Here Common isn't called upon to do much heavy lifting in the acting department, but he plays well with Queen Latifah. Sure, the movie is a formula. A formula that works reminds us of why it became a formula.

The fact is, this movie is really about a woman's spunk and a common man's sneaky revenge. And on that level it's absorbing and entertaining.

The movie is like a merger of his ugly drunk in "Bad Santa" and his football coach in "Friday Night Lights," yet Thornton doesn't recycle from either movie; he modulates the manic anger of the Santa and the intensity of the coach and produces a morose loser who we like better than he likes himself.

A delightful demonstration of how spirituality can coexist quite happily with an intense desire for France to defeat Brazil.

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.

There is hardly a thing I can say in its favor, except that I was cheered by nearly every minute of it. I cannot argue for the script, the direction, the acting or even the mummy, but I can say that I was not bored and sometimes I was unreasonably pleased.

Jarmusch is a poet of the night. Much of Night on Earth creates the same kind of lonely, elegaic, romantic mood as Mystery Train, his film about wanderers in nighttime Memphis. Tom Waits' music helps to establish this mood of cities that have been emptied of the waking. It's as if the minds of these night people are affected by all of the dreams and nightmares that surround them.

It’s a smart, solid and engrossing paper-chase investigative story about one man’s dogged determination to shed light on the government-sanctioned, post-9/11 torture tactics used by American interrogators on foreign soil.

Approaches the tricky subject of sadomasochism with a stealthy tread, avoiding the dangers of making it either too offensive, or too funny.

It's a movie about characters, primarily. It cares more about getting inside these people than it does about solving its crime.

Bounds from one gag to another like an eager puppy.

Operation Varsity Blues: The College Admission Scandal is a documentary, yet Matthew Modine does some of the most oddly compelling work of his career in a fully realized performance in this movie.

In the last analysis, I guess it all reduces to taste and instinct. Some paintings are good, says me, or says you, and some are bad. Some paintings could be painted by a child, some couldn't be.

The movie's success rests largely on the shoulders of Fernanda Montenegro, an actress who successfully defeats any temptation to allow sentimentality to wreck her relationship with the child.

This is not an easy watch, but there are also moments of deep emotion and genuine inspiration in the documentary.

Too many adults have a tendency to confuse bad taste with evil influences; it's hard for them to see that the activities in "Doctor Dolittle,'' while rude and vulgar, are not violent or anti-social. The movie will not harm anyone.

Diaz has one of the most winning grins in the movies. Basically, what I wanted was more of it. Some of that Cary Grant dialog. More flirtation. More of a feeling the characters, not the production, were the foreground. More of the stars.

Yet Love! Valour! Compassion! has power and insight, and perhaps what makes it strong is its disinterest in technical experiments: It is about characters and dialogue, expressed through good acting--the very definition of the "well-made play."

One of the delights of The Taste of Others is that it is so smart and wears its intelligence lightly. Films about taste are not often made by Hollywood, perhaps because it would so severely limit the box office to require the audience to have any.

I like movies about smart guys who are wise asses, and think their way out of tangles with criminals. I like courtroom scenes. I like big old cars. I like The Lincoln Lawyer because it involves all three.

The movie is cast so well that the actors bring life to their predictable destinies, and Elizondo casts a kind of magical warm spell over them all.

A somewhat convoluted and occasionally formulaic but disturbingly effective legal political procedural.

The story tells a useful lesson, the jungle inhabitants are amusing, and although the movie is not a masterpiece it's pleasant to watch for its humor and sweetness.

The film has been criticized by some as too politically correct. Perhaps so. But the characters' reality rises above the film's ideas and makes it human.

This is a well-photographed and rousing tale, with the “Stranger Things” star doing fine work as the fiercely determined heroine, and a deep and talented group of familiar faces in key supporting roles.

Directed in disjointed and sometimes unfocused fashion by Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk, An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power is nonetheless worth a viewing, if only for the continued, irrefutable, scientifically sound reminders that humankind continues to harm the planet in shocking and sobering ways.

Unlike the typical, effects-laden, comet-threatens-the-planet B-movie, Greenland is more in the vein of Steven Spielberg’s “War of the Worlds,” with the scenes of chaos and destruction serving as the backdrop for the story of one family’s desperate quest for survival — even when circumstances have ripped them apart.

With Romania standing in for 1850s New York State, The World to Come feels true to its time and place, and all four main players do a spectacularly good job of sounding and acting true to the time.