Directors Jennifer Lee (who also wrote the screenplay) and Chris Buck, along with the obligatory army of talented Disney animators, deliver one brilliantly rendered set piece after another.

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

An idea is not enough for a movie. Characters have to be developed, comic situations have to be set up before they can pay off and the story should have a conclusion instead of a dead stop. Real Life fails in all of those areas -- fails so miserably that it lets its audiences down.

Even when Disconnect follows the path we expect it to follow, it does so in a way that keeps us intensely engaged. There wasn't a moment during this movie when I thought about anything other than this movie.

So yes, “MaXXXine” is sometimes more style than substance. Still, amid all the clever inside jokes and Easter eggs, writer-director-producer-editor West delivers a masterfully paced horror film set against the dichotomy between actor-turned-politician Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America” and the reality of 1985 Hollywood and its grimy, exploitative, misogynist underbelly.

Too much self-pity.

Andrea Yates believed she was possessed by Satan and could save her children by drowning them. Frailty is as chilling.

The film is bold and passionate, but not subtle, and that is its downfall.

Movies like 8 Women are essentially made for movie-lovers. You have to have seen overdecorated studio musicals, and you have to know who Darrieux and Deneuve and Beart and Huppert and Ardant are, to get the full flavor. It also helps if you have seen Agatha Christie's "The Mousetrap."

Pennies from Heaven is dazzling and disappointing in equal measure. It's a musical with an idea, and ideas usually have been deadly to the musical, that most gloriously heedless of movie genres.

Sudeikis and Brie make for one of the most endearing pairings of the year, and Headland has delivered one of my favorite romantic comedies in recent memory.

The way to enjoy this film is to put your logic on hold, along with any higher sensitivities that might be vulnerable and immerse yourself as if in a video game.

I haven't been exactly a fan of the "Nightmare" series, but I found this movie, with its unsettling questions about the effect of horror on those who create it, strangely intriguing.

A funny movie with its heart finally in the right place, but all sorts of unacknowledged complications lurk just beneath its polished surface.

Some viewers may find the film confusing; I found it absorbing.

The performance and the character are fully realized, even in this movie that finds room for so many loose ends and dead ends.

The thriller occupies the same territory as countless science fiction movies about deadly invasions and high-tech conspiracies, but has been made with intelligence and an appealing human dimension.

Van Damme says worse things about himself than critics would dream of saying, and the effect is shockingly truthful.

The characters are all over the map, there are too many unclear story threads, our sympathies are confused, and there's an unconvincing showdown in which the story's lovingly developed ambiguities are lost.

I would like to see another movie in three or four years, about what has happened to these angry, gifted friends.

This isn’t the greatest Marvel movie ever made, but it’s definitely one of the funniest — and one of the sweetest.

Learning of this story, I thought, aw, come on, give me a break. But it turns out the story is not only based on fact, but the actual dolphin involved, named Winter, stars in the movie as herself. Her new tail functions admirably.

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.

Movies like this are more or less impervious to the depredations of movie critics. Either you laugh, or you don't. I laughed.

Gretchen Mol is finally the key to the mysterious appeal of the film, to its sweetness and sadness.

There’s not a single character in this film that doesn’t come across as authentic.

We know exactly where this story is going, and we're happy to come along for the ride.

In observing the reality of this relationship, Wang contemplates the "generation gap" in modern societies all over the world. His film quietly, carefully, movingly observes how these two people of the same blood will never be able to understand each other, and the younger one won't even care to.

Clockwatchers is a wicked, subversive comedy about the hell on earth occupied by temporary office workers.

Ghost movies like this, depending on imagination and craft, are much more entertaining than movies that scare you by throwing a cat at the camera.

Watching the film, I thought of Michael Powell's great 1960 British thriller "Peeping Tom," which was about a photographer who killed his victims with a stiletto concealed in his camera. Sy uses a psychological stiletto, but he's the same kind of character.

There has never been a movie quite like Northfork… The movie is visionary and elegiac, more a fable than a story, and frame by frame, it looks like a portfolio of spaces so wide, so open, that men must wonder if they have a role beneath such indifferent skies.

Those who deplore Beavis and Butt-Head are confusing the messengers with the message.

It might be another 30 years before we get the next “Fletch,” but if Hamm is up for a repeat appearance, I’d be more than pleased to come along for the ride.

This movie will no doubt be pitched to the same audiences that loved "The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel." It even brings Maggie Smith along. But it lacks that film's life, intelligence and spirit. It has a good heart. I'll give it that. Maybe what it needs is more exotic marigolds.

A magnificent science-fiction film, all the more intriguing because it raises questions about the origin of human life and doesn't have the answers.

Abandon your expectations of an orderly plot, and you'll end up humming the title song. The movie's a vast, rambling, nostalgic expedition back into the big band era, and a celebration of the considerable talents of Liza Minnelli and Robert De Niro.

It is straightforward, heartfelt and genuine.

Working with an economical running time of 100 minutes and a relatively modest budget, Hart infuses Fast Color with genuinely moving drama, an engrossing, supernatural-sci-fi mystery and some pretty darn impressive special effects.

The charm of Goon is that Doug Glatt (Scott) is a genial guy from a nice family. Just because he hands out concussions doesn't mean he dislikes anybody. He's just happy to be wearing a uniform.

The French Lieutenant’s Woman is a beautiful film to look at, and remarkably well-acted.

Sellers works. He develops a character and plays it, for better or worse, for the whole movie.

Rahimi simply made an inspired decision when he chose Farahani...who quietly but powerfully works her way through subtle shadings of emotion from fear to despair to anger to love to righteous vindication.

Janeane Garofalo in this movie... is so likable, so sympathetic, so revealing of her character's doubts and desires, that she carries us headlong into the story.

Bourdos’ high-minded aspirations are obvious, but his visually satisfying film is dramatically elusive.

I see so little there: It is all remembered rote work, used to conceal old tricks, facile name-calling, the loss of hope, and emptiness.

Remarkable, how in a film where we KNOW with an absolute certainty that all or most of the dogs must survive, Eight Below succeeds as an effective story. It works by focusing on the dogs.

While there’s a whole lot of fiction in this based-on-real-events tale, the essence of truth rings through.

When Asante finally closes with a close-up of Belle’s portrait, there’s something in her eyes and her smile that suggests so much more.

Despite some interesting performances and impressive art direction, director Luca Guadagnino’s take on the 1977, cult-favorite, supernatural horror film by Dario Argento is an arduous, overstuffed, convoluted and trashy piece — bloated and graphically blood-soaked, guaranteed to make you cringe at times, but not the least bit chilling or haunting.

What I like about the movie is its combination of suspense and intelligence. If it does not quite explain exactly how decryption works (how could it?), it at least gives us a good idea of how decrypters work, and we understand how crucial Bletchley was -- so crucial its existence was kept a secret for 30 years.

Gets better the more attention you pay. To say "nothing happens" is to be blind to everyday life, during which we wage titanic struggles with our programming.

It is intensely involving at the outset, but it faces an insoluble problem: The story, like the characters, has no place to go.

Has a kind of calm, sneaky self-confidence that allows it to take us down a strange path, intriguingly.

I laughed often enough during the screening of Harold & Kumar that afterward I told Dann Gire, distinguished president of the Chicago Film Critics' Assn., that I thought maybe I should rent "Dude, Where's My Car?" and check it out.

You might walk out of Swiss Army Man. You might tire of the flatulence and the erections and the self-conscious whimsy. But if you stick with it, there’s a chance it’ll grow on you as it grew on me — and you’ll be rewarded with maybe the best ending of any movie so far this year.

Director Mark Mori, whose last feature documentary was the 1991 exposé “Building Bombs,” does an entertaining job of conveying Page’s entire life in her own words and illustrating why she has become a worldwide symbol of liberated sexuality.

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.

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

Ready or Not is a warped and audacious and absolutely ridiculous slapstick gorefest. The gross-out visual punchlines might have you doubling over with laughter. Or gagging to the point where you’ll regret ordering those nachos. Or both.

Benicio Del Toro, one of the film's producers, gives a heroic performance, not least because it's self-effacing.

These performances are so quietly effective that we watch, absorbed. I'm not sure, however, that where this film comes from quite earns the place it goes to.

Though stylized and eccentric and non-linear in its narrative path, and filled with dazzling non-sequiturs and oddly cryptic storylines, Paolo Sorrentino’s Youth is indeed set on this Earth, and these characters are very much alive.

It is poetic and unforgiving, romantic and stark. Death is the subject we edge around.

The ads for Code of Silence look schlocky, and Chuck Norris is still identified with a series of grade-zilch karate epics, but this is a heavy-duty thriller - a slick, energetic movie with good performances and a lot of genuine human interest.

The movie itself is fun: goofy, softhearted, fussy, sometimes funny, and with the sort of happy ending that columnists like to find for their stories and hardly ever find themselves.

The elegantly composed visuals, the stately progression of the scenes, the deliberate understatement of the dialogue, are all as "faithful" to James as a film can be. But that's exactly the film's problem: Ivory hasn't found a way to make his own film, and has ended up with a classroom version of James, a film with no juice or life of its own.

Hawke is engaging as Baker.

What is perhaps most interesting about Wolfen is that the story remains plausible given its basic assumptions, of course. This is not sci-fi, fantasy or violent escapism. It's a provoking speculation on the terms by which we share this earth with other creatures.

Muppet Treasure Island, directed by Brian Henson, son of the late Muppet genius, will entertain you more or less in proportion to your affection for the Muppets. If you like them, you'll probably like this.

The Fury is a stylish entertainment, fast-paced, and acted with great energy.

If you thought the magnificently flamboyant Luhrmann was well-suited to put the flashiest of spins on “The Great Gatsby,” you can imagine what he does with the made-for-overkill mythology of Elvis — and from the moment we see a bejeweled version of the Warner Bros. Pictures logo, we know Luhrmann is going to flood our senses with a nonstop medley of arresting sights and sounds, never taking his foot off the directorial gas pedal.

If The Electric Horseman has a flaw, it's that the movie's so warm and cozy it can hardly be electrifying. The director, Sydney Pollack, gives us solid entertainment, but he doesn't take chances and he probably didn't intend to.

The movie has been cast, designed, clothed, scored and edited to the bleeding edge of hip, but it hasn't exactly been written.

A rarity, a movie that seems to be on autopilot for the first two acts and then reveals that it was not, with a third act that causes us to rethink everything that has gone before. Ingenious, how simple and yet how devious the solution is.

Christian Bale is heroic in the way he allows the character to leap joyfully into despicability.

That it succeeds is some kind of miracle; there's enough material here for three bad films, and somehow it becomes one good one.

Like a cocky teenager who's had a couple of drinks before the party, they don't have a plan for who they want to offend, only an intention to be as offensive as possible.

In a time when our cities are wounded, movies like Grand Canyon can help to heal.

It goes down like a French pastry, offering no real value but looking good and satisfying a craving for something light and airy.

As you’d expect, Ridley Scott’s sweeping, decades-spanning and magnificently filmed epic Napoleon is a stylized and violent interpretation of the life and times of one of the most famous and infamous military commanders and political leaders history has ever known — but it’s also a surprisingly funny indictment of a sniveling brute of a man who is utterly unaware of his shortcomings, so to speak.

It's the film you need to see in order to understand why the ending of "As Good As It Gets" was phony.

The charisma of such actors as Gandolfini, Pitt, Liotta and Jenkins depends largely on their screen presences and our memories of them in better roles.

Damon is in prime everyman mode as Paul, a good guy with a good heart who wouldn’t mind catching a break, a big break, just once. Waltz has a blast playing the party king Dusan, who has some wise observations about the ways of this new world. And Hong Chau is brilliant as the fiery and funny and fantastically blunt Ngoc Lan.

It's pure cinema, spread over several genres. It's a caper movie, a gangster movie, a sex movie and a slapstick comedy.

While elegantly mounted and well acted, the movie is not the equal of the TV production, in part because so much material had to be compressed into such a shorter time. It is also not the equal of the recent film "Atonement," which in an oblique way touches on similar issues.

We veer close to the edge of Precious, Indie-Hipster Cliche so often in Infinitely Polar Bear, but thanks to a gifted filmmaker and two brilliant lead performances, the voice-over narration and the home-movie footage and the flights of fancy aren’t as off-putting as they might have been in lesser hands.

The case involves lots of flaws in the original trial: unreliable eyewitnesses, time discrepancies, conflicts of interest. In other hands, this material might seem familiar, but Woods puts a spin on it, an intensity that makes it feel important - to him, and therefore to us.

Mercifully, at 84 minutes the movie is even shorter than its originally alleged 90-minute running time; how much visual shakiness can we take? And yet, all in all, it is an effective film, deploying its special effects well and never breaking the illusion that it is all happening as we see it.

Cheadle the director, producer and co-writer boldly goes for broke with mixed results in this highly fictionalized version of the Miles Davis legend — and Cheadle the actor gives a brilliant performance worthy of an Oscar nomination.

Pitt is at the top of his game, playing a man who has forgotten whatever he used to be and has wholly embraced his role in this war.

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

[Altman] has made a melodrama, almost a soap opera, in which the characters achieve a kind of nobility.

What Almereyda brings to the film is good control of tone (the movie is ironic, and yet sad about its irony) and an interesting visual style.

Edwards and Moore are working at the top of their forms here, and the result is a pure, classic slapstick that makes Micki + Maude a real treasure.

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

The Road evokes the images and the characters of Cormac McCarthy's novel. It is powerful, but for me lacks the same core of emotional feeling.

Wickedly effective thriller.