Rick Groen

Bad Teacher should be a hoot. But it isn't. Love the theory here, hate the practice.

The whole project labours towards an importance it never earns. In Beautiful Boy, the themes are vast but the picture is small, and the ensuing emptiness is what the characters are meant to feel – not us.

Ultimately, the result is identical to Mills's debut effort in "Thumbsucker." Once again, clever insight vies with misty-eyed sentimentality, honesty with artifice, real humour with bogus gravity, the genuinely affecting with the merely quirky. But "Thumbsucker" was at least a promising start; Beginners is just a frustrating continuation.

By happy coincidence, their names – Bitey, Loudy, Stinky, Lovey and Nimrod – pretty much double as a plot summary.

All the kids here are terrific, significantly better than the actual movie that surrounds them. Although ostensibly fashioned by Abrams, it's really a summer-weight Spielberg yarn.

Certainly, his (Allen) work here feels effortless, and that feather-light touch gives the picture its charm – modest but real.

That's partly why X-Men: First Class is such fanboy fun, as the script departs from official Marvel lore to invent a whole new "origin story" for the mutant ensemble.

A middling documentary but a magnificent indictment.

This is potentially compelling, but truncated flashbacks are far too crude a mechanism for exploring not only the intricacies of that tumultuous period in Kenyan history but also its ongoing legacy.

Judi Dench is much more of a challenge. Drenched in powder and pomp, the grand old Dame pops up in a London carriage. She's there in a flash and then, as quickly, gone, and her fleeting presence is exactly like the fleeting merit of this fourth galleon in the portly franchise: It prompts stirrings, not quite all the way to feelings.

Without its star, this picture would float off forgettably into the ether.

En route, what emerges is the kind of film, rich in paradox, that's common to Reichardt but so rare anywhere else – a film ponderously slow in pace yet kinetically charged with insight; starkly realistic yet allegorical too; psychologically astute yet politically resonant.

Poor Cattrall is caught in a script that, much like the white teddy, is an impossibly tight squeeze, obliging her to hit the farcical laughs while still playing the cellulite realism.

It's all a bit too schematic, yet the ambition is admirable and the message powerful: Today, no less than yesterday, the weak must be strong to survive, and their strength is endlessly tested.

Clearly, the screenplay is looking for some black comedy here, but Foster's direction is too earnest to locate it.

Alas, the news is mixed: Thor ain't much of a movie but it's a great career move. Both movie and move belong to director Kenneth Branagh.

More interestingly, it's also kind of sweet in a contrived and fumbling first-kiss sort of way.

No doubt, life is tough in the wild but, this being a Disney flick, it's loving too and even comes with a kiddie-friendly narrative that's easy to summarize and hard to dispute.

When the tent folds and the dust settles, the question is not whether the movie is good – sorry, not a chance – but whether it's garish enough, sappy enough, Hollywood enough to rise to the level of being likeably bad. Is it, in short, a guilty pleasure?

Give director Susanne Bier full marks: Her encasing parable is brand new and immediately provocative.

Soul Surfer is a true story that plays like bad fiction.

It's one of those imperfect pictures that manages to command and hold our attention straight from the opening frames.

Apparently, somebody thought it was time for a remake. Clearly, somebody was dead wrong.

It's Adrien Brody's turn to find himself the lone and immobilized star of an emerging new genre: Call it the anti-action flick.

View the Second World War through a child's eyes and the result isn't hard to predict: a loss-of-innocence tale. Winter in Wartime is the boilerplate version, with the already dramatic facts of the era ramped up to melodramatic levels. Little wonder it rings so false.

From that title on down, White Irish Drinkers is a compendium of clichés struggling to upgrade its status and become a respectable archetype.

Win Win is a paragon of truth at a slow jog, but that upbeat sprint to the finish feels like a big cheat.

Add it all up, including the nifty twist at the end, and what we have here is a fun Hollywood flick with a good head on its shoulders.