The thing about Ride the Eagle is we have a funny, sweet, insightful, low-key charmer of a story that’s all about making human connections, reconciling broken relationships and finding solace in the companionship of another fellow traveler on this planet — and yet the main characters are almost never in the same room with one another.

Deliberately ambiguous, The Reluctant Fundamentalist provides just enough answers while leaving us with more than enough questions. It's a film that demands discussion afterward.

It's too heavy on plot and too willing to cheat about its plot to be really successful, but it does have its moments, and it's better than your average, run-of-the-mill slasher movie.

Brubaker is a grim and depressing drama about prison outrages - a movie that should, given its absolutely realistic vision, have kept us involved from beginning to end. That it doesn't is the result, I think, of a deliberate but unwise decision to focus on the issues involved in the story, instead of on the characters.

This is a surprisingly cheesy disaster epic.

Director April Mullen shoots Wander like a kinetic horror film, which results in some pretty cool sequences but also far too many quick-cut flashbacks to the deadly auto accident, which results in us feeling more annoyed and manipulated than intrigued.

To Rome With Love isn't great Woody Allen. Here is a man who has made a feature every year since 1969, give or take a few, and if they cannot all be great Woody, it's churlish to complain if they're only good Woody.

I can't really recommend the film, unless you admire Caine as much as I do, which is certainly possible.

V/H/S is an example of the genre at its least compelling.

The movie is a mess: a gassy costume epic with nobody at the center.

After slogging through the predictability of countless would-be action thrillers, I admired the sheer professionalism of this one, which doesn't transcend its genre, but at least honors it.

The movie is so extravagant and outrageous in its storytelling that it resists criticism: It's self-satirizing.

Amusing without ever being break-out funny.

It's unfair to complain that Weiss seems over the top. The portrayal seems to be accurate.

This is an ambitious and sometimes effective but wildly uneven adventure that plays like one extended ego trip for Stiller. It feels like a movie by focus group, struggling to find a place between genuinely creative fantasy and audience-pleasing payoff moments.

Sandler works so hard at this, and so shamelessly, that he battered down my resistance. Like a Jerry Lewis out of control, he will do, and does, anything to get a laugh. No thinking adult should get within a mile of this film. I must not have been thinking. For my sins, I laughed.

The performance by Flora Cross is haunting in its seriousness. She doesn't act out; she acts in.

The film ends up feeling more like a very long music video.

Director Daniel Espinosa’s stylish and at times fantastically gory Life features an A-list, international and diverse cast, a few grotesque surprises and one very cool and labyrinthine spaceship — but eventually crashes and burns due to multiple failures.

At times Thor: The Dark World does fire on all cylinders, with fine work from the returning cast, a handful of hilarious sight gags and some cool action sequences. But it’s also more than a little bit silly and quite ponderous and overly reliant on special effects that are more confusing than exhilarating.

Clocking in at just 93 minutes and yet still feeling a bit stretched out, “Beast” features a wonderful cast and some gorgeous location photography in South Africa, but the screenplay requires everyone in this story to behave like the dopiest characters in the schlockiest of horror B-movies.

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.

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.

The Last Stand marks the American debut of the Korean director Jee-woon Kim, who delivers a half-dozen quality kills that will leave audiences squirming and then laughing at the sheer audacity of it all.

It’s a tribute to the script by Stuart Blumberg and Matt Winston, the directorial aplomb of Blumberg and the genuine performances of the cast that most of the time, we care about these people, we believe their problems are real and we want them to get the help they so desperately need.

The film, directed by Daniel Sullivan, is brave, I think, to offer us a complicated scenario without an easy moral compass.

I liked the music. I would rather have the movie's soundtrack than see Groove again--or at all.

What is wonderful about Angela's Ashes is Emily Watson's performance, and the other roles that are convincingly cast.