This ho-hum offshoot of Megan McDonald's book series earns negative "thrill points" as it chronicles the mirthless backyard shenanigans of a suburban Pippi Longstocking.

Beautiful Boy is a discerning film lover's off-season tonic, regardless of where, when or how it's seen. What matters most is simply that it be seen.

Trachinger clearly has the wit and the talent to do thought-provoking and challenging work. All she needs is a producer with similar aspirations, and she'll be well on her way toward fully achieving the promise on display here.

An historical drama so swamped by its soap opera crescendos, no resonant story can survive the wet.

The film has a narrative grip and pitiless portrait of idealism run amok that's hard to resist.

Devotees and the curious may find it mildly diverting, otherwise this effort is not for the faint-headed.

Troll Hunter may be a relatively low-budget fantasy but the film looks epic in all the right sequences.

Mr. Nice is hampered by tonal timidity and the inability to find a sufficiently entertaining through-line in Marks' life story.

Abolishing obvious innuendo and employing a deft handling of script and character, the film has all the fixings to play like a sleeper in arthouses.

Sweet moments of subtle comedy and straightforward family drama mix perfectly with Mike Mills' trademark artfulness in Beginners.

It's in the moments Abrams attempts to combine emotional payoffs with popcorn-style thrills that the film rings most false.

An auspicious, controlled and altogether droll debut film that resembles Wes Anderson's "Rushmore" without being derived from it.

Some of the performances in the film (from Mahalia Jackson to The Clara Ward Singers) are deeply affecting and the historical context the film provides is as impressive as the music itself.

It's by the book advocacy docmaking at its best.

Bloodworth is a true southern gothic. There is nary a smile nor chuckle to be had throughout and ultimately things end badly. The density of the drama will draw some audiences and repel others, and those who come may find it all a bit too dramatic for plausibility.

All of this is silly, none of it is funny and it's not long before the whole film stops making sense altogether.

This is a quirky, imaginative and outrageously funny little movie that will speak to more of us than any of us would like to admit - even if we aren't sporks, persay.

What the film does well, however, is grasp the tone and rhythm of the original comic books.

A fun and surprisingly affecting little adventure, Kung Fu Panda 2 ranks among the best films DreamWorks has ever done.

The price for an invite to Stu's (Ed Helms) Thai nuptials is fewer laughs and an air of menace and mystery that won't endear Part II to escapist-hungry audiences.

Rather than take a broad-brush approach director Muntean boggs us down in the detail of an adulterous affair. There are some similarities with his previous outing "Boogie" in that the main character is a man having a premature mid-life crisis.

Arguably the best creative decision Jacobs and Siskel make in the film is choosing their talented subjects.

Aggressively impressionistic and unapologetically spiritual, Malick's long-gestating meditation on the meaning of life is, if nothing else, a singularly original and deeply personal film - a growing rarity in American cinema.

Watching even the most tossed-off gag is worth whatever shortcomings Make Believe has, including its lack of real drama.

Much of the film is taken up with Wexler's musings about his own mortality and physical, shall we say, decomposition.

A conventional portrait of an endearingly unconventional sister act-with roots in music halls and the dairy farm on which they were raised (and became expert yodelers)-The Topp Twins is a piece of hagiography.

Bridged by rude comedy familiar to veteran viewers of Hong Kong martial arts cinema, True Legend is refreshingly unpretentious in comparison to the pompous nationalism of recent Chinese war spectacles like "The Warring States."

Even given narrative license, South African-born screenwriter Ann Peacock has trouble cobbling together a truly compelling plot that deals with Kenyan history, including tribalism, in a detailed way.