I would rather eat a golf ball than see this movie again.

No one in the movie has a morsel of intelligence. They all seem to be channeling more successful characters in better comedies. This would be touching if it were not so desperate.

The architecture of The Debt has an unfortunate flaw. The younger versions of the characters have scenes that are intrinsically more exciting, but the actors playing the older versions are more interesting. Helen Mirren, Tom Wilkinson and Ciaran Hinds bring along the weight of their many earlier roles. To be sure, the older actors get some excitement of their own, but by then, the plot has lost its way.

There are many scholars and critics here, most of them useful and pleasant, who obviously love him. Most remarkably, there is his granddaughter, Bel Kaufman, still looking terrific at 100, who had writing in her blood and wrote "Up the Down Staircase."

I know the novel, and as dark as this film is, I believe it hesitates to follow Greene into his dark abyss. It is about helplessness and evil, but isn't merciless enough.

This is a very good haunted house film. It milks our frustration deliciously.

It's refreshing, this late in the summer, to find a hot weather comedy that doesn't hate its characters and embed them in scatology and sexual impossibilities.

A brutal, crude, witless high-tech CGI contrivance, in which no artificial technique has been overlooked, including 3-D.

A slick, exciting, well-made crime thriller, dripping with atmosphere.

As in the earlier film, this one dances always at the edge of comedy. It especially has fun with the Rules of Vampire Behavior.

Simple enough to delight a child and complex enough to baffle a philosopher.

In a season of movies dumb and dumber, One Day has style, freshness, and witty bantering dialogue.

A documentary that does the job it sets out to do. I wish it had tried for more. It is a competent TV sports doc, the sort you'd expect to see on ESPN. Unless you are a big fan of Senna or Formula One, I don't know why you'd want to pay first-run prices to see it.

They (fans) know what they enjoy. They don't want no damn movies with damn surprises. I am always pleased when moviegoers have a good time; perhaps they will return to a theater and someday see a good movie by accident, and it will start them thinking.

An ingenious thriller that doesn't make much sense but doesn't need to, because it moves at breakneck speed through a story of a man's desperation to save his pregnant wife after she has been kidnapped. This is the kind of movie where you get involved first and ask questions later.

For 20 years the news has reported from time to time of crimes alleged by employees of paid defense contractors. These cases rarely seem to result in change, and the stories continue. We can only guess what may be going unreported. The Whistleblower offers chilling evidence of why that seems to be so.

The movie's strategic error is to set the deadline too far in the future. There is something annoying about a comedy where a guy is strapped to a bomb and nevertheless has time to spare for off-topic shouting matches with his best buddy. A buddy comedy loses some of its charm in a situation like that.

A lovely film, but maddeningly complacent.

The Interrupters is based on a much-acclaimed article in the New York Times Magazine by Alex Kotlowitz, who followed a period of intense violence in Chicago. He joined with James to co-produce the film. It is difficult to imagine the effort, day after day for a year, of following this laborious, heroic and so often fruitless volunteer work.

This is a good film, involving and wonderfully acted. I was drawn into the characters and quite moved, even though all the while I was aware it was a feel-good fable, a story that deals with pain but doesn't care to be that painful.

The movie is above all entertaining, if you enjoy human grotesquerie and flamboyant acting. Let's face it: Many of us do. There's a reason Hannibal Lecter remains the most popular villain in the movies.

On the surface, this film is an enchanting meditation. At its core is the hard steel of individuality.

The Guard is a pleasure. I can't tell if it's really (bleeping) dumb or really (bleeping) smart, but it's pretty (bleeping) good.

The movie therefore offers meager pleasures of character. Where it excels is in staging and cinematography. The running sequences, in races, on city streets and through forests, are very well-handled.

Each scene works within itself on its own terms. But there is no whole here. I've rarely seen a narrative film that seemed so reluctant to flow. Nor perhaps one with a more accurate title.

One of the dirtiest-minded mainstream releases in history. It has a low opinion of men, a lower opinion of women, and the lowest opinion of the intelligence of its audience. It is obscene, foulmouthed, scatological, creepy and perverted.

The movie has its pleasures, although human intelligence is not one of them. Caesar, to begin with, is a wonderfully executed character, a product of special effects and a motion-capture performance by Andy Serkis, who earlier gave us Gollum in "Lord of the Rings."

What's impressive is how well this film joins its parts into a whole.

The standards for comic book superhero movies have been established by "Superman," "The Dark Knight," "Spider-Man 2" and "Iron Man." In that company "Thor" is pitiful. Consider even the comparable villains (Lex Luthor, the Joker, Doc Ock and Obadiah Stane). Memories of all four come instantly to mind. Will you be thinking of Loki six minutes after this movie is over?

Cuts back and forth between a tragic story involving the Holocaust and an essentially trivial, feel-good story about a modern-day reporter. It's an awkward fit and diminishes the impact of the earlier story.

It's manipulative, yes, but clever and persuasive in its manipulations.

The movie, which should have been titled "Defend the Block," illustrates once again that zombie, horror and monster movies are a port of entry for new filmmakers. The genre is the star.

Cowboys & Aliens has without any doubt the most cockamamie plot I've witnessed in many a moon.

The strength of the movie, however formulaic its structure, is that it is slightly more thoughtful about its characters. It's not deep, mind you, but it considers their problems as more than fodder for comedy.

Soppy and sentimental, it evokes "Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood" without improving on it.

Movies about high school misfits are common; this is an uncommon one. Terri, so convincingly played by Jacob Wysocki, is smart, gentle and instinctively wise.

It goes without saying it's preposterous. But it has the texture and takes the care to be a full-blown film.

The news about this movie is that it makes it clear that both Timberlake and Kunis are the real thing when it comes to light comedy.

It's a shaky-cam meander through an unconvincing relationship, with detours considering the process of making the film. At 91 minutes, it seems very long.

It is a spellbinding enigma, and one of the damnedest films Morris has ever made.

The whole program could make a nice introduction to moviegoing for a small child.

This movie is impressively staged, the dialogue is given proper weight and not hurried through, there are surprises which, in hindsight, seem fair enough, and "Harry Potter" now possesses an end that befits the most profitable series in movie history.

Sara Forestier is uninhibited in the role and has great comic energy. She won the Cesar for best actress for this performance.

The movie suggests that humans benefitted little from Project Nim, and Nim himself not at all.

The performances are pitch perfect, even including Gabriel Chavarria as Ramon, the man who steals the truck. It adds an important element to the film that he embodies a desperate man, not a bad one.

It's not the romcom that's so entertaining, anyway; it's the slapstick.

Funny and dirty in about that order.

Bride Flight takes this melodrama and adds details of period, of behavior, of personality, to somewhat redeem its rather inevitable conclusion.

I enjoyed the film very much. It was a visceral pleasure to see a hard-boiled guy like David Carr at its center.

The screenplay carries blandness to a point beyond tedium.

It's chirpy, it's bright, there are pretty locations and lots happens. This is the kind of movie that can briefly hold the attention of a cat.

A visually ugly film with an incoherent plot, wooden characters and inane dialog. It provided me with one of the more unpleasant experiences I've had at the movies.

Of these characters, the rival played by Lucy Punch is the most colorful, because she's the most driven and obsessed. The others seem curiously inconsequential, content to materialize in a scene, perform a necessary function and vaporize.

A lot of Trollhunter - but not enough - is funny. I imagine the best way to see the movie would be the way it was presented at Sundance, at a "secret" midnight screening at which the capacity audience allegedly has no idea what it is about to see.

A film like The Last Mountain fills me with restless anger. I have seen many documentaries like this, all telling versions of the same story.

What I was left with was the goodness of Buck Brannaman as a man. He was dealt a hand that might have destroyed him. He overcame his start and is now a wise and influential role model. He does unto horses as he wishes his father had done onto him.

This is not to say Conan O'Brien is a bad man. In fact, after the movie, I rather admired him. What we are seeing is a man determined to vindicate himself after a public humiliation.

Cars 2 is fun. Whether that's because John Lasseter is in touch with his inner child or mine, I cannot say.

Pleasant and well-acted and easy to watch.

This is a great deal more entertaining than it sounds, in large part because the two actors are gifted mimics - Brydon the better one, although Coogan doesn't think so.

The movie stars Jim Carrey, who is in his pleasant mode. It would have helped if he were in his manic mode, although it's hard to get a rise out of a penguin.

Green Lantern does not intend to be plausible. It intends to be a sound-and-light show, assaulting the audience with sensational special effects. If that's what you want, that's what you get.

Here is a film that invites philosophical musing. Made without dialogue and often in long shots, it regards the four stages of existence in a remote Italian village.

If someone could give you a pill that allowed you to live for 500 years, would you take it? Not me.

A consistently entertaining documentary bringing together a remarkable variety of surviving performances on films and records, going back to circa 1900.

A film that little kids might find perfectly acceptable. Little, little, little kids. My best guess is, above fourth-grade level, you'd be pushing it.

Unfortunately, I was also convinced that trapped within this 98-minute film is a good 30-minute news report struggling to get out. Shearer, who is bright and funny, comes across here as a solemn lecturer.

A film like this can end honestly in only one way, and Ku is true to it. Life will go on, one baffling day after another. There can be no release, only a gradual deadening.

This film is an affront. It is incoherent, maddening, deliberately opaque and heedless of the ways in which people watch movies.

Submarine isn't an insipid teen sex comedy. It flaunts some stylistic devices, such as titles and sections and self-aware narration, but it doesn't try too hard to be desperately clever.

One of the pleasures of Beginners is the warmth and sincerity of the major characters. There is no villain. They begin by wanting to be happier and end by succeeding.

A wonderful film, nostalgia not for a time but for a style of filmmaking, when shell-shocked young audiences were told a story and not pounded over the head with aggressive action.

A remarkable documentary that's also one of the most beautiful nature films I've seen.

The only other film I've seen with this boldness of vision is Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey," and it lacked Malick's fierce evocation of human feeling.

X-Men: First Class is competent weekend entertainment. It is not a great comic book movie, like "Spider-Man 2," or a bad one, like "Thor." It is not in 3-D, which is a mercy.

What it comes down to is: Pierre is a lousy adulterer. He lacks the desire, the reason and the skill.

The film is terrifically entertaining, an ambitious big-budget epic, directed with great visuals and sound by Takeshi Miike.

The animation is elegant, the story is much more involving than in the original, and there's boundless energy.

Owen Wilson is a key to the movie's appeal. He makes Gil so sincere, so enthusiastic.

Is this some kind of a test? The Hangover, Part II plays like a challenge to the audience's capacity for raunchiness.

Here is a good and joyous man who leads a life that is perfect for him, and how many people do we meet like that? This movie made me happy every moment I was watching it.

The movie is fun until they set sail.

Meek's Cutoff is more an experience than a story. It has personality conflicts, but isn't about them. The suspicions and angers of the group are essentially irrelevant to their overwhelming reality. Reichardt has the courage to establish that.

At the end, I was expecting more of an emotional payoff; making a movie calm is one thing, and making it matter-of-fact is another. But make a note about Will Ferrell. There is depth there.

Bridesmaids seems to be a more or less deliberate attempt to cross the Chick Flick with the Raunch Comedy. It definitively proves that women are the equal of men in vulgarity, sexual frankness, lust, vulnerability, overdrinking and insecurity.

The bottom line: I am convinced this message is true.

Here is an unsuccessful movie with some surprisingly successful scenes. It has moments when it is electrifying and passages where it slows to a walk.

A charming documentary about the finalists in the Teenage Magician Contest at the annual World Magic Seminar in Las Vegas.

As good as Gibson is, his character is still caught between the tragedy of the man and the absurdity of the Beaver. Fugitive thoughts of Señor Wences crept into my mind. I'm sorry, but they did.

The cast is large, well chosen and diverting. The ceremony is delightful.

All of the characters are treated sincerely and played in a straightforward style. It's just that we don't love them enough.

He is one of the most prolific and generous of directors, and there is no word that summarizes a "Tavernier film," except, usually, masterful.

What I enjoyed was the way the film summons up the pure obsessive passion that chess stirs in some people.

Siskel and Jacobs focus on the performances, which are inspiring and electrifying.

What it all comes down to is a skillfully assembled 130 minutes at the movies, with actors capable of doing absurd things with straight faces, and action sequences that toy idly with the laws of physics.

Spellbinding.

Director Jim Mickle, who co-wrote the film with his star Nick Damici, has crafted a good-looking, well-played and atmospheric apocalyptic vision.

Most people do not choose their religions but have them forced upon themselves by birth, and the lesson of Incendies is that an accident of birth is not a reason for hatred.