This is yet another meta story with the characters commenting on the story as it goes along, and while that gimmick is becoming tiresome, this is solidly constructed piece of lightweight entertainment with terrific period-piece costumes and sets, and suitably theatrical performances from a talented cast that is clearly enjoying itself while delivering a quality spoof.

Pavilion is an odd thing: a movie that manages to be immersive without being about much of anything.

The Eclipse is needlessly confusing. Is it a ghost story or not? Perhaps this is my problem.

Saints and Soldiers isn't a great film, but what it does, it does well.

A rip-snorting adventure tale of the sort made before CGI, 3-D and alphabet soup in general took the fun out of moviegoing.

The Dictator is funny, in addition to being obscene, disgusting, scatological, vulgar, crude and so on.

The Attack is not just about an incident targeting Israelis. This is also the story of not knowing Palestinians.

A special movie - not just a police thriller, but a movie that has researched gangs and given some thought to what it wants to say about them.

The movie has so many other delights, though, that it's fun anyway. Maybe it wasn't exactly intended to be a love story.

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 delight on its own terms, even if it has little to do with the real Goethe; here is a randy young man not a million miles apart from Tom Jones.

The film, written and directed by Tamara Jenkins, is pitched pretty firmly at that level of ambition: Broadly drawn characters, quick one-liners, squabbling family members, lots of sex.

Clive Owen makes a semi-believable hero, not performing too many feats that are physically unlikely. As the plucky DA, Naomi Watts wisely plays up her character's legal smarts and plays down the inevitable possibility that the two of them will fall in love.

The acting is world-class in Eye in the Sky, a timely and tense but sometimes heavy-handed drama set in the modern world of drone warfare.

The dialogue has an edgy wit, although it has no ambitions to be falling-down funny. Here is the Odd Couple formula applied in a specific time and place that make them feel very odd indeed.

[A] diverting documentary.

The scenes involving the dragon are first-rate. The beast is one of the meanest, ugliest, most reprehensible creatures I've ever seen in a film, and when it breathes flames it looks like it's really breathing flames.

Cedar Rapids has something of the same spirit of "Fargo" in its approach to the earnest natures of its small-towners.

Four Brothers works as an urban thriller, if not precisely as a model of logic.

Plunges far beneath Todd Solondz's territory and enters the suburbs of John Waters' universe in its fascination for people who live without benefit of education, taste, standards, hygiene and shame. I

In a summer populated with comic-book superheroes, ersatz “Transformer” types and stupid buddy comedies, Still Mine lets viewers spend some quality time with real humans for a change.

Calderon and Larrain (also director of the Golden Globe-nominated “Jackie”) have taken great dramatic license with Neruda’s story, and the payoff is more than worth the risk.

Though specific in its humor and humanity, this is a film that also has a universal quality. Anyone who’s ever had a falling-out with a best friend can relate to the heartache felt by Stacy and Lydia when things go sideways — and will be rooting for these two wonderful young women to find their way back to one another. Theirs is a friendship worth saving.

Edmon Roch's Garbo the Spy is an engrossing documentary that is itself largely a work of the director's imagination.

Sweet rather than exciting.

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

The story is more entertaining as it rolls along than it is when it gets to the finish line. But at least King uses his imagination right up to the end, and spares us the obligatory violent showdown that a lesser storyteller would have settled for.

A genuine surprise: A movie as funny as the "SNL" stuff, and yet with convincing characters, a compelling story and a sunny, sweet sincerity shining down on the humor.