U-571's plot moves like a rocket, never pausing for breath, and this works to a point, but certain events ... are glossed over in favor of more (exceptionally well-done) shots of exploding depth charges and topside battles.

It honors this extraordinary couple’s defiant and unwavering love for each other, but it doesn’t celebrate it much beyond a cliched falling-in-love montage and a chaste wedding-night scene. You can look, but you better not touch.

The film is fun. It could have been produced by Ross Hunter but wasn’t, maybe even directed by Vincente Minnelli, although he probably would have screwed with it a lot more.

More methodical than innovative, Don’t Breathe is nevertheless an effective suspenser.

The film's best stretch, wherein each American gal is romanced by an international lover, faintly recalling the Fifties' sudser "Three Coins in the Fountain."

It's got a good creative pedigree and confident execution – as well as nifty design, down to its Hammond-organ Photek soundtrack and desert chic – but this ensemble piece set in a rural mobile-home park steps off the trail into melodrama from time to time.

The jokes hit about half the time – the best bits have an off-the-cuff feel – and it’s pocked with the kind of rom-com clichés that are practically written in stone (screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna's script for "The Devil Wears Prada" was far sharper).

Mommy bursts with so much frenzied, turbulent energy that it really only makes sense when looked at as the fifth feature film by a 25-year-old moviemaker. Québécois Xavier Dolan is one of those enfants terribles of the cinema, making and sometimes acting in films that court attention.

By letting her babble on and become a somewhat risible figure, the filmmakers display a somewhat mean-spirited attitude, despite all their fuss about finally appreciating this put-upon survivor.

Maybe Dumb Money’s storytelling would have been bolstered by having some bite instead of being all memes and bark.

It's interesting, though, to think of double-billing Woods' Crow with Pacino's Prince of Darkness from Devil's Advocate: Scenery-chewing never looked so good.

Not likely to win any hearts or minds this holiday season, La Bûche finally scores points by virtue of its inoffensiveness: Relax, pour a cuppa nog, and watch somebody else muck up the holidays for once.

His (Law's) is the standout performance, probably because it's quiet and reflective and nuanced amidst the flurries of relationship talk.

Everyone in the ensemble is game for their respective misadventures, but little of it seems all that inspired.

A middling film through and through, despite the occasional shocks it tries to earnestly to achieve.

Frozen can count in its favor visual grandeur, two energetic young women as co-leads, and a couple of plot twists that place the film a cut above your average princess fare.

Spielberg's typically emotive storytelling only comes to the fore in a few of the film's pivotal action scenes, a couple of which are truly spectacular and remind us only all too well of what this film might have been.

Genial and unbothered, Confess, Fletch never climbs higher than mere adequacy.

It's a spooky movie without anything really scary in it, a ghost story without any spirits, a romance that displays scant affection, a reincarnation tale that never uses that particular word nor engages in anything terribly transcendental.

Presents itself as a musical essay, but would certainly fall more under the category of a love letter. And ultimately, what would you rather experience anyway?

The gags are quick and barbed, but the wire seems blunted by the essentially one-note gag storyline.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a fun movie; so much better than it has to be and so much better than you expect it to be. Buffy is to vampire movies what Valley Girl is to Romeo and Juliet stories: a fresh reworking of an old formula staged by up-to-the-second California teens.

Toy Soldiers is little more than macho posturing for young men searching for their identities. As such the image of a beefy Astin sporting a machine gun is not especially healthy nor is it especially imaginative. There is an attempt at balance with the younger, nerdier intelligent kids having a role in their own salvation and a representative cast including kids of all colors. For those concessions and for directorial competence, I am grateful.

By trying too hard to stay on this side of hip and the other side of sentimental, Crowe winds up with a zoo that's neither fish nor fowl.

While it’s far from bad, it also falls far short of the icy frissons produced by the original.

It comes as no surprise that the film is less about fandom as it is about the community fans create with one another – who else to turn to when the object of your affection, your enduring obsession, blows big chunks? – and Fanboys, a likable, shaggy picture, pays nice tribute to that community.

It's a totally serviceable reboot for young people who are just discovering the joys of manga, but I can't help but miss the raw animation and even rawer emotional aesthetics of Tezuka's original televised animé series.

For No Good Reason comes alive whenever the camera sits back and records Steadman attacking a blank piece of paper.

It is, in essence, the video game transferred part and parcel to the screen, and very well at that.

For venturesome viewers, Jailbait would make a potent late-summer palate cleanser in preparation for festival season, even if you wouldn't make a meal of it.

A bore... The film leaves you with the feeling, once again, of having enjoyed a lovely meal fit for royalty only to discover, too late, that the fruit was made of wax and the roast was little more than a Styrofoam mock-up.

Like most of Apatow's work, Knocked Up walks a perilous line between sarcasm and sentimentality, and though it's extremely funny in bursts, the movie flirts once too often with schmaltz before toppling into melodrama in its third act. The fault lies as much with Apatow's casting as his writing.

While occasionally engaging, The Comedian isn’t very funny.

See it for the performances – they are delights from the leads on down to the characters in the episodic vignettes. But the film’s vision of Gen-Y nesting is liable to leave you up a tree.

So silly, so garishly over-the-top, and so bracingly eager to please, that it's hard not to fall under its gleefully gooney spell.

The movie features a very cool soundtrack and more hip lingo than two ears can absorb. But, like the air in Denver, this movie is spread awfully thin.

Mainly remembered for its rather soggy haunted-house plot and the Master Showman's latest gimmick, the "Illusion-O" Ghost Viewer (a strip of colored plastic not unlike 3-D glasses which enabled audiences to see the ghosts on screen, or "remove" them when cowardice got the better of them).

Feels like an overlong "SCTV" skit. Many prime gags are recycled throughout the film, and, honestly, there's only so much Eugene Levy schtick one can take (though he does get the best Yiddish lines in the film).

Renaissance man extraordinaire Michelangelo Buonarroti is frequently accused of greed in the incohesive historical drama Sin, but the only real transgression is his pride, whether it’s nurturing his own divine genius or badmouthing the mediocrity of contemporaries like Leonardo and Raphael.

Predicated on the slimmest of notions, this debut by Jones is so cuddly-cute in its desire to be pleasing that it's all but transparent.

The performances are uniformly good and Kelly’s effort to tell an unbiased story is admirable, but I Am Michael ultimately delivers more in the way of talking points than drama.

Does little to dispel the creeping feeling that Washington’s getting himself in something of a rut.

Teetering toward made-for-TV in its facile depiction of Walter’s many wives and veering tonally from too broad to totally mawkish (the score wants to arm-wrestle tears out of you), The Friend is all soft edges.

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.

It's a wonderfully nuanced performance in an otherwise un-nuanced narrative.

Ambling, just-passable picture.

Has its charms, but for a movie about loving radically, it sure plays it safe.

Occasional animated inserts inspired by Chantry’s work as an illustrator, while accomplished, inject an off-note of whimsy that doesn’t quite square with the script’s stabs at edgier humor.

In the final moments of the film, when the last piece of this very lovely looking landscape puzzle is placed, I couldn’t help but feel that the film was a missed opportunity for something more intriguing, profound.

This “one crazy night” taps out at lightly kooky; there’s nothing here that gets within striking distance of the sheer weirdness of "Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle" or the darkness of "After Hours", to name two genre stablemates.

The film is mostly predictable, but throws a few curveballs and ends up being surprisingly entertaining, if not at all outstanding.

It doesn't always succeed, and sometimes it has the egocentric obviousness of a particularly clever, grad-student thesis film, but at least Harrison is game enough to mess with your head in the first place.

An intriguing, disquieting, but ultimately overdrawn nightmare.

Norton's performance and the well-paced tension preceding the movie's climactic sequence provide an entertaining if slightly predictable thriller.

Julia Roberts is the only central character whose appearance is drastically different in the two time periods, and it remains to be seen if the pretty woman with the million-dollar smile will be accepted as a character bearing a pinched face and dead eyes or whether it will seem like stunt casting despite a solid performance.

There’s not enough here to carry the painstaking production design and costuming – a visual feast let down by shortage of meaning. This is a movie about perception, indeed: As beautiful as it is on the outside, the inside is completely superficial.

This film is an evocative, effective entry into the holiday blood-spray subgenre in its own right. And if it doesn't make your skin crawl ... you probably ate too much Christmas dinner.

There’s also something to be said for wanting a little bit more.

This con artist caper from the writer/director duo behind "Bad Santa" and "I Love You Philip Morris" bears some superficial resemblance to the 2005 romantic comedy "Hitch."

Morse and Caruso provide better reasons to see this film than do Ryan and Crowe.

Few genuine moments throw into even sharper relief the tedious trappings which surround this, your average teenage tragedy.

The November Man is diligently executed, and Brosnan gives a fine performance as an action hero who can convey a character’s thought processes as well as deliver a punch.

While Flamin’ Hot might be of questionable truthfulness, Longoria used that history to craft an undeniably charming Mexican American success story. Nyad offers shades of that same charm, but more than a few creative choices get between the film and success.

This expanded version only suffers, albeit in grim visual splendor, from the extrapolation.

Wistful voiceover explains too much, and, even worse, interrupts the requisite Teen Movie Climactic Speech.

This film wanders and dallies and much of it is fun to watch, but you really know about as much about Chaplin when you leave the theatre as when you enter, and what's missing is the magic.

When the film changes gears from light coming-of-age comedy to ex-post-facto war parable midway through, it loses its focus and suddenly becomes a much darker beast.

Viewers unfamiliar with Wharton's novel may have a hard time, especially at first, deciphering all the characters since Davies presents them at a steady clip while providing little background or explanatory material.

The Aviary, a modest mindf*ck of a thriller about two young women fleeing a cult in the New Mexican desert, goes round and round and round in a circle like a snake swallowing itself. A beguiling metaphor, but by the end, you’re left with a self-cannibalized movie.

Eastwood plays it cool, thankfully. It’s the best film about drug trafficking that you can take your grandparents to.

As Norman Bates, Vince Vaughn makes us better appreciate how much Anthony Perkins brought to the original project. It's clear now that he owned the role and that he shares equally with Hitchcock the credit for making Psycho the memorable creep show it is -- and was.

It's not rocket science making nonstop action feel semi-fresh, and The Losers’ script by Peter Berg and James Vanderbilt manages to render each individual, um, a loser in the broadest and most memorable strokes. It's not a masterpiece, either, but it'll do until Hannibal, Murdock, and the rest the A-gamers start blowing things up come June.

There’s little juicy about his life, except for maybe when he briefly left his stalwart, long-time male lover and business associate, André Oliver, for the sultry French actress, Jeanne Moreau. While House of Cardin devotes a few more than a glancing minute to this intriguing episode, perhaps it’s a worthy topic for another documentary at another time.

A strange Hollywood film, but for a home movie it's one bang-up job.

A preposterously silly bit of work, chock-full-o' nuts and rife with the kind of plot holes you could drive a submersible ROV through.

As a filmmaker, Clark still seems more beholden to his roots as a still photographer: Images are sometimes worth a thousand words, but, ultimately, they will always be skin-deep.

It's gritty, nasty, predictably meat-and-potatoes suspense, but genuinely gonzo fun nonetheless.

Gondry’s well-meaning but too soft, too structure-less picture.

Many questions occur to the viewer along the way but are never addressed by the filmmakers.

The end result is like watching a season finale of "This Is Us" with a commentary track by Elmo. The dogs sure are cute, though.

In his short career (The Station Agent, The Visitor), McCarthy has established himself as a craftsman of conventionally quirky pictures that are ENTIRELY about ingratiating themselves with the audience.

40 Years in the Making is a cliquey undertaking that leaves you mostly on the outside looking in, but after witnessing the joy of its participants at the end, there’s little to begrudge.

Wright is terrific – sensitive and alert – in the live-action opening. But that opening runs more than 45 minutes long, a way too heavy-handed preamble to the crazed animation to come, and the actress’ vocal delivery – soft-spoken, gently bewildered – is too soporific to pull off lines like, “Look at me, I’m your prophet of doom.”

Despite the bright spots of humor provided by the film’s game actors, Greed chintzes on unexpected barbs. Its satire hits every target but the film never aims at anything that doesn’t already have a giant target on its back.

There's a place in life for movies like this – goofy and lowbrow but never truly icky; the good guys are lovable losers and the bad guys have frosted feathered hair and unitards with inflatable codpieces.

Oliver and director Ry Russo-Young (Before I Fall) cherry-pick a few of these digressions and give them an artful, collage-like treatment; they don’t go far enough to mask the skimpiness of the story, which has been whittled down to Natasha and Daniel almost exclusively.

It has a basic goodness of heart that counteracts, if not entirely cancels out, the film's broadness and busyness.

There's so much ache in this plaintive little film that it almost makes you believe that the entire world is composed of estranged parents and children searching in vain for one another.

Yet while it's refreshing to see teen lycanthropy handled as something other than a metaphor for sexual awakening, Good Manners dawdles on its way to a surprisingly predictable and unearned resolution.

The result is something that feels like an adult’s idea of a sophisticated kids’ movie, its sense of adventure and imagination overruled and undercut by its tone of mature melancholy.

The fun in Norbit is watching Murphy at work – the guy has a knack for bringing the physicality of his comic characters to life.

It wants so hard to be "Pulp Fiction," but it ends up "8 Heads in a Duffel Bag."

Naïf meets waif in this touching yet unrealistic tale of love amongst society's write-offs. Between Masterson's schizophrenic Joon Pearl and Depp's oddball Sam, it's difficult to tell which one's the naïf and which is the waif.

Never fully rises to the occasion, maintaining a goofily even keel throughout but rarely tipping over into all-out froth and nuttiness.

Even when plausibility fails, I Origins is elegantly cosseted by its dreamy camerawork (courtesy of Markus Förderer) and pretty people.

The fact that Russians appear to have dash-cams as standard equipment in their four- and two-wheel rides is as foreign and fascinating as anything President Donald Trump could come up with.

On the whole, An Easy Girl is a light and pleasing enough watch.

Life Is Sweet observes this constellation of people without ever really commenting on their lots. Very little occurs and thus, if you don't find yourself drawn to these characters, you will find yourself wondering when it will all be over.