Roger Moore

Lena Dunham's amusing meander through "post graduate delirium," a relationship comedy about nothing so much as the permanent relationships of family and New Yorker's relationship with space - and the lack of it.

This film based on Alan Glynn's novel "Dark Fields" is entirely too reliant on voice-over, a bit too tarted-up by Burger in an effort to make this head trip a visual experience.

There's only so much humor you can wring from the f-bomb, even if you are a cute animated alien.

Populated with a peerless supporting cast, actors who bring just the right history to their roles.

Far more grim than "Grimm," and not nearly as much fun as it should have been.

It's a film of noble sacrifice and "good deaths" but surprisingly few chuckles.

Though light enough in tone, packed with good messages and delivering a couple of lovely, touching moments, "Mars" still has that plastic look that made you wish you were seeing the REAL Tom Hanks in "Polar Express" or the REAL Jim Carrey in "A Christmas Carol."

Hogancamp seems a pleasant, offbeat and intuitive fellow who probably takes all this less seriously than those who "discovered" him.

It's a farce with sexual come-ons and actual sex - the Boy Scout Tim's first encounter with a hooker and a crack pipe - but Cedar Rapids never loses track of the humanity of its characters.

A ten-years-too-late comedy.

This "Inception" meets "Made in Heaven" by way of "They Live" is also the screwiest movie Matt Damon has been in since, what, "Dogma?"

Witty, warm, well-cast and often wickedly funny.

Fitfully amusing or not, the whole demented enterprise of Rango comes into question when you're that tone-deaf about what's appropriate for children.

Heard sets herself up as a Megan Fox with talent. And Cage? He delivers. Mock him for his bad choices if you will, but consider this. Who else could have made this work, or would even want to?

The eggshells the screenwriter and director walk on distance the story from the reality it aims to imitate. And that robs this tale of loss, grief and redemption of its punch.

Sadly, Immigration Tango is like a slow-dance with your sister - perfunctory, awkward and without a hint of heat.

This isn't satire, it isn't that funny and the only bits that work are the titillating ones.

A rude and seriously crude riff on taking a vacation from marriage.

A humorless mashup of "White Chicks" and "Glee."

None of the current generation of wrestler-actors seem to have the charisma or comic gifts of a Hulk Hogan or Dwayne Johnson.

It's a solid, engrossing thriller, but a slack one.

Brit hunk Alex Pettyfer has grown into a solid and quite interesting lead to build this potential sci-fi movie series around.

Melodramatic, impulsive, painful, but never quite "totally unnecessary."

It's a rarely amusing movie overwhelmed by grating kids, unfunny sidekicks, half-hearted Sandler funny voices and a co-star who seems more fearful of smiling with each passing year.

3D or not, the film about the mop-topped Canadian - who turns 17 March 1 - doesn't let us get very close to "the talent."

The laughs - Doug tries to take up the pipe, a la Sherlock Holmes - are on the flat side.

Like Tati himself, The Illusionist feels like a relic of a different time.

Manages to deliver a striking, nicely detailed, visceral thriller built on a corny, old-fashioned script.

If it's not an unerringly faithful adaptation of Shakespeare's play, it still manages enough wit and charm to come off.

A timid thriller that manages a couple of mild jolts and a couple of creepy-cringe-worthy moments in its Variations on a "Single White Female" theme.

It's a solid, old-fashioned action yarn filled with the very latest dive gear and the oldest plot formula in the movie-maker's playbook.

In Mary, Leigh has found the polar opposite of Sally Hawkin's giggle-through-the-pain heroine of "Happy-Go-Lucky."

This isn't "Up in the Air," and we're not dealing with this awful event on a metaphysical level. But there's truth in between the cliches.

It's a sordid tale and, in Gibney's telling, a cautionary one.

Only Hopkins, readily referencing his bag of tricks, seems to get what to make of this "inspired by trues events (and a book by Matt Baglio)" hooey.

It's a modestly effective but jaw-droppingly violent picture.

Cassel's performance...the best reason to see this, one of the best French (In French with English subtitles) crime thrillers of the new millennium.

The lack of dramatic tension that knowing the ending before you being creates isn't a huge drawback.

Somewhere is a triumph of tedium, banality passing for depth, a vacuous embrace of nothing.

An entertaining old-fashioned prison escape movie with a touch of the epic about it.

It's a movie benefiting from another sparkling, sexy and emotionally available performance by Natalie Portman.

A wonderful movie anyone who's ever experienced dog ownership at its most glorious, and most embarrassing.

One of the most entertaining history lessons you could ever hope to sit through.

That message, this script and these actors make Rabbit Hole one of the best films of 2010.

An unsatisfying if often surprising experience, a less warm and fuzzy "Parenthood."

A violent, clumsy, jokey, badly-plotted and miscast mess.

A little like modern country music - odd moments of sincerity, heart and authenticity peek through the plastic, the hype and the manufactured hokum.

The best you can say about this hooey is that at least he had the King of the Bs, Ron Perlman, along for a few sidekick laughs.

A dry and moody piece built on closely-observed characters, not on thrills or an unraveling plot.

Its chilling third act suggests that sooner or later, even these riders on the Islamic short bus are going to get one right. And that won't be funny at all.

It's a gritty, almost ugly to look at film, and Cianfrance isn't shy about including a random blast of unwarranted shaky footage.

It is Carrey, turning his patented rubber-faced, rubber-voiced shtick loose on a role with heart, substance and entertainment value, who makes this romantic farce a movie too good to sit on any studio's shelf.

You'd better watch out. You'd better not swear. Have a gun handy, loaded for bear. Santa Claus is coming…to Finland.

The villains are weak and the narrative has little drive to it.

Engrossing and moving story of a alternately warm and combative relationship.

Matt Damon is an interesting, chatty choice to play Laboeuf.

Paul Weitz ("Cirque du Freak," "American Dreamz") takes over as director, and the film shows all the signs of re-shoots and re-edits designed to bring in more characters and perhaps find a few more laughs.

The voice casting is on the money and these funny people - and I'm including Pitt, who plays this sort of self-mocking Adonis well, even in animated form - make this cute comedy come off.

The best you can say about this Yogi Bear is that he's harmless. No animal was harmed in the making of this picture except the one Hanna-Barbera made a bundle on almost 50 years ago.

Too cute, too star-studded and entirely too long.

Artful, epic, operatic even, this thriller set in the world of ballet challenges the viewer with its intelligence and depth and wit.

That rare film in which every performer in it leaves the viewer in awe.

Like "Avatar," "Legacy" is a film too in love with its own good looks. And like the original "TRON," the sequel's a bit of a slog.

Shockingly, it's funny. Often in shocking or at least wildly inappropriate ways.

But as useful as it is to chew on ideas that don't hew to climate change dogma, Cool It leaves big questions about Lomborg unanswered.

this is a straight-ahead ticking clock thriller, with the usual Tony S. trademarks - punchy dialogue and men doing what needs to be done.

Any signs of life the series showed in the last installment (Saw VI), a dash of humanity here and there, were premature.

Two very good looking people play two offbeat and abrasively charming lovers in Love & Other Drugs. And when your screen romance is as sexual as this one, it helps if your stars are about as good looking with their clothes off as human beings get.

Whatever brownie points Tillman scored with "Notorious", Faster is that wake-up call that he's no John Woo.

The new creature feature Monsters is an intriguing mash-up of "District 9," "The Host" and assorted recent post-apocalypse road pictures.

The pleasures of Welcome to the Rileys are in the simplest human message of all. Take an interest in somebody who needs help and the life you save may be your own.

Animated musicals are only as good as their songs, and this one isn't on a par with "Beauty and the Beast" or even "The Princess and the Frog."

A musical vamp on young LA's decade-long Pussycat Dolls fascination with tarting up like strippers and shaking those money makers, it's somewhat less than the sum of its parts. But those parts. Oh my.

The first third is brisk and witty, the middle third gloomy and the finale of Part 1 not so much a cliffhanger as a grim, inspiring tease, a masterly build-up to put "I can't wait for part 2" on every Muggles' lips.

While we may ogle Tamara, blush at her charms and revel in her world, in the end Tarama Drewe is just a bit of Brit tease that doesn't come off.

Sweet and sunny (Lots of English language pop tunes) and laugh-out-loud silly and well worth seeing before Hollywood remakes it with somebody like Matthew McConaughey in the title role.

True to the intent of the Christian apologist Lewis' novels, there are lessons to be learned, many of them delivered by the chivalrous mouse, Reepicheep, voiced with a plummy verve by Simon Pegg.

The script piles the preposterous on top of the absurd and the film's thin charms dissipate, revealing the creaking movie star contraption underneath.

A genre mash-up that never quite achieves "So very bad it's good" status.

It's not the smoothest thriller. But All Good Things is thoroughly engrossing, a roman a clef that chillingly ponders a puzzle and suggests solutions outlandish enough to be stranger than anything Hollywood, on its own, could make up.

As spy thrillers go, more chilling than thrilling. But that's what makes it easy to relate to.

A detail-oriented thriller that lets us keep up even as it races to a conclusion.

Skyline plays like an effects guru's resume reel, not a movie.

This mismatched "couple" - have made, over the course of three long subtitled Swedish thrillers, the most dynamic duo of recent cinema history.

A barely serviceable romantic comedy.

Perry's great gift to this unfilmable play is getting it on the screen, his sharp eye for casting and his evident affection and sympathy for black womanhood, even in movies in which he doesn't don a dress.

We get little sense of his interior life, what was going on in his head as school, girlfriends and music were competing for his attention and music was winning out. His drive is suggested, but never really felt in the performance.

The magic in the film is in the actors. Only somebody who has stripped himself emotionally bare for the camera could achieve the level of performance that Goldwyn gets from every single SAG member on this set.

It's all tiresome, muddied and artlessly made.

A confident, cocky and often comic promenade down the same primrose path.

This Herefter, despite the odd engaging moment, is a terrible letdown, like investing in a belief system and discovering there's no "here" that you've been after all your life.

There's a taste of Southern Gothic here, even though this story is set in Michigan. The incendiary mix of religion, sex and crime threatens to ignite every time Stone tries to turn the interogations back on Mabry.

Director Michael W. Watkins, whose decades of TV credits go back to "Quantum Leap," manages one clever visual gag - a bus wreck, observed from the far side of a cornfield. We hear a crunch, see a telephone pole wobble and a little puff of smoke. Then Watkins blows the moment with a fiery overkill.

A stop any literary-minded movie-goer will want to make.

It's still a short-enough time-killer of a thriller -- not the worst of the summer, but a long way from the current state of the art.

The combination of a flexible, funny cast, an amusing situation and a style of movie-making that embraces every happy, nasty accident make this if not the funniest, then certainly the most uncomfortable comedy of the summer.

Casino Royale is just swell when Bond is busting up bathrooms in Prague, busting up embassies in Madagascar and busting a move in Nassau. But when he gets to, well, Casino Royale (here, in the former Yugoslav Republic of Montenegro), the film goes utterly flat.

Daniel Day Lewis, Hugh O’Conor and director Jim Sheridan made damned sure that whatever Hollywood thought, whatever “rewarding a stunt performance ” rationale might enter in filmdom’s collective mind about this bit of work, their combined efforts would be never less than a wholly realized human being.

Peixota has made a spacey film that is almost neutral on its subject, a soft-spoken pastel-colored meditation on Scientology that never wrestles it into the larger thesis of the psychology of “belief” he might have been aiming for.

The situations are painstakingly set up and downright painful to sit through. So enjoy, or endure the appetizers, because with this Dinner, dessert is truly the topper.

At two hours and 15 minutes, the new Karate Kid takes an absurd amount of time to get to that “big match.”

The performances, direction and writing of one of the best pictures of 2010 make this Social Network every bit as addictive, and a little chilling as well.

A low energy romance, a movie that rewards a filmgoer with the patience to let this affair play itself out. Sink or swim, Connie and Jack will come out of this changed. And so will we.

Haneke tells this tale a bit too patiently for my taste. But the metaphors are unmistakable, as is the power of the film’s message.

Tedious time-killer of a kiddie comedy.

Hallstrom and his low-heat stars can’t find the pulse of this corpse.

The movie's central gimmick isn't enough, and when more supernatural twists that don't play by the movie's own fantasy rules kick in, it lost me.

The characters in The Perfect Game speak old school “Hollywood Mexican.” In other words, they speak English with accents that we haven’t heard since the golden Age of Speedy Gonzalez.

This unblinking look at America's Red State Crystal Meth Belt is an instant Southern Gothic classic.

Reeves has Americanized a very good foreign film without defanging it.

Twin Flower is a solid if static on-the-road thriller that loses its way when it stops running.

Off the wall? Friend, you don’t know off the wall until you’ve seen five twelve-year-old girl singer-dancers cover the Tina Turner/Phil Spector epic “River Deep, Mountain High” in the screwball kiddie dance comedy, Standing Ovation.

What makes Say Anything timeless isn’t the cast so much as it is the characters, and isn’t the story as much as the way it is told. The dialogue, crisp and (relatively) clean by modern, coarse and cliched standards, is its own “grand romantic gesture,” teen angst, teen curiosity and the teen dilemma incarnate.

It’s a smart, poignant skewering of lives of diminishing returns, two grown men flailing at life and failing at life at 33.

Winter Kills is flawed and screwy and “out there” and the cast is mostly very old, never a recipe for box office success. It’s found its select audience over the decades on home video and streaming, with critics coming along and reviving interest in its bracing set pieces, big laughs and dark, uncomfortable chuckles.

Yes, it's pretty much a must to have seen the first film. Where Dragon Tattoo felt like fall, Played with Fire was shot in the Swedish summer, which suits the faster pace, ramped up violence and fresh collection of supporting players -- cops, a kickboxer, and a couple of borderline Bond villains.

Good looking (it was filmed in Winter Garden) but slow and bland, this faith-based tear-jerker is a depressingly unemotional affair, with writing and some of the acting so flat that even its emotionally loaded situations can’t inspire waterworks.

The Twilight Saga comes close to that sweet spot between swooning silliness and special effects slaughter with Eclipse.

One of the epic star vehicles of Ava Gardner‘s career earned a nice restoration a couple of years back. So if nothing else, Ava at her peak in glorious Technicolor should be lure enough to draw one to “Pandora and the Flying Dutchman.”

Duvall, an American Lear not going gently into that good night, reminds us that it will be a sad day indeed for movie fans when it's about time for him to Get Low.

After "Zombieland," The Crazies struggles to find novelty and laughs, and must battle the overwhelming sense that we’ve been here, seen this too often and too recently to experience any real surprises.

A feather-light meringue of a romance to remind us there will always be a Paris.

“Acreage” is so embedded in that earth you can taste it, smell the tobacco, cedar and slowly rotting corn stalks on those gently sloping hills.

Journalists are being targeted in combat zones around the world. Hondros highlights that danger and brings out the humanity in a career that was above and beyond the stereotypes of their profession.

This is dizzy diverting fun, from it's first Carell one-liner to the 3D gimmick gags stuffed into the closing credits.

The most striking thing about this classic adventure epic today might be its look. Using real locations, crumbling brick fortresses, parched passes and snowcapped peaks, “King” feels positively analog in its depiction of an “exotic” place of both beauty and stark, hardscrabble ugliness.

It’s not a great film, with some edge Sparks put in the novel left out of the script. But there’s real chemistry between the young lovers and an old fashioned virtue to the father-daughter, father-daughter’s boyfriend scenes.

On the sliding critter-comedy scale, Furry Vengeance falls somewhere between the Chipmunks and the Chihuahua (the one from Beverly Hills).

It's so sentimental and sweet that you can almost forgive the kids' comedy Ramona and Beezus for not being nearly funny enough.

It is a well-acted and vivid re-creation of a dark, downbeat era when "girls don't play electric guitar," and you had to be someone pretty tough and pretty special to try it.

Take Out, beautifully shot and coming to a Criterion DVD, makes a gritty, intimate portrait of working life on the struggling end of the spectrum.

Forever After still goes down like warmed-over porridge. You don’t have to be Goldilocks to think that this time they’ve cooked their Golden Goose.

Filmmaker Alankrita Shrivastava presents a vivid setting, a post-“gas tragedy” Bhopal full of working class/middle class life and clashing gender mores.

The film parks her at the center of a universe that was and is all about gender tolerance and inclusion, even if one doubts her claims of a “post ‘velvet rope'” party ethos.

The chatter is funny and the drunken acting-out just amusing enough to make these Pretty Problems pretty cute and easy to sit through.

Wonderland is equal parts Lewis Carroll and Grace Slick. It’s inspired by Carroll’s "Alice in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking Glass," but also, apparently, by Slick’s psychedelic ‘60s anthem, “White Rabbit.” It’s a trip, man.

Like those '70s movies it borrows from, there's a blast of tongue-in-cheek politics built around a "They messed with the WRONG Mexican" message. No, this may not go over in Arizona.

There's an unexpected wistfulness, a bittersweet undercurrent to Going the Distance that could not have been in the script. This romantic comedy co-starring Drew Barrymore and longtime beau Justin Long was finished just as the real life couple was splitting up. For good, this time.

This is not a bad cast, but whatever wit the script aims for is lost in the queasy details director Miguel Sapochnik found more fascinating.

With Halloween II, Zombie shows conclusively that he's not interested in growing, getting better or ever becoming an original. He's just a hack with a made-up name, a cult following and a wife who can't act.

An intricate and daft tale of love, family and revenge.

Even if the acting and sound make it dated, they don’t blunt the provocative anti-war message Klimov and his crew were getting across.

An engaging Israeli film about the days when the people throwing rocks, assassinating soldiers and setting off bombs were Jews out to carve a state for themselves out of the British "mandate" in Palestine.

It’s filmic fool’s gold, as every scene that doesn’t sparkle is just dirt -- dank, gritty visuals, murky plotting and very bad line-readings from Troyer (Mini-Me from the Austin Powers movies).

Tame as it now seems, “Madchen,” restored and re-issued via virtual cinema streaming (check your local art cinema’s website) is still a movie of prescience, poetry and honesty, essential viewing for anybody interested in the cinema as bellwether of change and indicator of the cultural cutting edge.

A deadpan, darkly funny Korean murder mystery.

The title’s a trite metaphor and the surprises are thin. But the sleepy scenery and charming performances – Stewart escapes her vampires and reminds everyone what the fuss used to be about – keep The Yellow Handkerchief from blowing it.

There’s a modicum of suspense, the sense that not all will survive and casting that gives away who has the best chance. It’s a shame everybody involved, including self-righteous Matts, is so unpleasant there’s nobody to root for.

Crisp, compact and cryptic, The American is a standard-issue hit-man thriller tailor made for George Clooney.

It's a humorless movie of morphing zombies (they take on beastly attributes), phoned-in performances and trite dialogue.

Moore makes this caricature of 1950s motherhood a down-to-Earth delight.

In a lot of ways, Die Another Day is a return to Bond's bad-old-days, the early 1980s, when the plots were outlandish and haphazard, the stunts were fake and the whole enterprise was being treated as a cartoon.

When the slow burn is this slow coming to a boil, it’s a lot easier to just shrug and move on to a thriller that makes more sense.

The polished production sometimes touches and amuses despite its naïve “love conquers all” script.

This adaptation doesn’t entirely founder on the rocks. But the viewer is a couple of steps ahead of the action, start to finish. The innocents take forever to figure out the obvious.

There are people, powerful people, who don't want old cases dug up. It's a tribute to the story's construction that the mystery only deepens, the more Benjamin digs.

Extraordinary Measures isn’t extraordinary. It’s simply safe.

Dafoe, high on the list of best actors never to win an Oscar, was at his very best in this portrait of a loner who starts to take stock of “the life” at 40.

Kilmer makes a worthy, if somewhat underscripted villain. And some of the bits -- MacGruber idiotically setting traps that the bad guys never fall for -- tickle. But this still feels instantly dated, a "Hot Rod in a Role Models" era.

If your kids are Chinese menu savvy, just figuring out what this character/dish or that one is that this or that character is supposed to be. For adults, it could play as a take-out dinner date drinking game movie, a 90 minute think-up-your-own-pun fest.

That’s the trick to making a cult film. It can’t just be bad, it has to be memorably so, and The Room is.

Writer-director Roy shows himself to be a De Sica, Spike Lee or Cuaron of the Philippines, an artist who points his camera at his world and makes us see it the way he does.

Basically a bloody buddy picture that tries too hard.

The film, which stretches history to its breaking point in some cases and finds deeper truth in others, looks at how the expediencies of war and the nature of tit-for-tat guerilla conflicts dehumanizes even the humane.

4L is set in Africa and feels like Africa, but that grounding flow of Africa into your soul that one character promises never happens.

Brooks is the one who makes the message work, the one who should have been credited and the supporting player who makes “Sullivan’s Travels” worth the journey. He’s the difference between a good film of the Depression Era, and a classic.

Her film has little dramatic arc to it, and little uplift. It plays as flatly as the desert valleys the girls pedal through.

At least, at 77 minutes, Deadcon doesn’t waste much of our time.

If only every comedy had the surprise twist that the Czech road picture Winter Flies saves for its finale. It’s simple, and simple-minded, and it so upends expectations that it leaves you the way every comedy should — tickled.

All these years after Predator, these decades past the classic film, "Most Dangerous Game," that inspired this genre, it’s good to see the idea of the hunter becoming the hunted still gets the blood racing.

An exquisite character study in grief.

Aniston doesn’t bring her old A-game to this. But at least she’s not quiet and reserved and no-energy, her approach to too many roles of late. Butler makes the most of his Neanderthal rut.

Thanks to a brisk script and the masterful editing of future director David Lean, “Aircraft” clips along, serving up genuine suspense, dashes of wit and limited bravado as the combatants put themselves in the hands of people who risk their lives to save them.

A sloppy, raucous, time travel farce in the grown-men-gone-wild "Hangover" style, it’s a surprisingly satisfying, if not exactly LMAO, riot.

The League is an entertaining survey of Negro Leagues history with special attention paid to their place within the African American life of their day.

There’s not much to say about the enervated romance The Boy Downstairs, except that literally every character and actor playing that character is more interesting than the leads.

The twists become increasingly obvious as the layers of intrigue are peeled off. But the third act, with its stark choices and grisly cliffhanger of a brawl, pays off, even it that payoff feels a tad more conventional than is promised.

If you’re into comics, “Drawn to Perfection” will illuminate for you one of the greatest artists the medium has produced. And if you’re not, you’ll still be bowled over by the quality of the work, the life in the drawn figures and the wicked, inviting sparkle in their eyes that made Stevens the standard which every artist since has had to measure herself or himself against.

Daybreakers is a stylish but unavoidably silly sci-fi vampire thriller.

The movie is a stupid, over-the-top comic-booky action picture with the occasional cheesy effect, oddball casting and an utterly predictable get-that-guy-before-he-gets-us plot, but Evans and a couple of his mates make it passable entertainment.

An odd duck of a thriller. Quiet, talkative, with the occasional explosion of violence, it has ghosts and characters philosophizing, quoting F. Scott Fitzgerald or blurting insensitive non-sequiturs.

“Mansfield” feels incomplete, reality TV that doesn’t quite the deliver the drama.

Red has enough acting flourishes and incidental action pleasures to make it an adrenalin-jacked giggle, if not exactly the romp one so fervently expects.

A mirthless, joyless comedy with nary a hint of romance, mystery or justification for its existence.

The film is more overwhelming than uplifting.

Caine is magnificent. This is not some laughable Stallone-boxing-at-60 exercise in vanity. He's an old man playing an old man, but one who lived through experiences that both scarred him for life and prepared him for his final test.

A game about “making the wrong move at the right time” becomes the right movie for Jewison, one that transformed a comedy guy into somebody who’d make dramas a lot better than this, often with a social subtext that couldn’t help but strike a nerve.

This mild-mannered fantasy makes a sweet-spirited love letter to Outback life, Paris and the enduring cool of jazz, as Miles Davis played it.

Longer, more thorough and tweaked to play to modern audiences better, Apocalypse Now Redux packs every bit the wallop it did when it was new. After Gallipoli and Full Metal Jacket, after even Platoon, it remains the definitive anti-war war movie.

The film is enough of a watershed moment in cinema to deserve “classic” status, even if it’s a tad mild-mannered (PG rated) and convoluted.

Our nostalgic attachment to actresses who had their share of iconic roles decades ago is worth something. And “Chantilly Bridge” does a service in reminding us that Slater, Richardson, Shire, Cruise, Eikenberry, Sheedy and Williams are still around, still good at what they do and still employable.

What’s Love Got to Do With It? manages to show us a classic rise/fall/comeback tale with a little flair and a lot of heat.

The Untold Story feels threadbare, a comedy creaking along on a walker. It’s not the cast that’s “old,” it’s the screenplay’s paucity of new ideas, new observations about life, fresh gags or situations that seem “ready for the home.”

It’s movies like “Secret Agent” that made the director, not the stars, the household name, the “brand” film fans would seek out then and for generations to come.

A Canterbury Tale may not be top rank of films from Powell’s canon. It’s dated in some unflattering ways (a stammerer is ridiculed as “the village idiot”). But it makes an adorably quaint snapshot — complete with marijuana joke — of the war in Britain and an English countryside perhaps properly spoiled by progress and by too many years of TV’s “Escape to the Country.”

It’s the script, started by many hands, crafted into something an actor at his best seething, or in full bellow, could sink his teeth into, that makes this series of movie accidents a “lust for glory” that lasts.

Tebo’s film gives us the sense that Tyler was living the dream most every rock singer of his generation shares, to front a Big Band, with horns and backup singers, paying homage to some old favorites, and vamping through others, and having a ball doing it.

It's the same movie as the earlier "gotta dance" over-choreographed crunk-and-breakdance epics. Exactly the same.

The dialogue is generally bland, though the insults have a seriously racist sting.

It’s a darned entertaining way to get a handle on a sport that can seem like a bunch of cars doing circles for a crowd that seems most interested in seeing that next epic wreck.

Though properly chilling when it’s supposed to be, it’s a film whose effects, script and performances keep it at arm’s length when it is supposed to be moving.

A dark and brawny version of the Robin Hood legend that anchors itself in English history and loses some of the merriment in the process.

The Expendables feels, well -- disposable, a movie whose nostalgia isn't enough to make this 50. caliber trip down Memory Lane worth the fake napalm.

The Olive Trees of Justice is languid but never feels slow. It tells a story but not really with words and dialogue. And it traffics in sentiment without getting lost in sentimentality.

The "Made of Honor" screenwriters don't deliver enough jokes or feisty exchanges between the ill-matched traveling companions.

The players embrace this for the lark it is. Their pleasure in going this gonzo spills off the screen.

It is both intimate and sweeping, a John Woo/Howard Hawks “men with a code” epic, with William Friedkin grit, and maybe a pinch of Peckinpah for those who like their gun violence realistic.

A dull but harmless big-screen comedy aimed at the youngest movie goers.

The acting, like the tepid thriller it is parked in, is so mild mannered it lowers the stakes when it should be raising them.

The performers are given stock types to play, and Elba and Dillon, at least, can do a little with that.

I Am Love is a cinematic orgy, a sensual Italian feast of food, sex, guilt and grief. An intimate, quiet and even slow movie, its subtle shadings veil turbulent emotions.

City Island is a light “family” romance that goes about as far as its novel location -- an island neighborhood tucked in the middle of New York City -- and a good cast can carry it.

It's amusingly off-the-wall, but entirely too cluttered to come together.

If you love movies you should love the ones with great writing. And if you’re looking for that yardstick against which to better judge any movie that comes along, you can’t do better than immerse yourself in Chinatown.

A crowded cast of some of the finest actors in the cinema act the hell out of a gimmicky, episodic, hit-or-miss script in Brooklyn’s Finest, Antoine Fuqua’s latest attempt to relive the glories of "Training Day."

Crass, gross and juvenile in all the best (and worst) ways, Diary is aimed squarely at a tween "don't touch the cheese" demographic. And if you don't get it, maybe you're just too old for a good booger joke.

It’s not bad, but as Scorsese, America’s greatest living filmmaker and film history buff should know, even Hitchcock came up short on occasion.

The wow factor alone makes Oceans a great Earth Day/Earth Week at the movies.

Director Zack Snyder choreographs this like a video game, emphasizing the body count over character.

Chairman Mao wouldn't necessarily approve. And even today, China won't be showing Mao's Last Dancer.

It's only a movie, and not a remotely effective one. And for Zellweger, whose "Miss Potter" and "Appaloosa" were barely seen, with "Leatherheads" and "New in Town" further deflating her A-list clout, that's the real shame here.

There's a soap opera going on inside that tin can with a cannon.

A newfangled old-fashioned movie about glory, honor, sacrifice and a martial code that crosses into fascism, homoerotism and homophobia at the same time -- there are plenty of turn-off buttons in this one. But by Zeus, this is a ripping yarn, told with limb-rending gusto, an iconic ancient battle as seen by an iconic comic-book creator, Frank Miller.

A masterpiece. A work of grand visual wit, clever songs, funny gags and genuine pathos, it is perhaps the greatest stop-motion animated film ever, a painstaking style of model animation that computers have all but completely done away with.

They made a historical drama so close to the truth and polished that it holds up to this very day.

Overlong and entirely too ambitious in the number of “issues” it tries to cover, To Save a Life wanders all over the place before reaching its very predictable conclusions.

That Disney touch (which even Disney has trouble replicating) is missing. Even the hockey is unconvincing.

Brolin is so damned good in the saddle, in the hat and in the part that a half-sober viewer could half forget how half-arsed this movie he's starring in is.

Pacing aside, “The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp” is an intensely lovable picture, a daring comedy that went against the “patriotism first” ethos of the war films of its day.

Whatever its virtues, Eli is a movie that can’t help but suffer in comparison to the much-delayed and much better "Road."

For what it is and for whom it is intended, it’s not a bad movie, just an indifferent one.

Survival of the Dead lacks the wit of "Zombieland," the polish and punch of last winter's "The Crazies," a remake of a Romero zombie picture from the '70s.

It has humor and a touch of charm, but plainly needed more love, more passion, more Shakespeare.

As dated as such films inevitably are, the collaborators here ensure that this 1950s melodrama never feels like an artifact, but merely another era in the passing parade of Egypt’s rough and tumble underclasses, perhaps one less divided by religious conservatism than the Muslim Brotherhood Egypt of today.

Aniston's work opposite the screen's premiere mild-mannered funnyman shows her at her most engaged and pitch perfect.

It's a story about storytelling, with differing versions of events in which people die by the sword. Filled with Yimou's characteristic symbolism and zest for striking colors, it's a fictional account of the unification of China.

Eat Pray Love isn't a bad movie -- just a spiritually dead one, wearing and wearying.

Sweet, sentimental, silly and star-studded, Nanny McPhee Returns is one of the best children's movies of the year.

Equal parts inspired and irresponsible, the new film from Miguel Arteta (director of the cult hit 'Chuck and Buck') turns C.D. Payne's books into a hit-or-miss homage to that French classic of outlaw love, 'Breathless.'

The action finale, the actual 15 Minutes of War, atones for many of the sins this solid B-picture tallies up until then.

Yes, it’s a thriller with a murder mystery at the heart of it. But “whodunnit” is immaterial to the film’s thrills, and the one thing I seem to forget every time I watch it anew.

Of all the gonzo-goofy comic book adaptations that embrace video gaming sensibilities, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World is the gonzo-goofiest.

Inception is an elegant, portentous ride, though I’m not sure Nolan is any closer to visualizing the real (dream) deal than Hitchcock was.

Almost everything about this one hints at a funnier movie than “Smoke” turns out to be, from the goofy, Home Shopping Network show (or PBS grilling series) title to clouds of exhalations that decorate many scenes that aren’t as amusing as the filmmakers seem to think.

O’Loughlin is the very definition of comic dead weight. Imagine making Greg Kinnear carry half of "Baby Mama," or sending Tina Fey out with Matthew Fox on "Date Night" and you’ll get the picture.

The dull screenplay does the actors no favors, and the charisma-starved players respond in kind.

It’s not one of Polanski’s masterpieces, but The Ghost Writer doesn’t dilute his reputation as a master of suspense.

A movie franchise can only take us by surprise once, and by that measure, Iron Man 2 is a preordained letdown. But so much of what gave the first film its gas — is still here.

This isn’t an A-picture, either behind the camera or in front of it. It plays like a competent TV film, lacking the polish or “names” of a “Downton Abbey,” but good enough to work.

This waking nightmare from the "Nightmare on Elm Street" creator is a puzzle with no solutions, a tale with a twist that isn't a twist at all.

This Mission unfolds at a near dead-sprint -- frenetic editing, whiplash camera pans, all hiding an intentionally under-explained plot and generic action beats that will be familiar to anyone who has ever seen a ticking-clock thriller. But if Mission: Impossible 3 is the first pitch of the popcorn-movie season, just two words come to mind -- butter up. [5 May 2006, p.8]

This milieu, kids flopping from apartment to house-breaking to checked-out hotel room that the maids haven’t cleaned yet, has an earthy promise that rarely delivers. Younger viewers may find a character to identify with, but the movie presents us only with superficialities

The new Funeral, directed by social commentator-director Neil LaBute ("Lakeview Terrace") doesn’t improve on the original, which wasn’t exactly a classic despite its classic structure.

The combat sequences are good, if nothing we haven’t seen before and staged and shot more impressively in films from Europe, America, Australia and Turkey.

Disney's effort to turn Kristen Bell into America's Sweetheart reaches its tipping point with You Again, a flat romantic comedy that packages her in a funny setup and surrounds her with funny people.

This performance reminds us that Bridges is that rare actor who has never had to make that apology. Crazy Heart lets him be every bit as grand as we’d hope him to be.

Bell, a petite, pretty blonde, may or may not have the Meg Ryan-Julia Roberts-Sandra Bullock goods. When in Rome, a leaden variation on that rom-com recipe, fails utterly to make her case.

It’s basically just a random collection of cliches filtered through the movies its veteran documentary producer-director seems to have half-forgotten.

Compared to the gravitas of “The 49th Parallel” and “One of Our Aircraft is Missing,” and the strained metaphors of “A Canterbury Tale,” “I Know Where I’m Going” is downright fluffy, feather light, despite a harrowing peril-at-sea sequence that is as polished as anything from the filming tank/rear projection era in black and white film.

A blend of comedy, song and dance, drama and male and female servicemember interviews, it’s funny, biting and tuneful, and it takes you right back there if you lived through it, and might be an eye-opener for activist “Ok, Boomer” millennials.

It's almost kitschy - the way Stone injects himself into a couple of scenes, an eccentric Eli Wallach cameo, the inclusion of a Charlie Sheen moment that flat out winks at the audience.

Devil is the sort of story Rod Serling would have taken for a spin in "The Twilight Zone," back in the day. Shyamalan came up with the idea, produced it and got others to script and direct this 76 minute exercise in movie minimalism.

A gorgeously animated combat fantasy - "The Lord of the Rings" meets "Happy Feet."

This cannot be about music if you don’t have the rights. So there’s virtually no on-stage performance content. That means you have to downplay the significance of meeting the big musical collaborators of his life, too.

The matter-of-fact way everybody involved faces this supernatural horror drains most of the chills right out of it.

It’s all eye candy and spectacle, all a bit much and pointlessly hard to follow. But make no mistake, this is something to see, even if making sense of it can feel more trouble than it’s worth.

The story is kind of all over the place, scatterbrained without being madcap (This one feels tinkered with, reshoots, re-edits.).

If Kristen Stewart ever saw Vampires Suck, she'd be scarred for life.

It's a little racy for our "High School Musical" set. But Bran Nue Dae (say it out loud) will play anywhere fans like a musical so cute you want to pinch its cheeks.