Tasha Robinson

It's the next best thing to being there, in that it's likely to make shuddering viewers intensely glad that they weren't.

It’s an artful, funny, endlessly surprising little acting and writing showcase that shows just how far it’s possible for writers to take tired, clichéd characters, by treating them as human beings and caring what goes on underneath the surface of the easy jokes.

As a pure cinematic experience, it's exhilaratingly, brutally beautiful.

The film is a sumptuous, handsome portrait of a woman poised fearfully on the brink of decline, yet too proud to grab at rescue.

Veers in and out of conventionality, and ultimately sinks into it at the end. But first, it deals with old types in new ways, raising issues as it raises hackles.

Hurt steals scenes with a brilliantly nuanced character, a man bitter enough to make every line delivered to his peers a challenge or an accusation, yet experienced enough to present those challenges with an ingratiating politesse that only cracks in extremis.

The trouble with Bashir's extraordinary technique is that it lacks the confrontational realism of live footage; the extreme stylization of the animation can be distancing, making it hard to relate the images to real events and people. But that's also part of Folman's point.

Campion's merciless staging forces a more intimate relationship between viewers and characters; it's hard to take a detached stance when she's smearing raw emotions all over the screen.

The connections and the meaning aren't immediately apparent, and viewers are given plenty of time to find their own patterns and invent their own associations. Then, in its final half-hour, it pulls all the threads together, and a breathtaking bigger picture finally comes into focus.

Superhero fans will likely be into Push just for the cool-factor of watching embattled heroes and villains in tense war of wits, wills, and skills. That broader audience is less likely to come along for the ride.

Machine Gun Preacher is stirring when it presents Childers as a hero, but it does its most impressive work when it addresses him as a flawed, struggling, but still determined man.

While Rise Of The Guardians boasts a great deal of visual energy and amounts to a lot of fun, it's mostly lacking in that kind of depth elsewhere.

For all the inevitable comparisons to March Of The Penguins, Arctic Tale isn't quite a nature documentary.

These stories are frightening, but they contain few shocks or flinches; they're deeper and more psychological, more about adult anxiety than pure terror.

It’s a perfectly functional, fairly scary kids’ film, with plenty of craft and creativity to keep adults occupied. But with a story as sophisticated as its visuals, it could have been much more.

However crafted their stories may have become, and however reluctantly they participate, their sacrifice will be appreciated by history, and by the next generation of voyeurs as well.

The film is good-hearted, energetic, and full of Ghibli's characteristically beautiful hand-rendered animation, but it's also lightweight and hyper, with none of Miyazaki's more resonant themes.

Géla Babluani is unmistakably a first-timer, and his debut project is raw and rough-edged. But he aces the way simple images can make the most of a simple story.

"Chasing Amy" star Joey Lauren Adams makes a competent, tender writing and directing debut with Come Early Morning, but the film is still entirely in Judd's hands.

This is the darkest, saddest, most sophisticated Harry Potter film yet.

What makes Fifty Dead Men work is the story’s sheer moral complexity, which dares viewers to sympathize with anyone onscreen for more than a few minutes at a time.

Narratively, Trance is questionable, but Boyle and Hodges whisk past all the unlikely developments with enough verve and style to keep audiences from thinking too hard until after they’ve left the theater.

Bluth's directorial debut (co-produced, co-written, and co-designed by Pomeroy and Goldman) has its clunky side, particularly in its bafflingly outré alterations to the plot of a beloved children's classic. But the animation was, as Bluth and company had promised, a spectacular return to old-school craftsmanship.

The setup is rote, almost insulting, but it's smarter than it looks: Once the pieces are in place, Kazan's script reveals a deeper game.

For all the verbal jokery, it's more tragedy than farce.

Conversations is well-calculated and well-ordered, and it manages an equilibrium that a science lab would envy.

Another crowd-pleasing comic-book film designed to bring in new fans while gratifying the old ones.

It's a smart movie for grownups, an increasingly rare commodity.

Finding Joe feels like a homemade quilt: It's warm and comforting, but visually busy, with a repeating pattern that some will find stuffy and overwhelming.

It takes patience and industry to make sense of the first half, intestinal fortitude to deal with the second, and a little flexibility to make the transition from one to the other. But the whole process adds up to a fairly impressive two-stage thrill ride, like rafting through choppy waters, then plummeting over a waterfall into a dark and deadly pit.

The story itself is so charmingly dense, fractious, and complicated that it frequently leaves the obvious good-guy-fights-bad-guy groove, and noses toward Terry Gilliam-esque randomness and ebullience.

Porco Rosso was initially conceived as a short film for Japan Airlines, and its roots show in its delight with aviation and the experience of flight, but also in its somewhat shapeless plot.

Pirates! comes with all the usual Aardman strengths intact, particularly the sense that its characters and creators alike are too good-hearted and sweet to nitpick.

While the stitches holding together the plot are clearly visible, Igor breathes some enjoyable life into its stolen grab-bag of gimmicks.

While I Am Legend is reasonably absorbing, it can be difficult to focus on the film that actually made it to the screen, instead of the many versions that didn't.

The Rise Of Cobra holds to a thrill-ride sensibility that’s unchallenging and more than a little goofy, but exciting and consistently well-managed.

The colorful characters don't entirely hide the fact that this is a lesser Pixar film, coasting on Finding Nemo's popularity, and telling a too-similar story that isn't as ambitious or emotionally intense.

For the most part, it manages to balance laughs, genuinely rousing moments, and a fully packed agenda into something fleet enough to keep running under the weight of its rich ambitions.

Could almost be a Christopher Guest bridging project--it's essentially Guest's The Big Picture for TV instead of film, though it's structured in the low-key, rambling, observational manner of Guest's later ensemble comedies.

The results are disappointingly conventional for a Ghibli film—the film is good-hearted, energetic, and full of Ghibli's characteristically beautiful hand-rendered animation, but it's also lightweight and hyper, with none of Miyazaki's more resonant themes.

The domestic humor is often too culture-specific to play for a non-Japanese audience, but Yamadas does have its accessible moments, particularly in the sweet extended opening flight of fantasy.

Few kid films manage to assemble this much ambition alongside this much sincere, sweet emotion.

For the most part, they live life convincingly, in a refreshingly inward-looking, well-made film that's smart enough to stay small, and leave the car crashes to the big summer action movies.

Genesis And Lady Jaye accurately portrays a restless artist with a kitchen-sink aesthetic, and offers up a film to match.

Ultimately, the problem with Infamous isn't that it revisits Capote's turf--it's that it does the same things well, and leaves the same unsatisfying holes.

In some ways, it's a more grown-up story than Happy Feet, with more complicated messages delivered in subtler ways.

Enthusiasts and neophytes alike should be able to join together in gasping at the sight of people plunging down vertical walls of ice, taking their lives into their own hands for a brief, lion-lifed adrenaline charge.

Heiskanen plays her layers beautifully, alternately revealing a talented artist stymied by poverty and marital problems, and a woman fiercely devoted to family first.

It's stylish, pretty fun, but not the kind of ambitious effort that should make the world sit up and take notice.

Weitz's sense of play and the Badly Drawn Boy soundtrack each give Being Flynn an enjoyable lightness; meanwhile, the curdled, hidden rage lurking within both Flynns gives it an equally enjoyable edge.

A film that’s largely a raw, uplifting love letter to creativity in every possible form.

This is no more a kids’ movie for kids than "Where The Wild Things Are"; it’s a film strictly for Wes Anderson fans of all ages. By now, they should know who they are.

Keret’s alternately sweet and bitter sense of humor comes through clearly in $9.99, via warm voicework by vets like Geoffrey Rush and Anthony LaPaglia.

Blackthorn could use more depth and less of a sense of weary inevitability, but it never lacks for the arid, vista-prone beauty of a classic Western, or for a sense of lived-in wear and tear that remains convincing even though it's more stylized than realistic.

Iron Lung is an immersive experience. It traps the audience in a close, suffocating space with Simon and the seeming inevitability of his death, and the sense of terror is palpable and thrilling. It’s a slow-burn horror movie, but it certainly isn’t lacking in scares.

A Better Life leans too heavily on sad music, broad symbols, and weighty speeches to tell its story; it's more effective when it lets images speak in place of words.

It's easier to find enjoyment in Sparrows on a moment-by-moment basis than to swallow its message whole, but that method squares just fine with Majidi's aesthetic, in which tiny, quiet joys are the best kind.

The Imaginary isn’t as visually or narratively rich as Mary and the Witch’s Flower, or as transcendent as Miyazaki projects like The Boy and the Heron. But it does feel like a move in the right direction for Ponoc, an effort at finding its own voice and its own footing.

Given how many zombie stories are basically elaborate wish-fulfillment video games, about blowing away targets, hoarding supplies, and finding a safe spot, Cargo’s quiet acknowledgement that suicide might be a kind option for the infected feels revelatory and even dangerous.

Felicioli and Gagnol's latest may be trying to do a few too many things at once, given its short length and genial aims. But it's still something distinctive and different in a sea of shiny mirrors, all reflecting the same slick CGI style back at each other.

It’s appropriately goofy given the premise and the structure, but a brisk pace and a committed cast turns it into a diverting indie horror-movie spin on a familiar gimmick.

While Fantastic Beasts’ erratic leaps between murderous gravity and childish silliness are distracting, one thing is consistent: the characters here can be silly, broad, naïve, bungling, or just one-dimensional, but a surprising number of them are in some form of pain.

This is a movie meant to introduce viewers to the real emotions people bring to their escapist fantasy worlds. But for most viewers, it’s more likely to simply be a confusing, exhilarating, context-free introduction to the fantasy world itself.

The ending is a bold play in a movie full of bold plays, but it seems designed more to whip up discussion than to draw the narrative together, or to give viewers either a horror-movie catharsis or a marriage-drama resolution.

It's only appropriate that the film is as competent, efficient, and mildly dull as the people it celebrates.

No matter how familiar the plot beats feel, that level of attention not just to functional special effects, but to outright beauty, makes The Wandering Earth memorable.

Ultimately, I Don’t Feel at Home in This World feels like an ambitious experiment from a first-time filmmaker trying everything at once. It’s scattershot, but it’s also goofy, creepy, and just wild surprising fun.

It's a frequently funny film that comes packed with the thrills of real combat, with real consequences for the characters. But the basic premise does make one question its priorities.

Beyond the film’s strong look and feel, it’s memorable because the script is so bizarre and unexpected, so confident and daring about what it’s trying to do.

For a first film, made on a shoestring with a largely non-professional cast, Krisha is remarkably textured.

The sequel loses the small-scale, intense focus in favor of The Conjuring-level supernatural effects and action. At its best, it’s much scarier than the first movie. But it also comes with a level of full-on action-goofiness that Derrickson and Cargill avoided in Black Phone.

The filmmakers try to innovate largely by making the movie as toothless and easily digestable as possible. Nothing in the film is real enough to care about past the moment, or serious enough to trouble audience’s sleep. Maybe in a world that’s already full of real-life disasters, it’s innovative enough to make monumental destruction this much dumb, lightweight fun.

The movie may not be what fans normally tune into the franchise for, but it’s certainly daring and different, showcasing how the core characters each react to being pushed beyond their limits. The animation is spectacular, with thrilling, complicated, multi-dimensional fights and some actual scares when it seems like there’s no way out.

This humor could be profoundly ugly, given how it's aimed at reducing other people's grotesque deaths to punchlines. But first-time director Tim Miller keeps the tone light — in his hands, Deadpool is more a snickering, naughty nut than an authentic sociopath.

The Pod Generation isn’t going to leave anyone with the dread and emotional impetus of a hard-hitting, scary sci-fi future, or the uplift and catharsis of a well-observed satisfying one. It’s more of a placid puzzler than a moving experience, though there’s certainly plenty to see on screen, and plenty to recognize in the commercialization it lampoons.

Manhunt is well aware of Hong Kong movie history and the visual language of international action movies. But it also approaches satire in its ridiculous mining of tropes and its conscious visual excesses.

Nothing about where the story is going or how it’ll get there stylistically can be taken for granted. That’s one of the biggest joys of Shaw’s projects — the sense of something new and different happening, of that anti-capitalist, anti-conformist, anti-containment bent that stretches throughout the story also extending into every aspect of the film’s aesthetics.

Race is exactly the kind of film the Academy loves to honor: bland, uplifting, respectable, engaged with historical social issues, but not too controversial or directly tied to the present.

See For Me updates the home-invasion formula with a couple of clever twists and a key relationship. But writers Adam Yorke and Tommy Gushue and director Randall Okita only push the formula so far before they run out of innovation.

The convincing child cast carries the film when the scares start to feel redundant.

For people who just want more stories told in this world, and don’t mind leaving Bird Box’s initial characters behind, the spinoff’s small mysteries and shocks may be enough to occupy a Friday night or a lazy Sunday afternoon. But for people who want more depth out of their sad-dad-found-family horror stories, The Last of Us is already out there. Bird Box Barcelona just feels a little late to the game.

Ballerina may not satisfy all the John Wick stalwarts, but the movie does have its own satisfying angles, thanks to two things the filmmakers do radically differently from the rest of the franchise — and one thing they take straight from the series’ heart.

The Endless rapidly develops from a mysterious, elliptical story about cult survivors and strained relationships into a much larger and stranger movie, essentially the Aliens to Resolution’s original Alien.

Because the film goes in so many tonal and narrative directions, it feels like a grab bag anyone can reach into and fish around in for something to their personal tastes, from dramatic themes to offhand banter, from mindless pummel-fests to thoughtful conversations about heroic responsibility. Justice League isn’t an entirely coherent film, but it’s certainly an egalitarian one.

By the end of Fresh, the film hasn’t done anything more than restating what it made clear at the start: Dating is hell, and women deserve more than to be treated like pieces of meat.

Impatient adult escorts ought to appreciate the brevity, and their kids should find plenty of good-natured diversion in the film's generally charming story.

It’s all flawed, and distracted, and conceptually messy, prioritizing color over common sense and energy over consistency. But as an afternoon’s diversion for a handful of misbehaving kids—both within the movie, and within the movie theater—it’s authentically winning.

For a children's film, Willy Wonka is surprisingly malevolent, which is most of its fun. But the refreshing malice and twisted whimsy only kick into high gear after 45 minutes of plodding setup and film-padding songs.

At its best, though, it breaks a little more new ground for Disney, escaping the yet-another-princess mode and finding new kinds of family dynamics to explore, and new ways to step outside its long-established boundaries.

Greyson does a terrifically empathetic job of putting viewers firmly in the moment, by making it irrelevant exactly when and where that moment takes place.

While Gloria lacks impact, urgency, or any sense of rising and falling action, it’s beautifully rendered through Benjamín Echazarreta’s warm lens and García’s subtle performance.

Holmes’ performance helps Miss Meadows considerably: It’s so relentlessly upbeat and deliberately artificial that it admits no cynicism or judgment, and it makes the film daringly weird.

At 144 minutes, Five Armies is the shortest and the least bloated and discursive of the Hobbit films. It’s also the one that relies least on filler material and extra character business, and the one that most earns its moments of outsized, dire drama.

The entire film vibrates with understated tension, but almost never raises its voice above a hissed threat or a discomfited mutter. For a film with so many life-or-death choices on the line, it’s almost perversely passive.

The tenor can be shrill, but there's no time to get bored. And on top of that, most of the gags actually work.

The film lacks the narrative tightness, stark beauty, and gripping intensity of Granik’s feature-film work. But it has much of the nuance, and the emotional impact.

Everything about the way this story is rendered makes it feel much bigger than the characters and their limited travails can make it.

Raw but riveting front-line journalism. Like any good reporter, Davis knows a fascinating story when he sees one, and he goes to impressive lengths to put himself in the middle of it, taking his viewers along for the bumpy ride.

It catches, in the most authentic and democratic way possible, a collection of people who’ve developed a strong taste for revolution, but are still trying to figure out what to do with it.

A little broad comedy keeps things perky, but the kids' excellent, restrained acting and the low-key script by "The Claim" screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce hold the whole sprawling project together, from weepy revelations to silly fantasy-saint sequences.

The hypnotic, clicky soundtrack, Bergès-Frisbey’s playful yet sad performance, and a few significant script moments laying out the film’s philosophy all aim toward a sleepy trance that helps put the biggest flaws into soft focus.

Charlie’s Country is sincere at the expense of nuance, and tragic at the expense of variety: It tends to hit its points over and over, with blunt, on-the-nose sincerity. But Gulpilil’s performance keeps it from crossing too far into hand-wringing preachiness.

Their best material, and the film's most authentically Southern humor, comes from their comfortable interactions, their funny tall tales, and their alternating shows of respect and good-natured teasing.

While "War Within" takes a deeper, more personal look at its protagonist, Paradise Now is a more ambitious film that better contextualizes its central characters and their politics.

While the film’s individual moments and images are often fantastically wrought, the story elements often seem as unintegrated as the moral exegesis.

Sky Blue is never subtle about its images of loneliness and isolation, or in fact about anything else. But as clichéd as its images are, they're still visually and tonally stunning.

It’s a ready-made cult movie, complicated and weird and grotesque and distinctly silly, and best when not taken remotely seriously.

Early on, it feels like it might become one of Allen’s best. Then the narrative direction becomes clear, the possibilities narrow, and the film shuts down along with them.

The film is as low-key and internal as the meditation it touts, and nearly as uplifting.

In some moments, White God is a fast-moving thriller... At other times, it’s a standard-issue slasher movie... But when Mundruczó pushes the camera in close on Lili or Hagen, it just becomes a family drama, and a portrait of longing—for freedom, for emotional reciprocity, for comfort.

Begin Again is all about the untrammeled joys of music, but like a hit pop song, it works better in the emotions than it does through any close examination.

Garcia's far-more-info-than-tainment style seems a little staid, but Future Of Food's clear, intelligent journalism and rich cinematography help take the edges off the immense brick of data Garcia lobs through the window of America's biotech industry.

Iris isn’t groundbreaking doc filmmaking, but it’s amiable and jovial in a way rarely seen in the field, which tends more toward drama, trauma, and forwarding big causes. Maysles doesn’t seem to have an agenda, beyond capturing Apfel as she is in this moment, as a complete, highly specific, and thoroughly charming character.

It’s sloppy and slippery, but for a $5 million movie, it’s remarkable.

Batkid’s story is fun in part because it’s so joyously frivolous. He’s cute because he’s a tiny version of a big thing. Trying to blow him up into something bigger than he is spoils some of what makes him special.

As with so many Merchant-Ivory films, The White Countess glides along on restrained, skillful performances and tapestry-rich cinematography, but its beating heart lies deep below the surface, where only determined viewers will find it.

Animated in much the same style as "Perfect Blue," but with greater depth and a more elaborate sense of playfulness, Millennium Actress is a visual feast, but also a mental gymnastics routine.

Deep Blue is a thrilling film, but not a thoughtful one; it'd be right at home on an IMAX screen, or possibly as the pretty, polished, and vaguely empty Successories poster it closely resembles.

Keanu Reeves is the perfect figurehead for this kind of yarn, as he was in The Matrix: Emotionless, poreless, and polished, his character is more a graven idol of vengeance than a human being seeking it.

It's a difficult balancing act, but Park crafts his layers carefully and masterfully. He's the kind of filmmaker who can meaningfully craft the gory details of an eye-gouging without ever forgetting the message that an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.

None of Ex Machina’s broad strokes are surprising: The story falls out so predictably at every stage that it can be frustrating. It’s the details that are surprising, and purposefully alarming.

For all its rough, unfinished edges, The Wolfpack is absolutely mesmerizing.

Sayles' version of reality is grim, but it provides an enlightening, grounding reminder that there's a far more crucial world of politics going on behind the headlines.

There’s a good deal of the sick-and-twisted element of The ABCs Of Death here, but managed with better pacing, more maturity, and more room to build each segment.

Howard and Morgan make the journey intense enough to keep audiences guessing up to the finish line.

Uekrongtham films the saga in gorgeous style.

Episodic, detached, and lacking in drive, but packed with amazing, hallucinatory dream-imagery that makes real dreams look flat by comparison.

Taken as a whole, Blackfish does an admirable job of preaching without force-feeding, seamlessly blending opinion with reportage, and addressing its central issues from enough angles to make a series of end-runs around dubious viewers.

While Babette’s Feast is bleak, and often ponderous and stony, it eventually resolves as a moving hymn to art.

The film sometimes seems to get lost in self-admiration and its own melancholy mood. Still, Amirpour maintains that mood exquisitely well.

From a technical and filmmaking standpoint, nothing about Joshua: Teenager vs. Superpower stands out.... It’s as dry and straightforward as a reputable news report. But from a content standpoint, the film is riveting.

Birth Of A Nation is powerful and effective, but it's spectacle that can't humanize or define its subject.

Favreau and Marks’ version is surprisingly daring in its use of violence, and its physical and emotional darkness. It’s also creative, occasionally in bizarre and colorful ways.

Comedy is rarely sympathetic to its victims, but by letting all the major characters serve as each other's karma engines, Stoller and the other writers create a hilarious world where everyone can be equally awful, and equally heroic, and equally ridiculous.

Waltz is the perfect villain in this setting: He's played this exact role before, as the smug, drawling, creepy aesthete who rarely stops smiling. But he's also capable of pivoting on a dime between real menace and garish, performative evil, between playing a subdued charmer, and the kind of movie-serial baddie who ties women to railroad tracks.

Star Trek: Beyond does have a strength that its two reboot predecessors lacked: it puts the focus squarely on the larger Trek ensemble, rather than solely on Kirk and his relationships.

Elio is a big-swing movie, an attempt to push viewers out of their comfort zones and into a strange new setting. But while it successfully blasts off to a colorful new world of wonder, it doesn’t always land.

At least there’s plenty to look at among Selick’s beautifully detailed characters, who each have expressive bodies and their own ways of moving.

The premise seems profound, but the claustrophobically inert execution lacks reach or imagination.

While the film will likely stick with viewers, it's ultimately a tossup what they'll remember most: the stunning buildup, or the massive letdown.

It's still a mixed bag with a lot of cutesy awfulness to wade through, but the acerbic ending is enough of a punchline to suggest that Westfeldt understands what a joke this kind of film can be.

There's no great art to Fried Worms' simple, family-friendly style and obvious clichés, but there's a refreshing lack of x-treme attitude, slapstick violence, and all the other things that make most kids' movies feel like they were generated by a marketing committee.

To some degree, it's trying to find the magic in the everyday, but the attempts to ground it are cringe-inducing and problematic.

As absorbingly weird and dark and sad as the film becomes, it still labors against jumpy construction, an irritating variety of visual styles and film stocks, and a crowded story that no one gets much individual screen time, which means that redemption for everyone comes far too quickly and neatly.

Nicolas Pesce’s gory writing and directing debut Eyes of My Mother goes all-in on the idea of a remote location where horrible things can happen, and no one will ever know. But Pesce does a lot more with the idea of isolation — emotional, physical, and even moral.

For the first time, the formula feels strained, due to excessive baby/dog humor and not enough Powell/Loy interaction.

It's all meant as gory good fun, but once the novelty wears off half an hour in, the rest of the film is only meant for people who absolutely agree with Giamatti's character about that violence thing.

A solid documentary feeling of “you are there” isn’t always a substitute for “…but here’s what happened when you left, and here’s what it all meant.”

It's Macbeth by way of “The Covenant,” all brooding pretty-boys with emo eyes and hipster hair, standing around in gauzily decorated rich-kid boudoirs in the dead of night, and at times, it's too overblown to take seriously.

Trumbo’s writing was so terrific, the film emphasizes, that it outweighed his caustic personality, his unfashionable politics, and the career-threatening dangers of working with him.

Each of the shorts has a markedly different visual approach, and they feel radically distinct in terms of pacing and editing as well. In spite of the common source material and tone of oppressive psychological horror, these shorts feel like they could be the work of five different people.

Part of it is cheap thrills, of course; this is a capable, experienced cast with extensive acting chops, and it's trashy fun watching them descend to the level of the material.

It's a polished, beautifully shot story, and it acknowledges the messiness of real life. But like real life, it's often baffling and frustrating.

This take on Charlotte's Web has its tacky side, but when dealing with a book this simply sweet and this revered--and given what was done with White's similarly gentle "Stuart Little" only a few years ago--"It could have been worse" practically counts as high praise.

The film looks terrific, all Vermeer-style light/dark interplay and sleek design. And Portman is fantastic as the tempestuous Anne.

One amusing disadvantage of the crystal-clear, you-are-there 3-D cinematography, and the focus on the audience experience is that in practically every shot, it's easy to pick out off-message concertgoers who are bored, tired, or otherwise disengaged.

By comparison with the other Rings movies - the extremely high bar Jackson has already set for himself - Unexpected Journey falls short and feels muddled, yet too eager to please its fan base with an obligatory swordfight every few scenes.

Like the 2005 bestseller that inspired it, the movie version of Freakonomics is fleet and accessible, an enjoyably light and lively pop artifact aimed at bringing some unusual economic theories to the masses.

None of this is particularly sophisticated humor; again, it's Austin Powers goofery by way of Mel Brooks, though with a cooler, dryer tone and a much straighter face, embodied by Dujardin's vapidly winning grin, which admits no embarrassment or self-awareness.

Veteran slapstick fans may get a kick out of the free-form antics, and the party's chaotic ending is suitably memorable, but empathetic viewers are likely to be as uncomfortable with Sellers' improv as the partygoers he leads into havoc.

The results are too often ridiculously excessive--Kites generally reads like the Jerry Bruckheimer version of "Slumdog Millionaire"--but to anyone versed in Bollywood conventions, it’s a natural outgrowth of the genre, and a comically overwrought but still generally fun time.

Hollywood features can be hellish, but in Guest's view, they're no different from "Waiting For Guffman's" community-theater productions, and that's just an impossible message to swallow.

Markovics largely rescues the film with his mesmerizingly layered, steady performance as a man who solves the problem of compromise by refusing to admit that he's compromising.

Surprise number one: It's smarter than it looks. Surprise number two: That doesn't entirely ruin it as an action film.

Cassel is convincing and riveting as Mesrine, which helps balance out the film's problematic slick shallowness and disconnects.

For all its ridiculousness, its enthusiastic comic excess, and its fart/booger/gross-out jokes, Diary Of A Wimpy Kid's heart is firmly in the right place.

It's all very clever and thought-through, but all the allusions don't much bolster the bland central romance or the paper-thin treatment of '60s social issues.

C7J isn't as cutesy as "Batteries Not Included" or "Short Circuit," or as grim as "Gremlins," though it resembles them all in its jerky, semi-comic look at the havoc and helpfulness of weirdo artificial life.

All this experimentation is enjoyable enough in the moment, but it's disappointing when Tykwer drops it in favor of a conventional, obvious ending.

Mostly, it just stands out in a crowded field of tacky also-rans by being a reasonably acceptable, more or less non-obnoxious way to spend an hour and a half.

It plays with comedy and drama, but keeps failing to commit to one or the other.

Despereaux at least has too much ambition rather than too little, but its curiously intellectual pleasures suggest a quaint puzzle rather than a passionately loved fairy tale.

Ignoring the weak storyline entirely, Rango is a joyously weird experience.

The film, lacking narration or much explanation of the character, is an outsider's version rather than his own. It's intriguing, but almost always frustrating.

It has its share of creepy moments, rising tension, and sudden-blast-of-music jump scares, but as a suspense story, it fizzles out surprisingly early.

Surprisingly realistic for an animated film of the time, but it's also as visually stiff and staid as any cut-rate sword-and-sorcery film, and just as formula-bound.

While Sanctum is frustratingly familiar, it's easy to get caught up in the action.

The problem with The We And The I: Gondry is focused more on moments than on the film as a whole.

Jack Goes Boating tells a tender story reasonably well, but it rarely lets viewers feel the emotions instead of thoughtfully observing them.

There's no getting around the fact that it all looks like a cutscene from a kiddie video game. It's a great showreel. Now someone give these folks a real budget so they can make a movie that looks as good as it sounds.

As Unmade In China gets more personal and less professional, it stops being a primer on filmmaking in a foreign environment with unfamiliar challenges, and becomes an onsite mouthpiece for a pouting, passive-aggressive filmmaker who desperately needs an outlet.

It’s frustratingly good at first, and then just frustrating, because it veers away from the things that make it unique, intelligent, and exciting.

All of Mirror Mirror is visually striking, even when it works on no other levels. But the humor is erratic, the heroism isn't necessarily compelling, and the whole thing feels like a grab bag of bits that don't entirely cohere.

On some level, the latest DreamWorks CGI project isn't a movie so much as a gag-delivery system wrapped in special effects. The story is crammed with incident, yet completely trifling; there are a ton of personalities, but no real characters.

The problem is that so little about Hooper's Les Misérables feels integrated. The cast feels like a grab bag of talented stage vets and garish stunt-casting choices, particularly Baron Cohen and Bonham Carter, who perform the fan-favorite comic number "Master Of The House" as a jerky, staccato series of show-off moves and attempted but inadequate scene-stealing.

It’s a Dada daydream of a movie, but no one who sits through it can complain that they weren’t warned up front.

Taylor makes the most of his tiny budget with creative editing and shooting, though his New York City is anemic, narrow, and underpopulated, and his constant repetition of the same damn 60 seconds of music becomes excruciating.

The cast is generally excellent, but Hartnett in particular comes across as convincingly complicated, alternately reprehensible and sympathetic.

Essentially, The Way starts out as "Eat Pray Love" and takes a long, surprising trip toward becoming David Lynch's "The Straight Story." And that's a longer trip than a mere monthlong trek across Spain.

Ocelot's 2005 semi-sequel, Kirikou And The Wild Beast, retains the gorgeously detailed visuals and that hilarious tonal bluntness, but loses much of the compelling mystery, and the urgency of life-and-death situations.

Take This Waltz is simultaneously a coming-of-age film, a love story, a breakup story, and an indie quirkfest, and it tries to do so many things at once that it can't hit many of its marks cleanly. But at least it's never boring, and rarely predictable.

The film's pieces don't always fit together, but even in isolation, some of those pieces are well worth watching.

There’s a lot of fantasy in the usual end-of-the-world scenarios, but there’s a lot of horror there as well. Bokeh asks which of those reactions is more appropriate, and how they both play out. It’s a gentle story, as apocalypses go, but even without monsters, it becomes a painful, emotional question of strength and survival.

As mythic spectacles go, it beats "Clash Of The Titans," particularly in the areas of intimidating villainy and actual Titan-clashing. Nonetheless, it isn't any smarter than its inspirations, just prettier.

Dennis Quaid could stand in for Jeff Daniels' similarly toxic snob in "The Squid And The Whale," if only he were a little smarter and a little better-dressed.

House Of Sand is a gorgeous piece of cinema, but by the end, it just dries up and blows away.

It's pleasant and often touching, and the well-chosen cast sells what little drama they get, but there's no depth and little affect, and every would-be conflict peters out noncommittally.

Velvet Buzzsaw is a messy movie, and not just in the sense that Gilroy ends up painting a room with blood at one point.

While The Beaver starts with Gibson in "What Women Want" slapstick mode, it eventually goes to such exaggerated, extreme places that it becomes as much of a must-watch train-wreck as Gibson's own real-life situation.

It’s a curiously specific movie, a gag aimed at fans of joyously culty, messy nonsense like Guns Akimbo or Crank — at least, until that final fight suddenly starts taking the narrative seriously. Even then, though, it’s best to watch Boy Kills World with the same snarky detachment the rest of its run time encourages.

As a Captain America movie, Brave New World is batting strongly below average. The filmmakers try to dodge the political commentary that’s always marked the MCU’s Captain America movies, and focus on personal stakes instead, but those plotlines don’t land with any force or focus.

While several of the characters seem to be making obvious choices for obvious reasons, as the story unfolds, the script gets progressively deeper into their psyches.

The heavy threat of sexual assault, physical consumption, and predatory control hangs over the film's treacherous first hour, but once the threat resolves, Neon Demon loses its tension and its power, and then just keeps going.

The film doesn’t come across as ironic, satirical, or like a thoughtful analysis or commentary. It’s the first of the three that could actually be considered a new entry in the genre it’s referencing.

Edgar Wright has built his reputation on steering his movies into unlikely, exciting places. In The Running Man, it rarely feels like anyone’s hand is on the wheel.

The script glosses over everything that's important to the characters, which makes them vague and poreless. Some sense of specificity, about virtually anything, would be helpful for making them seem less like bare story functions and gag-delivery systems.

It's a knock-down, drag-out fight between storytelling, franchise-making, and fan service, and some casualties were inevitable. But even a messy fight for nuance is better than an apathetic sell-out.

This isn't just an action film; it's a multi-pronged assault on the heartstrings, with plenty of wide-eyed, apple-cheeked Norman Rockwell Americana saturating the pounding digital waves.

All that character development goes out the window when everyone’s just focused on surviving the grueling ordeal ahead, but the creators never find a way to vary the action enough to keep it from being grueling for the audience, as well.

Purists could well complain at how far Howl’s Moving Castle departs from Jones’ terrific story in order to wedge in Hayao Miyazaki’s longstanding personal obsessions, like flight, the destructive and horrific nature of war, and the way courage conquers evil and love saves lives. But at least the film has a point of view, and the benefit of its creator’s highly specific and recognizable voice. Earwig, by contrast, often feels generic.

Seen today, The King And The Mockingbird doesn’t have the tight pacing or propulsive narrative of modern animated stories, or the consistency of a film made to a specific house style. It’s recognizably the work of an idiosyncratic artist dealing in bizarre caricature, and exploring weird ideas... But its visual design and movement are striking, and its story beats are intriguingly unpredictable.

Part of the point may be how trauma simplifies life by stripping away everything inessential, but just as there’s little satisfaction in watching Daisy pursue an unworthy goal, there’s little satisfaction in watching a specific, colorful, keenly felt portrait become such a familiar story.

Unlike so many "Seven" followers, it makes its missteps memorably, and offers a variety of stylistic rewards by way of compensation.

A gorgeous film, framed with an eye that makes every country seem beautiful in one way or another. It's probably fitting that the human element seems fragile and flat by comparison, but the contrast leaves Beautiful Country fairly bland.

By establishing some of the Glade’s castes, rituals, and personalities, the writers make an incredibly contrived scenario seem a little more tangible. But once that high gear is engaged, the IQ and ambition drop precipitously.

While Black Nativity often lacks polish and restraint, at least it never lacks for soul.

It's all innocuous, forgettable fun, but it's firmly aimed at those who find underwear endlessly funny.

Sometimes too pat and sometimes ragged with omissions and confusions, but it's still a fascinating look outside of that familiar world and into a harsher one.

Like Ghibli’s features, Kingdom is a friendly, elegiac, approachable movie. But it lacks the studio’s well-polished sense of energy and commitment.

The lack of plot coherence is a lingering irritant in a film that otherwise seems to be trying to improve on its cinematic-series forebears.

Reichert and Zaman don’t editorialize, which keeps Remote Area Medical from being preachy, forceful, or didactic, but also leaves it feeling shapeless.

Three Of Hearts seems like an unwieldy mating of two films: one a glossy documentary about the fictionalized perfection that three lovers and a director wanted to believe in, and another about the all-too-human truth.

It's daring and it's different.

Despicable Me 2 has its charms, in its spritely pacing, a rapid-fire gag-delivery system that hits as often as it misses, and especially in its innovative, expansive use of 3-D space.

Like Potter's "Orlando" and "The Tango Lesson," Yes showcases a craft and a hushed, vibrant intensity that prove compelling even when the story loses its focus.

Third Person’s considerable strengths generally come from the actors.

It’s amiable goofiness, delivered at an emphatic, feverish pitch. Inevitably, what works fine in 11-minute episodes becomes strained over 90 minutes on the big screen, especially during a grating musical number about teamwork.

It's all too easy to dismiss the characters' troubles as entirely of their own making. But the cast's fearless, evocative performances help a great deal.

It’s hard to fight the feeling that The Hobbit simply isn’t an epic story, and the efforts to expand it into one leave it feeling like an anvil crammed into a sock: The sock is taking on some weird shapes, and it’s being stretched awfully thin.

Marquis herself rarely comes off as less than fascinating, in spite of her cheaply titillating material.

It isn’t just that Gilliam’s ragged, wild style is easily recognizable after nearly four decades of feature films, it’s a sense that Zero Theorem recycles its tone, visual design, and plot points directly from his past work.

It's important to go in knowing the central secret of the movie: Nothing exciting is going to happen. Ever. Armed with that knowledge, viewers should be able to settle down and enjoy the extremely low-key, melancholy character study that plays out between a handful of excellent actors.

The many-threaded approach makes it feel narratively rich and sophisticated, but it also shorthands and shortchanges some of the most interesting characters.

Not everything Perry's voices say seems relevant to his central thesis, but they speak fervently and colorfully, and their intensity is compelling even when their message is lacking.

Given the talent on display in Sinbad, and the winning brio it dredges out of questionable material, it's easy to wonder what Dreamworks' animation department could accomplish if it stopped following Disney's lead and started forging new paths of its own.

There are no surprises in Dreamer--except that for all its visible and unselfconscious schmaltz, it's actually pretty enjoyable.

As silly as it is, Sisterhood is smart as well, about the modern draw of victimization and attention, and how people (not just girls, and not just teenagers) who live life on a perpetually scrolling online stage can become starved for validation in any form.

Shou focuses on a meaty subject, and he has an insider's access to the world he's exploring. But his behind-the-scenes film doesn't spend nearly enough time behind the scenes.

Riddick taps into a primal well of audience wish-fulfillment, but over the course of its unrelieved, monotonous length, it does its best to suck that well dry.

Greenstreet's film at least serves as a reminder of how useless public debate becomes when everyone's screaming and no one's listening.

It's unclear whether Frederick's an awful actress or a tremendous one pretending to be awful, but either way, it's hard to pity her nasal, pushy, babyish Iowa girl.

Trouble is, it's too rambling and digressive to feel focused, yet too calculating to feel as observational and natural as a good Altman flick.

Trouble is, most of the major changes took place inside her head and heart, which makes her story a natural fit for a book, but an awkward one for a film.

The Da Vinci Code isn't terrible. Brown's novel presented its concepts seriously, as food for thought; Howard's glossy version is more of a snack, designed to be taken only slightly more seriously than "National Treasure," and with the much the same sense of a puzzle-based thrill ride.

Brick Lane comes far too late to be groundbreaking, and tries to do too much to be fully coherent, but its talent for avoiding obvious choices on all fronts, narratively and stylistically, make it worth a look.

While the content is colorful and the actors seem up for the task, a flawed script and Oristrell's unemphatic direction let all the impact dribble away.

Hotel Transylvania is occasionally the kind of fast-moving, gag-a-second film that relies on quantity of humor rather than quality.

The middle scenes, where the foreground and background don't always integrate, and footage, voice talent, visual design, and characterizations are heavily recycled from earlier Disney movies, leave a queasy impression.

Identity Thief establishes its priorities: Expansive character business is front and center; actual character-building is in the margins, almost off the map.

At least "Elegy" has some passion. Learning To Drive has harmless sweetness, many revealing speeches about life, and a Kingsley performance that shades strongly into a “Robin Williams as a straight-faced foreigner” routine.

Far too much of the film is devoted to eye-rolling pop-culture gags and long montages set to recycled Elton John songs.

Eastwood's prim, respectful biography presents Hoover in turn as a muddy political metaphor, a lesson in self-mythologizing, and a case history in repression, but never particularly as a man.

Water is gorgeously composed and beautifully shot, with a dogged emphasis on water imagery and symbolism, and a luscious sense for color. It's often profoundly beautiful. But its distanced, calculated attempts to draw sympathy, from its wide-eyed child protagonist to its sad-eyed, personality-free lovers to its fairy-tale ending, all blunt the meaning behind that beauty.

Francine is so minimalist that it has to rely almost entirely on Leo for solidity, and it would be a far stronger film if it supported and framed her more effectively.

Meet The Patels does offer a light, hearty overview of a subculture and a family, with plenty of disarming humor. And it perfectly captures the paradoxes of family relationships—the way affection, respect, resentment, and exasperation can all blur into each other inside a close-knit family.

Puncture excels in the smaller touches, from Shaw's quiet performance to the woozy, unrushed motel idylls where the hard-driving Weiss finally slows down for a few breaths.

It comes across as unintentionally comic, because Scorch Trials is basically "Fleeing In Terror: The Movie." After more than two straight hours of running and screaming, screaming and running, no wonder Thomas is tired. Even marathoners gotta rest sometime.

First-time director Mark Palansky is trying for a deft, hip, modern fairy-tale feel, but the odd material, sprawling story, and complicated tonal balancing act get away from him, and the film winds up as a poorly paced tug-of-war between sweet quirk and sloppy camp.

Tries tremendously hard to win audiences over with manly derring-do, exciting action, and impossible-obstacles-overcome uplift. And it's undeniably compelling for minutes at a time

At times, Higher Ground feels like a lower-stakes "Welcome To The Dollhouse" for adults: It's a systematically built portrait of disappointment and despair, centering on a perpetual underdog looking for affection and surety in any possible form. But while Higher Ground is less painful than Dollhouse, it's also less passionate.

Only those already predisposed to love a TMNT movie that at least LOOKS edgy are likely to care.

A harmless feel-good movie that tries to tell audiences what it's like to be a victimized immigrant, and mostly winds up telling them what it's like to have their heartstrings yanked, gratuitiously and often.

Like the big shiny sphere at its center, the film is fairly pretty, but there's no real sense that there's anything inside it.

Unfortunately, the story rarely rises above cookie-cutter kids'-fantasy tropes.

In the early going, though, Waititi manages to keep the tone light and the humor surreal enough to avoid too much association with the real world. But as his story devolves into melodrama, the comedy curdles.

Many of Flowers' individual performances and scenes are striking and masterful, but taken as a whole, it's less a film than a rallying cry of "Our people feel more deeply than yours."

Lightning is a funny, fast-moving movie, packed with barbed one-liners, goofy hyperbole, and all the oversized exasperation of teen angst. But it's too acid, particularly where Colfer is concerned.