The key selling point is Bayona's ten-minute reenactment of the tidal wave and its carnage, which is brutal, visceral and without peer. His visual mastery is almost enough to make up for The Impossible's conventional final hour and the empty feeling of trying to find the point of this whole exercise.

On the Road is rich with evocative period atmosphere and anchored by a trio of compellingly lived-in performances from Sam Riley, Garrett Hedlund, and Kristen Stewart. Nevertheless, it's another staid adaptation that misses the forest for the trees and confuses people into thinking that some novels truly are "unfilmmable."

A competent period costume drama, this intimate character study is light as air - and probably more suited to Masterpiece Theatre than as a major theatrical release.

The Hobbit is just good enough to make you aware of how it could have been much, much better. If you take your kids-while shielding them from various nonhuman bad guys getting decapitated both repeatedly and, worse, bloodlessly-they'll have a good time. Bilbo Baggins' quest for adventure and Warner Bros' quest for cash will take him through three films. But your quest for epic, truly entertaining filmmaking will be more successful if you just stay home.

It's not much, but adult audiences starved for mature entertainment should be counted on to investigate this flawed, if admittedly heartfelt, work.

With a sure-to-be-talked about performance by Sean Penn and the dueling themes of overcoming depression and revenge against Nazi atrocities, This Must Be The Place is anywhere BUT the place for moviegoers who aren't in the mood for something different.

In 1994, 16-year-old surfer Jay Moriarity braved the biggest waves ever seen off the coast of Northern California. His biopic, Chasing Mavericks, gets that fact right but changes everything else about his life in order to bowl audiences over in a saccharine tsunami.

Fun Size isn't good enough to ascend to those John Hughesian ranks, and its small holiday window means it won't scarf much box office. But at least first time feature director Josh Schwartz can expect a minor slumber party hit on DVD.

While director Sam Mendes, aided and abetted by a crack technical team, delivers big-screen action with panache and style, something about this Bond feels a little off.

Paranormal Activity 4 may mean more of the same, but in a modern horror landscape too often made up of equal parts of gore and boredom and resigned straight-to-video, it's a chiller designed to be seen in a crowded theater, and that alone makes it superior to its peers.

Rebooting novelist James Patterson's famous Alex Cross character for the big screen, Tyler Perry aims at new cinematic territory and scores a bullseye as the Detroit detective embroiled in a hunt for a mega-evil killer that turns personal.

The movie version has the exciting and challenging parts down but the moral awakening it so strenuously wants us to experience remains beyond its reach.

Zemeckis intends to give us a slightly more depraved version of Washington's usual charismatic hero, then pull the rug out from him. But Flight's true downward spiral is its own loss of momentum.

Like James in the ring, it doesn't pack a lot of power, but it comes out swinging and sweats for applause.

A cleverly daft meta-romp that will be best remembered for its quotes, Seven Psychopaths is a game and garishly shot production that's elegant in its own seedy way.

Taken 2 is 91 minutes of "See Neeson kill-kill, Neeson kill!"

Ang Lee's adaptation of Yann Martel's mega-selling novel Life Of Pi is technically adept, mildly engaging and thematically pedantic.

Won't Back Down makes grand drama of bureaucracy, positioning Gyllenhaal as the knight slaying 400 pages of government paperwork in order to wrest control of her daughter's elementary school. It's rousing - if not thrilling - stuff.

No surprises or major laughs here, but as far as Sandler family fare goes, it's inoffensive enough.

This PG-13 scare-fest is more psychological terror than blood and guts, and should satisfy-not repulse-young genre fans.

The stylish sci-fi film makes some eye-popping and unexpected choices that add up to one heck of a fun film.

If it's true that movies can transport you to places you could hardly have imagined, then Resident Evil: Retribution is the cinema's ultimate passport to purgatory.

Though rife with clichés, Starry Starry Night has just enough nostalgic melancholy and quiet whimsy to make its coming-of-age narrative and elegy to childhood emotionally and visually compelling.

An industry that's lost 90% of its silent films and which has consistently demonstrated - montage lip-service aside - a staggering lack of interest in its own history can hardly be trusted to transfer films from format to format and keep them intact, let alone in good shape.

The result is an initial comedic buzz, but the further these women plunge into hot water - and are forced to confront their personal and professional hang-ups - the more the story turns screechy and obnoxious.

Paco Plaza turns his [REC] franchise on its rotting head with [REC]3: Genesis, switching up the series' blistering first-person-perspective terror for a more conventional, jokey and-much to the film's detriment-self-conscious approach.

With an incredible performance by young Natasha Calls and surprisingly effect direction by Ole Bornedal (Nightwatch) you'll be surprised how this horror gets you just when you think you're safe.

The song and dance interaction of kids hollering advice during Blue's Clues happens here on the big screen, which is meant to transform the movie into a social event of sorts.