Maybe someday there will be a better commercial comedy about a girl taking charge of her sexual education, but for now, this is the only one we’ve got, and it’s a filthy-fun charmer.

My be a gearhead's delight, but its appeal to middle-of-the-roaders will be stop-and-go.

Director Rose seems not to know what to show next, and whether this is in an effort to keep his audience guessing or not, it only ends up making what could have been an exceptionally disturbing film exceptionally annoying.

Hero dips into the world of Capra's Meet John Doe, and comes up with an even more repellant visage of the Media/Citizenry connection than that film.

Mickey Rourke's narration provides an appropriate level of drama and importance as it details the men's training, adversities, failures, and triumphs.

Alas, the younger actors in the Sixties stretch are no match for the senior set, weightless and blank next to the gravitas of Broadbent, Walter, and Charlotte Rampling.

Though occasionally emotional, this ain’t no heart-tugging rehash of Lassie Come Home. And there’s something to be said for that.

Each member of the well-chosen cast not only creates a distinct character with unique and memorable resonances but also meshes these separate personalities to form as satisfying an example of ensemble acting as we are likely to see for quite some time to come.

Léger and Robichaud’s update is mostly successful in filtering the intent of the original for modern sensibilities, not least in the plentiful sex scenes.

A white-trash riff on Little Red Riding Hood, the oddly titled Freeway is a road movie that hits a dead end.

Spoiler Alert is at its best when it's not afraid to be mawkish, sentimental, soppy, honest, and downright charming.

Amy Heckerling’s portrait of high school/shopping mall life in Southern California is still just about as good as it gets...The panoply of teen types and turmoils is dead-on accurate.

Occasionally, the unevenness of the performances in Star Maps becomes distracting and the dastardliness of the characters' dysfunction impinges the bounds of dramatic believability, yet you will be hard-pressed to find another directorial debut this year that equals the narrative and structural audacity of Star Maps.

To make an intelligent heist film is difficult work; to shoot an entertaining sociological study is near impossible. To manage both at the same time has got to be some kind of minor miracle.

It's a love story, though, and all the more poignant for being one that actually survived under such tempestuous circumstances.

Retelling of White's classic children's book is a spun-sugar treacle-bomb, though a darn good-looking one.

As directed by Taymor, it's a competent and nicely designed biopic that for all of the director's attempts to link surrealist film imagery with Hayek's depiction of Kahlo somehow manages to be generally lackluster.

Sumptuous to behold, although one will not leave the theatre with a much deeper knowledge and understanding of this great Spanish painter's career.

All in all, this is perhaps one of those films you applaud more for design than execution while hoping at the same time that its boundary-testing restlessness becomes more widely influential.

Magic Mike XXL isn’t really a movie. It’s a bachelorette party, or a book club, or any other safe space where women gather for some of that “you go, girl” good feeling. It’s an amusement-park ride. Fasten the safety belt, secure your purses, and get ready to scream.

Black Phone 2 may be a power ballad to the original’s minor chord metal, but it still rocks.

This sumptuous-looking film clearly spared no expense in its visual rendering; its optical flourishes and attention to detail aim for the Disney gold standard and, for the most part, come pretty darn close.

The Wretched may be guilty of stealing shamelessly from "Rear Window," "Disturbia," and the best summercamp slasher and small-town supernatural chillers, but none of those were exactly raw innovators, either.

With all the hallmarks of a prestige picture, chief among them a great cast and creative crew and an "important" message, The Soloist plays its tune with a frequently heavy hand.

Any film in which grande dames Maggie Smith and Judi Dench share the screen is one worth seeing, if only to marvel at their deft skills in the art of acting.

Young children will enjoy this piece of sweet cartoon candy.

Only a couple years removed from his screen super-success in Saturday Night Fever, Travolta struts his way through Urban Cowboy’s modern-West parable about machismo, cowboy manqué, and mechanical bulls. Travolta captures some of the confusion of a little big man on the new prairie, Debra Winger provides a vixenish challenge to his manhood, and Scott Glenn plays the guy in the figurative black cowboy hat.

Sisto's direction is a victory of glacial tone over actual content, and John and the Hole's frustrations outweigh its insight into the forces that can spawn a monster.

What holds the film together before that nerve-jangling sequence is Ivenko as the young genius.

McKay has made a protest film, plainly seething – a primal howl from a guy who used to just goose howls of laughter.

While I was expecting a few more plot twists, Ocean’s 8 is a safe bet for some glitzy summer fun.

When people think fondly of John Hughes, it's movies like Ferris Bueller that they're thinking of.

Screenwriter Steve Conrad has less success with the female characters: The always dependable Davis is forced into shrewish territory, and David's mother (Judith McConnell) is so barely present that it's a wonder she's written in at all.

The casting is the only part of the movie that feels genuine, with Hudson channeling the Dreamgirls emotive performance that earned her an early career Oscar.

Unfortunately, the film begins to fall apart when it leaves film parody and strays too close to reality. This film is so timely, it has the young pilots flying a bombing run on Saddam Hussein's nuclear plant. Either these filmmakers were lucky, or they made it last week. It almost seems as if the latter is true, because Hot Shots handling of Middle Eastern bad guys is just a little too heavy handed -- no, make that insulting and insensitive.

The film has a Leone eye (courtesy of cinematographer Juan Ruiz Anchía) coupled with a drowsy, doomy pace which, emboldened by the salt-licked Bolivian settings and the finely calibrated acting from all, makes for a phantasmagoric trip down a strangely different memory lane.

Julia, Huston, Ricci, and Workman are all excellent in their roles (Carol Kane as Granny Addams seems little more than an afterthought), but they're unfortunately not enough to save this elongated mess. If you haven't yet seen the first film, rent that instead, or, better yet, go pick up a volume of the original Addams cartoons.

If you're looking for a few hours of mindless, uncomplicated, air-conditioned escapism to get you through a hot late-summer's evening, I'd recommend you look some place other than Traitor.

A grinning but toothless comedy, this Christmas-themed outing pales in inventiveness compared to the original, which brought sweet, silly anarchy to its one-thing-leads-to-another plotting.

Authenticity is strangely lacking in Laurel Canyon, although Cholodenko’s exquisite eye for framing remains uncorrupted. Laurel Canyon is often visually captivating.

The script also takes the occasional dip into hokeyness, but even that is buoyed by its ballsy leading ladies.

The film is often quietly humorous.

While not quite up to the standard of Chan's finest movies, Rumble in the Bronx is fast-paced, funny, and exciting, and should serve as a nice introduction for the uninitiated to the hyperactive world of Hong Kong action filmmaking.

This time the acclaimed filmmaker tackles an entire “ism” and, much like its ambiguous title, Capitalism: A Love Story, Moore’s film is an unmethodical survey of a gargantuan topic, one that has only grown more so in the year since he began work on the project.

A conventional story, conventionally told.

In essence, the artistic failure of She's So Lovely is traceable to a single, supremely ironic fact: For a story by a writer with so much professed faith in the power of truth to bubble up out of apparent chaos, there's hardly anything here that feels recognizably true.

Not an easy film to love and politically incorrect to the hilt, it nevertheless leaves its mark on you – and it’s rarely, if ever, dull.

Never less than enchanting, constantly surprisingly exciting, and with a burning sense of optimism that maybe, sometimes, hard work and vision can really win the day, Pompo: The Cinéphile is a tribute to everyone who colors within the lines but make those colors all their own.

Never less than good but it's also never quite great.

There is a plot – a pretty clunky one, jerry-rigged with character motivations that amount to one long “huh?” and dialogue that might as well have been chunked out of a cliche generator – but who needs plot when we can have mayhem?

Mixing faded rock glory with Nazi-hunting and American road-tripping creates an odd hybrid that is completely transfixing, although some viewers are likely to find this film an awkward mishmash. The drama, however, is consistently offset by comic underpinnings, which are well-played by the actors and seamlessly presented by Sorrentino.

Connery didn't want to play Bond anymore, and it shows in this forgettable picture. From a stirred, not shaken, martini to the ninja training school to the "surgery" to make Bond Japanese (by shaving his chest hair), there's nary a moment of this film that doesn't make any viewer cringe.

This re-energized franchise has found its second wind, bursting with a creative vitality and boisterous humor that makes everything seem new again.

Onward is neither terrible nor great; it simply is.

A reprehensible movie from just about every perspective, Ransom tries to justify the behavior of its lead character as something grounded in principle, but make no mistake about it: This is the act of a man who can't bear the thought of losing, a man who will turn the tables on his enemy at the risk of a beloved's death.

One wonders what its objective is other than the cynical obliteration of all hope.

It’s a vivid indictment of the way in which we all stumble along, yet the film never musters full-throated chagrin at our dull complacency.

There’s some gorgeous animation and impeccable camerawork on display here. But as George Lucas’ 2015 fiasco "Strange Magic" demonstrated, beautifully executed visuals will get you only so far. There’s no emotional core to Abominable, which mostly proceeds at a glacial pace as the travelers’ journey across China.

Misanthropy in the movies has a new face. And, surprising to say, it's a handsome one. A matinee-idol face, in fact. Some might even go so far as to call it "dreamy." It's the face of Paul Rudd.

The final takeaway isn’t tragedy. It’s histrionics.

It's the final act that takes that final twist of the knife, as the thriller becomes a grand guignol horror, yet still based within the world and the rules established in that grounded opening.

An example of how good intentions don’t necessarily make for a good movie.

Movies about cons, if well done, are hard to resist – and such is the case with Criminal.

A touching (and at times horrific) -- albeit overlong -- Christ allegory, that scores not so much on the strength of its convictions as it does on the truly remarkable performances it elicits from the cast.

Though it’s as estrogenic as dong quai, this amiable adaptation of Karen Joy Fowler’s eponymous bestseller about six friends and their book club is thoughtfully rendered with a certain universality of spirit – in that sense not unlike the books of Jane Austen herself.

Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey isn't much of a trip. In a word...NOT!!!

Five years after Ang Lee attempted a stylistically and narratively daring reimagining of what a comic-book movie could be (an example that tanked disastrously at the box office), the big green gamma-guy returns to the screen in a purer, more unadulterated, vastly more entertaining form.

The Front Runner spends too much time involved in the glare of the situation rather than examining its intricacies or characters. Like many of Reitman’s films, particularly Men, Women & Children, The Front Runner is interested in the subject of privacy as mitigated by the TMI era. The character of Gary Hart, unfortunately, becomes only a means to this end.

As an ensemble comedy that at best is only firing on four cylinders at any given moment, Mr. Jealousy is a slight contrivance, one that dawdles around in your head for a brief while before vacating the area to make room for more pressing issues.

Howard's snappy-smooth performance, unsurprisingly, is what elevates Fighting from its hoary genre predecessors.

The movie has a big heart, ambitious references, and moments that make it an entertaining watch, but it can curdle thanks to the constraints of the superhero genre.

Oddly enough, Unlawful Entry can keep you from sleeping but when you wake up the next moring, it's hard to remember much about the movie.

Ultimately, no matter how fascinating the subject, there are only so many shots of rich people relishing amuse-bouche, especially when it never feels like the main course arrives.

The Song Remains the Same. There, said it – as will every other rock & roll fanatic considering Metallica: Through the Never.

Although it's interesting and well-performed, East-West never locates its crux: It's all over the map.

A sweet, sweet movie; it's just one that celebrates the bond between a boy and his dog with heart and a heavy, handy hand.

Ultimately a creepy tale.

The script is chockablock with al dente amusements – obvious targets still make for wickedly funny one-liners – and the German actor Waltz (Inglourious Basterds) is terrific as the only parent unburdened by decorum.

Tolkin's characters are annoying, yet there is something appealing in their misguided and consumer-driven search for the higher meaning. Tolkin's script may not measure up to the fast-paced verbal sparring of The Player but Judy Davis' performance is, as always, mesmerizing and hilarious.

I suspect a second viewing would uncover more information embedded in the mise-en-scène; had Trance – tonally a jumble and disorienting to the point of distraction – rewarded the audience with the pure perfection of a Keyser Söze-like reveal, I’d be more inclined to make the return trip.

It’s one of the most cautious readings of lust ever put to film.

Transformers is about as clever as an unplugged blender.

Alice Braga owns this film.

It's a mess, but it's Wenders' mess, and that means that there are any number of salvageable parts to the whole.

Deeply moral, thoughtful, and amiably humorous.

Something about The Comfort of Strangers remains aloof, creating a physical and emotional distance between its characters and its audience. Some of that is, no doubt, Pinter's script. But Schrader pinpoints a nucleus of moral decay and then observes it with a detached clinician's eye rather than the eye if a rapt storyteller.

From the most generous angle, All I Can Say functions as a found footage précis of the perils of fast fame, illustrating Hoon’s deepening addictions as the band’s profile rises.

Watching two irksome characters fall into a new co-dependence (all at the expense of other characters) is scarcely the emotional victory that Eisenberg presents it as.

Von Trier’s vision is amazingly thorough and exquisitely executed, but the audience may feel executed as well.

Compared to other franchises that have resurrected their seemingly indestructible purveyors of murderous mayhem long after they should have remained dead and buried (Halloween Ends, anyone?), this latest entry in the ongoing saga of Ghostface demonstrates its premise remains viable, though admittedly showing a few signs of calcification.

Though well-researched and competently acted, At Any Price doesn’t risk much, having neither a thesis nor a resolution. Like an awkward hug between estranged relations, there’s a lack of confidence in the execution.

It's thanks to Akhtar's standout performance that The War Within is as electrifying as it is.

And yet, it works, so much so that after two and a quarter hours, I was startled – and not a little disappointed – when the closing credits kicked in.

Ultimately, Elysium ends up with explosions, running gun battles, and summer non-blockbuster tedium. The outcome is never in question, and while Blomkamp has proven himself to be a master of sci-fi social commentary in the past, this dull wheel in the sky just lands with a resounding thud.

Thanks to Susan Seidelman for reminding us that romantic comedy is suitable for any population or age group.

For a movie about our relationship with our bodies, there's surprisingly little intellectual meat on its pretentious bones.

It's absolutely at its best as a predictable if pleasurable story of unlikely success. In those slight and joyous moments, this Cyrano is definitely something to touch the heart.

Molly Ringwald is radiant here as the eternal teen looking for love.