Streep kills each of her numbers (no surprise there), while Jo Ellen Pellman more than holds her own with the big-name stars and gives the story its heart and smile with her empathetic portrayal of Emma.

I cannot imagine a Hollywood movie like this. Audiences would be baffled.

The performance and the character are fully realized, even in this movie that finds room for so many loose ends and dead ends.

A diabolical and absorbing experience.

Here is a movie so absorbing, so atmospheric, so suspenseful and so dumb, that it proves my point: The subject matter doesn't matter in a movie nearly as much as mood, tone and style.

Its interest comes from Shannon's fierce and sadistic training scenes as Kim Fowley, and from the intrinsic qualities of the performances by Stewart and Fanning, who bring more to their characters than the script provides.

This is a fun movie, and a bright and intelligent one. It bears few signs of having been made on a low budget, and the special effects are reasonably slick.

The downward arc of the first two acts of the movie is made harrowing and yet perversely amusing by the performance of Paul Kaye.

This is a movie about ideas, a drama based on the ancient war between science and superstition. At its center is a woman who in the fourth century A.D. was a scientist, mathematician, philosopher, astronomer and teacher, respected in Egypt, although women were not expected to be any of those things.

Big Game never once feels credible, and that’s why it’s so entertaining. Almost nothing that takes place in this movie could occur in the real world, and there’s something comforting about that.

The movie is a delight, in ways both expected and rare.

Dan Brown's novel is utterly preposterous; Ron Howard's movie is preposterously entertaining.

Rod is played by Andy Samberg from "Saturday Night Live," who on the basis of this film, I think, could become a very big star.

No blood is shed. No bodies turn up. And yet The Assistant is one seriously chilling monster movie.

It has a charm based on its innocence, its conviction, its pre-Beatles soundtrack and the big 1950s cars the kids drive around in.

This is a good but not great Star Trek movie, a sort of compromise between the first two.

All of it is such a throwback on so many levels (Charlie’s car, his clothes, his incessant use of pay phones) that you just go with it, no matter how many confusing twists and turns the conspiracy theory plot takes thanks to co-writers Stuhr and Ricker.

The movie would have benefitted from a tight rewrite (it is too ambitious in including plot threads it doesn't have time to deal with), but Gibson's strong central performance speeds it along.

Shunning the tons of equipment ordinarily taken along on location, Brown used only what he could carry. The beautiful photography he brought home almost makes you wonder if Hollywood hasn't been trying too hard.

In a season of movies dumb and dumber, One Day has style, freshness, and witty bantering dialogue.

As a stand-alone work of cinema fiction, A Million Little Pieces is an effective blunt instrument of a film — a rough-edged, unvarnished, painfully accurate portrayal of addiction and rehabilitation.

This curious idea for a movie actually works.

It's one of the movies with a lot of smiles and laughter in it, and a good feeling all the way through. Just everyday life, warmly observed.

Outsourced is not a great movie, and maybe couldn't be this charming if it was. It is a film bursting with affection for its characters and for India.

This is no “Zero Dark Thirty” or “The Hurt Locker.” Lacking in nuance and occasionally plagued by corny dialogue, “13 Hours” is nonetheless a well-photographed, visceral action film, and a sincere and fitting tribute to those secret soldiers.

Body-switch plots are a license for adults to act like kids; probably nobody has had more fun at it than Tom Hanks did in "Big," but Curtis comes close.

While Friedkin will always be heralded primarily for the towering twin achievements of “The Exorcist” and “The French Connection,” this is a more than respectable farewell.

Michael Caplan’s Algren is a beguiling appreciation of the novelist, reporter and essayist.