Bertino's taut, spare thriller is plenty scary without relying on pseudo-historical context. Anchored by convincing performances from Scott Speedman and Liv Tyler, both of whom elevate their roles above the standard horror-movie caricature, this is an enormously unsettling movie.

Cinematographer Zhao Xiaoding manages some lovely images, and some of Spottiswoode’s compositions remind you he's capable of fine work. But Hogg never comes to life, on the page or on the screen.

This script bumps along, good ideas jostling with weak, derivative ones, and Seftel doesn't seem to know which way he wants to handle the material. Also, with Cusack playing yet another soul-fried wiseacre running on emotional autopilot, the piece doesn't have much of an engine.

Does not know when to quit. Nor does it extract much fun from a cockamamie story provided by George Lucas.

It's a vivid ensemble experience, and the acting is wonderful.

Roughly the same as the first in terms of quality and style. It delivers without much visual dynamism, and with a determined emphasis on combat. In the 1951 novel the climactic battle between the good Narnians and the bad Telmarines lasted a few pages. The film version of the same battle feels like "The Longest Day."

A kinetic delight, Reprise comes from director Joachim Trier, born in Denmark but raised in Oslo, Norway, and it’s a highlight of the filmgoing year so far.

The acting is impeccable, with Hernandez radiating an air of sleazy charm and Ochoa doing terrific work as a bitter man who's just lonely enough to have chinks in his well-developed armor.

At its best, it's buoyant pop entertainment focused on three things: speed, racing and retina-splitting oceans of digitally captured color.

It has a rich premise and no lack of amazements. What it lacks in any sort of dramatic shape.

A movie whose satire proves as lame as its clunky title.

The film is a restrained, straightforward report about an iconoclastic family whose pain and dysfunction play out against a backdrop of tumbling ocean waves, muscular surfers and golden sunsets.

The screenplay by Dana Fox (she was one of the rewriters of "27 Dresses") devolves into a series of humiliating pranks that always give the upper narrative hand to the male lead. Talk about depressing. I mean, that's what male screenwriters are for--to unfairly stack the deck against the female leads.

It's more that the plot is incredibly predictable, the score is manipulative and the denouement completely unsatisfying. I can sit through cliched and even offensive (to a point). Just leave me with a little bit of mystery, an iota of suspense. That’s all I ask.

The performances are often more compelling than the movie's sometimes static storytelling.

As big-budget comic book adaptations go, this one's a gratifying freak--the right kind of conflicted, as well as quick-witted. It's a lot of fun.

Dempsey's pleasant enough, but he hasn't yet learned how to play against a mediocre script's obviousness. Monaghan has, which is gratifying.

Like so many lovely cinematic dreams, Mister Lonely inevitably descends into nightmare, with an unsettlingly grim conclusion that, again, seems more imagistic than idea-driven.

Not everyone can act his material with ease. But Ejiofor, who brings a serene gravity to every exchange, was born to do Mamet.

A quirk-heavy comedy that tonally reads almost exactly like "Millions," as executed by amateur actors having the time of their lives.

The acting is uniformly strong, the visual approach self-effacingly honest.

The results are visually exacting if ideologically muddled. Biller's trying to find ways to make the old misogyny usefully ironic. But the acting is so amateurish, partly by accident and partly by design, that the film remains confined to an exercise in replicative style.

Midway through I started wondering why I wasn't laughing more. "Baby Mama" was not written by Fey and/or Poehler, which may be the reason.

Moving slowly these days, Reynolds does less than no acting in this role, and he’s still the best thing in Deal.

With her arresting, off-kilter look of bruised desire, Michelle Williams ends up being the most interesting aspect of this somber corn.

You find yourself smiling at some of the bits, wincing through many, many others, and ultimately wondering if the pacing would've improved had either H or K developed a terrible cocaine habit.

The ultimate charms of the movie lie in Lelouch’s confident control, in his telling of the story his way, almost stubbornly, his canvas splattered with both garish and hypnotic splotches.

It's gut-grinding, to be sure. But a misjudged degree of cinematic dazzle obscures the outrages at the core of Standard Operating Procedure.

A strength of Then She Found Me, from Elinor Lipman's novel, is its straightforward, uncomplicated storytelling that keeps the threads untangled and blends the everyday and the absurd with natural ease.

The preposterous 88 Minutes is a serial killer movie starring Al Pacino's festival of hair.

The result is a feeling of standing in an OTB with lots of races from lots of places--too many stories calling for attention--instead of the Kentucky Derby, which for two minutes each year focuses the sports world like a laser.

It's perhaps best suited for genre vets who can be satisfied with spot-the-reference games and Chan and Li's chemistry, or for undiscriminating kids who'll enjoy the "Karate Kid" vibe. But it's less a culmination of Li and Chan's careers than a passable footnote to better things.

It's worth seeing just for the banter between Segel and Hader, which recalls the peak conversational riffs from "Knocked Up."

Beautiful, horrifying, exasperating and just plain weird.

Morgan Spurlock is a living, breathing cautionary tale. Take a good, long look, kids: This is what happens when society validates really annoying people.

The film does a fine job of displaying the contrasts between these tense, formalized Chinese students and the faux populist American academics.

Church is most at home in his character’s skin; aside from the game but strident Quaid, all the leading players are ideally cast. It’s the script that isn’t ideally cast.

I enjoyed parts of Street Kings but I didn’t believe one thing about it, and I couldn’t get past Reeves’ unsuitability to his role. He may someday play a cop on the edge convincingly, but the edge needs to be sharper than this.

Jenkins and The Visitor”make lovely music together. It’s a case of a veteran character actor slipping on a leading role like the most comfortable pair of pants in the world.

The performances and Marcos Siega’s direction put a pleasing sheen on the material.

An odd, one-sided documentary that nevertheless opens a window onto Australian class struggles and a world weirdly familiar and exotic simultaneously.

It’s uneven and, in many instances, avoidably cheesy.

An exuberant, affectionate documentary.

A gem made by a filmmaker who loves life, and knows how to capture its ebb and flow and sweet complication.

Sidelined by a script that plays like an imitation of another era’s artifacts. It’s an oxymoron: a mild screwball romance.

Isn’t eye candy; it’s a drool-worthy slice of eye pie.

For all its limitations, the film still looks terrific. Flawless CGI and forays into animation keep things visually lively, and Nim’s enviable life is likely to hook kids into the story early and keep them entranced.

Shine a Light is one of those lions-in-winter affairs, and Jagger, who has a body fat count of negative 67, can still dance like a maniacal popinjay, and Richards still looks like a satyr who has stayed up all night every night of his adult life.

It is a fine and plaintive experience, more modern-day folklore than ethnographic study, and a wonderfully assured piece of cinema.

I enjoyed seeing Joss Ackland as well. The veteran character actor with the world’s lowest voice plays the diamond company chairman, and when he rumbles out orders, it’s like Sensurround never left us.

One of the problems with the new comedy Run, Fat Boy, Run is that it’s not English enough, even though its antagonist is a thoroughly detestable American go-getter.

21 isn’t pretentious, exactly, but it’s damn close, and in trying to whip up a melodramatic morality tale the film becomes an increasingly flabby slog.

By the end of this modest, strange venture, Leto made me believe it was worth being forced to hang out on the sidewalk with this man, if only to get a creeping sense of what that might’ve been like.

It’s a history lesson, a look at ’60s strife inside a corner far removed from our more familiar American images of that era. It’s also brightly performed, from sullen, boorish, yet charismatic Scamarcio to the instinctive, charming, infuriating characterization by Germano.

The fetching comedy Priceless”(“Hors de Prix”) weighs about as much as its star, Audrey Tautou, but like Tautou’s pleasingly craven heroine it knows exactly what it’s doing.

While Stop-Loss doesn’t pack anything like the emotional wallop of her previous film, the movies do share Peirce’s clear-eyed refusal to answer difficult questions with simplistic answers.

It's unlike any other war film, in any language.

Director Jeff Nichols lets the action unfold slowly following an impromptu insult, but the escalation of hatred and pain feels natural.

"Superbad” got a deserved R rating for its unmitigated and gleeful raunch. Drillbit Taylor is cleaner in mouth but far uglier in spirit. Wilson and Mann do what they can to tone it up, but their scenes belong to a different film, and a fresher one.

It’s hard to believe that a lineup so stellar could generate so few laughs, but there it is.

It turns out a success, tempering its farfetched scenario with enough restraint and believability to pass for a modest parable of modern manners.

An estimated 4 million Latinas leave one or more children behind when they travel north to find work. They deserve a more nuanced film, but this one’s often affecting.

Someday, if we’re all good little boys and girls, the world will hand us a Dr. Seuss film half as wonderful as one of the books. Meantime we have the competent, clinical computer animation and relative inoffensiveness of Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hears a Who! to pass the time.

It’s a little “Karate Kid,” a smidge of “Fight Club” (with none of the ironic ambivalence toward violence that David Fincher brought to that story), a lot of “The O.C.” (evil boy Gigandet played an evil boy on that series), and presto: probable hit.

Despite honorable work from Theron, Robb and Stahl, Sleepwalking makes good on its title in a not-so-good way.

A rich, vexing experience.

Funny Games is fundamentally a bourgeois exercise in authorial sadism. As the methodical games grind on, the suffocatingly beige and white surroundings start to look like a mausoleum.

Li’s story is lean and economical, but deeply harrowing, as Xuemei--sympathetically played by debuting performer Huang Lu, the only classically trained actor in a cast of non-professionals--clings to her courage and tries again and again to escape.

CJ7 is roughly as grating as that “Flubber” remake.

Emmerich has no time for poetry or magic, even when the director and his digital wizards (here doing wildly variable work) are trying to dazzle. He’s a taskmaster and a field marshall, not a visionary. But I enjoyed 10,000 B.C. more and more, and more than just about anything Emmerich’s done before.

Slick, ice-cold and enjoyable, The Bank Job is a bit of all right.

As generic as its title, College Road Trip feels like a first draft, the one the studio brings to the rewrite team that, in this case, never got hired.

Girls do rock, and the final concert is both wild and cathartic. Too bad we haven’t learned more about these rockers along the way.

It seems carefully calibrated to shock viewers out of a familiar frame of reference, while leaving nothing behind to take its place.

Style is a tricky, elusive thing, and this film doesn’t so much have it as strive for it, constantly. But something in Watson’s story endures: The wish-fulfillment truly satisfies. And with the war clouds gathering by story’s end, the fairy tale acquires a bittersweet edge, nicely cutting all that whipped cream.

“Elephant” may have won the Palme d’Or at Cannes but it really didn’t have anything to say about anything. Modest and artful, Paranoid Park says a great deal.

Green is a rare bird in American filmmaking: a humanist who knows how to tell a story.

Their story is deeply involving, all the more so because it isn’t simple or straightforward.

Director Morelli and editor Daniel Rezende know how to set up complex lines of action and keep the screws tight.

Morgen’s best achievement is the news footage, more detailed looks at events outside the Conrad Hilton Hotel and in Chicago parks than you typically see on TV rehashes.

Eric Bana doesn’t have much to do as Henry VIII except play the monarch as an overgrown spoiled brat. He is, however, awfully nice to look at.

I wish it were truly special instead of an interesting near-miss.

The court scenes are rarely funny, either in the trash talk or the slapstick.

Small but sure, the film is like Alejandro himself: quick on its feet, attuned to a harsh life’s hardships and possibilities.

Are teenagers really supposed to identify with a clumsy caricature such as Charlie, who, in spite of all his expulsions and school crimes, comes across as a gawping, perpetually surprised infant in an adult body?

The Signal combines the inconstancy of an omnibus film with the blandness of art by committee. The end result feels less like a blend of distinct styles than an opportunistic hodgepodge, a second-hand premise wedded to an attention-grabbing gimmick.

The film doesn’t hold together. But it’s the work of a real director, however fantastic his sensibility.

Swift and compelling, winner of this year’s Oscar for best foreign-language picture, The Counterfeiters may not be destined for the large international audience that embraced last year’s winner, “The Lives of Others.” But it’s the better, tougher film, with a more provocative moral dilemma at its center.

The performances reveal precisely what Rivette wants to reveal, which is to say, in conventional psychological terms, not a great deal.

With a less pedigreed international cast the whole thing would be a disaster, as opposed to a chilly new kind of disaster film.

The way Diary of the Dead chooses to deliver its gore, you know you’re in the hands of a grown-up uninterested in the excesses of the “Saw” or “Hostel” pictures. I mean, there’s gore, sure, and flesh gets eaten. But the way Romero shoots and cuts the shot of a girl’s reunion with her parents, one dead, one undead, it’s played for keeps--the right kind of gross, with a touch of mournful gravity.

Pulls you into a well-observed world and its characters.

Keeps you interested in its characters and isn’t afraid of complicating your sympathies a little. In these dog-day months for romantic comedy, that means a lot.

Jumper, the film, goes everywhere and nowhere.

A fast-moving adventure with more than dynamic glitz to recommend it.

Human-spirit cliches and all, the movie accomplishes job one: It moves. It also has a choice soundtrack, spiced by the likes of Missy Elliott’s “Shake Your Pom Pom” and Digital Underground’s immortal “Humpty Dance.”

You can watch The Band’s Visit for its political idealism, or you can watch it for entertainment value alone. In either case, it doesn’t disappoint.

A movie that keeps reminding you of its antecedents, all the way back to 1984 and the comic adventure “Romancing the Stone.”