A messy if initially intriguing take on sci-fi-underpinned high school angst for the vlogging age, Chronicle eventually grows repetitive and stale.

Aimed at kids, Arthur Christmas could be a little trying if you're over 10, but if you want an easygoing flick to get you into the mood for the holidays you could do a lot worse.

The work is a brutal rite of passage that will click with anybody who has put it all out there and lost once, twice or thrice. And still got up to face the music again.

Notwithstanding Steven Soderbergh's name among the nine credited producers, this is strictly mid-level assembly line product, designed to ride entirely on the modest marquee value of second-tier or past-prime stars.

The film is at once clever, poignant and timely.

The result is a lively mix of informative and enlightening storytelling, with a healthy dash of poignancy.

Jonah Hill is masterful at delivering an absurd story with so much sweetness, the nonsense ceases to get in the way.

With first-rate performances from Sean Penn and Naomi Watts and a compelling script, this suspenseful, taut drama should keep audiences nailed to their seats.

Films have punctured The American Dream before, but rarely so devastatingly as The Company Men does.

It's worth remembering that eleven years passed between "Judy Berlin" and 3 Backyards, both of which earned Mendelsohn best director prizes at Sundance.

Put simply: Scott Pilgrim is a blast! The total package is a wildly comic journey into the head of a true original. If you are under 25 you will find all of it really, really funny.

Further exploration of this psychological question might have made for a more substantial, less enervating artfilm. One less liable to be experienced as an approximation of cinematic waterboarding.

The entertaining non-stop action has the potential to give the film wide cross-over appeal and cult status.

The audience for this movie will have to be an adventurous one, and even then a substantial portion will be outraged by what they see.

Unsurprisingly, the strongest moments of the film are musical.

An impressively dark and well-crafted crime tale about, of all things, cattle farming and "the hormone mafia underworld."

A surprising follow-up to Doremus' low-fi but equally concept-driven 2010 Sundance feature "Douchebag," Like Crazy has appealing performances, a notable tone of realism in the acting and so many borrowed mannerisms from better or more interesting films it feels like a YouTube mash-up made by a Wes Anderson junkie who's studying Sophia Coppola movies while writing a term paper on "Garden State."

As action, as allegory, as cinema, The Hunger Games is the best American science-fiction film since "The Matrix," and if Ross and his crew stay with the series for the next two books, we may get that rarest of things: a blockbuster franchise that earns our money through craft, emotion and execution, not merely marketing and effects.

A fascinating, strangely funny and remarkable film about events so incredible you'll likely have a hard time believing what you see onscreen.

Bhutto's story is an epic one, and Hernandez and O'Hara prove up to the task.

The feature directorial debut of Martin Zandvliet, Applause has moments of flourish and moments that reach towards something as pared down as Thea's play.

Leon Gast's profile of the photographer is not devoid of entertainment value or unhelpful in understanding the history of photojournalism, however, the movie is as ephemeral as one of Galella's snapshots of a coked out, B-list celeb exiting Studio 54 circa 1975.

A superb ensemble cast makes the most of the comedy's numerous detours and storylines.

Easily one of the year's best films and one of the best ever in the well-worn cop genre.

With the best use of motion capture yet, Spielberg has translated the story of the youthful Tintin, his spirited pooch Snowy and the eccentric Captain Haddock into a first class action adventure that serves as the perfect cross between "Pirates of the Caribbean" and Spielberg's own "Indiana Jones" series.

Visually sumptuous and with a real literary beauty in both its narrative structure and dialogue.

Uncomfortably tense but worth savoring, particularly because of Tilda Swinton's devastating lead performance.

The overarching lesson is twofold: environmental issues are never as simple or as cut-and-dried as we would like, and the first order of business is to get the science right.