So potent it nearly succeeds even as a vacuum sits squarely at its center.

Your Highness is awfully vulgar fun when it works, which is much of the time (although it could've benefited from a few judicious cuts here and there).

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.

Comes across as a particularly unspecial "Very Special Episode" of a television series that never made it past the pilot stage.

Arthur overextends its welcome and relies too much on prop comedy.

It's a strange and electrifying brew of Hollywood genre tropes recalibrated for a globalized sensibility.

The true wonder of this low-budget movie, however, is its acquisition of the rights to so much of the previously mentioned music. It's almost exclusively Dylan and the Dead, but damned if you won't be stopping for some Cherry Garcia ice cream on the way home.

It is, in effect, a movie-house meta mirror, warped and weird, strange but true (except when it isn't). It's whatever you want it to be, which doesn't necessarily make it a great movie (although it contains moments of greatness), but it IS – by virtue of its premise alone – boldly unique.

It's not nearly as complex and eerily existential as the director's debut, "Moon," but in its own way it's an even more satisfying time slice of identity-scrambled sci-fi.

The only remotely entertaining aspects of Insidious come from Whannell and Sampson as a comic pair of hypercompetitive hipster ghost hunters, and even that schtick is repeated ad nauseam.

Some films are saccharine, but Hop is pure sugar.

It's something of a Tiananmen Square face-off, minus the overt politics, which makes it all the more spellbinding.

Wimpy Kid's filmmakers have gone off-book, so to speak, to inflect Greg with a surprising cruel streak.

Appallingly bad stuff.

Although the sequences grow somewhat repetitive in spite of their vicious escalation, and some of the details challenge believability, I Saw the Devil is a spectacle of substantial merit.

It is an utterly unique and highly ambitious project that isn't afraid to veer wildly from witty, risqué comedy to heavy emotional melodrama, often in the same sequence.

Perhaps every decade gets the Jane Eyre it deserves: Is the emphasis of conscience over passion emblematic of our times?

Has very little soul to speak of, but it's got swagger to burn.

Paul is offensive solely for being so underachieving.

This nature documentary about the vanishing lions of Africa is not your children's "Lion King."

Limitless is a writer's movie by a writer, and it explores the dark side of the muse.

This Red Riding Hood loses sight of the forest for the trees on its way to Grandma's house.

The how-it-was-made demonstration may have been the most captivating part of Mars Needs Moms.

The kindest thing that might be said of this Eighties nostalgia trip is that its formulaic plot and overall mirthlessness are meant as mimetic tributes to that blasted decade.

Viewed as a war film, it's strictly standard run 'n' gun fare.

Hudgens' dimples threaten at times to overtake the narrative, but in the end, they're no match for Olsen's creepy-ass smirk, which, frankly, appears ready-made for Tim Burton's next outing.

Hall Pass has half the right idea: Scratch out "Hall," and just … pass.

"When you race with the devil, you'd better be fast as hell." (And you, angry driver, are not that fast.)