More important, it has a Disney willingness to allow fantasy into life, so New York seems to acquire a new playbook.

You may be imagining this is an animated film, and that Jack Black is voicing Lemuel Gulliver. Not at all. This is live action, and despite the 3-D, it's sorta old-fashioned, not that that's a bad thing.

What I regret is that all of the expertise lavished on this movie couldn't have been put at the service of a more intelligent story about real firemen, real working conditions, real heroism, and the real craft and art of fire-fighting.

Amazing in what it shows, but underwhelming in what it does with it.

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

There is a kind of pleasure to be had from its directness, from its lack of gimmicks, from its classical form. And just like in the Warners pictures, there is also the pleasure of supporting performances from character actors who come onstage, sing an aria, and leave.

A powerful but often stilted drama bolstered by two great performances from accomplished actors and nearly sunk by an unfortunately (and surprisingly) off-key performance from another fine actor.

Neeson is in nearly every scene in the movie, and he carries it well. Yes, he’s played this nails-tough, world-weary, scotch-loving, ex-law enforcement type again and again — but he’s as good as anyone in the world at playing those types, and in this case he has some rich material to work with.

The flight sequence and many of the other action scenes in this new Disney animated feature create an exhilaration and freedom that are liberating. And the rest of the story is fun, too.

Heartbreakers is "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels" plus Gene Hackman as W.C. Fields. I guess that's enough to recommend it. It's not a great comedy, but it's a raucous one, hard-working and ribald, and I like its spirit.

A surprisingly effective thriller.

The movie proceeds quickly, seems to know its subject matter, is fascinating in its portrait of the inner politics and structure of the terrorist group, and comes uncomfortably close to reality. But what holds it together is the Cheadle character.

Costner’s performance is filled with memorable moments.

This is a story which, in other hands, could have simply been an all-female slasher movie, but Barbet Schroeder, who produced and directed it, has a mordant humor that pushes the material over the top. It is a slasher movie, and a little more.

The tension we need to draw us into the story isn't there; things move at too leisurely a pace, and the movie, like the Jimmy Stewart hero, has to be dragged into the excitement against its will.

Instead of cheap thrills, Schrader gives us a frightening vision of a good priest who fears goodness may not be enough.

What's sort of wonderful is the way this movie takes that old formula and makes it fresh and new, with actors who give it wit and charm.

I admire the closing scenes of the film, which seem to ask whether our civilization offers a cure for Vincent's complaint.

Lightweight and made out of familiar elements, but they're handled with humor and invention.

Timecrimes is like a temporal chess game with nudity, voyeurism and violence, which makes it more boring than most chess games but less boring than a lot of movies.

The film has extraordinary beauty. Indeed, the visuals by cinematographer Gokhan Tiryaki are so awesome that the characters almost seem belittled, which may be Ceylan's purpose.

Silly and spectacular, and fun.

The Clearing doesn't feel bound by the usual formulas of crime movies. What eventually happens will emerge from the personalities of the characters, not from the requirements of Hollywood endings.

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

For a grimmer and more realistic look at this world, no modern movie has surpassed Karel Reisz's "The Gambler'' (1974), starring James Caan in a screenplay by self-described degenerate gambler James Toback.

Right now, she's like the grade-school girl at the spin-the-bottle party who changes the rules when the bottle points at her.

The movie's a mixed bag, but worth seeing for the good stuff, which is a lesson in how productive it can be to allow characters to say what they might actually say.

As for the movie, I've seen better comedy films and better concert films. It noodles around too much and gets distracted from the music. Michel Gondry, who directed, makes good fiction films but is not an instinctive documentarian and forgets that even a fly on the wall should occasionally find some peanut butter. As the record of a state of mind, however, the film is uncanny.

Dillinger is the film, we may speculate, that John Milius was born to make: violent, tough, filled with guns and blood.

Every once in a while Are You Here strikes comedic gold.

Carry-On is a sharp, smallish thriller with some big and satisfying payoffs.

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.

The movie contains elements that make it very good, and a lot of other elements besides. Less is more.

It is a new documentary of a past event, recapturing the electricity generated by Muhammad Ali in his prime.

Courteney Cox, well known from TV, rarely gets an opportunity to revise her famous image, but here she is serious, inward, coiled. She carries the film; the other characters circulate through her consciousness as possibilities and hypotheses.

It’s a quirky and unique coming-of-age story.

It shares one annoying practice with their other early films: They like to use distracting little zooms in and out for no reason at all, except possibly to remind us the film is being shot with a camera.

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.

It is a real film. Not a slick exploitation exercise with all the trappings of depravity but none of the consequences.

Neeson never phones in his performances, but he’s particularly invested this time around, playing a guy who can be a pure killing machine one moment, and as lost as a child the next. Pearce and Bellucci headline the terrific supporting cast, and the 78-year-old Campbell proves he can still direct the hell out of a slick and engrossing thriller.

The charm of the movie comes in the performances - in the way Martin and Hawn lie to themselves and each other - and in the dialog, which is endlessly inventive as one lie piles upon another, and the characters test each other with a high-wire act of falsehood.

Do we want to know more about Osama bin Laden and al Qaida and the history and political grievances behind them? Yes, but that's not how things turned out. Sorry, but there you have it.

It is exuberantly old-fashioned, and I mean that as a compliment.

Here is a gloriously greasy, sweaty, hairy, bloody and violent Western. It is delicious.

Hackman could charm the chrome off a trailer hitch. Romano is more of the earnest, aw-shucks, sincere, well-meaning kind of guy whose charm is inner and only peeks out occasionally. They work well together here.

It isn't about thrills and explosions, but about tenacity, and most of it takes place within our own imaginations.

Barr could have made an easy, predictable and dumb comedy at any point in the last couple of years. Instead, she took her chances with an ambitious project - a real movie. It pays off, in that Barr demonstrates that there is a core of reality inside her TV persona, a core of identifiable human feelings like jealousy and pride, and they provide a sound foundation for her comic acting.

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.

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

One of the things I like best about Poolhall Junkies is its lack of grim desperation.

From the opening graphic with its classic 1950s noir static shot, the sometimes appropriately overwrought music from Danny Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans and impeccable production design, “Windfall” quickly settles in as a sometimes tense, often comically absurd and always engrossing game of verbal chess, as the Intruder realizes he has been captured by a security camera and ups his game, demanding hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Husband so he can disappear and start a new life.

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.

Sophisticated in its look and feel on the one hand (the warm hues and tones evoke a warmth that defies the wintry cold), it’s almost too retro for its own good on the other.

The movie isn't in the same league as Disney's big four, and it doesn't have the same crossover appeal to adults, but as family entertainment it's bright and cheerful, and it has its moments.

Gena Rowlands plays the role at perfect pitch: She is able to suggest, even in the midst of seemingly ordinary moments, the controlled panic of a person who needs a drink, right here, right now.

Taking Woodstock has the freshness of something being created, not remembered.

At the very least a superior action film, in which the action sequences are plausible and grounded in reality.

The Princess and the Frog inspires memories of Disney's Golden Age it doesn't quite live up to, as I've said, but it's spritely and high-spirited, and will allow kids to enjoy it without visually assaulting them.

Score is a straightforward film told in relatively broad strokes.

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.

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.

The five subjects of Home Movie at least know exactly why they live where they do and as they do, and they do not require our permission or approval.

Five minutes into the film, I relaxed, knowing it was set in the real world, and not in the Hollywood alternative universe where Julia Roberts can't get a date.

The way all of this plays out is acted warmly by the principals, and Eigil Bryld's photography (of Ireland) makes England look breathtakingly green and inviting. The director, Julian Jarrold ("Kinky Boots" and the TV version of "White Teeth") is comfortable with the material, and it is comfortable with him.

Editing seamlessly juxtaposes the women’s stories with historical performance footage. Their stories are so compelling, many suggest their own documentaries.

Working from a clever if sometimes ridiculously over-the-top script by Seth Reiss and Will Tracy, the British director Mark Mylod (“Game of Thrones,” “Succession”) teams with a well-cast ensemble to deliver a deadpan spoof of “Cabin in the Woods” type horror films, draped in a “White Lotus” setting.

Benny and Joon is a film that approaches its subjects so gingerly it almost seems afraid to touch them. The story wants to be about love, but is also about madness, and somehow it weaves the two together with a charm that would probably not be quite so easy in real life.

It has its laughs, but it’s a more thoughtful film, more softhearted toward its characters. It’s warm and poignant.

Duke and his screenwriter, Chris Brancato, don't make Hoodlum into a violent action film, though it has its bloody shoot-outs, but into more of a character study.

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.

Gods and Monsters is not a deep or powerful film, but it is a good-hearted one.

You could think of Larry Clark's Wassup Rockers as "Ferris Velasquez's Day Off."

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.

Things Change is a delicate balance of things that don’t easily go together: farce, wit, violence and heart. Here they do.

Serious pianists sometimes pound out a little honky-tonk, just for fun. That's like what Steven Soderbergh is doing in Ocean's Eleven.

What he has here is a story that probably cannot be believed in any conceivable level, and yet, to give him his due, he tells it with such conviction that it works anyway.

The movie contains less of its interesting story and more action and battle scenes than I would have preferred.

Even though there’s a tragic offscreen death and a devastatingly brutal confrontation scene between the two leads, Military Wives is like that one friend of yours who’s always in a good mood and is forever lifting everyone’s spirits, even at somber occasions and during the toughest of times.

The best reason to see it is simply because of the creativity of its visuals. They're entrancing.

Does for motorcycle racing what The Endless Summer did for surfing and it's enjoyable in exactly the same way.

It's is not a great high school movie like "Election," but it's alive and risky and saucy.

Sir! No Sir! is a documentary about an almost-forgotten fact of the Vietnam era: Anti-war sentiment among U.S. troops grew into a problem for the Pentagon.

One of the most entertainingly ludicrous movies of the year.

The film's heart is in the right place, and Ferris Bueller is slight, whimsical and sweet.

The claustrophobic, isolated Victorian household is a stage on which every nuance, however small, is noticed.

This is an exquisitely filmed and at times deeply melancholy portrait of an artist who had once made the rafters of great opera houses hum with her bel canto technique and had been mobbed by fans and adored by millions, but spent her last week surrounded by the echoes of sadness.

A quietly enthralling film because it contains the murder and the investigation within Carter's smooth calm.

It's a good thing that Geoffrey Rush and Johnny Depp are on hand to jack up the acting department. Their characters, two world-class goofballs, keep us interested even during entirely pointless swordfights.

The only real problem with Black Out, which plays like a cross between “The Hangover” and “Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels”-era Guy Ritchie, is that it’s naggingly over-familiar.

If watching “A Christmas Story” is a part of your annual holiday ritual, you might want to make time to catch the sequel. It’ll make for a warm double helping of Christmas nostalgia.

It is Christmas who steals every scene, and rightfully so. The teen actor is so engaging and endearing (despite his character’s penchant for foul language); his screen presence at such a young age is a wonder.

Return is a movie with some nice, droll opening scenes and the obligatory horrible climax. It doesn't make the mistake of Day Of The Dead - talking too much. It's kind of a sensation-machine, made out of the usual ingredients, and the real question is whether it's done with style. It is.

There is something almost perverse in the way Boorman defines his point of view. He is not concerned in this film about the tragedy of war, or the meaning of war, but only with the specific experience of war for a grade-school boy. Drawing from his autobiographical memories, he has not given the little boy in the movie any more insights than such a little boy should have.

The underlying secret of the four comedians is the way they find humor in daily life, and in their families. In this they're a lot like the Kings of Comedy.

The movie is like the low-rent, road show version of those serious drug movies where everybody is macho and deadly.

With Branagh also providing stylish direction (he’s also not above indulging in jump-scares), screenwriter Michael Green fleshing out and making some major changes to a relatively lesser work by Agatha Christie (titled “Hallowe’en Party”) and a terrific international cast who embrace the inspired, over-the-top lunacy of the story, this is an instantly involving murder mystery with a semi-crazy ending that really works — if we don’t think too hard about it. After all, this is a whodunit wrapped inside a ghost story.

What are we to make of this existence? Doc sees himself a messiah of surfing, clean living and healthy exercise. We might be more inclined to see him as a narcissistic monster, ruling his big family with an iron fist.

Conan the Destroyer is more cheerful than the first Conan movie, and it probably has more sustained action, including a good sequence in the glass palace.