In an age of prefabricated special effects and obviously phony spectacle, it's sort of old-fashioned (and a pleasure) to see a movie made of real people and plausible sets.

A curiously flat movie. It functions like clockwork and it looks right, but it doesn't feel like much.

This isn’t A-level X-Men, but it’s a visual feast, it doesn’t take itself too seriously, it’s brimming with stellar performances, it has some legitimately moving teamwork segments — and it contains perhaps my favorite scene of any movie this year.

Disney continues to make movies like Gus and people continue to pay to see them, but the process seems futile and this time even the mule seems bored.

This is a film that moves quietly along but speaks volumes.

Conor Allyn’s No Man’s Land is filled with noble ideas about the value of listening to and learning from the “other side” in the immigration crisis, but as it becomes increasingly heavy-handed, we feel as if we’re sitting in on a lecture.

This is a solid albeit slow-building film with few dull moments.

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.

It's nice enough, it's sweet, I loved LaPaglia's work, but there's nothing compelling here.

Regardless of Crudup’s ranking as a box-office draw, he’s every inch the movie star in Rudderless, a rather strange but engrossing film with one of the more jarring twists of any film in recent memory.

It was fun, it was funny, it was alive.

What makes Critters more than a ripoff are its humor and its sense of style. This is a movie made by people who must have had fun making it.

It takes some doing to make a Jack Black comedy that doesn't work. But Nacho Libre does it.

This is every bit the international thriller, from the exotic locations to the global political elements to the cast. If only we could get involved in Beckett’s story and truly care about his fate.

Insights into human nature don't seem to be the point of the movie, anyway. It's a slick, trashy, entertaining melodrama, with too many dumb scenes to qualify as successful.

The Drop has the feel of an extended improv exercise while spotlighting characters who are thinly sketched and often as boring as they are wickedly boorish, with the talented cast engaging in hit-and-miss dialogue that often falls flat.

Just about every scene features an Oscar winner or an Oscar nominee or an Emmy winner and/or a first-rate character actor — and just about every scene is a bloody mix of taut thriller and utterly implausible noir plot point. This is a sordid but slick and gutsy mess that comes across like a cover-band version of a Michael Mann movie.

Virtually every single element in Everything, Everything rings false and manipulative — and that’s BEFORE we get to a Big Reveal so contrived, so insanely implausible, so monstrously tone-deaf, we can see the entire movie plunging off a cliff, landing with a sickening thud in the Land of the Worst Movies of the Year.

All of this promising material is dealt with on that level where characters are not quite allowed to be as perceptive and intelligent as real people might be in the same circumstances.

While never losing its visual dazzle-factor, Epic keeps returning to overly familiar themes and characters.

It’s an impressively staged, well-acted, thoughtful and faithful telling of the last days of the Apostle Paul — and how Luke risked his life again and again to visit his great mentor in prison and make a written record of Paul’s life experiences and teachings.

If there is a shred of plausibility in the film, it comes from Bernard Hill's performance as Shirley Valentine's husband. He isn't a bad bloke, just a tired and indifferent one, and when he follows his wife to Greece at the end of the film there are a few moments so truthful that they show up the artifice of the rest.

(Li)'s scenes are so clearly computer-aided that his moves are about as impressive as Bugs Bunny doing the same.

Take away the drugs, and this is the story of a boring life in wholesale.

What redeems the film is its successful escapism, and Lane's performance. They are closely linked.

Kate Bosworth holds it all together with a sweetness that is beyond calculation.

It's the worst kind of bad film: the kind that gets you all worked up and then lets you down, instead of just being lousy from the first shot.

If you require that you "like" a movie, then Rick is not for you, because there is nothing likable about it. It's rotten to the core and right down to the end. But if you find that such extremes can be fascinating, then the movie may cheer you, not because it is happy, but because it goes for broke.