Stephanie Zacharek

It's hard to imagine Ms. 45 with any other actress. Lund is a particularly effective avenging angel, easily making the leap from innocent mouse to worldly wise killer.

The Photograph, both thoughtful and entertaining, with a pleasurably laid-back vibe, belongs to a class of movie that barely exists anymore on the big screen. It’s also a reminder that appealing actors are sometimes the best spectacle of all.

There are so many ways Despicable Me 2 could have gone wrong, and so many things it does right.

There's something to be said for watching an animated movie not with the eyes of a child, but with those of a turned-on grownup.

One of the tricks of Ted -- perhaps its smartest one -- is that everyone, not just John, knows the bear can talk.

The new Dumbo is ostentatious and overworked, less a work of imagination than a declaration of how imaginative Burton thinks he is.

This is a big movie served up in a surprisingly small, intimate package.

The pleasures of the period ghost story The Woman in Black are something like the creepy shiver of delight you get from Edward Gorey's illustrated poem "The Gashlycrumb Tinies."

The reality is that it's neither hip nor funny: Instead, it's excessively broad one minute and unctuously instructional the next.

The movie has a lilting, generous spirit: Springer Berman and Pulcini, the filmmaking team behind the 2003 American Splendor, have a feel for human eccentricities and weaknesses, and they know how to draw the best from their casts.

As flawed as it is, Major Dundee maintains its dignity in the face of the injustices that were done to it. Ripped-up and ragtag, it still holds its head high.

The picture may end a little too breezily, but Demme knows we have to be left with some hope for these wandering souls. Someday, they'll find their way home; it just may not be the same thing as going home.

It would be destined for the trash heap of Shakespeare adaptations, if not for its female lead, and its heart, 17-year-old Claire Danes.

Free Guy is a little like Ready Player One jumbled with The Truman Show, with some Sleeping Beauty and The Velveteen Rabbit mixed in. It is, admittedly, a lot of movie, probably too much. But Reynolds makes the most of Guy’s elation at finally busting out.

Nearly everyone, and everything, in Micmacs is at one point or another guilty of trying too hard.

The "black maid" may be a cliché. But when was the last time we saw a story told from her point of view?

Charm City Kings lands on an elegiac, bittersweet note rather than a happy one, and doesn’t feature as many crazy, exhilarating bike stunts as you might hope. But in its view of a world where kids make their own fun and also, sometimes, their own bad choices, it rings true. Sometimes becoming a man is the hardest stunt to pull off.

It's a friendly, unpretentious little thing -- at times it's a bit too muted and indistinct, but then, you have to at least give the Farrellys credit for not making the mistake of trying too hard.

A humorless picture, a somber, arty exercise in deep denial of its exploitation roots. The dialogue is stiff and mechanical and the performances are too.

There’s nothing cuddly about the were-creatures of The Cursed. But there’s no question that they get the job done.

The King, written by Michôd and Edgerton, zips along—it never feels like a slog, though it still has a satisfyingly hefty dramatic weight.

Overburdened with knowingly charming touches. It's waterlogged with whimsy.

The film ends with a syrupy coda that betrays its earlier subtlety. But Ronan and Howle are the keepers of its true spirit.

The Interpreter is so intent on reminding us that it's a QUALITY piece of work that it forgets to give us the very thing we thought we came in for: a story.

Probably supposed to be half fashion fantasy, half satire of the fashion world. What a drag that it's not enough of either.

Anton Corbijn's The American looks and feels like a movie made by a filmmaker who hasn't been to the movies since the '70s - and I mean that as the highest compliment.

Mostly, though, African Cats is extremely tactful about the truly harsh stuff that goes down in the world of nature.

It's to Stiller's credit that he can sustain the joke for the length of the movie, but just barely. Ten more minutes of Zoolander would have been 10 minutes too many.

A filmmaker's personal connection to the material doesn't necessarily mean that the resulting picture will be any good, and Stop-Loss is so dramatically tedious that it feels remote instead of resonant.

The Good Shepherd, soft when it needs to be sharp, is all cloak with very little dagger.

Even after losing its sexiest, tawdriest moments, this teen romance is still hotter, smarter and more fearless than its Hollywood contemporaries.

But there's so much going on in Big Miracle that the biggest miracle of all – the whales at the center of the story, get lost amid all the criss-crossing love stories, political wheeler-dealing and well-intentioned but inadequate rescue missions.

Making this kind of thriller has all but become a lost art, yet Mira clearly believes that high style is worth bothering with.

Tillman is clumsy in his handling of a few scenes, and considering what these kids are up against—junkie moms, drug-dealing pimp neighbors—the ending might be a little too implausibly upbeat. But Tillman seems to know that we need to go home feeling hope for Mister and Pete, who, it turns out, aren't so easily defeated.

The picture is frisky and casual; it doesn’t try to be something it’s not.

The movie's tone counts for a lot: it's silly and funny, and you never feel you're trapped in a civics lecture. Good Fortune is amiable, but it also has some bite.

How you'll feel about Sunshine Cleaning probably depends on your tolerance for slender, semi-hip comedic dramas about oddball families grappling with sometimes overwhelming problems.

Actually, the wonder The Polar Express induces feels something like a coma.

Director Brett Haley, who co-wrote the script with Marc Basch, brings enough understated sympathy to Lee's character to make the picture work--it throws off a gentle, sweet-spirited energy.

Unpregnant is ultimately about the people who have our backs when the rest of the world seems to be pushing against us — in other words, the families we choose for ourselves.

A bittersweet feel-good movie is perhaps the best kind.

Cameron’s vision is no longer the future, but a nostalgia trip, a very expensive form of deja vu. Movie magic can take many forms, but rarely is it as calculated as this, confusing awe with stupor.

A very gentle picture, intended to soothe us, not to jolt or shock us. But it's so gentle that it lacks any discernible energy; sometimes it seems there's barely enough tension in the story to keep the images from sliding off the screen.

The good news is that Anchorman 2 is pretty funny. It's also more rambling and hit-or-miss than its predecessor, which means, thankfully, that it's less likely to become what we euphemistically call iconic: In other words, fewer annoying guys will be inspired to quote it.

Lingua Franca — which made a splash at the Venice Film Festival last year, the first film by a trans woman to be featured at the festival — is a gorgeous and delicate picture, an understated work that opens a window on an intimate world.

So bad it's almost like performance art, or those cheap records from the '60s, where the Chipmunks sing the Beatles' greatest hits.

There are hints of greatness, one or two artfully constructed scenes that remind you why you look forward to new Scorsese films in the first place. But as a highly detailed portrait of true-life corruption and bad behavior in the financial sector, Wolf is pushy and hollow, too much of a bad thing.

Babylon isn’t a film made with love, or even with any degree of exactitude; it pretends to be a movie about “loving movies,” but more than anything else, it seeks to reflect glory on its creator. It advertises its alleged extravagance and glamour, loud and hard, but only comes off looking tinny and cheap.

This movie makes being young look like the opposite of fun, a spell you’ve got to break out of. Maybe that’s the ultimate revelation of the story of Peter Pan—but it shouldn’t be drudgery to get there.

Matchstick Men isn't even remotely intricate; it's not even particularly interesting.

Maybe it's only half of what it could be, but at least it's a healthy half. And in this era of mainstream cookie-cutter moviemaking, that's a feat in itself.

Not everything in Dog works—you can sometimes see its directors scrambling to find the right tone, and not quite succeeding. And the movie is not wholly free of hokum. But watching Tatum is pure pleasure.

Highly amusing for grown-ups, too.

A romance for the deeply romantic, which means that some people will certainly view it as cynical.

A triumphant movie about failure.

The sort of small, independent-minded picture that so much of American indie cinema strives, and often fails, to give us. It's a conventional picture, but it feels so deeply alive that it's practically a novelty.

McKay’s style here is the equivalent of a knowing cackle; the whole enterprise, elaborate as it is, comes off as lacking in passion. The Big Short had an exhilarating kick, but it also left you feeling queasy over the destructive misdeeds you’d just witnessed. Vice just leaves you feeling sapped, advertising its cleverness without actually being clever.

With a promising cast like that, not to mention the glittery party setting, Ocean’s 8 should be great fun. Instead, it’s a kind of noncommittal semi-fun.

Sleeping Beauty is best experienced as a piece of fragmented poetry rather than a strict ideological tract.

There are moments when Cage (with his perpetually worried eyebrows) and Caine (with his inherent emotional elegance) carry the picture admirably enough.

Respect honors the utilitarian nature of songwriting, and of making art in general. But the movie honors subtler elements of Franklin’s nature, too—as much as we can know of it—most notably her guardedness, born of necessity.

Pearce may be the other big star in Traitor, and while his performance is serviceable, it doesn't cut deeply. Taghmaoui, as a radical motivated by moral certainty, is the real actor to watch here.

It's an extravaganza of bad taste that in the end just tastes bad.

Cholodenko and her actors pull it off; the performances here are like a wary ballet, ruled as much by the mysterious magnetic attractions and repulsions these characters feel for one another as by anything so dully explicable as psychology or standard rules of social conduct.

It’s bad-gal blasphemy of the highest order.

This is a love story, all right, but it has less to do with the flaws of capitalism than it does with Moore's unwavering fondness for the sound of his own voice, and for what he perceives as his own vast cleverness.

What you DO get with Secretariat is a picture that, unlike its bland predecessor Seabiscuit, actually captures some of the thrill of racing.

Statham isn't an actor who coasts, not even in a recklessly enjoyable picture like Transporter 3. He does the work, so we don't have to: His Frank Martin is the personification of pleasure without guilt.

The story matters only in that it creates opportunities for heaps of ridiculousness, and writer-director James Bobin (who also directed The Muppets), along with co-writer Nicholas Stoller, mines them skillfully and breezily.

The kind of smart, openhearted comedy that doesn't come along every day.

Isn't as uproarious as it pretends to be. The foul language, the constant repetition of words like the aforementioned "boobies" -- look, they've even got me doing it -- doesn't feel daring or cathartic, only canned.

The Incredible Hulk suggests only that we've bottomed out on special effects: They're not necessarily getting better -- they're just getting bigger. Technically, Leterrier's Hulk is as realistic-looking as a rampaging green giant could be. But that doesn't make him credible.

Astute and painfully relevant political comedy.

Adult World captures beautifully, and with a great deal of self-deprecating humor, what it's like to feel trapped in a place you think is too small to hold you.

Is it entertainment? Is it satire? Is it art? It's probably a little of all three, and yet ultimately not quite enough of any.

The sex scenes -- intense, affecting and emotionally raw -- are the best thing about this frustratingly limp movie.

Watching Tetris, you’re likely to feel lost now and then, even though director Baird and screenwriter Noah Pink lay out this increasingly convoluted story as clearly as humanly possible. But it’s still a lively and, at least for a computer-game origin saga, strangely charming picture.

Eisenberg is a thoughtful filmmaker, devoted to showing his characters as multi-dimensional, flawed human beings.

Damon is as buff as ever, maybe even more so... But watching him lumber through Elysium's bramble of lofty ideals is no damn fun.

Bale gives a remarkable performance in a movie I can recommend to no one, because the sight of him is more distressing than any of the allegedly deep themes of the picture.

The Wolverine—despite being an improvement on Gavin Hood’s muddled 2009 X-Men Origins: Wolverine—isn’t worthy of Jackman’s gifts. It’s a reasonably engaging summer diversion, a semi-rousing adventure that doesn’t make you feel robbed of two hours of your life.

If you’re looking for a movie that speaks to the moment, a mindless action-thriller probably isn’t it.

Saltburn begins with a mildly intriguing premise. But Fennell can’t seem to distinguish dark, transgressive pleasures from outright unpleasantness, and the whole enterprise ends with an acrid aftertaste.

It’s one of those movies you watch not necessarily for its whodunnit complexities, but for the pleasure of watching a group of actors having fun, in a storybook English-countryside setting complete with happy, well-kept flower beds and cemeteries dotted with gravestones both ancient and new.

Its faux-riot-grrl moxie still leaves a metallic aftertaste. But it’s all leavened, at least, by a few fun supporting performances. And it introduces one character who, unlike the others, doesn’t work hard to be cool—because working hard to be cool is, as everyone knows, the exact opposite of cool.

Sometimes raw but mostly just raucous, Hart generally pulls it off in his third concert film.

Funny People is an ambitious, misshapen picture that feels like two, maybe even three, separate movies uncomfortably jammed into one.

Breezy, silly, possibly quickly forgettable—but if you need to lose yourself for an hour or two, it could be just the thing.

Hornet's Nest is filled with boring, not-great-looking white guys, talking - a lot.

In the end, Spectre is just too much of a good thing. Though each scene is carefully wrought, there's little grace, majesty, or romance in the way the pieces are connected. The whole is bumpy and inelegant — entertaining for sure, but hard to love.

The movie glows with vitality, thanks largely to the performers, who revel in one another’s company.

The best thing you can say about the moderately entertaining, if predictably excessive, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is that if you squint and concentrate really hard, you can tell it’s a Sam Raimi movie.

Freakier Friday is a movie that manages to humiliate everybody. And it appears to exist largely for one reason: to grift off the fondness many adults have for the original, even though the sequel has none of that picture’s breezy, observant charm.

It's the kind of movie whose value lies between the lines, not directly on them, and if the pleasures it offers are slender ones, at least there's something good-hearted about them.

There are few filmmakers as open-hearted, as stone-soup inventive, as Baker is. In movies like Tangerine and The Florida Project, he’s always shown a knack for doing a lot with a little. But with Anora, so playful yet so emotionally fine-grained, he maybe does the most. It's his best movie yet.

Its occasional entertainment value aside, the picture is also blithe to the point of being flimsy.

The scenes between LaPaglia and Weaver, directed and played with a straightforward austerity that occasionally moved me to tears, make up for every one of The Guys flaws.

Ends up being nothing more than a stifling morality tale dressed up in peekaboo clothing.

At what point do we stop applauding the Duplass brothers for their gumption and stick-to-itiveness and admit that, maybe, their storytelling just isn't so hot? Or that their characters sometimes seem more like groovy-cute constructs than believable people?

This well-cast adaptation somehow feels obvious and overblown.

Just when you think The Clearing is too simplistic to have any dramatic edge, the actors dig in and flesh out the stark framework of the story.

Both Mary Queen of Scots and "The Favourite," as entertaining as they are, end in a place closer to despair than to triumph – not necessarily because the Queens in question rendered poor judgment, but because, in their treacherous worlds, it became impossible to know whom to trust. And, to put it bluntly, men didn’t help.

Zemeckis uses technology to elicit the feeling we get when we watch old favorites. It’s almost like Smell-o-Vision, but with intensified visuals instead of aromatics. Even within this highly synthetic world, Pitt and Cotillard give sturdy, coded performances that feel naturalistic, not phony.

While Buzz strides through every scene with plodding virility, Sox pads along breezily, minding his own business unless he’s called upon to save the day, which is often. Sox is the secret star of Lightyear. But not even he is a great enough creation to warrant his own spinoff.

Mostly, with the exception of a tiresome, protracted gag involving a parental stash of sex toys, it’s more funny and charming than it is raunchy. If these boys are the men of the future, their parents have done something right.

An exercise in edgy tedium, and even though it's only 90 minutes or so, it seems to last longer than an actual transatlantic flight. If you bring an eye mask and a few sleeping pills, you should get through it OK. A magazine or book wouldn't hurt, either. It'll be over before you know it.

Surprisingly and pleasantly unflashy, a straightforward picture that makes a distinction between classiness and bling.

Sometimes an actor can help minimize a director’s shortcomings, and that’s what Fraser does here.

Levine – whose last picture was the intriguing, if only partly effective, cancer comedy “50/50” — is going for something more here, exploring what makes us human by contrasting it with a character who has lost all the basics and is desperate to get them back.

In its best moments, Sierra Burgess, directed by Ian Samuels and written by Lindsey Beer, has the charm of a Shakespearean mistaken-identity gambol.

The story becomes unpleasantly bitter and asks us to buy certain behaviors that don’t make much sense, and that we’re not quite sure a character would be capable of. Yet even after the movie makes that sharp zigzag, its one constant is Damon, who’s turning out to be one of those great, casual American actors we didn’t know we had anymore.

Frank Coraci's '80s-nostalgia comedy is predictable and unevenly paced, and it lunges too often for the easy joke.

You don't have to believe all of it - or even any of it - to enjoy the rascally charms of Mr. Nice.

The picture has a charming, low-key vibe that is, here and there, brushed with just a trace of adult melancholy. It’s good for kids, but maybe even better for adults who could use a little calming something.

As an amusement designed to take the world’s mind off its problems for a few hours, Wonder Woman 1984 is perfectly suitable. But it’s also OK to wish for less noise and more wonder, especially in a world that’s filled with the former and sorely in need of the latter.

The movie -- too much of it -- is spent testing the boundaries of how loud and obnoxious McCarthy can be. Feig doesn't hand this able comic actress the gift of freedom; he simply gives her enough rope, which isn't nearly the same thing.

The movie works neither as a comedy nor as a lame melodrama -- its entertainment value is embarrassingly feeble.

The highest purpose of movies is to give us more than what we think we want, and even though Three Thousand Years of Longing offers plenty of rapturous imagery, the arrow it shoots from its mighty bow just doesn’t pierce as it should.

This is a picture Beatty has wanted to make for years, and if the movie isn’t the achievement it should be, it’s at least entertaining in fits and starts.

Spartan is the same old stuff, but now it's been thoroughly Mametized, like a spray-on treatment you could spritz out of a can.

Basinger's debasement in the early part of the film is unpleasant to watch, and it's an unsettling bump in the context of the entertaining sheen of the rest of the picture. So much of Cellular is right on the button. If only it hadn't gotten its wires crossed.

There are some indignities that Drew Barrymore should never be made to suffer.

Herman isn't sure if he's doing a big-statement picture or a tiny treasure of a comedy, and his confusion throws Brassed Off off balance.

Ramis has made a fleet, unself-conscious, eminently enjoyable picture, where one-liners carom merrily like stray bullets, and where there's casual ease, like the drape of a sharpster's trousers, in the rapport between its two stars.

It’s ridiculous, and it’s wonderful. Falling in love is stupid like that.

If you buy the overprocessed headcheese of the serial killer as refined genius, you'll love Red Dragon. Or maybe not. Even Hannibal Lecter devotees may lose patience with this picture's grandiose, self-serious ponderousness -- that's Lecterese for, "It's kind of boring in patches, actually."

Foster's performance is crisp and forthright and surprisingly moving. There's something affecting about watching this disciplined, no-nonsense actress deliver her lines to a hand puppet - she's always game, if not exactly relaxed.

It's too good a story not to have been made into a movie. Yet Calendar Girls, directed by Nigel Cole ("Saving Grace"), is filled with lots of extras it doesn't need, when the bare-naked bones of the story would have been plenty.

It’s all kind of fun. It’s also kind of dumb. Even though The Aeronauts is based on real people, none of this really happened, or at least not like this.

Somewhere around the midpoint of Hobbs & Shaw, the action sequences become so elaborate that they start to weigh the movie down; it becomes less a lean machine than an unwieldy, chubby sausage. And even if you feel certain there’s no such thing as too much action, you surely know when you’ve had too much sausage.

Thus ends one of the most understated shark-attack sequences, ever; it's almost Bressonian, except it's not boring.

No matter how she got there, Gaga’s performance in House of Gucci is both tremendous fun and ultimately touching, likely despite any technique rather than because of it.

At its best, it’s a chronicle of how a great team made a great show—and proof that the “behind every great man is a great woman” aphorism can work the other way around, too.

Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again is terrible. And irresistible. How a movie that’s almost not even a movie can be both of those things at once is one of the mysteries of filmgoing, and one of its puckish pleasures.

Hayek, with that old-time movie-star pout, those dark, reflective eyes (they could be Satan's twin swimming pools), is the shivery, chilling backbone of Lonely Hearts. Martha Beck couldn't get away with murder. But Salma Hayek can.

We need good melodramas, especially ones with elements of romantic comedy built in, and I wanted to love We Live in Time. But its cracks kept coming to the fore.

Its spectacular special effects threaten to swallow characters whole, and there are times when overwrought and clumsy dialogue... nearly pitch you right out of the movie's mood.

Ambitious, overbearing and hollow; it goes overboard to impress, yet it never feels truly inventive or imaginative. At best, it achieves a level of clumsy camp.

Levinson and Pacino's willingness to explore the creakier end of life isn't a drawback; it's what gives The Humbling its bittersweet vitality.

The good news about Spider-Man 3 is that it's more of the same -- except better.

One of the most perfectly constructed pictures of the whole year, a taut, magnetic, visually splendid little package anchored by a sly star turn from Blake Lively.

At the movie's end, nuance is all we have left; beyond the admirable efforts of some of the actors, the picture leaves behind nothing so human as a fingerprint.

Lee seems less interested in capturing how people of color talk than in capturing how people talk. He coaxes us to step in and listen, and the very casualness of his invitation is the key to the joyousness of The Best Man Holiday, flaws be damned.

Silverman has taken serious, or at least semi-serious, roles before, but she's never had a part that demanded so much of her. She has been open about her own battles with depression, but what makes her turn here work is that it isn't nakedly expressive.

Tower Heist is overstuffed with actors, and yet Ratner manages to give each of them one or two good moments.

This is a movie about close family bonds and a more universal web that connects us, infinitely precious and worth preserving at all costs.

But as badly as the younger women in The First Wives Club are treated, none of the three central characters, with whom we're supposed to identify so strongly, comes off that well either.

You know you’re really only here for the monsters, squaring off and staring one another down, first at sea and later in the streets of Hong Kong. Director Adam Wingard (Blair Witch, The Guest) makes the most of these moments, fleeting as they are: The Hong Kong fight scenes are particularly gratifying, a melee of orchestrated swiping and tail-swishing that jolt the movie out of its doldrums.

As Lily Tomlin's Ernestine once said, "There's nothing like a Hoover when you're dealing with dirt." Clint Eastwood's J. Edgar could use more dirt: This is a sensitive, sympathetic portrait of a scummy little man.

It jumps around from song to song, and from plot point to plot point, unable to trust in the attention spans of modern children, or even just modern human beings.

To believe Déjà Vu, or even to pretend you can actually follow it, you'll need heavy-duty gear -- harness belt, spelunking helmet, a great deal of rope, PowerBars for sustenance. A little coffee wouldn't hurt, either.

Alfredo de Villa's Washington Heights feels stiff and overworked in places, and sometimes the acting is a bit awkward. And yet the story is both compelling and easy to identify with.

It often feels less than dynamic, perhaps a little inert. But then, sometimes it’s what a movie doesn’t show that matters. We all think we know the truth of Bruce Springsteen. Doesn’t he belong to us, after all? Deliver Me from Nowhere shows us another truth, the sound of a ghost captured on a length of tape.

American romantic comedies have become so dismal over the past 20 years that it wouldn't be hard for even the Romanian film industry to show us up. I'm still waiting for the great Romanian romantic comedy (and hey, it could be out there), but for now, France saves the day with Heartbreaker.

These two are both a little mad, and they’re made for each other; it takes this absurd mystery to make them see it. The screwball comedy is the truest and purest language of love. Like the song of lovebirds, it sounds like dizzy chatter—until you stop to really listen.

This well-intentioned movie is a somewhat flawed one: its pace is a little slack, and sometimes it feels too predictably prepackaged. But Jones and Hammer keep the picture moving even through its shakier phases.

Given the choice between a movie that's better structured and only half as funny, I'd take The Spy Who Shagged Me (or its predecessor, for that matter) any day.

Witherspoon's sophisticated-pixie brilliance practically makes the movie, and her easy, confident, curvaceous carriage doesn't hurt, either -- she's the thinking guy's cupcake, maybe because her mind is just as supple as her curves.

A Perfect Murder is more like a handful of anemic ice cubes floating in a lukewarm puddle.

As visually arresting as Kill Bill often is, there's a stultifying blankness about it. Despite Tarantino's obvious enthusiasms, he comes off jaded and cynical: He's seen plenty of movies, and this is his proof.

A dazzling true-life comedy that might be the funniest movie about grief ever made.

Stone's moralism, coupled with discreet but bloody beatings, shootouts and all manner of tawdry goings on, rings hollow. The picture is neither entertaining nor preachy – it is simply very loudly meh.

At least entertaining enough to keep you amused for an hour or two.

It’s worth half your attention. You might use the other half to mourn the memory of what movies, even enjoyably mediocre ones, used to be.

How, I'm wondering more and more often, do studios put movies like this one in front of audiences and assume they'll just buy it? The secret to making a great, or even just a good, thriller these days seems to have been lost.

Jurassic World is pretty good fun. Especially for a here-today, gone-tomorrow summer blockbuster, the picture is better-crafted than it needs to be: If you ignore some extraneous plot threads, and the stop-the-presses revelation that, in the end, “what really matters is family,” Jurassic World hangs together surprisingly well.

Rubber could have been a modest horror novelty, a wicked, malevolent version of "The Red Balloon."

I, Robot strives to be so many things that it ultimately falls away to nothing, a heap of expensive metal parts.

In its empty-headed hubris, it's not much more admirable than the conniving, moneygrubbing elite it's trying to take down.

The pleasures of Ballerina are both blunt and fleeting; you’re not going to remember the plot—or any of the performances, perhaps save one—five minutes after the end credits role. But the picture’s cartoonish brutality is cathartic.

Phoenix is acting so hard you can feel the desperation throbbing in his veins. He leaves you wanting to start him a GoFundMe, so he won’t have to pour so much sweat into his job again. But the aggressive terribleness of his performance isn’t completely his fault.

In the highly imperfect world of contemporary romantic comedies, What If is as close to perfect as anything we've got, not least for the way it captures the abject hopefulness of young people who'd like to be in love but don't know how to go about it.

It may be slight, but it's also buoyant and pleasurable, partly because the leads make the whole thing feel like a spontaneous duet. Lawrence trusts them to carry the picture, without feeling the need to throw in a lot of extraneous fluff.

There's nothing offhand or spontaneous-feeling about Nanny McPhee; it's a highly mechanical piece of work, and its potentially delightful details are wasted.

What Happens Later, directed by Meg Ryan, works so hard at trying to give us something fresh and novel that I couldn’t help wishing it were better: the cloud of dissatisfaction I felt after watching it kept trying to reshape its molecules into a better movie, albeit one that could live only in my head.

Cumberbatch and Colman make it all believable, their jokes pinging off one another with delightful, rancorous buoyancy.

The picture is cluttered and convoluted and big, and Marshall - taking over the reins from Gore Verbinski - doesn't seem to grasp how exhausting nonstop action can be.

This intelligent, breezy romantic comedy sings a love song to theater. Plus, there's a hunky lug and Mira Sorvino in drag.

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle has a pleasant, affable spirit, and Johnson is wholly charming.

A movie like Norwegian Wood is a peculiar case – its intentions are sterling, and it's hard to pinpoint any technical flaws. The problem, maybe, is that it's trying too hard; Tran has such firm control over the storytelling that the resulting picture has no room to breathe.

For all the absurdity, there's also something strangely touching about it, maybe because for once Malick has allowed himself to be unsure. To the Wonder is an irresolute piece of work, a sketchbook of a movie, one made by a human being rather than an august master.

The Accountant 2 is not, and is not trying to be, a movie about the realities of autism. Even so, it challenges us to think about how our brains work, why we do and say the things we do—and to recognize that even though we may think there’s a normal way to respond to social cues, not everyone is wired the same way.

Smith deserves a better romantic comedy than Hitch, but at least he somehow manages to improve the material around him.

Even though Prize Winner ultimately asks us to swallow that golfball-size happy pill, Anderson and her not-so-secret weapon Moore are actually clawing their way toward something deeper and far more complex than a cheerful, embroidered slogan.

August: Osage County, however, bitterly funny in some places and numbingly earnest in others, is just too much Streep. But all is not lost. Some of her fellow actors are resourceful enough to reconstruct themselves after being obliterated.

Just as the dessert topping you scoop out of a tub may contain only trace amounts of actual cream, the ninth installment in the Fast & Furious franchise, F9: The Fast Saga, isn’t so much a movie as an entertainment product. There’s nothing wrong with that, as long you know what you’re getting, and there are even some pluses.

Only half a mess -- and even with all its flaws, it's an enjoyable diversion that shows both respect and affection for the formidable legacy of the "X-Men" comics.

Mendes doesn't care about people -- he's too busy making his art. And with Jarhead he pulls off, effortlessly, what so many pro-and antiwar individuals since Vietnam have tried so conscientiously to avoid: His movie is antiwar and anti-soldier.

Brewer, who spent most of his childhood in Memphis, is one of the few contemporary filmmakers I know of who can make movies about the South without sentimentalizing it, glorifying it or looking down on it.

Greengrass, a meticulous, thoughtful filmmaker (he also directed the second and third films in the series, The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum), clearly believes in what he’s doing. But his earnestness is at odds with the movie’s desperate, frenetic desire to keep us engaged every minute.

Knightley, in a performance as crisp as the corners of an envelope, makes McLaughlin’s perseverance—and the pressures she faced as she also tried to be a good wife and mother—deeply believable.

Fortunately, Curtis isn't completely tone-deaf, and he does manage to capture the mood, and certainly the sound, of the era. The best parts of Pirate Radio take place in the movie's margins, in the vignettes and asides that don't necessarily have much to do with the plot.

The Reader feels weighty, all right; but it's an unsatisfying kind of weight, and Fiennes' presence, as the grown-up Michael, doesn't help much.

Defiance comes off as plodding and workmanlike -- and even in the midst of Zwick's too-careful machinations, it's a movie that's unsure of what it wants to be.

An American Pickle is a real movie, and it’s delightful.

Apex fails to work either as a vehicle for sick thrills or an excuse for lots of feminist butt-kicking.

Pathos isn't a cheap gimmick when it comes from the soul, and Li knows how to channel it, through his brain, his limbs and his heart.

Nothing says "Awards Season" like feel-bad cinema, and with Biutiful, Iñárritu hauls out the big guns. He also, maddeningly, has one hell of a weapon in his star, Javier Bardem.

The Dictator, for all its liberal leanings, doesn't let anyone off the hook, not even well-intentioned liberals. Cohen comes right out and says things that most of us, in polite conversation, wouldn't dare. He knows it's the impolite conversation that really gets things moving.

Craig never overreaches, and yet he accomplishes the unthinkable. He's not the Bond we ever asked for or hoped for, yet he's reimagined the character in ways we never could have foreseen. He's Bond with soul.

Happily Ever After is an exhilarating, joyous picture, but it's sometimes terrifying, too. It offers a vision of marriage as an adventure we embark on together, alone. If you didn't cry, you'd laugh.

While Snakes on a Plane barely stands up as a movie, it definitely qualifies as an event.

Berry isn't afraid to use melodrama as a tool to highlight injustice. It's his very un-flashiness that makes Frontera effective.

It’s Waititi’s ability to balance unassailably goofy moments with an acknowledgment of real-life horrors that makes the movie exceptional.

Mother Mary, arty and self-conscious, is just a slog. It works hard to impress us with its slinky weirdness, which isn’t the same as simply being weird.

Eclipse, while admittedly an improvement over last year’s barely coherent "New Moon," only adds insult to injury. Nothing so grand as a real eclipse, it’s more just a massive blind spot.

Curran, his actors and screenwriter Ron Nyswaner have made an old-fashioned melodramatic epic that, as steeped as it is in the language and tradition of old movies, is never less than thrummingly alive.

The story is almost embarrassingly simple. But the picture slides by pleasantly enough like a stream in a Budd Boetticher movie, a calm place to take off your boots and set a spell as you reflect on the true meaning of manhood, the necessity of overcoming hidden heartache and the pleasures of finally, in your sunset years, succumbing to the love of a good woman.

It may have been conceived as the kind of classy-but-ribald entertainment that might lure older moviegoers back to theaters. But insulting their intelligence probably isn’t the way to go.

Too conventional to capture Kaufman's insanity and too haphazard, too shapeless, to recapture Kaufman's energy in any meaningful way.

Most wonderful of all is Josh Brolin as the young Agent K. It's so easy to believe that Brolin could turn into Jones, given a couple of decades.

It's nicely made, well shot, and reasonably well acted, yet it's enough to filet the life force right out of you. We need stories in order to dream, and to live. But that doesn't mean we have to buy every crappy one that comes down the pike.

Doesn’t always have the dramatic force it should, and unanswered questions linger.

Shot for shot, Sheridan's approach isn't radically different from Bier's. And yet Bier gives us more to read between the lines: In her movie, there's an unspoken moodiness, a crackle of sexual tension, between Tommy and Grace's Danish counterparts. That understated but potent secret ingredient is missing from Sheridan's version, as sensitive and as artful as it is.

Now that Woody Allen is no longer making acceptable Woody Allen movies, it's surprising we're not seeing more comedies like Prime, a slight but well-meaning picture that strives for the same kind of pleasurably neurotic sophistication that Allen, at his best, used to give us.

Everything that made the original picture so sly, funny, and affecting is gone. Musical numbers spell out the obvious, and loudly.

Brings back the characters you may have loved, as I did, in the earlier movies: My particular faves are Antonio Banderas' poon-hound Puss-in-Boots.

As Pine’s Webber navigates that seemingly helpless little boat, squinting into the driving snow and more than once nearly falling victim to the ocean’s mighty maw, he’s the movie’s finest special effect — not because he’s mindlessly brave, but because he lets us see how scared he is.

The picture is entertaining and brutal (it's a movie about tough convicts fighting, after all), but it can't figure out what kind of movie it would like to be.

A light, smartly turned-out amusement, the sort of thing that's becoming more and more rare on the movie landscape these days.

An exploration of self-absorption that is itself too self-absorbed to be either entertaining or enlightening.

Fading Gigolo is a breeze, enjoyable both for its sweetness and its unapologetic silliness.

When a movie plays every card, it's bound to win a hand or two. You can't exactly call that approach craftsmanship. But in the case of the Jerry Bruckheimer-produced inspirational sports drama Glory Road, it at least amounts to a kind of blunt effectiveness.

Snaps to life too late. But at least there IS life in it. It doesn't hold together as a piece of filmmaking, but there's no doubt it comes from somewhere close to Schreiber's heart.

There are so many chase sequences in Dial of Destiny that the movie seems held together with slender bits of plot, rather than the other way around. Worse yet, they’re so heavily CGI’ed that they come off as grimly dutiful rather than thrilling or delightful.

Life is too short for leaden fanfiction liked Wicked: For Good, an extravagant picture that’s not nearly as imaginative as it thinks it is.

Gervais doesn't have movie-star good looks; it's his line delivery that has sex appeal.

Hawke gives his all here -- or maybe just half his all -- and it isn't quite enough: He's trying to be soulful, but he really just looks a little tired. The real delight is Willem Dafoe, as the rednecky leader of the survivor humans.

Though it's a bit of an oddity, it's an affecting curio suitable for both Hardy enthusiasts and Winterbottom fans alike.

Pet Sematary is creepy for a time, before it becomes stupid. Then it’s creepy again: The final image will make you want your mommy.

Much of the movie is bitterly funny; some of it just amusingly droll. But the finale, a rallying cry that’s both galvanizing and wistful, is a wrap-up worth waiting for.

But deeply earnest pictures aren't always great ones, and this movie's plot mechanics sometimes grind it down. The actors, at least, keep it breathing.

Even when the story falters, or becomes astonishingly silly, there’s still plenty to keep you gazing at the surface.

The good news is that Spinal Tap II mostly builds on the legacy of the earlier film, instead of just recycling its best jokes for nostalgia’s sake.

I was with the movie every step of the way, right until the final credits began rolling – at which point I realized that the whole thing made no sense whatsoever, and that none of my nagging questions about what the hell was going on would ever be answered. There's a distinction to be made between being a dupe and being had.

Dicks is so in love with itself and its own overworked kooky world that it treats the audience like the outsider in a threesome. Sometimes the self is the least interesting part of self-expression.

Actually, The Intouchables isn't bad - its merely shameless, but at least it's overtly so.

I never would have believed it, but Branagh gets the balance between pageantry and silliness just right.

Excessively intricate and extremely dull, the latest example of a filmmaker giving us a disjointed, overlong movie that’s unnecessarily confusing to follow.

This new Road House appears at a time when so much of our entertainment has been shrunk down to a manageable size. Even on the small screen, may its unruly spirit prevail.

The kind of self-conscious puzzle picture in which characters behave in ways that serve the plot but in no way resemble things that actual human beings would be likely to do.

A superb mainstream entertainment in the purest sense of the term: It's a picture made to please a wide audience without ever pandering to it.

I was so charmed by the opening scenes of 13 Going on 30, and so entertained by the middle portion of it, that I had high hopes for its ending -- hopes that were cruelly dashed. Like a petulant 13-year-old, I'm still pouting over my disappointment.

Boldly entertaining.

Chemical Hearts never pretends that getting through teenagerhood is easy or fun. But if Grace and Henry can survive the perils of first love, there’s got to be hope for the rest of us. Reliving all that anxiety makes adulthood in the modern age look better — at least a little.

Snyder’s new zombie entree The Army of the Dead is too scattershot, perhaps too derivative and definitely too long. But it’s definitely a movie, as well as a perfectly acceptable turn-your-brain-off entertainment.

A sweet-tempered, mildly entertaining picture.

Fine actors do their damnedest to make this dumb movie look sharp.

Bateman, as both director and star, digs his heels in too hard to make the movie's points, using lots of ho-hum close-ups and wriggly camera work along the way.

Lavish in its approach -- it attempts some rather extravagant battle scenes -- yet it still seems modest in its goals: It's more interested in being a Saturday-afternoon entertainment than a blockbuster.

Southpaw is an exhausting brutalist melodrama, but if nothing else, Fuqua always works with fine actors, and he's got a passel of them here.

May be overly sentimental at times, but at least it's about something.

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children could have been a return to form for Burton, but he loses his sense of direction halfway through. If only he could find his way back to his wild bread-crumb trail, the one that guided him so ably for years.

A very gentle-spirited picture, but it's not a self-consciously precious one.

Thor: Love and Thunder is packed with gags and jokes, advertising itself so loudly as “Fun!” that it ceases to actually be fun. This is the way with Waititi, a gifted director who, now that he’s no longer required to wield a light touch, seems to have forgotten how to do so.

Bang and Debicki are grand, and we’d be lucky to watch them in any movie. But it’s Jagger’s witchery you remember. Pleased to meet you — and at this point, there’s no need to guess the name.

That rare sequel that builds on the movie that came before it without crushing its attributes to death. "Escape" doesn't feel belabored. Giddy, freewheeling and sweet-natured, it pulls off the effect of seeming spontaneous, a tall task by itself.

Tricked up with so many points that there's barely any flow to it.

The big problem with Iron Man 2, maybe, is that it so dutifully gives the people what they want, instead of giving them what they didn’t know they wanted.

As The Muse chugs along, it becomes more apparent how tired and pointless it is.

Gallenberger tells Rabe’s story deftly, establishing essential elements of the man’s personality in subtle shorthand.

The plot of Cars 2 is both overly convoluted and thin, and it folds in so much unvarnished toddler-instruction that it almost feels like an educational film.

The picture works because Brevig and his actors -- not to mention his effects -- maintain a sense of humor and lightness. It doesn't hurt that Fraser, a fine actor who's made a name for himself not with his serious performances (which are reliably solid) but for his recurring role in the "Mummy" series.

The big problem is that Neeson drops out of the story for long stretches, and the movie needs him: None of the drug-biz guys, not even the classy, serene White Bull, can match his craggy charisma. When he’s absent, the landscape is very cold indeed.

Why can't heroines just be heroines anymore, instead of micromanaged personalities who may as well have the words "Role Model" tattooed across their foreheads?

Coach Carter, its flaws aside, is as interesting for what it doesn't do as for what it does.

If Lorne is nothing else, it’s a portrait of a guy who knows when to zig and when to zag.

This is a movie that offers simple, buouyant pleasures.

Breezy and enjoyable.

Mick Jagger acts his age, finally, in an entertaining but ultimately disappointing fable.

Aside from having murder on their minds, these three are a lot more well-behaved than the "Hangover" guys.

Mama is one of those pictures that holds you aloft on its vaporous mood of dread – the occasional silliness of the plot mechanics don’t matter so much.

Mel Gibson may have changed the face of cinema forever. I think he has: He's made the first true Jesusploitation flick, a picture that, despite its self-righteous air of grave religiosity, is barely spiritual at all.

Among the least-heralded of the Christmas releases, Casanova is one of the few that's wholly enjoyable.

Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit is half silliness, half swagger, but Branagh's arms-akimbo impudence as a director makes it work. He takes it all seriously, but with a wink.

Entertaining in a glossy, mindless way.

It’s an intellectual joyride without the joy.

This is a sweet-spirited movie about a nice bunch of kids having good clean fun.

The Kingdom is distasteful in several obvious and irrefutable ways: For one thing, the idea of setting an action-thriller against terrorist activity that's all too close to real-life events is simply opportunistic and creepy.

It’s all rather cartoony and self-aware, yet still not as much fun as it ought to be.

Minions: The Rise of Gru is hardly the best of the Despicable Me movies or spinoffs...But the ridiculousness quotient of The Rise of Gru—directed by Kyle Balda, Brad Ableson and Jonathan del Val—is still high enough to spark at least mild rejuvenation. And whether you have one eye or two, six hairs sprouting from your pate or none at all, you could probably use a little of that right now.

A pleasingly disreputable trifle.

As The Commuter rattles on, the plot becomes more and more implausible — though again, believability isn’t what we’ve signed on for here.

Leaving is a bit too dry and controlled, as well as too relentlessly bleak, to be a satisfying melodrama.

Franco's performance, particularly as he portrays the post-"conversion" Michael, is hard to read: the character drifts through the later scenes as if he'd been body-snatched. And, in some ways, he was.

Tamahori's Die Another Day is an imperfect Bond movie. But for every patch where it's dull and lifeless or just plain stupid, there are also sections that are significantly different from anything we've seen before in a Bond movie.

Wine Country springs to life here and there, but there’s something dispiriting about the way these women seem to be working hard for laughs rather than just being funny.

The 33, directed by Patricia Riggen, makes a valiant effort to tell this harrowing story onscreen, and there are moments when every shifting plate clicks right into place. In the end, though, the picture stumbles, and it may not completely be the fault of the filmmakers.

Fever Pitch lacks that Farrelly spark, that warm, crazy glint.

Adapted from a novel by Walter Dean Myers, Monster is the story of not just one kid but many kids. It’s harrowing in its believability alone. If only it were a better movie.

But at the risk of overintellectualizing what probably is, at heart, just a bunch of overgrown guys acting out, I will venture that many of the gags in Jackass 3D show plenty of visual wit, if not brilliance.

Works neither as an exuberant rock 'n' roll picture nor as a heroic fable. It will rock you --straight to sleep.

With big Hollywood movies getting glossier and more mechanical, and indie movies increasingly mistaking drabness for seriousness, we need Waters' sub-B-movie aesthetic more now than ever.

That a movie can run on empty and still be so obscenely enjoyable is a pretty slick stunt in itself.

This is potentially moving dramatic stuff—or at least bracing melodramatic stuff—but Showalter’s dramatization has a glazed, glassy-eyed surface, like a Pee-wee Herman movie without any of Paul Rubens’ surreptitiously sophisticated kindergarten wit.