Rene Rodriguez

Coogler occasionally overplays his hand: The scene in which Oscar says goodbye to his daughter for what we know will be the last time is prolonged to the point of overkill.

The coming-of-age tale The Way, Way Back is sweet, heartfelt and utterly trite and predictable from beginning to end.

The times have caught up with Almodóvar, who is now 63: He thinks he’s still pushing the envelope, but he comes off as old-fashioned and outdated.

The movie contains little in terms of traditional action, and Refn never uses it in a rousing or exciting manner, either. That would break the nightmarish spell this strange, beautiful film casts on the viewer. A mother’s love has never been this ruinous.

An uncommonly intense and frightening experience, The Conjuring is the first genuinely scary release in ages by a major studio that features practically no violence and spills only a bit of blood.

It’s the cinematic equivalent of a kid playing with his toys and smashing action figures together, except del Toro does it with more grace and imagination than most. There are long sequences in this movie that merit that most overused of terms, “awesome.”

There’s a rollicking Wild West adventure buried deep inside The Lone Ranger, a bloated, mega-budget revival of the story of the iconic gunslinger and his Native American sidekick Tonto.

The movie has a profound understanding of the back-and-forth nature of the bond between boys, and it ends on a silent note of forgiving looks and instant reconciliation that is the privilege of the young, whose lives aren’t yet complicated enough to put resentment before friendship

Monsters University feels half-hearted and lazy, like they weren’t even trying. At least show a little effort, guys.

Although there are some initial feints at using zombies as a metaphor for third-world issues and cultural differences, the picture forgets all that stuff by the final reel. World War Z opens with an undeniable bang. But if this is the way the world ends, we’re going out with a whimper.

What went wrong with Man of Steel? The early teasers promised Terrence Malick. The finished film is more Michael Bay.

This Is the End is a marvelously sustained, high-wire goof – a movie so nutty and daring, so crazy and out-there, that it feels like a low-budget independent except with big stars and a sizable budget.

The film is far from a downer. If anything, more than any of the films in the trilogy, this one may be the most hopeful - and the most affecting.

The Purge isn’t just stupid; it’s also pretentious and often makes no sense.

The picture is perfectly watchable but rarely compelling, because the filmmakers are too timid to take any chances.

There’s nothing more to this movie than the set-up. Even though Cypher is slowly bleeding to death, and Kitai is running out of oxygen capsules that allow him to breathe in the toxic air, there’s no sense of urgency, either. At least Shyamalan, sensing the thinness of the material, doesn’t stretch things out.

Playful, effervescent comedy.

There’s exactly one good scene in all of The Hangover Part III, a hilarious bit of business halfway during the end credits that reminds you what made the original film so good.

At Any Price teaches you a lot about the business of corn seeds and genetic manipulation (the stuff is actually fascinating) but what interests director Ramin Bahrani most are the dynamics of this deeply dysfunctional family.

The directors complied and made some trims, which helps explain why the film works better as a thrilling but superficial celebration of two incredible athletes instead of a personal portrait of two world-famous women who continue to make sports history.

The movie fares less well when the plot and Simon’s neuroses come to the surface, but there is some tremendous suspense in the movie’s final scene.

Star Trek Into Darkness gives you an exhilarating, tingle-inducing rush — that rare feeling that comes when a gigantic entertainment is firing on all fronts, exceeding your expectations.

In the House seems to be building toward a cathartic and unexpected finale. Instead, you get a baffling fizzle — an inexcusably limp and unimaginative conclusion that doesn’t bring a single plot strand to a satisfying end.

The movie is intentionally elusive, like a memory you can’t quite fully recall, but the result has all the depth and weight of a greeting card.

Marvel Studios will only be able to draw from this well only so many times, though, before fatigue sets in.

You come away from Mud fondly remembering those two boys, especially Ellis, who has taken his first steps toward adulthood and discovers it suits him just fine.

This is easily Bay’s best movie, the work of a filmmaker with a cracked sense of humor that he is able to share with the audience.

For its first hour or so, Oblivion is a visually mesmerizing, intriguing picture that doesn’t feel like the same-old: It engages your eyes and piques your curiosity. Then, gradually, the novelty wears off, the clichés start to pile up and we’re back to Post-Apocalyptic Dystopia 101.

Blancanieves is funny, inventive and daring enough to change the story’s ending, going out on a note of bittersweet, unexpected melancholy.

While the scope of the movie is bigger, its impact is smaller. "Blue Valentine" was a precise, heartrending portrait of a marriage coming apart at the seams. The theme of his new movie is a lot harder to discern.

Ascher treats all these insane theories seriously, but that doesn’t mean you have to.

Evil Dead is just a well-made gross-out, and it's kind of a bummer.

No is an exploration of the power of the media to manipulate hearts and minds. The moral of the story: Always go positive.

The movie is wild, but not in the ways that you expect, and it’s also surprisingly chaste — you think you see a lot more than you actually do.

Despite its astronomical body count, John Dies at the End never takes itself seriously, and neither should you.

Oz the Great and Powerful is an oppressive, bloated bore.

The movie leaves you feeling angry and frustrated anyway. And justice for all? Hardly.

Time to give the shoot-’em-up thing a rest, guys: It’s tired and played out, and so are you.

The main thing to keep in mind while watching Steven Soderbergh’s thriller Side Effects is not to take the movie too seriously or else you’ll feel betrayed by the end.

An unsalvageable wreck.

An excruciating and melodramatic comedy.

Bullet in the Head is a throwback to the past with its eyes trained on the present, and it proves Hill has kept up with the times.

This is the sort of small, intimate drama about unpleasant subject matter Hollywood rarely deals with, but Haneke isn't worried about turning off his audience, because death is something everyone has in common. It fascinates us, the way it also scares us.

Maya is as consumed with finding bin Laden as Jake Gyllenhaal was obsessed with finding a serial killer in "Zodiac," only he was doing it as a hobby.

Django Unchained is the most brutal film Quentin Tarantino has ever made. Unlike "Kill Bill" or "Inglourious Basterds," where the violence was thrilling and carried a visceral kick, the carnage here is often ugly and difficult to watch.

Reacher is so good at everything he does, and Cruise plays him in such a robotic manner, that the movie becomes a bit of a bore: The hero is practically omnipotent.

There will be opportunities to see the picture in regular 24 frames per second, but I recommend going the whole hog and sampling what Jackson has come up with - a new way to watch movies and a new take on a universe that seemed to have exhausted its narrative possibilities.

Hitchcock spends too much time off the set of Psycho, where the real story was, and focuses instead on incidental matters that feel like outtakes. Mother would not have been pleased.

There isn't a moment in the entire picture in which you will recognize an element of your own life.

Holy Motors is wild and unfettered and playful - the work of an artist who carries his love of cinema in his bones, and knows how to share that affection with the audience.

This Must Be the Place is as emotionally zonked-out as its protagonist, and just as difficult to warm up to.

This is writer-director David O. Russell's idea of a romantic comedy, and it's terrific - one of the freshest, funniest, most elevating crowd-pleasers of the year.

The House I Live In is a work of journalism, not propaganda: Jarecki has done his research and leaves it to you to decide what to make of it.

Mendes' approach to action is classical and elegant - no manic editing and blurry unintelligible images here - but what makes the movie truly special is the attention he gives his actors.

This is a gorgeous, flashy, widescreen epic, like "Boogie Nights" or "Casino," about the most essential things in life: Family, friends and love. But most of all, love.

Wreck-It-Ralph is a gorgeously rendered story that will play just as well to children as to their parents, albeit for different reasons. Playstation and Xbox junkies will be equally pleased.

Hunt gives this funny, touching movie its soul, and the actors elevate the material into something more resonant and memorable than the story promises.

If you're interested in the sheer craft of filmmaking, Cloud Atlas is required viewing - a rare example of a movie getting by entirely on technique and creative bravado.

Madrid, 1987 operates on a dizzying number of levels - as a romantic comedy, a sex farce, a study of culture clash, ageism and idealism - and the highest compliment you can give this ridiculously talky movie (which plays better if you speak Spanish) is that you're a little sad to see the characters go on their way once they part, probably forever.

Director James Ponsoldt, who co-wrote the script with Susan Burke (inspired in part by her own experiences), opts for realism and modesty instead of sensation.

Writer-director Stephane Robelin's frothy comedy is much more "Golden Girls" hijinks than "On Golden Pond."

Despite all the freaky business on display - and there are moments here when you cannot believe your eyes - The Paperboy suffocates you with boredom like a hot, wet blanket. You want to push it away and escape. It makes sleaze boring.

This is a talky picture, based on a historical incident where the outcome is already known – yet it still proves much more engrossing than crime dramas or bank robberies.

For a good hour, Seven Psychopaths is lively, bloody fun. Then the yawning starts.

The film also plays to the strengths of the found-footage format, proving that sometimes the scariest things are the ones you can barely see. For horror hounds, this is required viewing.

This is an exciting, exceptionally well-made futuristic thriller that also happens to be loaded with lived-in touches and punchy ideas.

Reveals yet another facet of this always-unpredictable filmmaker: a flair for compassionate, humane melodrama.

The movie even fails on a psychological level, never illustrating how, in a pressure-cooker environment and swept up by mob-think mentality, we are capable of committing acts that innately repel us.

Achingly beautiful and visually transfixing, Samsara offers a transporting vacation from the usual multiplex fare. It's a movie to get lost in.

The Master has become a contest between two gifted actors trying to shout each other down. The commitment to their roles is impressive, but it's tethered to a weightless, airless movie, a film so enamored of itself, the audience gets shut out.

On one level, Searching for Sugar Man is a testament to how music - or painting or literature or any form of art - can take on a life far greater than its creator intended when it happens to connect with the right people at the right time.

The most fascinating aspect of The Imposter, though, is why the missing boy's family believed his story.

Even at his worst - and Robert does some awful things - the actor almost makes you root for him, hoping he'll get away with it.

There are several cameos in For a Good Time, Call… by famous actors portraying the girls' phone-sex clients, including Kevin Smith and Seth Rogen, but they've been clearly been left to improvise, and they don't put much effort into their routines.

Even the story-within-a-story structure doesn't pay off. This material needed more substance and ideas - and less flash and sumptuous production values.

You end up feeling sorry for all the actors forced to humiliate themselves, except for McConaughey, whose portrayal of sadistic, manipulative evil is mesmerizing, in part because it was so unexpected. He continues to surprise. Friedkin, sadly, continues to coast.

Cosmopolis may be a cerebral mood piece, but it is loaded with strong performances that connect on an emotional level.

The best moments in director David Koepp's slight, dull movie are the scenes in which bike messenger Wilee pauses at busy intersections to figure out the path of least obstruction.

Everyone in Hit and Run is clearly having a good time. It's the audience that gets left out of the fun.

The film's earnestness makes up for its high corn factor.

The best artists - the ones whose work endures and matters and changes the world - are often troublemakers who challenge the status quo. Out of their defiance comes art. Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, director Alison Klayman's riveting documentary of the esteemed Chinese sculptor/painter/iconoclast, is practically a handbook on social rebellion.

None of this is all that engaging. But the art design of the movie makes up for the slack story.

Chuck Norris is also in this movie, although you should know that he gets roughly five minutes of screen time, half of those devoted to his telling of a Chuck Norris joke. That is as funny as the movie's self-aware humor gets.

The best stuff comes early in Ruby Sparks, which was written by Kazan (granddaughter of Elia) and directed by the husband and wife team of Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris (Little Miss Sunshine).

There's a streak of compassion in Dark Horse, a sincere empathy for a thoroughly detestable man, that is as surprising as anything in Solondz's earlier, more transgressive work.

The movie is oddly impersonal - you remember the concept more than the story - and feels like something that was made simply for the opportunity to pair Streep and Jones for the first time.

It looks fantastic, but it's also hard to sit through, because by that point The Bourne Legacy has repeatedly proven there are no surprises to be had here, no more fresh stories to be mined from this well. The stunts look exhausting, though. No wonder Damon bailed.

This is ultimately a movie about highly intelligent people in pursuit of trivial nonsense: At least Mulder and Scully caught a real monster every once in a while.

By the end, the movie has pulled off a small miracle: You become absorbed in the lives of these people for who they are and not what they own.

As it winds down to its quiet, haunting finale, Oslo, August 31st illustrates how all of us, even the most damaged and broken people, have a purpose to fulfill.

It's a beautiful, strange tone poem about childhood and innocence, set in a strange but still recognizable world where the polar ice caps are melting, crayfish shacks float down rivers and enormous aurochs, an extinct breed of bison, are sloughing their way toward our tiny, adorable narrator.

This is not the sort of movie you can just leave behind in the theater. And like any true finale to a trilogy, the picture doesn't work nearly as well if you haven't seen the previous two installments: It's not designed to stand alone, and it pays off all that has come before with an exuberant, thrilling high.

To Rome with Love is so inviting, and most of its gaggle of characters so diverse and likable, it's doubly disappointing that Allen, who wrote and directed the movie, can't think of what to do with them.

Aggressively, defiantly stupid.

Part of the reason The Amazing Spider-Man feels so fresh and invigorating is that its story is so simple - anyone remember exactly what the deal was with Loki and that cube? - and its protagonist so relatable.

Ted is more of an idea than a movie, a string of jokes and homages starring a cartoon and some game actors whose performances are destined to be enjoyed in chunks, rarely from start to finish, during momentary breaks of channel surfing on late-night TV.

An irritatingly contrived drama.

As Seeking a Friend for the End of the World crawls toward its sentimental finale, you're rooting for that asteroid to get here, quick.