Wesley Morris

By the end, you don't entirely understand either of these people, but you come to understand why they need each other.

Canner is either overwhelmed by so much impressive access to so many alarming business opportunities or lacking the investigative rigor to drive home the moral problems of these drugs and the existential problems of these women.

But that ending is a whopper all the same: a heartless blast of tragedy, exploitation, amusement, and general flagrance.

Never achieves the exhilarating feat of exemplifying the types of Hollywood movies it wants to unpack.

Basically an addiction thriller in which the thirst is for the acquisition and execution of knowledge. So you need an actor who seems surprised by how smart he is but not afraid to be charmingly intelligent. Cooper turns out to be perfect for the part.

Does a lot of winking and teasing.

The good news is that the movie advertises Dolan's delirious visual talent.

Kaboom lets Araki play with carnality as opposed to cautioning against it.

This is a movie whose power comes from the alignment both of Mija's discovery with ours and of a tremendous writer and director with his star.

The characterization couldn't be more flagrant if the soundtrack creaked out an oldie by a certain ancient pop quintet: You're a candy girl.

Whether this movie works for you largely depends on whether you're willing to work for it. To which I say: Bring your gym clothes.

Drive Angry is something new for Cage - a movie that feels like it's straight FROM cable.

Hall Pass is the brothers' 10th movie, and their most gangbusters since "Me, Myself & Irene."

The movie shouldn't work, yet it does.

Neeson is much better suited to the loneliness and self-doubt of Martin's crisis than he was for the thuggery of the previous movie.

"Angélica" feels most like the film that argues Oliveira is this close to the beyond without ever bothering to knock first at death's door.

The movie usefully, carefully, and cogently argues that Bieber is more than his hair. He is his hoodies. He is his pop-hooks. He is his many handlers.

Part of the trouble is casting. This is a movie that needs a great or gonzo performer to give it depth or heft.

Seeing her (Kidman) in junk like this is a bit like watching the Queen of England eat a Taco Bell chalupa.

It's the latest in the blank-from-hell genre, in which misogyny and entertainment are made to seem indistinguishable while the blank makes life hell for someone who then is cornered into striking back.

Like most films about gay men, Undertow can't envision a normal life of couplehood. But Fuentes-Léon works in a blithe and breezy magic-realist manner that fends off attendant feelings of depression.

The movie wails in pain. And it's that sort of grand empathy that makes Iñárritu both impossible to dismiss and impossible to live with.

The movie isn't a critique of zoo life. But it's possible we have on our hands, in Nénette's captivity, a microcosm of celebrity star-gazing.

Like "Life Is Sweet," "Secrets & Lies," and yes, 1971's "Bleak Moments," to name but three of Leigh's 10 semi-improvised character studies, Another Year is another frowning comedy.

Basically, talented French director Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire has too much style on his hands. His film isn't as amorally grandiose as "City of God." Nor does it achieve the hulking tragedy of "Gomorrah."

Many of the backgrounds look like watercolors that are either drying or dying.

Howard never decides on tones that complement each other, and the dissonance is jarring.

While the words belong to the storyteller, the story in And Everything Is Going Fine appears to be telling itself.

After a while, the movie tires of the witch business and trots out a plot twist that permits the effects department to spend money. Some moviegoers might find the bait-and-switch funny.

Paltrow makes the part look natural. She's not impersonating an actual singer, so she seems merely like a twangy, alcoholic version of herself. She should be stopped from dancing in enormous arenas, but her thin voice is rather pretty.

All the movie's good style goes to waste on a not terribly compelling conceit and loosely sketched characters.

A migraine inducement that you'd think Jack Black had gotten out of his system years ago. Yet he still finds an excuse to wear a blazer and shorts and fling his bodily orb like Angus Young on Guitar Hero night at the neighborhood bar.

I can't say why Coppola wanted to spend time with this man. It's like following someone on Twitter who fails to generate many compelling tweets.

This isn't a rousing movie as much as a reassurance. The brothers (Coens) prove they can play it straight, but they're preferred, for better and worse, at a sharp angle.

Not only does the movie look like it's set somewhere, it feels, cinematically, to have arrived from someplace - early John Cassavetes, the French New Wave, Eastern Europe.

Tron: Legacy gives us a dud stud named Garrett Hedlund as Sam Flynn, the hero of this petrified sequel to 1982's "Tron." None of what he sees impresses. The feeling is mutual.

The experiment in the new movie is this: What happens when his Type A's are forced out of their comfort zones? If only Brooks had managed to leave his. How Do You Know feels like a collection of scenarios he's done better.

The bliss of Megamind is the way it pursues solutions for tired problems.

A rather pat, occasionally desperate road comedy.

Cool It arrives having been labeled the anti-"An Inconvenient Truth." It is. But not in the philistinistic way you'd expect.

The dismemberment and torture are now shtick. The filmmakers - "Saw" veterans - struggle to imbue this movie with the usual righteousness.

Waste Land is just what the film's website says it is: "stirring evidence of the transformative power of art and the alchemy of the human spirit."

The movie has a field day with thousands of airborne lanterns, a troop of Neanderthal thugs (one is a mime), some surprisingly fleet camerawork, and good editing. I can't think of a cartoon more confident about how to use jump cuts for comedy. Those senses of cleverness and innovation merely underscore how shopworn the rest of this movie is.

It's entertaining enough, like watching a celebrity workout film with a plot. But never once is it believable.

A slow and silly action-comedy romantic-thriller.

The Dawn Treader, like its predecessors, has no real struggle or drama. We're dealing with kids for whom everything comes too easily for us to care.

It's one of the funniest things I've seen in a movie, and the closest Jaglom has come to brilliant satire. It also explains why this woman is just chatting on a countertop and not Jay Leno's couch.

The performance often errs on the side of cartoon, but it's laced with flashes of remorse and chagrin, with sincerity. When Carrey tries to do "dramatic acting'' the life always goes of out him.

For a studio so clearly willing to take risks with so many of its movies, this particular movie has a whiff of exploitation. Rowling wrote one epic funeral that Warner Bros. requires us to attend twice.

Some girls fight over men. Ballerinas fight over parts. But the occasional brilliance of Black Swan is that it's a one-way fight. Nina battles herself.

A modest but extremely enjoyable movie.

The Strauses don't care about how to keep an audience. Their movie has no sense of suspense or dread - Skyline is an apocalypse movie that plods like one of Romero's zombies.

Wiseman has made several films about both disability and dance, but this new one might be his most hypnotic, rhythmically assembled observation of corporeal expression.

Gibney has too much information, too much material, and too many people to shape a mystery or a drama or even a farce out of it all. His movie has elements of all three without ever sustaining one.

It's too much too-much. The audience I saw it with didn't seem to know whether to clap when it was over or start taking Lipitor.

This native send-off is robotic enough to leave you eager to see what an artist might do with a reboot.

What Conviction lacks in characterization (the people here are monochromes - bright ones, but monochromes nonetheless) it makes up for with personality.

The film's look makes a divine accessory for its music, which Miles Davis composed. There's not even 20 minutes of it in the film, yet it still defines the atmosphere, transforming a crime yarn into a bebop noir.

When a movie about a guy who orders a sex doll off the Internet can turn vice into virtue, something miraculous has occurred. Lars and the Real Girl achieves that kind of miracle.

A depressing show of how truly, madly, deeply outmoded Hollywood can be.

Even when the movie is bad -- it's addictively so.

It would be a stretch to call The Simpsons Movie more than a crisper, livelier-looking episode of the series. The change in mediums changes nothing.

A portrait of two different men whose compulsion for Donkey Kong is hilarious.

What ought to be a bittersweet movie about a woman's momentary unraveling feels like a workout class: Cardio melodrama.

The images in The Song of Sparrows have a poetic grace that's to be desired in storytelling. You feel Majidi's hand much more than you do God's.

With relentless and ruminative deliberateness, Reygadas shows us a Mexico City that seems to be decaying from the inside out.

This pop-up book of a film is an ideal arrangement between director and star.

They have the chemistry of step-siblings, so a movie that has them make out is, as the one of the few girls in the theater exclaimed, "so gross."

At its most compulsive, this is the only action flick you'll need this summer.

What he's (Brooks) come up with is one of the most humane works ever made about the lives of working mothers.

A movie drunk on its very existence, one that misses more frequently than it hits and couldn't care less.

The movie's primary narrative weakness is that its racism plot points seem ripped from the headlines of a "Geraldo" newsletter and stretched into a string of terribly executed car chases.

As cosmetically sanitized revisions of history go: This is as good as it gets.

Mostly, Smart People is a failure of imagination.

The movie will please those looking for easy physical comedy.

Little Nicky is but a meek gross-out cousin of "The Waterboy."

There's something wrong with this picture, and the problem is there on Smith's face -- Smith looks distressingly I-was-an-Oscar-nominee bored. That goes double for Jones.

An army of rolled abs and their owners give the state of American race relations a beginner's workout.

Things stay standard-issue French self-analytical from here.

Waist Deep is a cynical excuse for the writer and director (and talented actor) Vondie Curtis-Hall to sock some money away for the kids' college tuition. It's as if he watched "Get Rich or Die Tryin' " and thought, "It needs more palm trees."

It's a grand outdoor spectacle (the only real interiors are within tents, and those are hard to come by) and a perfectly juicy melodrama.

It's one of the most beautifully unpleasant movies ever made - its reverse charge being that it is no fun at all.

Not about crashing into walls or crashing into other people. It's about crashing into yourself and living to tell the tale.

Reinforcing the chasm between movie magic and wishful thinking.

The Poe-like atmosphere in Stolen is such a chilling success that when Mashberg says that Gardner would have cracked this case herself, it's impossible to imagine that she isn't out looking for those paintings right now.

A watchably absurd popcorn flick about a man who can see two minutes into the future.

Is it a romantic comedy? Is it a chick flick? This is silly, since, in truth, it's neither. It's simply a Julia Roberts movie, often a lovely one.

A gentle collection of scenes that work and scenes that don't.

The truth is, indeed, still out there. And when Carter finds it, may he heed its wisdom: Let go.

Martin puts a thankless gloss on the antic role he played in "Parenthood." As his wife, Hunt is the movie's saving grace.

The ends remain loose in The White Ribbon.’ But that lack of closure is thrilling. Haneke lays his movie and its mysteries at our feet, leaving us to ask, “What in tarnation?’’

An au natural (read: graphic) tryst-a-thon whose fashion sense is outweighed only by its bulky sexual intellectualism.

The End of the Affair's masterfully heartbroken final scene is scarier in its nightmarishly wry suggestion of ill fate than anything that ever happened on Elm Street.

Not so much a documentary as it is a bald-faced party movie.

Bangkok Dangerous is bad without lifting a finger toward interesting. The trouble with it is that the people who've made it don't appear to understand life enough to allow any of it into their movie. This is an airless affair.

It's fun to see Tom Wilkinson, for instance, with a massive bald spot virtually eating scenery with a knife and fork.

Death doesn't knock in Theo Angelopoulos' Eternity and a Day; it raps softly, sitting patiently in the waiting room of its terminally ill poet's life until he's ready to let it in.

This movie wants to cover every base without thinking very deeply about them. So while a lot of ground is covered in 80 brisk minutes, the information presented is only abstractly useful.