Shawn Levy

Anderson, god love him, seems determined to make the "Great American Film." The Master isn't it, but you come away from it with the sense that may be on the right path.

The script's contrivances and the director's lax handling aren't enough to hold you.

Zobel isn't a sadist about all of this as, say, Roman Polanski or David Lynch or Todd Solondz might have been. There's a humanity here, even for the restaurant manager. But that still doesn't make Compliance easy to ingest.

More seriously, Jarecki never quite pierces the skin of this world, capturing its shiny and grimy surfaces but failing to immerse us in its flaws; too often it's like flipping through a magazine story on the lives of the rich and corrupt.

There's a touch of whimsy to his misadventures, but the malfeasance he uncovers -- often using hidden cameras and microphones -- is anything but a joke.

The word 'samsara' means 'continuous flow of life' in Tibetan, and Fricke and company surely experienced that sensation in making the film, which took them to 25 countries in a span of five years.

A nitwit story about a nitwit author who has written a nitwit novel about a nitwit author who has published a nitwit novel which, in fact, he has stolen wholecloth from another writer whose personal behavior, as fictionalized in the novel-within-the-novel-within-the-film, can charitably be described as...nitwit.

This isn't the "Right Thing" in any sense.

The slowness and stillness in the film are, actually, a slow boil, and in Lie's taciturnity there is pain and even horror.

There's a terrific balance between human comedy and just-this-side-of-science-fiction in Robot & Frank.

The journey on which he takes us may not satisfy in the ways we normally ask of movies, but if it did it wouldn't be a Cronenberg, would it?

Director Bart Layton's film takes us to such strange and emotionally-charged places that we cannot believe that what we're seeing is real, even though it demonstrably is.

Slight but winning.

A rather routine thriller that's got two things going for it: the ticking of a clock and the clickety-click of bicycle wheels. Both impart a sense of exhilaration to a thin and even silly story, engaging you when, really, you ought to know better.

Spirited and saucy, Hit and Run is a small movie with big spirit, a Tarantino-ish sensibility, and a scattergun ethos that results in more hits than misses.

The overall cheekiness of the film far outweighs its preachy moments. For the most part, it's a brisk, funny and engaging movie that does genuinely exciting things with little bits of string and wire and such.

The result is a newly revived spy movie franchise -- and the best big-budget action film of the summer.

Wrapping the whole thing in a sentimental ending turns it into a fraud. The Campaign might have been truly -- and appropriately -- scabrous in other hands; those of the "South Park" guys or Mike Judge, say. But director Jay Roach and writers Shawn Harwell and Chris Henchy play it safe and down the middle. No actual political contributors or candidates need fear harm.

Hara-Kiri is low on blood and shock, emphasizing performance and atmosphere.

Watching The Queen of Versailles you don't know whether to laugh or cry.

You come away with an appreciation of the abstraction, scale and daring of Ai's art and, even more, a sense of the living man in his courage, humor and restlessness. It's an invigorating experience.

By the time the film reaches its convoluted, bombastic and preposterous climax, any sense of real magic that it once conveyed has utterly vanished.

It isn't art, it's will-o-the-wisp thin, but it might well make you squirt your soda through your nose. And as there seem to be a number of people willing to pay good money for that sensation, there's glory for you!

If Ruby Sparks doesn't warm you much or form a seamless whole, it's nevertheless got pieces that you can genuinely admire.

Neil Young Journeys is the third documentary/concert film focusing on the great Canadian songwriter that director Jonathan Demme has made since 2006, and it's the weakest of the three, even as it sporadically charms.

The Dark Knight Rises is reasonably accomplished as a gigantic superhero movie; as a meditation on capital and its personal and social discontents, it's strictly from the funny pages.

"Waltz" requires you to be on board with it from the start and doesn't often enough rouse itself to magnetize you if you're not.

Brings you into a world you didn't know existed with a closeness that the movies almost never achieve. If that constitutes exploitation, then it's a crime which all works of art should aspire to commit.

That strong presence in the center almost makes Lola Versus watchable even as it starts to get formulaic, preachy and tiresome.

Stone seems to take a little vicarious pleasure in making these relative lightweights squirm in fear and confusion.

The Amazing Spider-Man is agreeable. And occasionally it's more. But, as with the American remake of the Swedish film of "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo," you can't help but feel that you've not only heard the story before, but that you you've seen it before, too -- and recently.

Magic Mike doesn't sizzle often enough as either cinema or beefcake, though. It's medium-strength Soderbergh, which is better than the full-strength stuff most filmmakers can manage but not exactly the brand that keeps you coming back for more.

Ted may not be profound or deft, but when it hits the sweet-sour spot, which it does regularly, it can win you over.

Handsome and perky and built around a story so simplistic that it almost feels like it wasn't written down.

When Bekmambetov is in full stride and the gore, oaths and silver bullets are flying, it's a kick. The title may sound like a joke, but Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is serious fun.

Tepid, boilerplate production.

Filled with personal vignettes and famous-people testimonials, the film has a few too many narrative digressions, but it's a moving portrait of all-too-human personalities and the dogged optimism that keeps them going.

Discreet, delicate, and cautious, Monsieur Lazhar takes you by surprise -- and that goes for both the movie and the man.

Prometheus is breezy and comely and sufficiently clever to mitigate most qualms, and Fassbender, especially, is wonderful.

There's handmade and then there's amateurish. This, alas, is the latter.

Polisse won a jury prize at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival, but it's only a patchwork success.

If you've a mind to see a classic fairy tale rendered as an action movie, and if you want to see a sizeable handful of fine English actors have grand fun playing grizzled dwarves, there are worse ways to spend two hours than in the company of Snow White and the Huntsman.

It's a long film for such a familiar story.

So did the world need another "Men in Black"? No, not at all. But if there had to be one, then it's certainly a relief that it should be one as agreeable as this.

Offers a few laughs and a moment or two of drama, but it's finally more of a conceit -- and a familiar one -- than a film.

There are a few chuckles, a few head-scratches and, thankfully, very few missteps. It charms.

Slight but terrific. The intertwining of the sharply tuned actors and the guileless (and often hilarious) townspeople is seamless, the tale is sometimes despairing but never heavy, and the blend of drama, comedy and music is brisk and fresh.

The Dictator has a few laughs along its bumpy path, but not enough of them to indicate that Cohen has found a means to escape the shadows of his early career and forge a second act for himself.

'Bloodless' is the word for the whole enterprise.

The film wastes itself on silliness and scattered threads before very long, truly squandering a brilliant promise.

Even with the flaws of the final half, The Avengers is grand, brisk fun. It comes tantalizingly close to reaching the level of the very best comic book films of the current generation.

Goon is a hoot.

Comedy means different things to different people, but I'm pretty sure that most everyone agrees that it's best when it's quick and funny. The Five-Year Engagement is neither.

Befitting a film about Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven is dark and grisly and ghoulish. But it also has qualities that Poe's work never does: It's dull and mechanical and, most of all, phony.

It may, finally, be the best and last word on the man, his music and his myth that we ever get on film -- an estimable achievement in itself.

Some movies uses make-believe to make you squirm or cry or rise to righteous anger. Bully does all of that with reality.

It's a film full of clever moments that may at first seem cheeky but come to feel inspired, with a third act (which only a churl would describe) that rises to a dizzyingly heightened level of metaphysics and mayhem.

With its wide-open setting and taciturn, macho characters, it's a film that earns the right to use the "Once Upon a Time" title that Sergio Leone made so perversely famous.

There's much to enjoy in the lively, fun and fresh documentary Comic-con Episode IV: A Fan's Hope, but chief among them may be that its director, Morgan Spurlock, is nowhere to be seen.

This is the sort of film for which the phrase 'movie-movie' was coined -- and coined as a term of highest praise.

It's hot and sweet and made with inspiration and cheek. And it is not your children's animated fare -- which, in this case, is a recommendation.

Undefeated puts us inside his locker room, and you simply cannot fail to be moved by the human affection, commitment and passion you feel there.

It's a melodrama, but played with rigorous and surehanded spareness, and it never panders, even as it gets a mite hysterical near the end.

Watching it isn't easy, but it is definitely worth having waited for.

You can imagine a better adaptation of The Hunger Games, but you can much more easily imagine a far worse one, and all in all that's not a bad outcome.

Beautiful, thoughtful and engrossing.

It's a deeply uneven film that can't decide if it's a satire, a joke, a thriller or a heartstring-tugger, and in dithering in its tone and its aims it ultimately turns out to be none of the above.

The nearest thing to W. E. is Sofia Coppola's "Marie Antoinette," which tried to make a sympathetic victim of another of history's most notorious royal wives.

The film is amped up to insanity in its language (both verbal and cinematic), in its ironic embrace of teen-salvation movie clichés, and in its depiction of a small town as a ghetto hell. But just when you think they've gone too far, the Trost brothers 1) go further and 2) wink.

It never exactly lights you on fire, but you always believe it.

One of the great achievements of In Darkness, is in creating a sense of life in the sewers.

Alas, none of it, save Kristin Scott Thomas giving a peach of a performance as a political operative, smacks of real life or vitality. Even when it evinces spasms of life, this film is, more or less, a dead fish.

There's atmosphere and tension and dark humor and some truly shocking gore throughout. But the positive impression all of that makes pales next to a headscratching finale that is admittedly well-executed but is also undeniably perverse and borderline random. Maybe you'll go with it, simply out of shock. I, alas, could not.

Ellroy's bully-boy schtick is getting stale, and Moverman is overly beholden to it.

Characters in Bullhead act out of stupidity, greed, anger and vanity; their world is filmed in a washed-out haze; the miserable fortune that devastated young Jacky haunts him ceaselessly still. The film's final notes hint at a state of grace, perhaps, or at least of release. But there's a tautological determinism throughout that suggest otherwise.

If all you care about is bang-bang, then Act of Valor should satisfy you. But if all you care about is bang-bang, then you're invalidating the very reason the actual SEALS appear in this film: to put a human face on their dangerous work.

You can sense the deep investment Donzelli and Elkaïm have in what they're doing, which isn't something you get at the movies every day.

It happens to be splendidly acted and to be poised, as a narrative, on a knife's edge (the final shot, at a great moment of indecision, is utterly haunting). But, chiefly, it's a portrait of an essential and sympathetic human dilemma, and in that it's both real and timeless in ways that transcend borders, cultures and languages.

Genre movies are often mere excuses for shows of gore and tricked-up suspense, and while The Grey should satisfy anyone who seeks only that there's something more profound and pure at its heart, making it a genuinely entertaining thriller that puts a chill through you in more ways than one.

Pina, so exquisitely made and filled with such powerful beauty, suggests thrilling new possibilities for the marriage of movies and dance.

The chief attraction of Albert Nobbs is the acting.

Kudos to the makers Red Tails for paying homage to a remarkable group of men and their genuinely heroic deeds, and a hat-tip as well for the idea that the best way to tell the story was the old-fashioned way. But would that the film's old-school aura felt knowingly retro rather than dutifully rote.

The quality of the craft at the best moments of the film is undeniable. But it depends, finally, to how well you can embrace a young man named Horn -- a terrific gamble for a film and a subject of such size.

It isn't perversely genre-busting like "Drive." Instead, it feels like somebody turned down the volume on a hard rock album so as to hear the details better -- for which relief, much thanks.

The actors make the trauma in Another Happy Day feel real. But it's too often undercut by directorial fussiness that feels more academic than personal.

Anyone looking for a full-bodied account of the woman, her deeds, and her place in history shouldn't be encouraged to linger too long with The Iron Lady.

It's a tiny story, told on an intimate scale, and it is rich in emotion, specificity and care.

The story told in Garbo: The Spy is so outlandish that you almost feel as if you're watching a mockumentary. But it appears to be entirely true.

A smart and engaging entertainment.

Pieces of War Horse that may charm some eyes might well bore others to tears.

Because nothing says 'holiday fun' quite like an intellectual struggle between Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung peppered with a few vivid episodes of S-&-M sex, voila A Dangerous Method.

It's a bit precious, yes, but its earnestness and joy carry you along, and its climax simply delights.

Never quite as resonant as Spielberg's earliest "Indiana Jones" films, in which, for all the clamor, it often feels like something real and vital and human is at stake. But at its best, this film is as joyful as anything in those movies, and that is something of a movie miracle.

There's powerful craft here, and Larsson's story has more than proven its ability to grip. But missing almost entirely is a sense of urgency and discovery.

Resembles an amusement park ride -- a visit to a house of horrors that ends, more or less, where it begins.

"Juno" was accused (wrongly, in my view) of having things both ways: being cute and cynical, edgy and sentimental. Young Adult, despite the fun afforded by Theron and Oswalt, seems content to have things neither.

It's fast, it's sure, it's violent and it's fun, even as it sometimes pushes the limits of ready coherence or dramatic plausibility.

It's a film that casually mixes comedy with dread more or less deftly until faltering near the end. Up to then, however, it imparts the sensation that, along with Lonnie, you are being cooked alive in a pot of water that's slowly but steadily heating up toward the boiling point.