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.