This movie is "Finian's Rainbow" for dunderheads. Rudd has a few amusing moments talking to himself in a mirror (he's trying to convince himself he's a stud) but he would have been better off talking himself out of this film.

I wish the directors had emphasized more of the players' personal lives apart from the football field. But, in the end, this is a documentary about Courtney and the transformative powers of caring. He works wonders on his players and they reciprocate.

A marvelously captivating animated feature.

The best you can say about This Means War is that it would make a good date movie for couples in the witness protection program.

The reason we feel so close to Socha, a man who at first seems nothing more than a racist scoundrel, is that his moral odyssey, with its advances and retreats, is so emotionally believable.

The sometimes agonizingly powerful documentary Under Fire: Journalists in Combat is built around some staggering statistics: Only two journalists were killed in World War I. Sixty-three lost their lives in World War II. And in the past two decades, almost one journalist per week has been killed.

For all the special effects – like its predecessor, this is in 3-D – the film coasts on Johnson being charming and Caine being Caine.

Shannon chalks up another line on his rapidly growing résumé of memorable performances. But it's mostly Cardellini's show – she's in every scene. Her portrayal may at first seem opaque, as though she isn't quite sure who Kelli is. But that is, of course, the point. Kelli isn't quite sure who Kelli is.

Harrelson is effective, but the film isn't helped by the inevitable comparisons to the far superior "L.A. Confidential" and "Bad Lieutenant" movies.

Stephen Root, Ted Danson, Dermot Mulroney, and other familiar faces lend their support, but it's not enough to overcome the limp, by-the-numbers execution. The film comprises innumerable expository scenes, leavened with uninspired comic relief.

Radcliffe's fidgety performance is convincing, and he does come across as an adult, though a very young one.

The sadness and almost Chaplinesque pathos that ensues is well wrought and Close, although she is so recessive that at times she seems to fade into the ether, is quite touching.

Miss Bala has been praised on the festival circuit for being a gritty look at the Mexican drug trade but too often it seemed like a bargain-bin "Scarface" to me.

The greatest performance, though, is Vanessa Redgrave's as Martius's blood-lusting mother, Volumnia. It's an extraordinarily powerful piece of acting, all controlled rage. When, in the end, that rage erupts, her vehemence splits the screen.

When a great movie subject results in a middling movie, the loss is double.

Taut almost to the point of abstraction.

The film is more testimonial than drama.

The best thing about the film is the majestic mountain vistas, shot in Canada. You can practically inhale them.

It's a creepy and disturbing movie, but there's not a lot going on behind people's eyes. The soullessness lacks soul.

You may not feel like dancing after watching Pina – unless you have a thing for earth in your shoes – but you'll certainly know you've seen something.

Despite never having made a movie before, and utilizing comparatively primitive camera and recording equipment, Kurt and his son Ian crafted a movie unlike any other in the rock-doc genre.

You can blissfully zone out on the director's pretty pictures, which is a permissible indulgence when the pictures are as delicately alluring as they are here. Also, the performances of Kikuchi and Hatsune are first-rate.

The Iron Lady is too bland to be controversial, too antiquated to speak to the present.

A Separation is not the work of a constrained artist. It's a great movie in which the full range of human interaction seems to play itself out before our eyes.

The filmmaking is often wayward, the scenes of confrontation sometimes too stagey, but Oduye is a marvelous young actress with a camera-ready face brimming with soulfulness.

Daldry and his screenwriter Eric Roth make the mistake of showing bodies falling from the Twin Towers – it's a mistake because its graphic power seems more exploitative than cathartic – but they otherwise thankfully refrain from pulling out all the stops.

Danijel, who cares for Ajla while at the same time carrying out his mission of ethnic cleansing, is the least fully explored character in the movie, which leaves a big blur at its core. Still, this is an impressive piece of work that doesn't flinch from the atrocities that no doubt motivated Jolie to make the film in the first place.

If, like me, you find the movie technique known as motion capture creepy, you might be put off going to see Steven Spielberg's 3-D The Adventures of Tintin.

War Horse, despite its excellences, is a supreme demonstration of a director phoning it in.

Scarlett Johansson plays the head zookeeper and she's a lot less mannered than usual.

The coolness here has its creepiness, as in the dispassionate way Fincher depicts Lisbeth's rape and her subsequent, harrowing revenge, but the suspicion remains: Fincher didn't make this movie his own because he doesn't consider it his own.

If this was a quintessential Polanski movie, something malign would reside inside its heart: The sitcom would explode its boundaries. The movie is called Carnage, but the carnivores on display are toothless.

What this film really celebrates is crunch-and-thud video-game-style action, not especially well choreographed by director Guy Ritchie.

A very good thrill ride and Cruise is better than he's been in a long time.

The filmmakers may be just as clueless as Buddy when it comes to Mavis, who resembles nothing so much as a snooty stalker.

It's a beautifully modulated performance of a man whose presence, at times, seems on the verge of vanishing – not a bad attribute for a spy.

The cast, at least on paper, is formidable, if ill-used.

Sit this one out.

Once summer ends and the kids enroll in school, the jig will be up. The film ends with that eventuality. It would have been richer if it had opened with it.

It gives ample play to all sides of the argument. Herzog allows us to think things through on our own.

The action is swift and witty, and the 3-D effects are imaginative and not simply tacked on as with so many animated movies these days.

Hugo is a mixed bag but one well worth rummaging through.

Branagh is marvelous at conveying his exasperation. His conceit is that Olivier offstage acted the same as Olivier onstage – as if all of life was a vast playlet. For someone as thoroughly actorly as Olivier, this is probably no exaggeration. I would like to think that the great man himself would have smiled at Branagh's rollicking rendition of tantrums.

Low point would be Knightley's hysterical opening sequences in which she appears to be trying to trying to contort herself into a Moebius strip. Overacting this gross can only have been enabled by a director. Didn't Cronenberg look at the rushes? Or did he think he was back in "Dead Ringers" territory?

The Artist is full of homages to many other films. I suppose it will be fun for cinéastes to pick out the references, but not all of them – like the ones from "Citizen Kane" or "Sunset Boulevard" – are especially germane.

I would imagine that even those who line up for this film will be somewhat let down, if only because it's clear that most of the juicy stuff will arrive in Part 2 – which won't be released until next November.

Dislikable movie characters don't always result in dislikable movies but that's certainly the case with Sam Levinson's Another Happy Day, a dysfunctional family meltdown movie about an impending wedding that only grows more aggravating as it unwinds.

A jagged, uneven, often unfulfilling experience, but there are a few first-rate scenes between Joseph and Hannah that convincingly put forward the capacity for redemption in even the most ravaged of souls.

Clooney and Payne are coconspirators, too. They know that the story they are telling is too emotionally complicated to muck up with a lot of preening and artifice. They head right into the sad and crazymaking humor of the situation. This is a modest marvel of a movie.

Still, I prefer a bit more drama in my political docudramas. The Conquest never really breaks out of its genre in the way that, say, "The Queen" or "Il Divo" or the more fictionalized "In the Loop" did.

Adam Sandler plays a dual role in Jack and Jill, and he's a lot better as Jill than as Jack.

Dunst gives a strong, hard-bitten performance even though she is playing an attitude rather than a character. Much of Justine's upsets are recorded in Von Trier's shaky-cam style – seasick realism. The grand planet-busting finale, though, is a beauty.

The foundation of this sympathy is Hoover's complicated sexuality. Eastwood and Black have attempted to provide Hoover with the balm he denied himself in his own lifetime. It doesn't work.

Pianomania is the thoroughly apt title for a thoroughly enjoyable documentary.

Muddled cop thriller The Son of No One has a top-drawer cast and a bottom-drawer script.

Turns one of the greatest geniuses of German literature into a love-struck rapscallion.

If this film turns out to be a big success, malls everywhere may want to hire more security.

Frankly, if I'm going to be offered a heaping pile of revisionism about the greatest writer who ever lived, I'd rather it be from someone with more academic heft than the director of "Independence Day" and "Godzilla." I trust the teachers who receive this film's study guide have a shredder handy.

A semi-improvised, microbudget marvel with a range of feeling that shames most big-budget star-driven movies.

Depp is disappointingly recessive here, as he often is when he's playing characters who don't have an antic streak.

The writer-director Andrew Niccol is best known for writing "The Truman Show," another movie that got carried away by doomsday deep-think. The deep-think here is even sillier.

Durkin is a bit too fond of drawn-out scenes of ominous anomie, and he doesn't provide enough psychological ballast for Martha's misery. He doesn't need to. Olsen, with her angelic face and hard-bitten voice, provides it for him.

It's all fairly entertaining but also confusing for anybody who doesn't get the Wall Street lingo. Irons, as the company's chief executive officer, seems to sympathize with us: He keeps asking his minions to explain the impending problems in plain English.

The most powerful sequences in the movie are the linked vignettes involving Margaret and the various grown-up children whom she attempts to help in their search for – what, exactly? Closure? Catharsis?

The greater the illusion the greater the manipulator, and few are as good as Kevin Clash, the subject of Constance Marks's sprightly six-years-in-the-making documentary Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey.

Even though none of these guys is ready to kick the bucket, The Big Year has an unmistakable affinity with "The Bucket List."

Oka! is a fascinating movie with many free-form charms.

This same premise holds for the remake, and it seems more pandering (and dated) than ever.

It all achieves a loony unity by the end, even though what is being unified is not altogether palatable.

In the end, the power poetry workshops, as the teachers are first to admit, are not about creating Shakespeares. They are about survival.

Estevez directs with ease and assurance but, both internally and externally, not enough happens to these people.

They should call this overloud, underwhelming movie "Real Steal."

The film is actually fairly entertaining once you get past its overweening desire to be the bearer of bad tidings. A more adventuresome movie would have treated the down-and-dirty world of politics as its starting, not its ending, point.

I am not a fan of food you need a microscope to see, but if your idea of fine dining is pumpkin meringue sandwiches, bone marrow tartare with oysters, tea shrimp with caviar anemones, and ice vinaigrette with tangerines and green olive, then by all means make haste to El Bulli.

I wish I could say it's a resurrected classic but, alas, it's mostly a mess – a 2-1/2-hour mess no less.

Begins frighteningly and gets progressively more so.

The film's predictability dampens its best parts. Having decided to make a movie about a dreaded subject, the filmmakers too often retreat into the comfort zone of easy assurances and flip quips.

Much of the film is wordless, and apparently some of the Merjan ritualism is a concoction of the filmmakers. There's a trancelike quality to its best moments, but too much of it is artfully boring. Silent Souls is at the opposite extreme from Hollywood – it's all mood. Be careful what you wish for.

Director Marc Forster and screenwriter Jason Keller take the easy way out by turning Childers into a Bible-thumping Rambo. Just because the Childers of this movie is not, to put it mildly, introspective, is no reason why the filmmakers had to be equally dense.

De Niro, in what amounts to an extended cameo, is radically miscast. That's still no excuse for his nonperformance, which is beyond lackluster.

Moneyball presents a misleading story line in order to prop up Billy Beane as some kind of would-be miracle worker antihero. In truth, he's just another tobacco-chewing go-getter trying to make sense of a game that, thankfully, has never quite made sense.

For those who love chess, Fischer will probably always be its premier player, a fact his mental illness cannot expunge.

Kittelsen is a funny, expansive actress, and director Anne Sewitsky manages the sad-comic tonal shifts with emotional accuracy.

The irony of this film is that it's all about how we need to come together to conquer a calamity that pushes us apart.

It's all tease in the first half, and all implausibilities in the second. Still, Thomas is always worth watching, in French or in English, whether her mood be chilly or tropical.

See the film, if you must, for Mara, who will be starring in the upcoming Hollywood remake of "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo." She's a sharp, vigilant actress whose career bears watching.

Warrior becomes increasingly shameless until, by the end, with the big fights fought, we are clearly meant to rise as one and applaud the indomitability of the human spirit. But the only indomitable thing about Warrior are its clichés.

It's a lot more cornball – i.e., enjoyable – than "The Tree of Life," which tried for some of the same things. Utopia, with its big blue skies and peachy-keen people, may not rank right up there with Shangri-La, but it's close enough.

His rise from a marginalized Jewish boy in Nazi-occupied Paris to his chain-smoking fame as the composer of such Euro-hits as "Je t'Aime … Moi Non Plus" is presented as one long, hallucinatory jag, revealing far less about Gainsbourg, I would imagine, than about Sfar.

Despite its arty veneer and its ostensibly political edge, Circumstance seems more interested in titillation than revelation.

Although they might have wished for something less conventional, it's the thrills that make this movie.

Alternately inspirational and disheartening, galvanizing and wearying.

Joffe for the most part amps up the melodrama without tearing Greene's complex weave, but everything unravels toward the end with some staggeringly bad staging. It's as if the film itself had been mugged.

Too often ambles into inconsequentiality. And, predictably, Ned becomes a kind of family savior – the idiot becomes the sage. It's Frank Capra for dummies.

One of the few open-minded Hollywood movies about Christian fundamentalism, but the mind isn't sufficiently exploratory.

As speculative storytelling goes, Mozart's Sister is ingenious but as moviemaking it's plodding.

One thought that occurred to me while pacing myself through Flypaper: With the economy being what it is, will there be a rash of bank robbery movies?

This is a film that starts out cynically and gradually morphs into sentimentality of a particularly high gloss.