Will kids like the movie? I suspect they will. Kids like to see other kids learning the rules even if they don't much want to learn them themselves.

There is a cool, mannered elegance to the picture that I like, but it's dead at its center.

This is not a great movie, and you will be able to live quite happily without seeing it, but what it does, it does with a certain welcome warmth.

This might have worked as a short film or a 30-minute TV episode, but as a feature film, it grows increasingly cloying as the minutes tick on.

This perhaps sounds like a hilarious movie. So it could be, in the hands of the masters of classic British comedy. Unfortunately, the director is the Swede Lasse ("Chocolat"), who sees it as a heart-warming romance and doesn't take advantage of the rich eccentricity in the story.

Alec Guinness contributes a Marley wrapped in chains; the Christmas turkey weighs at least 40 pounds; Tiny Tim is appropriately tiny, and Scrooge reforms himself with style. What more could you want?

Benshis were the Japanese performers who stood next to the screen during silent films and explained the plot to the audience. If ever a benshi were needed in a modern movie, Night Watch is that film.

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.

Despite the stylish direction from the duo of Dan Berk and Robert Olsen and winning performances by Jack Quaid and Amber Midthunder, “Novocaine” sputters to the finish line.

Shows a man whose beliefs, both political and religious, seem to reinvigorate him; he even carries his own luggage in airports and hotels.

The Voices is a deeply warped, darkly funny and thoroughly depraved horror comedy... and whether you find this sort of thing walk-out-of-the-theater distasteful or wickedly subversive, I’m fairly confident we won’t see another movie like it for quite some time.

The movie has so many other delights, though, that it's fun anyway. Maybe it wasn't exactly intended to be a love story.

Here's an angry comedy crossed with an expose and held together by one of those high-voltage Al Pacino performances that's so sure of itself we hesitate to demur.

The story, based on an 18th century French play by Pierre Marivaux, is the sort of thing that inspired operas and Shakespeare comedies: It's all premise, no plausibility, and so what?

Brave, heartless, and exceedingly strange, a quasi-documentary in which the actor Maximilian Schell mercilessly violates the privacy of his older sister, Maria.

In the end, the filmmakers have given us one of the most fun movie-going experiences I’ve had this year. Huge kudos go to Johnson, Hart and especially Black for providing some truly entertaining performances for kids of all ages.

Not a great movie, but it delivers what it promises to deliver, and knows that a chase scene is supposed to be about something more than special effects.

The Split is the first Hollywood film to deliberately, overtly exploit black-white tensions in American society. On another level, it's a first-rate piece of entertainment.

Sure, there are times when we’re aware our emotions are being manipulated — but we’re fine with that, because we want to see, and we expect to see, the heroic underdog triumph against nearly insurmountable odds.

There is something in the nature of director Tran Anh Hung, however, that seems to resist happy endings. In the emotional arc of his art, the high point seems to be bittersweet. It's sweet all the way up, wavers in dread and slides down to doom.

There will be many who find To the Wonder elusive and too effervescent. They'll be dissatisfied by a film that would rather evoke than supply. I understand that, and I think Terrence Malick does, too. But here he has attempted to reach more deeply than that: to reach beneath the surface, and find the soul in need.

Fame is a genuine treasure, moving and entertaining, a movie that understands being a teen-ager as well as Breaking Away did, but studies its characters in a completely different milieu.

What brings the movie alive is the performance that Diana Ross and director Sidney J. Furie bring to the scenes.

The premise is intriguing, and for a time it seems that the Date Doctor may indeed know things about women that most men in the movies are not allowed to know, but the third act goes on autopilot just when the Doctor should be in.

The Enforcer is the best of the Dirty Harry movies at striking a balance between the action and the humor. Sometimes in the previous films we felt uneasy laughing in between the bloodshed, but this time the movie's more thoughtfully constructed and paced.

It scares and shocks us because it's so cleverly made; the writer-director, David Cronenberg, uses invention and imagination to replace expensive shock effects.

Everything unfolds pretty much as we anticipate, and at times “Operation Finale” IS gripping and involving — but more often, the story slows to a crawl and actually becomes less involving just when we should be holding our breath. This is a well-made but formulaic, by-the-numbers drama.

Avoids obvious sentiment and predictable emotion and shows this woman somehow holding it together year after year, entering goofy contests that for her family mean life and death.

This second film is again heartwarming and includes some nice performances from Connick, Gamble and Morgan Freeman.

A sometimes wickedly funny but ultimately sour, loud, draining tale of one of the most dysfunctional families in modern American drama. And that’s saying a lot.

For all of Muschietti’s visual flourishes and with the greatly talented Bill Skarsgard again delivering a madcap, disturbingly effective, all-in performance as the dreaded Pennywise, It: Chapter Two had a relatively muted impact on me.

Some misfires are far more interesting than others, and that’s certainly the case with director/co-writer Jeff Baena’s “Spin Me Round,” a restaurant-themed romp that starts off in rom-com land, veers off into territory hinting at the strange and disturbing darkness of a “Midsommar” or an “Eyes Wide Shut,” and winds up somewhere in between, coming across as half-baked and undercooked.

The movie does not have a conventional happy ending. Life will go on, and people will strive, and new routines will replace old ones. The movie has no villains and few heroes. But it has given us several remarkable scenes, especially two confrontations between Madigan and Hackman, one in a bar, the other at a wedding rehearsal, in which the movie shows how much children expect from their parents, and how little the parents often have to give.

If you have seen ads or trailers suggesting that horrible things pounce on people, and they make you think you want to see this movie, you will be correct. It is a competently made Horrible Things Pouncing on People Movie. If you think Frank Darabont has equaled the "Shawshank" and "Green Mile" track record, you will be sadly mistaken.

Troop Zero is so sugary you’d get a cavity if you bit into it — but it’s also a cozy, satisfying and inspirational underdog tale, featuring a wonderful performance by Mckenna Grace.

F9: The Fast Saga isn’t the worst entry in the long-running and popular Fast & Furious franchise, but it just might be the silliest and the loudest and the most ridiculous — and while that might well have been the filmmakers’ intention, it’s not a compliment.

I liked the action, I liked the absurdity, I liked the incongruous use and misuse of mutant powers, and I especially liked the way it introduces all of those political issues and lets them fight it out with the special effects.

The appeal of You've Got Mail is as old as love and as new as the Web.

The characters are bitter and hateful, the images are nauseating, and the ending is bleak enough that when the screen fades to black it's a relief.. Videodrome, whatever its qualities, has got to be one of the least entertaining films of all time.

It is not often that a movie catches exactly what it was like to be this person in this place at this time, but Jarhead does.

Its characters are bloodless, their speech monotone. If there are people like this, I hope David Cronenberg's film is as close as I ever get to them. You couldn't pay me to see it again.

The screenplay by Carolyn Shelby, Christopher Ames and Samantha Shad contains dialogue scenes so well-heard and written it's hard to believe this is a Hollywood movie, with Hollywood's tendency to have characters underline every emotion so the audience won't have to listen so carefully.

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

This new Footloose is a film without wit, humor or purpose.

Jason Bourne is the best action thriller of the year so far, with a half-dozen terrific chase sequences and fight scenes.

The movie proceeds with a hypnotic relentlessness that hesitates between horror and black comedy.

What he asks of the actors (those who are “soloists,” anyway) is not realism but the same kind of playful show-off performances he's getting from the musicians. And to understand the acting, it's helpful to begin with the music.

It's all shot in muddy earth tones, on grainy Super 8 film, Hi Fi 8 video and 16-mm. If you seek the origin of the grunge look, seek no further: Young, in his floppy plaid shirts and baggy shorts, looks like a shipwrecked lumberjack. His fellow band members, Billy Talbot, Poncho Sampedro and Ralph Molina, exude vibes that would strike terror into the heart of an unarmed convenience store clerk.

Disclosure contains an inspiring terrific shot of Demi Moore's cleavage in a Wonderbra, surrounded by 125 minutes of pure goofiness leading up to, and resulting from, this moment.

Eva Longoria’s Flamin’ Hot is a well-made but overly conventional and borderline corny (pardon the pun) biopic chronicling the rags-to-riches tale of one Richard Montañez, a maintenance worker at Frito-Lay who invented the globally popular Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, forever changing the snack-food game.

Writer-director Ruskin and editor Anne McCabe do a superb job of keeping the story moving, even though much of Loretta’s work involves grinding it out by knocking on doors, researching news clippings, interviewing survivors and relatives, making calls from pay phones, etc., etc.

Altered States is a superbly silly movie, a magnificent entertainment, and a clever and brilliant machine for making us feel awe, fear, and humor.

Richard Curtis is good at handling large casts, establishing all the characters and keeping them alive.

The crucial decision in The Reader is made by a 24-year-old youth, who has information that might help a woman about to be sentenced to life in prison, but withholds it. He is ashamed to reveal his affair with this woman. By making this decision, he shifts the film's focus from the subject of German guilt about the Holocaust and turns it on the human race in general.

The movie is put together in a sort of disjointed way; there are too many characters, and some of them disappear for so long, we forget them. But that doesn't matter much; the idea is to string together scenes that entertain, and Cleopatra Jones does that nicely.

Finds the right notes to negotiate its delicate subject matter.

A cheerfully energetic horror film of the slam-bang school, but slicker and more clever than most, about an evil doll named Charles Lee Ray, or Chucky.

But with a screenplay that developed the story more clearly, this might have been a superior movie, instead of just a good one with some fine performances.

The chilling and stylish and aggressively creepy Stoker begins at the end and takes us on a shocking and lurid journey before we land right where we started, now seeing every small detail through a different lens. It's disturbingly good.

William Hurt can be so subterranean we don't know where he's tunneling. Here he seems to be one thing while becoming its opposite.

Trouble With the Curve isn't a great sports film, like Eastwood's "Million Dollar Baby" (2004). But it's a superior entertainment, moving down somewhat predictable paths with an authenticity and humanity that appeals.

Hard Candy is impressive and effective. As for what else it may be, each audience member will have to decide.

Like a John Cheever short story or a sociological snapshot by Tom Wolfe, The Object of Beauty is about people who have been so defined by their lifestyles that without those styles they scarcely exist.

The best performance, because it's more nuanced, is by Liev Schreiber. His Zus Bielski is more concerned with the big picture, more ideological, more driven by tactics.

The formula is obvious: Die Hard Goes to Sea. I walked into the screening in a cynical frame of mind, but then a funny thing happened. The movie started working for me.

Emma Roberts and Dave Franco are just fine, but there’s no huge onscreen spark between them. Most of the supporting roles are thinly drawn and forgettable.

Even if you’ve somehow never even heard of the story upon which this film is based, it’s a crackling good lawman tale.

Rogen does a remarkably fine job in creating two distinct characters.

I couldn’t wait for this movie to end.

May be pitching itself to the wrong audience. The ads promise: "The Rhythm ... the Beat ... the Love ... and You Don't Stop!" But it's not a musical and although it's sometimes a comedy, it's observant about its people.

The movie lacks the wit and self-mocking irony of the Indiana Jones movies, and instead seems like a throwback to the simple-minded, clean-cut sensibility of a less complicated time. That doesn’t mean The Rocketeer is not entertaining. But adjustments are necessary to enjoy it.

It exists somewhere between parody and melodrama, between the tragic and the goofy. There are moments when the movie doesn't seem to know where it's going, but for once that's a good thing because the uncertainty almost always ends with some kind of a delightful, weird surprise.

It’s an entertaining enough offbeat crime comedy/drama featuring an amazing cast — led by the grizzled, shuffling, mumbling, wisecracking old dog playing the lead.

I found it to be the equivalent of a free-swinging slugger who is willing to strike out once, twice, even three times — but then hits one clear out of the park. It’s worth the risk-reward ratio.

The movie gets a bit slow, with too much time spent on the human characters, who are dreary and underwritten, compared to the big dreams of the little snail. But the film picks up when the racing snails come back onscreen, thanks to the adorable character design, with expressive use of those googly eyes, and especially to the voice talent.

Here's a technological sound-and-light show that is sensational and brainy, stylish, and fun.

The film had a curious effect on me. I was sometimes confused about events as they happened, but all the pieces are there, and the film creates an emotional whole. It's more effective when it's complete than during the unfolding experience.

The movie was directed by Perkins, in his filmmaking debut. I was surprised by what a good job he does. Any movie named Psycho III is going to be compared to the Hitchcock original, but Perkins isn't an imitator. He has his own agenda.

Even though they look nothing like sisters, they’re believable as sisters. Every once in a while when we take a break from the thuddingly unfunny slapstick stuff, there’s a nice and genuine moment.

Ingenious in its construction.

Surely few actors have faces that project sorrow more completely than Bardem.

The Dictator is funny, in addition to being obscene, disgusting, scatological, vulgar, crude and so on.

Don't ever let this happen again to James Bond. Quantum of Solace is his 22nd film and he will survive it, but for the 23rd it is necessary to go back to the drawing board and redesign from the ground up. Please understand: James Bond is not an action hero!

Roman J. Israel, Esq. has pockets of intrigue, and writer-director Gilroy and Washington have teamed up to create a promising dramatic character. We just never get full delivery on that promise.

The movie unreels his musical biography with an unending series of tastes of songs and performances. You may be surprised by how many you recognize.

There's nothing much wrong with the film; my complaint is that there's nothing much right about it.

Al Pacino sells the heck out of his performance as Danny Collins.

When the material in Uncle Frank wades into soapy, melodramatic waters, the performances are pure and powerful.

Suffice to say Tragedy Girls has great fun with myriad horror movie tropes.

There’s a terrifically entertaining sequence late in the film that plays like an homage to a certain element of the original “Poltergeist,” and a thrilling and nerve-wracking extended final sequence that will put you on the edge of the proverbial seat.

There's an audience for this film. It's not me. I gather younger children will like the breakneck action, the magical ability to fly and the young hero who has tired of only being a name. Their parents and older siblings may find the 89-minute running time quite long enough.

The Midnight Sky is a waking dream that keeps you in its grips.

Lean on Me wants to be taken as a serious, even noble film about an admirable man. And yet it never honestly looks at Clark for what he really is: a grownup example of the very troublemakers he hates so much, still unable even in adulthood to doubt his right to do what he wants, when he wants, as he wants.

Along with charming animated visuals, spot-on voice talent and nicely paced direction, Ferdinand incorporates themes that are very relevant and much-needed for our time.

With Solomon & Gaenor, it is hard to overlook the folly of the characters. Does it count as a tragedy when the characters get more or less what they were asking for?

Pitiless, bleak and despairing -- The Grey Zone refers to a world where everyone is covered with the gray ash of the dead, and it has been like that for so long they do not even notice anymore.

A skillful, efficient film that involves us in the clever and deceptive game being played by Ramius and in the best efforts of those on both sides to figure out what he plans to do with his submarine - and how he plans to do it.

There is one surprise in the movie, a decision having nothing to do with the reactor, that depends entirely on the ability of the characters to act convincingly under enormous pressure; casting stars of roughly equal weight helps it to work.