Scott Tobias

More than any masculine heroics, Pearce's primary job is maintaining the tone: smug, irreverent, and giddily punch-drunk.

The indie rom-com/sitcom L!fe Happens is a case study in how bad movies can turn an ordinary, relatable situation into a grotesque distortion with only a passing resemblance to the way actual human beings live and interact with each other.

There's a weary soul to HERE, embodied by Ben Foster and Lubna Azabal as two loners who meet in a café and impulsively decide to travel the country together, prompted more by mutual intuition than any meaningful exchange of words.

But a few mild misgivings aside, Spurlock has made, in essence, a 90-minute promo reel for the convention, a paean to fanboy (and fangirl) enthusiasm that could double as an orientation video, if such a thing were necessary. It's a brisk and cheery overview, sweet but superfluous.

No, the indie horror movie ATM is not about a psychotic automated teller that charges the steepest of convenience fees - your life! - but it isn't much smarter than that premise, either.

Scott has made an art - or at least a career - out of playing the affable dimwit. And with Goon, a salty Canadian comedy about the rise of a minor league hockey enforcer, Scott finally has his Hamlet, a role that calls for every blank, uncomprehending look in his toolbox while accessing the cuddly puppy within.

Feels tentative and weak whenever it isn't simply baldly derivative. It's old-fashioned to the point of ossification.

Best of all is the half-surreal, half-touching scene of the couple ordering Chinese delivery - needless to say, the tip is sizable - and inviting the courier to Skype his family one last time and share in a moment of common humanity.

There's a suffocating air to The Deep Blue Sea that makes it harder to access than other period romances of its kind, but Davies aligns himself wholly with Hester.

When the goal is simply to be as faithful as possible to the material - as if a movie were a marriage, and a rights contract the vow - the best result is a skillful abridgment, one that hits all the important marks without losing anything egregious. And as abridgments go, they don't get much more skillful than this one.

In the end, though, Seeking Justice evokes the post-Watergate paranoia of '70s thrillers like "The Parallax View" and "Three Days of the Condor" without having a worthy conspiracy at the bottom.

Delicacy is phony in ways that might seem drearily familiar to audiences weaned on American romantic comedies.

The second half of The Kid With A Bike diverges so much from the first that they seem like two different movies - the first a drama about an orphan's search for home, the second a moral thriller about the terrible things all people, no matter their social station, are willing to do in the interest of self-preservation. Both sections are riveting in their own way, and punctuated by startling shocks and bursts of emotion.

The FP feels like a junky, disposable lark, created for a midnight audience to swallow, belch, and forget about the next morning.

Stripped of all its random weirdness, Attenberg has the premise of a classic Yasujiro Ozu drama like "Late Spring," with its relationship between a widower approaching death and a devoted daughter who needs to leave the nest before it's too late.

Pleasing mainly just as a message-in-a-bottle from a restless, persecuted artist-that is, until the amazing closing shot, which brings the volatility of post-Green Revolution Iran home with unforgettable force.

Just as Marston's scrupulous attention to local custom and devotion to social realism recall the work of John Sayles (Lone Star), his occasionally enervating style also recalls Sayles at his worst.

Writer-director Michael K. Roskam takes his time in revealing why Jacky needs to shoot up, but that LaMotta restlessness is unmistakable - this bull here can rage.

It's a chilling film about the routine business of unspeakable acts.

It's common for coaches to take roles as father figures on a high-school and college level, but Undefeated gets into how that dynamic works on both ends, as Courtney seeks to salve the pain of his family history.

Given the creepiest rom-com premise this side of "Addicted To Love" - which at least had the wisdom to reflect on its camera-obscura voyeurism - director McG tries to turn This Means War into a cool pop confection along the lines of his Charlie's Angels movies. But pouring on the douchey hipness and charm only makes things worse.

Chronicle becomes what "Hancock" wanted to be - a dark superhero story with firm footing in the everyday. Perhaps now the found-footage gimmick has been fully exploited; let us never speak of it again.

The Turin Horse has a burnished beauty that's awe-inspiring, like a clear window into a faraway world as it dangles, and then falls, off the precipice.

Wiseman's fragmented approach misses the continuity of the show, which mixes erotic dance with comedy, magic and even a little soft shoe, and tells an overarching story that Crazy Horse never quite communicates. Yet there's more than enough compensation in the scenes Wiseman does catch.

Following up his acclaimed debut feature "Down Terrace," a gangster drama that also mixed genre shocks with dark comedy and explosive family spats, Wheatley gives Kill List a discordant tone that makes it feel like a horror film even when it isn't.

Miss Bala toes a delicate line between exploitation movie and movie about exploitation, but that's part of what gives the film its charge - this isn't some flaccid docudrama about how the cartels are poisoning the country, it's a lively, white-knuckle thriller where any such proselytizing is reduced to implication.

As the plot unfolds, brick by brick, the structure starts to wobble until it finally collapses into unintentional comedy.

Neeson brings gravitas to the table, acting as a legitimizing counterweight to the overwrought dialogue and flesh-tearing lupine hysteria. But in a scenario this persistently ludicrous, he can only do so much.

Nothing about it lingers, not even the sulfuric stench of a bum scene or a particularly hammy performance.

In truth, Haywire is simply a delivery system for ass-kickings, calibrated to the specific talents of Gina Carano, a former mixed-martial-arts star and American Gladiator whose fists (and feet) of fury can rattle skulls and cave in chests.

Better performances might have sold The Divide, but aside from Arquette's fine work as a single mother driven to self-degradation, the cast amplifies the impression of a canned, one-act theater piece.

In its best sequences, Ramsay puts her duress in dazzlingly visual terms, collapsing the past and present in an associative rush of red-streaked images and piercingly vivid moments out of time.

The body means different things for each of them, and Ceylan's mesmerizing existential drama takes its time establishing the players and bringing their inner lives into focus. It's cinema as autopsy.

There are times when even its subtleties seem predictable, when it questions dramatic conventions that indie films have already questioned, like the temperament of movie-parents whose children fear coming out of the closet. Yet the film has an abiding sweetness that's ultimately irresistible.

Beyond the impeccable performances and direction, it's foremost an exceptional piece of screenwriting, so finely wrought that the drama seems guided by an invisible hand.

It will always be "too soon" for Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close, which processes the immense grief of a city and a family through a conceit so nauseatingly precious that it's somehow both too literary and too sentimental, cloying yet aestheticized within an inch of its life.

Mara's Salander is the film's lifeblood, a shrewd yet vulnerable outsider whose resilience and pluck help Fincher elevate The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo above the standard procedural. But just barely.

The heart of Addiction Incorporated is what happened after DeNoble was canned and later emerged as a key witness in news reports, courtrooms, and Congressional subcommittees. Bound by a non-disclosure agreement, DeNoble operated like a character in a real-life John Grisham thriller.

For all their brutality, the fights are so seductive and exciting that their consequences - the physical and mental toll exacted from the men and their families - sometimes fail to register.

Yet in its best moments - and there are several good ones scattered across this ramshackle comedy - The Sitter is a reminder that Green's sensibility has always been heavy on whimsy and play, and that maybe he hasn't strayed that far from home.

The good news about Outrage, his grisly return to the genre, is that Kitano doesn't have to shake the rust off - his impeccable compositions and clean, minimalist sound design are still calibrated for maximum impact. Even as dozens of bodies pile up, each act of violence feels as bracing as the sound of a gunshot ripping through the night air.

McQueen is a showy director, but his bravura long takes have the effect of heightened attentiveness, allowing scenes to build in intensity without the relief of a cut.

Without soft-pedaling it in the least, Bonello nonetheless mourns the passing of a time where prostitutes didn't control their destinies, but at least had each other.

It's a complex fusion of film history and personal history, filled with dazzling embellishments and unabashed sentiment about the glories of cinema.

The Lie's payoff strikes an unexpected, refreshingly open note that makes this slight little indie more resonant than its scale suggests. The line this couple is about to cross is significant, and the film takes it seriously.

What makes Jack And Jill worse than the average Sandler vehicle is Jill, who's been conceived as little more than a dude in drag, hold the jokes.

His film powerfully suggests that violent death of any kind, whether personal or state-mandated, transforms everyone in its vicinity.

The grand concept is really just a vehicle for a more intimate study of depression and its dangerous, shifting polarities.

A few individual performances survive - Liotta finds a little of his old edge, and Pacino briefly revisits Serpico territory - but they're smothered in the slow-burning absurdity.

The Last Rites Of Joe May succeeds in some of the smaller details and the soulful performances.

"Fear And Loathing" star Johnny Depp more or less reprises his role as Thompson's alter ego, once again playing a journalist whose yen for excess obscures the idealism at his core. But the film, despite its obvious intelligence and flashes of wit, doesn't bring that passion across.

Paranormal Activity 3 has one new technical wrinkle, and it's brilliant: In addition to the cameras in the bedroom, Smith mounts a third to the base of a rotating electric fan, so it pans back and forth from the dining room to the kitchen and back again.

Kaurismäki has a narrow vision, disarming and sweet, yet utterly predictable, and there's little distinction between the films he's directing today and the films he directed 30 years ago. They have the wrong kind of timelessness.

If nothing else, Margin Call serves as a rebuke to "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps" emphatic style - which ultimately glamorizes the profession it means to shame - and brings this dangerous numbers game back to the trading-floor desktops and mahogany-covered conference tables where it belongs. It isn't sexy, but the stakes feel much higher.

The mix of blunt sexual politics and dime-store-paperback luridness has the bracing quality of tub-brewed rotgut. It eats away at the stomach lining - that is, if it can be stomached at all.

In many ways, the film is history repeating itself, as the same Weinstein brothers who famously dropped $10 million on "Happy, Texas" in 1999 have overpaid again for "Happy, Texas 2."

Real Steel falls somewhere near the intersection of elation and shame, essentially reworking the Sylvester Stallone arm-wrestling non-classic "Over The Top" for the equally ridiculous sport of android fisticuffs, and mostly getting away with it.

What's Your Number? trades in the sort of hard-R crudity that's become standard since "The Hangover," but the added explicitness doesn't make it any less artificial a contraption.

Côté and Henriquez err in pressing their case too hard on occasion, especially when they cut to reaction shots of Khadr supporters watching footage of his agony; there's a line between providing context and manipulating the audience that they don't care to acknowledge. Then again, subtlety isn't likely the goal: You Don't Like The Truth beats the drum, and beats it loudly.

Those schooled in Eastern European history may have better luck deciphering it, but what keeps it compelling throughout is Loznitsa's direction, which favors sophisticated long takes and particularly suspenseful use of foreground and background action. His next film should be a doozy.

Ideally cast as Reiser's stand-in, Joseph Gordon-Levitt digs into a character role that also gives him a chance to show off the comedic chops he developed during his years on "3rd Rock From The Sun."

Miller directs with intelligence, though not flair, but the script makes up for any flagging energy with crackling Sorkin dialogue and performances that sing with revolutionary fervor.

The film is little more than an exercise in style, but it's dazzling and mythic, a testament to the fundamental appeal of fast cars, dangerous men, and tension that squeezes like a hand to the throat.

The lack of authenticity underlines the thinness of their conceit: Without a plausible backdrop, all that's left of Love Crime are the power games between two duplicitous women and the serpentine plotting that results. And even that, under the slightest scrutiny, frays like a thin layer of tissue paper.

Not a second of it is convincing - or compelling - but then the film is about "utopia," a blandly idealized place unblemished by hardship, malice, sin, or errant golf strokes.

What's surprising, and ultimately disappointing, about Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life is the degree to which Sfar allows biopic obligations to smother his more whimsical instincts.

It uses a story about family as a vehicle for glorifying gangsterism. In other words, it's empty, amoral, and - in the style of other Besson productions - surprisingly easy to digest.

Iron Crows isn't the miserablist wallow you might expect. While director Park Bong-Nam observes the hazards of ship-breaking with a thoroughness that borders on fetishization, he also catches the humor and camaraderie of men in the trenches.

Absent any qualities beyond the surface, like the history and politics that trouble Del Toro's best films, Don't Be Afraid Of The Dark is little better than a half-decent scare machine.

There are swords and sorcery, pirates and monsters, taxed bodices and taxing mythology. In other words, there's the bare minimum necessary to summon this dismal movie into existence.

Everything and everyone acts as cogs in a relentless plot machine that keeps twisting and twisting like an annoying little gizmo on Christmas morning.

A documentary that focuses rigorously on process and atmosphere at the expense of context and engagement.

The whole thing is rigged for crowd-pleasing payoffs - a bit about chocolate pie gets more mileage than a Prius - and those payoffs are about honoring white viewers for not being horrible racists. Kudos to them.

Produced in partnership with YouTube and distributed by National Geographic Films, the documentary Life in a Day is offspring with the worst genetic traits of both: narcissism on a global scale, speckled with pretty pictures. In a world without books or magazines, this is the movie people would watch in the waiting room at the dentist's office.

There's nothing particularly distinctive or engaging about Wetzel's fly-on-the-wall style, which feels like second-hand Frederick Wiseman. But for hardcore foodies, El Bulli offers a clear, unvarnished look at the master at work.

Witnessing outreach workers intervening in these situations is inspiring enough, but their subtlety and nuance in neutralizing people of different backgrounds and temperaments is especially impressive.

Gosling and Stone, too, have wonderful chemistry; their all-night "seduction" sequence is the film's highlight, witty and effortlessly sexy.

It's a film where the feelings and experiences of young people are highly specific in detail, yet fundamentally universal and timeless.

Romantic comedies - and this is one, in spite of its phony irreverence - turn largely on star power, and theirs is transcendent, whether they're casually trading one-liners on the streets or doing running commentary on their sexual escapades. They'd have been better off staying in bed.

On a technical level, The Tree marks a significant advance over the humble utility of Bertuccelli's previous film, drinking in Australia's pastoral majesty with an abundant eye for beauty that falls just short of the intended poetry. Yet the characters aren't nearly as resonant.

McKinney may well be a madwoman, but Morris connects so deeply to her obsessions that the film's tone never seems exploitative or mocking.

The Ward feels less indebted to cinema's past than a desperate attempt to keep up with the present. Carpenter has made his approximation of a cheap, twisty, shock-filled modern horror movie, and he has lost all but faint sighs of his minimalist swagger in the process.

To an equal extent, Project Nim shows the human capacity for cruelty and narcissism as well as compassion and selflessness.

Through the ceaseless efforts of two dedicated pro bono lawyers-both with personal reasons to keep up the fight for five or six grueling years-director Yoav Potash follows every revelation and setback with an urgency most fiction films can't muster.

Monte Carlo finally resolves itself in a farcical climax that at least shows a little energy, but it isn't enough to overcome the discomfiting tensions and indifferent formula filmmaking that plagues nearly every scene.

Over a difficult three-hour sprawl, Cristi Puiu's Aurora fully explores the time before and after a killer strikes, and it has the cumulative effect of making what passes for a "motive" seem absurdly simplistic.

The farce withers away when it should be expanding.

Never to be confused for the rom-com starring Amy Adams - though that would be the mother of all video-store mix-ups - Leap Year lets actions speak louder than words, and the actions here are shockingly explicit.

The overall mood of Conan O'Brien Can't Stop is curdled and sour. It leaves the feeling that the next chapter can't come soon enough.

Rossi never gets around to exploring his opening question: What would the world be without The New York Times? Perhaps, as with a lot of his subjects here, the answer is just too painful to consider, no matter the economic realities.

A film so utterly lacking in conviction, it needs a 25-year-old Tom Cruise vehicle just to keep its spine straight.

The key mistake was Ahmed's choice to direct it himself; it's promotional when it might be revealing of impasses (and commonalities) between cultures and the complex tactics comedians use to address it.

It's not the artistry of X-Men: First Class that's particularly striking; though it's finely crafted, the film feels less the product of a visionary director than of the Marvel movies machine working at maximum efficiency.

Doing some of his best work in years, Ewan McGregor plays Mills' alter ego as a prickly, not altogether noble loner in his late 30s who initially doesn't take the news of his father's coming-out well.

The great Kôji Yakusho stars as a revered samurai who decides that enough is enough, and sets about assembling the assassins of the title like a men-on-a-mission movie.

The latest bloom from the flourishing garden that is Romanian cinema, Radu Muntean's Tuesday, After Christmas chronicles the emotional fallout from a classic love triangle, but it unfolds with the agonizing tension of a suspense film.

In terms of scale, The Tree Of Life recalls the mammoth ambition of Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey," but it's also more intimate and personal than Malick's previous films, rooted in vivid memories of growing up in '50s Texas.

The film never feels entirely staid: Lu wriggles out of convention where he can, especially in the first half, and engages with history as an artist, not a hagiographer.

It's no surprise that Bridemaids sputters, coughs, and lurches, but it's a winning shambles, buoyed by a sharp, balanced comedic ensemble and some truthful observations about how close friends adapt when their lives fall out of step.

There's something pure about the crude pleasures of Hobo with a Shotgun, a pre-fab cult film that aspires to nothing more (or less) than the red-meat feeding of a feral midnight-movie audience.

Yes, perhaps the audience will like its favored couple more, but all the engineering that goes into making them sympathetic results in a film that feels agonizingly synthetic and alien.

So long as Exporting Raymond sticks to the headaches of adapting Everybody Loves Raymond into Everybody Loves Kostya, it's a funny and revealing look at the immense chasm between the two cultures.

It's the sort of film Robert Altman might have made if he cut his teeth working for The Disney Channel.

Like a proper action sequel, it's bigger, louder, and sillier than its predecessors, but it's more streamlined, too, smartly dumping the tired underground racing angle in favor of a crisp, hugely satisfying "Ocean's Eleven"-style heist movie.

In spite of some thoughtful-and occasionally just bizarre-rumination on what the marvels of Chaumet really signify, Cave Of Forgotten Dreams often feels as stifling as the place it explores, rather than the sensual odyssey its evocative title suggests.

It helps that the actors' faces are so mesmerizing, particularly Manjinder Virk as Lorraine.

Though it has plenty of shocks, the film creates a wasteland that would be compellingly deranged even without vampires pressing insistently at every border. Horror is just the half of it.

Silver means to get across the adrenaline rush of lives lived in dangerous extremes, but winds up trivializing their accomplishments and making them seem like men of hearty appetites, but little intellectual depth.

The film is curiously sterile and lifeless, hardly the stuff of revolution. It feels more like an ideologically reversed "Tucker: The Man And His Dream," written and performed by robots.

Name the first things that come to anyone's mind about Rio de Janeiro - samba, soccer, sunbathing, Carnival - and those are the building blocks of this movie. Expect the expected.

For their part, the Danes are either having more of an adventure or covering up their trauma with chest-thumping braggadocio; almost to a man, they're ready to come back for more.

This Arthur cravenly turns Susan into a monstrous status-seeker, making her less of a human being and thus much easier for Arthur to trample over in securing a meaningful adult relationship.

Bier allows her film to be buried by its own overwrought ambition.

Meticulous and immersive, Meek's Cutoff feels like history in three dimensions.

Superficially exciting and handled with great aplomb. But the film is running to go nowhere.

Based on its thrillingly fractured first half - not to mention "Moon" in its entirety - Jones seems much smarter than he allows the film to be in the end. It wriggles out of its own intriguing puzzle.

Super exists in the no-man's land between indie quirk and raw exploitation, and when it works, it's thrillingly off-balance.

All calculation aside, scary is still scary, and Insidious makes up in old-fashioned tension what it sometimes lacks in originality.

Words like "smug," "derivative," and "shallow" could all be fairly applied to the film, but as a piece of late-night exploitation, it delivers the violence and nudity with the regularity of an IV drip, and some familiar faces in the cast help class it up.

While it's admirably perverse for a "killer-tire movie" to be this snooty, it's about half as clever as it thinks it is.

The only character who stands out is a relentlessly clowning man-child named Taloche (James Thierree), but only as a symbol for the irrepressible spirit of an entire people.

It's just another gangster movie for the pile.

The sequel, Diary Of A Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules, isn't motivated to change the formula in the least, but it's ever-so-slightly more palatable, if only for being less of a total spazz.

All these characters make a beautiful mess together, even if McCarthy spends too much time tidying it up.

It's no insult to say that the fine documentary Bill Cunningham New York resembles one of those minor profiles found in The New Yorker's "Talk Of The Town" section: a slight, glancing, yet subtly wrought slice of New York life. And it seems likely that the exceedingly modest Cunningham would want it that way.

It's a small victory for flash in its eternal war with substance, but in this case, the flash is enough.

As with "Women In Trouble," Gutierrez unveils a series of loosely connected characters and subplots that concern players in and around the porn industry, but the intended colorful irreverence looks a lot like standard indie quirk.

It's loud, relentless, and difficult to endure, capturing the experience of ground-level alien warfare with woeful verisimilitude.

A mesmerizing study of the nature of evil itself.

A moving, gently reassuring tale that softens the boundaries between humanity and nature, life and the afterlife.

Drive Angry feels like a five-minute Comic Con show reel that's been expanded beyond its limits. It's agonizingly cool.

Still, the Farrellys have a distinct touch that carries their dubious premise across. They bring back the toilet humor of yore and make it shocking and funny again.

Far from being a liability, Dolan's youthfulness gives it unmistakable vibrancy: This is a love-crazy, movie-crazy affair, laying bare its emotions just as plainly as its influences.

Zero Bridge is a rigorous piece of filmmaking, but it's played at too minor a key, honoring the neo-realist tradition so slavishly that it lacks an identity of its own.

Tacked onto a perfectly respectable thriller, Unknown's mass of unlikely turns and implausible reveals make the whole film seem retroactively less sophisticated.

The shame of it is, all this ridiculousness might have worked under surer hands. After all, farces are supposed to be a little silly, and the audience, for lack of a better phrase, can be trained to just go with it. The trick? Don't treat us like a bunch of Palmers.

Broadly speaking, Canner hails from the Michael Moore school of first-person editorializing, but Orgasm Inc. isn't given to vanity or cheap shots.

The cast, anchored by sweetly goofy Ed Helms, redeems the film at every turn, adding humor and dimension to characters who might have otherwise drowned in tacky grotesquerie.

The formalities of the period dialogue and a wavering, inexplicable accent test him (Tatum) beyond his limits, and the film isn't thoughtful or original enough to survive it.

A deplorable unofficial reworking of "Single White Female."

Madsen casts doubt on the notion that this Pandora's box will never be opened, either by some cataclysmic event, like another Ice Age, or drilling by future generations who may not be aware of Onkalo, or even able to decipher warnings of its contents. Something terrible seems likely to happen-just not today.

When We Leave is a film without villains. Instead, it features a set of circumstances that inevitably and needlessly spin out of control.

Though impeccably photographed and acted, The Housemaid begins to feel stifling and airless once Im's thesis about the abuses of the powerful starts to drive the film to a foregone conclusion.

At the movie's center, Schreiber approaches the role with a seriousness that lacks joy or any other colorful inflection.

It never coheres as well as it should, but the film makes a fine mess.

In spite of fine work from Bardem and Álvarez, Biutiful is an irritating, oppressive 150-minute dirge, not the step forward Iñárritu's dissolved partnership with Arriaga seemed to promise.

Cianfrance and his actors, Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling, have not made a cold or schematic film. They aim instead for raw emotional experience, one that's full of insight into the ways a relationship can go astray, but mostly feels like a slow-motion punch to the gut.

As with all of Philibert's work, Nénette is impeccably composed and admirably disciplined, but his patient observation can't unlock the mysteries of an animal that's grown more introspective and likely less expressive over time.

When the conclusion leaves the door open for still another sequel, it feels like an invitation to a living wake.

Shapeless and overlong, How Do You Know unfolds in a heap of unprocessed ideas and emotions, as if Brooks started production two or three drafts too early.

The best that could be said of Yogi Bear is that it doesn't diminish its source material.

Spacey has made a career out of projecting the smarmy elitism of the powerful, but Casino Jack is so painfully clunky that he gets dragged down along with it.

Disney has once again constructed a digital environment out of cutting-edge special effects, only this time, it isn't merely silly; it's as dry and talky as a PBS panel show.

Their friendship in Due Date is hard-won, and the audience is right there with them.

Here's a man who's doing to environmental science what the Atkins Diet did to weight loss, and Timoner isn't looking for anyone to call his conclusions into question? Nonsense.

As long as Unstoppable stays on the train, it's queasily effective.

Denis brings it all together for a genuinely shocking finale, unexpected, yet in keeping with the film's consuming madness.

When Gyllenhaal stops selling out, the movie starts.

Heartless seems eternally at war with its own genre, unwilling to succumb to bloody mayhem yet neither smart nor coherent enough to transcend horror convention.

It's silly and often laughable, but it's a sweet fantasy, too, produced in loving homage to the frothiest traditions of stage and screen.

Bale's live-wire performance typifies the many major and minor elements that elevate The Fighter from the deeply conventional sports movie it might have been into the endearingly offbeat sports movie it turns out to be.

von Donnersmarck's meat-and-potatoes direction makes The Tourist astonishingly lifeless and awkward, reducing two of the world's biggest movie stars to something akin to shy, pimply teenagers on their first date.

Here's a story about a man who befriended and eventually killed a Texan while going incognito as an exceptionally frumpy woman, then was eventually nabbed shoplifting a chicken-salad sandwich while carrying more than $500 in his pocket. Why underplay that?

Ficarra and Requa are more comfortable being bad: The nastier the film gets, the better it is.

Haggis doesn't trust the action to carry his themes across without emphasis, and his movie suffers for it.

It isn't clever. It isn't original. It isn't scary. At best, Skyline is a proficient, forgettable programmer that only occasionally lapses into irredeemably silliness.

Patrick Wilson rounds out the cast as McAdams' love interest, but his presence seems necessary only to classify Morning Glory as a romantic comedy. The heart of the movie is really McAdams' wonderfully contentious relationship with Ford.

The film rescues the story from tabloid hell, and asks for a saner assessment of a deeply flawed man.

Worse still, all that introspection adds up to a disappointingly shallow accumulation of regrets and life lessons, none of them surprising. After the adrenaline rush, 127 Hours turns to vapor.

Though narrower in scope and lacking the first-person angle, Waste Land resembles Agnès Varda's great 2000 documentary "The Gleaners & I," particularly in its awe of tough, creative, hard-working people who live on the margins.

What was scary once is scary twice, like a carnival funhouse remodeled with a few new mirrors and spring-loaded spooks.

It's neither remotely convincing as true-to-life drama or lurid and propulsive enough to work as exploitation. It's just bad.

A strange, stilted, misbegotten drama, undone by variable performances, awkwardly inserted flashback and fantasy sequences, and a gloppy overlay of voiceover narration.

What's really missing from Conviction are the thorny questions it refuses to take up with any depth.

At its best, the film works as a morally freighted film noir, with Jovovich particularly good as a breathy femme fatale who seduces De Niro with a mere change in inflection.

In an unfortunate case of star casting, Cruise strains credibility as a hard-edged Jersey dockworker.

The film wilts under the harsh light of rationality; after all, how could anyone make sense of a heroine whose doppelgänger is both distinctly separate and inextricably connected to her? And yet these parallel lives rhyme so tunefully through the reflective cinematography and sweeping score that any confusion or disbelief tends to melt away.

It's a beautiful mess, but it's a mess all the same.

Too often, Formula 51 fails to differentiate between gleeful excess and white noise.

Director Jeff Wadlow and screenwriter Chris Hauty are so committed to following through on the "Karate Kid" formula that they don't care for novelty; it's enough for them just to hit their cues and play up the slo-mo MMA brutality. In the future, movies this derivative will be made by robots.

It isn't particularly original--for one, it owes an unacknowledged debt to the French film "Them"--but as an exercise in controlled mayhem, horror movies don't get much scarier.

Debut features are rarely this confident and accomplished, much less such a perfect blueprint of what to expect from a filmmaker down the line.

The film insightfully probes into the things that are said and the intense feelings that are merely implied, buzzing at a low level just beneath the surface.

Constructed out of poorly supported accusations, vague innuendo, and naked emotional appeals, Bush's Brain has a Rove-esque quality of its own.

Lacking a more specific sense of time and place, Cinderella Man leans heavily on the technically proficient Crowe to slip into Braddock's skin, but he can only do so much with a character who's ready to be mounted in bronze over Central Park.

Though Chop Shop is an American film, it feels more like an Iranian movie or the Dardenne Brothers’ "Rosetta"; Bahrani introduces something like a plot point in the late-going, but he mostly focuses, to riveting effect, on how his young hero hustles and claws through everyday life.

With a few self-conscious exceptions, Soderbergh makes an earnest attempt to return to that place and time in both history and American filmmaking, and his risk-taking pays fascinating dividends.

Baratz’s apparent willingness to accept everything at face value papers over some of the more troubling aspects of Tenzin’s mission, but Unmistaken Child allows the mysteries of the process to be preserved without judgment.

Adapted from a long-running stage play, The Dinner Game has been refined to peak comic efficiency, with every misunderstanding and hare-brained scheme neatly cascading into bigger and bigger catastrophes.

Ballard makes a simple, deeply affecting emotional associations between Amy, her father, the geese, and the absent mothers and cinematographer Caleb Deschanel bathes the action in an appropriately magisterial beauty.

Though Scarlet Diva contains flashes of pungent black humor and self-deprecation, it's hard to know how seriously Argento takes herself, or how much her real life has been inflated for dramatic effect.

The film seems content with the more modest ambitions of a romantic comedy, albeit one with unusually potent wit and intricate construction. The old Ealing could never have afforded Parker's deluxe treatment of the material; the new Ealing seems to have forgotten the benefits of economy.

The big reason Chaos Theory doesn't work is that the gears are visibly grinding away, cranking out neat little ironies and life lessons without any liberating surprises.

The plot’s too fitful, but a stirring John Williams score ties a lot of the pieces together, and De Palma and Farris’ emphasis on children’s misplaced trust in authority figures helps The Fury resonate even when the story peters out.

Morel tries to keep the energy up for 85 minutes straight, but the film never manages to top itself, and in spite of the political overtones, it doesn't provide much thematic sustenance.

It's hard to fathom what they intended for this forgettable group of lonelyhearts, other than to choreograph a whopping 14 happy endings at once--all of them forced, none of them earned.

Bujalski's brand of stylized dialogue sounds genuinely fly-on-the-wall.

Solomon handles their crises of conscience with a studied compassion that hangs over scenes like a lead weight, though the actors (particularly Dunst) do their best to bring more range to his gray palette.

Give Flicka credit for one thing: It stays on message. Set against the gorgeous backdrop of a Wyoming mountain range--a view this time unobstructed by the gay cowboys who so alarm family audiences--the film offers up fantasy footage for every strong-willed girl who ever straddled a saddle, and little more.

The cast wrings laughs out of David Berenbaum's script as if it were a damp washcloth.

Morris’ film does everything it can to make Hawking’s thinking accessible to a wider audience, and reveal how A Brief History Of Time is as much its author’s story as it is the story of the universe.

Through Brody's remarkably controlled, self-effacing performance, Polanski succeeds in making his hero an invisible man, but the sights he conjures are surprisingly artless and ordinary, familiar from a dozen other Holocaust dramas. Among the casualties in The Pianist is a great director's imagination.

Careening from bubbly romantic comedy to bitchy melodrama to the darker matters of murder, incest, and suicide, the film possesses the catch-all qualities for which Bollywood cinema is known, but Bose exerts about as much control over them as the conductor of a runaway train.

Botches what could be the most mischievous power since Scott Baio's telekinesis in the 1982 comedy "Zapped!": a wristwatch that speeds up time for the user until the rest of the world seems to be standing still.

Every single joke, character detail, music montage, and pop-culture reference looks extensively market-tested, whether via screenings, focus groups, or other box-office successes.

Hopkins' increasing disconnection with his fellow actors and the material nearly sabotages Proof, an otherwise-respectable adaptation of David Auburn's Pulitzer Prize-winning play.

Martin makes a fine Clouseau, re-energizing musty old physical gags involving chandeliers and priceless vases, and rolling his tongue around a zesty form of pidgin French. If he ever finds his Blake Edwards, there may be hope for this franchise yet.

By turns playful, harrowing, intensely moving, and uproariously funny, Chain Camera cuts away all documentary artifice and goes straight to the source, allowing these kids to reveal themselves with the utmost directness and candor.

With Cop Out, Smith works from a script other than his own for the first time--this one penned by siblings Mark and Robb Cullen--but his slack direction siphons the energy out of this tongue-in-cheek throwback to ’80s mismatched-buddy comedies.

Much of the fun of Malice derives from Sorkin, Frank, and director Harold Becker understanding the been-there/done-that formulas of thrillers past and tinkering with them as much as possible. Instead of a little bit of misdirection, they devote a vast swath of the film to one.

Donaldson and his battery of screenwriters aim for nothing more than a coolly efficient thrill machine, but the mechanics break down in the end, foiled by a "whodunit" twist that's telegraphed early in the first reel. Careening forward without any real purpose, the film simply flies off the rails.

The sequences without Chucky are as stock as they come, and so are all the flesh-and-blood characters around him, but he's still a hugely entertaining mischief-maker, and what he lacks in physical gifts, he compensates for in sneakiness.

The trouble with artists making documentaries about other artists is that art tends to get in the way.

Like many stylish, whipcrack American and British indies made in the wake of Quentin Tarantino and "Trainspotting," the film gets off on the same anything-can-happen storytelling brio, which at least keeps things lively. But without any resonant characters or ideas, it's all empty calories.

Much like his overrated 2000 opus "Platform," Unknown Pleasures spends more energy fussing over the backdrop than on the poor souls languishing in the fore, who have little to do but wander aimlessly and symbolically as life passes them by.

Though the film is too slick and heavy-handed in its pro-integration sloganeering, and it's burdened by Travolta's ill-conceived star turn, its infectious high spirits and catchy tunes still pack one hell of a sugar rush.

Wilson and a loaded supporting cast are never as funny as they should be.

Once these players strap on their skates and take to the ice, it's hard to suppress that lump in the throat.

What distinguishes Goodbye Solo, beyond Savané’s larger-than-life personality bumping up against West’s intractable curmudgeon, is the continued particularity of Bahrani’s work.

Eternity And A Day occasionally lapses into navel-gazing ennui, and Ganz's reluctant kinship with the adorable moppet courts cliché, but Angelopoulos strings together so many haunting, exquisitely choreographed sequences that even his worst ideas are emotionally resonant.

What does it all mean? Nothing much greater than the sum of its seriocomic vignettes. To that end, Women In Trouble tends to sputter to life whenever the stories get racy.

A powerful documentary about a squad of Army grunts patrolling the Iraqi city of Fallujah in late 2004.

Jolie simply exercises Mariane's persistent will, and honors her in the process.

If her adoring public doesn't mind paying for the same movie twice, Legally Blonde 2 stands to leave her star power unquestioned.

The film never jells, but it's the Rosetta Stone for Scorsese's later work.

Dazzling cinema-essay.

Comfortable with the inherent contradictions, Ishii throws all sexual politics to the wind in his highly stylized, fearlessly gratuitous fantasy, an unsettling mix of titillation, morality, victimization, and empowerment.

Ritchie has said that it takes several viewings to fully understand what's going on in Revolver, but once will be enough for most to agree to take his word for it.

I Am Cuba is still propaganda of the first order, a beautiful and sensually overwhelming tribute to the land and its people.

Elegantly scripted by Pulitzer Prize-winner David Auburn, The Lake House never establishes any clear rules about how and when these strands of time can intertwine, but it succeeds at forging a bond between people who only know each other on the page.

Far from a watershed moment for lesbian coming-out films, Gray Matters has a queer sensibility that's several miles south of "Will & Grace."

Next bears some resemblance to another Dick adaptation, "Minority Report," about "pre-cogs" who can anticipate murders before they happen, but it doesn't really bother exploring the moral or emotional implications of Cage's power.

At its best, Bloody Sunday produces the same chilling illusion of history writ large, clearly detailing the strategies of both sides, then blankly observing the conflict through unadorned, newsreel camera stock and the precise orchestration of large-scale chaos.

Freaky Friday mines a lot of laughs from common misapprehensions adults have about adolescent life, with fun bits of observation about schoolwork, dating, and other practices where kids have to bend the rules in order to survive.

Touring his father's magnificent structures, Nathaniel shows signs of coming around to his mother's point of view, and of realizing that Kahn's towering contributions to art and humanity perhaps exceed (if not altogether excuse) his shortcomings as a father, a husband, and a lover.

Doubt is a complex, thematically loaded piece of work, and though it isn't enhanced on film, it deserves the wider exposure.

Happy Times doesn't buck the clichés so much as infuse them with feeling, playing off the pleasant, unforced rhythm of two characters who pine for simple companionship.

A daring and immediate debut feature for Koshashvili, Late Marriage could lead two likeminded people to opposite conclusions, and that may be its greatest strength.

The Boss Of It All, though clever as a piece of genre deconstruction, isn't terribly funny.

There’s no other movie quite like it.

It all works out agreeably enough, albeit in strict adherence to rom-com formula, right down to the obligatory wacky-best-friend roles given to space cadets Jeff Goldblum and Juliette Lewis.

Walsh is just a dumb bully who can’t see more than one or two steps ahead. He’s doomed to generic slasher villainy, and the film thoughtlessly obliges.

It's a triptych of erotic-themed short films directed by contemporary giants Wong Kar-wai and Steven Soderbergh, and nonagenarian master Michelangelo Antonioni. But the auteurist feast turns out to be a paltry spread, with one director on autopilot, another playing it safe, and the last apparently working on assignment for the European "Red Shoe Diaries."

Against all reason, this workingman's journey across the sea winds up seeming every bit as inspirational as the filmmakers intended, entirely because Mullan's grit validates every cornpone emotion. With a lesser actor, the movie would sink like a stone.

Country Music Television's answer to "Elizabethtown."

Though some of Slaughter Rule's conclusions are overly tidy, the film's powerful meditation on masculinity gets much of its credibility and punch from the two leads, especially Morse, a reliable character actor who sinks his teeth into a role with heavy physical and psychological demands.

As with many other mediocre actor-directors, Harris' attention to the performances, including his own fine turn, has cost him in other areas.

Though it's still too reliant on a sloppy, gag-a-second style, Stuck On You gets through the arid stretches by leaning on some winning performances, most notably from a hilarious Seymour Cassel.

Ask The Dust may find Towne a little past his prime, but after so much time in the Hollywood wilderness, it's good to see him trying again.

Whether some jokes were studio-tweaked or others simply failed on their own, MST3K: The Movie feels unmistakably like a compromised product, flattened by the stiff headwinds of mediocrity.

There's plenty of black comedy in their twisted affair, but a more substantial documentary wouldn't leave you smiling.

Though Clarkson acquits herself reasonably well in a terribly conceived role, her entrance interrupts David’s hilariously twisted mentorship of Wood and sends the movie careening in a far less promising direction.

First-time director Jarecki, better known as the co-founder of MovieFone, skillfully integrates the home-movie footage with his own thorough inquiry, weaving past and present into a patient, deeply engrossing piece of storytelling that's rich in ambiguities.

That the film works as well as it does--as an attractive, rousing time-passer for children--speaks more to the endurance of a good formula than its revitalization.

It takes less than a minute of watching Duel, Steven Spielberg's feature-length debut, to realize you're in the hands of a master director.

Chabrol handles the upended family dynamic beautifully until the final third, when a wildly implausible sequence of events lessens the suspense just as he should be turning the screws.

Efron is the epitome of sexless Disney heartthrobs, but he's an electrifying song-and-dance man, so much so that his castmates (Bleu excepted) look like they have concrete shoes by comparison.

Decades removed from his dreamy Kelly in the "Bad News Bears" movies, Haley pulls off the remarkable feat of bringing childlike vulnerability to his character while still suggesting ungodly menace.

Leave it to Giamatti to bring gravitas to the fat guy in the red suit; he's naturally the straight man in the sibling duo, but whenever Fred Claus goes for the heartstrings, he's the only one capable of plucking in tune.

Currently stopping by theaters briefly en route to DVD, the film tries to position Jameson as the next Linnea Quigley, the B-movie queen behind such enduring titles as "Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers" and "Sorority Babes In The Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama."

Though solidly plotted and executed all around, the film, too, feels like a quaint relic from another era, aping the form of journalistic thrillers like "All The President’s Men" while missing much of their urgency.

Mostly, 24 City falls into the same Jia trap of inadvertently drawing the viewers' gaze past his human subjects and to the poetic images of a country in painful metamorphosis.

If Porter's songs are so timeless, why does the movie sound like something that might have played on VH1 five years ago?

Few scenarios are more cliched than the curmudgeonly father-figure who takes in the precocious imp -- irritation in the first two acts, love in the third -- but Hornby infuses it with warmth and honesty, not to mention his obvious gift for wry observation.

There are precisely zero surprises in how things play out--the main thread is basically "Big Night" revisited--but the film gets better as it goes along, and it closes with a rousing musical flourish, as immensely charismatic newcomer Clark Jr. finally hits the stage. At last, Sayles' sleepy drama wakes with a start.

Plays like an extended episode of "Deadliest Catch" with eco-warriors as the stars--in fact, the Animal Planet show "Whale Wars," now in its second season, follows Sea Shepherd’s exploits--and it’s frequently a rousing adventure.

It's mysterious and bold at every turn, and refreshingly removed from the commonplace.

More than any self-declared masterpiece in the Disney catalog, Bambi has earned the right to be called timeless, because its concerns are transcendent and universal.