At best, North Country just inspires you to read the book.

Alpha Dog may well go down as the most dispiriting film of 2007.

De Palma's direction shines, but noir script doesn't match his gifts.

Once you get past the movie's needlessly fragmented framing device and its protracted introduction to a xenophobic rural Minnesota town, the core story gains some traction in your mind.

The film is tense and engrossing. But it lacks exactly what the title advertises: the sense of inexplicable familiarity that should haunt you as the story unfolds and leave you all a-tingle when it ends.

Watching The Lost City is like falling into a delirious dream on a marathon train ride only to be roused every 15 minutes by a conductor punching your ticket or barking out the next stop.

This Film Is Not Yet Rated performs a great service, though not especially well.

White throws in a dog-in-peril shot to ensure the audience's sympathies. The ploy works, perhaps too well, turning Year of the Dog less into the askew character study it wants to be than a showcase of lovable-dog shots.

Unlike so many movies directed at teens, ATL is not interested in exploiting its audience.

Too bad the bulk of Rowling's humor goes down a black-magic drain.

[Poitier] is indeed so good that he almost enables one to forget that "Buck and the Preacher" is simply a standard Western with a slightly different twist. [10 May 1972, p.17]

There's tremendous energy in How She Move, so much that the audience can't help but be swept up.

Refreshingly, the movie never wavers in the importance it places on friendship over just about anything else.

There's more than a trace of James Dean in Gosling, except that he's a rebel with a cause.

Engaging though flimsy, lively though occasionally tone-deaf, it's a movie that thrives on the strength of its affable co-stars and a sense of adventure that provides just enough brio to get audiences through some energy-sapping rough spots.

The way Frank structures and directs this film, it's too predictably "unpredictable."

It may not advance the art form, but it's a movie with pleasures for the whole family, and nowadays that's saying something.

It's infuriating in more ways than one. Yet it's also somehow touching in its melange of melodrama and modernism.

Comes across as more willfully clever than profound, leaving us to applaud the message while pondering why the messenger had to strain so hard to get it across.

Fellowes sets the screen for a tale of subterfuge in the upper crust, a la Agatha Christie.

No matter how good-natured, The Holiday ends up a glutted farce.

The first half is diverting and inventive. But the filmmakers use the second half as a box-office insurance policy. They fill it with the conventional super-heroics and heartbreak that they spend the first 45 minutes gleefully deconstructing.

Even when you're disappointed with the film's predictability, there's something invigorating about the way it embraces literacy and argument.

Director Joe Wright's new movie version of Pride and Prejudice is more Gene Kelly than Fred Astaire: more earthy and athletic than balletic.

Journey is weary, yet imaginative.

As great as the film looks, the story, adapted from a novel by P.D. James, never quite comes into focus.

At over two hours, Breakfast on Pluto is too much of a merely pretty and pretty good thing.

Whether the entry is good, great or (in this case) indifferent, it's always stimulating to return to the high-flying X-Men series.