Salerno blows little more than smoke in this one, especially near the end, when we get to the maybe-probably-sort-ofs regarding the maybe-probably-possibly full vault of unpublished work.

Modest and good-looking, the film starts as dark comedy and ends in pathos. Director Alvarez makes the Oregon scenery a character unto itself.

In the scenes between mother and daughter in their apartment, the world outside no longer judging every action, new worlds open up. And therein lies the cinema's role in our lives: It reveals what is concealed to others.

Some will take it and like it, all the way to the heart of darkness. Others may feel they've been jacked with, manipulated. Villeneuve collaborates with unusual sensitivity with his actors. The script operates on one level; the interpreters on another, higher level.

The movie's fun, a lot of it having nothing to do with its specific subject.

The sequel's not bad; it's not slovenly. Some of the jolts are effectively staged and filmed, and Wan is getting better and better at figuring out what to do with the camera, and maneuvering actors within a shot for maximum suspense, while letting his design collaborators do the rest. But Leigh Whannell's script is a bit of a jumble.

The depiction of Havana neither sugarcoats nor grunges-up the harsh reality. The movement intoxicates, but the situations are tough.

It's fun! Extremely violent, cleverly managed fun, full of eviscerating aliens.

It is a tour de force for the actress, needless to say. Iranian Golshifteh Farahani is wonderful in the role.

It's an up-and-down movie, honest one minute and a fraud the next, but you stick with it mainly because of Hahn.

Huppert, Poelvoorde and Dussullier are experts all.

Terrible but, in its squealing way, sporadically fun-terrible.

Since he popped up and broke hearts in Altman's "McCabe and Mrs. Miller," Carradine has learned a wealth of practical acting knowledge about how much and how little need be done at any given moment. He provides the on-screen link to those earlier days and brings the natural authority a director craves in a performer.

The satisfactions of the film are in seeing what a screen full of excellent players can do to steer you around the holes. Bana never quite seems enough to anchor a picture for me; all the same, he acquits himself sharply here.

The skillful quartet at the center of Drinking Buddies reveals the weaknesses in the material.

The movie is madly, wonderfully at odds with itself.

The Canyons may not work, and the sex (as well as the synthesized glop on the soundtrack) may be tragically unhip, but it was made by a director who still cares.

It's no better, no worse and essentially no different from the jocular, clodhopping brutality of the first one.

Here's a funny, poignant oddball of a movie, existing on a galaxy far, far away from the likes of "Pacific Rim" or "World War Z" or anything whose computer-generated actions speak louder than words.

There's nothing wrong with Paranoia that a stronger director, livelier leading actors and several hundred fewer narrative conveniences wouldn't cure.

The dialogue comes straight out of "The Benny Goodman Story." That look, someone says to a staring, pausing Kutcher, "tells me you're on to something big." Nobody talks in this movie; everyone speechifies or take turns sloganing one another to death.

The Butler tells a lot of different stories, some more effectively than others.

The Spectacular Now is rare: a coming-of-age movie featuring a teenage couple about whom you actually give a rip.

Cameo appearances by everyone from James Franco (as Hugh Hefner, putting the moves on Lovelace at her own premiere) to Hank Azaria (as a film "investor") dot the grimy landscape.

Planes has practically no visual distinction, it's a complete knockoff, but I think it'll get by with the kids.

With most films, that'd be enough to cut out half the potential American audience. But effective, evocative science fiction, which Elysium is, has a way of getting by with an ILA (Insidious Liberal Agenda) in the guise of worst-case dystopia.

When Jason Sudeikis and Ed Helms appear in the same movie there's a significant threat of clean-cut sameness. Mediocre material makes them like two halves of the same comic actor: Ed Jason Helms-Sudeikis.

The actors — including Patton as Bobby's DEA colleague and sometime fling — cannot act what is not there. But with Washington, Wahlberg, Olmos and Paxton around jockeying for dominance, the standoffs have their moments.

The film may be depressing. But even with a terrible, watery musical score, it's also good.

Uber-raunchy but pretty interesting as sex comedies go.

It's simply a more focused scenario than usual, full of violence done up with a little more coherence and visceral impact than usual.

Girl Most Likely goes a little bit wrong in nearly every scene, its stridently quirky characters never quite making sense together in the same universe, let alone the same movie.

This is the worst, least, dumbest picture made by people of talent this year.

My favorite thing in the movie is the way co-star and Korean action icon Byung Hun Lee uses his feet of fury to hoist a paint can and send it flying.

Fruitvale Station works because Coogler and his leading man present a many-sided protagonist, neither saint nor unalloyed sinner.

The movie belongs to the women, for once, and The Conjuring doesn't exploit or mangle the female characters in the usual ways. Farmiga, playing a true believer, makes every spectral sighting and human response matter; Taylor is equally fine, and when she's playing a "hide-and-clap" blindfold game with her girls, she's like a kid herself, about to get the jolt of her life.

It's closer to the hammering "Transformers" aesthetic than expected. Yet the weirdness around the edges saves it from impersonality.

Yes, for every star there are five more also-rans and maybe-next-times. But there is honor and glory in being part of the blend. And, at the film's midpoint, when Clayton talks about the late-night recording session in 1969 of "Gimme Shelter," the memory takes on the glow of myth.

The Wall is no endurance test; rather, it presents the facts of the case, adding an eerie low hum to the soundtrack whenever Gedeck's character edges near her outer limits.

The film's not as good as its cast, but The Way, Way Back has its moments.

It's a reasonably efficient baby sitter, done up in 3-D computer-generated animation of no special distinction. But the first one's weird mixture of James Bond bombast and hyperactive pill-shaped Minions (the protagonist Gru's goggle-clad helpers) had the element of surprise in its favor.

In scenes such as hundreds of Natives being slaughtered by U.S. troops behind Gatling guns, we have Tonto and the Lone Ranger acting like a couple of comic-relief ninnies, screwing around aimlessly for laughs on a handcar. It's as if the movie were having a nervous breakdown. At one point the masked man gets his head dragged through horse manure. Watching The Lone Ranger, you know the feeling.

There's something off in its scenes of Arterton's romantically unlucky loner showing up at Arthur's home, in the rain, distraught. If the movie weren't so determined to placate, you'd think you're in for a daring exploration of an affair between a 30-something emotional cripple and a 70-something sexy beast, unchained at last.

Like the recent "Searching for Sugar Man," A Band Called Death celebrates music born in Detroit that, with a turn of the wrist and a different roll of the dice, might've found the audience it deserved the first time.

At its sharpest, The Heat actually moves and banters like a comedy, with sharply timed and edited dialogue sequences driven by a couple of pros ensuring a purposeful sense of momentum.

Finally! A romantic comedy that works. And not just because of Shakespeare.

Coppola and her brilliant cinematographer, Harris Savides, keep the action simple, but the perspective is perfect.

No better or worse than the average (and I mean average) time-filling sequel cranked out by other animation houses.

The stakes are high and the excitement's there and the results, as previously stated, are messy but fairly entertaining.

An elegant miniature, Rama Burshtein's Fill the Void labors under a narrative inevitability, but it's artful work nonetheless.

Snyder films the violence in Man of Steel the way he films most of the rest of the picture: Like a man chasing tornadoes and not even trying to keep subjects in frame. It's a choice, and not a bad one, necessarily — the Smallville farm scenes, in particular, respond well to the approach — but by the end it's a visually limiting one.

Outrageous-plus, but often hilarious.

A gentle, honest and shrewdly realized film such as Tiger Eyes, based on the 1981 Judy Blume novel, shouldn't have to fight for a moviegoer's attention or an exhibitor's screens. But it's worth seeking out.

This is an effective genre piece. And Marling's quiet way of anchoring a scene is subtle enough to escape detection in almost any narrative circumstance.

Levy surely knew that the script at hand didn't warrant a full two-hour running time; even if you enjoy The Internship, as my son did, it feels 20 minutes over-full at least. Cut out half of the "Flashdance" and "X-Men" references, and you're halfway there.

Delpy has always challenged Hawke to find a simpler, more direct form of acting in Linklater's films, which gives them their unique suspense and rolling tension.

Won't change your world, but it's attractive and Smith the Elder, lowering his voice to subterranean James Earl Jones levels, delivers a shrewd minimalist performance. His son may get there yet.

Actually, if "Fast 6" shows any new ambitions, it's by enthusiastically embracing its inner-Telemundo, its heated, knotty "Game of Thrones" melodrama.

The animated result isn't bad. It's an adequate baby sitter. But where's the allure in telling the truth? Twentieth Century Fox and Blue Sky Studios present "Adequate"?

You may watch Frances Ha relating to little of it, or a lot of it, but this "road movie with apartments," as the director (shooting here in velvety black-and-white, recalling Woody Allen's "Manhattan" in its texture) so aptly put it, is informed by a buoyant, resilient spirit.

So it's a bit squishy at the center. But the film is sleek, purposeful and extremely well acted.

It's quite thin, but at least Black Rock plays its "kills" for more than stupid gamer's diversions.

The new film works. It's rousing.

Something in the Air, is the latest screen portrait of an artist as a young man. It's a good one too, rich and assured, even if writer-director Olivier Assayas is more successful at creating atmosphere than at making his romanticized younger self a three-dimensional being.

Despite a few good ideas and the uniformly splendid production and costume designs by Luhrmann's mate and partner, Catherine Martin, this frenzied adaptation of The Great Gatsby is all look and no feel.

Best of all: the musical score by Alfonso de Vilallonga. It's terrific — witty, symphonically lush and shrewdly informed by flamenco strains throughout.

A roughly mixed but interestingly plotted offshoot of "Death of a Salesman."

It's not without its payoffs; I enjoyed a lot of it. But overall last year's "Avengers" delivered the bombastic goods more efficiently than this year's Marvel.

Much as I enjoy the actors I didn't buy a word or frame of Arthur Newman.

It's Bay World. And after an hour of Pain & Gain, it felt more like "Pain & Pain."

The movie's own brand of charm has its subset of smarm.

The first-person remembrances hit you where you live, while everything else (including a bland musical score by John Piscitello) often creates the opposite of the intended effect: It keeps you at arm's length from an extraordinary story.

Malick is a true searcher, true to his preoccupations and definitions of soulful rhapsody. To the Wonder repeats its central motifs aplenty, yet you may find yourself thinking about life, and living, and love, while sorting through the movie. Even if it drives you nertz.

Oblivion is odder and less conventional than your average forgettable star vehicle; at times it feels like a five-character play taking place in a digital-effects lab. But there's not much energy to it.

The movie struggles to turn the story into a paradoxical easygoing thriller, befitting the age bracket of its key ensemble members.

For a while, Trance had me guessing, and more or less hooked. Then the violence, motivations, double-crosses and fantasy/reality tangles became tedious.

Treats its now-mythic Brooklyn Dodger with respect, reverence and love. But who's in there, underneath the mythology?

Evil Dead offers the core audience for modern horror plenty of reasons to jump, and then settle back, tensely, while awaiting the next idiotic trip down to the cellar beneath the demon-infested cabin in the woods.

I found most of what's actually put forth in the film interpretively ridiculous. But I'm just one theorist among millions, and the film worked for me anyway.

It is a better, more fully felt and moving picture than "Blue Valentine."

The script is corny and cliched and goes the way you expect it to go. But those things never stopped any movie from working with an audience.

The directive behind this sequel, clearly, was non-stop action. Let's think about that phrase a second. Do we really want our action movies to deliver action that does not stop? Ever? I get a little tired of action sequences that won't stop.

This is a true New York movie, though in its ear and eye for atmospheric beauty it feels more French.

Your kids may will fall in love with it, if you help them find it.

The film may as well be titled "Stephenie Meyer's Waiting Around."

At least there's Cage, who has become an astute voice actor, finding some odd, clever, energetic line readings consistently fresher than The Croods itself.

Starts out like a salacious, rump-centric and blithely bare-breasted hip-hop video and ends up in the realm of scary and inspired trash. That's not meant negatively.

Call it a successful failure. Some movies worth seeing are like that.

There's a good movie in this story. The one that got made is roughly half-good.

Without a strong narrative engine, Upside Down ends up exactly where it shouldn't go: sideways.

Of all the movies culminating in a rite of exorcism, Romanian writer-director Cristian Mungiu's remarkable Beyond the Hills stands alone.

The Incredible Burt Wonderstone serves as a reminder that everything in a film has a chance to go wrong before a film begins filming. In other words: It's the script, stupid.

The best material in the film is the loosest, capturing the perpetually insecure and overcompensating Pineda in his early concerts, leaping, bouncing, careening around as if every moment in every song were an audition for the next moment in the next song.

This one's likely to vex both history buffs and those who require some drama with their drama.

No succeeds, wonderfully, because it knows how to sell itself. It is cool, witty, technically dazzling in a low-key and convincing way.

As a series of sights, which movies like these are, Oz the Great and Powerful is more like "Oz the Digital and Relentless." Certainly this is true in its final half-hour, which seemed to me to be all explosions.

Robinson is undone partly by his own workmanlike touch as a writer, and partly by matters of casting. I like Harris, and he's quite moving here, but every time Duchovny reappears the overall energy level sinks to crush depth.

It's also gorgeously acted by all, and while this may not be one of Kiarostami's finest, the craftsmanship nonetheless is so high, it makes everything else currently in theaters look slovenly.