Hoge's film raises more questions than it answers – that's his point, I think, to get us thinking – and Gosling, who previously played the conflicted Jewish Nazi skinhead in "The Believer," inhabits the role of Leland so fully it's as if the character had killed him as well.

The story is so meandering and unbelievable that Westerners are still likely to roll their eyes. I have no idea what Indian audiences will make of Kites. The film is rousing, but it does not soar.

Director Noyce has a sure hand with the action sequences and keeps The Saint from bogging down too often in the mires of action film exposition (once again, think Mission: Impossible).

As it is, Newt Knight, the forward-thinking white liberal, is the only character with whom we might connect. And that’s a shame because this compelling episode of American defiance is so much richer than that.

It's an occasionally entertaining ride, although one fraught with numerous logical holes.

Danger's never clear and present, but rather a convention. Simply put, Oliver & Company didn't work for me not because I'm many years past my sixth birthday but because it never scared me into forgetting that fact.

Suffers mightily from sequelitis. Forced to explain what’s going on and what’s going to be going on in the next and final installment (due out in November), the Wachowskis have laced the film with a series of crushingly dull and often incomprehensible scenes of exposition and yakky gabfests.

The Spanish Prisoner seems an almost purely theoretical exercise, with Mamet as the con man whose sole goal is to make us believe anything he wants.

The final 30 odd minutes of this revisionist Holmes explodathon are downright thrilling, and it should go without saying but we'll restate it for the record: Downey Jr. inhabits the role of Sherlock Holmes to a near-molecular level.

Poser, the debut feature from local filmmakers Ori Segev and Noah Dixon, is so in love with the scene from which it draws, with the bands given momentary cameos, with the cool hipness and store brand subversion of it all, that they never seem quite capable of giving it the critique for which they seem to aim.

It’s too bad, then, that Justin Chadwick’s film does not offer a more substantial portrait of the man, whose passing is a fresh wound to mourners and curious onlookers worldwide.

It's overstuffed with all the actors wasting both the viewers’ and the movie’s running time by actually speaking dialogue when we all know that what audiences really want to see is outrageous vehicular slamslaughter.

Ultimately, the slow boil bleakness of the script, with its subtle ruminations of what it is to go on in a time of hopelessness, is what marks Settlers apart, even as it looks and feels like so many of the post-apocalyptic drought-plagued SF dramas of the last few years.

The Duplass brothers have an exceptional eye for microexpressions (yes, they're still zoom-happy), and there's something to be admired in this new interest in a macro lens on the universe's workings. If only it didn't take wading through so much drear to get to that divine.

Lacking a typically vivid color palette and bright song & dance routines, Photograph is almost the antithesis of a Bollywood epic. In fact, the film’s small, quiet moments are its most alluring feature, although it’s possible the film may ultimately be too quiet for its own good.

Even though Mrs. Hyde loses the trees for the forest, any movie starring Huppert (Elle, The Ceremony) is radiant, and it should be evident that tossing in a special effect or a message will be superfluous.

Final verdict: Cast is excellent; movie is OK; men and women are soooo different.

This frothy little comedy is a pleasant enough amusement. It's not a big belly-laugh of a comedy, but it's quickly paced, fun and entertaining.

Visually stunning, Mistress of Evil achieves full fairy-tale splendor – flowers glow, trees walk, and fairies of all shapes, sizes, and colors take flight. The elaborate costumes, especially those worn by Michelle Pfeiffer’s Queen Ingrith, are noteworthy and will surely inspire many a Halloween look. In short, this is where the second Maleficent excels, an instant crowd-pleaser for any fantasy-loving child or adult.

This veteran actor is always great, and it's just a little bit sad that he has to play a big, scary demon for us to sit up and finally take notice.

It's stoner comedy of the most absurd kind, part fryboy mental drizzle, part wink-wink audience baiting, and wholly, utterly funny.

Won't ever be accused of breaking new ground; it's too busy entertaining to worry about being original.

Escape the Field won’t change the world, but it is a solid showing for everyone involved, and it works overtime to keep the audience entertained throughout – at least until the sequel-bait ending for a movie that will probably never happen.

As a comedian, Davidson's run on SNL has arguably seen him stagnate. At least here, derivative as it is, there's a sense that he's self-critically stretching himself, analyzing how he's getting by on his aging dude-bro charm.

The saving quality here is Thompson’s performance as the prickly Travers.

Unfortunately, the story drags for the first half of the film, and the downright cheesy score and ending song disrupt scenes that could have carried the emotional weight better on their own.

Unfortunately, there's not much of a story to go with Hunter's engaging performance and LaGravenese's words.

Not that anyone was asking for a reboot of the series that is perhaps best remembered as the launching pad for Johnny Depp's career, but here it comes anyway. The film will probably gain several points on the likability scale for its sheer unexpectedness and modest ambitions.

In the end, Blackballed doesn't take home the winner's cup, but its genial stick-to-itiveness and reasonably well-aimed humor earn the film at least a good sportsmanship trophy.

As sequels go, Double Tap delivers the goods, but exists in a realm that feels more like a second serving than a new taste treat. It still tastes good, but nothing ever replicates the joy of the first bite. Just ask a zombie.

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is a very pretty production – pretty colors, pretty scenery, pretty bromides – and a busy one, too, which helps distract us from the sad fact that the movie is generous and humane but not all that interesting.

Coppola’s rejuvenated sense of career is a welcome addition to the world of filmmaking, even if the two films he’s made in the new millennium (2007’s "Youth Without Youth" and now this) are not up to his own self-set high standards.

The occasionally contrived music-video slicky edge, and the fact that there's no way on God's green earth that what takes place in Assisted Living happens in one day, it's a noble effort.

Life at least deserves a nod for supplying the mostly dramatic actress with her first starring comedic role.

Conceptually, The Accountant kills it, but in terms of execution, The Accountant doesn’t add up.

PAW Patrol: The Movie is bigger and prettier than the TV show, but it's still PAW Patrol. What makes it worth the time investment for kids is that it's really about introducing the street-smart long-haired Dachshund Liberty (Martin) into the team, while giving a little drama to Chase's life as he processes some old trauma about being a stray in the big city.

The film does much more than showcase eight years of a top photojournalist’s career. This is a film about evolution, about how Souza learned to use his voice.

At times, it’s a bit like being cornered and regaled by actor Bill Nighy’s aging rocker Billy Mack from "Love Actually," but certainly more interesting, and a rewarding and informative document of some unlikely visionaries of maximum rock & roll.

As the camera moves through the tall grass of this new world, there comes the realization that we could be within any one of Terrence Malick's movies, any one of the previous three stunners he has made in his 35-year-long career.

Depends on the two actors who all but carry it.

High Heels becomes mired in its own best intentions - primary colors and all.

There are times when it’s funny. There are also times when it beats you over the head with context clues. When the action ramps up, the over-the-top music score seems to stomp its foot and say, “Something is hap-pen-ing!” Certain plot points are overemphasized. It veers toward parody. But it’s also satisfying to see the outcome.

Interesting to watch like well-performed gymnastics but it never really connects.

The straight dope for speed junkies and fans of the art of flinging one’s well-padded frame through the contortions enabled only by disastrously catapulting oneself off a slippery asphalt track at speeds even Dale Earnhardt would have dismissed as lunacy.

On the whole, Extraterrestrial is slight, filled with lots of bark but little bite.

Its uneven comedy may leave moviegoers yearning for the confidently choreographed banter and moral sludge that marked LaBute's previous outings.

Early Man is wanting: of a cleverer narrative, of memorable characters. It’s not bad, necessarily. It just feels like an early draft of a better movie to come.

Filled with some marvelous dialog and quips delivered by some of the best in the business. There are worse ways to while away the time.

An interesting subject does not make for a great documentary. Stuntwomen, while clean cut, has the feel of a made-for-TV edit, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it doesn’t wow.

For all its unwieldy temporal scope and narrowness of perspective, Nixon is an amazingly graceful beast, flawed yet invigorating, packed with enough material that will fascinate and irk moviegoers of all stripes for quite a time to come.

Down in the Delta, like a gratingly platitudinous self-help tape, sugarcoats the complex one-step-back, two-steps-forward nature of personal and social progress. And like the drugs and booze it condemns, it provides a warm rush of euphoria, but no real answers.

As Christy, Garner gives an earnest performance, her perpetually worried expression put to good use here as the Beams grapple with the unimaginable possibility of losing Anna.

Carrey has yet to find the perfect vehicle for himself, but The Mask, while hardly as fantastic as it should have been, is a step in the right direction.

Unnerving and occasionally witty, were it not for its weak third act, Nolan's film might fall just short of genius. As it is, though, it's unique nonetheless.

The problem with The Beat That My Heart Skipped, as it was with "Fingers," is that the gravity of the character’s psychological divide is clear after the first half hour, and both films add little in the next hour to deepen our – or the characters’ – understanding or entanglement.

Wisely, writer/producer/director John Scheinfeld mostly keeps to the sound capture of his subject and a little soundtracking on Alpert’s storied imprint with Jerry Moss.

The landscape and the lovers are pretty to look at, but two households divided should really pack more of a punch.

Despite the grating, workmanlike direction of Chris Columbus (he's no Robert Wise, and Rent is nobody's idea of "West Side Story"), this boisterous adaptation is both a vivacious, wiseacre musical and an inarguable morality lesson: Love is all you need. Oh, and rent, of course.

Le Chef is practically bursting with good-natured bonhomie.

It points a determined finger (a middle finger, almost) at law enforcement, which cannot or will not recognize kidnapping victims in our midst, especially if they are undocumented and brown-skinned.

It’s ingratiating in that nice doggie way, but the dogs, who have had their lips enhanced via CGI to aid in the illusion of speech, don’t have much more on their minds than where the next stick is going to sail in from.

May not be best chick flick around, but it's the flick with the best chick by far.

More than a story about Iraq war veterans, The Lucky Ones is a movie about carefully considering one's options.

By the end of this film/experiment/prank – which, to be blunt, is pretty unsatisfying – the viewer is left to ponder what it's all about, and what its purpose may have been, which, knowing Lynch and Herzog, might well be what it was about, and what its purpose was.

Now and Then somewhat successfully pushes all the right emotional buttons by depicting themes common to most young girls, but I expected more, not less, from the now in Now and Then.

If this film is a jumping off point into more and, quite frankly, better discussions, then I guess it is worth watching?

Never thrills on an emotional level the way the best of sports films – a "Hoosiers," say – can, but it's a satisfying entertainment nonetheless.

Two Eighties genre staples – Disease-of-the-Week and Poppin' the Cherry – meet, shake hands, and mostly play nice in this sweet, if overly earnest feature.

Rises above its problems to deliver the essential goods.

There are scenes during which Everett’s Wilde commands our wide-eyed attention, still mesmerizing despite his physical and psychological decline. Yet in between those quickened moments, The Happy Prince trudges forward with monotonous uniformity.

Cornpone caricatures abound (witness "Hoedown Throwdown," in which Miley sunnily urges us to "pop it, lock it, polka dot it"), but so do worthy messages about responsibility – to family, community, even Mother Earth.

This pretender to the throne never gets past the fact that it's a remake, but with spiffier graphics. It's like a remastered classic game, but somehow the spirit is lost when the 16-bit animation is replaced with the processing power of a modern console.

Cute and toothless as a kitten, Seamstress doesn't inspire the same kind of fervent devotion its principals feel when confronted with art, but it does make a pleasant enough diversion.

Jiang Ziya is a big story, an incredibly complex mythos not unlike Hercules, and unfortunately it never finds its beat. Like many films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the story of Jiang Ziya is far more concerned with big epic punches rather than complex character weaving, and earned pathos.

In its use of texture and its recreation of beloved pop culture items, Power’s film is a fascinating slice of Nineties nostalgia viewed through a cardboard lens. But when the bodies hit the floor, you will wish for a little three-dimensional storytelling in this two-dimensional world.

It's all a little too polished, a little too smug to be ranked up there as one of the great journalism films.

As a heartfelt feel-good story about industrial espionage and how to win the right way, Hero Mode is charming if undemanding, and feels at least a little authentic to its milieu.

As YA adaptations go, this isn’t quite "The Notebook," but its core demographic of teen girls will likely be more than satisfied.

Ultimately, however, The Way Back fails to connect on the all-important visceral, emotional level.

The movie is kind of a mess – all over the place tonally, hastily paced, and overly reliant on the ostensible truisms of romantic comedy.

This remake of the 1972 Peckinpah gem lacks the Ali McGraw/Steve McQueen heart and soul of the original, opting instead for the vacuous and thoroughly forgettable anti-chemistry of Baldwin and Basinger.

To sum it up, there is little that is unexpected in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. Rather than an epic continuation of Jackson's Middle-earth obsession, the film seems more like the work of a man driving around a multilevel parking garage without being able to find the exit.

For a time, The Predator offers some popcorn thrills, grisly deaths, and funny one-liners. But the film tries entirely too hard to capture the magic of those Eighties action/comedy films that Black cut his teeth on that anything resembling a cohesive plot gets set aside for another endless round of bad jokes and running gags, which I’m quite sure is by design.

There are great scenes (many) and terrific performances, especially Glover and Woodard.

The moral dilemma at the crux of the story is what makes it interesting, and good choices were made in the casting of Fassbender and Vikander, he so deft at playing men suffering silently from inner turmoil and she so emotively open-faced.

Writer-director Duncan Tucker does little to develop his narrative setup beyond the basic and obvious, and his film begins to feel more like an exercise than a fully realized story.

The film is a pleasant surprise.

The film tries so very hard to be The Movie of Summer '93 that it almost makes you sick for what could have been, what should have been, and, in the end, what it is: soulless sound and fury -- action in a vacuum.

Luhrmann wants it all – comedy and tragedy, bombast and wet-eyed sentimentality. When it works, his kid-in-a-candy-store giddiness is infectious. When it doesn't – when he goes from silly to turgid in 60 seconds flat – he punctures Australia's proportions down from epic to simply overwrought.

The animated feature directorial debut of both Kim Burdon and Robert Chandler (writer/producer of The Amazing Maurice) is a light jaunt that's mostly delivered in mid-tier CG and mildly overblown celebrity voice-acting. However, there are still some delightful flourishes, like opening credits that evoke the distinctive vintage British Rail tourism posters, and a flashback involving articulated paper puppets.

The most expensive South Korean film ever made is also one of the most realistic (read: gory) depictions of the horrors of war, specifically World War II, global cinema has ever produced.

What it does have in its favor are two sit-up-and-clap supporting turns from Skarsgård, all barking bear in tacky gold chains, and Lewis, who wears the sour mouth of someone who just underwent a prostate exam. Collectively, they’re the film’s fail-safe: Whenever Our Kind of Traitor threatens to go completely inert, they show up and give it a good goosing.

Taken on its own fluff piece terms, Piece by Piece is an interesting sprint through three decades of cultural relevance and relatively scandal-free living. If Pharrell’s happy, then it seems we have to be too.

Despite a title that makes this movie sound as though it might be the latest madcap offering from Pedro Almodóvar, In the Land of Women is a much more conventional affair – a tame yet appealing melodrama about finding one's self that is alternately formulaic and unique.

It's an obvious effort through and through, but that doesn't seem to dampen its ridiculous charm one bit.

A certain inevitability hangs over The Mother – as if any of this could end well – but if Kureishi's framework is perhaps predictable, his knotty, complex characters are not.

In the end, the film doesn't add up to much of anything, but its individual parts are sometimes greater than its whole.

An unusually fun and funny film.