Ty Burr

Elsa & Fred does graze against an interesting idea: that the vitality of our youths lives on in the prison of aging bodies.

Haute Cuisine proves the limits of cinema: It’s a movie that needs Taste-o-Vision.

A sumptuous two-and-a-quarter-hour emotional epic built on one lachrymose climax after another. What little plot there is exists only to set up the next Big Cry.

Visually dazzling and dramatically trite -- it's virtuoso piffle.

It's the sort of thing you'll either find enchanting or an excellent reason to reach for the Scotch.

Breezily enjoyable for about 10 minutes, until you realize the entire movie is going to be pitched at the same exuberantly manic pace. It's like being trapped in an elevator with a performing poodle that doesn't know when to quit.

Genocide is hard to decorate with the trimmings of dark farce. The Hunting Party wants to get at political truths through audaciousness, but it keeps bumping into that problem of taste, only to back down.

Cleaner is a “Die Hard” knockoff with just enough fresh elements to make it watchable on a slow streaming night.

Watching Melancholia is like being stuck next to a brilliant depressive at a dinner party. The food is exquisite, the conversation scintillating, and the longer you sit there the more trapped you feel in another man's all-encompassing gloom.

It’s the kind of Hollywood formula product that proves why the formula’s so hard to kill: simultaneously easy to like and impossible to respect.

A textbook case of filmmakers who can't make up their minds about their characters; it's a failure of nerve disguised as dramatic ambiguity.

The result is a clattery, unfocused affair that at times is more irritating than fun.

This is no corporate project made to squeeze a few more dollars from a fading cash cow. No one else has been asking for another "Rocky," other than maybe Burt Young . No, this is a rarer beast -- an auteur sequel -- and it's so wrapped up in its maker's personal mythology and psychic needs that it becomes a hall of mirrors to which we're given a slack-jawed ringside seat.

Isn't just lame; it's neutered.

Flatters its audience by dividing the grown-up world into mean idiots and nice idiots, which might be interestingly subversive if the movie had anything on its mind. Instead, it's just a Hollywood crash course: Heist Films 101.

A comparison to Baz Luhrmann is useful: Where Taymor self-consciously aestheticizes pop vulgarity, a movie like "Moulin Rouge!" just dives right in.

The movie is largely set in a busy Paris restaurant, and, not surprisingly, the food looks terrific. You may come out hungry for poached sea bass and a little starved for drama.

This payback-revenge storyline, told mostly at night with minimal dialogue, is tense but familiar, and Bruno's quick-draw costume changes are fun to watch.

With mother!, Aronofsky throws caution to the winds and delivers his most abstract cinematic experience yet. It’s also arguably his worst.

Deeply, proudly average..."Mean Girls" it's not; a plastic butter knife has more edge. But sometimes it's nice to know your kids won't cut their fingers.

The film's case against overdevelopment needs to be, and could be, aggressive, airtight. It should play to the unconverted. Instead, The Unforeseen gives us . . . poetry.

Turns out to be rather less than the sum of its headlines.

If this is daring in theory, it's a failure in practice. Exactingly well-made, the movie is grueling and unpleasant in the extreme - that's the point - but it's also working from a specious premise, that film-school Brechtian devices can bring on mass enlightenment.

Reilly gives it his all, and he’s both very enjoyable and about as scary as a stubbed toe.

Has its moments of visual invention and self-aware humor — mostly when the hero’s trickster brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston) is around — but otherwise it’s an awkwardly plotted extravaganza.

The Mighty Macs sticks so closely to the underdog-sports-movie playbook that it's practically generic.

In short, there’s plenty of spectacle in Beauty and the Beast, which will be enough for many if not most young audiences. But there isn’t much magic, and what there is coasts on 26-year-old fumes.

Judging by the title, though, Sprecher made the movie she wanted to make, and if you're in the right damp-wool mood, you may connect with it too.

Primarily a one-man show for Darroussin, and the actor, a longtime pro in the French film industry, comes through with a scarifyingly believable portrayal.

Wants to be as shocking as its title, but it doesn't have the nerve.

With all that good will and with an abundance of source material, why does the documentary Love, Gilda feel like such a disappointment? It’s fine for casual viewers: you’ll come away reasonably satisfied if you want to catch up on the basics of Radner’s life and career while having your nostalgia gently stroked.

Will parents be able to sit through Kangaroo Jack without plunging sharp sticks into their eyes? The short answer? Yes. Barely.

The film's a minuet fetishistically repeated until either the audience or the lovers go crazy. I'd say it was a tie.

Barrels along on a diverting enough sugar high, but in the hangover that follows you may wonder where the wonder was.

The movie trades the paranoia of modern omni-cam culture for a tighter, more personal drama, and while it sticks with you, you feel the missed opportunity like a phantom leg.

The film is arriving on these shores in the wake of such successful foodie nonfictions as “Jiro Dreams of Shushi,” a 2012 art-house hit about an 85-year-old master of raw fish. Like that film, Ramen Heads reaches for the lyrical with slow-motion shots of roiling broth and soaring classical music on the soundtrack. Unlike the earlier movie, it goes so far overboard in ladling out praise that viewers might wonder if they’re being sold a bill of goods.

An earnest, extremely grueling, prodigiously crafted true-life drama that takes one of the worst natural disasters in recorded history and reduces it to a bad day at Club Med.

It’s rife with fey, unintentional camp like the scene in which a newlywed couple pledge eternal love on the deck of an ocean liner — only to move away and reveal a life preserver labeled Titanic. Cavalcade really won its Oscar because of Hollywood’s raging Anglophilia — the insecure sense that if a character says, ”Let’s all have a cup of tea!” the movie must be art.

Milo and Otis is an okay babysitter for the very, very young, but for anyone who truly loves animals it seems pretty fishy.

Weaver's randy, impatient, very funny performance is the main reason to see Imaginary Heroes.

A structural mess that turns contrived just when it should be hitting home.

It's pure plastic product from plot line to the pro forma 3-D to the tidy moral lessons - ersatz family entertainment as disposable as it is diverting. It made me want to go read a book.

ParaNorman is supposedly for kids, but it's really aimed at their snarky older brothers, and it illustrates the limits of the new family creepshows.

There's an interesting movie in here, too, about the isolation of Indian brides brought to a new country by strange new husbands and mistreated, but Provoked rarely ducks below its glossy surface to go there.

These are some of the questions raised and left on the table in the fascinating but frustratingly murky Author: The JT Leroy Story, a documentary by Jeff Feuerzeig that’s worth seeing if only to argue with the movie and with yourself.

An amiable if not especially urgent celebration of the life and work of Wayne White.

People Like Us is neither optimal nor prime.

Sarah Silverman is far and away the best part of I Smile Back, a strained entry in the Mad Housewife genre.

The new film's not only almost double the length of the original, it's four times as ambitious - a sprawling, surrealist, ultimately disturbing portrait of a society lurching uncertainly toward democracy. What's really on trial in this movie? Just the Russian soul.

The movie is almost wholly lacking in the Pixar touch — that extra oomph of wit, invention, creative craziness, darkness, depth of feeling, whatever, that makes the company’s products among the very few items manufactured for children in our sold-out popular culture to not feel like products.

Flatly filmed, drably lit, and sluggishly paced, Yes, God, Yes takes a cheeky premise and slowly lets the air out of it.

Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Time is a lovely visit to a Budapest that yields its secrets more willingly than the sad, repressed woman at the story’s center.

With Trance, story becomes just another element in Boyle’s commercial pop-Cubism, and the results are nearly fatal.

Marla Grayson is less a three-dimensional person (or even an interesting two-dimensional one) than a symptom of a sick society. And symptoms wear out their welcome pretty quickly. That shallowness renders Marla’s sexuality and stated feminism cynical rather than ironic, and it turns I Care a Lot into a lesser Coen brothers movie: No Country for Old Fogeys.

The parts, in other words, promise a brilliant whole. So why is this movie one of the signal disappointments of the year? You have to go back to the basics: Public Enemies has everything going for it except a reason and a script.

Hoffman confessed he was drawn to the role because ''this was a guy who didn't know how to feel, and I found that fascinating.'' His challenge is our frustration

This isn't a movie -- it's an author in love with the sound of her own voice.

For all the talk, there's not a lot of chess here, and the game remains stubbornly on the level of metaphor. You don't feel rooked, exactly, but by movie's end you're more than ready for the check.

Something to see and little to remember, an acrid character study undone by narrative implausibilities and its own lack of purpose.

The movie ends with a sentimental vision of unity that, admittedly, warmed this weary moviegoer's heart. If that vision was earned, I might even have melted.

Most useful and enlightening as a historical tour through the major crises of the Kennedy administration.

At its intermittent best, “Tuesday” pulls a rough and breathtaking beauty from the cataclysm. At its worst, it’s for the birds.

The Piano Lesson offers a spirited if uneven testimony to the playwright’s great gifts.

Can a vastly talented cast raise a heartfelt but banal screenplay on their own? The verdict is mixed, to put it kindly.

Climax is the first Noé film, though, to flirt with the novel sensation of boredom.

The film itself suggests a sketch video on Ferrell and McKay's "Funny or Die" website, padded out to the dimensions of a character comedy.

At best, it's unnecessary. At worst, it's vaguely insulting.

Fair Game takes one of the more shameful sub-chapters in modern US politics - and turns it into a strident, condescending Hollywood melodrama.

Watching Happiest Season is like opening the wrong present on Christmas morning: You’re a little bummed out and it’s too late to put it back in the box.

A sizable amount of national pride is on display in Ong-Bak.

As documentaries go, it's an able introduction that doesn't make its subject nearly as relevant to our current discontents as it could.

Monster House is the first horror comedy made exclusively for fourth-graders.

Genial, silly, and instantly forgettable, Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping is just another piece of product from the larger “Saturday Night Live” universe, a way for a former cast member to try to prove he’s capable of carrying a movie.

Ultimately, the problem with An American Carol is the problem with far too much political discourse in this country, left or right: It highlights the worst excesses of the opposition for the sole purpose of discrediting the vast middle.

Above all, it’s a meditation on art and creativity that’s by turns earnest, troubled, sentimental, and middlebrow. It’s a big, glossy affair that somehow feels rather small.

Real satire must be savage, and Four Lions, for all its daring, finally doesn't dare enough.

A clever and heartfelt comedy-drama that remains aloft as long as it retains its sense of humor; when the going gets serious, the dialogue turns therapeutic and heavy. Still, it’s a decent debut and an ambitious attempt to juggle tones.

Suffice to say that Shawn Levy, director of the "Cheaper by the Dozen" movies, is no Blake Edwards; for every finely tuned slapstick fillip, there's a ton of messy, family-friendly buffoonery.

Everyone in the film is an uninteresting grotesque.

Essential viewing for builders, graphic designers, visual artists, and other optically inclined folk, but it’s a bit of a slog for the uninitiated.

There’s a lot of talent here and a lot of enthusiasm; also a lot of influences that haven’t been successfully reprocessed into something convincing or fresh. It’s a mess, but a reasonably charming one.

Hot gospel singing and earnest family squabbles are all that distinguish Joyful Noise.

The gap between storytelling and story is rarely as wide as in The Last Tree, a coming-of-age drama that is rapturously shot and dramatically trite.

Time to Leave is an unintended litmus test for lovers of foreign films.

In sum, the movie’s a passable time-waster, but it might be better — for Kravitz’s filmmaking future and for us — if we just forgot the whole thing.

Here is where All Is By My Side runs into trouble. The real Etchingham has said, forcibly, that this didn’t happen — not the beating nor her subsequent attempted suicide, shown in the film.

White Hunter, Black Heart wants to show us a specific heart of darkness — a man who, by striving to kill one of nature’s grandest creatures, hoped to annihilate part of himself — but the theme gets lost in shades of gray.

It's a little short on coherence and long on comic-book sensationalism -- dig the hokey, climactic Battle of the Minds between the hero and a cadaverous Mr. Big -- but there's no denying the nightmarish pull of the film's aesthetic.

Like many of us who cherish the safe harbor of old movies, Rose and Cary mourn the fact that they don't make 'em like they used to. If they'd paused to ponder why not, they might have a better movie.

Well-mounted and expertly played, Winter in Wartime is a class act that lacks only focus and originality to raise it above the ordinary.

Largely plotless, confidently self-indulgent, and more leering toward those acting students than seems wise, Tommaso is worth a look for the Rome locations and the burnished widescreen cinematography of Peter Zeitlinger. Above all it’s a showcase for Dafoe, who continues a remarkable late-career run.

The Way Back is the first real Sad Ben film. It’s earnest and old-fashioned and sturdily made, and I wish that were enough to make it good.

Mary Poppins Returns is torn between taking audiences back to their childhoods and treating them like children. You might have a good time but don’t be surprised if you feel a little dociousaliexpeisticfragicalirupus afterward.

If you have ever loved the Downton Abbey franchise, you will most likely enjoy this one while finding it pretty weak Darjeeling.

It’s tempting to see Tigertail in the tradition of the Ingmar Bergman classic “Wild Strawberries,” with its emotionally constipated hero looking back over a lifetime of mistakes and missed connections. But the comparison only highlights Yang’s weaknesses as a first-time feature director: flat dialogue that mistakes subtext for text, glacially paced scenes that lack dramatic momentum, stolidly unimaginative camerawork, and a central character so unsympathetic that you end up siding with his ex-wife and daughter.

It's both achingly affectionate and a terrible mess.

A comparison to Carver's original story - called "Why Don't You Dance?," easily Googleable, and all of 1,600 words long - is instructive.

It's a doughty movie, stuck halfway between Masterpiece Theatre and Classics Illustrated, but, to his credit, gifted journeyman director Michael Apted understands he's playing the long game.