure that's deftly pleasing, though the human drama is just facile enough to make it seem, in the end, a little too much like connect the dots played with people.

This comedy about a couple who can't get pregnant is stuck between Judd Apatow's humane raunchiness and the American Pie series' smirky broadness.

I will say that it's been a while since a romantic comedy mustered this much charm by looking this much like life.

Klown, a comedy from Denmark about two men on a canoe trip who descend into all sorts of desperate debauchery, demonstrates how the semi-improv, jitter-cam mode of filmmaking has gone from being a style to a tic - a way to disguise how unreal a movie can be.

The Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei has achieved a prominence that makes him, in effect, the Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn of the Twitter age. He's also the least stuffy of dissidents, and Alison Klayman's stirring, important documentary catches his complex humanity.

Ruby Sparks is a romantic comedy that takes off from a premise so fanciful it needs every bit of the freshness that Dano brings it.

The Well-Digger's Daughter pushes a number of nostalgia buttons at once, most of them pleasing.

A succulently entertaining movie that invites you to splash around in the dreams and follies of folks so rich they're the 1 percent of the 1 percent. It's like a champagne bath laced with arsenic.

Easy Money is not merely an early-career curiosity. It's one of the best underworld films I've seen in years, and Kinnaman gives a fantastic performance in it.

As a sinister ESP showman, Robert De Niro is corny and fun.

The shots of urban traffic jams have more spark than the story, which skips from a pregnancy to the filming of a musical to murder - without convincing us of any of it.

Benoît Jacquot's film is shackled to a blah bourgeois leftism.

The documentary equivalent of a page-turner.

The film keeps throwing things at you, like a colorful ape pirate (Peter Dinklage) and a fun hallucination sequence. That said, the laughs are starting to feel prehistoric.

Donovan, acting with ironic reserve, hands the movie to Morse, who makes his character the kind of crank you can care about just because he's so abysmally lost.

Part of Me works hard to prove it's more than a glorified infomercial, and one reason it is more is that Perry has a startling story to tell.

Savages is Oliver Stone doing what he should have done a long time ago: making a tricky, amoral, down-and-dirty crime thriller that's blessedly free of any social, topical, or political relevance.

People Like Us demonstrates how a drama can be heartfelt and bogus at the same time.

The movie is Mike's story, and Channing Tatum proves himself a true movie star. His Mike glides through the world with the ease of a god, and on stage he's electrifying.

The movie is fascinating, though it smacks its own lips a bit too much at the tackiness of freak '70s stardom.

Fourteen years after "Happiness," why is director Todd Solondz still mucking around with the sort of idiot neurotic dweeb who makes George Costanza look like George Clooney?

Woody Allen has become such a beguiling travel agent that he rolls through these stories with a relaxed effervescence that is rather infectious.

Never underestimate the importance of guy-on-guy sentimentality in the Adam Sandler universe. It's his way of making his fans feel as if he's high-fiving them, or maybe giving them a group hug. But Sandler, bottom line, is too good at playing louts like Donny to spend this much energy getting us to like them.

We're given an intimate seat to this wildly democratic - and creepily messianic - spectacle.

Most of the numbers in Rock of Ages are flatly shot and choreographed, and they look as if they'd been edited together with a meat cleaver. With rare exceptions, they don't channel the excitement of the music - they stultify it.

Gerwig is adorable, but that's both good and bad, as the movie can't stop cuing us to see that Lola's winsomeness will rescue her.

Safety Not Guaranteed is a fable of ''redemption,'' and it's too tidy by half, but it is also very sweetly told.

The story in Madagascar 3 is functional, but the antically civilized spirit is infectious.

A tastefully overbearing franchise fairy tale with a handful of ravishing touches.

The film can be rambling and glib, yet it's no mere crime drama. It captures a middle-class French society that looks more humane than ours, but is just as messed up.

The best thing about the movie is that it keeps drawing conclusions in opposite directions.

As sociology, it's skin-deep, but if you're a parent or preparing to be one, you might see yourself in a few of these folks and have a good time doing so.

The movie gets mired in these deceptive mechanics. It shows no curiosity about the hatred, so the characters seem less than whole.

Bobcat Goldthwait's new movie is a burlesque that turns into a harangue that turns into a rampage.

Depp's performance is more than just funny - it's ghoulishly endearing.

The film, devising events that led up to his mysterious death in 1849, is also the most gruesomely literal-minded of period detective stories.

In terms of storytelling, The Avengers is for the most part a highly functional, banged-together vehicle that runs on synthetic franchise fuel. Yet the grand finale of CGI action, set in the streets of New York, is - in every sense - smashing.

Safe has more action than intrigue (or logic), and it's boilerplate vicious. It may satisfy Statham's fans, but they - like he - would do well to enlarge their expectations.

Sound of My Voice doesn't follow through on everything it sets up, yet it has a hushed and revealing psycho-intensity. It also has an oh-wow Twilight Zone ending that truly made me go, ''Oh, wow.''

A lively, original, and scattershot-hilarious ramble of a Judd Apatow production.

The Lucky One doesn't have the schlock rapture of "The Notebook" (the one Sparks adaptation that has really worked). The trouble with the movie isn't that it's too girly-swoony; it's that it tries to achieve emotion through glowy sunsets and a paint-by-numbers script.

Lawrence Kasdan's comedy strikes a note of rib-nudging blah coyness that feels very 1987.

Marley was directed by the gifted Kevin Macdonald (The Last King of Scotland), who shows off his chops not by doing anything dazzling - the film is documentary prose, not poetry - but by treating Marley as a man of depth and nuance, of inner light and shadow.

All three of the leads get very close to the Stooges' old looks and personalities, but they do more than impersonate; they inhabit.

Think Like a Man is so busy tracking courtship as if it were a science project that the bite-size love stories lack spontaneity.

He (Spurlock) takes Comic-Con seriously. He talks to Kevin Smith, Harry Knowles, and other famous grown-up geeks, but mostly he follows a handful of people whose dream it is to pass through the fan/professional looking glass and carve out a place for themselves in the industry of fantasy.

American Reunion is about the comedy of middle-class men who can't be satisfied with sex until it looks like porn.

For a movie like Wrath of the Titans, which is basically "Gladiator" crossed with "Lord of the Rings" crossed with a special-effects demo reel (call it Lord of the Rinky-Dink), he's (Worthington) the perfect actor.

The film is sketchy as biography, but it proves an aging artist can still crackle with the electricity of youth.

He can barely skate, but it hardly matters: As a goon, he's a genius.

As long as the MPAA is issuing its cavalier decrees, though, they're the ones acting like bullies.

One of Dafoe's deadbeat friends observes, ''The world's been ending ever since it started, man,'' and you may think the same thing about this movie.

Director David Gelb pulls back the curtain on the kitchen rituals of sushi, inviting us to experience the savory-smooth sensation of ''umami,'' roughly translated as ''Ahhh!''

I do wish that Evans were a better storyteller. When he isn't turning mad-dog violence into visual rock & roll, The Raid shreds narrative coherence to ribbons.

The movie is never dull, though, and Cage acts every moment as if he means it. As the cult's leader, Guy Pearce, looking deeply creepy with a shaved head, has a cruel playfulness.

When it stays in the classroom, Detachment is a scrappy testament - to the futility of even trying to reach students who are cut off from the possibilities of knowledge, and to the way that our teachers are slowly being driven nuts.

If you take the film on its own terms, as a kind of Elvis movie dipped in guacamole, it's quirkily engrossing. Ferrell is a good straight actor for the same reason that he's an inspired comedian: He commits himself to every moment.

In theory, A Thousand Words should draw on its star's abilities as a physical comedian, but Murphy, miming his order for a triple latte at Starbucks, comes off like Charlie Chaplin on crystal meth; he's strenuously unfunny to watch.

You can have a reasonably nice time at Salmon Fishing in the Yemen if you accept that it's the tidiest movie imaginable to ever say that falling in love is like swimming upstream.

Nothing in John Carter really works, since everything in the movie has been done so many times before, and so much better.

Project X, likewise, serves up the frat house/Spring Break/Snooki-and-Sitch-on-a-bender antics that many in the audience will have been staring at for years, and implies that it's breaking down bold new barriers of misbehavior. In the end, though, it ain't nothin' but a party.

Is it possible for an actor to go through the motions even as he's going over the top? In Being Flynn, Robert De Niro does phoned-in scenery chewing.

The movie is like a less original "WALL•E," but it's still vibrant and touching.

Perry holds back on the finger-wagging, eye-bulging tantrums. There were moments when I was grateful for that. There were others, like the kissy scenes between Perry and Newton, when I began to miss them.

Overheated yet bizarrely opaque criminal character study from Belgium.

It's all very sub-Tarantino showy and empty - at least, until the head-scratching climax, which tries to be "Eyes Wide Shut," "The Wicker Man," and "The Twilight Zone" all at once, but only makes you wish that you were watching one of them instead.

Throw in a nagging divorce settlement, an unplanned murder, and Billy Crudup - hilarious! - as a raging security man, and Jill Sprecher's film enjoyably fuses cleverness and sheer desperation.

For a documentary that's almost engineered to lift your heart, Undefeated is very well done.

The most original and excitingly executed wow-factor-meets-handheld-video feature since "Blair Witch" itself. It's also a movie that rebuilds the power of special effects from the ground up.

Compared with a superior potboiler like "Salt," which messed with your brain in entertainingly far-fetched ways, Safe House is action-movie porridge gussied up into a less-clever-than-it-seems mystery.

Big Miracle is harmless enough, but what's annoying about it is its aura of fake activism. The movie doesn't seem to get that it's exactly when the news media began to devote more time to subjects like whales that it started to turn into news not for activists but for couch potatoes.

It will have you groaning between yawns.

As long as it stays in the air, Red Tails is a compelling sky-war pageant of a movie. On the ground, it's a far shakier experience: dutiful and prosaic, with thinly scripted episodes that don't add up to a satisfying story.

A harmless crime caper. It stars Peter Facinelli (Nurse Jackie, the Twilight series), who also wrote the script, shaping the movie to his facile, unlayered charm.

The film's darkly bedazzled view of the '70s is spurred by great dish from André Leon Talley, Liza Minnelli, and Nile Rodgers, who set the stage for Halston's triumphs - and his jaw-dropping fall.

Contraband, while often grungy and far-fetched, does keep you watching. And in January, that's recommendation enough.

The movie's musical numbers are catchy and rollicking and, in their bright sunshiny way, rather soulful.

In the Land of Blood and Honey captures the sickening way the war in Bosnia became a gray zone of genocide. Yet that, unfortunately, is not enough to make it a good movie.

Farhadi is no mere formalist. His film is a spiritual investigation into the rise of women and the descent of male privilege in Iran, and a look at the toll that has taken. In a movie of flawless acting, it is Moadi - terse, proud, angry, haunted - who shows us that rare thing: a soul in transition.

Ghost Protocol brims with scenes that are exciting and amazing at the same time; they're brought off with such casual aplomb that they're funny, too.

The movie is like Doctor Dolittle remade as a therapeutic sudser. By the end, it got to me.

Yet here, as before, part of the movie's perversely cheeky design is that it throws away its own cleverness.

Fincher has made The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo into an electrifying movie by turning the audience into addicts of the forbidden, looking for the sick and twisted things we can't see.

Even a filmmaker as dazzling as Steven Spielberg has to create characters who lure us into their point of view, and the trouble with Tintin is that we're always on the outside, looking in. What all that motion can't capture is our hearts.

The movie is creepy, but it has no texture or depth. It's like "The Omen" directed by Miranda July.

A puzzle of a highly rarefied order. At times it's enthrallingly clever and subtle; at others it's borderline incomprehensible.

New Year's Eve is dunderheaded kitsch, but it's the kind of marzipan movie that can sweetly soak up a holiday evening.

Oren Moverman's Rampart is a terrific film: tense, shocking, complex, mesmerizing.

Days after I saw The Artist, I was still thinking (and grinning) about it, because the movie's real romance is the one between us, the jaded 21st-century audience, and the mechanical innocence of old movies, which here becomes new again.

Another beautifully chiseled piece of filmmaking - sharp, funny, generous, and moving.

The film has the same moral design as "Dead Man Walking," but since it never gets inside the darkness of the killers' minds, it's really just a rambling episode of "A Current Affair."

DiCaprio does more than disappear behind steely glasses and prosthetic old-age makeup. He transforms himself, in a feat of acting, from the inside out.

Merrily outrageous, over-the-top fun.

The more that secret comes out, the more incoherent (and ludicrous) the film gets.

With Ethan and Janie sharing folkie duets, it has a certain small, wan charm, like a father-daughter gloss on "Once." Breslin is a clear-eyed delight.

A marvelous movie.

The movie, I'm sad to report, has a majorly disappointing follow-through. It turns into a noisy, squalling chase movie.

To the audience, this stuff seems like awfully old news. We're supposed to be witnessing the birth of a great journalist, but Hunter S. Thompson, as his career went on, got swallowed up by his mystique as an outlaw of excess. In The Rum Diary, that myth becomes an excuse for a movie to go slumming.

Puss in Boots is beautifully animated (with 3-D that adds nothing), but the film is so mindlessly busy that it seems to be trying to distract you from the likable, one-note feline swashbuckler at its center.

You could describe Margin Call as a thriller (it's wired with suspense), yet the tension all comes from words.

The bottom line, for me, is this: I don't scare easily at horror films, but I watched Paranormal Activity 3 in a state of high anxiety.

The more I sat through it, the more it won me over in its very benign high-concept way. It's like "City Slickers" remade for the Discovery Channel.

Far more grotesque than the first Human Centipede - in fact, The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence) could be the sickest B movie ever made.

Clooney certainly brings out the best in his actors, but his driving trait as a filmmaker is that he knows what plays - he has an uncanny sense of how to uncork a scene and let it bubble and flow.

This suburban gothic is a logy, convoluted mess.

Lonergan's dialogue can sweep you up in a whoosh of personality and ideas, but it's hard to see what, apart from ego, convinced him that this story was so epic.

Though a great deal of this material (e.g., Troopergate) seems like old news, Broomfield is so dogged that he makes 
 a case, in a deeper way than we've seen, that there's a 
 terrifying remorselessness to Palin's feuding nature.

Out from behind his Captain America shield, Chris Evans proves a quirky and compelling actor as Mike Weiss, a personal-injury lawyer who spends most of his time doing drugs.

Director John Singleton offers bits of suspense, but Abduction is less a movie than a piece of engineering, a glumly ludicrous cat-and-mouse blowout designed to win Lautner male fans along with his girl demo.

The title, Machine Gun Preacher, makes it sound like a piece of grindhouse kitsch - and by the time it's over, you'll be thinking, ''If only!''

The supersmart and rousing Moneyball, which may be the best baseball movie since "Bull Durham," is also about talk, but in a coolly heady and original inside-the-front-office way.

The original "Straw Dogs," at least to me, isn't close to being one of Peckinpah's masterpieces, but it's a movie that the people who first saw it still remember 40 years later. I doubt that anyone will remember the new one by next month.

A tangy raw stew of history, even if it never begins to confront the contradictions that bedeviled black militancy.

Mostly, Warrior is a showcase for its up-and-coming stars. Edgerton, from last year's "Animal Kingdom," and Hardy, who stole scenes as the identity forger in "Inception."

At once overly episodic and playfully arty, like a TV movie made by Fellini.

In essence, this is an indie Adam Sandler comedy, and when its heroes are psyching themselves up for the big event, it's kind of funny. But the orgy doesn't make you laugh - it makes you cringe.

The Debt is basically an entertaining riff on "Munich." It's about a (fictional) operation of top secret Israeli revenge, carried out by three highly trained agents whose plan goes off the rails in ways that are more fascinating than the mission itself.

Jeff Prosserman's riveting documentary takes a question that haunted the Bernie Madoff scandal - how did he fool everyone for so long? - and answers it with a decisive "He didn't."

Higher Ground breaks crucial, sacred ground in American moviemaking.

Neither colorfully brutal nor especially fun. It's a plodding, derivative gothic potboiler: "The Shining" meets "Coraline," with a touch of "Gremlins" played (boringly) straight.

El Bulli becomes a haunting celebration of the human desire to turn food into art - even if the results are consciously insane.

The Help has a saucy, humorous side.

It's like seeing the birth of the '60s, with great moments (including Neal Cassady doing speed-freak monologues).

Bellflower is stylishly watchable - even when it's preposterous.

Rarely has a movie captured the obscene violence of sex trafficking with such unvarnished grubbiness. In the end, though, The Whistleblower is a corporate thriller.

The movie is zippier than Tim Burton's oddly lifeless 2001 "Planet of the Apes" remake, but unlike good sci-fi, it doesn't signify anything, or really even try to.

In this offbeat buddy-cop comedy, Don Cheadle, as an FBI agent trying to stop a drug ring, makes the perfect foil.

I'm not sure what it all adds up to, but The Devil's Double puts its hooks in you and keeps them there.

Nothing more (or less) than an enchanting light comedy of romantic confusion... It's a movie that understands love because it understands pain.

Cowboys & Aliens has fun moments, but it's a plodding entertainment because it mostly tastes like leftovers.

I'm not exactly sure this is a situation that a lot of people are going to identify with. More to the point, it gives the movie a faulty design. Dylan and Jamie sleep together and get along famously. Where's the dramatic motor?

It's one of those stultifying aftermath-of-
a-car-crash movies.

The Holocaust scenes are wrenching, the past-meets-present dialectics less so.

A symbol of the lost father, it looms, protects, and also wreaks havoc when a big branch collapses onto the house. Mostly, it's the expression of a movie that's content to stand still.

The Myth of the American Sleepover has fresh, lovely moments, but it could have used more psychological heft.

Stolidly corny, old-fashioned pulp fun.

At 88 minutes, Tabloid is short and sweet (it's pure movie candy), but by the end we've forged an emotional connection to Joyce McKinney at the deep core of her unapologetic fearless/nutty valor. And that's what really makes a great tabloid story: It's a vortex that's also a mirror.

In execution, it is charming...and also a little monotonous.

Zookeeper (I can't believe I'm even writing this) is a dumbed-down "Paul Blart."

At least Carpenter the spook-meister knows how to goose you.

A fascinating and in many ways tragic documentary, takes us back to one of the high-water marks of the apes-are-people-too era.

Beats is a welcome blast of '90s nostalgia, taking us back to a time - and a sound - that pulsates with optimism.

For a while, the movie has a cat-and-mouse appeal - it's like "Hard Candy" crossed with a smaller-scale "Deathtrap." Pierce acts with an enjoyably testy flamboyance, but by the time he starts to imagine that his guests have arrived even though dinner's been canceled, the film has given him one loose screw too many.

The film sweeps us up like a thriller, forcing us to at least ask whether terrorism like the ELF's (which targeted property, never human lives) might ever be justified.

A Better Life was directed by the eclectic Chris Weitz (The Twilight Saga: New Moon, About a Boy), who weaves the torpor and anxiety of immigrant life into something dramatically true, if at moments a bit draggy.

We're just watching a film try to pass off misanthropic blunt-wittedness as "edge."

Reynolds makes Hal a perfectly functional comic-book hero, but there's a big difference between functional and super.

If you can watch Popper's most trusted penguin finally get to fly and feel like you're soaring right up there with her, then you may just let this likable trifle whisk you back to childhood.

The film is a bit too chronological, but its historical reverence is true to gospel's joyful insistence on locating the spiritual in the everyday.

It was an effective choice to shoot these majestic creatures vérité-style, with a jittery camera, but Trollhunter, unfortunately, is such an under-imagined knockoff of The Blair Witch Project that whenever the trolls aren't on screen, it verges on tedium.

The Trip looks like a lark - and is - yet there's a sneaky resonance to the way it celebrates what acting means to these two rogue cutups.

The lesson is that fun can't be planned, but the film is so airless (think iCarly as a videogame) that there isn't a truly playful moment in it.

Michael Sheen and Maria Bello both have wrenching moments in this quiet, oblique drama. Yet the movie isn't really convincing.

The film is so self-conscious it seems to be dictating your every reaction.

Harper Lee hasn't been interviewed in 47 years, but this meditation on her only novel, "To Kill a Mockingbird," puts you inside her skin.

At times, Kung Fu Panda 2 suggests "Bambi" redone as an episode of Oprah. Yet it's a more-than-worthy sequel.

Here, as in "The Hangover," the laughs aren't just staged, they're superlatively engineered.

On Stranger Tides isn't nearly strange enough. Its one real act of piracy is stealing away your excitement.

This underworld fairy tale is so soggy and sentimental it's like a new genre: Hallmark noir.

The film hinges on too many conventional crises (a car accident, a divorce), but the fact that Burns is better at atmosphere than story isn't all bad.

As the checkout girl everyone's got a crush on, Natalie Portman makes a winsome return to her "Garden State" gawkiness.

She's an Everywoman you can believe in, showcased in the kind of deft comedy of feminine passion - where deep despair meets Wilson Phillips - that a great many people have been waiting for. Now that Wiig and company have built it, will they come?

Last Night is on to something fascinating. It meditates on the meaning of adultery: the purposes it serves, beyond sex.

So scrupulously researched and argued that only a fool would ignore its findings.

You'll laugh - a lot - but you'll also shed tears of recognition at this funny, salty, strife-torn look at the agony and ecstasy of family.

It's not art, but it's mighty fun.

Will Miss Perfect fall for the Leader of the Pack? It helps that he's played by Thomas McDonell, who's not only a dead ringer for the young Johnny Depp but also has a comparable charisma.

High-octane trash, but you will go "Ohhhhhh!"

While I was watching Madea's Big Happy Family, I couldn't deny that it PLAYS. Madea, as always, is a figure of towering low-down wit.

The movie is a bumpy road of twists that leads to a revelation that has the shock and force of Greek tragedy.

The role of a former star of the "golden age" of porn sounds perfect for Kim Cattrall, and she handles it nicely - at least, in the rare moments when this indie comedy isn't terminally contrived.

The movie is stiff-jointed and dull.

The soundtrack, overseen by Sergio Mendes, has a few lively bossa nova moments, but not nearly enough.

Soul Surfer, while formulaic in design, is an authentic and heartfelt movie.

The new Arthur is a feathery screwball satire, competent on its own terms, yet as the movie went on I found it increasingly hard to separate the character's self-indulgence from that of the actor playing him.

It's really a one-joke movie, but the joke is a good one.

A haunted-house movie that has some of the most shivery and indelible images I've seen in any horror film in decades. Yes, it's that unsettling.

It's "Alvin and the Chipmunks" with only one chipmunk, and (if possible) even less fun.

Confused? So is Miral, a film that makes bits and pieces of the Palestinian experience come alive without assembling them into a coherent vision.

Win Win, it turns out, isn't a tale of facile victory. It's a movie about how loss makes everyone do things they'll both defend and regret.

In Limitless, a potently fanciful and fun thriller about a drug that turns you into a genius, Cooper proves a cock-of-the-walk movie star.

Except for the relentless, jittery way that the film has been photographed, there's nothing of interest going on in it. It's all fractious guerrilla-newsreel "style" masquerading a void.

The end will haunt you.

The film never conveys that something larger is at work - like, say, the hand of fate. And without that, there's more busyness than beauty to Brontë.

It does possess a certain backward-glancing innocent appeal.

An enjoyable piece of hokum – your basic doom-laden parable of metaphysical sci-fi mind control, only with a surprise romantic sparkle.

Even the film's one "original" twist is just a desperate attempt to link it up to Ghost Rider, the only lousy Nicolas Cage action film that is actually spawning a sequel.

Hall Pass would like to be as dunked in reality as Judd Apatow's best comedies, but the movie is thin. The Farrellys can't quite nudge the characters from two dimensions to three.

Worth seeing.

Cold Weather becomes the world's first mumblecore "thriller" - a good idea for a movie that someone, in the future, should execute a bit less lackadaisically.

Anderson has made a zombie movie without the zombies.

Every movie about cuddly dwarf statues in an English garden should have music this big.

If this is what it sounds like when a new millennium goes pop, I'll take it.

This shot-on-film-and-video trifle reveals a Bombay (that's what all the characters call it) that "Slumdog Millionaire" didn't: a delicate metropolis sunk in torpor.

The Rite commits the supreme sin of making the devil dull.

As it is, The Mechanic is ham-fisted pulp, like Robert Rodriguez's "Machete" taking itself seriously.

Paul Giamatti, dialing down his trembly-voiced neurotic energy to good effect, gives a holy hell of a performance as Barney Panofsky.

The best thing about it is Claire Foy's performance as the seething, caged is-she-a-witch?. Foy, like a Brit Kristen Stewart, has an entrancing sparkle of disdain.

What it does have is an overwhelming bittersweet melancholy at the passing of life from middle age into…well, you could call it late middle age.

The film keeps throwing things at you: drunk scenes, adultery scenes, "All About Eve" rise-of-the-young-rival scenes. Yet despite the presence of some appealing actors, none of it quite adds up.

The movie's redemptive structure is a bit routine, yet I watched nearly every scene with a sense of discovery. Coppola is a true filmmaker, and in Somewhere she pierces the Hollywood bubble from the inside.

Blue Valentine is lushly touching and gorgeously told.

Too goofy-surreal to pack a lot of emotional punch, but it's antically light on its feet, with 3-D images that have a lustrous, gizmo-mad sci-fi clarity.

The sequel, more successfully (if less innocently), injects you into a luminous technological wonderland and asks you to be happy with the ride.

Now that the series is, it can be said that the most disturbing thing about the Saw films is the way that they turn torture into a wink of megaplex vengeance. They're made, and consumed, as a big bloody joke, and that's scary.

Depardieu and Marie Bunel (as Bellamy's wife) have a terrific interplay, but Chabrol's sharp direction can't quite rescue his fuzzy script.

Eckhart shows a new kind of foreboding anger. He's powerful as a man who will do anything to crack the ice.

This one, as thoughtful as it is rousing, scores a TKO.

The Tourist isn't a debacle, but it's a caper that's fatally low on carbonation.

Kevin Costner, as Bobby's carpenter brother-in-law, does the finest character acting of his career.

Lurid and voluptuous pulp fun, with a sensationalistic fairy-tale allure. You can't take it too seriously, but you can't tear your eyes away from it, either.

Where Broadcast News mourned the trivialization of the nightly news, Morning Glory asks you to learn to stop worrying and love the trivia.

Deepens the saga of New York's former governor and attorney general into the paradoxical morality play it really was. Spitzer, almost three years after he was caught soliciting escorts, comes off as chastened but still regal, like a hawkeyed Jewish Kennedy.

Fair Game gets you riled up all over again at a deeply unpatriotic abuse of power.

Mostly an epic rehash of the tale Larsson has already told, and that makes it, at two hours and 28 minutes, the first movie in the series that never catches fire.

A true-life adventure that turns into a one-man disaster movie - and the darker it gets, the more enthralling it becomes.

Even when nothing is happening, the often dead-silent shots tend to grow scarier the more you look at them.

This rotely cheeky, Anglo-plastic adultery comedy is set in the golden-green English countryside, and it makes a few quirky nods toward artistry, but it's really just a glib concoction.

In First Reformed, Paul Schrader courts respectability and leaves it in the dust, getting stoned on excess. But make no mistake: He’s still one hell of a filmmaker.

You never forget you're watching a derivative, machine-tooled entertainment; the fun is in how the machine keeps spinning off course.

The movie has a mystery, and moral unease, that lingers.

Now Ray has directed his second film, the abysmally titled Breach, and it's a bona fide companion piece, another true-life tale of duplicity gone secretly insane.

With its ungainly double-deception premise, How to Lose a Guy feels like it was made out of two connect-the-dots drawings laid haphazardly on top of one another.

Spells out the problem in clear, urgent, prosaic terms.

Working with affectionate mockery, the Coens take the cinder-block-synagogue banality of American Jewish life in 1967 and make it look as archly exotic as the loopy Scandinavian-American winterscape of "Fargo."

Salt knows how to stay one step ahead of you in devious, if jaw-droppingly contrived, ways. The movie is fun, dammit. So who cares, really, if it's trash?

It's like ''Grease: The Next Generation'' acted out by the food-court staff at SeaWorld.

Supple and engrossing, a liquid-smooth street-rap testimonial.

There are limits to how much comic irony can be wrung out of the sight of two grown men acting like complete cretins.

An eminently watchable B-movie nightmare.

Though the film gets a bit repetitive, in its moving climax Lior does more than just have his bar mitzvah -- he earns it.

Bryan Bertino, stages The Strangers' early scenes with spooky panache...But then comes the blood, the shrieking midnight chase scenes, the anything-goes over-the-top-ness. In other words, everything that we liked the movie for not being.

This is the sort of movie in which everyone on screen is swathed in gauzy benevolence. You practically have time to say a prayer in the dead spaces between lines.

The movie is a true folly, yet there's no denying that Gilliam has gotten some of the hallucinogenic madness of Thompson's novel on screen.

Glum and depersonalized, as if Eastwood couldn't muster the energy to guide us through this maze of improbable twists. [14 Feb 1997, p. 39]

Lacks even the good, guilty setup of "I Know What You Did Last Summer" -- the sense that the heroes are fleeing the consequences of their own crime.

Features a supernatural twist that is merely okay, but the film's mood of fractured anxiety and longing made me eager to see what the director, Christoffer Boe, does next.

The movie is "Star Wars" with martial arts, plus a touch of "The Last Emperor." Technically, it's not badly done; I enjoyed the physical clash of elements, the water balls rising like sculpture in the air.

It's an okay brat movie.

It’s the rare movie that truly evokes the grindhouse ’70s, because it means everything it’s doing. It’s exploitation made with vicious sincerity.

In the brutally efficient Under Siege, Seagal, with his soft-spoken nihilist charm, attempts to move beyond limb-snapping exploitation and into epically scaled mainstream thrillers. He succeeds — but only because this sort of slick action bash doesn’t require a star with much personality. At this point, personality might only get in the way.

The movie, in a sense, is just like Bettie's photos: all glorious surface. The Notorious Bettie Page captures, with seductive finesse, how Bettie Page happened, yet what it leaves us with is the tantalizing enigma of a girl who couldn't truly be ''bad'' because she made sex divinely delicious.

A crowd-pleaser, all right, but, for all its appeal, a naggingly sanctimonious one.

Squeezes fresh laughs out of what is, in essence, a rather startlingly post-Freudian, nature-trumps-nurture view of child development.

His pluck and chutzpah shine through.

Greenwald floats the vital issue of whether Wal-Mart should be restrained by antimonopoly regulations, but his real question is cultural: Even with its rock-bottom prices, is Wal-Mart in the best interest of American consumers?

Carrey suggests an escaped mental patient impersonating a game-show host-and, what's worse, his hyperbolically obnoxious shtick is the whole damned show.

Very much a kiddie ride, Stuart Little 2 is lively without being hyperactive -- it's a bouncy mouse caper with a wee bit of soul.

The power of The Social Network is that Zuckerberg is a weasel with a mission that can never be dismissed. The movie suggests that he may have built his ambivalence about human connection into Facebook's very DNA. That's what makes him a jerk-hero for our time.

Tempting as it may be to dismiss Mel Gibson as a glorified pain freak, dressing up a martyrdom fantasy in Aramaic and Latin, it would be more accurate, I think, to say that the filmmaker, a Catholic fundamentalist, presents his torture-racked vision of Jesus' last 12 hours on earth as a sacred form of shock therapy.

It's an irony too significant to ignore that the movie, which proselytizes against penning up whales in order to make them do cute tricks for humans, spends much of its time making Willy do cute tricks for humans.

The surprise, and disappointment, of The Da Vinci Code is how slipshod and hokey the religious detective story now seems.

A romantic comedy with all the confectionary value of one of those watery diet shakes; it practically evaporates while you're watching it.

This is one nowhere boy who commands your attention.

As Zeus, Liam Neeson twinkles where Laurence Olivier kvetched, and Ralph Fiennes, as Zeus' dark brother Hades (who has egged on the revolt to challenge Zeus), has a slinky nastiness.

Cyrus cues us to expect it to go over the top, but the film never does. That may be its neatest trick

Zippy, enjoyable sci-fi slapstick jamboree.

In Proof, Paltrow plays yet another young woman who is being gnawed at by termites of instability, only this time out, her performance, rather than startling, is merely competent: earnest and overly familiar.