Peter Rainer

War Witch is most effective not when we are looking in on Komona but when we are inside her head. When she says that, in order to survive in the rebel camp, she “had to learn to make the tears go inside my eyes,” our identification with her is total.

It has moments when the spiritual and the secular burst forth in stunning disarray.

Raimi’s film is supposed to be about magic, but magic is in scant supply.

One thing is clear from A Place at the Table: You cannot answer the question “Why are people hungry?,” without also asking “Why are people poor?”

Park employs all manner of cinematic derring-do – shock cuts, off-kilter compositions, discontinuous storytelling – all to no great purpose other than to make us go “Wow.” A more appropriate response might be, “Huh?”

Not awful, not wonderful, Jack the Giant Slayer is a midrange fairy tale epic that’s a lot more ho-hum than fee-fi-fo-fum.

The ferocity of the performances is inextricable from the men’s real-life criminality. We are baffled, moved, and repulsed – often at the same time – by the elemental spectacle before us. In this metaprison drama, the prison bars are both illusory and unbreakable. Caesar Must Die chronicles an exalted entrapment.

Writer-director Carl Franklin offers up a tone of heightened reverence that weighs down the material, but there are small, lovely moments when the magic realism approaches the magical.

So free-floating that it floats away.

The tone of uplift is earned. Larraín’s unarguable point is that, in politics, if we wait for good to issue only from the pure in heart, we will be waiting a very long time.

A dash – only a dash – of Tim Burton ghoulishness might have helped.

Safe Haven is a species of Gothic chick flick.

If there is to be a sequel to this thudding slab of cacophony, why not just go all the way and make John McClane a superhero?

I squirmed in my seat throughout Identity Thief, a colossally unfunny and misguided comedy.

Soderbergh and screenwriter Scott Z. Burns maintain a tone of taut creepiness, but the plot’s double and triple crosses are more ingenious than believable.

Saskia Rosendahl is a highly expressive actress within the limited confines of her character, and the film is studded with memorable scenes.

Ferlinghetti’s home-brewed brand of anarchism is weirdly as American as apple pie.

The pessimism pervading this film is summed up by Shalom, who says, speaking of the decades of occupation: "The future is very dark."

It pales beside the best down-and-dirty political movies (ranging from "The Candidate" to "The Manchurian Candidate") because, finally, it lacks the courage of its own lowdown convictions.

Directed by Allen Hughes and written by Brian Tucker, the film is a collection of crime noir oddments that don't add up to a full meal.

In "Birders," by contrast, nature is one big entrancing show; a world of tweets without "tweets."

What gives the movie its poignancy – what turns it into something more than a polite entertainment – is Smith's role. Or, to be more exact, her performance, in tandem with Courtenay's.

Penn is always entertaining when he's playing characters drunk with depravity. Gangster Squad could use more of him.

Promised Land is more effective as an anti-fracking screed than as a drama. Damon has his low-key charisma and Van Sant captures the enraged anomie of the community, but, except for one big plot twist, everything in this film is telegraphed from the first frame.

What gives the series its force is not just its universality but also its particularity. These grown-ups may be Everyman, but they are also singular.

Will Tarantino, who is more talented than he allows, ever break out of his perpetual adolescence and make a movie that does more than glorify his love of schlock? Will we ever get a "Tarantino Unchained"?

Tom Hooper, who directed "The King's Speech," is not great with action and big set pieces, but he gets the job done. What makes Les Misérables work are the up-close moments when he can focus on performance and song.

It's all rather exhausting, as opposed to exhilirating.

Gandolfini, though, is a standout as the old-school father who can't abide his new-style son (but loves him anyway).

Werner Herzog, better known as one of the finest living directors, plays a bad guy with Teutonic relish. If he doesn't watch it, he'll have a whole other career for himself playing dead-eyed villains.

Because of its subject matter, and because of the actors, it's impossible to watch this film without being moved. But a martinet is running the show.

The jokes mostly fall flat and the dramatic scenes fall even flatter.

The performers are so likable that you stay with them even when, as is often the case, the material is hit-or-miss.

My first thought in watching The Hobbit was: Do we really need this movie? It was my last thought, too.

By showing scenes of torture without taking any kind of moral (as opposed to tactical) stand on what we are seeing, Bigelow has made an amoral movie – which is, I would argue, an unconscionable approach to this material.

Rust and Bone is made by filmmakers and actors who are capable of much more – and they know it. The result is a true oddity: an orgy of hokum dressed up as an art film.

It's never altogether clear why this visually blah and dramatically bland movie needed to be made at all (or why it wasn't made for television instead). The only answer I can come up with is that Murray wanted to show off with a cigarette-holder.

What we do see, among much else that is damning, are archival NYPD videotapes of the boys being interrogated by detectives who press them to implicate one another in exchange for a leniency that never materialized.

The dialogue is sharp and so are the performances. Andrew Dominik directed this neo-noir in a low-key comic style that's alternately gritty and fancy. The gritty stuff is best.

Hopkins has been fitted out prosthetically to resemble Hitchcock and he does a reasonably good job of impersonating him, but it's a foredoomed effort.

Too much of this movie, directed by Peter Ramsey, is more clamorous than inspired, and little kids might find parts of it too scarily intense.

Lee may, in the end, be too balanced a filmmaker to give Life of Pi the extra spin of lyric delirium it sorely needs. It's a sane movie about an essentially deranged situation.

This is the kind of it-can-mean-whatever-you-want-it-to-mean art film that I usually run from, but Carax is such a prodigiously gifted mesmerist that, if you give way, you're likely to be enfolded in the film's phantasmagoria.

It's slick stuff, but Lawrence, in her most high-low, sad-comic turn yet, is remarkable.

One of the many, many things wrong with Joe Wright's Anna Karenina, starring Keira Knightley as literature's most famous adulteress – take that, Emma Bovary! – is that one never feels the love. It's a conceit in search of a movie. It could just as easily have been titled "Décor."

Whenever Jones is on screen, the film's energy level kicks up several notches, an indication, I think, that Spielberg otherwise overdoses on directorial decorum.

He's 9Mendes) discovered his stride here, a blend of thrills and sabotage and deep-dish emotionalism. The powerful performances by Craig and Dench surely owe a great deal to his indulgences.

Sean Penn is one of those actors, like Nicolas Cage, who is best (sometimes worst) when he's over-the-top. Unlike Cage, Penn doesn't pour himself into dreadful commercial vehicles. No, his dreadful movies are usually not destined for the multiplex. Case in point: This Must Be the Place.

Zilberman's conceit is that these players, who mesh so beautifully in their music-making, are discordant in their personal lives. Those lives are constructed for maximum messiness, turning what might have been resonant drama into high-class soap opera.

The people who made Flight have done a courageous thing. With all the potential revenue to be had from in-flight movie sales, they have made a movie that is guaranteed to never be shown on an airplane.

The Loneliest Planet is not a perfect work of art, but it gets at something powerful: the way that life can turn us around in a flash, without warning.

Goldfinger happened upon a story far larger than he must have anticipated. The Flat is about the persistence of denial, and of hope.

The result is maddening, exasperating, occasionally exhilarating – and mostly boring.

Although stylistically and conceptually it never lifts itself entirely out of the realm of a made-for-television drama – don't expect "My Left Foot" – The Sessions is bracing. It's also one of the few movies to recognize that people with severe physical disabilities have sexual lives, too.

As inspirational academic stories go, it doesn't get much better than this.

Photographic Memory is about the permanence and impermanence of what we choose to preserve: on film and in our heads (which is often the same thing). I would like to think that one day Adrian might look at this documentary and see it as a supreme act of paternal love.

The movie has some powerful moments, but it's mostly superficial.

In some ways the movie might have been better if it had been about those two Hollywood guys with only occasional blips from the hostage crisis in Iran.

The director of this jamboree is appropriately named Olivier Megaton.

Jarecki's thesis is that law enforcement targets minority communities, but his analysis is far too simplistic. Since when did pushers become victims?

Her film is closer to Truffaut's "The 400 Blows" in the way it gets inside the gumption and desperation of childhood lived on the edge. It's a terrific, bracingly sad movie.

As the "Empress of Fashion" who was the fashion editor of "Harper's Bazaar" before editing "Vogue" in its 1960s heyday, Vreeland comes across in the movie as something of a cross between Auntie Mame and Godzilla. She was a true original in a world where knock-offs abounded.

Hollywood has never been the best arena to hash out policy debates. But social-issue movies can have real societal impact. That's why Won't Back Down, which presses a lot of hot buttons, deserves to be taken seriously, and criticized seriously, on its own terms.

My favorite line in the movie comes when Gordon-Levitt, in a face-off with his mob boss (Jeff Daniels), informs him that he'd like to leave the business one day and move to France, to which Daniels replies: "I'm from the future; you should go to China."

As Sam, the wayward stepsister of Charlie's sardonic friend Patrick (Ezra Miller), Watson doesn't lose her cool, or her warmth, in a role that might easily have devolved into terminal sappiness.

I wish that the Mexican drug cartel subplot was not so overwrought and Oliver Stone-ish, and the decision to shoot much of the film "Cops"-style is also problematic. But the film puts you right inside an everyday inferno and, to its credit, doesn't turn down the heat.

What you get in Trouble with the Curve is standard-issue late-career Eastwoodiana. The growl, the snarl, the crotchetiness are already familiar to us from "Million Dollar Baby" (2004) and "Gran Torino" (2009), his last appearance as an actor.

Needless to say, everybody comes equipped with their very own overweight baggage; old grudges are revived, new ones are invented; and big personal revelations – most of which you can see coming a mile away – arrive on cue.

The performances by Phoenix and Hoffman are studies in contrast. Phoenix carries himself with a jagged, lurching, simianlike grace while Hoffman gives Dodd a calm deliberateness. Both actors have rarely been better in the movies. The real Master class here is about acting – and that includes just about everybody else in the film, especially Adams, whose twinkly girl-next-door quality is used here to fine subversive effect.

Fred Schepisi, one of the world's great directors ("The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith," "A Cry in the Dark") is working at half-speed in The Eye of the Storm, a convoluted family drama derived from a Patrick White novel.

As for me, I don't see why women being as slobby and gross as the guys is such a feminist breakthrough – especially since, as in Bachelorette, the slobbiness and grossness is witless.

Abbott has a compelling unpredictability, though, and in a couple of his scenes with Lynskey, you can spot the stirrings of a more complex film than the one we finally ended up with.

This may sound like a dry subject, but, as presented here, it's anything but – especially if you have more than a passing interest in the art and science of what gets projected onto our movie screens these days.

What does it all mean? I'm not convinced that Fricke's movies are much more than exalted travelogues, but you certainly feel as if you've been somewhere after you've seen one of them.

Clarke started out as a dancer studying with Martha Graham, and much of Ornette has a dancelike swing and propulsion. What it doesn't provide is a cogent look at Coleman's artistry. This is not a jazz film for people who want to sit back and get mellow. The film itself is a species of jazz. It's offbeat without missing the beat.

Langella's performance turns what might have been a "Twilight Zone"-style trifle into something more: a movie about a proud, ornery man combating his fearfulness.

Good at scenes of high-level nastiness, but there's too much confusing exposition in this "Legacy" and the action scenes, some of them good, are too little and too late.

Potty jokes and bawdy gross-outs predominate, and the few good laughs are swamped by the overall laughlessness.

Karsin doesn't adequately detail the political complexities of the struggle, but how can one not respond to someone like tribal leader Flor Ilva, who declares, "We women are warriors, not with weapons, but with our thoughts and through raising our children."

If the film doesn't really explore the pain and bitterness of this marriage, it's still leagues ahead of most such attempts.

The Imposter has too many reenactments for my taste, and Bourdin is glorified by Layton more often than he is condemned. Still, this is one creepy mystery.

It's as if we were watching one of those buddy-buddy bromances told, this time, from the perspective of the woman who is normally on the sidelines of the men's attentions and affections. It's a welcome angle.

Morgan is a wonderful writer when he's working from the headlines, but his "personal" movies, like "Hereafter" and this one, release a bleary, pseudo-profound aspect of his talent that's best left in the dark.

Director Len Wiseman is good on action, and Patrick Tatopoulus's dystopic production design is within hailing distance of "Blade Runner," his chief influence. But essentially this is a big-screen video game.

The title captures the man. He makes no apologies.

This is a real-life fairy tale with a remarkably happy ending.

It's a mash-up of blah buddy comedy and gross-out CGI monster splatter, with nary a laugh to be had.

It's a movie that could easily have been made 50 years ago, and I don't mean that as a knock. There is much to be said for a film that values unflashy craft and simple, unhurried storytelling.

Above all, literally, are the kites. When a character says, "You fly these kites and feel the joy," we know just what he means.

Were it not for Anne Hathaway's Catwoman-ish Selina Kyle, there wouldn't be a single character in "Rises" who cracks a smile. I'm not arguing that "Rises" should be "Singin' in the Rain." But its Wagnerian ambitions are not matched by its material. It hasn't earned its darkness.

In Michael Winterbottom's Trishna, Thomas Hardy's Victorian romantic tragedy "Tess of the D'Urbervilles" proves surprisingly adaptable to contemporary India.

Character is action, Scott Fitzgerald once wrote. It certainly is here.

The plot slogs along and family secrets are hauled out, each more implausible than the next.

It's a fascinating story, fascinatingly told.

Polley has a sometimes graceful understanding of emotional temperate zones and Williams, when she isn't being zombielike, is touching. But Margot comes across as such an elusive and unsympathetic twit that you wonder why we should care about her.

Almost every scene is pitched for dewy sympathy. Madsen, a strong actress who might have matched Freeman, is portrayed in varying shades of blandness. Even Freeman, good as his is, is held back here. His rock bottom isn't very rocky, and far from bottomless.

It's really about the ways in which Chinese westernization clashes with the traditionalism of Confucian teachings. It's about competition versus piety.

Savages isn't about anything except flashily directed mayhem. In this nest of vipers, it's the slitheriest varieties that survive – at least for a time.

The whiz-bang stuff doesn't kick in until the Peter-Gwen relationship (which is the best thing in the movie) is firmly established.

A feast for Neil Young lovers and initiates alike.

It's all rather sweet but instantly evanescent.

The endangered swampland dwellers are supposed to be an indigenous pastoral community threatened by eco-unfriendly oil refineries. I kept rooting for Hushpuppy and Co. to leave behind their squalor and relocate. This is not the politically correct response.

The most interesting plot development – Frankie starts falling for Sam – is nipped in the bud. Some things even a soap opera won't stoop to.

Among other things, Unforgivable is a free-floating meditation on the distresses and exhilarations of being a parent.

No envelopes are pushed in Brave, which was directed by Brenda Chapman and Mark Andrews, and no genres are subverted. It's a safe experience; but safe, in this case, is better than sorry.

This may seem like a stunt, but the experience, with many of the sitters tearing up, or smiling beatifically, is overwhelming to watch.

More good than bad, at least until its too tidy conclusion. Since it's essentially a three-character movie, it's a good thing that the characters, and the actors who play them, can hold the screen.

Warning: If you have an allergic reaction to songs like "Take Me Home Tonight" and "I Want to Know What Love Is," do not venture within 10 miles of this movie.

Lola is, in other words, a believable heroine for our times.

There's a great movie to be made about the survivors of Woodstock Nation and their children. But in order to make that movie, you first have to respect the ideals of that generation enough to at least give them their due.

Ridley Scott has made two iconic sci-fi films, "Alien" (1979) and "Blade Runner" (1982). Trying for a hat trick with Prometheus, he comes up short. I'll say this much for it – it's not boring.

It's a sweet and disquieting excursion made by filmmakers whose eyes and ears and imaginations are in marvelous sync.

The cumulative effect is somewhat overwhelming. How could it not be?

Some of the fairy tale effects are marvelous; but the odyssey from darkness to light is unduly long and sloggy, and Stewart, with her contemporary edge, seems to be acting in the wrong era.

It's worth noting that this movie is loosely based on actual people – except the real-life Driss character is, in fact, an Arab. If Driss had been an Arab, The Intouchables would have waded into less navigable waters, but it might have made for a tougher movie.

It makes you nostalgic for the pangs of young love.

I wish the entirety of Polisse were as good as its parts, but perhaps its free-form, mood-swing approach was unavoidable, given the subject. The audience is put through the same wringer as the cops.

The aliens are as gloppy and gross as ever. I especially liked the joke about Andy Warhol being an alien – except didn't we know that already?

Cameron Diaz and Jennifer Lopez provide the star power, but what's missing is script power.

Even the humor is played too broadly – another notch and we'd be in "Monty Python" territory, though not half as witty.

The script is replete with howlers. My favorite, from Kitsch, after the aliens strike: "I've got a bad feeling about this." Indeed.

If Baron Cohen is going to continue making scripted comedies, he needs to work with directors far less slapdash than Larry Charles. He can be one of the funniest people on the planet, but he needs a real dictator – I mean, director – calling the shots.

The result is doubly satisfying: We get not only a trenchant political drama but a bang-up concert film as well.

The marvelous Japanese director Hirokazu Koreeda shows a strong affinity for the humors and longings of childhood. It's an adult movie about children that feels made from the inside out.

The film is best when it focuses on Barnabas's culture shocks in this brave new world. Depp has fun with the character's bafflements without camping it up. What's missing overall is the sense of fun Burton once evinced in films like "Beetlejuice."

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is an ersatz experience, a commingling of forced uplift and exotica, but it's moving anyway.

I've become weary of documentaries about winning prizes, but this one is special because the kids are.

The film is good enough to keep all the Marvel Comics crazed audiences out there deliriously happy while keeping the rest of us earthbound types in moderate thralldom.

Freilich includes interviews with three generations of kibbutzniks and some fascinating historical footage going back to the 1920s.

The innocence of the townspeople is weirdly uplifting. They love their Bernie so much that they seem even more blinkered than he is.

I was expecting something raunchier. Instead, what we have here is a wistful, somewhat overextended but occasionally sweet comedy about a couple that can't – in more ways than one – quite get it together.

A pleasant little dawdle and yet another example, in these dog days for cinema, that dogs are a movie's best friend.

Hansen-Løve wants us to experience all this as a kind of amour fou, but all I kept thinking was that Sullivan was a prize jerk and Camille would be well rid of him.

Although their responses too often seem rehearsed, their innocence is touching and redemptive.

There are wonderful sequences strewn throughout, like the moment when Lazhar, at a school dance, begins to slowly sway to the music as if in a trance.

The wonderful Polish actor Jerzy Stuhr plays the harried papal spokesman. It's a marvelous movie until the halfway point, when it unaccountably devolves into silliness.

Nasheed is no saint, and if he had remained in office, maybe, as with so many others, he would have capitulated to politics as usual. But his temper, if not his outcome, is inspiring.

In its own superannuated preppy way, Stillman's comic universe is as singular as Woody Allen's.

At its best when it gets into the cutthroat dynamics of academic competition, which are both horrifying and amusing.

It's minor, but powerfully so.

Look for a cameo by a movie star whose initials are J.D.

The idiocy of the film's conceit is that Simon recruits innocents like Will to carry out these vigilante killings.

It's a soggy farce that not even its top-notch cast can rescue – though not for want of trying.

It's a lovely oddity, and one that will probably hit home for preteen audiences all over the world.

It's the kind of cutesy idea that doesn't ring remotely true.

So why is everything so thuddingly fun-free?

By holding the shot, as she so often does in this film, Takesue is encouraging audiences to take a deep, long look at things they might otherwise miss.

Schoenaerts has the gift of being able to make inarticulateness expressive. Perhaps this is why, in moments, he seems to recall Brando and Dean.

Dano is still doing his ethereal, creepy underacting routine, but, compared with De Niro's scenery chewing, he seems almost dignified. The film, written and directed by Paul Weitz, has many touching moments and many more hokey ones.

Director Chris Renaud and his team have fun with these dithery, frenetic characters. The film is less special when it slows down and takes a breath of fresh air.

In Panahi's case, he is insuperably handicapped by his current constraints. And yet, despite everything, here is This Is Not a Film, which is emphatically a film – and an extraordinary one.

My favorite character is not Nik but his 15-year-old sister, Rudina (Sindi Lacej), who takes over her father's bread delivery route in his rickety wagon and makes a go of it against all odds. Her pluck seems both Old World and New World.

The bad guys, who specialize in funny beards, funny accents, and shaved heads, would feel right at home in an "Austin Powers" movie.

This movie is "Finian's Rainbow" for dunderheads. Rudd has a few amusing moments talking to himself in a mirror (he's trying to convince himself he's a stud) but he would have been better off talking himself out of this film.

I wish the directors had emphasized more of the players' personal lives apart from the football field. But, in the end, this is a documentary about Courtney and the transformative powers of caring. He works wonders on his players and they reciprocate.

A marvelously captivating animated feature.

The best you can say about This Means War is that it would make a good date movie for couples in the witness protection program.

The reason we feel so close to Socha, a man who at first seems nothing more than a racist scoundrel, is that his moral odyssey, with its advances and retreats, is so emotionally believable.

The sometimes agonizingly powerful documentary Under Fire: Journalists in Combat is built around some staggering statistics: Only two journalists were killed in World War I. Sixty-three lost their lives in World War II. And in the past two decades, almost one journalist per week has been killed.

The sadness and almost Chaplinesque pathos that ensues is well wrought and Close, although she is so recessive that at times she seems to fade into the ether, is quite touching.

Miss Bala has been praised on the festival circuit for being a gritty look at the Mexican drug trade but too often it seemed like a bargain-bin "Scarface" to me.

The greatest performance, though, is Vanessa Redgrave's as Martius's blood-lusting mother, Volumnia. It's an extraordinarily powerful piece of acting, all controlled rage. When, in the end, that rage erupts, her vehemence splits the screen.

When a great movie subject results in a middling movie, the loss is double.

Taut almost to the point of abstraction.

The film is more testimonial than drama.

The best thing about the film is the majestic mountain vistas, shot in Canada. You can practically inhale them.

It's a creepy and disturbing movie, but there's not a lot going on behind people's eyes. The soullessness lacks soul.

You may not feel like dancing after watching Pina – unless you have a thing for earth in your shoes – but you'll certainly know you've seen something.

Despite never having made a movie before, and utilizing comparatively primitive camera and recording equipment, Kurt and his son Ian crafted a movie unlike any other in the rock-doc genre.

You can blissfully zone out on the director's pretty pictures, which is a permissible indulgence when the pictures are as delicately alluring as they are here. Also, the performances of Kikuchi and Hatsune are first-rate.

The Iron Lady is too bland to be controversial, too antiquated to speak to the present.

A Separation is not the work of a constrained artist. It's a great movie in which the full range of human interaction seems to play itself out before our eyes.

The filmmaking is often wayward, the scenes of confrontation sometimes too stagey, but Oduye is a marvelous young actress with a camera-ready face brimming with soulfulness.

Daldry and his screenwriter Eric Roth make the mistake of showing bodies falling from the Twin Towers – it's a mistake because its graphic power seems more exploitative than cathartic – but they otherwise thankfully refrain from pulling out all the stops.

Danijel, who cares for Ajla while at the same time carrying out his mission of ethnic cleansing, is the least fully explored character in the movie, which leaves a big blur at its core. Still, this is an impressive piece of work that doesn't flinch from the atrocities that no doubt motivated Jolie to make the film in the first place.

If, like me, you find the movie technique known as motion capture creepy, you might be put off going to see Steven Spielberg's 3-D The Adventures of Tintin.

War Horse, despite its excellences, is a supreme demonstration of a director phoning it in.

Scarlett Johansson plays the head zookeeper and she's a lot less mannered than usual.

The coolness here has its creepiness, as in the dispassionate way Fincher depicts Lisbeth's rape and her subsequent, harrowing revenge, but the suspicion remains: Fincher didn't make this movie his own because he doesn't consider it his own.

If this was a quintessential Polanski movie, something malign would reside inside its heart: The sitcom would explode its boundaries. The movie is called Carnage, but the carnivores on display are toothless.

What this film really celebrates is crunch-and-thud video-game-style action, not especially well choreographed by director Guy Ritchie.

A very good thrill ride and Cruise is better than he's been in a long time.

The filmmakers may be just as clueless as Buddy when it comes to Mavis, who resembles nothing so much as a snooty stalker.

It's a beautifully modulated performance of a man whose presence, at times, seems on the verge of vanishing – not a bad attribute for a spy.

The cast, at least on paper, is formidable, if ill-used.

Sit this one out.

Once summer ends and the kids enroll in school, the jig will be up. The film ends with that eventuality. It would have been richer if it had opened with it.

It gives ample play to all sides of the argument. Herzog allows us to think things through on our own.

The action is swift and witty, and the 3-D effects are imaginative and not simply tacked on as with so many animated movies these days.

Hugo is a mixed bag but one well worth rummaging through.

Branagh is marvelous at conveying his exasperation. His conceit is that Olivier offstage acted the same as Olivier onstage – as if all of life was a vast playlet. For someone as thoroughly actorly as Olivier, this is probably no exaggeration. I would like to think that the great man himself would have smiled at Branagh's rollicking rendition of tantrums.

Low point would be Knightley's hysterical opening sequences in which she appears to be trying to trying to contort herself into a Moebius strip. Overacting this gross can only have been enabled by a director. Didn't Cronenberg look at the rushes? Or did he think he was back in "Dead Ringers" territory?

The Artist is full of homages to many other films. I suppose it will be fun for cinéastes to pick out the references, but not all of them – like the ones from "Citizen Kane" or "Sunset Boulevard" – are especially germane.

I would imagine that even those who line up for this film will be somewhat let down, if only because it's clear that most of the juicy stuff will arrive in Part 2 – which won't be released until next November.

Dislikable movie characters don't always result in dislikable movies but that's certainly the case with Sam Levinson's Another Happy Day, a dysfunctional family meltdown movie about an impending wedding that only grows more aggravating as it unwinds.

A jagged, uneven, often unfulfilling experience, but there are a few first-rate scenes between Joseph and Hannah that convincingly put forward the capacity for redemption in even the most ravaged of souls.

Clooney and Payne are coconspirators, too. They know that the story they are telling is too emotionally complicated to muck up with a lot of preening and artifice. They head right into the sad and crazymaking humor of the situation. This is a modest marvel of a movie.

Still, I prefer a bit more drama in my political docudramas. The Conquest never really breaks out of its genre in the way that, say, "The Queen" or "Il Divo" or the more fictionalized "In the Loop" did.

Adam Sandler plays a dual role in Jack and Jill, and he's a lot better as Jill than as Jack.

Dunst gives a strong, hard-bitten performance even though she is playing an attitude rather than a character. Much of Justine's upsets are recorded in Von Trier's shaky-cam style – seasick realism. The grand planet-busting finale, though, is a beauty.

The foundation of this sympathy is Hoover's complicated sexuality. Eastwood and Black have attempted to provide Hoover with the balm he denied himself in his own lifetime. It doesn't work.

Pianomania is the thoroughly apt title for a thoroughly enjoyable documentary.

Muddled cop thriller The Son of No One has a top-drawer cast and a bottom-drawer script.

Turns one of the greatest geniuses of German literature into a love-struck rapscallion.

If this film turns out to be a big success, malls everywhere may want to hire more security.

Frankly, if I'm going to be offered a heaping pile of revisionism about the greatest writer who ever lived, I'd rather it be from someone with more academic heft than the director of "Independence Day" and "Godzilla." I trust the teachers who receive this film's study guide have a shredder handy.

A semi-improvised, microbudget marvel with a range of feeling that shames most big-budget star-driven movies.

Depp is disappointingly recessive here, as he often is when he's playing characters who don't have an antic streak.

The writer-director Andrew Niccol is best known for writing "The Truman Show," another movie that got carried away by doomsday deep-think. The deep-think here is even sillier.

Durkin is a bit too fond of drawn-out scenes of ominous anomie, and he doesn't provide enough psychological ballast for Martha's misery. He doesn't need to. Olsen, with her angelic face and hard-bitten voice, provides it for him.

It's all fairly entertaining but also confusing for anybody who doesn't get the Wall Street lingo. Irons, as the company's chief executive officer, seems to sympathize with us: He keeps asking his minions to explain the impending problems in plain English.

The most powerful sequences in the movie are the linked vignettes involving Margaret and the various grown-up children whom she attempts to help in their search for – what, exactly? Closure? Catharsis?

The greater the illusion the greater the manipulator, and few are as good as Kevin Clash, the subject of Constance Marks's sprightly six-years-in-the-making documentary Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey.

Even though none of these guys is ready to kick the bucket, The Big Year has an unmistakable affinity with "The Bucket List."

Oka! is a fascinating movie with many free-form charms.

This same premise holds for the remake, and it seems more pandering (and dated) than ever.

It all achieves a loony unity by the end, even though what is being unified is not altogether palatable.

In the end, the power poetry workshops, as the teachers are first to admit, are not about creating Shakespeares. They are about survival.

Estevez directs with ease and assurance but, both internally and externally, not enough happens to these people.

They should call this overloud, underwhelming movie "Real Steal."

The film is actually fairly entertaining once you get past its overweening desire to be the bearer of bad tidings. A more adventuresome movie would have treated the down-and-dirty world of politics as its starting, not its ending, point.

I am not a fan of food you need a microscope to see, but if your idea of fine dining is pumpkin meringue sandwiches, bone marrow tartare with oysters, tea shrimp with caviar anemones, and ice vinaigrette with tangerines and green olive, then by all means make haste to El Bulli.

I wish I could say it's a resurrected classic but, alas, it's mostly a mess – a 2-1/2-hour mess no less.

Begins frighteningly and gets progressively more so.

The film's predictability dampens its best parts. Having decided to make a movie about a dreaded subject, the filmmakers too often retreat into the comfort zone of easy assurances and flip quips.

Much of the film is wordless, and apparently some of the Merjan ritualism is a concoction of the filmmakers. There's a trancelike quality to its best moments, but too much of it is artfully boring. Silent Souls is at the opposite extreme from Hollywood – it's all mood. Be careful what you wish for.

Director Marc Forster and screenwriter Jason Keller take the easy way out by turning Childers into a Bible-thumping Rambo. Just because the Childers of this movie is not, to put it mildly, introspective, is no reason why the filmmakers had to be equally dense.

De Niro, in what amounts to an extended cameo, is radically miscast. That's still no excuse for his nonperformance, which is beyond lackluster.

Moneyball presents a misleading story line in order to prop up Billy Beane as some kind of would-be miracle worker antihero. In truth, he's just another tobacco-chewing go-getter trying to make sense of a game that, thankfully, has never quite made sense.

For those who love chess, Fischer will probably always be its premier player, a fact his mental illness cannot expunge.

Kittelsen is a funny, expansive actress, and director Anne Sewitsky manages the sad-comic tonal shifts with emotional accuracy.

The irony of this film is that it's all about how we need to come together to conquer a calamity that pushes us apart.

It's all tease in the first half, and all implausibilities in the second. Still, Thomas is always worth watching, in French or in English, whether her mood be chilly or tropical.

See the film, if you must, for Mara, who will be starring in the upcoming Hollywood remake of "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo." She's a sharp, vigilant actress whose career bears watching.

Warrior becomes increasingly shameless until, by the end, with the big fights fought, we are clearly meant to rise as one and applaud the indomitability of the human spirit. But the only indomitable thing about Warrior are its clichés.

It's a lot more cornball – i.e., enjoyable – than "The Tree of Life," which tried for some of the same things. Utopia, with its big blue skies and peachy-keen people, may not rank right up there with Shangri-La, but it's close enough.

His rise from a marginalized Jewish boy in Nazi-occupied Paris to his chain-smoking fame as the composer of such Euro-hits as "Je t'Aime … Moi Non Plus" is presented as one long, hallucinatory jag, revealing far less about Gainsbourg, I would imagine, than about Sfar.

Despite its arty veneer and its ostensibly political edge, Circumstance seems more interested in titillation than revelation.

Although they might have wished for something less conventional, it's the thrills that make this movie.

Alternately inspirational and disheartening, galvanizing and wearying.

Joffe for the most part amps up the melodrama without tearing Greene's complex weave, but everything unravels toward the end with some staggeringly bad staging. It's as if the film itself had been mugged.

Too often ambles into inconsequentiality. And, predictably, Ned becomes a kind of family savior – the idiot becomes the sage. It's Frank Capra for dummies.

One of the few open-minded Hollywood movies about Christian fundamentalism, but the mind isn't sufficiently exploratory.

As speculative storytelling goes, Mozart's Sister is ingenious but as moviemaking it's plodding.

One thought that occurred to me while pacing myself through Flypaper: With the economy being what it is, will there be a rash of bank robbery movies?

This is a film that starts out cynically and gradually morphs into sentimentality of a particularly high gloss.

The problem with this year-by-year structure is that the slow crawl to the end can seem agonizing if the film isn't engaging. And One Day, despite strenuous attempts by all involved to make us laugh, cry, and laugh-cry, is more likely to induce winces. We've seen it all before – and better.

This rousing documentary directed by Kevin Tancharoen and shot during two live concerts in New Jersey, is a nonstop campy celebration of youthful pizazz.

The result may have value to '60s sociologists, ethnologists, superannuated hippies, and Kesey fanatics, but for the most part what is on view is a jumble of scenes featuring pranksters getting high on grass and LSD.

Not surprisingly, a documentary constructed entirely from newsreel footage proves inadequate to the task of sounding the depths of someone as complicated or driven (pun intended) as Senna.

July, like Hal Hartley, another overrated art-house luminary, is an acquired taste I have yet to acquire.

It's a carefully manicured, almost genteel piece of moviemaking. The film is paradoxically both rousing and lulling.

Since the only really good "Planet of the Apes" movie was the 1968 original with Charlton Heston, I've always wondered why filmmakers can't just leave well enough alone.

The Whistleblower is frustratingly uneven, but at least it affords us the rare opportunity these days to meet up with a movie hero who isn't wearing jammies and a cape.

Chapman coaxes good performances from his cast, especially Wilson, who makes Joe's immense conflicts a matter of empathy as much as abhorrence.

The coarseness wouldn't be so bad if at least the steady stream of obscenities were funny.

Numbingly inane comedy.

The big news here is not simply that Nim was traumatized, it's that Nim was signing that he was traumatized.

From a psychological standpoint, this is murky territory but Jacobs presents it as the height of enlightenment – a confluence of two damaged souls. At least "Good Will Hunting," another movie that played this game, wasn't blah.

With all the talk in Page One about the demise of print journalism and the rise of new media, this shiny spacious emporium seems like both a beacon and a staggering folly.

It's enough that these two castaways are friends, but I guess friendship doesn't cut it when you're trying to create a star-driven hit. It should, though. Better a believable friendship than an unbelievable love affair.

The only saving grace is that this time around, the script (yes, there is one, and it was concocted by Ehren Kruger) has occasional wisps of lucidity, and Bay delivers – overdelivers – on the mayhem.

Eric Eason's script is sometimes unduly contrived and derivative, but we are always aware that something larger is being played out.

Too much of The Names of Love is a joke book posing as a movie.