The thing about Ride the Eagle is we have a funny, sweet, insightful, low-key charmer of a story that’s all about making human connections, reconciling broken relationships and finding solace in the companionship of another fellow traveler on this planet — and yet the main characters are almost never in the same room with one another.

Deliberately ambiguous, The Reluctant Fundamentalist provides just enough answers while leaving us with more than enough questions. It's a film that demands discussion afterward.

It's too heavy on plot and too willing to cheat about its plot to be really successful, but it does have its moments, and it's better than your average, run-of-the-mill slasher movie.

Brubaker is a grim and depressing drama about prison outrages - a movie that should, given its absolutely realistic vision, have kept us involved from beginning to end. That it doesn't is the result, I think, of a deliberate but unwise decision to focus on the issues involved in the story, instead of on the characters.

This is a surprisingly cheesy disaster epic.

Director April Mullen shoots Wander like a kinetic horror film, which results in some pretty cool sequences but also far too many quick-cut flashbacks to the deadly auto accident, which results in us feeling more annoyed and manipulated than intrigued.

To Rome With Love isn't great Woody Allen. Here is a man who has made a feature every year since 1969, give or take a few, and if they cannot all be great Woody, it's churlish to complain if they're only good Woody.

I can't really recommend the film, unless you admire Caine as much as I do, which is certainly possible.

V/H/S is an example of the genre at its least compelling.

The movie is a mess: a gassy costume epic with nobody at the center.

After slogging through the predictability of countless would-be action thrillers, I admired the sheer professionalism of this one, which doesn't transcend its genre, but at least honors it.

The movie is so extravagant and outrageous in its storytelling that it resists criticism: It's self-satirizing.

Amusing without ever being break-out funny.

It's unfair to complain that Weiss seems over the top. The portrayal seems to be accurate.

This is an ambitious and sometimes effective but wildly uneven adventure that plays like one extended ego trip for Stiller. It feels like a movie by focus group, struggling to find a place between genuinely creative fantasy and audience-pleasing payoff moments.

Sandler works so hard at this, and so shamelessly, that he battered down my resistance. Like a Jerry Lewis out of control, he will do, and does, anything to get a laugh. No thinking adult should get within a mile of this film. I must not have been thinking. For my sins, I laughed.

The performance by Flora Cross is haunting in its seriousness. She doesn't act out; she acts in.

The film ends up feeling more like a very long music video.

Director Daniel Espinosa’s stylish and at times fantastically gory Life features an A-list, international and diverse cast, a few grotesque surprises and one very cool and labyrinthine spaceship — but eventually crashes and burns due to multiple failures.

At times Thor: The Dark World does fire on all cylinders, with fine work from the returning cast, a handful of hilarious sight gags and some cool action sequences. But it’s also more than a little bit silly and quite ponderous and overly reliant on special effects that are more confusing than exhilarating.

Clocking in at just 93 minutes and yet still feeling a bit stretched out, “Beast” features a wonderful cast and some gorgeous location photography in South Africa, but the screenplay requires everyone in this story to behave like the dopiest characters in the schlockiest of horror B-movies.

A genuine surprise: A movie as funny as the "SNL" stuff, and yet with convincing characters, a compelling story and a sunny, sweet sincerity shining down on the humor.

In sad-sack movies there is often a helpful woman around to help the despairing heroes. In "Garden State," it was Natalie Portman; in "Elizabethtown," Kirsten Dunst. Both were salvation angels, but Tyler has a gentle approach to this kind of role that is perfect for the tone of Lonesome Jim.

The Last Stand marks the American debut of the Korean director Jee-woon Kim, who delivers a half-dozen quality kills that will leave audiences squirming and then laughing at the sheer audacity of it all.

It’s a tribute to the script by Stuart Blumberg and Matt Winston, the directorial aplomb of Blumberg and the genuine performances of the cast that most of the time, we care about these people, we believe their problems are real and we want them to get the help they so desperately need.

The film, directed by Daniel Sullivan, is brave, I think, to offer us a complicated scenario without an easy moral compass.

I liked the music. I would rather have the movie's soundtrack than see Groove again--or at all.

What is wonderful about Angela's Ashes is Emily Watson's performance, and the other roles that are convincingly cast.

The most outspoken and yet in some ways the calmest of the new documentaries opposing the Bush presidency.

In more ways than one, this is one of the dopiest films of the year.

Like Superman when he’s first brought back to life, the new Justice League isn’t necessarily better than the original, but it’s different and darker, markedly so.

[This] timely documentary is less persuasive about translating logic into political and economic reality.

Joe Bell never quite packs the dramatic punch the real-life story deserves.

By the time we reach the insanely dubious final twist of The Voyeurs, we’d rather just look the other way.

It is not what's there on the screen that disappoints me, but what's not there.

The movie is lightweight, as it should be.

The result is not quite a documentary and not quite a drama, but interesting all the same. It uses the approach of Haskell Wexler's "Medium Cool" (1969), but without the same urgency.

Reddy’s story is given the standard, time-honored biopic treatment in I Am Woman, which checks off just about every cliché imaginable — and yet wins us over, in large part due to the star-power performance of Tilda Cobham-Hervey as Reddy.

The very embodiment of a star vehicle: a movie with a preposterous plot, exotic locations, absurd action sequences, and so much chemistry between attractive actors that we don't care.

For one of the few times in Eastwood’s career as a director, he seems indecisive about what kind of movie he wanted to make.

But if you do not have some secret place in your soul that still responds even a little to brave cowboys, beautiful princesses and noble horses, then you are way too grown up and need to cut back on cable news.

There is no rhythm to the movie, no ebb and flow; it's all flat-out spectacle.

I object to the movie not on sociological grounds but because I suspect a real geisha house floated on currents deeper and more subtle than the broad melodrama on display here.

The animation is nicely stylized and the color palette well-chosen, although the humans are so square-jawed, they make Dick Tracy look like Andy Gump. The voice performances are persuasive. The obvious drawback is that the film is in 3-D. If you can find a theater showing it in 2-D, seek it out.

This is a weird, uneven, generally intriguing thriller about a young man whose fantasy life is totally controlled by images from movies.

The film establishes a bland, reassuring, comforting Brady reality - a certain muted tone that works just fine but needs, I think, a bleaker contrast from outside to fully exploit the humor.

There is something powerful and elemental in the appeal of gold, especially somebody else's buried treasure, and it plugs holes in the plot that no base metal could possibly cover.

There is a wise and understanding teacher on the faculty, played by Anjelica Huston. Defending the work of Dead White Males, she sensibly observes that when they did their best work "they weren't dead yet."

Though this is the cinematic equivalent of an album of cover tunes by artists who have created much more dazzling original work, it’s a sweet, smart and funny confection.

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

So I Married an Axe Murderer is a mediocre movie with a good one trapped inside, wildly signaling to be set free. The good movie involves a droll and eccentric Scottish-American family whose household embraces more of the trappings of Scottishness than your average Glasgow souvenir shop. The bad movie is about a young man's romance with a woman he comes to suspect is an ax murderer.

Sparkle isn't blindingly original but it delivers solid entertainment, and despite the clichés I was never for a moment bored.

Here is a gaudy vomitorium of a movie, violent, nauseating and really a pretty good example of its genre. If you are a hardened horror movie fan capable of appreciating skill and wit in the service of the deliberately disgusting, The Devil's Rejects may exercise a certain strange charm.

What this movie needs is a clear, spare, logical screenplay. It's all inspiration and no discipline.

Bad Grandpa obviously is not for everyone, but Johnny Knoxville and “Jackass” fans will eat it up.

Writer-director Jonathan Jakubowicz’s Hands of Stone is a rousing, well-filmed and solid (if at times overly generous to Duran) biopic with a bounty of charismatic performances, two of the sexier scenes of the year, some welcome laughs and a few above average fight sequences.

Goodbye Christopher Robin is a film of rough edges and jagged twists, at times beautiful to behold but more often shot in jarring close-ups that make Christopher Robin’s parents look like the villains in a gothic horror film.

A glorious romantic fantasy, aflame with passion and bittersweet longing.

12 Strong winds up being an almost-good film about some great American soldiers.

In its complexity and wit, this is one of his (Allen's) best recent films.

The problem with Die, Mommie, Die, a drag send-up of the genre, is that it spoils the fun by making it obvious.

I could go two ways. I could say that No Mercy is a dumb formula thriller, which we can all sort of figure out from the ads, or I could go the other way and talk about the movie's style and energy. I think I'll go the second way, because whatever this movie is, it's not boring. It doesn't take shortcuts and it delivers on its grimy, breathless action sequences.

The movie is an ideal showcase for the talents of Coogan.

The movie feels so plotted, so constructed, so written, that I found myself thinking maybe they shouldn't have filmed the final draft of the screenplay. Maybe there was an earlier draft that was a little disorganized and unpolished, but still had the jumble of life in it.

Gardens of Stone is content to be a slice of life, a story that says some of our best young people went to Vietnam and died there, and those who knew them missed them. We knew that already. Perhaps there is nothing else to be said, but this movie seems to give promise of seeing more deeply, and then it doesn't. Every moment is right, and yet the film as a whole is incomplete.

A no-holds-barred comedy permitting several holds I had not dreamed of. The needle on my internal Laugh Meter went haywire, bouncing among hilarity, appreciation, shock, admiration, disgust, disbelief and appalled incredulity.

Arriving in theaters nearly three decades after Will Smith and Martin Lawrence proved to be a hilariously likable duo in the original “Bad Boys” and four years after the entertaining, midlife-crisis threequel, the bombastic and cartoonishly over-the-top “Bad Boys: Ride or Die” is one loud misfire.

Unfortunately, I was also convinced that trapped within this 98-minute film is a good 30-minute news report struggling to get out. Shearer, who is bright and funny, comes across here as a solemn lecturer.

It's never really believable, but it tries to be, and it would have had a better chance as straight satirical comment.

With Will Ferrell and Jamie Foxx as the lead pups, Strays delivers a handful of solid chuckles and a few laugh-out-loud moments — but it’s a premise that turns out to be awfully thin for a feature-length film.

It’s funny, exciting, preposterous, great to look at, and made with the same level of technical expertise we’d expect from a new Bond movie itself. And all of that is very nice, but nicer still is the perfect pitch of the casting.

The best moments in the movie involve tightly knit dialogue scenes between King and Crystal, who co-wrote the movie. Their timing has the almost effortless music of two professionals who have spent their lifetimes learning how to put the right spin on a word.

Deathtrap is a wonderful windup fiction machine with a few modest ambitions: It wants to mislead us at every turn, confound all our expectations, and provide at least one moment when we levitate from our seats and come down screaming.

It is what it is, without apology or compromise. It made me smile a lot.

The movie feels dark, clammy and exhilarating -- it's like belonging to a secret club where you can have a lot of fun but might get into trouble.

It seems at first to be merely a jumble of discordant images ("Freaks" shot by the "Blair Witch" crew) but then, if you stay with it, the pattern emerges from the jumble.

Yes, the movie is corny, but no, it's not dumb. It's clever and insightful in the way it gets away with this story, which is almost a fable.

The opening scenes of Johnny Dangerously are so funny you just don't see how they can keep it up. And you're right: They can't. But they make a real try. The movie wants to do for gangster films what Airplane! did for Airport, and Top Secret! did for spy movies.

It’s a well-calibrated performance, with Harrelson convincingly conveying how Lyndon Johnson felt the weight of the world on his shoulders and took on that challenge in mostly admirable ways.

The movie is told almost entirely from Nolte's point of view, and he makes an immensely likable character right from the top.

The problem is, the plot wavers from nearly indecipherable to semi-ridiculous to … I stopped caring.

The remake is so close to the original that there is no reason to see both, unless you want to prove to yourself that black and white photography is indeed more effective than color for this material.

John Carpenter's Escape From L.A. is a go-for-broke action extravaganza that satirizes the genre at the same time it's exploiting it.

Deadly serious people are involved in deadly serious business in “Wasp Network,” and there’s an air of importance and urgency to their every move, and we should be utterly immersed in this story — but we’re not. Not even close.

With Ilana Glazer leading an outstanding cast, False Positive is not a movie you can easily shake off in a day or two. Or three.

Director Dexter Fletcher paints Eddie’s story in broad, bold strokes, never missing an opportunity to milk a suspenseful dramatic turn or go for the relatively easy laugh — but it’s a style well-suited to this wonderfully ridiculous story.

You need to be strapped in and focused for director and co-writer Charlie McDowell’s ambitious, unnerving, slightly loopy and beautifully ambivalent gem, which only tackles the question: How would people react if there was absolute proof of an afterlife?

Although the movie is a wall-to-wall exercise in bad taste, it somehow retains a certain innocence; it challenges and sometimes shocks, but for me at least it didn't offend, because its motives were so obviously good-hearted.

This is a film that pulls off the difficult balancing act of carrying an important and uplifting message while delivering consistent laughs and introducing us to some wonderfully badass teens.

Most problematic of all is the character of fictional FBI Agent Jack Solomon (Jack O’Connell), who is tasked with leading the surveillance and digging up dirt on Seberg and becomes deeply conflicted about his job.

The movie makes the same mistake as some of the characters in it: It treats these two guys like lovable old characters instead of listening to what they really have to say.

Educating Rita, which might have been a charming human comedy, disintegrated into a forced march through a formula relationship.

Disney’s bland comedy Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day might have been a little more entertaining if it had been a little more, terrible, horrible, no good and so forth.

Though Captive State has plenty of action, it’s not a blood-and-guts sci-fi thriller. It aims for a more cerebral, social-commentary approach.

There is noting quite so awkward as a film that is one thing while it pretends to be another.

A quasi-documentary about love that is sweet, true and perhaps a little deceptive.

This is a repetitive, pointless exercise in genre filmmaking--the kind of movie where you distract yourself by making a list of the sources.

Desert Flower tells a rags-to-riches story, but it plays like two stories in conflict. Everything involving Waris in Africa or in London before her success feels true and heartfelt. Many later details are badly handled.