Walter Addiego

Throughout, Croghan knows where she wants to go, but has no fresh ideas for getting there. The characters are reasonably appealing, but the jokes are mostly weak.

This is highly skilled filmmaking, but the movie is not for everybody — the relationship involves dominance and submission, sexual games played at a high pitch. This material falls short of pornographic, but still packs plenty of erotic punch.

A bonbon, not of a full-course meal. Foodies will smack their lips over many delectable shots of victuals prepared by the film's engaging protagonist, a provincial woman chosen to cook for the president of France. As a story, though, it's insubstantial - there's conflict here, but it feels perfunctory.

There’s lots of eye candy, and the pace is fast, but somehow the movie falls short. You’re forgiven if you get the idea that “Scorch Trials” suffers from “middle movie” fatigue.

What Laika achieves is an effective mixture of hyper-real and hyper-stylized, a combination that keeps “Kubo” appealing to the eye for audiences of all ages. If the film’s plotting and dialogue had measured up, “Kubo” might have been a masterpiece.

Really doesn't pay off much.

A counterfeit of a Woo movie, even though Woo himself co-produced it.

The picture is a relentless blast of color and movement that's based on the old TV show, but boils down to a supercharged version of old-time Saturday-afternoon movie serials.

It's an interesting spectacle, but not enough to carry a movie.

So there’s talent on view here, but in service of a questionable proposition, with the whole thing tiptoeing toward the exploitative. It would be nice to see Mascaro try his hand at less volatile material.

Skillfully made and offering moments of great power, the French Canadian drama Incendies nevertheless overplays its hand, piling tragedy on tragedy until we feel browbeaten with misery.

It would be wrong to say Close’s performance in The Wife is wasted, but it certainly deserves a better movie.

Costner’s performance is mostly monotone, but Harrelson has some nice moments portraying Gault as surprisingly reflective.

An old-fashioned and family-friendly comedy.

Mainly for those who already know and like Jodorowsky’s work.

The film refuses to soft-pedal Dickinson’s heartbreaking descent into bitterness and near-misanthropy, but sometimes operates with a heavy-handedness that’s certainly at odds with her poetry.

Like Someone in Love is best suited to viewers already familiar with this extraordinary filmmaker's better work.

Miserly on food porn but not on prefab characters, it's well short of a cinematic feast.

The Dance of Reality may not succeed, but it may hold some interest to cinephiles as a relic of a kind of extravagant, overheated personal cinema that doesn't exist anymore.

There's no getting around it. Though it's not without virtues, The Loneliest Planet may try the patience of even the most dedicated lovers of art film.

Well made, but it's a talkfest that wears its stage origins on its sleeve.

His personal efforts are praiseworthy, but if glacial melting is in fact the "canary in the climate coal mine" (his words), the movie might have given us a bit less of Balog and a bit more of the startling sequences he produced.

Francis Ford Coppola's Jack has its affecting moments, but in the end illustrates the pitfalls of the "concept" movie, the kind you can boil down to a one-line hook.

The film raises significant questions about manhood and offers a few gripping sequences, but isn’t fully satisfying.

In short, a nice, predictable film unlikely to linger in the memory.

the movie comes perilously close to implicitly justifying the killing that sparked the plot - a killing, by the way, that is close to senseless.

Besides some fine dogfight sequences, it often feels threadbare, just an exercise in recycling.

Capably made but simplistic story.