Based on the novel of the same name by Olen Steinhauer and directed with style and skill by the Danish filmmaker Janus Metz, All the Old Knives feels like a small-scale version of a John Le Carré adaptation, with the obligatory Spy Movie Score as perfect accompaniment to the tension-building sequences in the restaurant and the cloak-and-dagger stuff in Vienna.

This film is a symphony of recognizable notes.

In a summer where the special effects in movies have grown steadily more repetitive and dreary, "LCTR:TCOL" uses imagination and exciting locations to give the movie the same kind of pulp adventure feeling we get from the Indiana Jones movies.

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.

Watching the movie is an entertaining exercise in forensic viewing, and the insidious thing is, even if it is a con, who is the conner and who is the connee?

There are some nice, amusing scenes, especially when one of the dozen (Donald Sutherland) pretends to be a general and inspects some troops. In fact, right up to the last scene the movie is amusing, well paced, intelligent.

A jolly movie and I smiled pretty much all the way through, but it doesn't shift into high with a solid thunk the way "Bridget Jones' Diary" did.

After a while, it seems to run out of places to go, but for most of its running time, it’s a wickedly clever divertissement.

Eight different characters, all played by Murphy, all convincing, each with its own personality. This is not just a stunt. It is some kind of brilliance.

As much parable and fantasy as it is realistic.

This one holds its flavor better than most.

What I saw was a successful attempt by the outsiders to dramatize how success and status in the world often depend on props you can buy, or steal, almost anywhere - assuming you have the style to know how to use them.

It’s the beautiful and breathtaking animation that gives The Tale of the Princess Kaguya a luster that is both simple and sophisticated. Once again the visionary Takahata and Studio Ghibli prove that great animation is not just for kids, but can be universal in its reach.

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.

It’s a variation on the teletransportation paradox as filtered through a live-action Looney Tunes cartoon, with some B-movie creatures thrown in for good measure.

De Niro infuses Costello with a kind of avuncular charm, while Genovese has the fiery temper and paranoid fury to match Jake La Motta in “Raging Bull.” It’s a privilege to witness one of the best actors of all time, still at the top of his game.

Here is a film that, for all of its plot, depends on characters in service of their emotional turmoil. It feels good to see Coppola back in form.

It is sophomoric, obvious, predictable, corny, and quite often very funny. And the reason it's funny is frequently because it's sophomoric, predictable, corny, etc. Example: Airplane Captain (Peter Graves): Surely you can't be serious. Doctor (Leslie Nielsen): I am serious. And don’t call me Shirley. This sort of humor went out with Milton Berle, Jerry Lewis, and knock-knock jokes. That's why it's so funny.

Griffiths is one of the most intensely interesting actresses at work today.

Both a distraction and a revelation.

Even when writer-director Cooper’s adaptation of Louis Bayard’s acclaimed novel takes some insanely big dramatic swings and doesn’t always connect, Bale is immersed in his performance — equally powerful when he’s quietly revealing a painful moment from his past or exploding with the earth-shattering rage.

Romero finds still new and entertaining ways for unspeakably disgusting things to happen to the zombies and their victims.

What I liked the most about the second "Dozen," was another performance, the one by Alyson Stoner as their daughter Sarah. As a girl poised on the first scary steps of adolescence, she finds the kind of vulnerability and shy hope that Reese Witherspoon projected in "The Man in the Moon."

The parts work even if the whole leaves me uncertain. Many movies are certain about their whole, but are made of careless parts. Forced to choose, I would take the parts.

Perhaps too laden with messages for its own good, but it has many moments of musical beauty, and it's interesting to watch Janet McTeer.

Die Another Day is still utterly absurd from one end to the other, of course, but in a slightly more understated way. And so it goes, Bond after Bond, as the most durable series in movie history heads for the half-century.

If the film has a flaw, and I'm afraid it does, it's the Sondre Lerche songs on the soundtrack. They are too foregrounded and literal, either commenting on the action or expounding on associated topics. In such a laid-back movie, they're in our face.

This is a film brimming with essential truth about the events at hand, and it delivers an impactful but also entertainingly resonant message. It’s also a crackling good, emotionally satisfying, old-fashioned thriller, with readily identifiable heroes and hiss-worthy villains.