The beauty in this film is in its directness. There are some obligatory scenes. But there are also some very original and touching ones. This is a movie that has its heart in the right place.

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.

I was entertained, and yet I felt a little empty-handed at the end, as if an enormous effort had been spent on making these dinosaurs seem real, and then an even greater effort was spent on undermining the illusion.

It's the kind of movie you can sit back and enjoy, as long as you don't make the mistake of thinking too much.

As it is, the movie goes in one direction and the cable guy goes in another, and by the end we aren't really looking forward to seeing Jim Carrey reappear on the screen.

WQhat would it really be like to huddle in a wrecked aircraft for 10 weeks in freezing weather, eating human flesh? I cannot imagine, and frankly this film doesn't much help me.

It's fun to watch 2 Days in the Valley” in the moment, and then fun afterward to think about the way the story was put together, and all of those lives connected.

An eccentric period melodrama with horror-flick overtones. Occasionally incoherent but never dull, the movie brims with weird imagery.

It’s not in the same league as “Playbook” or “Hustle,” but thanks to some memorable set pieces and the best performance by Jennifer Lawrence since her breakout role in “Winter’s Bone,” the sometimes-bumpy journey is worth your investment.

I didn't laugh much. I don't think the Stooges are funny, although perhaps I might once have. Some of the sight gags were clever, but meh. The three leads did an admirable job of impersonation. I think this might be pretty much the movie Stooges fans were looking for.

The movie creates such an urgent situation, and fills it with such interesting characters, that when everything goes wrong at the end I felt more than disappointed, I felt cheated.

Betty Blue is a movie about Beatrice Dalle's boobs and behind, and everything else is just what happens in between the scenes where she displays them.

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

It's strange about Stir Crazy. We go in with big expectations, and we laugh so much at the beginning that we're ready for the movie to launch itself as a hit. And then it all goes flat and we come out disappointed.

The principal pleasure of the movie is in the ensemble work of the actresses, as they trade one-liners and zingers and stick together and dish the dirt. Steel Magnolias is willing to sacrifice its over-all impact for individual moments of humor, and while that leaves us without much to take home, you've got to hand it to them: The moments work.

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.

The story of Black Rain is thin and prefabricated and doesn't stand up to much scrutiny, so Scott distracts us with overwrought visuals.

3-D is a distraction and an annoyance.

W., a biography of President Bush, is fascinating. No other word for it.

Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks make a lovable couple; she's pretty and goes one-for-one on the bleep language, and Rogen, how can I say this, is growing on me, the big lug.

Twilight will mesmerize its target audience, 16-year-old girls and their grandmothers. Their mothers know all too much about boys like this.

A peculiar and intriguing film.

This is not a "horror" film or an "underground" film, but an act of transgression so extreme and uncompromised, and yet so amateurish and sloppy, that it exists in a category of one film -- this film.

Concussion is a good movie that could have been great without trying so hard to be great.

It has all the necessary girls, gimmicks, subterranean control rooms, uniformed goons and magic wristwatches it can hold, but it doesn't have the wit and it doesn't have the style of the best Bond movies.

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.

Original, absorbing and curiously moving.

We’re just watching Jude Law, who gained some 30 pounds for this role, acting his rear end off but also spinning his wheels in a story that never amounts to more than a collection of vignettes about Dom’s life after prison.

Mommie Dearest is a painful experience that drones on endlessly, as Joan Crawford's relationship with her daughter, Christina, disintegrates from cruelty through jealousy into pathos. It is unremittingly depressing, not to any purpose of drama or entertainment, but just to depress. It left me feeling creepy.

Sleepless in Seattle and Only You and now Love Affair, all movies about nice people getting into goofy misunderstandings because they love one another so much.You have to be in the right mood to enjoy movies like this. Or maybe they put you in the mood.

Spaceman is a wonderfully weird journey that ends on just the right and quite satisfying notes.

Sam Peckinpah's The Getaway is a big, glossy, impersonal mechanical toy. It's like one of those devices for executive desks, with the stainless steel balls on the strings: It functions with great efficiency but doesn't accomplish anything.

Pacific Heights could stand comparison to "Rosemary's Baby." Both films are about a young couple who are deeply concerned by events that seem to be happening in another flat in their building. The difference between the movies is instructive: Roman Polanski insinuates us into the gradually growing horror of his couple in "Rosemary's Baby," while John Schlesinger, in "Pacific Heights," seems concerned only with generating the most obvious shock effects.

One of the problems with Mel Brooks's High Anxiety is that it picks a tricky target: It's a spoof of the work of Alfred Hitchcock, but Hitchcock's films are often funny themselves. And satire works best when its target is self-important.

Only movie lovers who have marinated their imaginations in the great B movies from RKO and Republic will recognize The Hot Spot as a superior work in an old tradition - as a manipulation of story elements as mannered and deliberate, in its way, as variations on a theme for the piano.

What sets Prefontaine aside from most sports movies is that it's not about winning the big race. It's about the life of a runner.

The movie is too flighty and uncentered, and it allows actual violence to break the spell when false alarms would have sufficed.

I’m So Excited! is random, episodic and essentially meaningless, but it’s also a hoot. And if that’s all you’re looking for, you might as well get it from the master.

While A Tale of Love and Darkness is often difficult to watch — because of all the sadness it presents — it is also a beautiful film in that it makes us think about existing in a world where we do not completely fit in.

With an almost circus-like score setting the tone, a supernatural touch and a terrific ensemble cast playing characters that range from the eccentric to the deeply eccentric, Monuments is at times grounded, at times almost hallucinogenic — and always smart and entertaining.

The result: No other studio could produce historical treasure like this from its vaults.

That looking-glass quality is missing, alas, from Back to the Future Part III, which makes a few bows in the direction of time-travel complexities, and then settles down to be a routine Western comedy.

It's not the idea that people will kill each other for entertainment that makes Series 7 jolting. What the movie correctly perceives is that somewhere along the line we've lost all sense of shame in our society.

A sweet and delicate comedy, a film to make you hold your breath, it is so precisely devised. It has big laughs, but it never seems to make an effort for them.

Working within the limitations of the star rating system, I give four stars to the subjects of this movie, and two stars to the way they have been boiled down into cute pictures and sound bites.

Panic about pop culture is not new. Yet Antiviral finds a novel angle of attack.

A movie with some nice surprises, mostly because it takes the time to create some interesting characters.

Friends With Kids is altogether too casual about parenthood, and that supplies a shaky foundation to a plot that's less about human nature and more about clever dialogue.

A mostly underwhelming film, with underdeveloped characters and supercharged fight scenes that drag on forever and offer nothing new in the way of special-effects creativity.

The Fog is encouraging because it contains another demonstration of Carpenter's considerable directing talents. He picked the wrong story, I think, but he directs it with a flourish. This isn't a great movie but it does show great promise from Carpenter.

In this taut and gripping drama from director/co-writer Marco Perego (Zoe’s real-life husband), Saldaña delivers arguably her most impactful performance yet in a film that mirrors today’s headlines but eschews overt political commentary in favor of an unsparing, realistic and sometimes tragic story about humanity, and in some cases, the lack thereof.

All that was needed to pull these elements together was a structure that would clearly define who the characters were, what they stood for and why we should care about them. Unfortunately, that is all that is missing.

The performances by Miller and Graynor are high-spirited enough that you yearn to see them in worthier material. The potential is there. If there's anything more seductive to Manhattanites than sex, it's a cheap apartment overlooking Gramercy Park.

An exhilarating visual experience and proves for the third time he's (Zemeck) is one of the few directors who knows what he's doing with 3-D.

I was pleased again and again by set-ups, camera angles, lighting effects, editing rhythms and the fanciful staging of action scenes. But I never for a moment cared about the characters, and the plot was all too conveniently structured - just a guideline to the action.

Alive and daring.

Adapted from Damien Lewis’ book “Churchill’s Secret Warriors: The Explosive True Story of the Special Forces Desperadoes of World War II” and featuring stunning visuals from the location shooting in the beautiful city of Antalya, Turkey, “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare” is a fantastic blending of some basic facts and a whole lot of fictionalization, including shuffling of the timeline.

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.

What a waste of a wonderful cast.

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.

Here is a rarity, a film about religion that is neither pious nor sensational, simply curious. No satanic possessions, no angelic choirs, no evil spirits, no lovers joined beyond the grave. Just a man doing his job.

All of this is actually a lot of fun, if you like special effects and gore.

Then I realized the movie's point is that someone like this nerdy Harvard boy might be transformed in a fairly short time into a bloodthirsty gang fighter. The message is that violence is hard-wired into men, if only the connection is made.

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

Many comedies fall short, putting wit on hold to fulfill the necessities of plot. Here, however, plot simply provides a destination and a deadline. This film races with such high energy that the humor continues to satisfy, if only because the characters are so likeable.

This is the most confused feature-length film I've ever seen.

A rip-snorting adventure tale of the sort made before CGI, 3-D and alphabet soup in general took the fun out of moviegoing.

It is not about whether the hero will get the girl. It is about whether the hero should get the girl, and when was the last time you saw a movie that even knew that could be the question?

At first, the jigsaw puzzle seems needlessly difficult to solve, but once all the pieces are in place and we see the big picture, we’re left with admiration for director/co-writer Antonio Campos’ ability to weave a memorably brooding film from Donald Ray Pollock’s novel of the same name.

This movie is lively at times, it's lovely to look at, and the actors are persuasive in very difficult material. But around and around it goes, and where it stops, nobody by that point much cares.

It fascinates in the moment. It's getting from one moment to the next that is tricky. Surely this is one of the most ambitious films ever made.

Hitchcock tells the story not so much as the making of the film, but as the behind-the-scenes relationship of Alma and Hitch. This is a disappointment, since I imagine most movie fans will expect more info about the film's production history.

Jackson disappears into his role, completely convincing, but then he usually is. What a fine actor. He avoids pitfalls like making Champ a maudlin tearjerker, looking for pity. He's realistic, even philosophical, about his life and what happened to him.

This isn't a serious historical film. It plays different instruments than Spielberg's "Lincoln." Murray, who has a wider range than we sometimes realize, finds the human core of this FDR and presents it tenderly.

Despite an intriguing premise, some Hitchcockian camerawork and a few effective shock scares, this is a thudding disappointment with surprisingly wooden performances from fine actors, and some of the most excruciatingly awful dialogue in any movie this year.

It offers wonderful things, but they aren't what's important. It's as if Burton directed at arm's length, unwilling to find juice in the story.

There's not much wrong with Tony Scott's The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, except that there's not much really right about it.

A movie where the story, like the sub, sometimes seems to be running blind. In its best moments it can evoke fear, and it does a good job of evoking the claustrophobic terror of a little World War II boat.

Thanks to a stylish directorial turn by Jodie Foster and the shining star power of George Clooney and Julia Roberts (as well as a first-rate supporting cast), Money Monster rises above an uneven script that veers from clever and insightful to heavy-handed and obvious — sometimes within the same scene.

Seems curiously unfinished, as if director John Landis spent all his energy on spectacular set pieces and then didn't want to bother with things like transitions, character development, or an ending.

Jake Gyllenhaal is an A-lister for a reason, but he gives a one-note, screaming performance here and is less than convincing as an unhinged psychopath who seems to have a death wish.

Seven Years in Tibet is an ambitious and beautiful movie with much to interest the patient viewer, but it makes the common mistake of many films about travelers and explorers: It is more concerned with their adventures than with what they discover.

This is a family drama, all right - but not one of those neat docudramas in which every character comes attached to a fashionable problem, and all the problems are solved in the same happy ending. The family in Light of Day is more like your average, everyday, unhappy family in which the biggest problem is that some of the members quite simply hate each other.

Infused with a stylish and shadowy style courtesy of director Rob Savage (“Host,” “Dashcam”), with a sharp screenplay by Scott Beck, Bryan Woods and Mark Heyman, The Boogeyman is a familiar but still effectively unsettling variation on the time-honored story of the terrifying entity who’s in the closet or under the bed or maybe just down the hall, waiting to pounce on you and your loved ones, even as everyone around thinks you’re nutso for insisting there’s a Boogeyman living rent-free in your house.

The Frears version is cerebral and claustrophobic, an exercise in sexual mindplay.

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

I am not a golf fan but found The Greatest Game Ever Played absorbing all the same, partly because of the human element, partly because Paxton and his technicians have used every trick in the book to dramatize the flight and destination of the golf balls.

The leading men are successful. Alan Bates, in a change of pace, is the loyal shepherd. Terence Stamp is a suitably vile Sgt. Troy, and Peter Finch makes Boldwood strong and honorable in his love for Bathsheba. Miss Christie, however, is too sweet and superficial, and so is the film.

The movie’s failure is one of imagination. It tilts too far in the direction of horror and special effects, when it might have been more fun to make a satirical comedy about punk teenagers.

It's easy to pick holes in movies like this, to find the inconsistencies and the oversights and say the movie's no good because we're smarter than it is. But maybe that's exactly the point. Maybe the actual pleasure comes from the fun of being frustrated and full of free advice while the character marches to her doom.

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is not only about Germany during the war, although the story it tells is heartbreaking in more than one way. It is about a value system that survives like a virus.

The first hour of Protocol is so much fun, and the Goldie Hawn character is such an engaging original, that at first I couldn't believe they were going to throw away all that work by going for a standard Hollywood ending. But they did.

The plot is essentially a backdrop, as it was in "Charade," for Paris, suspense, romance and star power -- If it is true that there will never be another Audrey Hepburn, and it is, I submit it is also true that there will never be another Thandie Newton.

The movie is finally just a little too ungainly, too jumbled at the end, for me to recommend, but it has heart, and I feel a lot of affection for it.

Fascinating because it require us to see the younger character through two sets of eyes -- our own, which witness an attractive woman drawn to a younger male, and the women's, which see a lost love in a new container.

Cate Blanchett plays Guerin in a way that fascinated me for reasons the movie probably did not intend.

I felt the Kids were too busy being hip and ironic to connect at the simpler level where comedy lives. They were brought down by their own self-protective devices.

With a sharp and funny if sometimes convoluted script by Blake Masters and slick, pulpy direction from Baltasar Kormakur, and of course that first-rate cast, 2 Guns rises above standard action fare.