Steve Persall

Efron makes hay with his richest role post-High School Musical, making Dean a rural rake with conflicting charisma.

This franchise that won't die began in 2001 as The Fast and the Furious and has pretty much run through every title permutation, so the inevitable next chapter might be called only "The & The 7."

The Hangover Part III is more like "Beverly Hills Cop," a generic crime flick improved by comical touches that shouldn't fit the proceedings.

Renoir is beautifully filmed and scored, yet with the emotional pull of watching exquisitely textured oil paint dry.

Yes, this one is even better: funnier, brawnier and ingeniously constructed for appeal to both devoted fans and reluctant converts.

A feel-good movie in the most positive meaning of that term, thanks to the Motown music and O'Dowd's cheeky charm.

The images captured by cinematographer Adam Arkapaw are more dreamy than nightmarish as if his camera — like the children — doesn't fully understand the dangers.

As a purely sensory experience at the movies you're hard-pressed to find anything more dazzling than the first 90 minutes of The Great Gatsby, when Luhrmann's riotous amusements make anything possible.

Iron Man 3 is missing that old Tony Stark spark. Not from Robert Downey Jr., who is still the best thing about this overblown show.

The movie's best performance — and worst defamation — belongs to Tony Shalhoub, playing the first victim as a conniving, egotistical jerk who deserves to be kidnapped, maimed and ruined financially.

It's a story languorously told in three chapters, the first two in the late 1980s and the third 15 years later. Each could be a movie unto themselves. Together they prove Cianfrance to be an effectively unobtrusive storyteller, crafting without artifice what book critics would call a page turner.

One of the all-time great sports movies — primarily because it's one of the all-time great sports stories.

I learned a total of two things from watching Evil Dead: No camping kit is complete without duct tape, and sometimes end credits are worth sitting through for a movie's best gag.

The movie needs one or two central characters directly affected by the dictatorship, in order to create more tension around a conclusion that's already known.

This movie never realizes how ridiculous anything it does truly is, right up to the last-second promise of another sequel.

The Host doesn't strive for social allegory, as previous body snatcher flicks have done with the Red Scare, civil rights and Watergate. If anything it's merely a teenage girl's fantasy checklist for prom.

Tampa Bay wears fringe nihilism well, including wet-fever dreams of trigger-happy angels floating on cannabis clouds and dusted with cocaine like beignets waiting to be licked clean. Or drug gangstas sporting cornrows and gold-grill teeth, living large and thinking three-ways. Film as a fetish tool, that's what Spring Breakers is all about, y'all.

Stoker operates in a perpetual state of dread, a sophisticated Southern gothic that starts out confusing and winds up as a perversely humorous coming-of-age yarn.

The third act of Scardino's movie is very funny, and its finale featuring the exposure of an impossibly successful illusion is flat-out brilliant. It's just too bad that the movie's opening act is so sleight of humor, damaging the movie's potential. Now you see it. Then you don't.

It took brains to create such a sumptuous fantasia with pixels and keyboard swipes. Now, if it only had a heart.

Emperor is also one of those movies in which the most intriguing occurrences are revealed by "what-happened-to . . ." title cards at the finale.

21 and Over remains enjoyable for what it is and all it cares to be, which is nothing any respectable movie critic should recommend, and I'm down with that.

Thanks to Jackson's involvement as a producer, Berg has time and access Berlinger and Sinofsky didn't, allowing expansion of whatever material that's repeated.

Jack the Giant Slayer is merely cable TV fodder waiting to happen and not worth a hill of beans, magic or otherwise.

Snitch is grittily streetwise, and until its last 20 minutes fairly credible compared to other movies "inspired by" true stories.

The fifth edition of the franchise, A Good Day to Die Hard, is the brawniest and most brainless of the bunch.