Roger Moore

Young Onata Aprile makes Maisie a passive wonder, a sweetly poker-faced, nonjudgmental and hopeful child, even as she’s being ditched at bars, forgotten at school or passed back and forth like a prize, or a bad penny.

This movie hangs utterly on performance, and DiCaprio’s Gatsby is mesmerizing.

The fact that Serena, ranked number one again this year — the oldest woman (31) ever so ranked — means that their story isn’t over, and that if a skeptic wants to finally appreciate their historic impact on the game, he or she still has time to come around.

Kon-Tiki is a grand old school yarn with enough drama and dramatic incidents to make even Indiana Jones envious at the adventure of it all.

The dialogue is hard-bitten and Mamet-sharp.

The broad, goofy jokes and one-liners land — even if they feel a little winded, this time.

For all its pleasures, as Germaine nudges Claude toward that “ideal” ending that will make the reader say “I never saw that coming” and “It could not have ended any other way” at the same time, one only wishes this absorbing but melodramatic film had taken that advice.

It goes on too long, but this is personal essay filmmaking at its best, one that passes that ultimate test of such self-involved projects. It has a story worth telling.

Coarse, crude but often cute, The Big Wedding serves up the spectacle of its title, and the bigger spectacle of four AARP-eligible Oscar winners cursing like sailors.

This is more “Something Mild” than “Something Wild.” But Firth and Blunt handle their characters’ many revelations with care and play with layers of hurt and disappointment with great sympathy and pathos.

It’s just too much — too much graphic violence, too many plot wrinkles, too much stupidity, too many supporting players to track...For a movie as physically fit as this one wants to be, Pain & Gain is carrying way too much extra weight.

There’s nothing much new here, but the performances and the milieu make Filly Brown an entertaining, honorable installment in a story that is the American Dream incarnate, and has been ever since the first wannabe showed up on Tin Pan Alley at the beginning of the last century.

Beneath all the melodrama, beyond the fine performances, what sets At Any Price apart is the depiction of farming as it is today, the salesmanship, the traditions and ideals abandoned for greater profits and easier work and the ruthless world these patented “high yield” seeds have made.

It doesn’t trivialize Mud to label it Tennessee Williams lite — at least in its romantic notions. Nichols gets good performances out of one and all, but lets himself get so caught up in his sense of place that this potboiler hangs around more than a few minutes after that pot has come to a boil.

It’s too bad the muted Home Run didn’t take its own advice about being daring and inventive.

That doesn’t make Oblivion a bad movie, just a familiar one — generic.

Paris-Manhattan is an amusing little nothing of a movie built around the wit and wisdom of Woody Allen.

Scary Movie 5 comes up short in every way imaginable.

Earnest, righteous, historically accurate and often entertaining.

It’s a blunt instrument of a movie, and often melodramatic. But it sometimes moves and often hits its target square on the nose.

Is this Evil Dead (no “The”) any good? Yes and no. It several genuinely hair-raising moments and presents, for your edification and enjoyment, some of the most graphic horror violence ever presented on the screen.

Robert Redford delivers one last lecture on ’60s idealism and passes another baton to Shia LaBeouf in The Company You Keep, an engrossing thriller about the last anti-Vietnam War radicals still underground.

For all its plot trickery, mind science and relationship square dancing, Trance doesn’t have the emotional tug or technical pizzaz of Boyle’s best films – “Slumdog Millionaire,” “Trainspotting” or “127 Hours.”

The Brass Teapot stumbles into tedium, a parable that never quite resolves itself into the moral lesson it so desperately wants to convey.

Cranking out two formulaic movies like this a year show the Atlanta mogul’s true ambition — replacing all those soap operas TV is canceling, two hours at a time.

The diminutive McAvoy, trying his hand at all manner of action, may be hoping to become the Scottish Tom Cruise. But Welcome to the Punch shows he’s still more of a Scottish Michael J. Fox, an actor better served by roles with more charm and less grimacing than this one.

'Twilight' of the Body Snatchers, without much urgency or sexual heat.

It’s a live-action version of on an ’80s cartoon that was designed to sell toys. This is “Transformers” without the Bumblebee Camaro, a lot of action, a few one-liners, and a lot of gunplay.

Unwieldy, overlong and overly reliant on melodramatic coincidences, A Place in the Pines is still better than it has any right to be, thanks to its cast.

Potter’s film is at is most artful in the painterly ways she composes the wordless scenes of the girls testing cigarettes, hitchhiking with the wrong boys and Rosa exploring heavy petting with another boy, showing off for Ginger.

There’s a phone app that could text a funnier script than this.

Not every cute movie about the mentally ill is Oscar worthy, but this touching and riotous one from Down Under works well enough.

We’re reminded not just of sacrifice, but of those to whom service is a genuine calling and what that bandied-about word “hero” really means.

For all the bursts of blood, the gunplay and execution-style head-shots that punctuate scores of deaths, it’s hard to see Olympus Has Fallen (Secret Service code) as much more than another movie manifestation of a first-person shooter video game.

The first pleasant surprise of spring, a gorgeous kids’ cartoon with heart and wit, if not exactly a firm grasp of paleontology.

No matter how great her ambitions, no matter how little she was able to accomplish, thanks to the strictures of her time, here was a woman history remembers simply through the force of her personality and the simple courage it took to be ahead of her time.

Fey plays this inner-outer conflict well. But at her most wide-eyed and vulnerable, she still has trouble making a romance credible, even with Rudd, edgy comedy’s puppy dog of a leading man.

There’s more than a hint of the ‘90s Roddy Doyle adaptation “The Commitments” in all this – people far removed from Memphis and Detroit connecting to soul music on a spiritual level.

It’s a smidge too cute and a bit too long, but Huard and Scott make this comical journey (in French and “Franglish” with English subtitles), a trip from indifference to kindness, incompetence to responsibility, a most rewarding reinvention of what “family” can mean.

An engrossing but frustrating movie, so subtle in its depiction of a teenager struggling to come to terms with a world and worldview utterly upended that it almost trivializes the tragedy that Lore, we suspect, is just beginning to feel responsible for.

The film reminds us that as amusing as he could be, he wasn’t the dazzling wit history packaged him as. “Relevant” is how he wanted to be remembered. And before he died, he got a filmmaker to remind us of exactly that.

Spring Break – it’s every bit as much fun as you think it is. Until it isn’t.

Rare is the thriller that goes as completely and utterly wrong as The Call does at almost precisely the one hour mark. Which is a crying shame, because for an hour, this is a riveting, by the book kidnapping.

The documentary Room 237 is an ostensibly thoughtful deep reading, a deconstruction of Stanley Kubrick’s film of Stephen King’s 1980 novel “The Shining.” What it really is, is a bunch of obsessives obsessing about an obsessive movie maker’s obsessive movie.

Few jokes take us by surprise, but enough comic haymakers land to make “Burt Wonderstone” credible, in not exactly “incredible.”

It’s a lovely film, a sentimental parable that carefully recreates a post-war Japan obsessed with obliterating its past.

A well-crafted documentary variation on "Defiance," Ukrainian Jews saving themselves by going underground -- literally.

Rapace is all over the place with her performance — needy, then self-assured, enraged, then in love. The always feral Farrell seems as dismayed by her as the rest of us.

It’s still a passion project, in all the best ways, a jaunty, juicy ramble through music history from Johnny Cash to Nine Inch Nails, Neil Young to the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

The cast, plainly packed with second or third choices, lets it down. Is there anything in James Franco’s past that suggests larger-than-life, a fast-talking, womanizing con-man? And the three witches – Theodora, Evanora and Glinda – are Bland, Blander and Blond Bland.

An instant midnight movie, a morbid mishmash of styles and filmmaking formats – 26 films, 26 filmmakers from the four corners of the horror globe, all making short films about death. It’s not for everyone.

Tommy Lee Jones gives us a saltier version of MacArthur than the image-conscious general ever let on to.

What’s fresh here is the tone – rude, blunt and bordering on shrill. This is a less in-your-face Michael Moore-style take on this subject.

Part II is every bit as cheap and far more generic, nothing more than a run of the mill ghost story masquerading as The Devil Made Her Do It.

The bottom-line on this bottom-baring/bottom-branding farce is “Is it funny, on top of all the shocks?” And yes, it is. On a number of few occasions, all of them involving Jeff Chang.

Here’s a fascinating piece of history that escaped much of the world’s notice, when it happened back in 1988.

For all Singer’s expertise at making the fantastic real, all we’re left with here is an expensive-looking bauble – worth looking over, but not really anything to treasure.

It’s a beautifully shot and reasonably balanced film, but one that struggles to find a hopeful note to end on.

The Hollywood debut of Korean filmmaker Chan-Wook Park (“Oldboy”) is a vivid, short exercise in tone, a movie lacking shocks and huge surprises, but one that makes up for that by creeping us out, from start to finish.

A down-and-dirty genre picture that manages a couple of decent plot twists, a couple of passable car chases and two epic shoot-outs.

Robinson manages some suspense, but the thriller’s ticking clock is a weak one.

It’s a passably chilling bit of nonsense that builds on the past, the tropes of the genre, and relies on them for the odd jolt and the occasional ironic laugh.

Roberta Grossman’s cute documentary gives weight to the tune, tracing its lineage to a town – Sadagora, in the Ukraine – and the 19th century. It bubbled to life as a “Nigun,” a wordless hymn or prayer, more hummed than sung.

What gives it’s juice is the supporting cast. John Bernthal (“The Walking Dead”) is credibly wary as the ex-con John begs to get him in the door of the drug world. And the terrific Michael Kenneth Williams is the first dealer he meets, a guy who pulls a gun on him just to test him.

It’s an engaging yarn, set in a place, a time and among a people rarely represented on the big screen. But “Ultima” is a poetic novel that becomes prosaic on the screen.

Unlike say, “Doogal” or “Hoodwinked 2,” at least you won’t want to gouge your eyes out after this one.

Loud and tedious, “Die Hard 5” is a shaky-cam/Sensuround blast of bullets and bombs, digital explosions and death defying feats of defying death.

Hallestrom and his screenwriters may be stuck with Sparks’ formula, but they take advantage of the geography, the leads and a couple of homespun supporting players – Robin Mullens is a wonderfully folksy owner of the seaside seafood shack.

There’s something so delicious when Brits such as Thompson and Irons sink their fangs – sorry – into Deep South dialect. Thompson devours scenery, supporting players and dialogue with every “Bless your heart, shooo-gah” in the script, and Irons curls his non-existent mustache with every syrupy zinger.

While the filmmakers might have shot for "Midnight Run," but settled for "Due Date," they wound up only achieving "Guilt Trip." Identity Thief is sputtering long before that mid-movie moment when it turns all sentimental and goes off the rails.

A mad, laugh-out-loud mashup of “The Little Mermaid,” “Harry Potter,” assorted vampire tales, “Pan’s Labyrinth,” the disaster epic “2012” and oh – “Pokemon” – just to impose the cinematic precedents on display here, Sorcerer is a Chinese twist on the reliable sword and sorcery genre which caused Hollywood to impose “Clash of the Titans” and “Immortals” on the undeserving.

Steven Soderbergh, rightly considered one of Hollywood’s smartest movie makers, is at his cleverest in Side Effects, a canny, cunning big idea thriller in a minor key, an engrossing zeitgeist whodunit about Wall Street, Big Pharma, prescription drugs and the power we give psychiatry and psychologists.

The movie hinges on Murray's turn as FDR, and frankly, he comes up wanting.

Damon the Oscar-winning writer does something nobody else in Hollywood would – write a dumb character for Matt Damon to play.

A Royal Affair...is a lovely history lesson, but a film without the spark of invention that makes this modern parable feel modern.

Rust and Bone doesn't earn the ending it delivers.

For all the heists, chases and shoot-outs, it's a sluggish picture. Characters feel the need to stop the action to explain themselves. Thoroughly.

There's nothing thrilling about summarily dispatching everybody who isn't meant to survive to the credits, nothing entertaining about meathook, hatchet and chainsaw murdering that we've seen scores of times.

It's all quite lovely, mesmerizing – and right on the edge of sleep-inducing.

It's a fine summation of this complicated story, one that focuses heavily on Echols and his sweeping declarations about the state of justice in Arkansas and America.

Gangster Squad is a gang war drama built on Western conventions, a rootin' tootin', Camel-smokin', whiskey swillin' shoot'em up.

For 85 rude and raunchy minutes, he does his best to drive a comical stake through the heart of horror's hottest franchise and the "found footage" genre. He doesn't exactly succeed.

Take that sign at the entrance to his Tulbagh, South Africa compound seriously – "Beware of Mr. Baker."

56 Up feels like the most hopeful film of them all - amusing, entertaining, and touching.

The absurd turns the story takes to serve up streetwise and bloody "life lessons" for the kid will make any parent blanch and any movie lover roll his or her eyes.

It's a junky, crowd-pleasing movie of sidekicks – Guzman and Knoxville – bad acting, over the top shootouts, and catch phrases.

Horror is all about that short-circuit the screen's technical manipulations cause in our brain, so this isn't high art. But Mama is easily the most moving, most chilling ghost story since "Insidious," an emotional tale efficiently and affectingly told.

Director Allen Hughes ("The Book of Eli") hides the secrets well and stages a good fight and chase. But what's most entertaining about Brian Tucker's script is the lived-in feel it has.

Using archival footage, inventive animated recreations of incidents and chilling aerial smart-bomb views of air strikes as they happen, Moreh creates a simple yet elegantly damning film.

It's a celebration of great old actors set in a world of once-great singers, and Hoffman's affection for them and the material shows in every frame.

Before it trips over its own overly complex plot, before the comic leads have exhausted their modestly amusing repertoires, this odd stoner/sci fi creature feature blows out of the gate and threatens - for about thirty minutes - to blow your mind. Then it doesn't.

Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters is more Gatling guns and grenades than The Brothers Grimm.

About a third of the short films land a few laughs. But even the weakest material is lifted by the actors.

Despite an epic fight or two, Parker robs us of the revenge, the suspense of the hunt, of Parker's methodical way of tracking down those who betrayed him, one by one.

The central premise is a half-hearted retread. And the gags come from a score of earlier films and sitcoms.

Choppy and bordering on incoherent, Bullet to the Head is Stallone's answer to Schwarzenegger's "The Last Stand," an action exercise in "Here's how we used to do it."

Jonathan "50/50" Levine has turned Isaac Marion's teen romance novel into an often amusing tongue-in-cheek romantic comedy - tongue in cheek, and brains in teeth. Chewy, tasty brains.

A daft pitch-black dark comedy about family dysfunction that plays out over painfully ugly family Christmas celebration.

Rarely has a movie been so sexual without being remotely sexy. Rarely has a guy who might be admired in a sex comedy as a "playa" seemed more pathetic with each fresh conquest.

Branagh and Williams are worth the price of admission, the former "wunderkind" of British stage and screen having a go at the pretentious, plummy Olivier.

In a genre - the animated holiday film - already overflowing with the sentimental, the silly Arthur Christmas is a most welcome treat to find stuffed into the cinema's stockings this holiday season.

The Descendants lets Payne show us the Other America and the Other Americans - little lives caught up in small but epic problems far away from the La La Land of Hollywood hype, sex and violence.

The musical comedy whimsically and often cleverly revisits the characters, their shtick and and the TV show and movies that made them most famous.

A stunning exercise in 3D and a delightful celebration of Scorsese's lifelong love of the movies, something he, like Hugo, developed on childhood.

At long last, The Twilight Saga sinks utterly into camp with Breaking Dawn: Part 1.

A clever and adorable original film remade with most of the charm wrung out of it.

It's as disquieting as it is unsatisfying, a slog through gender issues, surgery and violence - sexual and otherwise.

Yelchin doesn't generate the same warmth or passion that Jones does. That is partly by design, as this whole affair was her idea, after all.

The film manages one grand "300″ moment, Cavill rallying troops for battle, doing his best Gerard Butler. But the lack of humor, the confusing, stumbling story and limited color palette blunt the film's 3D slo-mo shots of heads exploding and torsos torn asunder by the sword.

Then there's Pacino, out-of-place and yet somehow right at home. You want big? Al does BIG. And since is as close as we're likely to get to "Don Corleone Does Don Quixote," that alone is worth the price of admission.

Truth be told, J. Edgar drags, even when it pays homage to the widely discredited urban legend that the guy liked to dress in drag.

The rawboned Hawkes manages both charm and menace in the same look, and Dancy gives his character a testy, fearful edge that doesn't make him scary, but rather someone we fear for.

The charm has aged right out of this silly stoner franchise.

A winning "Robin Hood and his Merry Doormen" comedy about getting even. A cast of comedy specialists each deliver their comic specialties to perfection, delivering double-takes and one liners so well that you don't notice how clunky the actual caper in this caper comedy is.

It's all very messy and entirely too obvious at the same time. Montiel makes the most of his settings, but the story keeps staggering into dead ends.

The Double is barely half the movie it had the potential of becoming.

"Gattaca" director Andrew Niccol's sense of the zeitgeist is as on the money as ever with In Time, a sci-fi parable that plays like "Occupy Wall Street: The Movie."

Thanks to Banderas and his Corinthian leather purr and writers who know how to use it, "Puss" is the best animated film of 2011.

Even lacking the laughs and romance, he (Emmerich) has delivered an entertaining eye-roller of alternative history.

"English Reborn" isn't terrible and is certainly seriously harmless.

This is a once-in-a-lifetime fiasco, an epic fail like none we have seen this year, a bad idea by a very bad director and a career-crippling credit for all concerned. You don't want to miss it.

Give it points on setting and a couple of the performances, but the joke-starved All's Faire in Love only rarely rises to the level of fair to middling.

Though it only rarely reaches the level of gonzo farce that it might have been, "Diary" is still an agreeably drunken stagger through the novel Thompson based on his formative year as a writer.

This Paranormal doesn't tamper with the formula that worked in the first two films. It lacks the "money" moments that those films delivered and ends with a finale that is downright conventional. "Paranormal" reveals itself for what it has become, the "Saw" of found video thrillers.

The action is wan, the laughs hard to come by.

This compelling-acted film explains, better than any soundbite, why people have taken to the streets, "occupying" centers of finance. If their rage is unfocused, Margin Call suggests, that's with good reason. There are no real heroes or villains here, just human beings with human failings making BIG human mistakes.

This tiny Catholic school for women dominated the sport at a turning point in history, and this plucky, old-fashioned sports drama sets the scene and tells the tale with a lot of heart and a dash of wit.

What this film from the director of "The Devil Wears Prada" does manage is a gentle amiability.

A first-rate one-woman-against-the-system drama.

The movie never convinces us that Forster is convinced himself. The director lines up this bad good man in his sights, but he never quite has the nerve quite to pull the trigger.

Brewer gave the film a little Southern hip hop, and brought in real Southerners Quaid, Andie MacDowell and Ray McKinnon to further Southernize it.

It's an infuriatingly static picture - actors walking around when they should be running, ruminating when they should be panicking, generally failing to convey fear and pick up the pace.

The leads are charmingly mismatched, but adorable enough to root for, as a couple. Forestier is a wildly uninhibited actress, sexy as all get out. She makes this girl dangerous, seemingly capable of anything.

Restless is far more precious than profound. But that takes little away from this soulful teenage exploration of love, life and death.

Jackman gamely does his best, Levy keeps the kid just shy of insufferable and just this side of kid-appropriate in his behavior and language.

It isn't a great film. But it is a smart and high-minded one, wonderfully cast, with understated direction. Clooney is good enough in the lead to stir talk of a political future.

It's a plucky film that covers a lot of ground and uncovers this wonderful, ancient ritual that people of many faiths and from all walks of life take on.

So much is just so…obvious.

Anna Faris and Chris Evans don't have enough scenes together, don't have enough funny lines and aren't surrounded by enough funny people to give this "Bridesmaids-lite" a shot.

Odds are you'll find something of substance, a few life lessons in between the laughs in 50/50.

The message delivered isn't subtle, with Kendrick delivering toss-away lines that suggest he doesn't even tolerate "the option" of divorce. But the bigger message might be that the Kendricks haven't sold out, "gone Hollywood" or watered down their Baptist beliefs based on efforts to reach an audience beyond the faithful.

"Evil" fails to triumph. Utterly.

One serious omission in the film - identifying what these seemingly prosperous alumni of the band do for a living and did with their lives.

Abduction puts Lautner in motion and never goes very far wrong as long as he remains in motion.

Whatever the grownups say, Manyaka's Chanda is the one person in this village who understands how simple things really are, that it really does come down to Life, Above All.

Senna himself gives it its heart. I just wish I'd gotten a better handle on who he was before the film's checkered flag falls.

No, this isn't how it really happened. But director Charles Martin Smith ("Air Bud") wrings plenty of heartfelt tears and a few laughs out of this fictionalized account.

Best of all, the filmmakers took the time to give these hard men just the right things to say - not catchphrases, just lines that smell of blood and gunpowder every time Statham, Owen or DeNiro utter them.

Moneyball is a thinking person's baseball movie, and a baseball fan's thinking movie.

An exploitation picture built on redneck cliches and big city liberal outrage, it's not all bad. But it is a pretty unpleasant wallow in the obvious.

If Laugh at My Pain makes people take a second look at this perpetual third banana on the big screen, so much the better.

"It was a perfect tabloid story," the Brit Peter Tory, who covered it, remembers. "Kinky sex, religion, kidnapping, a beauty queen."

She (Parker) looks exhausted, first scene to last, and that fatigue spills off the screen onto us.

They (Refn and Gosling) have collaborated on a car picture that unnerves us with its idling quiet, and then pins our ears back when they stomp the accelerator.

It's an ugly movie to look at and a faintly nauseating one to sit through, truth be told.

Absurdly plotted, ineptly scripted and haplessly acted, Creature is a new variation on the "Creature from the Black Lagoon" theme.

Farmiga directs and plays this as a woman with questions. Thus, the tone is a bit all over the place - frank discussion and depictions of sex, but with an equally frank embrace of Christianity, talking the talk and walking the walk.

There is little urgency to this spiraling disaster. Soderbergh has made a lot of noise this past year about quitting directing and taking up a less collaborative, more solitary pursuit - painting. This is an anti-social painter's movie. Millions are dying, but he doesn't care that much. So why should we?

Whatever merits the production values have, the cheap frights don't deliver, the performers bring no pathos and the gimmick behind Apollo 18 flat out does not work.

Lawyer-turned-screenwriter Dylan Schaffer's script is an unhappy combination of genres, tones, too many dead stretches of people in cars and inept dialogue. Rapaport's tiresome patter doesn't allow for the weak laughs to land.

Warrior is a straight genre picture, a fight movie of the old school. But it's a mixed martial arts tale, and as such, it's the best MMA movie ever.

The worst movie of the summer, arriving on the last weekend of the summer.

Lacks surprises.

The sex sequences are revealingly awkward - with their "Don't try this at home" message. But without characters we can invest in, this "Hangover Meets Zack & Miri Make a Porno" is just the "porno," and entirely too tame for that, too.

"The Debt," a very good 2007 Israeli thriller with Cold War and Holocaust connections, earns a nerve-wracking and entertaining Hollywood remake.

That makes Sarah's Key that rare Holocaust tale that punches through the cobwebs of history and its dry, inhuman statistics, and brings that terrible past to life.

As straight exploitation, it's amusing, in fits and starts. It's just that Colombiana lacks the kinetic energy of "The Transporter" and the pathos of "La Femme Nikita."

The unfailing sweetness of Paul Rudd's lead performance makes what could have been another raunchy and rude R-rated farce a bracing change of pace in a summer of aggressive comedies about aggressive people, from "Bad Teachers" to "Horrible Bosses."

Entirely too literal, but it still manages to be a literally hair-raising piece of modern-style old school Gothic horror.

The Guard soars along on a script, like those by the other McDonagh (Martin wrote and directed "In Bruges" and the Oscar winning short "Six Shooter," both starring Gleeson) built out of verbal flourishes and Irish curses.

Nobody has much that's funny to say or cool to do. Even the spy gadgets are lame.

This episodic romance works in fits and starts, and captures a bittersweet faux British turn by Anne Hathaway, plainly mismatched in being paired with real-life Brit Jim Sturgess.

Fright Night can also boast of having the best vampire-villain in ages. The bushy-browed Colin Farrell was BORN to wear fangs.

The sweet, the comic and the tragic blend together most agreeably in the winsome French romance The Hedgehog.

Take away much of the myth, most of the sorcery and all of the humor of the 1982 John Milius-Arnold Schwarzenegger version of the sword and sorcery epic "Conan the Barbarian" and you've got an idea what the new "Conan" is like.

This isn't the worst of the bunch, not by far. But my premonition is this won't be the finale this series has screamed out for these past few years. This decapitation train never seems to reach its destination.

The wildly improbable set-up is merely the jumping off point for an exploration of grief, guilt and redemption.

There's too much cheese, but there are still enough amusing action beats and funny one-liners to let one say, 30 Minutes or Less delivers, more or less on time.

Haters, head for the door. But Gleeks? Get your "Glee" on.

Davis and Spencer give faces and fully-fleshed out lives to women who must have been more than what they did for a living as The Help.

The trouble with The Change-Up is that it doesn't change-up enough of the formula to render this new.

Audacious, violent and disquieting, Rise of the Planet of the Apes is a summer sequel that's better than it has any right to be.

The ending smacks of Hollywood rewriting of history. But The Devil's Double shows the political consequences of Uday's misdeeds, the delicate negotiations that keep the people with grievances in line. And Dominic Cooper delivers a career-making performance.

The slapstick is very small-kid friendly and even the most adult-friendly jokes are pretty mild stuff.

Despite the locations and the informative narrative, almost every scene is missing that spark that would bring the characters to life and immediacy to the story.

That it lacks the snap, crackle and kapow of the summer's better comic book blockbusters isn't surprising. With all this effort riding on a big, expensive and rushed studio summer picture, the real miracle is that any of them come to life.

As a Steve Carell comedy, it works. He plays the victim well, the guy romantically in over his head ever better. Surrounding him with people this funny - Ryan Gosling, who knew?

A brisk blast of bloody good fun, sci-fi with a little social commentary as subtext. Attack the Block is the movie that "Battle: Los Angeles" was not - thrilling, nerve-wracking and fun.

Chemistry is king. It's one reason the rom-com has long seemed like the toughest code for Hollywood to crack. But never underestimate the power of snappy, rapid-fire banter, the paving stones of the Hollywood road to romance.

The fourth comic book movie of the summer is the best comic book movie of the summer. Johnston has delivered a light, clever and deftly balanced adventure picture with real lump in the throat nostalgia.

Does well in capturing the cruelty of school life and the assorted "types" who inhabit schools there and here. But it's more twee than clever, more affectionate than romantic and more promising than satisfying.

Once you get past the cliched Spanglish dialogue and the sentimental tone of the early acts, A Better Life settles down into something both involving and moving.

It's a treat for children making their first trek to the multiplex and for parents and grandparents with fond memories of the Hundred Acre Wood.

The finale to the Harry Potter saga is, like most of the films in the series, a bit of a slog. But it's a generally satisfying slog.

A slick one hour and 50 minute version of those political convention hagiographies ("A Man From Hope"), so it's not exactly an objective take on its subject, former Alaska governor and vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin.

The first funny film to give those "Bridesmaids" a run for their money.

James takes his comic lumps like a man. His Griffin suffers injuries and indignities and lets us laugh at him as he does. No matter where the script wanders and where the direction founders, at some point, James' comic instincts take over. And this time, they don't let him down.

Here's a documentary so slick, novel, touching and outrageous that your first thought might be "This has to be fake."

Zeroing in on Carr as the movie's "hero" was a smart move. He comes off as smart, confrontational and unconventional.

A perfectly pleasant but fluffy, inconsequential romantic comedy.

This script, this leaden direction ensures that even as the teen wish-fulfillment fantasy, complete with young women playing dress-up, Monte Carlo fails.

Moon delivers the popcorn in gigantic fist-fulls of fun.

It's a movie of thematic dead-ends. Director Azazel Jacobs and writer Patrick DeWitt give us a slow SLOW and somewhat morose tale that isn't remotely funny or profound enough to sustain that pace and tone.

Bad Teacher is a pulled punch, a pot-smoking/kid cussing/teacher copulating farce that is less than the sum of its parts.

It's a bit long to be as kid friendly as this educational and visually striking film is meant to be.

They turn more of the story over to the comic relief, the dopey tow truck Tow Mater, and get a sillier, more kid-friendly movie out of it. Yes, Cars 2 is better than "Cars."

The riffing, the one-upsmanship, the off-the-cuff zingers and the singing (ABBA, a great favorite of Coogan's most famous creation, the dizzy talk show host Alan Partridge) make The Trip an easy-going trek down a road well-traveled by these two.

Glibly put, this challenging time-skipping rumination is the big screen equivalent of watching that "Tree" grow.

Precious, protracted and pleasant enough.

Well, Green Lantern isn't "Jonah Hex" bad. But it's silly enough to be part of the same "silliest Warner Brothers comic book summer movies of all time" conversation.

A screen romance that echoes its title. It gets by. Barely.

Taken on its own merits, this profile of "Buck" Brannaman is a pleasant and touching but somewhat superficial insight to the man and his methods.

Not a neat and tidy thriller. It is a most engrossing one, commanding our attention even as the filmmaker tries to slip this or that hole in the plot past us.

A mild-mannered kids' comedy that makes for a pleasant-enough time killer.

J.J. Abrams, with Steven Spielberg producing, has made one of those jaw-dropping out-of-body summer entertainments that kids old enough to swear and see PG-13 films will remember on into adulthood.

If you're looking for a filmmaker to document, for all of humanity, "one of the greatest discoveries in the history of human culture," the great Werner Herzog is your guy.

Souffle-light and long on charm.

This is still a most original take on the consequences of following your own "yellowbrickroad" when you don't know, for sure, that there's an Oz at the end of it.

X-Men: First Class still sings the praises of Marvel Studios' marvelous quality control of comic book movies. It's good, clean summer movie fun where the money they spend is up on the screen - with actors and effects - so that we won't mind spending our money on it.

Has a "been there, done that, jailed for it" feel.

Never graduates to the uplifting tale it sets out to be.

A sequel that delivers more heart than laughs, and is, if anything, more visually dazzling than the 2008 original film.

An often moving and always disturbing film. Little is explained, motivations aren't explored. We miss them, at times. It's still a film of power, wit and thought-provoking ideas, one well worth seeing.

Repetitious, tedious, and pretty much joyless.

Incendies is occasionally compelling, but also overlong and vexing in the ways it draws out a "shocking" conclusion that we unravel long before the characters do.

The story isn't particularly organized. It's more a collection of scenes - than a coherent coming-of-age tale.

A mad mash-up of sci-fi, Western, sacrilegious silliness and vampire movie. What lifts it to "I've seen worse" status is the previous teaming of star and director Scott Stewart, who last gave us the archangel fighting off other angels fiasco "Legion."

Hobo hits the screen as a grim, visually ugly, intermittently funny-occasionally preachy piece with only the estimable Mr. Hauer to recommend it.

It's a bleak yet optimistic film, and Ferrell perfectly underplays his Carver anti-hero and delivers a rich, layered and subtle performance. And a funny one.

This is "Her Hangover," a smarter and sweeter stumble to the altar that never quite gets to Vegas, and doesn't seem to mind.

Greatest Movie isn't Spurlock's best. It plays like an overlong, overly cutesy TV news report (woman and man on street interviews included) on product placement.

A most deserving Oscar winner and a film that could provoke discussion anywhere it is shown, anywhere people of any age are being bullied.

The daft feather-light French farce Potiche is a period piece designed to remind us of just how far and how fast women have come in the Western world.

The funny moments outnumber the warm ones. There's a touch of religion and plenty of melodrama, especially in the contrivances of a cluttered and drawn out third act.

Thank heavens Krasinski, at least, had the screenwriter's ear. He makes every one-liner land. "The Hamptons are like a zombie movie directed by Ralph Lauren."

Has a lot of that winking wit we've come to expect from our post-"Spider Man" Marvel movies. It has a hunky, self-mocking young star, solid support from a couple of Oscar winners and the slick sheen that state-of-the-art effects can give you.

Its star, Brandon Routh, is just as miscast as a droll, world-weary "investigator of the undead" as he was as a boy-Man of Steel back in 2006.

Absurdly long, absurdly over the top and absurdly absurd, Five Five - still manages to be more fun than any movie with its outrageous carbon footprint has any right to be.

Disney's Prom is to real high school what "High School Musical" was to "West Side Story" – all fluff, no edge.

The script is a mad, muddled blitz of one-liners and movie references. Some of the animation is a hoot, and a few voice actors stand out.

It's a sturdy World War II yarn, with harrowing and heart-breaking moments sprinkled throughout.

13 Assassins is entirely too long and too talky. But the cat-and-mouse game of strategy, figuring out when and where to ambush the evil overlord's entourage, is fascinating.

A winning narration (read by Greg Kinnear) holds things together. And there's just enough script for a good cast to run with. Harris and Madigan lift the whole enterprise just by being who and what they are - great actors.

Stuffed to the gills with Perry's mix of the sacred and the silly and a serious dose of self-help for the self-absorbed.

Take "Kick-Ass." Strip it of most of its wit and charm, amp up the violence, the sadism. Make it more crude and coarse and gory. And what you're left with is Super.

Whatever romance and charm Gruen summoned forth from these rough and tumble show people living by their own laws in a traveling, self-contained world of poverty and cruelty, director Francis Lawrence has hacked and ground them off.

Almost every shot is a postcard-perfect African vista, and every animal shown in majestic close-up.

It's not a bad looking movie, with Deco design touches that remind me of the earlier Rand film adaptation, "The Fountainhead." But the acting's flat and the script is absurdly cluttered with characters whose purpose may only truly become clear if they ever are allowed to make the other two films they have planned.

Comical, colorful, wonderfully cast and beautifully animated.

May not be as emotionally compelling as John Ford's work ("The Prisoner of Shark Island"), but it's every bit as meticulously crafted.

It's a fitfully amusing, not remotely scary slasher picture.

This Arthur is on the rocks long before Last Call.

A quietly compelling if not particularly emotional and sober-minded treatment of an infamous incident.

With Win Win, McCarthy has found his emotional sweet spot, a sweet and complex story to set it in and the perfect title for it.

Saoirse Ronan shines in the title role, a wily, physically-fit and lethal girl.

The best faith-based film ever made, an uplifting, entertaining and wonderfully-acted account of surfer Bethany Hamilton's life before and after a shark bit her arm off in the waters off her favorite Hawaiian beach.

Best taken as the perfect film to transition your kids from animation to live action fare – short, sweet, and educational.

It's meant to be faintly Pythonesque with a hint of bowdlerized "The Black Adder"...But it's entirely too slow of foot for that comparison to pay off.

The Elephant in the Living Room is damning, but also very sad. These stories, as Harrison points out, never have a happy ending.

Duncan Jones, director of the very fine and very paranoid "Moon," makes this seemingly silly situation work, building tension over 93 minutes.

It's a vivid, blunt and candid look at their kill-or-be-killed existence, which Joubert writes and Irons narrates is "the eternal dance of Africa."

The slapstick is mild-mannered, there's no romance, not a hint of emotion.

The spookiest and most entertaining horror flick since "Paranormal Activity."

The most epic miscalculation since the Golden Summer of M. Night Shyamalan. An unerotic unthrilling erotic thriller in the video game mold, Sucker Punch is "Last Airbender" with bustiers.

Less mopey and downbeat than TV star Zach Braff's "Garden State." But it succeeds in many of the same sweet ways and is similar enough to warrant labeling Radnor "Zach Braff: The Next Generation."

It just takes a very long time to get going. Apparently seventh grade doesn't pack as much potential for amusing, scarred-for-life trauma as sixth grade.