Wesley Morris

The movie itself is never truly clear. If it's also never intentionally bad, its unintentional badness keeps blasting into shockingly clever places.

Bully contains some moments of real alarm and, in the school bus, one nightmarish motif.

How could the Farrellys not? It pleases me to report that the movie is far from a disaster – on a dozen or so occasions, it's even funny.

This is a manic hour and a half. It's full of pushy, grabby, assertive, borderline obnoxious characters, not all of whom went to Harvard.

The directors don't know how to make this new plot funny or infectious. Most promises of comedic pleasure go as unfulfilled Stifler's T-shirt. This movie hasn't a clue where to begin the donation process.

Rachel Weisz has become an exquisite camera artist. In a single shot, she can open up a whole movie. The Deep Blue Sea has a scene like that.

Footnote culminates with stirring gravity that you wish Cedar had the confidence - in himself, his material, and us - to sustain. Both Uriel's dilemma and his father's are unenviable, even as you understand the deep guilt, sense of conflict, and hubris this mix-up provokes.

The movie doesn't exactly argue anything. It's mostly a collection of scenes and footage, directed by Losier in plumes of abstraction and unified by Megson's voice-over.

The movie charts its nine-game winning streak and post-season. If there's a problem, it's that there are too few moments like that one with Chavis in the locker room.

Jeff Who Lives at Home devotes so much of itself to mocking the loneliness and personal shortcomings of these characters that once it stops jabbing and turns serious, you start laughing.

We have lots of terminology for what happens when two male stars appear to have the platonic hots for each other. The genre is called bromance. The feelings are bromantic. The orientation is bromosexuality. What Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum have in 21 Jump Street scrambles, transcends, and explodes all of that.

It's all been called Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, just like Paul Torday's 2007 novel, and, except for some despicable behavior in the later going, it couldn't be more harmless.

There's also new piety and self-righteousness about parenting. Comedies are nervous to find the real humor and wonder in having a family. It's usually tragedy or nothing.

This is acting that seems more freaked out, more traumatized than it ought to for a movie about an unwanted houseguest.

It's been animated by the same company that made "Despicable Me,'' which is to say you don't know whether to watch The Lorax or lick it.

The party itself is something to see. A Pasadena blowout turns into a horny, druggy, apocalyptic scene culminating in riot police, news choppers, and a gentleman with a flamethrower.

Good Deeds is the first of the 11 movies he's written and directed to try a one-tone-fits-all approach. Sadly, that tone is funereal, and it's always a beat out of step with the rhythms of both real life and most movies.

Roskam appears more interested in trying to combine genres that don't easily cohere. On one hand, the film's a crime-thriller and police procedural. On the other, it's about the lingering trauma of Jacky's personal misfortune. The other hand is much stronger.

Peculiarly entertaining exercise in bare-bones, Hollywood-style action heroism.

This movie has no teeth. It does not want to say anything, other than the unprintable word for penis, over and over.

As ponderous and overwrought as a film hogged by a couple of young hipsters named Roméo and Juliette can be.

It's got both a soap opera plotline and a Chuck Norris-load of taxpayer-financed gadgets and gear. It also has Reese Witherspoon in another terrible part.

Dennis's film attempts something few documentaries have: to inhabit the psyche of its subject.

I'm not getting the most of his (Washington) charisma or enough of that million-dollar dental work. I'm not getting the joy, and I miss that.

Even by the unambitious standards of some children's movies and many movies that star Caine, this one has a difficult time making a case for itself as anything other than an adventure in baby-sitting.

For too long, this movie asks us to be interested in something that rarely in the history of the service industry has been sustainably entertaining: how dull certain jobs can be.

Janet McTeer provides a little ham to the role of a woman who dresses up her dogs because she misses her dead twin sons. But there's not nearly enough of her. Nor is there enough legitimate suspense.

This is a trenchant emotional thriller that you watch in dread, awe, and amazing aggravation. It's entirely predicated upon the outcome of bad decisions - and it is not a comedy. The situation that unfolds approaches the absurdity of farce but denies the relief and release of humor. It's a tragic farce. No option or choice is to be envied.