This is exactly the sort of film I wasn't expecting from either Gorak or his producers. In many too-obvious ways this is just a formulaic riff on Spielberg's "War of the Worlds."

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.

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.

It's a period piece about the origins of psychoanalysis and the sexual confusions of its progenitors that is eloquent and handsomely made, if never quite revelatory.

What's so intensely pleasurable about The Artist, however, is not its predetermined seriocomic trajectory but the endless parade of smartly creative and self-referential gags, which include all manner of sly, silent delights; the inevitable Jack Russell; and even an extended orchestral cue of Bernard Herrmann's, cribbed outright from "Vertigo."

One wishes for a chewier whodunit – there just aren't enough clues for the viewer to work with – and the reveal of the mole is perversely anticlimactic. But maybe that's just stickling. We always knew Smiley'd get his man.

A cracking good adventure film well worthy of classic Saturday-afternoon matinee status. It's also, in myriad ways, a more youthful version of Spielberg's "Raiders of the Lost Ark."...What you don't have, however, is a great movie.

It's a knockout, sucker punch of a performance, and although it doesn't completely erase the memory of Rapace (and why should it?), Mara's doomy gaze cuts through the hype and bores straight into your soul.

One of the freshest and most original movies around right now, though caveat emptor: This may not be enough to make it likable.

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.

Left me with the feeling I've seen much of this before. It's not that I'd like something better, it's just that I'd like something new.

I really think the entire payoff to the Chipmunks' gambit comes in those inevitable moments when Dave bellows in exasperation, "Alvin." Maybe if we all bellow in unison it will be forceful enough to put an end to this painful film franchise.

Equally harrowing and heartrending, Shame is a film that feels akin to going into battle, and I for one didn't emerge unscathed.

For a comedy, The Sitter is frightfully spare on full-bodied laughs.

This French import is as casual as the summer afternoons of childhood that it depicts.

Mostly, New Year's Eve is appalling stuff, a poorly constructed, sentimental sham. Auld lang suck.

Padilha's film offers no easy answers, but the title is a tip off as to where at least his sympathies lie.

Knuckle is the real deal, with the strapping, brutally human Traveller clans butting heads with not only one another but with the very future of their subculture's existence.

A coda set in 1965 seals the film's status as a bourgeois fantasy, but fear not: Paris' student and worker riots of 1968 are only a hair's breadth away.

Despite its short running time, Being Elmo is an engrossingly layered documentary.

Although a nip and a tuck here and there might improve Hugo's overall pace, there is no denying that this love letter to the movies is something to cherish.

Bill Condon (Dreamgirls, Chicago, Gods and Monsters) takes over the directing reins for these final two parts; his most noteworthy contribution to the series so far is a terrifyingly staged birth scene that should turn the teen fan base off of sex altogether … which is precisely what this whole dumb, punishing series has been gunning for from the start.

Thus, this indifferently shot film winds up being another in a long line of creative works by men that exploit the legacy of Marilyn Monroe for their own satisfaction and little public good.

It is with immense pleasure that I can report that Disney's Muppet reboot movie is an absolute delight.

Sarah Smith pulls the various threads of this wholly original – well, as original as can be reasonably expected given the thousands of cinematic iterations Christmastime has provoked over the years – together into a very coherent, visually stunning, oftentimes laugh-out-loud hilarious holiday film.

Dunst's performance is a thing of calm beauty and mired grit, fully deserving of the Best Actress Award she received for this work at Cannes. The entire supporting cast also proves to be a delight, even in their obstinacy and oddities.

The Descendants is beautifully shot (by Phedon Papamichael) and compellingly performed, especially by its young stars, and it has moments of startling tenderness. If only it didn't feel phony to its bones.

I'm not sure which is more freakish: the fact that this savagely unfun and relentlessly generic Adam Sandler comedy has spawned its own (infinitely more entertaining) Internet meme or the realization that something has gone seriously awry with the decision-making process of Al Pacino's agent.