Warm-hearted and effective.

One of the best cop thrillers since "Training Day."

I am just about ready to write off movies in which people make bets about whether they will, or will not, fall in love.

Strives hard to replicate the screwball comedy but ends up being a lot more screwball than comedy.

It fulfills every one of our expectations with a deadening safeness. It is about a man who wants a child so that he will leave something after himself, but it never convinces us that he has a self to leave.

The movie’s premise doesn’t work – not at all, not even a little, not even part of the time – and that means everyone in the movie looks awkward and silly all of the time.

If you’ve seen “The Big Chill,” you’ve seen this movie, with older grown-ups. Even if you haven’t, you won’t be surprised by much.

As in his previous film, Davis gets mileage out of supporting players who do not look or sound like professional actors and so add a level of realism to the action.

Chasing Mavericks is made with more care and intelligence than many another film starting with its template might have been. It's better than most movies targeted at teens. And the cinematography of the big Mavericks scene by Oliver Euclid and Bill Pope is so frightening that you sort of understand why Frosty stays on the shore, watching Jay with binoculars.

Works splendidly as a courtroom thriller about military values as long as you don't expect it to seriously consider those values.

An earnest but hopeless attempt to tell a parable about a man's search for redemption. By the end of his journey, we don't care if he finds redemption, if only he finds wakefulness.

Here is a movie that embraces its goofiness like a Get Out of Jail Free card.

Bootmen is the story of a young dancer and his friends who revisit the cliches of countless other dance movies in order to bring forth a dance performance of clanging unloveliness.

I’ve seen versions of the plot of “Necessary Roughness” in almost every other movie ever made about an underdog sports team - but I fell for it again this time, because it was well done, and because the movie doesn’t try to pump itself up into more than it is, a good-humored entertainment.

Perhaps this story would be better told in a limited non-fiction series as well, as Queenpins relies too much on scatological humor, farcical sequences and a not entirely convincing message that these women were feminist, Robin Hood heroes.

It's pretty good, in fact, with full-blooded performances and heartfelt melodrama.

This is also one dark and wickedly funny comedy.

Harsh times and heartbreak abound in the Russo brothers’ gritty addiction epic Cherry, but there’s poetry in the language of the script and in certain moments of wonder and hope, of dark comedy, of love and redemption.

I found the opening third tremendously intriguing and involving, I thought the emotions were so real they could be touched, but then the film lost its way and fell into the clutches of sentimental melodrama.

If the crime elements in K-9 are routine, the relationship between Belushi and the dog at least has the courage to be goofy.

Without question, this movie does elicit “feel-good” emotions — largely driven by Garner’s ability to exude genuine maternal devotion and the charm of young Kylie Rogers.

Meg Ryan does this sort of thing about as well as it can possibly be done, and after "Sleepless in Seattle" and "You've Got Mail," here is another ingenious plot that teases us with the possibility that true love will fail, while winking that, of course, it will prevail.

The movie is not a great dramatic statement, but you know that from the modesty of the title. It is about movement in emotional waters that had long been still. Taylor makes it work because she quietly suggests that when Evie's life has stalled, something drastic was needed to shock her back into action, and the carving worked as well as anything.

There’s an admirable commitment to absurdity, yet it belies the thoughtful coming-of-age journey for the five teens up until they hit “morphin time.”

Some of the surprises in Oz the Great and Powerful, the much-anticipated "Wizard of Oz" origins movie, are delightful. Others, however, sink the movie just below the point of recommendation, with the primary drawback falling on the lovely shoulders of Michelle Williams and Mila Kunis, as early versions of Glinda the Good Witch and the Wicked Witch of the West, respectively.

Joyful Noise is an ungainly assembly of parts that don't fit, and the strange thing is that it makes no particular effort to please its target audience, which would seem to be lovers of gospel choirs.

Once you realize it's only going to be so good, you settle back and enjoy that modest degree of goodness, which is at least not badness, and besides, if you're watching Rush Hour 3, you obviously didn't have anything better to do, anyway.

McFarlane goes as goofy as you’d expect, but there’s a fairly soft and traditional center lurking inside this hard-R candy.