Picks and chooses cleverly, skipping blithely past the entire Russian Revolution but lingering on mad monks, green goblins, storms at sea, train wrecks and youthful romance.

Project X is not a great movie because its screenplay doesn't really try for greatness. It's content to be a well-made, intelligent entertainment aimed primarily, I imagine, at bright teenagers. It works on that level.

The Soloist has all the elements of an uplifting drama, except for the uplift.

Perfectly sweet and civilized.

This is a brighter, more engaging film than the original "Madagascar."

As McKay acknowledges in the introduction, Dick Cheney remains an enigma after all these years. I’m not sure Vice sheds any new light on the Cheney story. It places him in a spotlight that continually changes colors and tones but is almost never flattering.

The movie was made with a lot of love and startingly fresh memories of the early 1940s, and reminds us once again that Spacek is a treasure.

While the spectacularly gifted and enormously likable cast has the firepower and charisma to match the testosterone-fueled ensembles of those earlier films, Ocean’s 8 is more of a smooth glide than an exhilarating adventure.

The film's heart is in the right place, and Ferris Bueller is slight, whimsical and sweet.

For a time in her life, a woman's pregnancy is the most important thing about her. That is the subject of Hideaway.

The dialogue in As They Made Us rings authentic and the performances are universally strong, but there’s a dour air to the proceedings, and we wind up thinking Abigail would have been better off if she, too, had left home the moment it was possible and had never looked back.

This film has moments of uncommon observation and touching insight.

Respect is filled with memorable supporting turns, including Audra McDonald as Aretha’s mother and Saycon Sengbloh and Hailey Kilgore as her sisters, who were often in the background in more ways than one — but an old-fashioned show-business biopic such as this rises and falls on the talents of the lead, and it’s hard to imagine anyone in the world doing more justice to the legacy of Aretha Franklin than Jennifer Hudson.

The first-time director is Mateo Gil, known for the screenplays of "Open Your Eyes," "The Sea Inside" and "Agora." Ironic, that the film's weakness is its screenplay.

What is most beguiling about Addams Family Values is the way the relationship between Gomez and Morticia has ripened.

The movie proceeds quickly, seems to know its subject matter, is fascinating in its portrait of the inner politics and structure of the terrorist group, and comes uncomfortably close to reality. But what holds it together is the Cheadle character.

I have no idea if this movie was made stoned. Like its predecessors by Cheech and Chong, it might as well have been.

I expected another mindless surfing movie. Blue Crush is anything but.

A wacky and eccentric heist comedy with many virtues, but it is also a remake of "Big Deal on Madonna Street" (1958), a movie much beloved by me. Some scenes are so close to the original it's kind of uncanny.

Not a successful movie--it's too stilted and pre-programmed to come alive--but in the center of it McDormand occupies a place for her character and makes that place into a brilliant movie of its own.

Any attempt to defend this movie on rational grounds is futile. The whole point is Jackie Chan, he does what he does better than anybody. He's having fun. If we allow ourselves to get in the right frame of mind, so are we.

The film's title is never explained. What does Moore mean? Maybe it's that capitalism means never having to say you're sorry.

It is a great film about greatness, the story of the horse and the no less brave woman who had faith in him.

She's So Lovely does not depict choices most audiences will condone, or even understand, but the film is not boring, and has the dread hypnotic appeal of a slowly developing traffic accident (in which we think there will probably be no fatalities).

It has the unsettled logic of a nightmare, in which nothing fits and everything seems inevitable and there are a lot of arrows in the air and they are all flying straight at you.

For all of von Trier’s attempts to go big and go bold, the two Nymphomaniac films ultimately come across as a self-indulgent marathon run on a treadmill.

Wah-Wah has a sequence, based on old newsreels, in which the flag is lowered and the sun sets on another bit of the empire. Odd how many critics have felt the whole movie should be about this. I don't see why. The story is about people who lived closed lives, and a film about them would necessarily give independence only a supporting role.

Against all odds, the billion-dollar “Fast & Furious” franchise is actually picking up momentum, with “FF6” clocking in as the fastest, funniest and most outlandish chapter yet.