Wesley Morris

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.