Ty Burr

When Dandelion is wholly inside her music — performing or composing or even idly picking out melodies while sitting beneath a city bridge — she carries her own magic hour inside her, and the refusal of the rest of the world to see it is what’s wearing her down. “Dandelion” is the story of how she gets her groove back, and only the star’s gift of presence keeps it from floating off on the breeze.

Disappointingly, Pineapple Express is less than the sum of its ingredients, even if it's still a good stupid time at the movies.

Absolutely not for feminists, lovers of period films, and anyone whose sensibilities are bruised by over-the-top stuntwork, it's a cocktail made up of three parts testosterone to one part brains.

Quartet is a sweet-tempered, rather fuddly drama about retired opera singers, and compared to a slick crowd-pleaser like "Best Exotic Marigold Hotel," with whom it shares a star and a sentimentalized view of old age, it's a mess.

Yet Crudup does good, mercurial work despite a silly surfer-dude haircut.

What has aged well in Diva is the grave beauty of that aria and the wry, painterly camera shots - you should see the new print for the colors alone - conceived by Beineix but executed by the great French cinematographer Philippe Rousselot. They're enough to tide us over and maybe convince the kids that hip date movies existed back when their parents and dinosaurs roamed the earth.

Sympathetic and a little colorless, Butler makes an effective maypole for everyone else to spin around.

There are enough indie clichés to blunt this movie’s edge.

A powerful documentary that, with a wider scope and a bit more shaping, could have been even more powerful, perhaps unbearably so. What's there is strong enough.

Rather than a suspenseful action exercise with volleys of gunfire, The Mule is more of a quixotic character picaresque, a distant relative of the recent Robert Redford farewell, “The Old Man & the Gun,” without being nearly as well written.

The filmmaking is cool, watchful, and ultimately too distanced. Outrage isn't outrageous enough, and it hurts.

An endlessly fascinating movie. If only it were a good one.

She (Tsai Chin) and she alone makes the movie worth your time. Written by Angela Cheng and Sasie Sealy and directed by Sealy, Lucky Grandma is a low-budget labor of love that’s very funny until you realize it has no idea where it’s going.

It’s just another wry New York family-dysfunction farce, with a stronger supporting cast and (slightly) better production values than Robespierre’s first film but also a propensity for playing it safe and dulling the pain just when the pain should be sharpest.

Steve McQueen’s “Blitz” is a triumph of production design; unfortunately, what it triumphs over is story.

You can bet your parrot "Pirates" will be back, even if "At World's End" hasn't the foggiest idea when to quit.

A lot of this is naughty, overproduced egghead fun, and the scenes between Eisenstein and Canedo simmer with sexual tension. But too much is never enough for Greenaway, and while the leading men give bravura performances, the supporting cast is weak — Lisa Owen as Mrs. Upton Sinclair is actively dreadful — and the film’s hyperactivity ultimately wears you down.

Where it works best is in the domestic dance of death between a husband and a wife. Linney flutters with increasingly panicky intelligence throughout the film, while Byrne sinks further into his own bulk.

In Fabric is good bizarre fun, but after a while that’s all it is.

The British actor works his gonzo Method madness with such rigorous control, though, that he’s mesmerizing to watch even when the movie around him is losing its mind.

Force of Nature lives up, down, and sideways to all those demands; it’s hardly a great film, but it keeps you watching, and only partly in disbelief.

This is frostbitten Fellini -- a film that finds fresh beauty and contentment in the wake of centuries of conquering armies. The great joke of Vodka Lemon is that the conquerors missed what was there all along.

The movie has its cheesy pleasures, and some of them are even intended. I'm just not sure whether Tom Cruise's impersonation of Axl Rose is one of them. 

Maybe The Oranges does represent a middle-age male fantasy, but Laurie lets you see its pitfalls as well as its pleasures.

The movie convinces us that the hero sees and understands Simone’s evil even as he continues to enable it — even as he allows his own life to be ruined. Dogman ends with a paroxysm of cathartic violence and an eerie echo of Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita” (also with Mastroianni).

Charming, melancholy, and, in the end, not terribly memorable.

Filmed with panache, wit, chic amorality, and an inexhaustible supply of Micro Uzi ammunition, ''Killer'' nevertheless represents a baroque dead end for the Hong Kong action genre.

As sympathetic and well-turned as it is, Nowhere Boy only gives us more mythology.

A frolic that keeps tripping over its own gorgeous feet.

This gulf between a woman's public and private faces is an intensely rich subject that Rapaport glosses over.

Essentially a dramatic reenactment of a generation's coping strategies.

The point of "the official Muslim comedy tour" is that these guys are ordinary Americans just like you and me. Unfortunately, that extends to a lot of the jokes.

In its best moments, Reign Over Me quietly says that we're our problem friends' keepers. At its worst, the movie IS a problem friend.

8- to 12-year-olds will have a good time, and you'll have a good time watching them have a good time. Otherwise, the film's an oddity.

Unbroken stirs a moviegoer by default; it’s an astounding story of human endurance that has been brought a little too safely to the screen.

Everyone here is obsessed with finding "the real thing" - the next hot actor, the next revealing paparazzi shot, the lover or the friend who'll make it all worthwhile. Everyone settles for the illusion of reality instead. It's prettier, and it doesn't hurt so much.

Stealing the movie, however, is rapper Snoop Dogg as Huggy Bear, the pimp/informant originally portrayed by Antonio Fargas on the TV show.

Produced, co-written, and directed by its star, The Birth of a Nation is very much a first film, its hesitancies disguised as bluntness, and the best things about it are Parker’s acting and his ambitions.

The movie's straightforward and ingratiating, and as pretty-boy history lessons go, it's a lot less obnoxious than "Pearl Harbor."

You’re left with another Denzel Washington performance that gets under your skin and stays there, rankling away. That’s a lot more than most movies offer — even the better ones.

Noah is equal parts ridiculous and magnificent, a showman’s folly and a madman’s epic.

The magazine changed hands a number of times before shuttering in 1989, but JJ Kramer now owns the brand and the archives and with this movie hopes to reintroduce them to a new generation. And why not? One thing about CREEM is that it always rises to the top.

Kleine's film is rambling and unfocused but mostly charming, and it steps into deeper waters almost in spite of itself.

If only the movie had the courage to be as gonzo as it wants to be!

Greenland, a solid, stolid disaster film arriving on major streaming platforms this week, posits that the sky is falling, puts manly Gerard Butler in the middle of it, and asks us to be diverted by the spectacle of civic breakdown and mass panic. Are you not entertained? Somewhat surprisingly, yes.

When a cast is assembled that is as elegantly depraved as the one in The Burnt Orange Heresy, attention must be paid. And this art-world thriller has enough burnished surfaces, glamorous locations, and dark doings to keep an audience rapt for much of the running time. Yet somehow you may end the movie feeling less full than when you began.

Siberia is a Freudian wallow made by a New York street fighter of a Fellini, and it is nothing if not authentic in its stress-fractured machismo.

It ain’t Shakespeare, or even Kurosawa. But it’s an acceptable remake of a western that itself was an acceptable remake of one of the greatest movies ever made. Enjoyable, even, until the last act proves how dull an overextended gun battle can get.

The Twentieth Century exists somewhere on the Venn diagram between midnight movie, fever dream, Turner Classics fetish object, and all-Canadian prank. Does that sound interesting? By all means. Does the movie go anywhere? Not really. Will you mind? I didn’t.

Ostensibly a road-trip farce, Chair really depicts the highway to man-child hell: The laughs come from the gulf between how mature the characters think they're being and what emotional toddlers they are.

When art-minded film directors stoop to genre-minded filmmaking, it’s generally a good idea to duck. Despite sequences that may lodge in your memory forever, Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria is no exception to this rule.

The filmmaking is shallow but assured, the star charisma thoughtful but undimmed. As for the character, I'd vote for Mike Morris. Actually, I wish I could.

A proficient, atmospheric fangfest that does nothing you haven't seen before but still does it passably well.

The most striking aspect of Mud is the air of myth and tall-tale telling that hovers lightly over the settings and characters.

A conventional New York-lonely hearts story made watchable by one element and one element only: Parker Posey.

When the cast starts clomping atop a car, their synchronized bodies joining with the booming cross-rhythms, we're sold.

A movie only a copyright lawyer could love. It strip-mines at least three Hitchcock classics - "North by Northwest," "The Wrong Man," and "The Man Who Knew Too Much" - then commits unlawful assault on Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" just for the heck of it.

A look at Morgan Neville’s 2018 documentary “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” is enough to remind a viewer how engaged Fred Rogers could be and was. By contrast, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood comes a little too close to turning him into a magical sprite. That’s a fairy tale that grown-ups may need, but something tells me the children know better.

Kendrick gives a truly bad performance here - she's a self-conscious actress playing a self-conscious person and getting her signals all mixed up - and it's unclear whether she has been hung out to dry by her director or if it's just that the character makes no sense whatsoever.

The Penguin Lessons will please the kind of audiences who like to travel the world in comfort, as those PBS ads for Viking River Cruises say, but it accidentally offers those audiences uncomfortable food for thought.

The movie stands as evidence that Benny Safdie is not just half of a stellar brother act (and a fine actor, as attested to by his Edward Teller in “Oppenheimer”) but an intriguing directing talent in his own right.

Scott’s “Exodus” is dutiful, deeply earnest, and more than a little dull.

It's a fine line between interesting characters and "Northern Exposure" quirk, but the movie mostly stays on the right side of it.

Both despite its familiarity and because of it, Nothing Like the Holidays brings it home for Christmas.

At the technical level, The Secret World of Arrietty isn't as ambitious as the studio's finest work, and the animation is stronger on texture than detail.

The longer it takes for the eldritch glop to hit the fan, in fact, the less true the movie may be to King. For better and for worse, Dreamcatcher is true to King.

If the new Wuthering Heights makes you uncomfortable, that's part of Andrea Arnold's game plan.

At a certain point, The Duchess stops attending to the topiary and becomes a women's melodrama instead.

Danny Collins leaves absolutely nothing to chance. The cast is full of sharp little turns by Melissa Benoist — the girlfriend in “Whiplash” and a future Supergirl — and Josh Peck and Katarina Cas, the latter playing Danny’s bubblehead user of a fiancée.

Here’s the thing about Disney’s “live-action” remakes of its animated classics: The new versions may be bigger, louder, and more lavish, but they’ll never be original. The thrill of first impact is gone.

It’s an occasionally plodding but rarely dull movie, and one whose stakes outweigh its impact as drama. In the end, the message is both illuminating and disturbing.

Together Together sounds like a really bad idea on paper, and for the first half-hour or so, it’s a really bad idea on screen. Yet a funny thing happens to this surrogate-pregnancy romantic comedy (I told you it was a bad idea) as it bumps along: It develops curious and unexpected pockets of feeling.

So how’s the movie already? Not terrible, not great, something of a disappointment after what feels like a geological epoch of hype.

Seven Veils doesn’t crash to Earth, but it also never quite frees itself from the notebook of its ideas to become the gripping emotional thriller it seems to want to be.

A bonbon of embarrassment comedy.

As true-story dramas about innocent men on death row go, Just Mercy is just above average. I still hope it reaches the widest audience possible. To quote a statistic cited in the film, for every nine prisoners executed in this country, one is found to have been wrongfully convicted. That’s a number to shame a nation.

There are pieces of a great movie here, but they never quite come together in a way that allows a gifted filmmaker to take flight.

Leave it to James to sum up a legendary, culture-altering talent: “She turned her lack of self-awareness into a triumph.” Both sides of that coin live on in our modern culture, and Kael’s voice fills every self-satisfied corner of the Internet. Two decades after her death, she’s still the ghost in the machine.

Preposterous, luridly entertaining.

Charming, if terribly overstuffed, vision of romantic London gridlock.

It’s a fun movie to see with a rip-roaring midnight crowd; watched on its own, it’s a little depressing. You can only shock the monkey so many times before the shock wears off.

Old is a fiendish idea only partially realized.

Inferno is the exact cinematic equivalent of an airport paperback, which is what’s fine and forgettable about it.

It takes its sweet and sour time getting there, but eventually “Sacramento” finds a satisfying seriocomic groove in the plight of men facing the prospect of fatherhood and realizing adulthood has to come along for the ride.

The plot -- it's inspired and ridiculous at the same time -- is best described as "Groundhog Day" meets "Memento."

Winter Passing plays like two indie movies trapped in one film, and Zooey Deschanel is in the better of them. Will Ferrell is in the other one.

One comes away from Interview exhausted and a little unclean, entertained by the acting equivalent of a pit bull fight but needing a hose-down. The movie confirms that in every relationship "there are winners and losers." True enough, but for the audience this one's a draw.

Rudely silly rather than transgressively shocking, Zack and Miri is the sort of bawdy but fundamentally decent farce you could take Grandma to, provided Grandma were familiar with the oeuvre of Traci Lords.

Third Person staggers well over the two-hour mark only to self-destruct in a burst of overwrought cleverness.

The most original thing about Lucky Number Slevin is that it lets Lucy Liu play a screwball heroine.

Eastwood was never much of a cinematic stylist to begin with, and this film in particular has the dull, proficient sheen of a TV movie.

Oppenheimer has made a chamber play of and for the damned, and while it never fully escapes the laboratory of ideas, it shows a daring and lethally sharp creative mind at work. More, please.

This loopy slacker horror farce is so intent on playing with your head — and time, and space, and paranoid conspiracy theories — that it doesn’t care about making sense. Which doesn’t stop the film from being a pretty good bad time.

Babel is a ziggurat of brilliant pieces built on sand. It's also this season's "Crash," a movie you know is Important because it never stops telling you so.

An inspirational sports movie, soccer subdivision, and it stops at every expected station of the cross on its road to the triumphant against-all-odds finale (in sudden-death overtime, yet). Yet it also feels appealingly handmade in a way most jock dramas don't.

Depressingly, and in keeping with the stringent rules of bad-boy shock-comedies, all the women here are bimbos, shrews, and slutburgers except for one cool chick -- Cusack’s love interest, played by Lizzy Caplan -- who acts like a guy.

Isn't for the kiddies. It probably isn't for anyone not interested in the darkest corners of the human psyche.

What's missing here is the one thing any duffer knows you need: Focus. The Greatest Game Ever Played works so hard to convince you of the truth of its title that it never settles down to address the ball.

It overuses ’80s nostalgia as shorthand for genuine emotional involvement, and it presents us with a rapturous digital wonderworld only to sternly lecture us that reality is the better value.

The director is Lee Daniels, of Precious (2009) and The Butler (2013), here evoking the historical era and its figures with verve and intelligence but unable to find a dramatic center other than his electrifying star.

More predictable than it ought to be - you can set your watch by the appearance of the mournful Nick Drake song on the soundtrack.

A watchable, unnecessary re-do that works hard but lacks the charm to really zing.

The performances are worth a look, especially since Christopher Walken so rarely gets to play a sane person.

Out of the Furnace could have been a starkly powerful human drama or a cheesy, vibrant action film. It splits the difference and ends up playing like a lesser Springsteen song.

It's an honorable attempt, but there's still no genuine need for this film to exist.

An overly constructed little thriller that squeezes a fair amount of suspense out of its far-fetched plot.

Daniel Anker's Music From the Inside Out is so intent on divining the mysteries behind the creative act that it comes up frustratingly short on specifics.

It’s a solid if not stellar crime drama, well put together, very well acted, and lacking only a genuine reason to exist.

The movie has the indulgent fondness of a gift from a son to his talented mum and aunties. But it also feels the funk, and that’s what counts.

One for the fans, even though writer-director Rodger Grossman and co-writer Michelle Baer Ghaffari labor mightily to spin it into something larger.

The filmmakers have made this for the purposes of near-term celebration rather than long-term understanding, and they’re probably judging their audience well.

The movie struggles to find its shape throughout. Jacobs favors observational moments rather than linear narrative, and that's fine, but you still sense he's drifting toward a point that never quite coheres.

Like Crazy gets the evanescence of young passion right - the way it ultimately has to burn off, leaving us standing in an unfamiliar adult world. But it never convinces us of the fire itself.

Death" builds slowly and inexorably to a comic explosion that's just too good -- too insanely, impossibly mortifying -- to spoil here. Let's just say it dwarfs everything that has come before it.

Kon-Tiki is stalwart and uplifting and there are passing moments of wonder.

Extremely watchable, even if it never goes as deep as it should.

The follow-up, Revenge of the Electric Car, arrives today and it's a lesser animal, more hopeful but also more complex and lacking the focused urgency of the original.

A manically playful revenge fantasia made from the spare parts of Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns and strapping World War II action flicks.

Voyagers shows that Burger can still move a story along with craft, pace, and skill, even if that story is, in the end, awfully predictable.

Luhrmann is working a tricky game: He's trying to come to terms with modern Australia's racist legacy while telling a ripping yarn while also making fun of ripping yarns - but not too much.

An entertainingly brutal portrait of feckless privilege and buried tragedy, hewing reasonably close to those points we know to be true and juicily provocative about what happened in rooms you and I weren’t privy to.

The movie moves, but it doesn't breathe.

The main characters may be refreshingly cliché-free, but almost everyone they meet in Beverly Hills is a stilted cartoon.

At times, Fanboys is every rowdy low-budget '80s road movie you've ever seen on Cinemax at 2 in the morning. What keeps the movie near, if not actually in, hyperdrive is its love of deep-dish geek culture and a gaggle of cameo appearances.

Astro Boy alternately soars and sputters through a story line that’s not quite sure who it’s aimed at.

A strident, contrived, surprisingly lovable Noo Yawk City family farce.

Fans of the animated wildlife adventure show will be in warthog heaven; others need not necessarily apply.

A slick, ripsnorting character drama whose artistic ambitions are consistently neutralized by its commercial imperatives, puts Downey in a box from which even he can’t escape.

The cast does good work, despite a less-than-great screenplay.

Queen and Country shows a modern sensibility in its young hero’s all-encompassing disgust with the military mind-set, but it has one foot in Britain’s old “Carry On” comedies, and a subplot in which Percy and Redmond steal the RSM’s beloved regimental clock could come straight out of the old Henry Fonda classic “Mr. Roberts.”

There’s a terrific popcorn movie in Focus — a con-game romantic comedy that bubbles along on a playful high and that keeps the audience guessing in a state of delighted suspension of disbelief. Unfortunately, that movie is over after 40 minutes, and Focus still has another hour or so to go.

Honors the power and beauty of these beasts even as it underscores the cultured savagery of the men who are crowding them out.

The World’s End is more frantic than funny, but it’s still funny enough — just — to outweigh its own silliness.

The new film is a return to form after that sagging midsection, and the coterie of Hartley admirers still paying attention will find frustrations, rewards, a few darkly intelligent laughs, and an ending that unexpectedly haunts.

Lee’s Oldboy stands on its own. It just stands a bit shorter.

The new film is a lightly poisoned amuse-bouche that’s made with tasty high-end ingredients, but at 71 minutes it leaves you hungry for more.

Like ''Blair,'' it never quite finds a way out of its own built-in dead-end.

The movie is strong and holding as long as it's shambling about in the Montauk dusk; when Dieckmann has to bring things to a resolution, Diggers turns ordinary -- sweet, but you've seen it many times before.

The mystery is why a movie so hell-bent on having fun feels so formulaic.

The film, like the tour it documents, wallops you in the face with politics.

A lot of the movie works, but enough doesn’t for Maps to the Stars to go down as a lost opportunity and one of this director’s braver missteps.

The best part of Orphan is the outstandingly lunatic plot twist that kicks in just as you're checking your watch and hoping they'll wrap things up. This development - I'd love to tell you, but you wouldn't believe me - boosts the movie into overdrive for a final 20 minutes of happy, disreputable mayhem.

A likable but cliched star-crossed romance set along the post-WWII Havana-New York jazz axis, the Spanish-made film features terrific music, passable artwork, and characters who stubbornly refuse to become more than sketches.

Irresistible is a movie of the moment. Unfortunately, that moment is 2015.

Satisfyingly, May also turns out to be lowdown genre fun, a film that nearly makes up in slacker wit and high-spirited gore what it lacks in budget and elegance.

Ultron’s goals never make much sense beyond the basic kill-the-Avengers-and-destroy-the-Earth checklist, nor does he develop as a character over the long haul. He’s just a static baddie, fun to look at and handy with a quip but ultimately as dull as unpolished chrome.

Unfrosted may be the Platonic ideal of the Netflix movie: ephemeral, edible, enjoyable, forgettable.

The catch in Gabrielle is that the audience pays as well.

See Steve McQueen’s “Shame” (2011) if you want a sense of how destructive this sickness can be to the soul. See Thanks for Sharing if you want to know what people can do about it.

Parts of the film aren’t pretty because people don’t always act in pretty ways, and the speculation that such an event might create its own hermetically sealed reality, one increasingly distorted to our eyes, is intriguing, if not especially deep. It all plays out like a “Big Brother” reality show with 5,000 participants and no Big Brother.

Audiences should feel free to lower their guard — to adjust expectations into B-movie territory. And as a B-movie, “Solo” delivers, sometimes in a way that reminds a viewer of this franchise’s roots in classic Saturday matinee adventure serials and sometimes simply as proficient, dutiful, time-passing entertainment.

The Conjuring digs up no new ground — indeed, it seems almost proud of its old school bona fides — but it plows the classic terrain with a skill that feels a lot like affection. The ghost that’s really haunting this movie is nostalgia.

As written by Park and performed by Stella and Plaza — both players with crack comic timing — the interplay between the two Elliotts is the best part of “My Old Ass.”

Watching Adoration is like juggling three tennis balls, a porcupine, and a graduate thesis, but eventually it finds a unifying theme, that of tolerance melting away racial and intergenerational hatreds.

13 (Tzameti) is an existential horror film, a violent prank, a metaphor for modern Europe, and a first-time director's startling calling card.

Legend is more than a gimmick, but not quite enough. The movie’s a testament to the Krays’ ability to get away with everything — for a while, anyway. But it’s better evidence of Tom Hardy’s ability to do just about anything.

The real struggle in The Alamo is between historic revisionism and Hollywood notions of sacrifice, and it's not much of a contest: Hollywood wins, as it did in John Wayne's sprawling, factually spurious 1960 film.

It's a lovely dream that, in the end, feels too dreamlike. The director coaxes an intentionally passive performance from his daughter Marie, so that Nannerl's eventual waking to cold patriarchal reality doesn't sting as it might.

That uncertainty -- in the professor, in the audience -- is what drives Emperor's Club to a surprisingly thought-provoking, even disturbing conclusion.

There are some good, sharp, surprising laughs in Youth in Revolt. So why does it feel so dreadfully familiar?

This Is Not Berlin is a relative rarity: a coming-of-age drama in which the student may have more maturity than the teachers.

Looks steam-cleaned, and that can't be right.

The movie’s a platypus: cute as the dickens but what the heck is it?

It’s a twisty dark comedy in the action-suspense vein, piled high with talented actors playing cretinous fools and featuring enough betrayals, mistaken identities, and narrative switchbacks to keep you pleasurably befuddled.

This is a grim, at times lurid tale with hard observations about growing up poor, Black, and male in America — about the cycles of defeat that can land multiple generations in prison — and many of the details have the sting of the rap songs that permeate the soundtrack. Elsewhere, however, All Day and a Night plays like an urban crime thriller made with more earnestness than style.

Anyone interested in Buddhism and the chance to see the high-altitude, deep-spirited landscapes of Bhutan from a movie theater seat is herewith directed to Travellers and Magicians.

It's crisp entertainment even as plot absurdities gum up the works.

James Scurlock's documentary horror show has a critical message to impart -- your credit cards are out to kill you -- and a naive, ham - handed way of imparting it.

Preposterous without being much fun about it. That's a shame: How often do you get to see Cruise play a professional assassin with Bill Clinton's hair?

Neither rare nor particularly well done. If you're looking for Danish meatballs served on dark wry, though, you could do worse.

It’s fiery. It’s big. It’s deafening. It’s dull.

If Saved! sinks into formula -- any movie with a showdown at a prom is treading a well-worn path -- you're grateful for its forgiving spirit.

An earnest drama about the futility of "rescuing" gay men back to Jesus, Save Me presents a paradox: It's an issue drama in which the most compassionately drawn character is on the other side of the issue.

And again things go bump and eventually yarrrragghhh in the night.

Despite a moving, canny incarnation of the man by Frank Langella, despite a slickly entertaining coffee-table production as only Ron Howard knows how, the movie feels cooked up.

An intelligent, often touching, sometimes pedestrian drama.

The studied impassivity of The Bling Ring feels increasingly like a dodge as the movie progresses; we sense an anger and a moralism that the director’s too cool or too wary or too close to engage.

Shiny and peppy, with some solid laughs and dandy vocal performances, but even a small child may sense how forced this movie is -- how hard it tries to be all things to all audiences.

The real villain is a cowed and lazy citizenry. Meaning all of us. Disappointingly, V for Vendetta makes this point early and moves on, at some point turning as shallow as what it protests against.

Snow Cake is dazlious, too: overly forced, a shade too whimsical, but filling a void other words and other movies haven't the nerve or errant taste to confront.

Fiennes's energy gets the film over the finish line.

The lead performers put it over, with Lewis very appealing as Ellie. She plays this small, fierce character as comfortable in her social invisibility yet increasingly exasperated by the insularity and ethnic slurs of her small town.

The Surfer feels overthought and underwritten, a cacophony that builds to an undeserved power chord of acceptance, transcendence and retribution.

Dunham has been justly praised for her determination in getting Tiny Furniture made, but the movie itself has been overpraised as a result.

Sweet, smartly acted, and charmingly old-fashioned, Flipped is a minor pleasure that will strike a lot of moviegoers - those who think no one makes movies for them anymore - as a major treat.

The problem with Semi-Pro is that it keeps forgetting it's a parody of sports movies; the final scenes are supposed to be uplifting (sort of) but they're not fooling anyone. The film's much better when it just lets the guys gas and sass each other.

At its best, “The Lost Bus” offers a testament to people’s courage, solo or in groups, when faced with nature’s deadly chaos (albeit a chaos intensified by human-caused climate change). At its worst, it reduces the biggest fire-related calamity in recent memory — 85 deaths, about $16 billion in damage and an area five times the size of San Francisco burned to the ground — to an effective but impersonal disaster movie.

A fond, uncomplicated love letter to two irrepressible good-time Charlottes.

'39 Pounds of Love is a heartwarmer that looks away from darker, deeper, and more troubling matters.

Without question, not for the children. It is, however, just the cup of rancid black-comedy eggnog for anyone fed up with holiday cheer in all its manifestations.

The movie isn't badly done, just overdone - a cozy art-house crowd-pleaser coasting on the expectations of its genre.

What Trollhunter isn't is particularly scary, but in its defense, it's not trying to be.

A stirring if somewhat ham-fisted telling of a life that needs to be known by all Americans.

Unashamed about giving its audience a good time, and the high spirits go a long way toward counterbalancing the cliches.

Inside Amelia is a sharp idea struggling to get out: How does a woman marketed to the public as a star turn herself back into a human being? And at what cost?

Five Minutes of Heaven’reduces Northern Ireland’s troubles to a gimmick, but it’s an interesting gimmick, and the two men hoisted on its petard work at vivid cross-purposes. If nothing else, the film’s worth seeing as a demonstration of opposing acting techniques.

About the only thing the title doesn’t tell you is that the movie’s a loving, sensitive exploration of S&M bondage techniques and polyamorous relationships.

What played as glorious period tomfoolery to European festival juries and discerning U S audiences in the early 1950s now just seems quaintly pleased with itself.

The film's lack of focus is almost criminal, but schadenfreude energizes Stone.

The best scenes are when Stark just cuts impatiently through the claptrap.

Even in the city’s most crowded place, Giroux makes his lovers seem like the only couple on Earth.

The movie's a genuine oddity: a Latino action drama with one foot in bullet-spitting genre flicks -- '70s blaxploitation and '80s coke-kingpin films are the primary reference points -- and the other in raggedly personal family melodrama.

Priceless is a bauble - an art-house diamond made of paste that somehow still gives you good glimmer for the money.

Since its maker is one of the least vain of Hollywood actors, it's one that is worthy of indulgence and respect.

Picking up where Joss Whedon, director of the first two “Avengers” films, left off, sibling filmmakers Anthony and Joe Russo have so many pairings and sparrings to work through that the movie is essentially a mixed martial arts extravaganza with a severely overcrowded undercard.

My Cousin Rachel is a well-turned, well-acted literary adaptation that suffers from a built-in problem: The hero is a twit.

An honest, honorable indie chamber drama that, if anything, errs on the side of caution. It benefits from a scrupulously observed performance by Kevin Bacon.

Hearts Beat Loud is gentle, funny, humane, and predictable, kept from becoming tiresome by a cast of pros that includes not only Offerman but Toni Collette as Frank’s landlady and possible love interest and a frisky Ted Danson as a philosophic stoner who owns the neighborhood watering hole.

The thing barely makes a lick of sense. Rapturous on a scene-by-scene basis and nearly incoherent when taken as a whole, the movie is idealistic and deranged, inspirational and very, very conflicted.

The Wild Robot has reduced a lot of respectable early reviewers to happy tears, and chances are that you and your children will feel the same.

Fly Me to the Moon is a crummy movie for kids, yet it still holds out the prospect of past wonders and future marvels. It's one small step for a housefly, one giant leap for 3-D.

The Accountant keeps you hanging on all the way to the looney-toon ending, well past the point where your higher brain functions have called it a night. It’s not a good movie but it’s not a bad way to kill a few hours.

One nice thing about Mila Kunis’s portrayal of a heroin addict in Rodrigo García’s Four Good Days is that the vanity’s up front, in the character and in the star’s nervy embrace of a woman who has become human wreckage.

And there you have the problem with The Zookeeper’s Wife: Dialogue and plotting that keep this inspirational, mostly true story earthbound by hitting every note with a hammer.

This is quite enjoyable as creature features go, and Bale continues to demonstrate his curious under-the-radar appeal. As for McConaughey, let's just say a star is reborn. Suddenly that whole naked-bongo-playing incident makes a lot more sense.

Voyeurism is central to the cinema and to acting, of course, and you'd better believe these women know it. Still, Casting About feels oddly disingenuous.

The resulting movie is atmospheric and compelling, and it makes an empathetic case for Borden as an intelligent, passionate woman so stifled by her father and the suffocating society he represented that she lashed out (and then some).

Flow preaches to the choir with a starry-eyed NPR eco-humanism that can set the wrong kind of person's teeth on edge.

This is an old-fashioned sports hagiography of the sort that Gary Cooper used to star in while Teresa Wright sat smiling and worried on the sidelines, and, amazingly, it engages your attention and even respect while trotting out every clubhouse cliche in the book.

Color Me Kubrick digs all sorts of devilish ironies out of this "true...ish story," and it's a fine dark farce before turning sad and, worse, monotonous. The con wears off before the movie does, but while it's in the air, "Kubrick" spins with bogus cheer.

The best scenes - the only time This Is 40 taps into genuinely messy comic anxiety - feature Brooks, who shpritzes shabby false confidence as Pete's pop, saddled with a younger wife and triplets he can't tell apart. Otherwise, the movie never quite comes to a point.

What was intended as a tart elegy for a vanished way of life becomes a valedictory to a certain kind of filmmaking: beautifully appointed, intelligently played, and civilized into inertia.

The movie's silly, predictable, and surprisingly sweet - the sort of thing you can and probably should take your mother to.

Cheerful, skittish entertainment that never takes its subject seriously enough.

As visually overstuffed as a hoarder’s apartment, the movie improves as it goes.

It seems to play as vastly different movies depending on who's looking at it.

That uncertainty is the strength of writer-director Tayarisha Poe’s debut feature and ultimately its undoing. There’s dramatic ambiguity and there’s a muddle, and you may spend the movie’s 97 minutes trying to untwine one from the other.

Monkey Man seems hellbent on establishing itself as the latest wrinkle in post-Wickian cinema: nonstop mayhem featuring an actor previously thought of as a sweetie pie.

Cantet does something that educated, upscale audiences may find exasperating in the extreme: He takes a tinderbox of racial and sexual exploitation, pours gasoline all over it, and refuses to light the match.

As an entry in the advocacy-entertainment genre, in which glamorous movie stars bring our attention to the plight of the less fortunate, Blood Diamond is superior to 2003's ridiculous "Beyond Borders" while looking strident and obvious next to last year's "The Constant Gardener."

This is one of those rare movies that genuinely likes its characters and wishes them the best; as agonizing as it can be to watch Jack fumble toward human connection, Hoffman knows the fumbling's the point.

Suicide Squad prides itself on being “dark,” but it’s really just jokey, cynical, and violent, not to mention visually ugly as sin. It’s as subversive as milk. But the cast and the pacing keep it moving.

In the end, the lure of the gimmick proves too much for Meyjes, clearly a writer-director of talent. If Max were half as audacious, it would be twice as good.

Bulging with period details and a large and busy cast, Parkland is well made and at times queasily fascinating. At others, it gives in to melodrama and the ticking off of facts.

An amusingly damning portrait of a man trying to impose his will on a world that, really, has better things to do.

It's a deceptively small film, one whose observations may continue to detonate quietly in your mind after the lights have come up.

The new movie is tart and weightless, and it entertains without leaving a mark. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but at 85 minutes, The Valet at times feels like a blueprint for a farce rather than the farce itself.

A less than inspiring documentary about extremely inspiring individuals, High Ground is worth seeing for what it shows rather than how it shows it.

Both leads are excellent; you expect as much from Vance but the surprise is the quietly charismatic Athie, who gives his role shades of geniality, ambition, frustration, and pig-headedness.

Lushly engaging, even if it covers some of the same ground as ''The Pianist'' with less artistry and more melodrama.

One thing's clear: R.J. Reynolds won't be showing Constantine at the company picnic any time soon.

Eventually it straightens out into a fast, funny, emotionally resonant story about mothers and daughters, but it takes a while to get there and it's never less than weird.

The stand-up routines — from Jackie and the pros alike — are funny and blue enough to shock a few laughs out of you, sometimes in spite of your better judgment, and the star seems once again genuinely invested in creating a character.

What keeps you interested in Demolition is accompanying Davis as he solves the mystery of himself. What keeps you checking your watch is that the character’s not terribly interesting to begin with.

This big, brawny historical drama feels more personal to its maker as both an artist and an Australian. For better and for worse, the movie’s a labor of love and of national identification.

Early in the documentary The Eyes of Orson Welles, a box is taken out of long years of archival storage at the University of Michigan and opened to reveal an entire alternate career: pages upon pages of Welles’s graphic artwork. For this, Mark Cousins’s documentary is necessary viewing. For the glutinous narrative voice-over of Cousins himself, it’s decidedly less so.

Brolin's performance is funny, masterful, confident, and more than a little unsettling. If one human being can sample another, that's what's going on here. The rest of Men in Black 3 is about as good as one could hope for from an unnecessary sequel that's a decade late to the party.

Taken as a whole, the film says, "We grieve too, but like this, and this, and this."

Maybe it's a cheap shot to call Revolutionary Road "American Beauty" without the laughs, but it gets to the heart of the problem.

A loud but proficient slab of explode-o-rama summer blockbuster nonsense, perfectly entertaining if you like that sort of thing, extremely skippable if you don't.

The new version is completely unnecessary and sloppier than it should be. It’s also still funny, partly thanks to smart casting in a few key roles and partly because farce this ironclad cannot be denied.

Ayer, who has dealt with charismatic bad boys before — he wrote the script for “Training Day” and directed the sharp police drama “End of Watch” — makes the paternal “Wardaddy” into a figure both monstrous and upstanding.

It's a bizarre, provocative story and a moving one, but it doesn't access the richer levels and themes of the film the publicity campaign obviously wants you to think of: 2006's "The Lives of Others."

The movie's amiable, impulsive, intense, and scattershot, and since those are qualities associated with Vaughn himself, in the end it's a fair representation.

Some films wear their length like an epic and some just wear you out; Army of the Dead tends increasingly toward the latter.

Just Wright is as formulaic as they come, but at its core is a surprisingly tender romantic drama.

Completely unoriginal, sure, but watchable and even likable.

A fertile example of the Studio Film Gone Berserk, where too many characters and too many story lines geometrically progress until a level of blissful absurdity is reached.

A problematic memory play, shot through with honey-colored nostalgia, that backs nervously into darker matters.

It's painless, especially if you have a small child in tow, and the Rock, bless his heart, acts like it's all new to him. The star should do more comedy - he's got quick reflexes and a face that lends itself to cartoon double takes, and he's not afraid to look completely ridiculous.

A charming, spiky period piece that might be called "Boo Radley: The Final Years."

A sequel that is noisy, fast, and pretty smart but that lacks the spark of gonzo originality that made the first movie an out-of-nowhere treat.

Dream Horse is a very nice movie, about very nice people, but nice is rarely enough, and thank goodness Toni Collette knows that.

A chilly inquest into very bad behavior, Savage Grace is presented to us like an entrée at a five-star French restaurant. It's decadence under glass.

It rockets along entertainingly enough for most of its running time - only that it's made with a self-importance the story itself doesn't warrant.

Directed in the breathless inspirational tones of an infomercial, the film's an acceptable document of a thoroughly remarkable individual.