The film is founded on three performances by Annette Bening, Kerry Washington and Naomi Watts. All have rarely been better.

The movie depends mostly on wild exaggerations of 007, and here it does something right: It shows stunts and special effects that look like they might have been staged in 1967.

I stared at A Nightmare on Elm Street with weary resignation. The movie consists of a series of teenagers who are introduced, haunted by nightmares and then slashed to death by Freddy. So what? Are we supposed to be scared?

The actors cast themselves adrift on the sinking vessel of this story and go down with the ship.

This movie plays better than perhaps it should. Directed as a debut by Daniel Barber, it places story and character above manufactured "thrills" and works better.

The movie is about imperfect characters in a difficult world, who mostly do the best they can under the circumstances, but not always. Do you realize what a revolutionary approach that is for a movie these days?

What's lacking is a little more depth. This is a movie that covers a lot of distance in only 87 minutes.

Six has now made a film deliberately intended to inspire incredulity, nausea and hopefully outrage. It's being booked as a midnight movie, and is it ever. Boozy fanboys will treat it like a thrill ride.

Somehow isn't as exciting as a duel over a woman should be.

The movie gets the job done, and the actors show a lot of confidence in occupying that tricky middle ground between controlled satire and comic overkill. It's fun.

A sweet, good-looking film about nice people in a beautiful place, and young John Bell is an appealing performer in the tradition of the Culkins. Quinn and Nielsen are pros who take their roles seriously, and Vic Sarin's direction gets the job done.

Some movies are no better than second-rate sitcoms. Other movies are no better than third-rate sitcoms. The Back-up Plan doesn't deserve comparison with sitcoms. It plays like an unendurable TV commercial about beautiful people with great lifestyles and not a thought in their empty little heads.

This is a documentary about what happens to you when you appear in "Troll 2."

You hear some nostalgia, but with most of them you don't get the idea that if they had the chance they'd do it all again.

Will I seem hopelessly square if I find Kick-Ass morally reprehensible and will I appear to have missed the point? Let’s say you’re a big fan of the original comic book, and you think the move does it justice. You know what? You inhabit a world I am so very not interested in.

I laughed all the way through, in fact. This is the best comedy since "The Hangover," and although it's almost a scene-by-scene remake of a 2007 British movie with the same title, it's funnier than the original.

The widespread speculation that Exit Through the Gift Shop is a hoax only adds to its fascination.

Either this is a tragic family or a satirical one, and the film seems uncertain which way to jump.

It’s not a game anymore. In 1957, these kids were playing. And it was a perfect game.

Juan Jose Campanella is the writer-director, and here is a man who creates a complete, engrossing, lovingly crafted film. He is filled with his stories. The Secret in Their Eyes is a rebuke to formula screenplays. We grow to know the characters, and the story pays due respect to their complexities and needs.

All the time Phil and Claire seem like the kind of people who don't belong in a screwball comedy. That's why it's funny. They're bewildered.

We can enjoy the suspense of the opening scenes, and some of the drama. The performances are in keeping with the material. But toward the end, when we realize that the entire reality of the film is problematical, there is a certain impatience. It's as if our chain is being yanked.

It lovingly, almost sadistically, lays out the situation and deliberately demonstrates all the things that can go wrong. And I mean all the things.

I think more edge is needed, more reality about the racial situation at the time, more insight into how and why R&B and rock ’n’ roll actually did forever transform societies in America and the world.

Here their hearts are in the right place, but the film tries to say too many things for its running time.

So the screenplay is a soap operatic mess, involving distractions, loose ends, and sheer carelessness.

Some kind of sweet, wacky masterpiece.

For its intended audience, I suspect this will play as a great entertainment. I enjoyed myself, particularly after they released the Kraken.

I like Miley Cyrus. I like her in spite of the fact that she's been packaged within an inch of her life. I look forward to the day when she squirms loose from her handlers and records an album of classic songs, performed with the same sincerity as her godmother, Dolly Parton. I think it'll be a long, long time until she plays a movie character like the free-standing, engaging heroines of Ashley Judd, but I can wait.

Succeeds beyond any expectations suggested by the title and extends John Cusack's remarkable run: Since 1983, in 55 films, he's never made a bad one.

It's not the kind of movie that depends on the certainty of an ending. It's more about how things continue.

The Eclipse is needlessly confusing. Is it a ghost story or not? Perhaps this is my problem.

Some movies seem born to inspire video games. All they lack is controllers and a scoring system. How to Train Your Dragon plays more like a game born to inspire a movie.

The most fascinating scenes in Waking Sleeping Beauty involve the infamous Disney work ethic. Friends of mine at the studio said the unofficial motto was, "If you didn't come in on Saturday, don't even bother to come in on Sunday."

Why, oh, why, was this movie necessary?

Repo Men makes sci-fi's strongest possible case for universal health care.

But don't get the idea City Island is a laff riot. For this story about these people, it finds about the right tone. They're silly and foolish, as are we all, but deserve what happiness they can negotiate.

It's nimble, bright and funny. It doesn't dumb down. It doesn't patronize. It knows something about human nature.

A compelling thriller to begin with, but it adds the rare quality of having a heroine more fascinating than the story.

I have a weakness for actresses like Greta Gerwig. She looks reasonable and approachable.

A movie like this can get you thinking.

Its interest comes from Shannon's fierce and sadistic training scenes as Kim Fowley, and from the intrinsic qualities of the performances by Stewart and Fanning, who bring more to their characters than the script provides.

The film is beautifully well-mounted. The locations, the sets, the costumes, everything conspire to re-create the Rome of that time. It provides a counterpoint to the usual caricature of Mussolini. They say that behind every great man there stands a great woman. In Mussolini's case, his treatment of her was a rehearsal for how he would treat Italy.

The film is labyrinthine and deceptive, and not in a way we anticipate. It becomes a pleasure for the mind.

It is a thriller, not a documentary. It's my belief that the nature of the neocon evildoing has by now become pretty clear. Others will disagree. The bottom line is: This is one hell of a thriller.

The movie is not a comedy classic. But in a genre where so many movies struggle to lift themselves from zero to one, it's about, oh, a six point five.

A pleasant but inconsequential comedy, awkward for the actors, and contrived from beginning to end.

A well-made movie. I cared about the characters. I felt for them. Liberate them from the plot's destiny, which is an anvil around their necks, and you might have something.

"Alice" plays better as an adult hallucination, which is how Burton rather brilliantly interprets it until a pointless third act flies off the rails.

The best things about Brooklyn's Finest are the one-on-one scenes. These are fine actors.

The movie has a wide appeal, with a gap in the middle. I think it will appeal to children young enough to be untutored in boredom, and to anyone old enough to be drawn in, or to appreciate the artistry.

A lot of the dialogue is intended as funny, but man, is it lame.

A perfectly competent genre film in a genre that has exhausted its interest for me, the Zombie Film.

The best performance in the film is by Arestrup as Cesar. You may remember him from Audiard's "The Beat That My Heart Skipped" (2005), where he played a seedy but confident father who psychically overshadows his son.

What is finally clear: It doesn't matter a damn what your will says if you have $25 billion, and politicians and the establishment want it.

Begins rather awkwardly, but ends by making a statement that explains a great many things. One question left unasked: Why did we promise to defend Taiwan with nuclear weapons but refuse to recognize it as a sovereign nation?

The formula is obvious, but the story, curiously, turns out to be based on fact.

The film's primary effect is on the senses. Everything is brought together into a disturbing foreshadow of dreadful secrets.

The movie tells this story in a traditional, straightforward way. No fancy footwork. No chewing the scenery. Meat and potatoes, you could say, but it's thoughtful and moving.

This movie is the work of a man who knows how to direct a thriller. Smooth, calm, confident, it builds suspense instead of depending on shock and action.

It has smart characters, and is wise about the ones who try to tame their intelligence by acting out.

Joe presents not so much a problem for Jayne and Laura as an opportunity. It's time to finally grow up and be true daughters and sisters. They've waited long enough. All of this, I must add, is done with a nicely screwy, sometimes stoned humor.

The Wolfman avoids what must have been the temptation to update its famous story. It plants itself securely in period, with a great-looking production set in 1891.

Director Chris Columbus has fun with this goofy premise, but as always I am distracted by the practical aspects of the story. Does it bother the Greek gods that no one any longer knows or cares that they rule the world? What are the genetic implications of human/god interbreeding?

Valentine's Day is being marketed as a Date Movie. I think it's more of a First-Date Movie. If your date likes it, do NOT date that person again. And if you like it, there may not be a second date.

This is the face of dysfunction. Apparently alcohol and drugs are not involved, except perhaps with some of the missing men. The drug here is despair. They seem to treat it with cigarettes.

Dear John exists only to coddle the sentiments of undemanding dreamers, and plunge us into a world where the only evil is the interruption of the good.

This is a hot modern martial art. Not only do the shots look convincing, not only are they held long enough to allow us to see an entire action, but Belle in real life does a version of this stuff.

I hasten to say this is not criticism of John Travolta. He succeeds in this movie by essentially acting in a movie of his own.

I've only been to Denmark twice and have no idea if this is even remotely a Danish situation, but it could fit right fine in the Old West.

The latest and one of the most harrowing films set along the religious divides in Israel.

Winstone's interaction with Gibson provides the movie with much of its interest. For the rest, it's a skillful exercise in CGI and standard-order thriller supplies.

These fears explain why in its scenes on the Eiger itself, North Face starts strongly and ends as unbearably riveting. They also explain why it was a strategic error to believe this story needed romantic and political subplots.

This movie is all elbows. Nothing fits. It doesn't add up. It has some terrific free-standing scenes, but they need more to lean on.

Still Bill is about a man who topped the charts, walked away from it all in 1985 and is pleased that he did.

I have a feeling the loss of their child and the state of their marriage were what most interested the backers of this film. They must have wanted to make a film about Darwin the man, not Darwin the scientist.

An ordinary film with ordinary characters in a story too big for it. Life has been reduced to a Lifetime movie.

What the film is really about is social embarrassment, and Bleistein's clear-headed, calm understanding that his old friend has a stupid daughter who has caused fraudulent trouble for a great many people.

There's no way I can recommend this movie to anyone much beyond the Tooth Fairy Believement Age, but I must testify it's pleasant and inoffensive, although the violence in the hockey games seems out of place.

The film looks and feels good, and Washington's performance is the more uncanny the more we think back over it. The ending is "flawed," as we critics like to say, but it's so magnificently, shamelessly, implausibly flawed that (a) it breaks apart from the movie and has a life of its own, or (b) at least it avoids being predictable.

Everybody knew to wait for the outtakes during the closing credits, because you'd see him miss a fire escape or land wrong in the truck going under the bridge. Now the outtakes involve his use of the English language.

Arnold deserves comparison with a British master director like Ken Loach.

This intriguing premise, alas, ends as so many movies do these days, with fierce fights and bloodshed.

This is a full-bore, PG-rated, sweet rom-com. It sticks to the track, makes all the scheduled stops and bears us triumphantly to the station. And it is populated by colorful characters, but then, when was the last time you saw a boring Irishman in a movie?

One of the secrets of Youth in Revolt is that Nick seems bewildered by his own desires and strategies. He knows how he feels, he knows what he wants, but he'd need a map to get from A to B. It's his self-abasing modesty that makes the movie work. Here, you feel, is a movie character who would find more peace on the radio.

The film is visually masterful. It's in black and white, of course.

The film has its rewards and one performance of great passion. That would be by Ellen Burstyn, as Miss Addie, who plays it all in her sick bed in a Tennessee country mansion with a debutante party going on downstairs.

The Chaser is an expert serial-killer film from South Korea and a poster child for what a well-made thriller looked like in the classic days.

The less I thought about Sherlock Holmes, the more I liked "Sherlock Holmes." Yet another classic hero has been fed into the f/x mill, emerging as a modern superman.

There's funny stuff here. We like everybody.

This is an Imaginarium indeed. The best approach is to sit there and let it happen to you; see it in the moment and not with long-term memory, which seems to be what Parnassus does.

It is astonishingly original.

Its surprisingly effective key scene involves an argument with his captain over the dictionary definitions of the words "conscience" and "justice." This may not sound exciting, but it was welcome after legions of cop movies in which such arguments are orchestrated with the f-word.

What possible reason was there for anyone to make Did You Hear About the Morgans? Or should I say "remake," because this movie has been made and over and over again, and oh, so much better.

Once again, [Cameron] has silenced the doubters by simply delivering an extraordinary film. There is still at least one man in Hollywood who knows how to spend $250 million, or was it $300 million, wisely.

Nine is just plain adrift in its own lack of necessity.

Emily Blunt makes Victoria as irresistible a young woman as Dame Judi Dench made her an older one in "Mrs. Brown" (1997).

I enjoyed this film so much I'm sorry to report it was finally too much of a muchness. You can only eat so much cake.