Todd McCarthy

What fun there is falls to Jackman, who gives the grand old man of pirate characters plenty of fresh and unusual wrinkles and emerges better than the others simply by virtue of playing a two-dimensional, rather than one-dimensional, figure.

So comprehensively does the film fail to represent the labyrinthian literary wonders of Amis’ book that it scarcely seems worthwhile to detail its universal shortcomings.

With no through-story or strong continuity to hold it together, the film does go on a bit and becomes repetitive; it's hard to remain stimulated by the same techniques, however imaginative, at such length without some connective dramatic tissue.... Still, for cinephiles and aficionados of the singular, The Forbidden Room represents a very particular kind of feast.

Blanchett gives this dynamo of intelligence and doggedness a real human dimension that allows the propulsive drama to breathe; it’s another stellar performance that rates among her best.

From a sensory point of view, the film is a pleasure, the images having been manipulated in various ways to evocative effect, Anderson’s voiceovers proving more amusing than not, and the music taking mostly lively turns.

Director David Gordon Green’s latest unpredictable addition to his resume is offbeat and appealing on some levels but is neither as funny nor as trenchant as it might have been.

The director and screenwriter downplay the conventional melodrama inherent in the situation in favor of emphasizing how practical problems should be addressed with rational responses rather than hysteria, knee-jerk patriotism or selfish expedience.

Overall, it’s a decent shot at a tall target, but real credit is due the lead actors, with Larson expanding beyond the already considerable range she’s previously shown with an exceedingly dimensional performance in a role that calls for running the gamut, and Tremblay always convincing without ever becoming cloying.

Racing in high gear from start to finish, Danny Boyle’s electric direction tempermentally complements Sorkin’s highly theatrical three-act study.

Depp's instinct for observing, underlaying and keeping things in, then letting it all out when required, pays big dividends here in a performance far more convincing than his previous big gangster role, John Dillinger in Michael Mann's Public Enemies; it's unexpected, very welcome at this point in his career, and one of his best.

This material cant help but be interesting, even compelling up to a point, but its prosaic presentation suggests that the story's full potential, encompassing deep, disturbing and enduring pain on all sides of the issue, has only begun to be touched.

The necessity of circumstances dictates everything anyone does here and you can only react with varying degrees of outrage, anger, disgust, pity, empathy and, if you're a blind optimist, hope for something better.

With its perilous central premise and gallery of individuals some of whom are destined not to make it, you could say Everest is a disaster movie in the old Hollywood sense of the term, but it doesn't feel like one. And that's a good thing.

A genre mash that's mildly amusing until it can't think of anything else to do besides flop around in the deep end of conspicuous gore.

It's got a few things going for it and it's not unenjoyable to sit through, but, at the same time, the tone and creative register never feel confident and settled. It's not bad but not quite good enough either.

A sense of heaviness, gloom and complete disappointment settles in during the second half, as the mundane set-up results in no dramatic or sensory dividends whatsoever.

The formula of ingredients is familiar and time-tested, to be sure, but some cocktails go down much better than others and McQuarrie and company have gotten theirs just right here.

At isolated moments a tolerably amusing send-up of alien invasion disaster movies in which the attackers are video arcade-era renegades arrived to gobble up as many famous landmarks as possible, this one-note comedy runs out of gas within an hour (it is based on a short film) and should have been trimmed to a neat 90 minutes.

The clear-eyed film dedicates itself to breaking through the debris of cliched, one-dimensional public impressions of vets, bikers, immigrant wives and kids and trailer-park lifestyles as it fashions an involving portrait of a deeply scarred man sustained by certain rituals and an unextinguished sense of empathy for others’s problems.

Although the story dynamics are fundamentally silly and the family stuff, with its parallel father-daughter melodrama, is elemental button-pushing, a good cast led by a winning Paul Rudd puts the nonsense over in reasonably disarming fashion.

In its considered, neatly packaged way, the film occupies a safe and solid middle-class middle ground in teen storyland, between crass gross-out comedies and mawkish romance on one side and edgy, exploratory indie fare on the other.

Magic Mike XXL is ridiculously entertaining.

Action scenes are accumulated as if mandated by a stop-watch and almost invariably seem like warmed-over versions of stuff we've seen before, in Terminator entries and elsewhere.

An enthrallingly intimate look at the brilliant, troubled and always charismatic screen legend.

Intensely self-conscious of its status as a cultural commodity even as it devotedly follows the requisite playbook for mass-audience blockbuster fare, Jurassic World can reasonably lay claim to the number two position among the four series entries, as it goes down quite a bit easier than the previous two sequels.

Hakonarson observes all this with the practiced eye of a good documentarian but, in the compositions, the rigorous timing of the editing and the performances of the two leads, he lifts the material beyond the observational to a modestly accomplished work that not only neatly observes an obscure lifestyle but brings to life a most peculiar sibling relationship.

Gus Van Sant’s sticky, gooey side — previously on display in the likes of Finding Forrester and especially in the 2011 Restless — oozes out once more in the woefully sentimental and maudlin The Sea of Trees.

The violence of the inter-American drug trade has served as the backdrop for any number of films for more than three decades, but few have been as powerful and superbly made as Sicario.

Youth is a voluptuary’s feast, a full-body immersion in the sensory pleasures of the cinema.

The sensitive macho Schoenaerts is pretty much center-screen throughout this sleekly made suspense piece based on a script more loaded with holes than the numerous bad guys he either shoots or stabs to death.

Blanchett makes an indelible impression as a woman who, through breeding, intense personal cultivation and social expectations, has brilliantly mastered the skill of navigating through life.

It’s an audacious concept, and Docter’s imagination, along with those of his numerous collaborators, is adventurous and genially daft enough to put it over.

All hands on both sides of the camera do outstanding work. Clooney seems to be enjoying himself thoroughly as the old grump whose creative flame hasn’t been entirely extinguished, but it falls more to Robertson to carry the film, which she does with great energy and appeal.

The first two Max features ran barely 90 minutes and it takes guts and real confidence to dare push a straight chase film with very little dialogue to two hours. But Miller has pulled it off by coming up with innumerable new elements to keep the action compelling.

The film is essentially nothing but little and ineffectual bits of recycled shtick with no sense of freshness of invention. And the women never bond in even the most rote or superficial way that's expected in this sort of claptrap.

In every sense, The Great Museum (Das grosse Museum) imparts a feeling of privilege — privilege on the part of those (the Hapsburgs) who built and opened Vienna's extraordinary Kunsthistorisches Museum in 1891, privilege among those lucky enough to work at such a rarified establishment and privilege on the part of any viewer of Johannes Holzhausen's wonderfully evocative and droll documentary.

Avengers: Age of Ultron succeeds in the top priority of creating a worthy opponent for its superheroes and giving the latter a few new things to do, but this time the action scenes don't always measure up and some of the characters are left in a kind of dramatic no-man's-land.

Just as the basic plot points are hard to swallow, even the most rudimentary aspects of the characters' interactions feel forced, artificial and unspontaneous.

Given the challenge of solving a problem like Bathsheba, Mulligan succeeds, more than Christie did, in providing an answer.

Clever enough to provoke a few abrupt laughs along the way, this big screen debut for two television stalwarts, director Matt Shakman (It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia) and writer Robert Patino (Sons of Anarchy, Prime Suspect), is sabotaged by some frightfully on-the-nose expository dialogue and an adamantly prosaic visual style.

The story keeps everyone in motion all night long, and frantically so, to the point that it could easily have been titled Non-Stop 2.

The spectacle of a dissolute hedonist suddenly acquiring a heart and a conscience late in life is shamelessly, and shamefully, contrived in its emotional trajectory.

With unappealing one-note characters, retread concepts and implausible motivations, Chappie is a further downward step for director Neill Blomkamp.

This ultra-slick, fantasy-inducing visit to an international wonder world of wealth and deception plays more like an inventory of thieving and gambling techniques than a captivating diversion, even if it's hard not to be voyeuristically pulled in by some of its ruses.

Malick's most distinctive ambition here is his attempt to create an almost pointilistic portrait of a man by evoking acute moments of his past and present, and this sustains real interest for a while, as you wait to see how it all might come together. But as the film just keeps offering more of the same...it doesn't build or pay off with what it seems designed to do, which is to provide either a dramatic or philosophical apotheosis.

Even with all its familiar action tropes, less-than-fresh special effects and loopy plotting, the most depressing element in the Wachowski siblings' latest sci-fi mash is that, as they conceive it, human society has been around for more than a billion years but is still presided over by a rivalrous British-style royal family that treacherously behaves as if it were the 1550s.

A potentially fun premise soon turns into no fun at all in Cop Car, a seriously imagination-challenged low-end action thriller.

[An] accessible and informative close-up documentary.

For American viewers of an intellectual/historical persuasion, there could scarcely be any documentary more enticing, scintillating and downright fascinating than Best of Enemies.

Garcia’s take, however beautiful physically, is intellectually opaque and creatively cautious, leaving the interested viewer, whether or not a believer, with much to wonder about but little to actually chew on.

A superb, comically gifted cast helps writer-director Jim Strouse lift this quite a few cuts above his previous work as well as above the general run of films about modern life and relationships.

Pleasantly involving and sometimes annoying throughout most of its running time, this is also a vibrant, thoughtful piece about modern life in a very particular gentrified neighborhood.

The film has nothing if not great vitality and an active creative spirit, but it has all been channeled here in a way that comes off as erratic and sometimes ill-judged.

Classily and classically crafted in the best sense by director John Crowley and screenwriter Nick Hornby, this superbly acted romantic drama is set in the early 1950s and provides the feeling of being lifted into a different world altogether, so transporting is the film’s sense of time and place and social mores.

Awash with ripe, voluptuous summertime imagery and brimming with aborning adolescent female sexuality, The Summer of Sangaile is an appealingly simple, poetically conceived teen coming-of-age tale.

A Walk in the Woods serves as a terrific showcase for two exceptionally durable stars.

Craig Zobel effectively sets all its surface parts in motion but, crucially, doesn’t sufficiently develop that turbulent undercurrents of tension and intrigue that are called for in the hothouse circumstances.

The dark and sometimes funny The D Train is a feel-bad comedy, in that one feels bad for what happens to every character in the film and bad for sometimes being taken to places that feel more implausible than just transgressive.

Writer-director Robert Eggers' debut feature impresses on several fronts, notably in the performances, historical feel and visual precision, but the overall effect is relatively subdued and muted, probably too much so for mainstream scare fans.

A remarkably vibrant and frank look at one precocious teen’s emerging sexual life — a film with the stuff of life coursing through its veins and sex very much on its brain.

The Bronze is a strident comedy made in accordance with the sole guiding principle of, when in doubt, go even more vulgar.

The ultimate effect of [Östlund's] studied techniques is more restricting than beneficial, which, combined with a protracted running time, faintly self-righteous air and a perplexing, misguided coda, produces a sense of letdown at the end despite the strength of much that has come before.

An intensely sophomoric and rampantly uneven comic takedown of an easy but worrisomely unpredictable target.

With Gere’s character so lacking in memory and mental clarity, the film provides very little for an audience to latch on to. Tedium quickly sets in and is only sporadically relieved in this labor of love that simply doesn’t reward even the patient attention of sympathetic viewers.

The final stretch of The Battle of the Five Armies possesses a warm, amiable, sometimes rueful mood that proves ingratiating and manages to magnify the good and minimize the bad of the trilogy.

A great true story is telescoped down to a merely good one in Unbroken. After a dynamite first half-hour, Angelina Jolie's accomplished second outing as a director slowly looses steam.

This nimble, bemused, culturally curious look at the married instigators of the kitschy “big eyes” paintings of the early 1960s exerts an enjoyably eccentric appeal while also painting a troubling picture of male dominance and female submissiveness a half-century ago.

A taut, vivid and sad account of the brief life of the most accomplished marksman in American military annals, American Sniper feels very much like a companion piece—in subject, theme and quality—to The Hurt Locker.

In nearly every scene, Wahlberg carries off the central role with what could be called determined elan.

Unfortunately, Mockingjay — Part 1 has all the personality of an industrial film. There's not a drop of insolence, insubordination or insurrection running through its veins; it feels like a manufactured product through and through, ironic and sad given its revolutionary theme.

The film succeeds in that it provides a more vivid sense of this sort of 19th century childhood -- and Lincoln’s youth in particular -- than most people would have had before.

A tough-minded, bracingly blunt look at the sometimes debilitating cost of doing business that casts an unblinking eye on the physical, emotional and moral bottom line.

Although there’s talent on display in all aspects of this time-jumping, visually distinctive independent that rests its commercial hopes on the names of leads Justin Long and Emmy Rossum, Esmail strenuously overplays his hand with the torrent of obnoxious dialogue he asks his male lead to deliver, which is enough to make one want to run out several times for a breather.

This grandly conceived and executed epic tries to give equal weight to intimate human emotions and speculation about the cosmos, with mixed results, but is never less than engrossing, and sometimes more than that.

No matter one's personal stance about what Snowden did, this revelatory work is fascinating and thought-provoking, if, at the same time, oddly lacking in tension; unlike the provocations of Michael Moore or Oliver Stone, the temperature of this film is very cool.

Fury is a good, solid World War II movie, nothing more and nothing less.

Only fitfully does the film manage the kind of lift-off as that achieved by Pynchon's often riotous 2009 novel and, most disappointingly, it offers only a pale and narrow physical recreation of such a vibrant place and time.

The homily-laden wrap-up, stressing the upside of bad days, is enough to make you hold your nose, but it only lasts a moment, which is suggestive of the way Arteta and the cast provide the energy and momentum to get the job done but not overstay their welcome.

Technically and in his work with actors, Philip represents a great leap forward for Perry; a subsequent jump might involve presenting a central character with whom viewers could legitimately engage.

Renner appears completely immersed in his role and when the clouds of doubt accumulate and the man becomes a professional pariah, it's a painful thing to see.

A sharply made, perfectly cast and unfailingly absorbing melodrama. But, like the director's adaptation of another publishing phenomenon, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, three years ago, it leaves you with a quietly lingering feeling of: “Is that all there is?”

[A] mostly engaging but only fitfully inspired serio-comedy.

Jason Reitman's new film skillfully navigates through the personal melodramas of many characters with a nice sense of balance and a sharp appreciation of generational differences.

Unfortunately, Barthes brings nothing new to the familiar story.

It’s an impressive debut, an ambitious project pulled off with confidence.

Has there ever been a Hollywood adaptation of a major novel as faithful and yet so misguided and downright strange as the three-part version of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged that now comes to a conclusion with the third installment?

You laugh in spite of yourself in This Is Where I Leave You, a potty-mouthed comedy with enough exasperation, aggravations, long-standing grievances and get-me-outta-here moments of family stress to strike a chord with anyone who’s ever had to endure large clan gatherings that might have lasted a bit too long.

Melfi comes up with any number of good and effective scenes and there’s plenty to enjoy in the performances.

Ramping up his style to a more dynamic and elegant level than he’s achieved previously, Fuqua socks over the suspense and action but also takes the time for some quiet, even spare moments to emphasize the hero’s calm and apartness.

The Judge is well served by intense performances from stars Robert Downey Jr. and Robert Duvall, but is undercut by obvious note-hitting in the writing and a deliberate pace that drags things out about twenty minutes past their due date.

An urgent work, the burning anger of which will viscerally connect with many viewers, who will recognize themselves or people they know up on the screen.

Dominating it all is Cumberbatch, whose charisma, tellingly modulated and naturalistic array of eccentricities, Sherlockian talent at indicating a mind never at rest and knack for simultaneously portraying physical oddness and attractiveness combine to create an entirely credible portrait of genius at work.

Writers and directors Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland have crafted a solid script... Holding the enterprise back, however, is a terribly restrained directorial approach and academic visual style that prevent the lubricious story from truly coming to life.

The performances are all sincere and solid and the situation is easy to respond to emotionally. But as a case history in the annals of political repression, it feels like a bit of a side show.

The film's exhilarating originality, black comedy and tone that is at once empathetic and acidic will surely strike a strong chord with audiences looking for something fresh that will take them somewhere they haven't been before.

As an exercise in style, it's diverting enough, but these mean streets are so well traveled that it takes someone like Eva Green to make the detour through them worth the trip.

Fronted by an outstanding performance from Catherine Keener, who is onscreen, often by herself, at almost every moment, this challenging but not difficult second feature from Mark Jackson parcels out its information in gradual increments, forcing the viewer to infer rather simply receive most narrative information.

A film that should but doesn't get under your skin and give you the creeps.

Magic in the Moonlight does have a not-disagreeable expensive-vacation vibe to it. But the one-dimensional characters are mostly ones you’d want to avoid rather than spend a holiday with.

Sex Tape is sexcruciating.

Beautiful to look at, this is nothing more than a Little Engine That Could story refitted to accommodate aerial action and therefore unlikely to engage the active interest of anyone above the age of about 8, or 10 at the most.

It’s a waste of a good cast as well as a serious trip-wire for McCarthy, who may know what’s best for her talents but, on the evidence, needs a deft-handed outsider to make sure she’s maximizing them.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes manages to do at least three things exceptionally well that are hard enough to pull off individually: Maintain a simmering level of tension without let-up for two hours, seriously improve on a very good first entry in a franchise and produce a powerful humanistic statement using a significantly simian cast of characters.

The thoughts may not be profound, but they are profoundly true to life,and the writer-director’s approach to young people’s concerns is remarkably universal and timeless.

A dash of showbiz pizzazz has been lost but some welcome emotional depth has been gained in the big-screen version of the still-thriving theatrical smash Jersey Boys.

The main performances are powerful, the visuals are bold and vivid, the final effect one of the gut having been punched and the mind stirred.

Endlessly stimulating and provoking, Ivory Tower presents a solid overview of an urgent problem that some claim is about to implode and others believe can be worked through with the intelligent application of fresh ideas.

Raunchy humor laced with gradually revealed vulnerability makes for a winning combination in Obvious Child, a wildly funny and appealing female-centric comedy that launches very promising talent on both sides of the camera.

The visuals are undeniably dreamy, but they mostly seem borrowed from other filmmakers’ dreams.

The result is vivid when focusing on those directly involved in the war but laborious when devoted to the fretful hand-wringing of do-gooder outsider characters, which is a lot of the time.

This beautifully crafted film intrigues as a story never told before and ratchets up dramatic interest through a succession of unexpected turns.

Binoche and Stewart seem so natural and life-like that it would be tempting to suggest that they are playing characters very close to themselves. But this would also be denigrating and condescending, as if to suggest that they’re not really acting at all.

Cronenberg assumes a distinctly clinical approach to the emotional, social and business shenanigans on display here, a perspective that has brilliantly served some of his overtly psychological, horror and sci-fi pieces but gives this one a brittle and airless feel.

As usual, there are only fragments of thoughts, nothing is developed, and it will be left only to the tiny band of die-hard Godardians to try to make any meaningful sense of the disparate fragments stitched together here.

As in any classic Western, there are blunt pleasures to be had every time the tables are turned on men in black hats, as well as from direct, threat-loaded dialogue, meaningful looks, geometric arrangements of heroes and villains, and tense hunts for prey that play out both in rugged mountain settings and the tight quarters of buildings.

Always commanding attention at the film’s center is Pearce, who, under a taciturn demeanor, gives Eric all the cold-hearted remorselessness of a classic Western or film noir anti-hero who refuses to die before exacting vengeance for an unpardonable crime.

Mesmerizing in its incremental layering of a bizarre, tragic and thoroughly warped character study, Foxcatcher sees director Bennett Miller well surpassing even the fine work he did in his previous two films, Capote and Moneyball.

Although the humor helps, the Groundhog Day-like repetition gets tedious; it makes you feel more like a hamster than a groundhog — or rather a hamster's wheel, going round and round, over and over again.

Superbly made but burdened by some dull human characters enacted by an interesting international cast who can't do much with them, this new Godzilla is smart, self-aware, eye-popping and arguably in need of a double shot of cheeky wit.

Frame by frame, Ida looks resplendently bleak, its stunning monochromes combining with the inevitable gloomy Polish weather and communist-era deprivations to create a harsh, unforgiving environment.

Duplass and Moss are put to the test to carry the film entirely on their shoulders and unquestionably carry it off... On the other hand, viewers will have widely disparate reactions to spending 90 uninterrupted minutes with these characters.

A female solidarity adultery comedy that's three parts embarrassing farce to one part genuinely comic discharge.

After building up a narrative head of steam, the film relaxes too much back into expository documentary form. What might have been thrilling is merely entirely engrossing.

The film only intermittently displays the snap, precision and stylistic smarts a mixed-tone project like this requires; a half-good effort is not enough where buoyancy and a sly-to-mean spiritedness are required at all times.

Pfister, who, like his mentor Nolan, adamantly continues to shoot on film (not digital), shows a sure hand at staging scenes, creating visuals and setting a tone -- if only all the diverse elements here fit comfortably under the same tent.

In his most effective full star turn in perhaps a decade, Kevin Costner dominates as the greenhorn general manager of the beleaguered Cleveland Browns.

Darren Aronofsky wrestles one of scripture's most primal stories to the ground and extracts something vital and audacious, while also pushing some aggressive environmentalism, in Noah.

For sheer plotting and audience involvement, this is a notch above any of the other Avengers-feeding Marvel entries, the one that feels most like a real movie rather than a production line of ooh-and-ahh moments for fanboys.

Some years from now, Starred Up, a rough, violent and, to American ears, half-indecipherable British prison drama, will be remembered as the film that announced a new star, Jack O’Connell.

Quai d’Orsay zips along at a good clip and benefits from the gruffly benevolent gravity of Arestrup, which offsets the machine-gun pace set by Lhermitte.

The repetitive storyline about successive heists during a Muppets European tour grows tiresome and the fun is intermittent.

Particle Fever succeeds on every level, but none more important than in making the normally intimidating and arcane world of genius-level physics at least conceptually comprehensible and even friendly to the lay viewer.

Other than for the pleasure of watching Green try to conquer ancient Greece dressed as a distant forebearer of Catwoman, more is less and a little late in this long-aborning sequel.

This quite mediocre spawned-from-television feature feels like a Jesus film designed primarily for true believers, meaning that the faith-based public that has already been put on alert by seal-of-approval-dispensing church leaders that this is a film to see will make the Fox release into a significant Heartland attraction.

A constant low-boil of ridiculousness both mocks and sustains Non-Stop, a jerry-rigged terror-on-a-plane thriller with a premise so far-fetched as to create a degree of suspense over how the writers will wriggle out of the knot of their own making.

A highly homogenized and sanitized remake that's little better than its 1981 predecessor.

Aspiring transcendent love stories don't come much more claptrappy and unconvincing than Winter's Tale.

Constant lateral tracks, push-ins, whip-pans, camera moves timed to dialogue, title cards, chapter headings, miniatures, use of stop-action, fetishization of clothing and props, absurdist predicaments — all the techniques Anderson has honed over the years — are used to pinpoint effect here.

Something less than monumental, The Monuments Men wears its noble purpose on its sleeve when either greater grit or more irreverence could have put the same tale across to modern audiences with more punch and no loss of import.

As detrimental as anything to the film’s effectiveness are the visuals, which are murky, lack compositional interest and do the actors no favors.

Unfortunately, the film never begins to reveal what's really going on inside Joe Albany.

James has done a wonderful job of telling a colorful life story.

Land Ho! is appealing for not going the route of easy gags and dumbed-down humor.

Kikuchi manages to make Kumiko interesting company no matter how far the character recedes into herself, using subtly expressive body language that would have been at home in silent movies to create a very strange self-imposed social outcast.

I Origins is a bracingly venturesome, exploratory work that achieves an exceptional balance between the emotional and intellectual aspects of its unusual story.

It's the selective but cumulative use of seemingly arbitrary but significant experiences that gives Boyhood its distinctive character and impressive weight.

The mash-up of elements combine with a singularly unpleasant roster of characters to create a work of genuinely off-putting quirkiness.

The story is a jigsaw puzzle in which all the pieces are of an indistinguishable gray, making fitting them together a tricky matter.

The antithesis of “let’s-put-on-a-show” fluff, Whiplash...is about the wages of all-out sacrifice and commitment.

Efficient, if ultimately rote, political thriller.

If The Legend of Hercules were just a little more inept or over-the-top, it might have been ridiculous fun. As it is, unfortunately, Harlin embraces the mediocrity of the screenplay with a dour straight face, draining it of any enjoyably camp possibilities.

Blue Ruin is a talented but sophomoric low-budgeter that straddles the divide between genre thriller and art piece with mixed results.

Volume two gets down in ways the first half doesn't, although anything resembling real sensuality remains MIA.

It is never boring and does provoke and stimulate, although not as a turn-on, not remotely.

Nearly as extravagant as the characters it depicts, Martin Scorsese's comic, operatically-scaled film is, on a moment-by-moment basis, often madly entertaining due to its live-wire energy, exuberant performances and the irresistible appeal of watching naughty boys doing very naughty things.

Comedically, everyone's on the same page here, which means that, even when things flag, more fun isn't far off.

The film is rugged, skilled, relentless, determined, narrow-minded and focused, everything that a soldier must be when his life is on the line.

After exhibiting an almost craven fidelity to his source material the first time out, Jackson gets the drama in gear here from the outset with a sense of storytelling that possesses palpable energy and purpose.

Homefront is sufficiently silly and low-down to be entertaining on a certain marginal level, but it wouldn't appear that those involved, with the possible exception of Franco, approached this with the idea that they might be making good trash; it looks too elaborate and costly for that and the script exhibits no self-aware humor.

An admirable idea in theory proves to be a real slog to sit through in Everyday.

This is a safe, serviceable, carefully crafted action drama in which the subversive seeds planted in the first story take welcome root.

In the meaty bad guy role, Harrelson entertainingly goes all the way, putting him way out there on the ledge with any of your favorite loonies, psychos and unhinged nutjobs.

Energetic, humorous and not too cloying, as well as the first Hollywood film in many years to warn of global cooling rather than warming, this tuneful toon upgrades what has been a lackluster year for big studio animated fare.

The connection between art and technology is explored in an entertaining and accessible way in Tim's Vermeer, a documentary that demonstrates how a savvy and dedicated amateur with sufficient resources was able to create a remarkable likeness of a great 17th century painting.

Although formulaic in design and programmed to meet its quota of laughs, the film makes a point of going beyond basic expectations into some legitimate aspects of mature friendships without getting soggy about it.

There is much here of interest to aficionados of the great author as well as to those curious about the complicated relationship between sisters Mariel and the late Margaux.

Despite its scaldingly hot cast and formidable writer/director combination, The Counselor is simply not a very likable or gratifying film. In fact, it's a bummer.

They just don't make 'em like this anymore, and it's a good thing, too.

Our Day Will Come speeds along for a while on the fumes of its own audacity until it can no longer hide the lack of coherent ideas in the tank.

The Old West is portrayed as a venal loony bin in Sweetwater, a handsomely designed, occasionally funny but ultimately empty female vengeance yarn.

This is a probing, inquisitive work of a very high order, although it goes a bit slack in the final third and concludes rather conventionally compared to much that has come before.

The older the actors here the better they are, as pros like Paul Giamatti and Damian Lewis have it all over low-voltage young leads Douglas Booth and Hailee Steinfeld. Relativity will be lucky to milk anything more than a moderate take from this pretty but unexciting enactment.

What's actually up onscreen in this vaguely ambitious but tawdry melodrama falls into an in-between no-man's-land that endows it with no distinction whatsoever, a work lacking both style and insight into the netherworld it seeks to reveal.

An unsuccessful attempt to get inside the head, under the skin or through the looking glass of Bush administration Secretary of Defense and Iraq War proponent Donald Rumsfeld.

What starts as potentially interesting apocalyptic speculative fiction devolves into dreary sub-Hunger Games survivalism and banal teen romance.

More pictorially arresting than intellectually coherent.

The best feature film directed by someone named Coppola in a number of years.

A career high point for Ralph Fiennes as both an actor and director, this unfussy and emotionally penetrating work also provides lead actress Felicity Jones with the prime role in which she abundantly fulfills the promise suggested in some of her earlier small films.

Fading Gigolo features enough strange narrative turns and modest laughs, not to mention a substantial role for Woody Allen as a very unlikely pimp, to provide a measure of curiosity value.

Richard Shepard’s film is far from dull, but it just doesn’t feel like the real thing, more like an artificial construct inspired by pumped-up crime favorites from a couple of decades ago.

This is Holofcener’s sweet spot, the depiction of the emotional confusions, self-deceptions, uncertainties and misguided decisions that can cloud and get the better of otherwise bright, aware people, especially the female characters she tends to specialize in.

A pictorially unusual but dramatically listless tale.

The film rips right along and never relinquishes its grip.

Reitman keeps a strong grip on all the aspects of the story to prevent it from becoming corny, unduly melodramatic or obvious.

Chris Hemsworth and Daniel Bruhl excel as, respectively, British wild man and hedonist James Hunt and Austrian by-the-books tactician Niki Lauda.

Perhaps the nature of the story is such that the film can’t help but be obvious and quite melodramatic at times, but it gets better as it goes along and builds to a moving finish.

At once the most realistic and beautifully choreographed film ever set in space, Gravity is a thrillingly realized survival story spiked with interludes of breath-catching tension and startling surprise.

Even as a quasi-experimental work of subjective surrealism, Escape From Tomorrow is massively erratic and isn't particularly original. But it must also be said that its take on Disney World, as well as many of its individual images, are indelible and won’t be easily forgotten.

Inspiring if not inspired, Lee Daniels' The Butler is a sort of Readers' Digest overview of the 20th century American civil rights movement centered on an ordinary individual with an extraordinary perspective.

The film's slender conceit is given some weight by its 11-year-old leading lady Sydney Aguirre, whose portrait of a flinty, instinctively mischievous tomboy growing up without benefit of parental guidance provides gratification even when there's not much going on.

Director Rawson Marshall Thurber adequately manages the mechanics demanded here but adds no finesse or grace notes.

All the interest and good will built up by the sharply conceived preliminaries is washed away in a succession of scenes that feel crushingly routine and generic, not to mentioned guided by ideological urges.

Far from the renegade, boundary-pushing, sexually explicit sensation that its makers have been suggesting, The Canyons is a lame, one-dimensional and ultimately dreary look at peripheral Hollywood types not worth anyone's time either onscreen or in real life.

This is a second-rate special effects-dominated 3D entry that will join several prominent would-be blockbusters that need not be mentioned on the summer junk heap.

Although marred by a couple of too-convenient plot contrivances, this often humorous drama lands firmly in the plus column among the Woodman's recent works.

An attractively designed but narratively challenged, one-note film.

It’s impossible to buy into the film’s plea to be taken seriously at the end, just as the upbeat finale feels false.

To kill time between action set-pieces, del Toro has done an above-average job of avoiding tedium via some flavorsome casting, passably interesting plot contrivances and, above all, by maintaining strong forward momentum. Unlike so many similar crash-bang action spectaculars, this one feels lean and muscular rather than bloated or padded; the combat is almost always coherent and dramatically pointed rather than just splashed on the screen for its own sake.

A moderately amusing but very uneven revisionist adventure with franchise and theme park intentions written all over it...This attempt by Verbinski and producer Jerry Bruckheimer to plant the flag for another Pirates of the Caribbean-scaled series tries to have it too many ways tonally, resulting in a work that wobbles and thrashes all over the place as it attempts to find the right groove.

Director Drake Doremus confirms his knack for pinpointing subtle emotional tremors on fragile personal landscapes, even if some too-easy coincidences and pat dramatic moments chip away at the compressed story's credibility.

The script's simpleminded shenanigans notwithstanding, the two stars sync up better than their characters do, especially with some rough-and-tumble physical slapstick, resulting in a crude, low-brow audience-pleaser that will hit the funny bones of both performers' fan bases.

As much spectacle and action — minute-by-minute, frame-by-frame — as any movie anyone could think of. Zack Snyder’s huge, backstory-heavy extravaganza is a rehab job that perhaps didn’t cry out to be done but proves so overwhelmingly insistent in its size and strength that it’s hard not to give in.

A humdrum straight line of a film, Monsters University never surprises, goes off in unexpected directions or throws you for a loop in the manner of the best Pixar stories. Nor does it come close to elating through the sheer imagination of its conceits and storytelling.

Brad Pitt delivers a capable performance in an immersive apocalyptic spectacle about a global zombie uprising.

It also expresses the anxiety and insecurity of comics conscious of the big issues in life they are expected either to avoid or make fun of in their work. Rogen and Goldberg take the latter approach here, in an immature but sometimes surprisingly upfront way one can interpret seriously. Or not.

This reflection on the past, love and death through the prism of layers of theatrical endeavor is both serious and frisky, engaging on a refined level but frustratingly limited in its complexity and depth.

A superficially diverting but substance-free concoction, a would-be thriller as evanescent as a magic trick and one that develops no suspense or rooting interest because the characters possess all the substance of invisible ink.

Only Lovers Left Alive is an addictive mood and tone piece, a nocturnal reverie that incidentally celebrates a marriage that has lasted untold centuries.

Enhanced by a splendidly atmospheric recreation of the Lower East Side, the intimately focused work is anchored by another superior performance by Marion Cotillard.

The ‘70s recreation is reasonable -- there are plenty of vintage cars and pop tunes of the moment -- but the characters never register beyond the surfaces of the scenes despite being equipped with long-festering resentments and grudges.

Franco, employing diverse cinematic techniques from split screen (mostly early on) to direct-to-camera address, makes the Bundrens’ time of trial more immediately coherent than it is on the page without disrespecting Faulkner’s oblique style.

Redford, who can’t avoid exuding charisma, plays this role with utter naturalism and lack of histrionics or self-regard.

[A] wryly poignant and potent comic drama about the bereft state of things in America’s oft-vaunted heartland.

Ambition markedly outstrips achievement in The Congress, a visionary piece of speculative fiction that drops the ball after a fine set-up.

This is a gorgeously made character study leavened with surrealistic dimensions both comic and dark, an unsparing look at a young man who, unlike some of his contemporaries, can’t transcend his abundant character flaws and remake himself as someone else.

Coppola’s attitude toward her subject seems equivocal, uncertain; there is perhaps a smidgen of social commentary, but she seems far too at home in the world she depicts to offer a rewarding critique of it.

No matter how silly and outlandish the action gets — and it does become ridiculous — it also delivers the goods its audience expects.

No matter how frenzied and elaborate and sometimes distracting his technique may be, Luhrmann's personal connection and commitment to the material remains palpable, which makes for a film that, most of the time, feels vibrantly alive while remaining quite faithful to the spirit, if not the letter or the tone, of its source.

After impressing well enough in his previous big screen directorial outings, Abrams works in a narrower, less imaginative mode here; there's little sense of style, no grace notes or flights of imagination. One feels the dedication of a young musician at a recital determined not to make any mistakes, but there's no hint of creative interpretation, personal feelings or the spreading of artistic wings.

The fact that the three actors who do most of the fooling around — Robert De Niro, Diane Keaton and Susan Sarandon — have a combined age of 202 pegs this as a sex romp for the Viagra crowd.

A lively, sometimes very funny comedy.

Black and his co-screenwriter, first-timer Drew Pearce, have great fun reshuffling the deck, teasing about who might occupy what superhero suit and morphing the story along with identity revelations and expansions of the dramatic horizons; the well-chosen cast members respond in kind with virtually palpable glee.

Given all the ways a project like this could have gone wrong, the result is surprisingly good on several fronts, beginning with a shrewd structure that fosters an intelligent dual perspective on the public and private aspects of the Deep Throat phenomenon.

The story is told in a hammer-on-anvil manner that evinces no gift for social satire or sharp cultural insight.

Basically the film consists of a bunch of techies in white shirts and glasses laboriously discussing their views, exchanges you get the feeling the filmmaker thought would come off as humorous.

Crude, repetitive and rigorously single-minded, the popular actor’s writing and directing debut lays it all on a bit thick, as the few points the film has to make are underscored time and time again.

Oblivion is an absolutely gorgeous film dramatically caught between its aspirations for poetic romanticism and the demands of heavy sci-fi action. After a captivating beginning brimming with mystery and evident ambition, the air gradually seeps out of the balloon that keeps this thinly populated tale aloft, leaving the ultimate impression of a nice try that falls somewhat short of the mark.

Pretty when it should be gritty and grandiosely noble instead of just telling it like it was, 42 needlessly trumps up but still can't entirely spoil one of the great American 20th century true-life stories, the breaking of major league baseball's color line by Jackie Robinson.

Watching a bunch of people take a drug trip is seldom either entertaining or edifying, but Chilean director Sebastian Silva manages to make it at least tolerably amusing.

There's something about novelist Stephenie Meyer that induces formerly interesting directors to suddenly make films that are slow, silly and soporific.

So fetishistic about high-powered weapons that it qualifies as an NRA wet dream, G.I. Joe: Retaliation pretty accurately reflects the franchise's comic book and cartoon origins, which is both a good and a bad thing: good if you're a 12- to 15-year-old boy, bad if you're just about anyone else.

Although there is incident in the film's second half...it doesn't build to the level of compelling drama, leaving the film in a quiet, temperate realm that scarcely makes the pulse race.

Danny Boyle has great and plainly evident fun adding twists and curves and tunnels and endless style to his modern London noir Trance, but he makes so many left turns that the film turns in on itself rather than going anywhere.

Generates a fair amount of tension and produces the kind of nationalistic outrage that rock-ribbed Americans will feel in their guts.

The Call for the most part is a tense, extreme-jeopardy thriller that delivers the intended goods.

As Oscar, Jordan at moments gives off vibes of a very young Denzel Washington in the way he combines gentleness and toughness; he effortlessly draws the viewer in toward him.

For all its derivative poetics -- as many exteriors as possible were shot during or just after magic hour, a la Malick -- the film is a lovely thing to experience and possesses a measure of real power.

Deftly playing Tina Fey's feminist-icon mother, Lily Tomlin all but steals Admission, a knowing but uneven comedy about the neuroticism of the college-admission process on both sides of the equation.

A film that seems drained of life and ideas rather than sustained by them.

A miscast James Franco and a lack of charm and humor doom Sam Raimi's prequel to the 1939 Hollywood classic. Oz the Wimpy and Weak would be more like it.

This paean to youthful irresponsibility applies the right crude and rude 'tude to its bulging sack of gags to have the desired effect on its target audience.

Ordinary in some ways and extraordinary in others, The Spectacular Now benefits from an exceptional feel for its main characters on the parts of the director and lead actors.

There's little facetious comedy a la the "Pirates of the Caribbean" series. It's all traditional stuff, done well but without an original spark.

The film’s small scale is more than compensated for by its insights into adolescent awareness, the passions stoked by global causes and the moral hypocrisy of the ideologically righteous.

The director mixes moods with a playfulness that is both brazen and carefree and yet precisely modulated, yielding results that amplify the specific content of the screenplay. This makes for a film that, however cheap it was to make, is incredibly rich to watch.

Unusual for this sort of thing, Snitch is a film after which you remember the characters and actors more than the big action moments.

Unfortunately, John Moore has directed these sequences in a way that makes the incidents look so far-fetched and essentially unsurvivable that you can only laugh.

Nicely cast and made with as much conviction as can be brought to something so intrinsically formulaic.

This lushly and pretentiously made drama about a young American whose worst instincts are unleashed during a stay in Paris endeavors to entice with details of the seedy underworld of La Pigalle but is a turn-off in almost every respect.

Nutty, arcane and jaw-dropping in equal measure, this is a head-first plunge down the rabbit hole of Kubrickiana from which, for some, there is evidently no return.

With Melissa McCarthy playing a one-woman demolition team who, for 95 percent of the running time, is a genuine affront to nature, there are unavoidably some laughs here, although the gifted comic actor got more of them in less screen time in her previous films than she does in this starring role.

Upstream Colors certainly is something to see if you’re into brilliant technique, expressive editing, oblique storytelling, obscuritanist speculative fiction or discovering a significant new actress.

In trying to merge this alarmist theme with an old-fashioned murder mystery, the filmmakers throw at least one plot-twist sucker-punch too many, leaving the viewer with an “Oh, come on” reaction to the entire film.

Would have made for a fine film noir 60 years ago but feels rather contrived and unbelievable in the setting of contemporary New York.

Mama represents a throwback and a modest delight for people who like a good scare but prefer not to be terrorized or grossed out.

Not the worst but is very far from the best film the star has made in his career.

Made up of synthetics rather than whole cloth, this lurid concoction superficially gets by thanks to a strong cast and jazzy period detail, but its cartoonish contrivances fail to convince and lack any of the depth, feeling or atmosphere of genre stand-bearers like "L.A. Confidential."

This is one hot, provocative, revelatory and astonishing documentary, one sure to provoke enthralled interest and controversy wherever it is shown worldwide.

A creakily old-fashioned comedy that forgot to pack the laughs along with the nudging and kvetching.

Only Tarantino could come up with such a wild cross-cultural mash, a smorgasbord of ingredients stemming from spaghetti Westerns, German legend, historical slavery, modern rap music, proto-Ku Klux Klan fashion, an assembly of '60s and '70s character actors and a leading couple meant to be the distant forebears of blaxploitation hero John Shaft and make it not only digestible but actually pretty delicious.

Tom Cruise is in fine form as mysterious tough guy Jack Reacher finally reaches the big screen.

Promised Land presents its environmental concerns in a clear, upfront manner but hits some narrative and character bumps in the second half that weaken the impact of this fundamentally gentle, sympathetic work.

As the enduring success of this property has shown, there are large, emotionally susceptible segments of the population ready to swallow this sort of thing, but that doesn't mean it's good.

Stewart, selected for Marylou five years ago on the basis of her striking debut in "Into the Wild," is perfect in the role, takes off her clothes more than once and nearly always seems to be breaking a sweat, which kicks the sexiness quotient up high.

A purist's delight, something the millions of die-hard fans of his Lord of the Rings trilogy will gorge upon. In pure movie terms, however, it's also a bit of a slog, with an inordinate amount of exposition and lack of strong forward movement...There are elements in this new film that are as spectacular as much of the Rings trilogy was, but there is much that is flat-footed and tedious as well, especially in the early going.

Even with all its ups and downs, there are more than enough bawdy laughs and truthful emotional moments to put this over as a mainstream audience pleaser during a holiday season short on good comedies.

The comedy just isn't that funny and the enterprise never finds an exact tone.