The problem is that once you get past the barriers that Jewish players dramatically overcame between the early 20th century and post World War II, the rest is precipitously less interesting.

A film about how outwardly alienating our circles are (much to the detriment of our careers) and how caustic our supposedly nurturing intimacies can be at the same time.

The entire cast is superb. Crowe's an ideal Robin Hood-born to play the role-he's fully in command but human to the core. He owns it.

The script is ridiculous, the bodies are great and the film skates so long on the line between knowingly bad and bad that by the time the body count hits 100 and the booby count hits 1000, we've lost track of the difference.

Though the film is a fairly plastic British period piece with all the intimacy of a Hitachi Wand, the script captures some delicate and intelligent facets of a tensely conflicted era.

Sitting through The Winning Season you marvel at how it obsessively duplicates all such films that came before but still consistently thwarts your impulse to dismiss it out of hand.

Writer/director Chris Ordal's debut feature is not a documentary nor is it precisely a biopic. Instead the drama captures the artist at a pivotal moment in time.

Michael Apted opts for a certain dated and mannered appeal with a whiff of nostalgia for more innocent times, which lends added enchantment.

A refreshing, hilarious and heartwarming movie for everyone.

Thompson's brutality and misogyny are on full display, but it is too slick, there is little suspense or energy, and the whole affair has a curiously embalmed quality.

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.

Kids will fall in love with it as a movie treat full of heart, laughs and fantastic songs, and it could have crossover appeal as a Valentine date night treat thanks to all its pointy-hatted romance.

While "Role Models" mined riches even in the well-plowed comedic soil of cretins befriending kids, Wanderlust's equally musty city-vs-country culture clash plot finds only flecks of hilarity in mostly bland-to-bold mediocrity.

The Book of Eli takes the violent, gritty feel of a spaghetti western, marries it with elements of "The Road," places it in the future and gives it a spiritual twist.

Pleasant is an underrated value in moviegoing, and pleasant is a word that describes director Sue Bourne's look at the world of amateur Irish dance competition in spades.

Directorially, the film takes a few too many trips into prosaic slow motion.

The pace is solid and engaging without putting you on the edge of your seat-you won't be looking at your watch, which means it's at least worth the time spent.

While it is captivating stylistically, and the primer on the China/Taiwan relationship is great fodder for political geeks, even in its deepest moments of intrigue and pathos this is a cable TV movie at best.

In short, if you like her, you’ll likely love her after the film, which I suspect is timed to usher in a return world tour.

Performances are generally first-rate with Hopkins exhibiting an ease and laid-back approach that serves Adam perfectly.

For the most part, though, Who Do You Love does a marvelous job of recreating the times and the music and, most of all, of bringing to life this behind-the-scenes giant of the music business.

It's funny, clever, touching and real.

A crime saga cobbled together from scraps of genre predecessors, Deadfall's unbelievable silliness escalates at every turn.

The movie was written and directed by Oscar winner Paul Haggis (Crash) and when stripped to its logline, it's pretty ridiculous.

This comic fantasy will delight kids and parents alike.

A movie that overrules logic irritates its audience; we don't like to be reminded that there's a writer pulling the strings. And here, the POV horror is a conceit as well as a distraction, a crutch to create suspense from shaky, dark footage.

Insidious could have been something special: a horror movie that actually horrifies without resorting to gore. Instead, thanks to too many cheap jokes and a bit of silly music, it falls short.

Where the actress succeeds, all but disappearing into the role of Thatcher, the rest of the film is a bizarre amalgamation of archival footage, half-baked montages, hallucinations that push the bounds of poetic license straight into the gray area of bad taste, and plain old tedium.

In keeping with the flamboyant clan of despots that were the Husseins, the drama is ultraviolent and over the top and made absolutely mesmerizing by Dominic Cooper's electrifying turn in both roles.

Brotherhood moves fast, but it can't outrun its superficiality.

Every frame of silent, lip-biting, pent-up tension in the series has been holding its breath for this -- a 600-minute soap opera suddenly exploding into a Grindhouse slasher.

The more pressing affliction in Pascal Laugier's film is the absence of chills, logic and coherence.

The film is a really entertaining look at the Bieber phenomenon; the music in Never Say Never is great and Bieber proves himself to be the real thing as a musician and performer.

Is the result - a slapstick, bizarro melodrama where Ferrell plays the Mexican born and bred scion of a wealthy farmer - meant more for Spanish speakers or stoned and giggly Americans? It's a tough call.

If there was ever a horror film that made fans of the genre feel old, it's Scream 4.

Waltz is the highlight of this glossy but plodding drama, a live wire in a movie that sorely needs a jolt.

What this predictable tale lacks in surprises it more than makes up for in charm, good music and the indelible performances of Alessandro Nivola and Abigail Breslin as father and child.

Safe House isn't the most original of plots - it feels like a loose amalgamation of ten other spy flicks - but director Espinosa infuses his production with some bold choices, both in terms of technics and twists.

The story behind brothers Logan and Noah Miller getting their movie made is almost better than what’s onscreen, but the film is heartfelt and engaging enough to be worthy of attention.

Burns captures the look and spirit of the times with perfect detail.

This Americanized version of the 2008 Nordic thriller "Reykjavik Rotterdam" transfers the original's gritty, violent action into an entertaining and intense starring role for Mark Wahlberg.

Bottom line: It's a good one, fresh, funny and vintage Woody.

Not quite the yuk-fest one was hoping for or as perversely alienating as "Observe and Report," Due Date shares the schizophrenic quality, though not the numbing length, of another Seth Rogen movie, "Funny People."

It's a real film, and a fun one, made with gonzo good humor and plenty of action from the opening brutal battle over which the sound of The Wu-Tang Clan's 1993 single "Shame on a N***a" roars.

Offers very little new for those who saw the original.

A winning cast and solid writing from screenwriters Keith Merryman and David A. Newman (Friends With Benefits) should appeal to men and women alike.

David Lowery's St. Nick provides plenty to marvel at.

Predators is sometimes silly and hardly original, but it delivers the thrills.

Two hours of femmepowering wish fulfillment.

Holy Rollers is mostly a marker being put down by some talents to watch, especially Eisenberg, who is greater than fans of "Zombieland" could have imagined.

This over-the-top sequel caters to the lowest common denominator in the best possible way, and it's so fully committed to brainless bombast that it muscles audiences to applaud by sheer force of will.

Both emotionally charged and at times extremely funny, with humor emerging naturally from the characters' predicaments, Meet Monica Velour has the feel-good factor without comprising its ideals.

Likely to resonate with a generation of young people to whom "When Harry Met Sally's" orgasm scene seems downright quaint.

Even better than the first edition, in its own sitcom-ish ways.

The film's biggest (and saddest) crime is malaise - it's not that John Carter doesn't care about what it's doing, it just can't make us care, even though the magnitude of every event, conflict and emotion is as melodramatic as its Victorian roots.

Why is Emmerich elbowing his way into the conversation about Shakespearean authorship? Because the debate is explosive - and he can't resist packing on a few more pounds of dynamite on his confident drama of incest, greed and beheadings.

This depraved charmer offers enough to admire and a specialized hipster crowd will enjoy it, if to a mutedly positive effect.

The dark is not threatening, and metaphorical darkness is even less so; as a result this movie is not particularly scary.

This new round of toe-tapping musical numbers from the penguin population is shot in eye-poppingly gorgeous 3D.

It's the best 3D horror movie ever made, as much for its superlative technical merits as for its satisfying thrills.

Tedious and forgettable.

These ladies - even at their weakest - carry themselves with the confidence of winners, and we cling to their strength like a life raft.

Ugly characterizations and simplistic preachiness negate the terror in Red State - a film that eventually proves horrific in ways unintended by writer/director Kevin Smith.

One of the summer's great escapes - no mean feat in a year that has attempted, but failed, to provide fun, mindless, movie fare.

The film knows the aesthetic of enlightenment, the filmmakers demonstrate adoration for their subject, but whether or not the film grasps the principle further is very arguable.

A charmingly hardened Carla Gugino reprises her role as the titular porn star, still pregnant and now coping with retirement.

Don McKay just never seems to be able to blend its noir elements into a story that makes us care one way or the other.

A traditional southern gothic, Septien delivers oddities from the perverse to the parochial with a straight face, and in the process restores the oddball genre to what might be called authenticity.

A highly entertaining original movie that's funny, touching and real.

The glossy Manhattan footage, as hermetic as Woody Allen's rendition of New York, is engagingly expensive-looking at least, but the cast is barely given anything to work with.

Think of it as someone making a peanut butter and chocolate swirl of Mad magazine and The New Yorker - two unique tastes making one great treat.

This movie believes that true love isn't supposed to be hard. A fine ideal, but it feels as flat as a pizza.

In some ways the film is reminiscent of "It's A Mad Mad Mad Mad World" with the theme of greed and a gaggle of people all after a piece of the pot, but Lottery Ticket pays off on the laughs with a strong message about using sudden riches responsibly and the importance of giving back to the community.

The film wears its heart on its sleeve, but the drama falters when the tone grows over-earnest; additionally, Scott's direction fails to exert a tight grasp on his material.

Mixing old-fashioned content and state of the art effects, this Jerry Bruckheimer production trades ‘pirates' for ‘princes' to revive the swashbuckling, sword fighting spirit of the sort Douglas Fairbanks or Errol Flynn specialized.

It's easy to like the cast - thanks as much to their previous work as anything on screen here - but with such a convoluted, illogical and dull story, no one fares particularly well.

Fails to completely satisfy, thanks to problems with the script that neither director nor stars can overcome.

With a terrific cast led by Reeves, Vera Farmiga and a splendid James Caan, this is a fun comedy with irresistible heist and heart.

Pleasantly old fashioned, with plush period sets of '20s Shanghai and actual hand-to-hand combat.

On the heels of another revelatory turn in True Grit, Bridges is sensational again, here in a groundbreaking performance.

Offers audiences a similar-but-not-the-same mix of effects, existentialism and creepy body horror while forgetting the things like character, humor and tension that made Carpenter's take on the same material so memorable past the initial fearsome fluid flesh sequences.

Beyond the Black Rainbow is the kind of movie whose cool-looking trailer entices you to midnight screenings, but the film will bore you so profoundly you'll fall asleep halfway and wake up disoriented during the closing credits.

The result is the best slice of Pie yet: a savvy sequel that's flat-out hilarious raunchy fun.

This film stands out as one of the year's best.

There is so much wrong with the political system at this point that gerrymandering, in which politicians shamelessly redraw electoral boundaries to rig the outcome of elections, seems almost quaint.

Quality evidently not being a concern, Ice Age: Continental Drift is nonetheless a slight improvement over its predecessor.

The perfect family film in every way, moms, dads, kids and even those Martians are gonna love this funny, warm and wonderful tale.

First time documentarian Angela Ismailos has interviewed ten noteworthy international directors about their art, and then cut them together by skipping back and forth between their voices like an iPod in shuffle mode.

Adam Green's inventively gruesome slasher is the widest unrated release in 25 years.

Ultimately, however, the movie is about the fact that there was a civil rights movement at all, and incidents like the murder of Dickie Marrow necessitated that movement--deep into the 1970s and beyond.

Lola Versus arrives with a pedigree that suggests it should be better than it sounds. It isn't.

At barely 80 minutes, the film seems like a slight little adventure, but Fleischer fleshes out his twists and turns to make it feel like a fully-rendered story.

Silent House is undeniably built on its "one-shot, real-time" gimmick. And while it works reasonably well - especially in the first half of the film - it's still just a gimmick trying to gussy up a common horror flick.

The new film could have benefited from even a moment of genuine reflection. Being a mechanic seems like a thinking man's occupation. The Mechanic, though, barely has a thought in its head.

The strong central hour - full of beautifully assembled linking montages and a refreshingly offbeat sense of dramatic timing that could pass for comedy - makes up for a lot, marking Najbrt as a filmmaker to watch.

Director Guy Ritchie is like a Heismann-winning football player cast in a ballet stage-perfectly talented, but wrong for the circumstance.

The movie is a bit of a departure for the mumblecore pioneer, one that does not play to his strengths.

The film is really a valentine to the fans.