Wesley Morris

Misericordia is film noir with the lights turned on. Even when its characters are working your nerves, it tickles. Guiraudie is playing those nerves like a harp.

The movie gets lost in the gulf between standard, if illuminating, biography and roiling existential crisis.

Setting aside some gratuitous jump scares, Eggers has now made a Dracula movie that’s more than an exercise, more than an assertion of talent. There’s a vision at work.

This is not a deep movie. A lot of it isn’t even good. The images and story are chaotically assembled. The arrangements bring the music too naggingly close to the rounded, boppy, angsty gleam of certain 21st-century stage musicals . . . Even so, the people who’ve made this thing understand what the Indigo Girls are all about.

The sad news is that nothing in “This Is Me … Now” is as fun — or funny — as those commercials. This project doesn’t seem to have brought Lopez any closer to serenity or levity. It’s an occasion for even more toil.

I don’t know if it’s entirely possible to be supremely conscious of one’s self and yet be vividly unselfconscious, but that’s where Beyoncé finds herself.

Saltburn is the sort of embarrassment you’ll put up with for 75 minutes. But not for 127. It’s too desperate, too confused, too pleased with its petty shocks to rile anything you’d recognize as genuine excitement.

There’s a sharpness to the comedy, some attitude and freshness, some wisdom. That maybe comes, in part, from the kids looking a little older than their characters are. It also comes from Payne’s emotional finesse.

It’s a shame that the shots here are all over the place — the stage, the sky, too close, too far, too kinetic; only occasionally, in medium close-ups, just right. The director is Sam Wrench, and it’s unclear whether he’s making a movie or a salad. Under the circumstances, he’s done the best he probably could.

Nothing here’s overthought or pumped up. To invoke the words of a different beacon of catchiness, “Wham!” is a teenage dream. You could drink it from a coconut.

This is a work of discipline and structure. It’s a situation comedy in the best, classical sense: These people’s ethical problems are sometimes ours. I’ve been Beth. I’ve been Don. And I had to watch half of what they’re dealing with through my fingers.

The new, live-action The Little Mermaid is everything nobody should want in a movie: dutiful and defensive, yet desperate for approval. It reeks of obligation and noble intentions. Joy, fun, mystery, risk, flavor, kink — they’re missing.

The best I can say about all of this is that it didn’t bore me.

This is a substantial, patiently made, entertaining portrait, with a percussive, rhythmic jazz score by Ramachandra Borcar and some emphatic spoken word courtesy of Umar Bin Hassan of the Last Poets. But eventually, the rich interpretive consideration of Hammons’s essence, philosophy and process starts to vanish.

It’s all a mess of ideology and theology, of flowing robes, flying fists, karma, camp, cant and can’t: can’t act, can’t kick, can’t marshal any art.

The only thing I want less than a thriller about a school shooting is a thriller whose other main character is the main character’s iPhone.

No one tries for anything mightier than put-on dumbness because that’s the outer limit of where the acting, writing (by Jeff Buhler and Rebecca Hughes) and directing (by BJ McDonnell) can take this premise. It’s fun, nonetheless, to catalog everybody’s imperviousness to embarrassment.

If anything, The Automat seeks to burnish the mystique — it won’t be hijacked by social politics even if the company’s stance in such matters appeared to be the right one. The movie opts for a starry, top-down vantage.

There’s something here. It’s just undercooked. The cinematic philosophy around these minimalist hallucinations comes down to whether the images ought to amount to anything, as they always do with Weerasethakul and almost always with Reygadas.

Marry Me is a sad tale that’s too busy leaping from plot point to plot point for Lopez to express anything close to real. It tells a lot and shows nothing.

On one hand, this is just cinema. On the other, there’s something about the way that the editing keeps time with the music, the way the talking is enhancing what’s onstage rather than upstaging it. In many of these passages, facts, gyration, jive and comedy are cut across one another yet in equilibrium. So, yeah: cinema, obviously. But also something that feels rarer: syncopation.

It’s bad, the sort of bad that knows what it is — campy rather than camp. “Campy” is camp with a diploma and a martini. And “Christmas on the Square” is a drunk.

The King of Staten Island is one of those 10-block-radius life slices whose smallness and intimacy ought to be a virtue. But the movie seems afraid of itself.

The Italian movie, which Paolo Virzì directed, had a marrow-deep instinct for class. There were higher costs. The people in it were stranger, with sharper angles; they were alive. This new movie, which Oren Moverman wrote, Marc Meyers directed and has parts for Liev Schreiber and Marisa Tomei, is a character study that hasn’t done its homework.

There’s no way for Loach to have gone smaller. When the movie’s over, you have, indeed, witnessed a tragedy, just not the usual kind. Nobody dies. No one goes to prison (there is one police-station visit unlike any I’ve seen). But life: that’s the tragedy, what it takes to get by, what it takes be just a little bit happy — for one lousy meal.

Wilson has captured Swift at a convincing turning point, ready, perhaps, to say a lot more.

Berman can’t quite juggle it all.

The whole thing just makes me miss how horny and violent movies used to be. Here, all the violence is sex. Only, it’s not. It’s just winking.

I liked the deluge of visual information and personalities. The pictures, footage, biography, news and gossip are the opposite of a Halston dress — unruly, busy, fussed over. But they come at you with an energy that feels substantial. Knowing what to do with all of that material is its own kind of intelligence. Why overthink it? Or: why show us what you’ve overthought?

The movie is warm, observant, mildly philosophical and deeply curious about the daily and inner lives of both the people and their four-legged assistants.

All of that observation in Babylon amounts to something that still feels new. You’re looking at people who, in 1980 England, were, at last, being properly, seriously seen.

You can see what this movie is after, something cockeyed but sincere, something in the neighborhood of Paul Mazursky, Elaine May or Alexander Payne. But the writing and filmmaking (Snyder directed) just aren’t quick enough.

More than half the reason I went to see this movie is because I miss “Fool’s Gold,” too. But that movie is 11 years old. And the days of low-stakes thingamabobs with some stars and even a little bit of writing are gone. Instead of a caper with Kate Hudson, McConaughey has got a mess written and directed by Steven Knight.

Fyre needs another layer. You can locate in it this national moment of brashness and effrontery.

This is Jenny from the blah.

It’s just two and a half years of — sorry, two and a half hours — of oceanic screen savers and hair that won’t stop undulating so we know when we’re underwater.

Something feels off with von Trier’s sense of artistry now. Something feels stuck, like his head’s wound up lodged in his rear, which brings the movie closer to “The Human Centipede” than I would have thought. But this isn’t cinematic horror. It’s proctology.

The more time Khaled’s camera takes to wend its way around Hassane’s suspended body, the more its caresses seem to match all the embracing and caressing Hassane’s friend does. And the more time the movie devotes to the parts of this one man’s body the more that care seems to stand in for a country’s neglected whole.

It’s impressive that Alami can put all this across — romance, suspense and, in the moving final act, a kind of tragedy — and maintain the movie’s nimbleness. But he’s a natural storyteller.

You get both the most lovely gaze a professional camera’s ever laid upon Aretha Franklin and some of the mightiest singing she’s ever laid on you. The woman practically eulogizes herself. Don’t bother with tissues. Bring a towel.

Mr. Faraut’s impressionistic conflation of humor, wonder, horror and sympathy whisks this movie to the deluxe suite of the pleasure palace.

Ms. Streep’s near total absence leaves a hole Cher is expected to fill. It’s too little, way too late, of course, and because it’s Cher, it’s also too much.

Whitney is too funereal to be a party, too sad, strange and dismaying to cheer. Yet, in its grim, guilt-inducing way, the film works, even on the occasions when it’s working against itself.

The trouble is that despite how earnest and committed Mr. Zahs appears to be, the story of what’s in the collection might be more be more fascinating than the man who’s collected it.

The relief of Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami is that it seeks to square the person with the provocateuse. The documentary is a feat of portraiture and a restoration of humanity. It’s got the uncanny, the sublime, and, in many spots, a combination of both.

The performances in tandem with the writing take most of these seven movies to interesting places.

An elegy for a vanishing emblem of what once characterized this country's vitality.

Gangster Squad is an almost movie. It's almost terrible. It's almost entertaining. But it's missing the shameless insanity of a wonderfully bad movie, and the particular vision, point of view, and coherence of some very good ones. So it sits there in between - loud, flashy, and unnecessary.

All the makers of Texas Chainsaw 3D cared about was getting your $16.

The images are meant to accumulate shame, and they do. But they also might be too much.

Parental Guidance is overly generous with regard to the silliness. However, it's not clueless. Crystal seems determined to give as generously as he gets. When a bully whacks him, Crystal covers the bully in vomit. Good for him.

The movie Quentin Tarantino has written and directed is corkscrewed, inside-out, upside-down, simultaneously clear-eyed and completely out of its mind.

After 2½ hours, the movie's become a bowl of trail mix - you're picking out the nuts you don't like and hoping the next bite doesn't contain any craisins. All the carefully crafted misérables turns into a pile of miz.

This movie is the height of by-the-book dullness.

What Hoss is asked to play - and does play with great skill - is the fine line between self-protection and hauteur.

If the second hour or so isn't as strong as the first, it's because the filmmaking fails to rise to the injustice that's befallen its subjects since their exoneration. It can't, really.

There is one bright spot. Ellie Kendrick plays Dolly's silly, breathlessly romantic little sister, Kitty.

At some point, he finds himself drifting around a swimming pool, and it's tempting to think of Dustin Hoffman sinking to the bottom of the deep end in "The Graduate." But there's a difference. Swanson's pool is empty.

Huppert's character, who's a tornado of demands at work, is almost as obnoxious as Poel-voorde's. She just not as willfully disgusting. He chews up all the scenery with his thick Belgian accent and splaying limbs and general cartoonishness.

This isn't a genre-less character study, it's myopic romantic comedy, and watching a woman of Catherine Zeta-Jones's easy carnality and fathomless beauty compete for the attention of Gerard Butler, who's pining for Jessica Biel, is dismaying, like spotting Anna Wintour in line at a soup kitchen.

The movie observes the general misery of needing serious medical treatment and the particular awfulness of needing medical treatment you can't pay for.

There's something touching about the way Goldfinger obeys his moral compass. He doesn't seem at all happy with that luxury. It's a burden by a more extravagant name.

The Collection is an honest title. The movie is just a lot of other people's greatest hits.

This is all a long way of saying that the best way to better understand the man who made those and dozens of other movies is simply to see them. There's no case to be made for a mangy shortcut like Hitchcock. It's all surface and formula.

Cooper gives the performance just the right lunacy and doubt.

This fifth and mercifully final installment features so much idle anticipation that it's unclear whether we're watching a movie or an Apple product launch.

These are truly tedious stakes for an action movie. The franchise isn't worried about world safety. It's fretting over whether to start wearing Depends.

Lacks the creepy immediacy of even the most misbegotten of the found-footage genre.

The film has sprung from the mind of the Frenchman Leos Carax and ought to be seen to be believed, on the largest screen you can find, and probably sober, too, since it becomes its own narcotic.

The movie captures a kind of tragedy of self.

Flight is a so-so movie with Denzel Washington as a commercial-airline pilot who crash-lands a plane while drunk, high, hung over, and horny. It doesn't do much that you couldn't anticipate just by seeing the trailer - the trailer is more exciting than the movie itself.

The most interesting thing about Smashed is the way Kate, the movie's alcoholic schoolteacher, never looks drunk - at least, not the way drunk people do in the movies.

It's done persuasively enough that you wonder how you'd feel under similar circumstances.

Come for the surfing. Stay for the sainthood.

The ending steals actionably from "The Blair Witch Project," the movie that helped spawn these first-person chillers.

It's delicately made, yet forceful in its delicacy.

The comedy in Robelin's movie veers from wacky and overwritten to truly, beautifully sad, especially the whimsical final sequence, which is as apt an existential tribute to the afterglow of Fonda's fabulousness as you'll see.

Nothing works. Or some of it works, but that doesn't matter because what's working is so deeply, painfully boring.

For some, Atlas Shrugged Part II is a ridiculous movie. For others, it's scripture.

It's inspired of Sachs to lean on Russell for a kind of oblique emotional depth. But it's possible to leave this movie mistaking Sachs's soul for Russell's.

Clearly, there's a story here. The documentary The Other Dream Team tells it in a smart, lively, if somewhat hectic fashion.

With "Dogtooth," the point was: Don't try this at home. Now, the expanded lesson is: Don't try this anywhere.

I've never seen a movie like this. Not on purpose. Daniels isn't saying he's tasteful. He's just saying that his tasteless trash is as deserving of our attention as the tasteful trash we feel like we have to see. The whole thing's a crazy fantasy, like watching a porno dream it can win the Oscar.

The clichés are still clichés. They've just been renovated.

Argo is absurdly suspenseful for both of its hours. I've never been this stressed-out watching people shred documents.

The whole thing ends with an urgent plea to visit the movie's site, which is partially devoted to The Issues, which involve such topics as "overmedication," "overtreatment," and "reimbursement."

It's a stupid movie by smart people who aren't smart enough to realize it's stupid.

The college singing-group comedy Pitch Perfect isn't dumb, but Kendrick's participation implies that it might also be smart. And sometimes it is.

The movie has a lot going for it. In less than 90 minutes, it walks us through sketches of Vreeland's private life and the formulation and decades-long execution of her philosophy in the pages of Harper's Bazaar and Vogue. The energy here is a selling point.

We're now far enough from that era that seeing it all again feels like a slap to the face in the same way that watching certain moments in the civil rights epic "Eyes on the Prize" chills your bones. This doesn't have that series' stately magnitude. It's smaller and crasser, but it's comparatively galvanic.

This is a terrible little movie even by the standards of the genre.

An inconsequential high-school-reunion comedy that gets better when it stops trying to make you laugh.

The camera is just everywhere, from the point of view of everything. When I left the movie the other night, people complained of seasickness.

The movie's patient in the way of "El Bulli: Cooking in Progress" or "Jiro Dreams of Sushi." That's where culinary nonfiction is now - sleepy, observant. And, for the most part, that's OK.

Nothing as big and strange and right as The Master should feel as effortless as it does. That's not the same as saying that it's light. It's actually heavy. It weighs more than any American film from this or last year. It's the sort of movie that young men aspiring to write the Great American Novel never actually write.

Dunst is the realest, rawest thing in the film.

The Words aspires to depths greater than the sex we never see these two have. There's nothing for the eye to do while the ear fills with the banalities of two streams of narration, one by Dennis Quaid, the other by Jeremy Irons, all of it built around a lie.

This movie is basically where some small-screen comedy in the last year has been: "2 Broke Girls," "New Girl," and, their far superior sister, "Girls."

Oh my God, evil. What's with you? Ever since "The Exorcist," it's been the same song-and-crab-dance: Demons don't kill, divorce does.

Birbiglia, who's from Shrewsbury, has done some wonderful things with awkwardness. I'm sad to report that Sleepwalk With Me isn't one of them.

The directors and distributors can't rely on us. They should be implored to watch their movies in the same theaters we do. It's the only way for them to understand that a crime is being committed.

With Dosunmu, African culture thrives in a demographically shifting but historically African-American part of town. If the idea is that Nollywood could work in Manhattan, this is the director who can show us how.

It's a better movie than what's inspired it, but that fails to explain much. It's like preferring the line at the concession stand to the one for the bathroom.

Some bad movies can make you feel awful for the people who made them and worse for the audience that shows up. The actors, the script, the camera: There's nowhere good they can go. For Greater Glory is that kind of bad movie: a total embarrassment.

This tired little movie got on my last nerve. If Driss is so charismatic and so full of ingenuity, why isn't he using any of that skill to help lift up his family?

Moonrise Kingdom is Anderson's seventh movie, and it's the first since "Rushmore" that works from the opening shot to the final image.

The movie wants us to find this frightening, but there's no suspense, no terrifying images.

This is much too buoyant a movie for tragedy. But Koreeda's achievement is that he gives us children who might weigh more, emotionally, than their parents, yet they're still these little creatures learning how to wield and bear that weight.

The entire movie is pitched at a scream. But the screaming is more Janis Joplin, Axl Rose, or Mary J. Blige than Jamie Lee Curtis. All the tears I shed were hard-earned. So were all the laughing and clapping and eye-covering. In each case, it was involuntary.

Eerily tragic and chillingly hard to come to terms with.

You can feel the movie building away from the whiny comedy and toward something more emotionally raw then something sexually weird.

It's a movie so late in noticing a shift in American male grooming that for a documentary on the subject to work, Spurlock would either have to pitch it to our grandparents (or be a grandparent) or trace the arc of the shift and unpack it.

You're left with an inert, politically neutral movie, a satire that can't bring itself to properly satirize anything.

It's as much a satire as a mystery, a film as much about art as it is about faith.

This is an easy movie to spoil. It's rather plotless. But things happen in precisely the way that life happens.

You don't need to be a "comic-book person" to find the set pieces exhilarating. But if you are such a person, or a fan of the movies that comic books turn into, The Avengers feels like the moment you've been waiting for.

What's refreshing about the Danish movie is how direct the girls are.

These are women who seemed raised on Louisa May Alcott and might have been aspirationally besotted with Jane Austen. But you sense tragedy looming. They're hurtling, inexorably, toward Tennessee Williams.

It's not much of a part for Henson. None of these characters makes real-world sense. They're walking chapter outlines.

Seeing her (Schilling) and Efron fumble at each other is like watching a stick of butter and a bag of flour not turn into a cake.

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.

It's cheap the way The Grey wants to be both a Liam Neeson "Quit Taking My Stuff'' movie and an existential thriller about survival.

You could cast this movie with potato chips and still get cheers when one of the bad guys is cuffed. It doesn't matter that none of it is to be believed.

The Flowers of War is the latest movie focused on the Nanking atrocities. Lu Chuan's "City of Life and Death'' was released in the United States last year and presented a far greater, grimmer, and more punishing re-creation of the sacking.

So all the handsome shots that turn the city into a toyland and all the superb editing and vibrant art direction - all the formal tricks Daldry uses to whip you up and work you over - risk being too much. After 45 minutes, it can feel like junk on a sundae. But the movie has a human coup.

The pleasure of this small, eccentric movie is the natural way Carano hurts people - by, say, walking partway up a wall and climbing onto a man's back, by sprinting toward the camera and flying into the human target standing in the foreground.

The movie is so desperate to be palatable, to appeal to everybody that it doesn't taste like anything.

The best thing about Everyday Sunshine: The Story of Fishbone is that it really is the story of Fishbone. It's a hearty, thoughtful, smartly assembled, vaguely complete documentary about a rock band that, even by the standards of out-there musical acts, seemed out there both in the mid-1980s and even now.

It's a parade float atop which Streep can pose and impose. Sometimes her showmanship amounts to shamelessness. She wants us to watch her sack another part.

It's doom that we're meant to feel here. And repulsion. I hate to say, but I shrugged.

I don't know that a lot of Contraband makes sense. But I'm not sure that it has to. The director Baltasar Kormákur carries the movie off with efficiency, brutality, and humor.

No one onscreen was actor enough to make us believe we were watching actual people commit or require actual exorcisms.

This is a movie that feels in all its vividness, specificity, and honesty - and in its amateurish screenwriting, too - like something found from the early- to mid-1990s, when American independent moviemaking encouraged far more conversations about the sexuality of young, brown girls in movies like "Just Another Girl on the I.R.T.'' and "I Like It Like That.''

This is the best thing Mortensen's ever done. His slow, paunchy, hairy Freud has a cavalier authority and a capacity for drollery. He's also seductively wise in a way that makes both Fassbender and Knightley, as very good as they are, also seem uncharacteristically callow.

I don't think I've seen an actor do more with deadpan expressions than Mara does in this movie. Her face doesn't move but, whether she's tasing a man or standing in front of a mirror watching a cigarette dangle from her mouth, we respond to her.

Diablo Cody wrote Young Adult, and it's an improvement over "Juno," her first script.

Bird also really punches up the ensemble playing. I imagine one of the upsides of being the director of nonhuman beings is that you're trained to respond to characters as much as stars.

There's a misery in Fassbender that's spellbinding. I rolled my eyes for most of Shame. But never at him. That face tells the story of addiction: the joylessness of sex.

New Year's Eve is fun in the way that eating at a buffet is fun. It's two hours of foods that have nothing to do with each other piled high on a plate because it was too cheap to resist.

None of what we see is at all credible.

I've never seen a movie so perfectly balanced between unabashed nerdiness and hipness.

The movie is long and uniquely bad, the last of Stephenie Meyer's four books greedily tortured into two installments.

The achievement of this movie is that Kaurismäki manages the seemingly impossible task of making a farce about farces. In other words, this is a very good movie in quotation marks and a very good movie.

Smoothly made and smart enough. It's not going for too much, but I laughed a lot.

The Skin I Live in is Almodóvar reaching back to his sickest, kinkiest self, and it's nice to see him trying to luxuriate in sleaze again.

The moviemaking is proficient, if unremarkable. I like the idea of an Elizabethan action movie apparently more than I enjoy watching one.

The movie tries to do for forearms what the loosely similar science-fiction romance "The Adjustment Bureau'' attempted for men's hats: make them chic.

The Mill and the Cross captures the wish that some of us have had while standing in front of a great painting. What hangs before us is so striking, beautiful, strange, vast, horrifying, ethereal, lifelike - so alive - that we're desperate to enter the other side of the canvas, to be inside the painting.

In the case of Jeremy Irons playing the aloof English billionaire who owns the bank, that's dinner theater. But it's of the highest caliber.

One of the truest, most beautiful movies ever made about two strangers.

One of those movies that an audience knows is terrible the minute it starts.

Really, all Six is going for, with the generous application of both hardware supplies to the skin and feces to the camera, is a tired commentary on his shallow talents: They're excremental.

This remake does something less organically fun. It makes kids nostalgic for something they never experienced.

It's a funny, fearless, suspenseful sex comedy that, in drawing on science and philosophy and art and death, risks accusations of pretentiousness. But, even in its romantic idealism, the movie proceeds according to recognizable rhythms of how some people live.

Who knows what movie Lonergan was searching for in all that footage? But what emerges from the tinkering and legal skirmishes is an occasional marvel, a kind of everyday highbrow social X-ray, Paul Mazursky by way of Krzysztof Kieslowski.

They're not looking to say anything grand. What they do say - and what we see - is smart and true.

The movie is corny enough to remind you that boxing rings are square.

This is a ridiculous movie - a thriller so indifferent to suspense, so above mystery that one character literally stabs another in the front.

It's an imperfect but ambitious film willing to confront an enormous, complex period in this country.

If Bunraku were serious about subverting or reinventing the genres it's cobbled together, Moore would play the gunslinger or the samurai or the crime boss. But no. All she gets are a couple of scenes that demonstrate that she still looks great soaking wet.

It's that awkward, tedious monster mash of "chick flick'' and romantic comedy.

The movie attempts to both explain everything away and pat itself (and Norway) on the back once we see Noa watching President Obama deliver his Nobel Prize speech.

The film isn't about the actor's intelligence. It's about his emotional radiance.

Killer Elite is based on a true story and about a half-dozen Jason Statham movies.

This is the first movie to make me equate coming home from prison with coming home from war.

The immediacy and caprice of violence in The Interrupters are just as strong as in nearly every documentary I've seen about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It's a crude, queasy, ugly remake of a crude, queasy, ugly, yet artistically superior 40-year-old Sam Peckinpah movie.

The movie has you from its nearly wordless opening sequence.

There's too much narration and too many drug-movie cliches.

As a filmmaker Soderbergh requires nothing more of us than a willingness to enjoy ourselves. He had fun. Why shouldn't we? With Contagion, the fun begins with a cough.

This is bench-press melodrama, and it's as manipulative as anything Bette Davis or Jane Wyman ever starred in. You can't abide the shamelessness of any of it.

Heartlessness, stupidity, cynicism, and greed are a demoralizing combination for movie-going. We pay to see a movie that doesn't respect us for being there at all.

It has a sense of small-town America that feels special even without great specificity. Some of the music on the soundtrack places it in 2007 or 2008, but, really, the film occurs outside of time, virtually outside of place (it's suburban Detroit), and in a void of cultural chic.

The movie is terrible partly because it's badly written, directed, and conceived and partly because it lacks the necessarily thematic coherence to accomplish proselytism of any kind.

It's basically a blaxploitation movie stretched to meaninglessly international proportions that leans on tired Colombian stereotypes. But if Saldana's aiming to be some kind of new Pam Grier, she needs to save more than herself.

Wetzel's challenge is to film the experiments so that the process itself is legible. We're made to marvel at slow-cooked, freeze-dried, unappetizingly bagged food, the way some mushrooms, when delicately sliced, evoke fruit and some crustaceans resemble side-sleeping snooze-bar slappers.

Mysteries of Lisbon brings us far inside oil-on-canvas in a way that isn't imitative. It's simply, magically a moving picture, what a movie in the 1800s would look like.

Chasing Madoff is mostly that sort of movie, the kind you make when all you've seen is other movies and television shows about crime, when you want someone to know what you can do with a juicy story that takes some effort to ruin.

It's all emotionally counterfeit, and that bogusness infects the comedy.

The remake isn't openly nostalgic. In a sense, this is another sexy vampire movie. But Farrell does something special with the sexuality: It's simultaneously omnivorous, dangerous, and a hoot.

Octubre is a quick, quiet movie that distills Lima, Peru, to a downtrodden version of its more dynamic current self.

The movie's assemblage of audio interviews poured mostly over astounding race footage is fit for a shrine.

The movie's amateurishly made. But the script is full of little surprises.

The crime is appallingly petty. But occasionally the friction between two actors' idiocy will produce a comic spark.

The movie is too pious for farce and too eager to please to comment persuasively on the racial horrors of the Deep South at that time.

Bring Wet-Naps to The Devil's Double. It's coated and fried in the same batter KFC uses for Extra Crispy chicken. The movie might be greasier, actually.

Luckily, the movie has Scott Thomas. She knows her radiance can't be helped, so she uses it here like a searchlight.

If I must watch two men not be gay together for the 300th time this summer, those men should be Jason Bateman and Ryan Reynolds.

It's not that Jenna Fischer is miscast in A Little Help. It's that she's mis-everything else: misused, misdirected, misanthropic.

In an age in which it feels as if seemingly pure intimacy no longer exists, this film thrives on nothing but intimate moments.

The fun is in watching these robustly generic people trip over and pinball off of each other, seeing them eddy around Carell, who as the straight man here is getting dangerously close to Greg Kinnear's territory - where comedy is too self-serious to laugh at.

It's hard to tell whether this is a tribute to female solidarity or a lamentation.

This is an easy movie to watch. If only Julie Bertuccelli had more trust in her most interesting stuff.

On the one hand, welcome to the music business. On the other, if A Tribe Called Quest can't stay together who can? It's a worry that eventually gets at the eccentricity of both the music and the movie.

This is what the ongoing onslaught of comic book movies lacks: stars. Real stars. Robert Downey Jr. is the exception when he should be the rule. It's possible we take these movies for granted because the marketing tells us we should.

This is a bright, broad, silly, harmless movie whose sweetness is a means to an end.

A microscopic piece of shoestring weirdness-slash-hipster regionalism that the actor Robert Longstreet delivers into some odder, funkier, altogether mysterious place. I don't know what he's doing or what he's going for. But unlike the rest of the movie, his bizarreness seems authentic rather than forced or put on.

This isn't a case of a liberal-minded movie inflicting goodness upon a character but a man radiating goodness because, well, he is good.

The idea that self-mockery makes people relax is tricky. One man's disarmament is another's minstrelsy, and the fine line is well worth another documentary.

Even by the standards of mental-institution-movie misogyny, what an accidental but predictable creepshow this is.

Larry Crowne isn't a movie for adults. It's a movie for adults who don't like things with screens and keyboards.

Honestly, the whole movie is from 1960-something.

He concocts a climactic war that flattens downtown Chicago. Bay is such a little boy's director. You know he picked that city because it's the one with the best rock-'em-sock-'em street names. Wacker! Wabash!

The Last Mountain is that sort of movie, the sort that sends a Kennedy into the West Virginia wilderness to press for change. It's sincere. It's misguided. It feels like a stunt.

Metz is another artist more interested in war's side effects than combat itself, although he and his crew are embedded for battle.

This is an action movie that nods to Hayao Miyazaki and those sleeky dumb European chase thrillers with guys like Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson.

You don't want to think, what would Preston Sturges or Alexander Payne do with this material? But there is a seed of satirical cynicism in this movie that a smart, clear mind could have finessed. Jake Kasdan is not that director. He doesn't appear to know what to do.

There's just very little in Beautiful Boy that feels fresh or new or truly raw. The houses, that title, every emotion, even the false moves: They're all generic.

This is a flavorless adaptation of Richard and Florence Atwater's 73-year-old children's book.

The film is remarkably stunted.

The movie is foggy with reverence and uncertainty. This is the passive work of a man nervous to touch the third rail of his parents' discontent.

Mosteller might be the movie's real discovery. He twists his lisp and slurry speech around the dialogue in a way that exudes far less attitude than the kids.

The movie is church via the planetarium. It's as if Malick set out to paint the Sistine Chapel and settled for a dome at the Museum of Natural History.

Here the Japanese senses of honor and of shame are particularly entangled. Later in the film, Lu mounts an Imperial Army parade through the Nanking ruins. It's something to see.

The movie Thoretton's made, L'Amour Fou, is ironic. It's a term that conveys wild, passionate love. But there's nothing "fou" about the movie.

It's the sort of movie that thinks cutting between two different stories makes it art. Usually, it feels like an exercise in art. There's a lot of calisthenics but very little beauty or truth or whatever it is the movie is going for.

Bridesmaids openly, comfortably turns the stress of being girlfriends into comedy. It's really about the single friend backing away from the edge of temporary insanity. This isn't the greatest such movie. That would be Nicole Holofcener's "Walking and Talking" (1996), with Catherine Keener and Anne Heche.

The most provocative thing about The Beaver is the adult-movie title. The film itself is alternately fascinating and dull, though mostly the latter.

It's a self-conscious, inherently absurd tale of a rich black family invaded by secrets, lies, working-class loudmouths, and one or two pairs of pants found down around the ankles.

Cinema's greatest caveman meets his ancestors. For us, it's a reassurance: The creative process is astonishingly old and its fruits still surprisingly fresh.

I don't know whether she's (Hudson) drunk, stoned, or simply out of her mind, but if it weren't so sad watching her pick away at this skimpy, overlong romantic lie, she might be entertaining.

Carancho is a particularly jaw-dropping example of what this great, cunning city - on film, anyway - is capable of: an exhilarating bummer.

As is par for the course in a "Fast and Furious'' movie, the only persuasive physical intimacy is between the men.

The camera, costumes, and art direction do everything right. Too much so. The movie strips away both the grand weirdness of the circus and the dire desolation of the Depression. Diane Arbus and Dorothea Lange are exchanged for Vanity Fair.

Makes the surprising and seemingly inarguable assertion that, if we're not all Brazilian, then, at the very least, Brazil is a state of mind.

The movie is swept up in earnest self-importance.

Scream 4 has a smart beginning, featuring Anna Paquin and Kristen Bell, and one well-delivered line at the end that would have brought down the house in a better movie.

The movie effectively rids you of any notion that owning a cougar or a python is a good idea.

It's as much a portrait of a kind of artist as it is a document of a city's evolving sense of style.

As Apichatpong erases, once again, the barriers between the celestial and terrestrial, he also does away with the cordons between film genres - this is sci-firomancefamilyreligiousthrillercomedyporn. No video service has a section for that. The only suitable shelf is the one in your soul.

The best moments come when Robb's all-purpose toughness experiences vulnerable doubt. These moments are flickers, but they're bright and human.

The new remake of Arthur is a thin copy of the 1981 original. But it has a few things going for it.

Shadyac doesn't film how his change inspires more change, or showing him, say, starting a school for destitute orphans. All we see him give is this movie. It's not much of a contribution.

The movie is generic and shallow in its glimpse of the love and sex lives of a handful of young New Yorkers.

Miral feels like gastric bypass moviemaking. It's a miniseries awkwardly stuffed in the body of a two-hour drama about the Palestinians' long struggle against the Israelis.