What's effective is how matter-of-fact Fair Game is. This isn't a lathering, angry attack picture.

Perry tries to be faithful to the play and also to his own boldly and simply told stories, and the two styles don't fit together.

So what has happened is that this uptight, ferocious, little gamin Lisbeth has won our hearts, and we care about these stories and think there had better be more.

For a time in her life, a woman's pregnancy is the most important thing about her. That is the subject of Hideaway.

An efficient delivery system for Gotcha! Moments, of which it has about 19. Audiences who want to be Gotchaed will enjoy it.

In Hilary Swank, the film finds the right actress to embody gritty tenacity.

This is a film for intelligent people who are naturally curious about what happens when the shutters close.

Tamara Drewe is one of those British comedies in which, one way or another, we envy all of the characters.

It's not enough to like such films because they're "so bad they're good." You need to specialize, and like the films because they're so good about being so bad they're good. Modus Operandi, a film by Frankie Latina that has won praise on the midnight movie festival circuit, is such a film.

De Niro is so good at playing a man who has essentially emasculated himself because of fear of his anger, so that sex and anger may be leashed in precisely the opposite way, as in "Raging Bull." And Norton, the puppetmaster - it may not even be freedom he requires, but simply the pleasure of controlling others to obtain it.

Clocking in at a brisk 88 minutes, Assassin reaches a heartfelt but ludicrous conclusion, and you’ll start to forget it moments after the final credits.

Neither hagiography nor cold-plate dish, this is a solidly researched, well-photographed, crisply edited film that chronicles Trotter’s life with journalistic integrity, while providing fascinating glimpses into the “foodie” culture of the times, in Chicago and around the world.

For all the beautiful and lovely music Whitney Houston gave us, for all those soaring notes she hit, the documentary Whitney. Can I Be Me is a nearly joyless and melancholy piece of work. Because we know how it ends.

Poetic Turkish tale. Nuri Bilge Ceylan shot this entrancing black-and-white story in his hometown, from a story written by his sister and with a cast of friends and relatives. [20 Oct 1998, p.37]

A poet imprisoned during the Islamic Revolution is released 27 years later. Camera focus, reflections and water droplets are sublimely designed to articulate what his liberty will let him see. [04 Oct 2012, p.4]

The acting is effective, the direction by Alexandre Franchi is confident, and the cinematography by Claudine Sauve could hardly look more assured.

Red is neither a good movie nor a bad one. It features actors we like doing things we wish were more interesting.

It is a great film about greatness, the story of the horse and the no less brave woman who had faith in him.

So anyway, what happens in Life As We Know It? You'll never guess in a million years. Never.

This despicable remake of the despicable 1978 film "I Spit on Your Grave" adds yet another offense: a phony moral equivalency.

We learn that the emotional roller coaster of his formative years probably contributed to the complexity of his lyrics.

One of the most fascinating aspects of Inside Job involves the chatty on-camera insights of Kristin Davis, a Wall Street madam, who says the Street operated in a climate of abundant sex and cocaine for valued clients and the traders themselves.

David Fincher's film has the rare quality of being not only as smart as its brilliant hero, but in the same way. It is cocksure, impatient, cold, exciting and instinctively perceptive.

Those hoping to see a "vampire movie" will be surprised by a good film.

You want gore, you get gore. Hatchet II plays less like a slasher movie than like the highlight reel from a slasher movie.

It's an entertaining story about ambition, romance and predatory trading practices, but it seems more fascinated than angry.

The movie's pleasures are scant, apart from its observance of Gene Siskel's Rule of Swimming Pool Adjacency, which states that when well-dressed people are near a swimming pool, they will - yeah, you got it.

The use of 2:35 wide screen paradoxically increases the effect of claustrophobia. I would not like to be buried alive.

Guggenheim, contends the American educational system is failing, which we have been told before. He dramatizes this failure in a painfully direct way, says what is wrong, says what is right.

One of the qualities I like about this film is that the writer-directors, Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, are aware of the time when Beat scene was new.

The movie is forgiving. But the search for happiness is doomed by definition: You must be happy with what you have, not with what you desire, because the cost of the quest is too high.

Everything is here. It's an effective thriller, he (Affleck) works closely with actors, he has a feel for pacing. Yet I persist in finding chases and gun battles curiously boring.

It's a funny, engaging comedy that takes the familiar but underrated Emma Stone and makes her, I believe, a star.

The facts in the film are slippery, but the revelation of a human personality is surprisingly moving.

The actors make it new and poignant, and avoid going over the top in the story's limited psychic and physical space.

This is a good movie, from a masterful novel.

A sad and painful documentary that serves little useful purpose other than to pound another nail into the coffin. Here is a gifted actor who apparently by his own decision has brought desolation upon his head.

It isn't a masterpiece, but it is a good-hearted, sweet comedy, featuring an overland chase that isn't original but sure is energetic.

In most movies, we know the police bullets will never find their target. With Mesrine, (1) sometimes they do, and (2) in real life, he survived an incredible 20 years with the police firing at him at least annually.

I will say that the attempt to reinterpret the memorable closing shot of "Blood Simple" is so gauche and graceless that I involuntarily moaned in disgust. I docked the film another half-star just for that.

It's one of those extraordinary films, like "Hoop Dreams," that tells a story the makers could not possibly have anticipated in advance. It works like stunning, grieving fiction.

Here is a gripping film with the focus of a Japanese drama, an impenetrable character to equal Alain Delon's in "Le Samourai," by Jean-Pierre Melville.

The acting is macho understatement. Mesrine is a character who might have been played years ago by Gerard Depardieu, who appears here as Guido, a bullet-headed impresario of larceny.

A formula thriller done as an elegant genre exercise. Johnny Hallyday was brought in by To as a last-minute sub for Alain Delon, and could have been the first choice: He is tall, weathered, grim and taciturn.

Shameless wish-fulfillment, a Harlequin novel crossed with a mystic travelogue, and it mercifully reverses the life chronology of many people, which is Love Pray Eat.

Maybe what makesFlipped" such a warm entertainment is how it re-creates a life we wish we'd had when we were 14.

What's interesting is that every single person in this film is seen as themselves, is allowed to speak and seems to have a good heart. I've rarely seen a documentary quite like it. It has a point to make but no ax to grind.

The guests at the dinner are a strange lot. To describe them would be to give away their jokes, and one of the pleasures of the movie is having each one appear.

All of this is just plain enjoyable. I liked it, but please don't make me say it's deeply moving or redemptive and uplifting. It's a genre piece for character actors is what it is, and that's an honorable thing for it to be.

We know Kline can play kooky (he won an Oscar as Otto in "A Fish Called Wanda"), and he does it very well, but the effort can become exhausting after a while.

This is a featherweight G-rated comedy of no consequence, except undoubtedly to kids about Ramona's age.

It's gloriously absurd. This movie has holes in it big enough to drive the whole movie through. The laws of physics seem to be suspended here the same way as in a Road Runner cartoon.

That's another thing about Carion's direction: He has an eye for unusual, atmospheric touches -- the kinds of striking little things you notice in the world and think: "Somebody should put that in a movie."

There's always rationing in wartime. What's rationed in Todd Solondz's Life During Wartime are feelings of hope, kindness and optimism.

Now here's this rich and textured film.

It seems to me that Campbell has a good case here--good enough, anyway, to convince the judges on the African court.

Inception does a difficult thing. It is wholly original, cut from new cloth, and yet structured with action movie basics so it feels like it makes more sense than (quite possibly) it does.

The Sorcerer's Apprentice is a perfectly typical example of its type, professionally made and competently acted.

The film is funny, energetic, teeth-gnashingly venomous and animated with an eye to exploiting the 3-D process with such sure-fire techniques as a visit to an amusement park. The sad thing, I am forced to report, is that the 3-D process produces a picture more dim than it should be.

The movie is mostly about our nasty heroes being attacked by terrifying antagonists in incomprehensible muddles of lightning-fast special effects. It lacks the quiet suspense of the first “Predator,” and please don't even mention the “Alien vs. Predator” pictures, which lacked the subtlety of “Mothra vs. Godzilla.”

Moore and Bening are superb actors here, evoking a marriage of more than 20 years, and all of its shadings and secrets, idealism and compromise.

The Girl Who Played With Fire is very good, but a step down from "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo," if only because that film and its casting were so fresh and unexpected.

Although we find out a lot about this virtual hermit and develop an admiration for his cantankerous principles, the movie leaves some questions unanswered.

The Last Airbender is an agonizing experience in every category I can think of and others still waiting to be invented.

The movie contains violence and death, but not really very much. For most of its languorous running time, it listens to conversations between Bella and Edward, Bella and David, Edward and David, and Edward and Bella and David. This would play better if any of them were clever conversationalists, but their ideas are limited to simplistic renderings of their desires.

The script fails to persuade me this story needed to be told. It should have been trashier or more operatic, maybe. I dunno. It exists in that middle space of films that accurately reflect that which has little need to be reflected.

A pleasant, genial, good-hearted, sometimes icky comedy that's like spending a weekend with well-meaning people you don't want to see again any time real soon.

There is the sense they're fighting for each other more than for ideology.

Dogtooth is like a car crash. You cannot look away. The Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos tells his story with complete command of visuals and performances. His cinematography is like a series of family photographs of a family with something wrong with it.

The film is a visual pleasure, using elegant techniques that don't call flashy attention to themselves. The camera is intended to be as omniscient as the narrator, and can occupy the film's space as it pleases and move as it desires. Here is a young man's film made with a lifetime of experience.

Diaz has one of the most winning grins in the movies. Basically, what I wanted was more of it. Some of that Cary Grant dialog. More flirtation. More of a feeling the characters, not the production, were the foreground. More of the stars.

This is a jolly, slapstick comedy, lacking the almost eerie humanity that infused the earlier “Toy Story” sagas, and happier with action and jokes than with characters and emotions.

It's based on some DC Comics characters, which may explain the way the plot jumps around. We hear a lot about graphic novels, but this is more of a graphic anthology of strange occult ideas.

Here is a film that uses very good actors and gives them a lot of improvisational freedom to talk their way into, around and out of social discomfort. And it's not snarky. It doesn't mock these characters. It understand they have their difficulties and hopes they find a way to work things out.

An amazing film. It is deep, rich, human. It is not about rich and poor, but about old and new. It is about the ancient war between tradition and feeling.

The first shot tells us 45365 is the zip code of the town." In this achingly beautiful film, that zip code belongs to Sidney, Ohio, a handsome town of about 20,000 residents.

If you've seen “The Karate Kid” (1984), the memories will come back during this 2010 remake. That's a compliment.

Bored out of my mind during this spectacle, I found my attention wandering to the subject of physics.

Fascinating and has a lot of laughs in it.

The movie heroes who affect me most are not extroverted. They don't strut, speechify and lead armies. They have no superpowers. They are ordinary people who are faced with a need and rise to the occasion. Ree Dolly is such a hero.

Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky concerns a love affair between two irresistible forces who have never met an immovable object before.

Disappointing then, that the movie introduces such an extraordinary living being and focuses mostly on those around her. All the same, it’s well done, and intriguing.

Under the cover of slapstick, cheap laughs, raunchy humor, gross-out physical comedy and sheer exploitation, Get Him to the Greek also is fundamentally a sound movie.

If you like the comic strip, now in its 56th year, maybe you'll like it, maybe not. Marmaduke's personality isn't nearly as engaging as Garfield's. Then again, if personality is what you're in the market for, maybe you shouldn't be considering a lip-synched talking animal comedy in the first place.

A creepy documentary with all the elements of a horror film about a demented serial killer, and an extra ingredient: This one is real.

The two leads are not inspired. Jake Gyllenhaal could make the cover of a muscle mag, but he plays Dastan as if harboring Spider-Man's doubts and insecurities. I recall Gemma Arterton as resembling a gorgeous still photo in a cosmetics ad.

The skullcap moment appealed to me. It was new. Not much else is new in Survival of the Dead.

I look at a film like this and must respect it for its ingenuity and love of detail. Then I remember "Amelie" and its heroine played by Audrey Tautou, and I understand what's wrong: There's nobody in the story who much makes us care.

The film's second half is the most touching, because it shows that our lives are not merely our own, but also belong to the events we set in motion.

This is a movie about ideas, a drama based on the ancient war between science and superstition. At its center is a woman who in the fourth century A.D. was a scientist, mathematician, philosopher, astronomer and teacher, respected in Egypt, although women were not expected to be any of those things.

Some of these people make my skin crawl. The characters of Sex and the City 2 are flyweight bubbleheads living in a world which rarely requires three sentences in a row.

The film's failure is to get from A to B. We buy both good Sam and bad Sam, but we don't see him making the transition.

Douglas plays Ben as charismatic, he plays him shameless, he plays him as brave, and very gradually, he learns to play him as himself. That's the only role left.

Bronstein's performance is crucial. It's difficult to make a manic character plausible, but he does.

A high-tech and well made violent action picture using the name of Robin Hood for no better reason than that it’s an established brand not protected by copyright.

I know Letters to Juliet is a soppy melodrama, and I don’t mind in the least. I know the ending is preordained from the setup. I know the characters are broad and comforting stereotypes. In this case, I simply don’t care. Sometimes we have personal reasons for responding to a film.

Here Common isn't called upon to do much heavy lifting in the acting department, but he plays well with Queen Latifah. Sure, the movie is a formula. A formula that works reminds us of why it became a formula.

Princess Kaiulani is much remembered in Hawaii, much forgotten on the mainland, and the subject of this interesting but creaky biopic.