What I like about the movie is its combination of suspense and intelligence. If it does not quite explain exactly how decryption works (how could it?), it at least gives us a good idea of how decrypters work, and we understand how crucial Bletchley was -- so crucial its existence was kept a secret for 30 years.

Gets better the more attention you pay. To say "nothing happens" is to be blind to everyday life, during which we wage titanic struggles with our programming.

It is intensely involving at the outset, but it faces an insoluble problem: The story, like the characters, has no place to go.

Has a kind of calm, sneaky self-confidence that allows it to take us down a strange path, intriguingly.

I laughed often enough during the screening of Harold & Kumar that afterward I told Dann Gire, distinguished president of the Chicago Film Critics' Assn., that I thought maybe I should rent "Dude, Where's My Car?" and check it out.

You might walk out of Swiss Army Man. You might tire of the flatulence and the erections and the self-conscious whimsy. But if you stick with it, there’s a chance it’ll grow on you as it grew on me — and you’ll be rewarded with maybe the best ending of any movie so far this year.

Director Mark Mori, whose last feature documentary was the 1991 exposé “Building Bombs,” does an entertaining job of conveying Page’s entire life in her own words and illustrating why she has become a worldwide symbol of liberated sexuality.

For all the beautiful and lovely music Whitney Houston gave us, for all those soaring notes she hit, the documentary Whitney. Can I Be Me is a nearly joyless and melancholy piece of work. Because we know how it ends.

As in the earlier film, this one dances always at the edge of comedy. It especially has fun with the Rules of Vampire Behavior.

Ready or Not is a warped and audacious and absolutely ridiculous slapstick gorefest. The gross-out visual punchlines might have you doubling over with laughter. Or gagging to the point where you’ll regret ordering those nachos. Or both.

Benicio Del Toro, one of the film's producers, gives a heroic performance, not least because it's self-effacing.

These performances are so quietly effective that we watch, absorbed. I'm not sure, however, that where this film comes from quite earns the place it goes to.

Though stylized and eccentric and non-linear in its narrative path, and filled with dazzling non-sequiturs and oddly cryptic storylines, Paolo Sorrentino’s Youth is indeed set on this Earth, and these characters are very much alive.

It is poetic and unforgiving, romantic and stark. Death is the subject we edge around.

The ads for Code of Silence look schlocky, and Chuck Norris is still identified with a series of grade-zilch karate epics, but this is a heavy-duty thriller - a slick, energetic movie with good performances and a lot of genuine human interest.

The movie itself is fun: goofy, softhearted, fussy, sometimes funny, and with the sort of happy ending that columnists like to find for their stories and hardly ever find themselves.

The elegantly composed visuals, the stately progression of the scenes, the deliberate understatement of the dialogue, are all as "faithful" to James as a film can be. But that's exactly the film's problem: Ivory hasn't found a way to make his own film, and has ended up with a classroom version of James, a film with no juice or life of its own.

Hawke is engaging as Baker.

What is perhaps most interesting about Wolfen is that the story remains plausible given its basic assumptions, of course. This is not sci-fi, fantasy or violent escapism. It's a provoking speculation on the terms by which we share this earth with other creatures.

Muppet Treasure Island, directed by Brian Henson, son of the late Muppet genius, will entertain you more or less in proportion to your affection for the Muppets. If you like them, you'll probably like this.

The Fury is a stylish entertainment, fast-paced, and acted with great energy.

If you thought the magnificently flamboyant Luhrmann was well-suited to put the flashiest of spins on “The Great Gatsby,” you can imagine what he does with the made-for-overkill mythology of Elvis — and from the moment we see a bejeweled version of the Warner Bros. Pictures logo, we know Luhrmann is going to flood our senses with a nonstop medley of arresting sights and sounds, never taking his foot off the directorial gas pedal.

If The Electric Horseman has a flaw, it's that the movie's so warm and cozy it can hardly be electrifying. The director, Sydney Pollack, gives us solid entertainment, but he doesn't take chances and he probably didn't intend to.

The movie has been cast, designed, clothed, scored and edited to the bleeding edge of hip, but it hasn't exactly been written.

A rarity, a movie that seems to be on autopilot for the first two acts and then reveals that it was not, with a third act that causes us to rethink everything that has gone before. Ingenious, how simple and yet how devious the solution is.

Christian Bale is heroic in the way he allows the character to leap joyfully into despicability.

That it succeeds is some kind of miracle; there's enough material here for three bad films, and somehow it becomes one good one.

Like a cocky teenager who's had a couple of drinks before the party, they don't have a plan for who they want to offend, only an intention to be as offensive as possible.