Rgatime is a loving, beautifully mounted, graceful film that creates its characters with great clarity.

I will say that the attempt to reinterpret the memorable closing shot of "Blood Simple" is so gauche and graceless that I involuntarily moaned in disgust. I docked the film another half-star just for that.

Oldman and Ryder and Hopkins pant with eagerness. The movie is an exercise in feverish excess, and for that if for little else, I enjoyed it.

If the story is immensely satisfying in a traditional way, the style has its own delights.

Robert Rodriguez has somehow misplaced his energy, his flair and his humor in this third film, which is a flat and dreary disappointment.

This is a story that has been told time and again in the movies, and sometimes the performances overcome the condescension of the formula.

The standards for comic book superhero movies have been established by "Superman," "The Dark Knight," "Spider-Man 2" and "Iron Man." In that company "Thor" is pitiful. Consider even the comparable villains (Lex Luthor, the Joker, Doc Ock and Obadiah Stane). Memories of all four come instantly to mind. Will you be thinking of Loki six minutes after this movie is over?

The movie gets credit for not making the high life seem colorful or funny. It is not. It is boring, because when the drugs are there they simply clear the pain and allow the mind to focus on getting more drugs.

Body of Lies is a James Bond plot inserted into today's headlines. The film wants to be persuasive in its expertise about modern spycraft, terrorism, the CIA and Middle East politics. But its hero is a lone ranger who operates in three countries, single-handedly creates a fictitious terrorist organization, and survives explosions, gunfights, and brutal torture.

Writer-director Cooper (Crazy Heart, Out of the Furnace, Hostiles) is an enormously gifted storyteller who infuses nearly every moment of this movie with a sense of despair and hopelessness, as some genuinely goodhearted but in most cases deeply damaged souls struggle mightily to battle a mythical, flesh-eating creature from the deep woods while also dealing with real-world trauma that’s equally frightening.

The remake bounces all over the place with a convoluted storyline, a number of superfluous characters and two main villains who are sorely lacking — one because he’s a bland nothing, the other because he's so far over the top it’s like he’s in a Saturday morning cartoon.

Space Jam is a happy marriage of good ideas--three films for the price of one, giving us a comic treatment of the career adventures of Michael Jordan, crossed with a Looney Tunes cartoon and some showbiz warfare.

Adult Beginners has a casual, comfortable, low-budget authenticity, though it loses some of its edge near the end with some overly predictable and familiar resolutions.

By the end of Scent of a Woman, we have arrived at the usual conclusion of the coming-of-age movie, and the usual conclusion of the prep school movie. But rarely have we been taken there with so much intelligence and skill.

The modern sequences lack realism or credibility. The ancient sequences play like the equivalent of a devout Bible story. The result is a slow-moving and pointless exercise by Bertolucci, whose “The Last Emperor” was a much superior telling of a similar story about a child who is chosen for great things.

Maintains a certain level of intrigue, and occasionally bursts into life.

Always nice to enjoy a little comfort-food movie in which almost nothing surprising or particularly fresh happens, but we’re happy to spend time with the characters and we wish them the best as the credits roll.

There are images of astonishing beauty in Godfrey Reggio's Powaqqatsi, sequences when we marvel at the sights of the Earth, and yet when the film is over there is the feeling that we are still waiting for it to begin.

This movie is a study in wretched excess. It is so smoky, so dusty, so foggy, so unfocused and so brownish yellow that you want to try Windex on the screen. A director is in deep trouble when we do not even enjoy the primary act of looking at his picture.

There really is a little something here for everyone: music and culture, politics and passion, crime and intrigue, history and even the backstage intrigue of the auction business.

Jennifer Garner is indeed a charmer, but she's the victim of a charmless treatment in 13 Going on 30.

Bernie Mac gives a funny and kind of touching performance as a man who attains greatness once and then has to do it again.

Clive Owen can be a likable actor, but the character is working against him...And please, please, give us a break from the scenes where the ghost of the departed turns up and starts talking as if she's not dead.

It's not enough to like such films because they're "so bad they're good." You need to specialize, and like the films because they're so good about being so bad they're good. Modus Operandi, a film by Frankie Latina that has won praise on the midnight movie festival circuit, is such a film.

In Sacrifice, about a father who loses his son to the power of the state, it is difficult to miss the parallels with Chen's own life.

Fey is such a likable and funny screen presence, but she’s no lightweight when it comes to playing subtle, honest drama.

Setting entirely aside the accuracy of the film, the IRA still has him marked for death, and indeed there was an attempt on his life in Canada 10 years after he fled. He’s still out there somewhere.

Geraldine Viswanathan, fresh off her scene-stealing turn as the intrepid high school newspaper reporter in “Bad Education,” gives a knockout performance.