Ty Burr

May be the most successful forgery in the history of hate.

The movie is extremely well produced, it features two excellent lead performances, and it is dull.

"The Expendables" trotted out the concept this summer, and it was good dumb fun - a nudge-nudge wink-wink '80s movie on steroids. RED is more self-consciously wacky, more stridently in your face, and more disappointing.

This is not a well-made film but it is an enjoyable one, in part because it’s genuinely unpredictable and in part because it’s a pleasure to see one of the great stars of his era on a movie screen once more.

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

When Spartan is good, it's surprisingly gripping and fresh, and when it's bad, it's just another overcooked Hollywood paranoid thriller.

A drably directed yet terrifically affecting drama about family bonds, classic rock, and the human brain. It's sentimental, yet so honest and eccentric that it rises above schmaltz.

As Hopkins's Lecter is concerned, it's official: He's Freddy Krueger.

Director/co-writer Ariel Vromen has made a grimly passable crime drama in the sub-“GoodFellas”/“Sopranos” vein, and if you’re looking for something to order up on a slow Saturday night, it’ll do.

The best audiences for this thrilling confabulation may be younger ones: They’ll feel their minds expand with inspiration and be less inclined to deflate back to earth afterward. Somebody did something amazing back in 1862; The Aeronauts commemorates it with artifice, enthusiasm, and a smattering of the truth.

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.

The dread in Mitchell’s film never cuts to the bone, because we never really care about his characters.

"Hobbs & Shaw” is fine summer meathead entertainment, a brainless bone-cruncher with clever players, a decent script, and enough demolition derby mayhem to satisfy the yahoo lurking within the most civilized of moviegoers.

It also made me laugh harder than anything I’ve seen at the movies this year.

The actors are excellent, as are the bruising re-creations of the firefight and the uncountable injuries sustained.

Where Do We Go Now? has a heart and an anger to offset its structural fuzziness. It's refreshingly open-minded about faith, too.

For the record, Rare Birds doesn't even fly as a birder's special, since Tasseter's Sulfurious Duck is a fictional species. Now, if they'd seen a Eurasian Wigeon, then we'd be talking.

As literary desecrations go, this makes for perfectly acceptable, occasionally very enjoyable children's entertainment. You'll forget about it by Monday, though, and if they're old enough to have developed some taste, so will your kids.

I wish I could tell you that Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again is ridiculous and I hated it, but the fact is that it’s ridiculous and I loved every minute.

The movie never fully clicks.

The movie is sardonic, hip, heartfelt, surprisingly white, and for all its ensemble pleasures, it's squarely about a furiously prim young woman and how she learns to bend.

Part detective story, part coming of political age saga, and all teenage identity crisis, Captive is the first film written and directed by Gaston Biraben , who has worked steadily as a Hollywood sound editor since the early '90s. That professionalism shows in the polished filmmaking as well as an occasional tendency toward shallower melodrama than the situation deserves.

Mystery Team is a guilty pleasure - a deeply dumb movie made by pretty smart people.

The result is a genuinely cathartic night at the movies - which is one of the reasons we go to them in the first place. Art it ain't, but popcorn is rarely this skilled or seductive.

The more adventurous or open-hearted may step into this film and find a kind of translucent everyday poetry.

In any event, Pugh uses her expressive eyes and ardent, intelligent sensibilities to paint a touching if underdeveloped portrait of an artist desperate to leave her mark before being rushed too soon from the show.

Aided by Simon Beaufils’s luxuriant wide-screen photography and Laurent Sénéchal’s alternately swooning and plinking suspense music, “Sibyl” is a vacation for the senses and a gathering headache for the brain. The screenplay, by Triet and Arthur Harari (David H. Pickering supplied the English-language dialogue spoken on the island’s film set), piles a lot on the unstable heroine’s plate and then adds even more.

Not all of it works - and not all of it works the way the target audience of jacked-up young males might want it to - but the movie is hugely provocative fun, and I'm pretty sure that's on purpose.

For smart kids between the ages of 8 and 12, the movie hits the sweet spot with a satisfying cosmic bang. It's a cross between "A Wrinkle in Time" and a middle-school version of "Close Encounters of the Third Kind."

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.

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

Jackson has marched the modern fantasy-action epic into a thundering blind alley; the movie exhausts your senses without ever engaging your imagination.

A paranoid male fantasy about cheating, with surface similarities to Hollywood movies like ''Fatal Attraction" and ''Unfaithful." This one's Italian, though, and its attitude toward adultery is more European.

All is True is expertly acted and handsomely filmed but suffers from an excess of sentimentality, a rash of revelations, and a surfeit of subtext, with characters blurting out the hidden motives for their behavior instead of simply behaving them. I imagine Shakespeare himself might be simultaneously tickled and appalled.

The performances are excellent, but it’s the direction that lifts the movie up and spins it around. Like Hitchcock, Park storyboards everything ahead of time, and while that level of control might seem claustrophobic in theory, it ends up freeing Stoker to sail into zones of malevolent visual sensuality.

Godzilla vs. Kong has speed, wit, and a refreshing refusal to take itself very seriously.

That J. Edgar never ultimately convinces - that at times it's quite entertainingly bad - can be blamed on both an unfocused script and the project's very bigness. Somewhere in this ambitious, meticulously produced epic is a small love story struggling to get out.

Carell's performance is enjoyable but safe, and while he and Knightley play well enough together, there's no genuine chemistry - no zap to convince us these two deserve to be the last lovers on Earth.

Throughout, Firth compellingly plays a man struggling to make sense of the ordeal that his life has become. Too often, though, you can feel the movie struggling right along with him.

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).

Helmed by James Madigan, a second-unit director moving up to the big chair, from a screenplay by Brooks McLaren and D.J. Cotrona, “Fight or Flight” is high-spirited junk, too full of itself at times but mostly content to work out every last variation on a theme: How do you kill someone on an airplane?

The film captures how the constant turnover of students keeps educators poised between loss and rebirth, fuddy-duddyism and eternal kiddishness. That balance is there, most pleasurably, in Dreyfuss’ performance. The wonders of makeup and hairpieces have taken 20 years off his age, and his acting feels 20 years younger, too. He has an edgy vigor here that recalls his ebullient star turns of the late ’70s.

Watchable, illuminating, and ultimately unmemorable — inspiring without being inspired.

Ice Age: The Meltdown is pure sequel product that should make children and undemanding grown-ups happy even as it lacks anything resembling storytelling inspiration.

Its quirks are exactly what make Signs interesting, entertaining, and good.

“Baby” is to Helen Fielding’s original 1996 novel and its 2001 movie adaptation what “Sex and the City 2” was to the HBO series — a cause not for celebration but overdue burial.

Elvis & Nixon strains itself to bring the title duo together and then relaxes — finally — while Spacey and Shannon perform the actor’s equivalent of a waltz.

Savages is Oliver Stone's strongest work in years - a stylish, violent, hallucinatory thriller with both a mean streak and a devilish sense of humor.

Run the game, bow to the movies that did it better and before, keep the dialogue on the line between hard-boiled and hokey, and throw one last curveball before the lights come up. It's a con in itself, but the reward's in the playing.

''Bonjour" is especially lucky in having Shlomi Bar-Dayan, the 16-year-old misfit of the title, played by a young actor named Oshri Cohen, who's able to convey the impossibility of ever making sense of the world with a single bruised gaze.

Believability takes a back seat here, obviously, and the special effects are so over-the-top bloody as to be more comical than scary; unlike In the Earth, a much slicker British horror film opening in theaters this week, Jakob’s Wife proudly embraces its inherent B-ness. But it’s the star who makes this a low-down hoot while rooting it in some tart and deserved observations about the battle of the sexes.

Jurassic World is a roadworthy retread, a summer blockbuster that has more than its share of absurdities and bald patches but gets by anyway because dinosaurs.

The carnage is cartoonishly graphic, but the onlookers watching through binoculars from a nearby sandy bluff are impressed.

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.

A stylish, watchable, very familiar future-cop action thriller. What was once original is now almost completely derivative.

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

It speaks to a cultural sisterhood that knows exactly what Paola Cortellesi is talking about. But some things get lost in translation, and this lovingly crafted work of neorealist cosplay is one of them.

Heights breathes, is briefly and immediately present, and is over. In this summer of noisy steroid cinema, such small favors are welcome.

De Armas simply doesn’t have a purchase on the cultural affection that Reeves has built over four decades of stardom, and that lack keeps “Ballerina” firmly in the minor leagues for about two-thirds of its running time.

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.

Co-directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman cut their teeth on 2010's glib social-media mystery "Catfish,'' and since they're clever boys, they make the most of the series' new toy. Otherwise, Paranormal Activity 3 is almost identical to, and just as eerily effective as, the first two films in its alternation of cheesy "boo!'' tactics and genuine scares.

Maybe writer-director Adam Brooks has made a fluffy Woody Allen pastiche here, but it's arguably more pleasing than anything Allen himself has done lately.

If the Marvel/Disney comic-book movies tend toward the chromium brio of the “Avengers” series, the DC superhero movies purveyed by Warner Bros. have taken their cue over the years from the 1986 revisionist graphic novel “The Dark Knight Returns,” and they are very dark indeed. Joker is the culmination of that approach, a slab of self-important pop-culture masonry whose only bright spot is the figure dancing brilliantly along its top.

The movie has a problem, too: Spall is likable, Kazan is adorable, Driver is amusing enough as the blowhard best friend, and Radcliffe as Wallace is . . . a passive-aggressive lump.

Just rent the kid ''National Velvet" when you get home. That movie's proof you don't need a true story to be inspired.

In the end, the movie's just the kind of enjoyably empty-headed fluff it celebrates and mocks. It sits up, it begs, eventually it plays dead, and still you want to pat it on the head. It's a good dog.

It wouldn’t be Thanksgiving without a turkey, and in Old Dogs, we have the season’s blue-ribbon gobbler.

George Nolfi directs with a TV-movie straightforwardness and at two hours the film is overlong, but the story is an eye-opener and the central performances are terrific.

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.

Her chattiness here is unexpected and disarming, and if the film's overindulgent, it puts you in a forgiving mood. How often do we get to hear a lioness speak?

Too raw to be entertaining, too entertaining to be dismissed, it’s one of the weirder mainstream releases to come along in some time.

As history it's bunk; as inappropriate historical fiction, it's awfully close to comedy.

To press the point, there is absolutely no need for a fourth Pirates of the Caribbean.

A documentary that falls somewhere between overlong and compelling as it follows the 39th president on his controversial book tour.

All the cinematic huffing and puffing only calls attention to the paradox on which this movie is built: It’s a portrait of a woman who’s not particularly interested in being seen other than to prod the world to value other women as much as they value men — culturally, politically, and financially.

The star is so engaging and her story so compelling that this well-edited profile easily hangs together.

The director’s first real misfire, a meditation on love and lost paradise that starts with breathtaking assurance and slowly crumbles into self-parody.

James has the forward drive of a trash-compacted Ralph Kramden with some of Ed Norton's random gentility and, here at least, he has a knack for fine-tuned physical comedy that gets you laughing even when the script's not there.

So, no, August: Osage County isn’t all that original, and sometimes it’s just a lot of yelling. But it does rouse itself to a powerful fury every so often, and Letts knows an audience’s dirty little secret: We love the bloodlust of a family feeding on itself.

The Mist doesn't provoke further thought; it provokes active annoyance at being punished in the service of a pulp morality tale with pretensions.

A perfectly enjoyable star vehicle that does exactly what it sets out to do. [7 May 1999, p.66]

All writers are entitled to tell the story of their own war, whether it's on the battlefield, in their head, or -- as is usually the case -- somewhere in between. Like it or not, Anthony Swofford did just that. Mendes, by contrast, tells the story of a Hollywood war, and it's simply not the news we can use.

It exists for no other reason than that people like Matt Damon, they like him as this character, and the producers know audiences are willing to see more of him.

Does have the enclosed, slightly overheated feel of a family theatrical.

The result is insanely good, and the best time I've had at the movies in ages.

Writer-director Richard Curtis (“Love Actually’’) has made a party, not a movie, and if the party goes on much too long, at least the guests are great company and the host’s taste in music is impeccable.

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

In its sneaky, cheeky way, Defamation is a mitzvah, an act of kindness.

The script is by first-timer Randy Brown, but it feels as if it were spit out by one of the assistant GM's computers, so regular are its beats and revelations.

Hard Candy is the rare movie that may be worthiest for the arguments you'll have after it's over.

Depressingly predictable in its dialogue and dramatic beats, Defiance is most interesting as a study of unlikely leaders.

There’s a line between enjoyably stupid and stupid-stupid, and Nerve sails over it right around the halfway mark.

Among other things, An American Pickle is very, very Jewish, and a scene toward the end revolves around Ben finally joining a minyan to say the Mourner’s Kaddish. Better they should have said it for the movie.

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.

When the new movie wings it, it sputters but clears the runway. When it sticks to the script, it crashes and burns.

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.

Inventive and enjoyable but ultimately shallow.

Stylish and only superficially superficial, Happily Ever After plunks us down with three male friends as they dance on the edge of their 40s.

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.

The movie rarely takes the easy way out of a scene, and the observational details can be rich.

That’s already more laughs than a month of Saturday Night Lives.

The Midnight Sky is handsome to look at and, in its early scenes, quite engrossing. But it’s an oddly structured affair and, in the end, the director can’t keep it on course.

A movie called Snakes on a Plane had better be one of two things: So bad it's good or so good it's great. Darned if it isn't a little bit of both.

iIf you can ignore a ridiculously overbearing soundtrack - a big if - the film's a pleasant bauble. Still, those coming in cold may be forgiven for thinking they've wandered into "Atonement" remade as a farce.

Should be seen: It's a worthy ordeal, with flaws that, ironically, make grist for later arguments.

A hardly fair, not especially balanced broadside that has the advantage of being correct.

You realize the movie isn’t nearly as clever as it looks.

There’s no question this exuberantly directed coming-of-age tale — a peppy slapstick drama, if you can get your brain around that — is a sight to see. Whether you want to see it is something you may not be able to decide until halfway through.

Wicked Little Letters manages the paradoxical trick of being both broadly played and finely acted, the first due to a director intent on underlining every action with a heavy Sharpie and the second to a cast that colors in the outlines of their characters with finesse, depth and life.

So appallingly slipshod in all the usual departments is this sequel to the engaging martial-arts comedy Western ''Shanghai Noon'' that you're tempted to cite its makers for contempt.

The latest and most creatively unhinged film from director Takashi Miike.

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.

As always, it’s a good idea to do your homework before or after seeing an Oliver Stone movie. You may come out convinced of his point of view and still feel hustled by how he got you there.

Greeson writes dialogue that’s shallow but clever; and under Nisha Ganatra’s direction, The High Note tells a brisk, improbable tale.

Henry Johnson is unusual for Mamet in that it focuses on the prey. It’s also as close as a movie can get to a filmed play without including your dinner and a ride home.

The movie is both stunning on the level of visual pageantry and curiously inert as cinema.

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.

The downside is that "The Hobbit" no longer looks like a movie at all. It looks like a video.

It’s a movie made for the kind of audiences who feel that movies aren’t made for them anymore — you know who you are. If you go, you might want to bring a raincoat.

The film casts Annette Bening as the vain, aging stage actress Irina Arkadina, Saoirse Ronan as the naive country beauty Nina, and Elisabeth Moss as bitter Masha, dressed in black “in mourning for my life.” Those are three excellent reasons to see the movie, and the filmmaking fights them almost every step of the way.

City of Ember lacks the vision and scope of "WALL-E," but it's based on a pretty good kids' book and it makes a pretty good "Twilight Zone" episode, with hope dangling at the end rather than one of Rod Serling's cosmic black jokes.

High-concept, low-budget, proudly set-bound, Hotel Artemis shouldn’t work at all. Somehow, miraculously, it does.

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.

An attempt to turn the 2005 nonfiction bestseller into a high-energy docu-romp, Freakonomics is a misconceived botch.

A sweet-natured, terribly unthreatening drama about redemption and renewal, and it may matter more to the man who made it than the audiences who see it.

We’ve been here before and many, many times, and Monday, newly available on demand, doesn’t give us enough reason to be here again.

Everything Is Illuminated hasn't been adapted so much as gutted, stuffed, and mounted.

So few Hollywood movies go here that this one's oddly welcome, even in its most turgid moments, of which there are many.

With The Invention of Lying, the British comic actor Ricky Gervais has come up with a wickedly funny idea for a movie - and then purged the wickedness right out of it.

For all the film's flaws, it has a caustic, nondenominational view of apocalypses to come.

Stark eye candy of the first order, the film is saddled with the oldest story this side of "Blade Runner." Still, comic-book fanboys and graphic designers with time to kill should feel no shame in checking this one out.

Jarecki's not remotely in Scorsese's league yet, but he knows New York and he has seen the dark soul of man. Maybe next time he won't blink.

Crank is an efficient, witty, junkyard dog of an action movie for its first hour. Unfortunately, the script runs out of gas before the hero does. While it's cooking, though, it's violently preposterous fun.

To paraphrase the old ad for Levy's rye bread, you don't have to be Jewish to love "Keeping Up With the Steins," but it helps.

It's assured and neatly crafted - the time zips by while you're watching it.

Trishna should move the soul and engage the tear-ducts, yet it passes by as distant as it is lovely. And the blame must fall on the movie's star, Freida Pinto.

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.

All these segments are well made and engaging, but their lack of interconnectedness reduces The Laundromat to a sketch comedy, and random guest appearances by actors like Sharon Stone (as a Vegas real estate saleswoman) and David Schwimmer (as a small-time lawyer) only add to the scattergun atmosphere.

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.

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.

I regret to report that Spinal Tap has become Dad Rock.

For a holding maneuver, Thor itself turns out to be diverting enough - not close to a sharp-edged romp like "Iron Man" but not the B-movie roadshow some of us were expecting.

It's a genre film - the action is fierce and nonstop - with a brooding undercurrent of unease that aims for the complexities of John le Carre.

Ball's trying to be honest about adolescent coming of age, but since he's dishonest about everything else, the movie collapses in on itself.

An elegantly made, almost unbearably depressing tale of WWII-era deprivation and survival.

Tidily arranges its raw feelings about fathering and manhood into a decent, intelligent melodrama meant to soothe audiences and provoke no one.

The movie plays like a global-political farce made by people who’ve never left the Upper West Side.

A tart, eager-to-please screenplay by first-time director Natalie Krinsky and a cast skilled at verbal badminton hook a viewer from the start, and “Gallery” especially stands as a welcome showcase for Geraldine Viswanathan.

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

A meticulously observed, rapturously directed account of World War III and its aftermath as seen from the point of view of a spoiled young woman. The movie’s pretty fascinating before it goes bonkers.

A cheerfully rambling documentary that's much more thought-provoking than the sum of its parts.

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

As the title character in Albert Nobbs, Glenn Close skulks through Edwardian-era Dublin like a eunuch on a stealth mission.

Benton has laid bare a great author's creaky plotting only to deliver a melodrama with bookish pretensions.

In general, the more young people who see the film, the more who will be made aware of a fascinating, complicated near-relative whose numbers are dwindling rapidly.

Very like a gummy bear, Teen Spirit gives you a nice little sugar rush until the lights come up and you realize you’re still hungry. Part of the problem is the script, which includes lines of dialogue so generic it’s as if Minghella is daring himself to squeeze a drop more juice out of them.

This is a genre with especially sturdy bones, and when Southpaw connects, which is more often than you might expect, you feel it down to your toes.

The immediate problem with making a movie based on Potter's life is that it doesn't seem to have been very interesting.

Antic, cute, scattershot, it's a remarkable-looking but terribly uncertain bit of CGI fluff, with its richest humor off to the sides of the action and a whole lot of average in the middle.

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.

If you're young, the film may intoxicate you. If you're older, it may make you relieved you're no longer young.

It's an actor's film, all right -- peppered with rich supporting performances but unconvincing in the telling.

It has a naive, heartfelt selfishness that may offend some viewers, and a resolve that others will find intensely soothing. ''Dying's not as easy as it looks,'' cautions Ann's doctor (Julian Richings), but here it's as easy as a movie can make it.

What this dystopia doesn't do is shock. In truth, Code 46 traffics in notions of speculative social fiction that are so familiar by now as to feel disconcertingly normal.

It’s an unexpectedly charming diversion — a studio film turned inside out, with the stars sent out to pasture and the worker bees front and center.

Some things remain a mystery. If we were a little bit better as people, this decent, clear-eyed movie hints, they might not.

For a harmless "Indiana Jones" knock-off, Journey to the Center of the Earth has an awful lot riding on it.

I could pile on the cooking metaphors until you cried "uncle," but the fact remains that there's a very good movie in here that its makers have failed to bring off.

The film is low budget but puffed with self-importance, and it offers proof that Hollywood filmmakers should probably steer clear of topics that actually matter.

Just feels like it was made from the pieces of every fantasy-action movie ever made.

The movie is congenial, self-effacing, and reasonably dull, and since it promises an inside look at 30 years of being a Rolling Stone, that has to be considered a disappointment. On the other hand, Oliver Murray’s film about the life and times of Bill Wyman offers proof that even average blokes can be rock stars, and maybe more of them than we think.

For all its unforgivable blandness, "High School Musical" opens young audiences to the charms of this most transporting of movie genres.

A quieter, less melodramatic piece of work than last year's "Crash," and arguably a better one.

An acrid family affair that has been aggressively over-directed by the talented Oren Moverman (“The Messenger”) and brought to intermittent life by a very good cast.

A good-natured but terminally mild British mockumentary.

Morning Glory is itself a work of extreme fluff, a lightweight bauble about the morning-show wars that floats on the updrafts of character comedy until it charmingly self-destructs in the final act.

It very much wants to be "Garden State" five years down the line.

The movie is Hawke’s fourth and best feature as a director; it’s immensely touching, and only deceptively shapeless.

Even the gunplay, of which there is plenty, feels secondhand.

Harvey is so thin it barely registers as a movie, yet these two actors - British apples and American oranges in their respective approaches to character - almost miraculously weave something memorable out of nothing much.

I say kill off everybody else and bring back Farrell for the sequel.

LeBeouf may yet mature into an American James McAvoy — a charismatically spineless leading man — but Sarandon and her character have him and his character for lunch.

It's a charming disappointment that retains the elements that make the writer's novels so good without ever bending them into cinematic shape.

The movie looks great and sounds better, and its status as a pioneering work of cinematic eye candy seems secure. For one thing, it's hard to imagine ''Moulin Rouge'' without it. As a movie about recognizable human beings, however, One From the Heart remains a failure.

In the end, the problem with movies like Dark Blue is that they willfully ignore the systemic, historical, cultural, and class causes of racism in favor of pinning it all on a few bad apples. Sure, that's entertainment. It's also a lie.

Here's a film made by grown-ups for grown-ups, on grown-up themes of statelessness and belonging. Yet you could show it to a 6-year-old and have him or her understand all the nuances of plot and characterization.

The problem with Flash of Genius isn't that the subject is dull but that the movie is.

A very good drama about the difficulties of being young, black, and gay. With a bigger budget and a sharper focus, it might have been a great one.

Seems to be exactly the movie Mel Gibson wanted to make as an abiding profession of his traditionalist Catholic faith. On that score it is a success.

As a director, Cahill’s a capable and sometimes breathtaking stylist, and he accomplishes remarkable things on a modest budget, topping up the visuals with patterns, rhymes, and concordances.

What’s good about Rubberneck is also what makes it tough to watch: Karpovsky burrows under the skin of this repressed romantic nebbish until the frame seems ready to burst.

This Equalizer is a brooding, brutal origin tale, one that starts well but steadily caves into genre clichés. It’s a B-movie sheep in A-movie clothing, acceptable meathead mayhem as long as you know what you’re paying for.

It pleases me to report, then, that Downey brings his brain, his wit, and his gift for intelligent underplaying, even as he understands he has been hired to play Sherlock Holmes, action hero.

This is one of those follies that go beyond pesky, bourgeois notions of ''good'' and ''bad.''

The film squeezes out its feel-good messages like toothpaste from a tube.

The movie ends on a plaintive can’t-we-all-get-along note, but at heart it’s a Charles Bronson flick. It mashes the revenge button the real world won’t let us push.

A meat-and-potatoes action movie that manages to extract the charisma from one of our most likable sides of beef.

Mufasa at least has the grace to offer audiences a fresh story, but children and parents may find it surprisingly difficult to tell one exquisitely rendered lion from the next.

Perfume is a pitch-black period epic of squalor and enterprise.

So who am I to carp that the film trades in the amiable realism of the show for just another watered-down pop star fantasy? Heck, it beats the Olsen twins. But not by much.

The only reason to see Leaving - and it's not a bad reason at all - is for the sight of Kristin Scott Thomas in a rare happy mood.

In Fanning, Potter has found the perfect vessel, and the miracle is that the actress doesn’t even seem to be trying. She just is.

It’s handsomely filmed, well-acted, and hollower than it wants to be, with a mid-movie revelation that rearranges the moral stakes in ways that dampen the telling.

It's an inside-the-park home run -- a small, lovingly overwritten comic drama about fate, failure, and primal longing. To put it in words a Sox fan would understand, the movie hurts good.

Like Jolie's public persona, Blood and Honey is both strong and headstrong, equally invested in grit and glamour with a hazy understanding of the line separating the two.

It’s solid, well-acted, thought-provoking fare, if rarely rising to the level of inspired.

Straw has all the feels it wants and little of the art it needs. But there’s nothing to suggest Tyler Perry would have it any other way.

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.

Downey’s deftness is so miraculous, in fact, that it’s a shame Heart and Souls never really lets him cut loose.

Hobbled by its vaguely insulting comic-book version of the '60s and by a humorlessness that can only come from talented people convinced they're creating work for the ages.

An unusual story and sharp talents have been put through the Disney family-film machinery and come out flattened into formula. It’s an average movie, and that isn’t bad — just average.

It’s a watchable disappointment that leaves mostly frustration in its wake.

Does what an exploitation movie should: It gets in, it scares you silly, and it gets out, all while playing fair by the audience.

The movie looks great at least, and the cast includes such stalwarts of Italian cinema as Claudia Gerini and Pierfrancesco Favino.

Doesn't have the gonzo wit of ''Re-Animator'' or ''Evil Dead 2,'' nor is it flat-out terrifying like ''The Texas Chainsaw Massacre'' or even a zombie-come-lately like this year's ''28 Days Later.''

The result is a revenge thriller that's too taken with its own ambience to actually thrill.

Pike understands the woman she’s playing was a genius and that genius is rarely likable; her performance bristles with charismatic impatience.

Race wants so badly to get every last bit of the big picture that it dashes past the little details that actually tell a story. Like an over-trained athlete who pulls a hamstring in the big race, the movie tries to do it all and comes up short.

A straightforward and rather sane version of the events described in the book and, against all odds, a surprisingly effective movie.

The best moments in Watchmen, then, work as delirious music-videos.

Diary of a Wimpy Kid the movie returns Kinney's tale to live-action reality, and the party's over.

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.

The improvisations are a mixed bag -- Reed and Fox are surprisingly hilarious, while Roseanne is a shrieking horror show -- but the air of gentle play and a wistful sense that Brooklyn is some kind of lost Eden put this one up on the more structured "Smoke."

The movie has a pleasing skinned-knee innocence that makes you wish everything else about it wasn't so shoddy.

In a subtle but wily performance, Strang never loses sight of his character’s innate sense of resistance. By drawing his way out of the closet, Tom of Finland drew a door for others to come out as well.

Writers John W. Richardson, Chris Roach, and Ryan Engle bet that the central hook — Who’s the bad guy? How’s he doing this? — will keep us paying attention. And they’re right.

It's a smooth, compelling, almost suspenseful (more on that in a bit), and slightly hollow Hollywood period piece.

While there are moments of eldritch atmosphere and a few pro forma jolts, nothing here justifies our attention, let alone the film's inexplicable R rating.

French Exit allows Pfeiffer free rein to play, and her performance is glorious in a major key of scornful hauteur and a minor key of self-pity.

What you might call conditional whimsy, predicated on the audience overlooking so many plot implausibilities that it might get tuckered out from all the charity.

To truly appreciate Wagner & Me, a BBC documentary getting a spotty theatrical release in this country, you have to cherish the music of Richard Wagner with the same quivering intensity as host Stephen Fry.

A celebration of a time when secret agents dressed impeccably, bantered with style, and had exceptionally cool toys. That the movie is almost instantly forgettable is part of the pleasure.

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

It’s a handsomely mounted, intentionally claustrophobic film; too claustrophobic over the long haul, with relentless close-ups that constrict the galvanic emotions on display.

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

The Rum Diary has been retroactively Hunter S. Thompson-ized. And not for the better.

A multi-character melodrama about the supernatural that's affecting both in spite of and because of its flaws.

Pure bangers-and-mash realism: a spotty yet ingratiating working-class farce that suggests a Mike Leigh movie with opera buffa tendencies.

Short, suspenseful, funny, and profane, the film's a throwback to the neat little B-level thrillers the entertainment industry used to crank out by the dozen in the post- World War II era and the early days of TV.

The loosest, silliest, broadest thing the Coens have yet committed to celluloid, and that includes "Raising Arizona," one of this critic's favorites.

At its intermittent best, Troy suggests a primitive pro-wrestling smackdown with epochal consequences. At its worst, it's a throwback to the ham-fisted sword-and-sandal international coproductions of the early 1960s: "The 300 Spartans" with better sets. Barely.

Phoebe in Wonderland gradually loses its grip on tone and believability, climaxing with a show-must-go-on moment that's just plain silly. Thankfully, Barnz knows exactly where to end his film: on the face of a girl, and an actress, at the crossroads.

It does give believers and those tottering on the edge something to chew on, and it steadfastly refuses to demonize everybody else.

Low budget, self-distributed, awkwardly charming, it's the kind of midrange Hollywood entertainment that's supposed to be extinct in this modern age. It makes you want to support your local vintner and your local moviemaker.

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

Far from a classic of precision farce, but it's funnier than the trailers make it seem.

Pacino, thankfully, is on-screen enough to keep this stew on a solid low boil.

As engrossing as it is, the movie still tells only half the story: the other, nobler half.

The movie’s a shambles, alternatingly agreeable and aggravating, held together by our interest in its heroine and by Lawrence’s tremendously sympathetic performance.

Spectacular locations on the southeast coast of England and a handful of fine performances are the best that can be said for Summerland, but that’s still better than most.

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

Everyone in the film is an uninteresting grotesque.

If you have to see Monsters vs. Aliens - and if you're a parent, you will have to - make sure it's the 3-D version.

Either you'll find the man hilarious -- or he'll seem like one of those awful, tedious comedians who only THINKS he's hilarious.

When it works, W. can take your breath away. When it doesn't, you can feel Stone still working out his feelings toward the man.

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.

Actually, the movie's a better movie than the book was a book, in part because Meyer struggled to put her characters' galloping emotions into print whereas director Catherine Hardwicke just visualizes them in all their inarticulate purpleness.

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.

So spectacularly bent that it exudes a contact cough-syrup high all its own.

I wish the movie were so good that I could say you have to see it; while Smith’s performance takes on a life of its own, the movie seems locked to its talking points.

An overly muted and cautious piece of work. Watching it is like seeing a man ease out onto the limb of a tree, constantly testing its strength.

Thus the hapless hordes of college kids who went to see “Spring Breakers” hoping for a mindless good time and were appalled when the fun got spit back in their faces with candy-colored brio. That movie was and is a conceptual masterpiece, a movie specifically built to cross an audience’s wires. The Beach Bum, by contrast, isn’t close to that level.

I’m So Excited! is probably its director’s most forgettable work. But it has its trashy pleasures, and it beats an in-flight movie — the one place you can bet it will never be seen.

She (Portman) has filmed the book according to its emotional meaning to her, and that’s fine. What she hasn’t done is whip it into shape as a compelling movie.

Snyder knows how to put on a show, and Man of Steel has a massive scope that’s hard to resist... But what’s missing from this Superman saga is a sense of lightness, of pop joy.

Shockingly, the new film turns out to be very good, at times close to brilliant: a darkly detailed marvel of creative visualization that does well by Dickens and right by audiences - when it’s not trying to sell them a theme park ride.

Anne Hathaway's Jane is headstrong and clever, balanced and true.

If you can stagger around the plot holes (how'd a Brazilian cargo ship with a dead crew get to Lake Michigan?), the last 30 minutes are pure, dumb monster-movie fun.

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.

Unlike "Tree" or "2001," Cloud Atlas offers more answers than it does questions, and by the end of its nearly three-hour running time - which flies by surprisingly fast, all things considered - it feels like the most feverishly expensive late-night college bull session ever. There are glories here, but they fade in the light of day.

I don't know if I've ever seen a movie as spectacularly tone-deaf as Hyde Park on Hudson.

Old is a fiendish idea only partially realized.

Tim Burton has got his groove back.

Watching Eagle vs Shark is like sitting next to a terminally awkward first date at a restaurant. You cringe and feel protective toward the poor, sweet dweebs at the same time.

By itself, the new "Pelham" is a solid, suspenseful tale all over again, so long as it stays in the subway tunnels and airless offices of the transit department.

At its strongest cataloging the sheer sensory overkill of the festival -- the faces, the food, the many roads to bliss. Only the slightest historical information is offered and no spiritual background whatsoever.

A comedy, and for all its cliches and clumsiness, close to a great one.

An acceptable time-waster for a slow day in a movie theater or a slow night on cable. But it never makes you mad as hell, so what’s the point?

It’s content to keep things light and predictable, with the result that one of the richest song catalogs known to man is here to prop up an increasingly formulaic and far-fetched love story. Yesterday makes less sense the longer it lasts, albeit with some good bits along the way.

Wendy feels like a holding maneuver — a way for a gifted young storyteller to keep one foot in the innocence of childhood while figuring what he’s really going to do next.

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’s the best Tyler Perry movie to date - the writer/director/actor/mogul’s most confident and competent mixture of uplifting black middle-class melodrama and low-down comedy.

Because its gaze is so level and so unyielding, it stands as one of the better dramatic films made on this subject (although it's not nearly as fine as Louis Malle's "Au Revoir les Enfants."

Contains more than its share of implausibilities and absurdities.

The movie has style but increasingly little sense.

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 finest scene in Don't Come Knocking is its quietest...The movie could have used a lot more of it.

Take the kids at your peril. Mismarketing aside, Step Brothers is crudely funny, which means that sometimes it's crudely hilarious and more often it's just crude.

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.

Is “Megalopolis” the movie that Coppola has wanted to make for more than 40 years? Absolutely. Is it an unfashionable ode to optimism and the freedom to create, a vision as generous as it is crazy as it is overflowing with delirious invention? That, too.

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

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

At 40, Mastroianni is looking more and more like her father, Marcello Mastroianni. She has his eyes and that air of existential befuddlement, and she's beginning to suggest the magnificent ruin he became in his later career.

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