Peter Hartlaub

Entertaining and compelling.

While it's filled with quality actors, this James Bond tale for tweens feels like something you should be getting for free on television.

Dawson turns out to be a necessary ingredient, propelling the emotional core of the film forward, while somehow convincing the audience that a smart, attractive woman could find a schlub like Dante desirable.

An honest, fair and quite voyeuristic look into avatars and the real-life humans who control them in Second Life.

Even with the conflict overkill, most of the small moments ring true. Dolphin Tale has more in common with "The Swiss Family Robinson" than most modern live-action family movies, where slapstick and cheap laughs feed short attention spans.

Berlin is still a subject very much worth exploring on film, and his observations as an aged man are even more fascinating than the statements he made as an artist in his prime.

The movie is overly long and much too intense for small children, yet it's filled with dialogue and plot turns that are too juvenile to thrill adult audiences.

Fright Night isn't quite a classic vampire movie, but it's refreshingly straightforward and self-deprecating.

Although the finished product isn't great, it's more akin to a bad Steve Martin movie from the 1980s than bad Pauly Shore from the 1990s. We mean that as a compliment (sort of).

Produced by "Lost" and "Alias" mastermind J.J. Abrams, Cloverfield has been one of the more interesting experiments in large-scale guerrilla filmmaking.

Cheadle the actor is nearly perfect in the role.

The entertaining new film from Sony Pictures Animation is a nice surprise, and the rare mainstream American kid film.

Crown Heights is a challenging film with long treks between uplifting moments. And there’s no question the film earns every moment of grace.

It's an achingly beautiful movie and a triumph of location scouting, with more cosmopolitan spectacle than the past three Indiana Jones and James Bond movies combined.

It's a funny, mostly harmless and entertaining film with a bad case of dry mouth.

Most of the time, the movie is appropriately gritty and plenty engaging.

The feature film Everest provides soaring visuals, but it’s a distant second in terms of storytelling depth and narrative impact.

Twilight has a few gory plot turns - mostly offscreen - and one near-sex scene that may offend a few Amish people, but the rest is maybe 33 percent less wholesome than "High School Musical." It's almost certainly less risque than what you were watching when you were 14. (Cue the soundtrack to "Risky Business.")

Robots never stays in the same gear for long, and the abrupt shifts in tone kill the movie's chances of becoming a classic.

The similarity between the children is the most striking part of the movie.

A clever, heart-pounding thriller, and a welcome return to form for the director.

A humorous yet unfocused romp, so unwilling to settle on a single theme that hyperactivity medication should be handed out with the 3-D glasses.

Satan is optional in The Last Exorcism. This is the rare horror film that would have been entertaining even if nothing scary happened.

It's the kind of fun and quirky film that you don't see very often in art houses this time of year.

The female actors, particularly Hudgens and Ashley Benson, are game for the ride. And Franco is indispensable, bringing humor and pathos to one of the more repulsive cinematic creations in recent memory.

Always watchable, and occasionally great. And that’s probably more than even the most forgiving former Shyamalan fan ever thought they’d see again.

It gives fans what they want, while also working most of the time as pulse-pounding escapism. Even though he has almost nothing to do with the actual movie, the spirit of a “Speed”-era Keanu Reeves is present throughout.

The picture eventually collapses under the weight of its own gimmickry, but it's still an entertaining distraction for cerebral horror fans who want an appetizer before the B-horror feast that is "Diary of the Dead."