Rene Rodriguez

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.