Ferrell and Witherspoon play off each other with impeccable timing, and the supporting cast (which includes a couple of celebrity cameos) is universally terrific.

A lightweight charmer with a winning performance by Robin Tunney.

The sweetest and most openhearted love fable since "The Princess Bride."

The Navajo code talkers have waited a long time to have their story told. Too bad it appears here merely as a gimmick in an action picture.

Nastassja Kinski, in one of her most affecting performances, does much to convey the turmoil going in her soul.

Mammoth is a perfectly decent film. Too bad it isn't more thoughtful. It's easy to regret misfortune if all you do is regret it.

Too fawning to be consistently gifted, but it manages to be occasionally, perhaps accidentally, profound.

For a film so aggressively intent on Big Shock Moments (cannibalism and lesbian necrophilia, anyone?), it’s more often stultifying and tedious than provocative.

This is a movie that comes in two parts: It knows exactly what to do with special effects, but doesn't have a clue as to how two people in love might act and talk and think.

A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy is so low-key, so sweet and offhand and slight, there are times when it hardly even seems happy to be a movie.

Eddie and the Cruisers is all buildup and no payoff.

It all comes down to the difference between a "concert film" and a documentary. Let’s Spend The Night Together is essentially a concert film recording an "ideal" Rolling Stones concert, put together out of footage shot at several outdoor and indoor Stones concerts. If that's what you want, enjoy this movie. I wanted more.

There’s hardly a moment in this film that doesn’t feature at least one great actor in top form.

Contraband is based on an Icelandic thriller named "Reykjavik-Rotterdam," which leads you to suspect that neither New Orleans nor Panama City is particularly essential to the plot. That film starred Baltasar Kormakur, who is the director of this one, perhaps as a demonstration that many stars believe they could direct this crap themselves if they ever had the chance.

Breathe is an inspirational story well told, but it’s essentially a paint-by-numbers biopic of a very deserving subject, with only a few bursts of stylistic flair and a couple of minor surprises at best.

A work of limitless invention, but it is invention without pattern, chasing itself around the screen without finding a plot.

Writer-director Paul Solet serves up some intricately choreographed and creative action sequences and some gruesomely realistic violence.... Mostly, though, Bullet Head is about the characters and the crackling dialogue, and the first-rate actors giving just the right spin to their lines.

It’s Pena’s quietly powerful interpretation of Cesar Chavez the man that makes this movie work so well.

On the basis of this film, Monty Lapica, at 24, has a career ahead of him as a director, an actor or both. He also has a life ahead of him, which the film does a great deal to make clear.

Benton has made better movies, but this one has no organic reality.

The movie is forgiving. But the search for happiness is doomed by definition: You must be happy with what you have, not with what you desire, because the cost of the quest is too high.

An Almodovar film is always an exercise in style, but High Heels also generates narrative energy and mystery, and provides what was, for me, a genuine surprise at the end.

So the movie probably contains enough laughs to satisfy the weekend audience. Where it falls short is in the characters and relationships.

It’s one of the most endearing romantic comedies in recent memory, with some laugh-out-loud dialogue, gorgeous photography and uniformly charming performances from the entire cast.

The story, having failed to provide itself with character conflicts that can be resolved with drama, turns to melodrama instead.

This stuff is so concocted I had no business caring about it. But I did, because of Bullock.

It's the kind of movie that provides diversion for the idle channel-surfer but isn't worth a trip to the theater. A lot of it seems cobbled together out of spare parts.

The problem with The Baxter is right there at the center of the movie, and maybe it is unavoidable: Showalter makes too good of a baxter. He deserves to be dumped.

First-time director D’Onofrio has as an admirable visual style, whether we get medium-long-shot takes or intimate close-ups. This is a good-looking period piece film, percolating with top-tier performances.

An artfully shot and occasionally provocative but ultimately underwhelming and self-indulgent film.

Mighty Joe Young is not meek and harmless; it's a full-blooded action picture, all right, but with a certain warmth and humor instead of a scorched-earth approach. You feel good at the end, instead of merely relieved.

A rousing, original and thoroughly entertaining adventure.

I laughed all the way through, in fact. This is the best comedy since "The Hangover," and although it's almost a scene-by-scene remake of a 2007 British movie with the same title, it's funnier than the original.

Sure, the pricey special effects are impressive to behold (though, as usually the case, the 3D is nothing to text home about). And yes, at times “Valerian” creates a strange and beautiful universe. Which ultimately means nothing, because the plot is paper-thin.

The performances are strong, even if the characters aren’t given much depth.

Live From New York! is a solid, pleasant 82-minute walk down memory lane. But given that we’ve just been through the 40th anniversary celebration, cresting with that marathon of a TV special, it just doesn’t feel particularly necessary.

The movie tries for poetry and elegy in its closing scenes, and we can see where it's headed, although it doesn't get there.

It's an overwrought Gothic melodrama that has a nice first act before it descends into shameless absurdity.

It’s often fascinating stuff, but the whole thing comes across as a film new employees would watch on their first day of work, right after filling out all the packets of forms in Human Resources.

If you told me Bird Box was based on a Stephen King story — yep, I could see that. It’s that chilling. That suspenseful. And oh yes, that scary.

The problems resulting from the switch of identities are fairly predictable, but fun: This is one of the better recent Disney productions.

There is a curious problem with Birthday Girl, hard to put your finger on: The movie is kind of sour. It wants to be funny and a little nasty, it wants to surprise us and then console us, but what it mostly does is make us restless.

While there are too many characters in too much story for the movie to really involve us, it's amusing as a series of sketches about how the French think they are a funny race (or the Americans, take your choice).

One of the pleasures of Ronald Bass' screenplay is the way it subverts the usual comic formulas that would fuel a plot like this.

By casting attractive stars in the leads, by finding the right visual look, by underlining the action with brooding, ominously sad music, a good director can create the illusion of meaning even when nothing's there.

Hill doesn't really try to avoid the cliches in a story like this. He simply turns up the juice. Like his "Southern Comfort," "48 Hrs.," and "The Warriors," this is a movie that depends on style, not surprises. He doesn't want to make a different kind of movie; he wants to make a familiar story look better than we've seen it look recently. And yet there is a big surprise in Extreme Prejudice in the appearance and character of Nick Nolte.

This movie wasn't made for me. It was made for the people who will love it, of which there may be a multitude. The stage musical has sold 30 million tickets, and I feel like the grouch at the party.

Working from a clever if occasionally convoluted screenplay by David Golden, director Michael M. Scott has fashioned a classic cautionary tale about two seemingly good and smart people who make some dumb decisions when greed and opportunity come knocking.

The result is a tiresome exercise that circles at great length through various prefabricated stories defined by the advice each couple needs (or doesn't need).

The most interesting part of the film for a non-Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle fan is the production design - the sewers and the city streets above them. Roy Forge Smith is the designer, and seems inspired by a low-rent vision of Batman or maybe Metropolis.

Who would have guessed Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson would deliver the best work of his career playing a guy who squares off against a pack of small-time street thugs.

A vibrant and crazy and thought-provoking and immensely entertaining film that could have been even more resonant had it not settled for a relatively conventional final act we’ve seen in dozens of thrillers.

Though aimed at a young audience, this is one of those superhero adventures that will keep the adults entertained as well.

To give the movie credit, it's as bored with the underlying plot as we are. Even the prom queen election is only a backdrop for more interesting material, as She's All That explores differences in class and style, and peppers its screenplay with very funny little moments.

We’re not supposed to think about a movie like Skyscraper. This is superficial summer popcorn fare, given a PG-13 because when innocents are mowed down, the camera lingers on the smugly smiling sociopathic villains, not the carnage.

The movie is awfully sweet. The young actresses playing eighth-graders look their age, for once, and have an unstudied charm.

The dynamic between Dern and O’Connell is powerful and palpable, even though their bond develops solely through written correspondence and prison conversations in which they’re talking on the telephone and separated by thick glass.

The stars hold the film together.

While the subject matter is often bleak, this isn’t a depressing journey. Seeing great actors at the top of their game working with such rich material is never a downer.

This is the kind of movie that some kids would probably enjoy - it's filled with technology, special effects and action. But it just doesn't make any sense. And It lacks the wit to have fun with its time travel paradoxes, as last year's wonderful Time After Time did. It just plows ahead. Or behind. Or somewhere.

Uys's style sheds a sweet and gentle light on this new comedy, which is a sequel to the surprising international success - and, I think, a better film.

The fact is, the reverse chronology makes Irreversible a film that structurally argues against rape and violence, while ordinary chronology would lead us down a seductive narrative path toward a shocking, exploitative payoff.

Give the Sony Pictures-backed Affirm Films and Risen director and co-writer Kevin Reynolds credit for making a different kind of Biblical semi-epic.

This is an unabashedly sentimental, family-friendly mashup of “A Christmas Carol” with “It’s a Wonderful Life,” sure to leave you smiling and maybe even a little teary-eyed.

A perfectly acceptable brainless action thriller.

A funny movie that only gets funnier the more familiar you are with the James Bond movies, all the Bond clones and countless other 1960s films.

Bright and zesty.

One of those movies where the audience knows the message before the film begins and the characters are still learning it when the film ends.

Griffin is quick, smart and funny.

Lacking a smarter screenplay, it milks the genuine skills of its actors and director for more than it deserves, and then runs off the rails in an ending more laughable than scary.

Proves to be unsatisfactory because it establishes a well-defined group of characters and shows them disrupted by the careless behavior of a tiresome young woman and two adults who allow themselves to be motivated in one way or another by her infectious libido.

Casino Jack is so forthright, it is stunning.

From time to time you’ll laugh and maybe shed a tear But this isn’t the kind of “Grinch” you’ll want to see each year.

Hitchcock liked typecasting, he said, because if an actor was right for a role, that made less work for the director in getting the audience to accept the character. Here the casting is so wrong that nothing quite works.

It's like a three-way collision between a softcore sex film, a soap opera and a B-grade noir. I liked it.

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

Broderick is splendid as the gambler. He knows, as many addicts do, that the addictive personality is very inward, however much acting out might take place.

In September of 1946, two months after Mother Cabrini was canonized, more than 100,000 gathered at Soldier Field for a Holy Hour celebration. “Cabrini” the film is a fine reminder of why she was so revered by so many.

Fortunately, Dumbo is so awesome and so determined and so brave, and the heartwarming aspects of the story are so impactful, we never stop caring.

Rough Night doesn’t begin to cover it. It’s also “Painfully Unfunny Night,” “Contrived Night,” “Unsurprising Plot Twist Night” and also, “How Do These Dimwits Ever Make It Through Any Night”?

Cleaner is “Die Hard,” just with different people.

The movie has been directed and acted so well, in fact, that almost all my questions have to do with the script: Why was the hero made so uncompromisingly hateful?

This movie could obviously go on fooling us forever, but we are good sports only up to a point, and then our attention drifts. Shame, since there's so much good stuff in it, like how effortlessly Rachel Griffiths keeps two tough guys completely at her mercy.

Plays like a tired exercise, a spy spoof with no burning desire to be that, or anything else.

In a rare weak performance for Cate Blanchett, she plays an aggravating, off-putting wife and mother in Richard Linklater’s disappointing book adaptation.

The awkwardly titled Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre is a mixed bag that plays like a cross between a “Mission: Impossible” movie and “Get Shorty,” and there are some moments of hilariously dark humor and a few nifty fight sequences. But the plot is so convoluted it feels as if chunks of different scripts were all fed into some kind of A.I. blender, with the result being an inconsequential serving of empty cinematic calories.

In Death Wish we get just about the definitive Bronson; rarely has a leading role contained fewer words or more violence.

Simon Curtis’ Woman in Gold is a shamelessly sentimental fictionalization of this true story, but it’s a fascinating story nonetheless, beautifully photographed and greatly elevated by a brilliant performance from the invaluable Helen Mirren.

It's one of those off-balance movies that seems searching for the right tone.

Quigley Down Under is a handsome film, well-acted, and it's a shame the filmmakers didn't spend a little more energy on making it smarter and more original.

Living these lives, for these people, must have been sad and tedious, and so, inevitably, is their story, and it must be said, the film about it.

I have a feeling the loss of their child and the state of their marriage were what most interested the backers of this film. They must have wanted to make a film about Darwin the man, not Darwin the scientist.

It's one of the movies with a lot of smiles and laughter in it, and a good feeling all the way through. Just everyday life, warmly observed.

Look Who's Talking is full of good feeling, and director Amy Heckerling finds a light touch for her lightweight material.

A small and warmhearted gem starring one of our finest veteran actors in a well-crafted and emotionally involving remake of a film about a widowed curmudgeon who begins to grow and change after experiencing some major life setbacks.

Me Before You is a beautifully filmed and well-intentioned weeper marred by an unfortunate performance from one of the leads, and a plot development that leaves us more angry and frustrated than moved in the final act.

When a film telling three stories and spanning thousands of years has a running time of 96 minutes, scenes must have been cut out. There will someday be a Director’s Cut of this movie, and that’s the cut I want to see.

Any Which Way You Can is not a very good movie, but it's hard not to feel a grudging affection for it. Where else, in the space of 115 minutes, can you find a country & western road picture with two fights, a bald motorcycle gang, the Mafia, a love story, a pickup truck, a tow truck, Fats Domino, a foul-mouthed octogenarian, an oversexed orangutan and a contest for the bare knuckle championship of the world?