Lawrence gives the same committed, heart-rending performance, and she’s even more saintly than before: The script never lets her fire an arrow except in self-defense, and she stubbornly defies Snow in public, though she knows the probable consequence is death. Hutcherson has more personality this time, yet Peeta doesn’t deepen as a character.

t’s possible to laugh at Marguerite and with her at the same time. Cover your ears at key moments, and you may even fall in love with her.

Superbad simply isn't. It isn't super, as it intersperses crudely funny gags with an equal number of dry spots. It isn't ever truly bad, because even the lame segments pass quickly.

It's ploddingly directed, indifferently acted and insufficiently frightening.

If you ride the paranoiac tide, letting Jonathan Demme's assured direction carry you along, the sardonic humor and anxiety-inducing message work on you.

Here’s a paradox: The millions of people who have read Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo are the panting target audience for the Swedish-language film adaptation. Yet they’re also likeliest to be disappointed by this carefully crafted drama, while people who haven’t read the book are likely to enjoy the movie and wonder what the literary fuss is about.

A loving interpretation of C.S. Lewis's beloved parable for children, and it's almost perfect in every detail. Yet there's the one difficulty: It's almost perfect in every detail, fully realized in too few.

Hank Greenberg was to Jews what Jackie Robinson was to African Americans: a great athlete, handsome and hard-working, who took the first line of abuse from bigots and proved that his people belonged at the highest level of professional sports.

I think Baumbach and Gerwig mean Brooke to be a life-affirming free spirit who can’t find a place in our mercenary world. Instead, she comes off as selfish, rude, deluded, irresponsible and mean-spirited.

British director Stephen Walker approached this project with wide-eyed good humor.

Unobtrusively satisfying.

Winterbottom has darkened the tone: The final scene takes place during a golden sunset that brings no closure to either man.

Watching Lovely and Amazing is like coming into a long-running, well-written television series where you've missed the first half-dozen episodes and probably won't see the next six.

A horror film that doesn't wear out a moment of its welcome.

Here’s something I never expected to say, something I doubt I’d have believed if someone else had said it to me: Martin Scorsese can make a three-hour movie without one fresh perspective or compelling character from end to end. The proof, for three agonizing hours, can be found in The Wolf of Wall Street.

Veteran documentary-maker Louise Osmond directs with flair. She gives us just enough of the history of Blackwood to show what Dream Alliance means to the place, and she gets us inside the horse’s head.

Top honors go to Guinee, who steadily builds his character from tiny details, and Reaser, who's understood through eyes and attitude while speaking a hodgepodge of German, Norwegian and English.

There may not be much meat in Hodges' stew, but the sauce was so tasty I felt satisfied after the light meal.

The film isn't quite as striking as its star, but it's just as honest.

To adapt it for a 130-minute movie, Irving ruthlessly cut away subplots, eliminated supporting characters and pared down the traits of the ones that remain.

Ryder puts fire into both Abigail's pants and her belly, aided by makeup that makes her seem as much victim as victimizer. [20 Dec 1996, p.1E]

Fiennes isn’t naturally an outgoing performer, and he’s playing the most extroverted author in English history. So he does his best work in intimate moments, when Dickens finds himself at a loss for words.

It has the charm, irony and saucy wit of the original, plus two supporting characters -- a suave, egocentric feline and a cheerfully conniving fairy godmother -- who are funnier than anyone in "Shrek."

I never did sort out the gangsters fighting for control of a 19th-century town, nor did I figure out exactly what happened to the main henchman. But I was rarely bored.

Enchanted charmingly reworks all the old favorites while incorporating fresh twists of its own.

By the end, a Zen-like calm that might be mistaken for stasis settles over the story. But these lives move forward slowly, inexorably, and they move us, too.

All three leads give effective, low-key performances. (I don’t remember a single character raising a voice.) Their acting fits the tone of this movie and all the ones Reichardt directs: Her camera moves slowly, and she accumulates tension by showing detail after detail.

Captain America: Civil War appeals to me more strongly than any superhero movie of the last decade.

The coolest film in town offers industrial espionage, power struggles, thwarted romance, betrayal and suspense - and best of all, it's true.

Starts as a tart little lemon drop of a movie and ends up as a bitter pill. I'm glad to have seen it, for I appreciated Campbell Scott's dominant performance and Jesse Eisenberg's breakthrough. But I hope writer-director Dylan Kidd mixes less acid into the next drink he pours.

Evans makes a terrific raconteur, imitating voices and putting us behind the scenes.

What director Jan Hrebejk and writer Petr Jarchovský are talking about is the Czech Republic, ravaged for decades by communism and then left to fend for itself in a world to which it can scarcely adjust.

Slight, enjoyable comedy.

Once every couple of years, a movie comes along to remind us how satisfyingly complex the genre can be. Christopher Nolan’s reimagining of the “Batman” saga did that masterfully. On a slightly less ambitious scale, so does X-Men: Days of Future Past.

It's a pleasant but insubstantial excuse for a film.

The technical side of Baadasssss! far surpasses that of "Sweetback," and re-created scenes from the 1971 film look much better in the son's hands than they did in the father's.

If the brothers Weitzes) don't yet have a defined style, they do seem at ease with this more sophisticated material.

Ryan Gosling's riveting as a neo-Nazi who was raised in Jewish faith

Even Wilder's most ardent admirers split on 1970's little-seen, much-edited adventure-comedy "The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes", but all agree it is one of his most personally felt movies. [18 Jul 2003, p.11E]

[I] enjoyed McQuarrie’s ingenuity in construction, smiled occasionally at the jokes and admired Ferguson’s performance as the most interesting femme fatale in the series.

This may be yet another variation on the usual coming-of-age/sisterhood themes so familiar in Disney movies, but who does those better?

The film remains sadly profound and profoundly sad, yet it holds just enough humor to lighten a weighty subject without trivializing it.

The film contains the usual Moore plusses and minuses, now familiar to anyone who's watched even one of his films.

Writer-director Patty Jenkins makes an impressive debut, showing savvy that often eludes old pros.

Nothing in the longer Frankenweenie is new.

The most sophisticated and satisfying ghost story on film since "The Sixth Sense."

Nolan’s tale is not only a trip through mental labyrinths but a reminder that memories may cripple us, unless we learn to let them go.

Whedon wants to make a Serenity trilogy, and I suspect the actors will grow on me if he does. In this case, familiarity would breed not contempt but comfort.

Besides its title, the movie has retained the book's outline...But the film throws away the point of the book completely.

The middle 90 minutes, which put Hanks alone on an island without voice-over narration or even a musical background, is as risky as anything Hollywood did this year.

This is a game of numbers, not personalities, and a shrewd man wants the bigger numbers on his side when historians pick up their pens.

By the end, you'll be chilled and disturbed by what you've seen -- and, rare as this is in a horror movie, touched to the heart.

Soderbergh and writer Ted Griffin added plot twists that will catch you off-guard, dumped the clever ending and worked in a love story that's as superfluous as elevator shoes on Shaquille O'Neal.

Except for moments of labored symbolism and a too cozy ending, the movie stays sharply focused on its well-chosen targets.

Proves eye-opening in two ways: Sweeping, bloody battles will make your orbs pop, and you'll re-evaluate this supposedly “uncivilized” man who unified quarrelsome Central Asian tribes to create one of the largest empires in history.

Would you feel anxiety or remorse if you pulled the trigger on Osama bin Laden, however satisfying or even necessary it might be? Munich argues that finding him in our rifle sights would leave any of us a different person.

Starts as sweetly impossible and ends as impossibly sweet.

Goes down easily enough.

Examines Muslim family's religious warfare.

All his facets come through: the satirist, the prankster, the self-described political conservative with libertarian leanings, the anti-authoritarian who urged people to vote, the man tolerant of anything except intolerance.

The movie indicts exclusion and racial hierarchy without finding villains inside that system.

Historians at Ellis Island estimate nearly half of all Americans had at least one ancestor pass through there between 1892 and 1954.

Because the tale is straightforward and conventional, it needed and got terrific acting.

If you like films short, sweet and soothing, this may be exactly your "Dish."

The rest of this well-intentioned picture never reaches (Washington's) level of subtlety and intensity.

Best of all, Billy (Jamie Bell) is that rarity in a film distributed by Hollywood: a real boy, confused at 11 about almost everything.

The voice cast includes Angelina Jolie as a tigress, omnipresent Seth Rogen as an acupuncturist who's a praying mantis, David Cross as a nasal crane and Lucy Liu as a cheerful viper.

Though all but two students look too old, their interpretations are unanimously fine.

The title comes from the memoir by Mariane Pearl, wife of kidnapped Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. It applies equally to Winterbottom, who has made the rarest movie among this summer's releases: a taut police procedural that examines all sides of an issue and forces us to re-think our own.

The movie feels operatic at times. Tempestuous arias play on the soundtrack, and Puccini figures directly.

Everything here has been done better in other books, other movies. The lone remarkable thing is the level of violence, which exposes the cowardice and hypocrisy of the Motion Picture Association of America's ratings system.

Sitting through Source Code is like watching a chef coax a beautiful soufflé into perfect shape for 80 minutes, then drop a bowling ball on it.

Like "Shattered Glass," the other picture Billy Ray directed, Breach probes a guilty mind and reveals how he baffled people. We get a Hitchcock-like pleasure from knowing the protagonist is guilty and watching other shocked characters realize his wickedness.

I think Garland and Boyle just want to make our flesh creep by showing someone else's flesh decaying. If that's their aim, they achieved it.

Penn, one of Hollywood's most famous iconoclasts, must have felt instinctive sympathy with someone who told the whole world in general to leave him alone.

It's watchable, due to the rotoscoping technique...It's also as lightweight as the smoke rings blown by one of many perverse, dull characters.

In a world full of recyclable superheroes and mindless “empowerment” comedies, we’re finally getting a movie about reality. We’re surrounded by surveillance and the threat of violence, and this film asks us to judge the proper balance between liberty and security – and the amount of collateral damage acceptable to maintain the latter.

Freeman's understated, deeply-felt acting tops a passel of good performances. [25 Dec 1998, p.7E]

When I first heard about Wordplay, I assumed I wouldn't have an ort of interest.

The honesty of the performances more than makes up for slight amounts of hokiness in the telling.

A lot of chaotic fun.

The Son's Room refers to every room this family will inhabit for a long time -- he's an unseen, ubiquitous presence -- but they may learn to lead ordinary, even joyful lives again.

The juice in "Man" comes from supporting characters.

Trumping its predecessor with a tauter plot, a lower body count and just as many edge-of-the-seat jolts.

Two things keep the film off Disney's top shelf. First, Naveen is a dull hero; his good-natured vanity isn't engaging until late in the story. Second, Newman's songs are less bland than usual but no more memorable.

I'll sum up my reaction in a word: Yawn.

Yet as fine as she and Ewan McGregor are as the parents, Tom Holland stands out as eldest son Lucas, a slightly sullen teen who learns to put other people before himself.

Leaving the book aside, how well does the picture fare? Middingly, and in fits and starts.

For all its flashes of emotional honesty and mordant humor, is nonsense at its core.

Eastwood has directed five war movies and acted in others, and he knows there’s no single truth to convey about combat.

The documentary stays entirely within the corporate world of record sales, which may seem an airless atmosphere to someone who never haunted such joints. Yet the movie gradually expands to give us a somewhat larger picture of the music business.

The part that caters to older fans is funny and satisfying, if unbelievable. The part that plays to action-movie devotees is muddled, unsatisfying and unbelievable. Luckily, the first part is about two-thirds of the movie.

Nick Schenk's well-intentioned script employs the creaky old Hollywood device of reversing everything set up in its first half.

On the most basic level, Cars is an old-fashioned fable about an egotistical, talented loner who learns humility and redeems himself by helping unfortunates.

Exactly the right length. That sounds like faint praise, but isn't it rare? Many movies drag past the points where they should stop; others end abruptly, leaving you to wonder at things unexplained or unconcluded.

Brilliantly embodied by Jamie Foxx in this unflinching, entertaining biography.

Doesn't reveal all its layers until you've taken the last bite.

So I was curious to see why we needed a two-hour documentary about the three-hit wonder who cast away his career halfway through life and coasted on celebrity status for 30 years. After seeing Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, I'm still not convinced we do.