Handsome and generally amusing adventure.

This odd-couple comedy reunites Galifianakis with Todd Phillips, who directed "The Hangover," but don't expect anything like the other movie's novel plotting or wild slapstick.

Thanks to her fearless, charismatic star, Ondi Timoner has directed one of the more hopeful movies of the year.

Screenwriter Mark Bomback doesn't do much with the backstory scenes linking Pine and Washington to their worried families, but the main story is gripping, flawlessly paced, and nicely grounded in operational detail.

Strange, dumb, and sometimes even fun.

This haunting drama by Claire Denis burns with a mute fear and rage at the ongoing atrocities in central Africa.

A watered-down satire of the pharmaceutical industry.

The film never outshines its influences, but as back-to-basics action filmmaking, it's often superb.

The result is notably dim and flat on a big screen, and the giant-monster scenes, often cloaked in darkness, are few and disappointing. Edwards tries to take the high road with a politically intriguing premise (a la District 9) and a tight focus on the evolving relationship between his two traveling companions, but his shapeless script doesn't do much with either element.

This is the art-house equivalent of a Clive Barker splatterfest, punctuated by mildly amusing stabs at Lynchian absurdity and compromised by an incoherent plot twist that would leave M. Night Shyamalan rolling his eyes.

Fast-paced and intelligent documentary.

Unfortunately, this is one of those movies with a twist ending that turns a character inside out, revealing earlier scenes to be essentially fraudulent and more or less invalidating one's emotional investment in the story. No one ever walked out of a Hitchcock movie feeling as cheated as this made me feel.

The tale of Rapunzel gets a cheeky make-over in this gorgeous Disney animation, which combines the studio's traditional hand-drawn look with the sculptural qualities of digital 3D.

The current burlesque revival is a throwback to ostensibly more innocent times, and writer-director Steven Antin finds something redemptive in each character.

A tolerably warm bath of postcollegiate self-pity, salted with irony and self-mockery.

The beguiling creature design--from minotaur to dragon, sea serpent to one-footed dwarf--and 3D effects heighten the illusion of a storybook coming alive, while the rousing sea adventure drives home Lewis's Christian ethos better than either of the previous entries.

Unfortunately, as the opening title might suggest, the filmmakers have punted on the hard cinematic work of making the incredible seem credible; instead they've turned Russell's story into a broad farce with one wocka-wocka gag after another.

The best portion is an animated story-within-the-story, supervised by Ben Hibon, that recalls Lotte Reiniger's filigreed shadow puppets as it sets the stage for armageddon.

The hero's psychological transference is so blatant that even the characters begin commenting on it after a while, yet this modest three-hander is capably acted and genuinely touching.

I haven't seen the shorter version, but I would hate to lose one moment of the gripping 66-minute sequence-really the heart of the movie-in which Carlos plots and executes his spectacular 1975 raid on the meeting of OPEC ministers in Vienna.

The black/white duality isn't terribly interesting, but as in most of Aronofsky's films, an intense horror of the body and its uncontrollability fuels the rhapsodic psychodrama.

Director Nigel Cole is best known for "Calendar Girls" (2003), another condescending exercise in you-go-girl uplift.

Appealing restaurant comedy.

The characters are so vivid that the suspense never lags. Crowe is best in buttoned-down roles like this one, and he holds the husband's fear and resolve in balance.

Visual-effects wizards Greg and Colin Strause directed, showing more affinity for the city's steel and glass than for any of the characters.

The comedy divides cleanly into dark, violent slapstick (much of it hilarious) and more routine gags highlighting the fanatical characters' foolishness and incompetence.

Aside from an exhilarating opening and a gruesome climax, the movie isn't all that rich emotionally; all the visual razzle-dazzle winds up serving a pat lesson about people needing other people.

McAdams is typically effervescent here, but she can't rescue this weak comedy from a wooden Ford, whose stick-up-the-ass character is unimaginatively goosed by screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna.

Perry benefits from the fire, heft, velocity, and lyricism of the language, but he also updates the material and makes it work onscreen, eliciting powerhouse performances from an ensemble of actresses.

Doug Liman's Fair Game is a model exercise in dramatizing recent political scandal, and easily the best fact-based Hollywood political thriller since "All the President's Men."

The emptied-out characters strive for a transcendence they'll never quite reach, and so does the film.

In place of romance there are numerous talky espionage scenes that make the movie feel like one of those labyrinthine cold war pictures from the 60s.

Sam Rockwell plays the brother, and in his handful of scenes he skillfully tracks the character's slow decay from cocky loudmouth to thoroughly beaten man; Swank, delivering her usual spunky turn, suffers badly by comparison.

Lacks the toughness of Eastwood's best work.

Thomas Hardy it's not, but as far as middlebrow British romances go, better this than "Love Actually."

The incandescent Doona Bae (The Host, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance) gives a daring performance as the toy-turned-woman,

This is deeply felt, poetic filmmaking, though the unrelentingly dour tone isn't for everyone. [18 Oct 2012, p.41]

The film preserves many of Ellis's amoral one liners (best delivered by Malkovich and by Richard Dreyfuss as one of the villains), though as in much of his writing, the fun is discolored by a profound cynicism.

At their best, the Jackasses combine low-brow humor with delectable absurdity (one of my favorite gags from Jackass: The Movie had a guy creeping up on a cougar while dressed as a giant mouse), but here it's almost pure punishment.

The period details are so exact they're occasionally distracting, the use of gospel music at the end is questionable, and director Randall Wallace (We Were Soldiers) shows a surer hand in the track sequences than the domestic scenes. Still, there's no denying this movie has heart.

The movie relies on the notion that postponing sex heightens arousal, but its lovers aren't any better matched post-coitus than they were before.

A fairly standard coming-of-age story, but the peripheral wackos keep it from feeling too pat. The film inhabits that elusive space between sanity and insanity, where most of life takes place.

What it doesn't have is the first movie's primal understanding of patriarchal violence and feminist rage, as both moral horror and exploitation gold. As a result, this is a much easier movie to watch.

The maternal triangle is pretty well handled too, giving a good sense of where Lennon came by all that exuberance and melancholy.

"American Casino" and Michael Moore's "Capitalism: A Love Story" offered more striking images of the human wreckage, but Ferguson is more successful at nailing the perpetrators in New York and their gullible accomplices in Washington.

The founding of Facebook becomes a tale for our times in this masterful social drama.

The language has been changed to English, of course, which is the only real reason this movie exists; the story development, desolate tone, and key set pieces are mostly copied from the original movie, which in turn was based on a novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist.

The end result is more like a supermarket on Saturday afternoon. The content is engaging, though.

The setup for this Oliver Stone drama keeps its iconic villain so far removed from the financial action that he seems like a dog tied up outside a restaurant.

As a cautionary tale about the perils of nation building, this is both creepy and provocative, but director Rodrigo Cortés blows it in the last few minutes with a rushed ending that feels like a cheat after all the escalating tension.

Bitchy cheerleaders and swimming pool catfights are just two of the tedious cliches propping up this brittle comedy.

French director Gaspar Noe has kept a pretty low profile since his 2002 drama "Irreversible" notorious for its brutal nine-minute anal rape scene. But this epic, psychedelic mindfuck confirms him once again as the cinema's most imaginative nihilist.

The result, though clearly flawed, is passionate and ambitious, celebrating that long-gone era when a book of verse could spark a revolution in consciousness.

This documentary about the public education crisis isn't as smart or rigorous as Bob Bowdon's shoestring production "The Cartel," which arrived in town earlier this year and quickly vanished. But the new movie is still an admirable exercise in straight talk.

The paltry theme is that we can't predict the future, but I spent part of the time calculating how many more feeble movies Allen will make, based on his productivity rate (one per year), his batting average (four duds for every success), his current age (74), and his father's longevity (Martin Konigsberg lived to be 100). Are you ready for 20 more remakes of "Manhattan"?

Director Will Gluck (Fired Up!) shows wicked comic timing and uncommon warmth in an overworked genre.

The great cinematographer Tak Fujimoto has the time of his life on this low-budget horror feature, playing with dolly shots, abrupt zooms, and negative space inside the widescreen frame, and the fun is infectious.

This second feature doesn't resonate with nearly as much power, but its suspenseful story of two generations of career criminals in the city's northerly Charlestown neighborhood has a similarly haunting quality.

There are some creepy chuckles to be had from this allegedly true account of a hip, young New York photographer.

Making his feature directing debut, Hoffman shows considerable generosity toward the other players, which was probably a good idea given his own listless performance as the mumbling title character.

You don't have to get too far into Kazuo Ishiguro's brilliant 2005 novel Never Let Me Go to realize it's hopelessly unfilmable.

The behind-the-scenes access to professional kitchens, the intricacy of the desserts, the venerable traditions, and above all the camaraderie and respect the chefs extend each other reveal the craftsmen at their civilized best; think of this movie as the antidote to Gordon Ramsay.

As a drama this is rote, as a musical it's uninspired, and as a comedy it's adolescent; ultimately it's a mess, unsure what it wants to be.

The wrestling scenes are the best part of this drama.

True to series form, plot is nearly indiscernible, but this fourth installment in the sci-fi/horror/action franchise created by writer-director Paul W.S. Anderson is the sleekest so far, thanks to 3D and star Milla Jovovich's body-hugging catsuit.

To judge from this agonizing documentary, sniveling man-child Joaquin Phoenix was put on earth to make us appreciate Crispin Glover for the level-headed fellow he is.

Truly compelling, however, is the material about Gould's innovative studio recordings and radio documentaries.

The movie contemporizes teen-sex comedies like "Porky's" and "American Pie": when the witless nerd gets caught with his proverbial pants down, the footage ends up on YouTube with an astonishing number of hits.

It's fun to watch the habitually intense Duris relax somewhat in a light comedy role, and director Pascal Chaumeil gets good mileage out of the team's ridiculously elaborate con games.

Vincent Cassel sets a new standard for Gallic cool as the title character.

There's also some gallows humor about the record and newspaper industries, but overall this is a light, genial comedy about denial and self-defense.

Rodriguez retreats into gruesome violence and flaccid comedy, grasping feebly for topical relevance by referencing the current immigration fracas.

The result is an uneasy mix of Coen-style laughs (particularly evident in the big comic close-ups) and Zhang's majestic imagery (in one shot the couple's divorce papers shatter into a burst of confetti).

Disappointment, inhuman work schedules, sluggish exports, and the crush of a two-day rail journey ratchet up the familial tensions, which finally explode over a holiday dinner.

George Clooney produced and stars in this international spy thriller, which he probably thought of as existential but which registers onscreen as a giant bore.

Patrick Fabian is charming as Marcus, and director Daniel Stamm delivers a series of surefooted scares as the staged possession turns real. But the movie is still unsatisfying; in its eagerness to deliver familiar genre pleasures, it somehow misplaces its soul.

Comparisons with Michael Mann's recent Dillinger biopic "Public Enemies" are inevitable, and mostly flattering to this project: director Jean-Francois Richet and screenwriter Abdel Raouf Dafri take advantage of the additional screen time (about 100 minutes more than Mann had) to flesh out their protagonist, who fancies himself an honorable thief and even a left-wing revolutionary but ultimately turns out to be something much simpler: a man who loves his work.

There's little here about soldiers and mercenaries that isn't lifted from other movies, though Marshall elicits a steady seriousness from his actors (especially Michael Fassbender, in an introverted lead performance), which generally keeps the movie from sliding into camp.

Distinguishes itself with three-dimensional characters and an engaging storyline.

No doubt the characters are stereotypes, but the performances are handled with a knowing wink and a great deal of fun-particularly Mike Epps, who shines as a hammy Little Richard-style preacher.

Moderately entertaining popcorn thriller.

Bar-Lev ponders myth in both senses of the word-as a web of lies, but also as a psychological construct that gives life purpose. An atheist and critical thinker, Pat Tillman had no use for either.

Akin perfectly captures the antic pace, eccentric personalities, and fickle fortunes of the restaurant game, and his vision of the Soul Kitchen as an all-night bacchanal is irresistible.

How can a romantic drama tailor-made for Julia Roberts from Elizabeth Gilbert's best-selling memoir about self-actualization--shot against alluring locales in Italy, India, and Bali, and directed by the acclaimed Ryan Murphy (TV's Nip/Tuck and Glee)--go so ass-numbingly wrong?

Michael Cera elevates deadpan to an art, starring as a slacker turned action hero in this wildly inventive comedy that's one of the most vivid and spirited adaptations of a comic book since Spider-Man--and one of the hippest since Ghost World.

Stallone directs a bloodbath that borrows liberally from such male-bonding classics as Robert Aldrich's "The Dirty Dozen" and Sam Peckinpah's "The Wild Bunch," but offers not a whiff of the tragic fatalism and astute critique of machismo that inform those superior dramas.

A densely textured moral universe that makes good on his metaphoric title-and in this case, the animals are perfectly willing to eat their young.

The most riveting interview subject is the unrepentant Killen, who granted the filmmakers surprisingly broad access to his personal life.

Michael Keaton is a stitch as an emasculated police captain moonlighting as a retail store manager.

With Mallick as one of the producers, this Boogie Nights wannabe benefits from an insider's knowledge of how online commerce was born but suffers from a seemingly endless voice-over by the Wilson/Mallick character steering our sympathies in his direction (it's the sort of middle man the movie could have done without).

Director Jon Chu (Step Up 2 the Streets) ably exploits the 3D format, constantly moving the action forward and upward. The color and music also pop, as do scene stealers Martin and Facundo Lombard, Argentine twins whose comedic talents nearly match their dizzying footwork.

Eventually the kids figure out that parents and other authority figures (among them Rebecca De Mornay, Anthony Edwards, Penelope Miller, and Aidan Quinn) don't always have it together. Was this trip necessary?

Samuel Maoz drew from his own war experiences to write and direct this searing drama, which ranks alongside "Platoon" and "No Man's Land" as an antiwar statement and recalls the claustrophobic despair of "Das Boot."

A perfect example of the modern comedy mill gone wrong, a prolonged muddle whose plot, specific situations, and improvised quips never line up.

This handsome period drama is the sort of quiet, homespun story that Duvall, who served as executive producer, has always loved.

Cross the cold war nostalgia of "Good Bye, Lenin!" with the larcenous high jinks of "The Producers" and you've got the gist of this zany Russian screwball comedy.

The scenes in which Charlie plays catch with the ghost of his Red Sox-happy brother are only the most mawkish in a movie whose every element is calculated to set a 12-year-old girl's heart thumping.

Based on a novel by Jonathan Ames, this drearily quirky mess wants to be "Secretary" for submissive males, but it's just a sitcom in a powdered wig and size 17 pumps.