The film’s sophistication is compromised by the rather dumb plot, but some of the numbers—especially “Think Pink” and “Bonjour Paris”—are standouts.

A significant influence on Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch, this grueling pile driver of a movie will keep you on the edge of your seat, though it reeks of French 50s attitude, which includes misogyny, snobbishness, and borderline racism.

The twist of making Bronson a genuine working man adds interest to the action-revenge formula, but not enough to lift this out of the programmer category.

This packaged tour through the great man's career is unenlightening and obfuscating, despite an adept lead performance by Robert Downey Jr.

On the whole there's not a lot of flesh on these cynically haphazard bones.

This isn't a major Dante effort, but his ability to make a good-natured satire that allows an audience to read it several ways at once is as strong as ever, and many of the sidelong genre notations are especially funny.

The true schism here, however, is between the brainless fun of the action plot and Stone's cheap exploitation of the cartels' real-life sadism.

The supposedly cunning protagonist registers as a cipher, and the directors' tendency to shoot dialogue scenes in close-up blunts any understanding of the social milieu he's trying to conquer.

However gritty this indie comedy may look (cinematographer Steve Calitri seems to be aping William Eggleston's photographs of the American south), it isn't all that different from an Adam Sandler vehicle: writer-director Robbie Pickering spends much of the movie mocking his characters' stupidity, then pulls an about-face with a sentimental conclusion that feels unearned.

Director-cowriter Nathan Adloff displays real sensitivity toward the central characters, yet he hasn't crafted a story in which his observations might carry any weight.

Despite their assorted vulgarities and lack of polish, the films of Adam Sandler are remarkably consistent in their own particular way. This one's no different.

Where the narrative and characterization work, the visuals are lacking. Director Colin Trevorrow's digital cinematography occasionally resembles a YouTube video in mid-buffer, making the gorgeous and picturesque setting of the Pacific Northwest coastline appear bland and texture-less.

You may feel fussy asking for a coherent narrative, though, because director Ridley Scott delivers so many of the shocking set pieces that are the real hallmark of the series.

The CGI effects are so slick that they undercut the movie's shock value, and the action moves too quickly to instill a real sense of fear, but this is still visually impressive, with spectacular make-up, costumes, and cinematography.

A box office phenomenon in France, this crowd-pleasing drama is based on a true story but sticks closely to the template for a Hollywood buddy movie.

The comedy sci-fi franchise returns after a ten-year hiatus, with the same formula of respectably funny wisecracks and obsessively detailed space monsters.

An odd stylistic mash-up, the movie never quite coheres, in part because the characters are so thin that the style doesn't have much to cohere to.

Once the special effects take over, Berg has little room to assert his personality (or tell a story, for that matter), and the movie feels like a chore.

The movie is fairly entertaining, but the high production values and shticky humor invert the dynamic of the show, which was played totally straight despite the fact that the sets were always threatening to fall down.

As long as Efron's shirt comes off, he could play an accountant and no one in the target audience would care.

Writer-directors Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg are content to trot out the familiar gags and characters, and the murmurs of recognition I heard in the preview audience indicate that the series has become some kind of sad generational touchstone.

Inevitably, however, this oh-so-cosmopolitan setup gradually devolves into resentment, messy romance, and marital strife.

Director Gary Ross (Pleasantville) generally avoids the elaborate exterior shots and special effects that dominate high-concept blockbusters.

Directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller (Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs) seem to be after the gentle irreverence of David Gordon Green's buddy flick "Pineapple Express," but without his sensitivity and attention to character the movie quickly grows monotonous.

There are some funny scenes in which the two brothers spy on the wife, who may be having an affair, but the movie's climax is a badly contrived attempt to ratify Jeff's notion of personal destiny.

If the project was intended to enlarge the comedian's audience, it may be a wash: for every prospective Ferrell fan who can't understand English, there must be an existing one who can't understand subtitles.

Pederson has no smoking gun that connects Nashi to dirty tricks or violence, but there are plenty of both swirling around Moscow.

Unlike Stanton's memorable animation features, this is surprisingly devoid of humor or winning characterization, though the special effects are fantastic.

Film noir has seldom been so blanc.

This doesn't lack for crazy charm, particularly when Nicolas Cage (in his go-for-broke Bad Lieutenant mode) and Ciaran Hinds (playing the devil) try to out-weird each other with broad, even cartoonish performances.

Donzelli, a busy actress in France, directed this drama from a script she wrote with Elkaim, which may explain why the parents become the center of the movie while the ostensibly suffering boy never takes shape as a character.

Pine, who expertly approximated William Shatner in the Star Trek reboot, seems to have picked up some of the actor's air of self-serious buffoonery, and it suits him well; as Witherspoon's best pal, late-night TV comedian Chelsea Handler holds down what might be called the Nora Ephron part, dispensing an endless stream of bawdy man jokes.

This has some currency as ethnography, showing how tribal and interpersonal matters mesh with sports mania, but it remains a formidably dull account of an inherently exciting pastime.

The auction makes for a pretty good hinge between the two narratives and, more importantly, allows Madonna to indulge her fetish for fine English things.

Espinosa never conveys any sort of perspective on the material, as Scott does through his obsessive attention to production detail; the stylization feels empty, distracting from whatever simple pleasures the routine plot (involving double agents and stolen microchips) might have delivered.

Most of the time it plays like the movie adaptation of a Land's End catalogue, making monogamy seem essential by associating it with high-end interior design.

The argument is so tilted against windmills (sorry) that this comes perilously close to an advocacy video. But Israel deserves credit for delivering the bad news that wind power, like natural gas and nuclear, comes with its own array of social and environmental headaches.

Visually and dramatically it works well - it's Shakespeare by way of "Black Hawk Down" - but as an allegory of modern-day geopolitics it doesn't really go anywhere.

Passably creepy chiller.

Though Istvan Szabo (Being Julia) was slated to direct at one point, the assignment ultimately went to Rodrigo Garcia, who's known for his female ensemble dramas (Nine Lives, Mother and Child) but demonstrates no particular affinity for this material.

This precious story line, adapted from a novel by Jonathan Safran Foer, keeps shriveling up against the backdrop of a traumatized city; only gaunt Max von Sydow, as a mute old man who accompanies the young hero on his rounds, supplies the grave authority the premise demands.

In minimizing the novel's morbidity, Tran also denies its obsessive pull.

George Lucas served as executive producer for this effects-heavy action film about the Tuskegee Airmen, and it feels as synthetic and dull as "The Phantom Menace."

It's hard to enjoy the movie's charms when writer-director Todd Graff (Camp, Bandslam) keeps trying to shove them down your throat.

The tendency that often sinks Angelina Jolie's performances - overemphasizing certain naturalistic behaviors at the expense of well-rounded characterization - more or less sinks her first film as writer-director.

This French biopic of Nicolas Sarkozy plays like a competent TV miniseries, moving briskly and focusing on the hustle and bustle of electoral politics as the protagonist climbs toward the presidency.

Feels particularly mechanical. The movie isn't a complete waste: it adequately re-creates the comics' Dickensian characterization, and every frame brims with clever details. But once the action begins, Spielberg's incessant, force-fed "fun" quickly gets exhausting.

This may seem slick and sentimental, but beneath the surface is a film every bit as morbid as "A.I. Artificial Intelligence," which also used a nonhuman protagonist to contemplate human death on a mass scale.

In this cute 2001 children's feature from the Netherlands, the title cat magically transforms into a woman (Carice von Houten, later of Paul Verhoeven's Black Book) and assists a beat reporter with his field research.

The task of dramatizing this proved too difficult for Niels Arden Oplev when he directed a Swedish adaptation in 2009, but as Fincher demonstrated in "Social Network," he knows how to make information technology eerily seductive. Unfortunately Larsson's salacious plot elements - mass murder, Nazism, and the like - feel just as shallow as they did in the earlier version.

Like the earlier film, this one has an airless quality, much of the action taking place in the hushed and colorless offices of "the Circus." But whereas the dank tone of "Let the Right One In" served to heighten the moments of poignance and shrieking horror, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy begins to seem phlegmatic after a while.

Never really delivers on that promise, mainly because its scenes of two brilliant men discussing the nature of the subconscious can't compare with Cronenberg's visual rendering of that subconscious in earlier movies.

I found this sequel more tolerable than Sherlock Holmes (2009), though I'm not sure whether it's actually better or I've just accepted the putrid idea of turning Arthur Conan Doyle's brainy detective into just another quipping action hero.

If you can tolerate the overbearing music (think John Williams at his most manipulative), this is relatively painless, thanks to a lighthearted tone and some energetic lead performances.

Whether the character is supposed to be a stand-in for Cody, who grew up in the western 'burbs of Chicago and has since won an Oscar, is more than I can say, but the movie suffers from the sort of self-pitying fog that can envelop a writer when he dives into his own malaise.

Among the other characters are an African-American TV writer (Kali Hawk) who hates black people and a widower (Erik Palladino) who stumbles onto a kidnapping case. The latter development provides the film with a denouement that's dramatically valid if overly neat.

The leads are the whole show, and the understated visuals give them room to make the material their own. But none of the other characters is all that fleshed out (Eddie Marsan, as the woman's cruel husband, hasn't got much to do), and despite having shot the entire film on location, Considine never establishes much sense of place.

Fortunately for the company, Largo turns out to be a formidable knife fighter in the corporate sense; fortunately for this sleek, empty thriller, he turns out to be a formidable knife fighter in the street sense too.

This male weepie is ridden with cliches (Farina's character tends to a pigeon coop on his roof, for God's sake) and climaxes with a predictable act of self-abnegation.

There's nothing here about Monroe that we haven't been told a thousand times already: she was sexy, she was troubled; she was warm, she was selfish; she took pills, she lit up the screen.

The plot, though, is recycled from the Vince Vaughn comedy "Fred Claus" (Santa's duties are assumed by a goofy relative, in this case son Arthur) and the old Rankin-Bass special "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" (Arthur goes on a rogue expedition with a couple other misfits).

Tykwer manages to negotiate this incredible coincidence without much trouble, though the movie slows to a crawl in its second half.

Alexander Payne has won an Oscar for best adapted screenplay (Sideways), but you'd never guess that from this clumsily written drama: characters keep explaining things that their listeners would already know, and the first couple reels are so thick with expository voice-over that you may think you're listening to a museum tour on a set of headphones.

I'd have preferred less personality stuff and more hard information about the current technical and commercial challenges, but if polishing these guys' egos is the only way to make them do the right thing, then so be it.

This agreeable French comedy wears its class consciousness on its sleeve but functions primarily as bourgeois light entertainment.

Highly recommended if you want to watch an assortment of rich movie stars feel your pain.

Ineptly realized in everything but its chase scenes (which are, I'll admit, pretty good), the movie is rich in moments of inadvertent surrealism.

The result is a problem drama with more problem than drama.

Despite some scattered moments of bad craziness involving the hero and his drinking buddies (Michael Rispoli, Giovanni Ribisi), the spine of the story is no strange and terrible saga but a conventional morality tale.

The real problem, however, is the male protagonist and his foul inner life: Almodovar's impressive recent work has focused on the rich emotionality of women, and though the film provides an interesting take on gender and submission, this sort of nastiness just isn't his thing.

Michael Mann was one of the producers, and his daughter Ami Canaan Mann directed; a couple more Manns fill out the credits, which makes you wonder why they couldn't just have a nice picnic and softball game at a state park somewhere.

Fails to replicate Carpenter's blue-collar humor or carefully modulated suspense.

Director Anne Sewitsky aims for quirky humanism along the lines of Finland's Aki Kaurismaki; she's helped along considerably by Kittelsen's sunny performance, though the film crosses over into Scandinavian kitsch with a series of country-swing interludes sung a capella by a male quartet.

Shepard is the whole show here, as weathered and elemental as the harsh Bolivian locations; the movie's best scenes are those that pit him against Stephen Rea as a former Pinkerton man who tracked the outlaws for years and can't believe Cassidy is still drawing breath.

The movie plays like a slightly degraded version of the original: the dialogue is a little lamer, the acting a little poorer.

Estevez strains to prove his earnestness at every turn, undermining the film's good intentions with a surfeit of explanatory dialogue and a sappy adult-contemporary soundtrack. But for all his awkwardness Estevez is undeniably sincere, regarding both people and nature with disarming good will and maintaining a steady, soothing pace that allows the life lessons to resonate.

He's a fascinating character (even in the person of Gerard Butler), but his conversion from drug-crazed bruiser to psalm-singing family man is so swift and unconvincing that the movie is hobbled from the start. It becomes more engrossing once Childers finds his mission in Africa.

There's something wrong with a suspense film when the sets are more interesting than the characters.

The parallel between the dolphin and the disabled tourists who flock to see it borders on treacle, but Gamble's rapport with his finned costar is so touching that the movie works anyway.

There's a good deal of honest emotion onscreen, particularly from the parents left behind to worry, yet the documentary sometimes feels like the work of a filmmaker who began with a preconceived story and wasn't quite sure what to do with the one she actually got.

What has changed, however, is the audience consuming it: back in 1971, the Peckinpah film horrified moviegoers with its bloody climax, whereas today people are so vengeful and sadistic that the remake is just another multiplex crowd pleaser.

Glodell seems to be reaching for the nihilistic buddy romance of a movie like "Mean Streets" (1973), but without the serious intent; despite all the roiling emotions, this begins to feel like a pile-up of macho fetish items and stylistic affectations.

It's smart, swanky, and good-looking, but strangely, it's not all that funny.

Though it easily surpasses most American action flicks, it suffers from the old commercial imperative of making the protagonist a nice guy, something Refn has seldom bothered with in Europe.

First-time director Mona Achache mixes feel-good platitudes with quirky conceits (including animated interludes and narration by an 11-year old girl) to put across some hoary old notions about bourgeois neuroticism and hypocrisy.

This isn't at all scary, but the rough images can be weirdly compelling, the movie's conspiratorial jive enhanced by the fact that the lunar surface looks like someone's backyard.

This French kidnapping drama drags on for so long I'd have paid the ransom out of my own pocket just to wrap things up.

It almost goes without saying that Harlin is the wrong man to direct a docudrama about the Russia-Georgian conflict of 2008, which displaced tens of thousands of people and left hundreds of others dead. Lacking political insight or sympathy for real people (as opposed to action-movie types), Harlin can offer little more than tasteless spectacle.

By accident or design, the resolution here is morally ambiguous and vaguely distasteful, which may be the reason I liked it.

If the combination of Christian bromides and golf tips strikes you as a recipe for boredom, stay away.

A strong cast fails to rescue this ponderous Oscar bait.

Saldana makes this watchable, James supplies a fitful plausibility, and director Olivier Megaton (a former graffiti artist) keeps things racing along, preposterously.

Joffe, a British screenwriter (The American, 28 Weeks Later) debuting as director, hits some of these notes in his adaptation of Brighton Rock, but the movie's religious flourishes seem more rhetorical than heartfelt.

Like Nicole Holofcener's "Please Give" (2010), this turns on the friction between an unusually altruistic character and the self-centered people around him, though screenwriters David Schisgall and Evgenia Peretz never pursue their premise into the sort of moral comedy that so distinguished the other movie.

The visual effects are as gleefully shoddy as ever, and the playful ideas sometimes achieve a dreamlike suggestiveness.

Michael Webber's documentary "The Elephant in the Living Room" (2010) makes such a powerful case against private ownership of exotic wild animals that this portrait of circus owner David Balding and his beloved elephant Flora seems sentimental by comparison.

Watchable but not very gripping. Patricia Clarkson does her best with an underwritten part as the young man's terminally ill mother, and British actor Ken Stott is excellent as the grieving husband she leaves behind.

Rife with the oldest and simplest pleasures of 3-D movies: all sorts of objects fly at the camera, and the climactic battle takes place over a deep, dark chasm. At its best the movie suggests a funhouse at a state-of-the-art county fair; at its worst it's a fairly dumb celebration of brute violence.