Tom Russo

The result is sometimes charming and always visually astonishing.

Keener’s performance keeps the film grounded even as blunt scenes of the opposing camp’s machinations flirt with soap opera villainy.

At least a plot point about “secret formula” is sort of clever. The rest comes across as gibberish.

Its animal spin on unlikely-buddies interplay is amusing enough, but hardly as inspired as the teaser promised.

The stylishly crafted film mostly succeeds in its engaging (and tagline-ready) ambition to chronicle “how mankind discovered man’s best friend,” even if its naturalistic strengths are swapped out for an exaggeratedly epic tone in the later going.

Ultimately, cast and crew conjure up horror that’s more efficient than terrifying.

You’ll just have to look to your own effects-jazzed inner child to find a kid who’s relatable here.

Tricky territory to navigate, but it ultimately lends some genuine poignancy to the story’s familiar accidental-family themes. If there’s someplace Roth makes a mark, it’s here.

At an hour and a half, the action in Free Birds gets stretched thin. It’s Thanksgiving fare, sure, but it only partly satisfies our hankering.

Some of the exotic landscape the group trailblazes looks imported from “Avatar” — happily, bringing that immersively dimensionalized, eye-catching quality along with it.

You can picture the DreamWorks corporate confab: "OK, the kids respond to move-it, move-it repetition - give us something else repetitive, and let's get herding." It wasn't just desperate, it was insulting.

Consistently intriguing as all the lit-process tidbits are, the film struggles to mesh footnotes and somber notes.

This does seem to leave room for bigger, bolder, more momentous adventures down the line.

Macdonald knows plenty about crafting something evocative from unscripted material.

Thor’s bloodsport detour diverts an inordinate amount of the filmmakers’ attention, and ours, from the whole end-of-days buildup. Hopkins gets short shrift, as does Idris Elba’s returning interdimensional gatekeeper, Heimdall.

The film comes across as an irksome contrivance. What’s meant to communicate the mysterious, even taboo allure of playing chameleon instead just leaves us scoffing.

William Friedkin directs the adaptation of Matt Crowley's off-Broadway play about a group of gay men in Manhattan speaking increasingly frankly as a birthday party wears on. Sufficiently effective that you wonder what Friedkin was thinking with Cruising. [09 Nov 2008, p.N16]

The film is surprisingly light on conflict and definitely goes a bit heavy on period bromantic bonhomie. Even so, it’s an intriguing study of the personalities and torturous process behind some of the early 20th century’s great writing.

"Mars" needs Mom more than the filmmakers seem to realize.

The film was technically astonishing and yet brazenly simple.

It’s a sequel that sticks to more routine territory of action, angst, and dystopian gloom — mostly a sound approach, thanks to the consistent strength of franchise lead Shailene Woodley and a mix of intended and inadvertent surprises.

Writer-director Burr Steers delivers a screen mash-up that’s generally done in the right, warped spirit. It lampoons Austen cleverly enough at points, without winking any harder than needed.

An uneven spectacle that can’t sustain its solid first-half character moments. But the movie can also flash a surprising, often clever sense of legacy, and is intermittently capable of thrilling us.

One of the best things about the movie, aside from its screwily positive message, is the blithely freewheeling yet clever way that Rogen and company assemble the story’s puzzle pieces.

Why can’t the film maintain its subtler shadings throughout? It’s a puzzle.

It’s a diverting if slightly undercooked throwback that could offer more genuine intrigue, but that’s still worth it to see the cast gamely chuck out the window manners and vanity.

For all of Alita’s she-Pinocchio charm — and her Cameronian estrogen-charged badass-itude — she can’t quite carry the audience all the way across that pesky uncanny valley.

What we’re left with, then, is yet another “Terminator” far easier to appreciate for isolated bits of inspiration than for any stroke of genius it manages overall.