Ty Burr

One of the funniest yet most depressing movies in Martin Scorsese’s long career — a celebration and evisceration of male savagery, financial division. It’s like “GoodFellas,” only (slightly) more legal, which is very much the point.

A transporting cinematic experience with a churl at its center, and how you feel about the movie may depend on how you feel about the churl.

While Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues is a disappointment — how could it not be? — it’s not for lack of trying. If anything, the movie tries too hard.

It’s a juggling act that Russell can’t sustain and doesn’t: The last 20 minutes feel aimless, and the movie doesn’t end so much as coast to a halt. And still you walk away giddy and full. American Hustle takes your money and makes you glad you were fleeced.

Because it’s a Hollywood movie from a major corporation looking fondly at itself, it concludes that, while art may heal our psychic wounds, craftsmanship and commerce heal them better.

Second verse, same as the first, a little bit shorter and a little less worse.

As pointedly as The Punk Singer looks at the past, the movie’s uncertain where the energy of that original moment has gone. Where are the riot-grrrls of today? Take your daughters to the movie, then ask them.

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.

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

Philomena is a tearjerker of rare honesty and craft.

It’s a movie that floods you with emotion when you least expect it.

The film is unobjectionable, sentimental, and not a little dull.

The Armstrong Lie is one for the time capsule, because it preserves for future generations a very particular modern response to scandal: confession without remorse.

Delivery Man is predictable but likable, schmaltzy but sweet.

Very few people will take in this spectacle of a society amusing itself to death, of “reality games” and the vapid media hysteria that surrounds them, and not draw a parallel to our own televised bread and circuses. At its best, “Catching Fire” is a blockbuster that bites the culture that made it.

The final questions in Pervert’s Guide to Ideology nag at us, and in a culture so built upon and so profiting by fantasies of Hollywood apocalypse, they deserve to.

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.

By the end of this sincerely calculated, always watchable movie, everything has burned away but the fury, including whatever you may think or have thought about the actor you’re looking at. That’s how good the performance is.

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

Hirschbiegel and Watts don’t have the nerve for camp. Even a scene of a rejected Diana back at Kensington, forlornly playing Bach at her piano while mascara streams down her face, is played gloomily straight.

If you don’t really understand women — or don’t even want to — it’s easier to just call them a mystery and let it go at that. For all the close-ups, that may be why Blue Is the Warmest Color never gets close enough.

That Ginsberg is played by Daniel Radcliffe might come as a shock, but the shock wears off as the movie rolls on and you realize you’re in very good hands.

12 Years a Slave is to the “peculiar institution” what “Schindler’s List” was to the Holocaust: a work that, finally, asks a mainstream audience to confront the worst of what humanity can do to itself. If there’s no Oskar Schindler here, that’s partly the point.

All Is Lost works quite brilliantly on its most basic narrative level.

The Fifth Estate is itself the response of an entrenched and corporatized information system toward something it barely comprehends. It makes a media format that has sustained us for decades — the two-hour movie — feel like a 20th-century dinosaur.

The new Carrie is a thoroughly dispiriting remake — “retread” is the appropriate word — that could have been directed by any proficient Hollywood hack.

Carlos Carlei’s Romeo and Juliet is a failure of skill.

Scott’s probably the perfect actor for this, since he’s too likably lightweight to suggest any emotion more crippling than exasperation.

Director Paul Greengrass creates an aura of urgency so compelling, so rooted in detail, that we temporarily forget what we know and hold our breaths for two-plus hours of tightening suspense.

Through luck or Huber’s eye for the odd detail, it adds up to an unexpectedly moving portrait of a maverick at twilight.

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.

When it’s time for the hot sex scene between Timberlake’s ambitious Richie Furst and Rebecca (Gemma Arterton), his boss’s luscious second-in-command, the encounter is as charmless and chemistry-free as the wooden banter that has led up to it. I’ve had dentist’s appointments that were sexier.

The movie’s an astonishingly detailed, visually painstaking state-of-the-art production that advances what the cinema can show us—even as the human story at its center feels a little thin after a while.

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

The film’s a character piece with a tightening noose of suspense, and while it has its artsy-indie-dawdly moments, it’s disturbing in ways that aren’t easy to shake. Is the movie necessary? Do we need a “John and Lee: Portrait of Two Serial Killers”? Because it shines a light, however hesitant, into the cramped, resentful mind-sets that fester in the corners of America, I’d have to say yes.

What Don Jon is, surprisingly, is honest. R-rating aside, it should be required viewing for every 15-year-old boy on the planet.

In a way, Howard has made a philosophical drama about the way men move through the world. It’s just a really, really fast drama.

You could argue that Gandolfini doesn’t have enough screen time, but what’s there is, as they say, cherce. The scenes in which Albert and Eva get to know each other are delightful miniatures of emotional intimacy, two bruised romantics amazed to find someone still on their wavelength.

Some documentaries are an embarrassment of riches. Salinger is merely an embarrassment.

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.

A startling fantasy of Muslim feminist empowerment that allows the Iranian-born actress Golshifteh Farahani to put on what amounts to a one-woman show.

As gripping as it is grueling, with performances that swing for the fences and a central mystery that seems an unresolvable tangle of knots until those knots come undone in a somewhat forced final act.

Drinking Buddies is further evidence that Wilde has more depth and ambition than mainstream Hollywood can currently handle, and it marks Swanberg as one of the subtler talents of his generation — a deceptively casual moralist whose films observe their characters without judging them yet whose conclusions are unmistakable.

The results feel a little life lesson-y but also well-earned and well-observed, and Hahn takes advantage of a rare lead role to locate both the ugliness and beauty in her character.

This is back-to-basics stuff, which turns out to be not such a bad idea.

He (Cretton) just loves this place and these people so much, he wanted to give us more of them. For that, we should be grateful.

Writer-director Liz W. Garcia depicts Leigh’s quandary with a heavy hand that gets heavier as the movie goes on, ending with one of those portentous freeze-frames that worked in “The 400 Blows” and never since.

Hess has made a classic rookie director mistake: Any spoof has to be at least as smart as the thing it’s spoofing, and this one’s twice as dumb.

It’s a secondhand vision, when all is said and done, but that doesn’t have to be a bad thing when the craft is rapturous.

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

Kick-Ass 2 is a special kind of crap: the kind smart people make for audiences they think are stupid.

A cleareyed, disarmingly tender adolescent romance that bears comparison with the best of its genre.

The Butler is a remarkable, even exhilarating movie not for its inherent Gump-itude but for the social portrait that gimmick allows.

Le Pont du Nord is not one of Rivette’s greatest works — honor goes to “Celine and Julie” or 1991’s “La Belle Noiseuse” — but it’s a useful compendium of his themes and it captures a very specific time, place, and sensibility.

Jasmine is a creation to stand with this filmmaker’s best, but Blanchett makes it better. She finds the grace notes in a disgraceful woman and leaves us stranded between horror and pity.

It’s a letdown, but this director’s still a talent to be reckoned with.

It’s an August dog-day special, in other words: a few easy laughs, one or two flashes of inspiration, and enough sentimentality to ensure that no one actually gets hurt.

The movie has style but increasingly little sense.

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

Computer Chess is deeply strange and occasionally impenetrable, yet it’s also surreally funny, with touches of science fiction that bedevil the proceedings with outré possibilities.

Writer-director Coogler could easily have turned Fruitvale Station into a work of agitprop — a film to work you into a froth of anger — but he’s after things that are harder to grasp: the measure of a man’s life and the smaller struggles, satisfactions, and injustices that can fill it.

In its exuberantly smutty way, The To Do List is a revolutionary development: a teen sex comedy where the girls get to play nasty and the boys stand around looking vaguely terrified.

One doesn’t really want to beat up on Girl Most Likely, because it means well and everyone in it appears to be having a good time. But so many things are wrong with the film, from a script that’s bright but never sharp to the editing that leaves scenes hanging flaccidly in the breeze.

Only God Forgives is the kind of remarkable disaster only a very talented director can make after he finds success and is then allowed to do whatever he wants.

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.

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.

Pacific Rim is, hands down, the blockbuster event of the summer — a titanic sci-fi action fantasy that has been invested, against all expectations, with a heart, a brain, and something approximating a soul.

A meditative and intensely beautiful documentary.

The movie’s a minor pleasure rather than a major work. But minor pleasures have their place, especially in summertime, and at its best The Way, Way Back goes down like a popsicle on a hot July day.

The greater embarrassment is that so many millions of dollars have been wasted on an entertainment that feels so smug, so pointless, and so thunderously empty.

A Hijacking tells a simple story whose ripples ultimately turn into tidal waves.

20 Feet From Stardom may possibly be the happiest time you’ll have at the movies all summer, but it comes with a heavy load of frustration. The joy...is in the sound of women singing their big, beautiful hearts out. The pain comes from the anonymity they’ve spent their lives working under and fighting against.

If you’re going to make a dopey, bawdy, foul-mouthed, predictable lady-buddy-cop movie, you might as well make it funny. And until it overstays its welcome in the final half-hour, The Heat is shamefully funny.

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.

Joss Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing is just about the sloppiest Shakespeare ever put on the screen. It may also be the most exhilarating — a profound trifle that reminds you how close Shakespeare’s comedies verge on darkness before pirouetting back into the light.

This is not a bad movie, and to small children it will be a very good one. But it is closer to average than one would wish from the company that gave us “Up,” “Wall-E,” “The Incredibles,” and “Toy Story 3."

World War Z is epically realized entertainment that feeds on our fears of apocalypse, but it’s just fast enough and smart enough — and, more importantly, human enough — to keep an audience on edge from start to finish.

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.

[A] crass, patchy, often shamelessly funny farce.

A stylish and very funny teenage coming-of-age story graced with surreal fringes and a mysteriously hushed core.

If the first two films belong with the greatest (if talkiest) movie romances of all time, the new film is richer, riskier, and more bleakly perceptive about what it takes for love to endure (or not) over the long haul.

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

Creative, colorful, and unexpectedly wise, The Painting is the latest offshore animation to show to kids burned out on computer-generated Hollywood toons.

Bahrani is brilliant at small gestures and the way they can speak volumes, but in At Any Price he’s aiming for grand tragedy, and he doesn’t yet have the knack. The pacing of the final act is uncertain; the epic sweep doesn’t arrive.

What Maisie Knew flirts with sentimentality but mostly keeps it at bay until the very end, at which point the filmmakers and we realize the kid has probably earned it.

This third go-round for the "Wolf Pack" doesn't bother to Xerox the original 2009 hit comedy, as 2011's witless "Hangover 2" did. Instead, the new movie heads in different, if utterly formulaic, directions. So it's not terrible. It's just bad.

Stories We Tell is one of those movies you watch on a screen and replay in your head for days, moving between its many levels of inquiry and touched, always, by Polley’s compassion toward her relatives in particular and people in general.

Darkly funny though it is, Sightseers has undercurrents of genuine and very British weirdness...Way down beneath the whimsy is a class rage as heartfelt as it is warped.

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.

All Abrams wants to do is give us a great ride while holding firm to our longstanding emotional investment in these characters.

Renoir may be too decorous, but it’s about decoration — the intense beauty of surfaces.

It’s a simple story, really, but Nair mucks it up with the hot-button suspense of the framing scenes: surging crowds and rooftop standoffs, panicky cellphone calls and crackling walkie-talkies.

With a minimum of melodrama and a fluid camera style that weaves restlessly in and out of the throng, Something in the Air is attentive to the users and the used in this generation of supposed equals. There’s no anger to the film, though, and what sometimes feels like passivity is really just the fond, unromantic gaze of an artist carefully considering his younger self.

It has in Leonardo DiCaprio — magnificent is the only word to describe this performance — the best movie Gatsby by far, superhuman in his charm and connections, the host of revels beyond imagining, and at his heart an insecure fraud whose hopes are pinned to a woman.

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

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

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

Pain & Gain, a jokey but fatally tone-deaf true-crime caper, plays like “Fargo” for idiots.

Watching Room 237 is like being stuck on an airplane next to a stranger hellbent on convincing you of his very detailed, very paranoid theory of the universe. Actually, it’s like being stuck on a plane full of those guys, each with a different yet compellingly insane take on reality. And the in-flight entertainment features only one movie: “The Shining.”

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

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

Disconnect is far from a bad movie. It’s just better at melodrama than drama.

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.

The ambitious new biopic about Robinson, is better written and produced than those children’s books, but it isn’t any deeper, and that’s a disappointment.

It’s a deceptively impersonal style, because Beyond the Hills seethes with astonishment and rage at a broken society marooned between the 21st century and the 16th.

Mostly it’s a footloose tour through the noise and sun of a summer metropolis and an unassumingly wise portrait of a friendship.

Poppy Hill doubtless plays most strongly to Japanese audiences — especially the musical score made up of old-timey jazz and early-’60s pop that sounds like corn syrup to Western ears — but its central conflict is gentle, unyielding, and universal. Which is to say that it turns out to be a Hayao Miyazaki movie after all.

It’s very much a film about men, their yearnings and discontents, and about the way sins tumble down from one generation to the next. It’s a bank-robber movie, too, as well as a drama about the pressures teenagers face from parents and peers. You can feel Cianfrance biting off more and more until his mouth is too full to chew.

The movie’s a funny, dark, increasingly razor-sharp inquiry into the metaphysics of modern fame — how the dream of “being seen” and thus validated on some primal level can completely unhinge the average schmo.

War Witch deals with a reality so horrific that the film’s touches of magical realism are welcome, even necessary — the only way to retain one’s bearings and sanity in a world without signposts.

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.

The Host will make perfect sense to 12-year-old girls, while their college-age sisters will probably laugh themselves sick and their mothers will look at Hurt and wonder when he got so old.

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

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

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.

Korine wants to give us a portrait of our nation’s children — the girls, especially — as beautifully depraved sharks, pleasure-seeking killers oblivious to the comedy and horror of their existence. And damned if he doesn’t pull it off, or come close enough.

The actor/walking disaster known as Charlie Sheen gives a perfectly credible performance here. It’s the rest of the film that tries your patience.

While the “Paradise Lost” films captured events as they unfolded in the heat of battle, West of Memphis has the luxury of at least partial closure.

The new film is slender, and it plays obliquely with the style of the 20th-century Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu: simple shots of simple people revealing universal truths.

You’ve seen pieces of this movie in “Psycho,” “Silence of the Lambs,” and 2004’s “Cellular.” Still, the early scenes in the Hive give The Call a needed novelty: It’s a workplace drama, and the work is responding to other people’s desperate worst-case scenarios.

The hair is funny, in part, because not much else is. “Burt Wonderstone” is a lazy, underwritten imitation Will Ferrell movie.

The arrival of Raúl Ruiz’s final work, Night Across the Street, brings the total to four, an elegant, clear-eyed bridge game of artists playing their last trump cards.

I’m not sure Lore holds up to repeated viewings — Shortland’s style is so feverish it could quickly turn precious — but it demands to be seen at least once.

No is a comedy, but of a dangerous sort. Its eyes are open and the laughs tend to stick in your throat.

Before this urban revenge melodrama falls apart in a clatter of plot absurdities and pretensions, it has its loopy charms.

Which is precisely what’s missing from Oz the Great and Powerful: that sense of emotional journey.

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.

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.

It’s about spycraft, but it goes to the source. If for no other reason, it deserves to be seen for arranging decades of events in the Middle East into a chronology that, to an outsider, makes dreadful sense.

As much as this tale of bent love runs in the ruts of its maker’s obsessions, it has an undertow that’s impossible to shake. [22 Nov. 2012]

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.

A black-and-white fever dream, and, like all dreams, its meanings are elusive. It’s opaque, maddening, often pretentious, yet the pretensions may be on purpose, to push us away from the adulterous colonials at the story’s center and reveal the Africa they’re too obsessed with each other to see.

There are two problems with A Good Day to Die Hard: It’s terribly filmed and nothing in it makes any sense.

It’s all a big, gluey metaphor for a girl’s sexual fears and raging mom conflicts, and, as in “Twilight,” the metaphor itself gets buried under mounting waves of CGI nonsense and a ridiculous back story about reincarnated Civil War lovers.

The attitude of many “UP” fans hovers between voyeurism and concern, between cherishing these people as distant friends and as extensions of ourselves. They’re canaries in the coal mine of human existence.

A sleekly clever murder mystery, the film plays as many games with the audience as it does with its characters, and for the majority of the running time — the challenge comes from matching wits with what you’re seeing.

Unfunny, predictable, and vulgar, it’s the generic equivalent of a Judd Apatow movie. As always, you get what you pay for.

We get it: Stand Up Guys is supposed to be cutesy criminal magic realism. But Stevens, an actor turned director, never finds the right vibe, and the movie's genuinely creepy misogyny sours the attempts to go sentimental in the final act.

The line between gross-out humor that's inspired and the kind that's witless is fine indeed, and Movie 43 obliterates it with poop and movie stars.

I don't know if the first zombie date flick is a step forward or backward for civilization as a whole, but I can say that Warm Bodies pulls off a pretty impressive trick: It has its "Twilight" and goofs on it too.

The results are exactly as patchwork as that sounds, with sequences of rowdy, sacrilegious invention punctuated by long spells of tedium.

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.

What happens between two people? Only the chemistry that keeps us from stumbling through the chaos by ourselves. Is that an illusion, too? Amour says it doesn't much matter. There is no dignity in life except love.

As the implausibilities and conspiracies and double-crosses pile up, Broken City paints itself into a corner. A plot can be confusing as long as the filmmakers themselves don't seem confused, but that's not the case here.

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

It's a movie made with the same coolly fanatical attention to craft the lead character displays in her work. Bigelow is now recognized as one of our true filmmaking naturals.

It's both achingly affectionate and a terrible mess.

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

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

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.

The leads save it, particularly Cotillard, who once again subverts her own glamour with ferocious lack of ego. The movie itself only occasionally matches her intensity.

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.

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

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

Neighboring Sounds unfolds like a casual nightmare in the light of day.

Wilde is stuck with the harder job of simultaneously playing sexy, innocent, conniving, and heartsore, and the effort appears to give her a headache. "This is kind of like an old movie," Liza says to Jay in one scene. Lady, don't you wish.

A bleakly comic, brutally Darwinian gangland saga that at times comes close to being this year's "Drive." It also does something that, if you're from around these parts, seems downright perverse. It takes the Boston out of George V. Higgins.

A Royal Affair is tosh but it's ripely entertaining tosh, with emotions as flamboyant as the window treatments. There is nothing like a Dane.

Reducing Life of Pi to a homily does it a disservice. Lee gives the framing story short shrift and concentrates on visualizing the inner tale with as much detail and power as possible.

The new film staggers under such a weight of self-conscious visual style that the story never connects with a viewer's emotions. Leo Tolstoy's classic novel has been filmed often, but this is the first time it takes place in a snow globe.

Orlowski does share Balog's smoldering rage at a society that refuses to face the consequences of its actions, and that rage forms the necessary spine of Chasing Ice. This is an agit-doc with no apologies and a lot of sorrow.

Tales, which (as the title suggests) is an "Arabian Nights"-style omnibus, has similarly eye-bending backgrounds but a creatively monochromatic foreground that comes to feel like a limitation.

A big, sorrowful, dramatically trite period epic about a bleak chapter in the history of modern France.

This isn't a great movie, but it is a special one. And Penn is something to see.

It makes politics exciting again.

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

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

I'm wary of implying that it's your civic duty to see The House I Live In, but - guess what - it is. And see it with someone whose views are different from your own. We're going to need everyone to help get us out of this mess.

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

The movie feels loose and unpredictable. You're never sure where Paul or the story is going, and while that makes The Big Picture unexpectedly gripping for much of its running time, the shapelessness ultimately wins out.

The achievement of this simply told, exceptionally fine film is the clarity with which it portrays the drama of a good soul in an inert body.

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.

The movie's sharp-tongued and softhearted, a Sundance kind of film that mostly sidesteps generic Sundanceyness.

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

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

All this manic invention is great fun for a while, until Tai Chi Zero falls apart on the rocks of the eternal verities: story, acting, direction.

Sensitively written, nicely shot, expertly acted, and intelligently ambiguous, Nobody Walks still manages to send you out with a shrug.

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.

Wake in Fright is a monster movie, and the monster is us.

Absurdly entertaining even after it disappears up its own hindquarters in the last act, and it gives some of our weirder actors ample room to play.

Butter dearly wants to be a hot-button social satire that plays rough with sacred cows: Midwestern power-moms, the religious right, race, sex, you name it. Mostly, it wants to be an Alexander Payne movie from the 1990s. "Citizen Ruth," say, or "Election." Instead, it's a shrill, cartoonish mess.

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

The movie, a simple yet immensely pleasurable tale of a little boy and his undead dog, is good enough on its own. If you know the back story, it's even better.

The issue is contentious, messy, prone to wishful thinking. Some see a corporate plot to privatize schools. Others see a last chance to save them. Won't Back Down is on the latter side, obviously, and it has the boilerplate urgency of a TV movie that has been blessed with a high-end cast.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower finds an unexpectedly moving freshness in the old clichés by remaining attentive to the nuances of what happens within and between unhappy teenagers.

With Looper, Johnson proves he can finesse the most complicated notions and visual setups his mind can imagine. It's the simple things that still elude him.

A sociopolitical prankumentary in which the prank blows up in the filmmaker's face, exploding-cigar style.

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.

It has a sense of drift that both vexes and beguiles.

The movie's a must for baseball fans in general and Red Sox fans in particular - if nothing else, it will help remove the battery-acid taste of the season now stumbling to a close.

Of the two French films opening in the Boston area today - "Beloved" is the other - Little White Lies is the less ambitious, more watchable, and ultimately more annoying.

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.

Shut Up is intentionally slapdash, with jumbly hand-held cameras and random bursts of feedback. But there's a beguiling sense of quiet to it, too.

Arbitrage is a breezy watch, with good performances that don't cut very deep and an eye for décor but little interest in what it's decorating. What's missing, really, is outrage, or a sense of the 99 percent.

The surface of Oslo, August 31st is as cool and crystalline as a Scandinavian lake, but at its core is a benevolence for the life we all share and tears for the man who can no longer share in it.

Chatty, neurotic, maddeningly messy, often very funny, "New York" spins in a lunatic orbit of its own.

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.

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

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

It's just another happily idiotic Will Ferrell comedy, ably directed by Jay Roach ("Meet the Parents," "Dinner for Schmucks") and tossing its bawdy jokes at the side of the barn.

The best thing that can be said about The Bourne Legacy is that Renner will survive it.

Alison Klayman's documentary is one of the most engagingly powerful movies of the year almost completely on the strength of Ai's rumpled charisma and the confusion it creates in the bureaucratic mindset of the Chinese Communist Party.

The only laugh to be had in Total Recall, a ripsnorting sci-fi action extravaganza that starts well and works its way down to average, is in the opening credits, where we learn that the movie's primary production company is called Original Film. Really?

Queen of Versailles is still worthwhile, not because it questions all-American entitlement but because it prompts us to think hard about what, exactly, we believe we're entitled to.

It's another one of those loud, penis-obsessed bro farces, lazily written (by actor Seth Rogen, among others) and haphazardly directed.

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.

Everyone is equal parts emotional victim and villain in Unforgivable, an elegantly rambling Franco-Italian affair about the ways we do each other wrong while trying to do each other right.

Nolan brings his Batman trilogy to a close with a majestic, almost completely satisfying crash. Everything feels epic about the film: the characters, the effects, the emotional stakes - even the missteps (and there are more than a few).

It's fast, lean, satisfying, and forgettable; nothing special, really, until you realize that the movies have largely lost the knack for brisk mayhem like this.

Neil Young Journeys is easily the least of the three documentaries director Jonathan Demme has made with the legendary rocker; but in its shaggy, eccentric way, it may be the truest.

A charming but terribly self-indulgent trifle that's less than the sum of its many parts.

The new movie's a visual achievement and a narrative muddle: A color-drenched story of lust, love, and infidelity, it suffers from a vagueness that may be the point but that feels accidental.

She's (Hushpuppy) trying to make sense of this world, and the movie, pitched between realism and fable, is the story of how she finally does. That balance is the key to the movie's magic.

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.

Dumbed down, tarted up, and almost shockingly uninspired, it's the worst superhero movie since "Green Lantern."

People Like Us is neither optimal nor prime.

Director Steven Soderbergh is working very near the top of his game here, and if Magic Mike tells an old, old story about a young man, his talent, his rise, and his fall - see everything from "Saturday Night Fever" to "Boogie Nights" - he brings the confidence of a born filmmaker and a cast that's sharper than their characters and ready to play.

A crass, foul-mouthed, mostly hilarious, surprisingly sentimental bromance.

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.

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.

A pox upon history and an insult to the 16th president of the United States. It's that, of course - actually, that's the point - but this joyless, deafening cinematic headache commits a different crime. It's a sin against entertainment.

The final scenes deliver a payoff worthy of the film's scrappy optimism, but that may not be the reason you walk out of the theater on a cloud. It's the sight of a character coming rapturously into her own at the same time as the actress playing her.

A well-intentioned indie that tries to be a "real" version of a Hollywood romantic comedy and ends up feeling more ersatz than ever.

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. 

Me, I'm a Johnny Rotten man, so this limp culture-clash comedy with a heart of patchouli just made me want to stab my eyeballs out.

The problem with Hysteria is that it keeps patting itself and us on the back for knowing better.

Robert Pattinson isn't all that bad in Bel Ami. He just isn't right.

A playful French meta-mystery that's occasionally too proud of its own cleverness.

Watching Prometheus is like opening a deluxe gift box from Tiffany's to find a mug from the dollar store.

The first Guy Maddin movie that feels as if it got only halfway out of the director's head and onto the screen.

Elena reveals a filmmaker in full command of his art and not much interested in catering to an audience. If you want this film, you have to meet it more than halfway.

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

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

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.

The writing is sharp and the performances bright, and if you've been through the forced gestational march known as pregnancy, there are knowing laughs to be had. If you haven't, do yourself a favor and stay away.

Black gets to play an actual character instead of a loudmouthed cartoon. The movie's bright and endearing and surprisingly lacking in a point. I wish I liked it better.

Darling Companion would be instantly forgettable if not for Keaton, who imbues Beth with a sorrow, warmth, wisdom, and rage that feel earned.

The Hunter becomes turgid with corporate conspiracies, hired assassins, and offscreen tragedies, and the appealing leanness of the early scenes gets lost.

Both provocative and muddled, the film's a moody, passive-aggressive tract that's buoyed by superior performances and sunk by its own uncertainties. An alternate title might be "The Joylessness of Sex."

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

Because its subjects are so driven and so talented, First Position, which is about ballet, is more gripping than the norm.

Tim Burton has got his groove back.

In short, This Is Not a Film is the world within an apartment, and it is quietly devastating.

It's predictable fluff, sometimes pleasantly so, at others times irritatingly.

A grimly preposterous serial-killer thriller set in 19th-century Baltimore, this riff on the final days of the author of "The Tell-Tale Heart" and other masterpieces of the macabre might qualify as literary desecration if it weren't so silly.

Five-Year Engagement alternates between realistic scenes of couples bickering and broad character farce, and the two halves mesh uneasily.

There's a quiet metaphor here: How do you teach children without touching them - their minds, their souls, their sensitivities?

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.

The Fairy may be as close as we'll ever get to a live-action cartoon.

It can't be easy to turn one of the most stirring human rights dramas of the past quarter century into stultifying screen pageantry, but director Luc Besson and writer Rebecca Frayn have managed the trick with The Lady.

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

Whenever it stays with Piccoli, though, it's mysterious and moving, struck by the humility of a man who's not up to playing God.

The movie balances nicely on the edge of meta-horror, with characters breaking free of their assigned roles (in more ways than one) and monkey-wrenching the very urban legend they're dying to get out of.

The movie never fully clicks.

Jiro Dreams of Sushi is a foodie's delight, obviously, and best seen either on a full stomach or with restaurant reservations immediately following.

The Dardennes achieve lyricism without seeming to try.

Poised at the midway point between an ultraviolent video game and a neo-classic dance musical. As midnight-movie mash-ups go, it's pretty amazing.

Hyper-stylized, funny, a crowd-pleaser.

Just a limp, jokey family film that wants to have its fairy tale magic and its hip irony, too.

"Unpredictable'' is one adjective you could use to describe the new Audrey Tautou movie, Delicacy. Others might be "charming,'' "offbeat,'' "droll.'' "Unfocused'' and "underwhelming'' also apply.

What The Hunger Games does have is a game cast, a large budget well spent, Collins on board as co-writer, and Lawrence as Katniss.

The Salt of Life is about that moment in a man or woman's life when members of the opposite sex stop seeing them, and while the mood is jauntily sensual, the undertow is fierce.

It's a solid short film stretched to Silly Putty thinness.

Ramsay delivers an overdirected, conceptually obnoxious art film that's torture to sit through, listen to, and think about.

Mostly, though, Being Flynn is memorable for the sight of a once-great actor rousing himself to a performance the movie itself isn't prepared to handle.