Director Marc Forster is very good at amping up the terror, but after a while, we reach zombie overload and we might as well be watching an infestation of Transformers.

I have rarely seen a movie that better expressed the revivifying nature of music. (Many of the women, not surprisingly, grew up singing gospel in church choirs and had preachers for parents.)

This is a movie that cries out for more than the too-cool-for-school Coppola’s trademark hipster anomie. She may be too much a part of the celebrity-mongering world she portrays to do justice to its injustices.

Taking a cue from the “Batman” series, the film is dark and thudding and overlong.

I enjoyed Whedon’s film both as a species of stunt and also as a legitimately entertaining entry in the voluminous Shakespeare adaptation sweepstakes.

I wish Rowley didn’t so often dabble in standard movie-thriller-style stylistics, but his film is an exposé of practices that need – demand – exposing.

There’s a potentially good comedy to be made about old-school guys trying to make a go of it in a youth-dominated digital marketplace, but director Shawn Levy and screenwriter Jared Stern overdose on moronic excursions.

Implicit in this film is a simple truth: The sheer force of artistry has the power to convert outsiders into insiders. I left Fill the Void feeling privileged, however briefly, to have been brought into this world.

There is nothing magical about seeing one’s umpteenth car chase. Mark Ruffalo plays the weirdly scruffy FBI agent on the case, while Morgan Freeman, in super-slow mode, plays a famous magic debunker. He’d make the ideal critic for this movie.

It’s impossible to take this movie seriously, certainly not as seriously as it takes itself.

Has some vitality, but it sinks into cliché just the same.

Director Chris Wedge falls into the common animator’s trap of making the “human” characters a lot duller than the nonhuman creepy-crawlies.

The results are far more exciting than most Hollywood espionage thrillers.

Before Midnight is the fullest and richest and saddest of the three movies in the trilogy. Make it a quartet, I say.

The tonal problem of the second installment, which often resembled a drug-infested pulp thriller instead of a comedy, is also problematic here.

The Canadian actress and director Sarah Polley set out to make a straightforward documentary about her mother, Diane, who died when she was 11, but by the time Stories We Tell was finished five years later, it had become unclassifiable.

It’s a skimpy, overextended riff, but some of the seemingly tossed-off moments are lovely.

The most pressing question I took away from the film is, Are they really still teaching "A Tale of Two Cities" in honors English classes?

Since 9/11-style terrorism is very much on display here, I suppose it’s fair to say that Star Trek Into Darkness is a sci-fi blow-out with overtones of the real. Series founder Gene Roddenberry would, I think, approve.

One of those documentaries that is more testimonial than investigation.

The slapstick is often clunky, but Robinson has a sweet jester’s disposition that keeps many of the gags from collapsing.

The Great Gatsby isn’t simply a classic American text: In Luhrmann’s hands, it’s also the greatest self-help manual ever written.

The film stands quite well on its own. The directors have made the right, essential decision to make the movie almost entirely from Maisie’s point of view.

Assayas doesn’t bring out the fiery best in this material, but he’s smart enough to know that revolutionaries like their comforts as much as the ruling class does.

The film’s political scope is wide, beginning in 1917 and extending for sixty years, and, especially in the first hour or so, the antic, magical tone of Rushdie’s novel is sustained.

The action, directed by Shane Black, ranges from passable to interminable. The plot goes from clang to bang. Downey Jr. is still the best thing about this series.

In the House does at least engage us. It even enlists us implicitly as co-conspirators in Claude’s devious storytelling.

Is Malick deliberately courting self-parody here? Probably not. That would imply he had a sense of humor.

Is it possible to truly start life all over again? Arthur Newman might have been better if it had not started at all.

Timeliness is certainly on the side of Mira Nair’s uneven but fascinating The Reluctant Fundamentalist.

Nobody in it seems to possess a nervous system.

The film itself vaporizes before your eyes, but it’s likable. Given its unstable mishmash of thuggery and whimsy, that’s something of an achievement.

The filmmaking is TV-movie-of-the-week dull and Robinson’s ordeal is hammered home to the exclusion of virtually everything else in his life.

Boyle loads his movie with so many snazzy effects that we lose sight of what it all means – if anything. His showoffiness confuses.

Here at least the gobbledygook is entertaining.

Equal parts preachy and melodramatic, The Company You Keep never quite figures out what it wants to be.

Although simpler and less mysterious than the great Hayao Miyazaki movies, the gently melancholic From Up on Poppy Hill is still a must see at a time when family entertainment is too often synonymous with blandness.

Renoir at least looks like a great movie. If you want a full-scale immersion in this material, I recommend “Renoir, My Father,” Jean Renoir’s wonderful 1958 biography. This book is the touchstone for all matters Renoir, both père and fils.

Coming on the heels of the Taviani brothers’ quasi-documentary “Caesar Must Die,” about the staging of “Julius Caesar” in a maximum-security lockup, Reality gives credence to the notion that Italian prisons are hotbeds of acting talent.

Granted, this is not automatic laugh-riot material, nor should it be, but didn’t Fey recognize how hackneyed it all is? Does being a movie star mean blanding out everything that makes you special?

Leon has a marvelous and rare eye for blending staged dramatic sequences into documentary settings, from barrio bodegas to high-rise penthouses. He often films in extended, unbroken takes, and this gives the actors a chance to work up their own distinctive rhythms.

War Witch is most effective not when we are looking in on Komona but when we are inside her head. When she says that, in order to survive in the rebel camp, she “had to learn to make the tears go inside my eyes,” our identification with her is total.

It has moments when the spiritual and the secular burst forth in stunning disarray.

Raimi’s film is supposed to be about magic, but magic is in scant supply.

One thing is clear from A Place at the Table: You cannot answer the question “Why are people hungry?,” without also asking “Why are people poor?”

Park employs all manner of cinematic derring-do – shock cuts, off-kilter compositions, discontinuous storytelling – all to no great purpose other than to make us go “Wow.” A more appropriate response might be, “Huh?”

Not awful, not wonderful, Jack the Giant Slayer is a midrange fairy tale epic that’s a lot more ho-hum than fee-fi-fo-fum.

The ferocity of the performances is inextricable from the men’s real-life criminality. We are baffled, moved, and repulsed – often at the same time – by the elemental spectacle before us. In this metaprison drama, the prison bars are both illusory and unbreakable. Caesar Must Die chronicles an exalted entrapment.

Writer-director Carl Franklin offers up a tone of heightened reverence that weighs down the material, but there are small, lovely moments when the magic realism approaches the magical.

So free-floating that it floats away.

The tone of uplift is earned. Larraín’s unarguable point is that, in politics, if we wait for good to issue only from the pure in heart, we will be waiting a very long time.

A dash – only a dash – of Tim Burton ghoulishness might have helped.

Safe Haven is a species of Gothic chick flick.

If there is to be a sequel to this thudding slab of cacophony, why not just go all the way and make John McClane a superhero?

I squirmed in my seat throughout Identity Thief, a colossally unfunny and misguided comedy.

Soderbergh and screenwriter Scott Z. Burns maintain a tone of taut creepiness, but the plot’s double and triple crosses are more ingenious than believable.

Saskia Rosendahl is a highly expressive actress within the limited confines of her character, and the film is studded with memorable scenes.

Ferlinghetti’s home-brewed brand of anarchism is weirdly as American as apple pie.

The pessimism pervading this film is summed up by Shalom, who says, speaking of the decades of occupation: "The future is very dark."

It pales beside the best down-and-dirty political movies (ranging from "The Candidate" to "The Manchurian Candidate") because, finally, it lacks the courage of its own lowdown convictions.

Directed by Allen Hughes and written by Brian Tucker, the film is a collection of crime noir oddments that don't add up to a full meal.

In "Birders," by contrast, nature is one big entrancing show; a world of tweets without "tweets."

What gives the movie its poignancy – what turns it into something more than a polite entertainment – is Smith's role. Or, to be more exact, her performance, in tandem with Courtenay's.

Penn is always entertaining when he's playing characters drunk with depravity. Gangster Squad could use more of him.

Promised Land is more effective as an anti-fracking screed than as a drama. Damon has his low-key charisma and Van Sant captures the enraged anomie of the community, but, except for one big plot twist, everything in this film is telegraphed from the first frame.

What gives the series its force is not just its universality but also its particularity. These grown-ups may be Everyman, but they are also singular.

Will Tarantino, who is more talented than he allows, ever break out of his perpetual adolescence and make a movie that does more than glorify his love of schlock? Will we ever get a "Tarantino Unchained"?

Tom Hooper, who directed "The King's Speech," is not great with action and big set pieces, but he gets the job done. What makes Les Misérables work are the up-close moments when he can focus on performance and song.

It's all rather exhausting, as opposed to exhilirating.

Gandolfini, though, is a standout as the old-school father who can't abide his new-style son (but loves him anyway).

Werner Herzog, better known as one of the finest living directors, plays a bad guy with Teutonic relish. If he doesn't watch it, he'll have a whole other career for himself playing dead-eyed villains.

Because of its subject matter, and because of the actors, it's impossible to watch this film without being moved. But a martinet is running the show.

The jokes mostly fall flat and the dramatic scenes fall even flatter.

The performers are so likable that you stay with them even when, as is often the case, the material is hit-or-miss.

My first thought in watching The Hobbit was: Do we really need this movie? It was my last thought, too.

By showing scenes of torture without taking any kind of moral (as opposed to tactical) stand on what we are seeing, Bigelow has made an amoral movie – which is, I would argue, an unconscionable approach to this material.

Rust and Bone is made by filmmakers and actors who are capable of much more – and they know it. The result is a true oddity: an orgy of hokum dressed up as an art film.

It's never altogether clear why this visually blah and dramatically bland movie needed to be made at all (or why it wasn't made for television instead). The only answer I can come up with is that Murray wanted to show off with a cigarette-holder.

What we do see, among much else that is damning, are archival NYPD videotapes of the boys being interrogated by detectives who press them to implicate one another in exchange for a leniency that never materialized.

The dialogue is sharp and so are the performances. Andrew Dominik directed this neo-noir in a low-key comic style that's alternately gritty and fancy. The gritty stuff is best.

Hopkins has been fitted out prosthetically to resemble Hitchcock and he does a reasonably good job of impersonating him, but it's a foredoomed effort.

Too much of this movie, directed by Peter Ramsey, is more clamorous than inspired, and little kids might find parts of it too scarily intense.

Lee may, in the end, be too balanced a filmmaker to give Life of Pi the extra spin of lyric delirium it sorely needs. It's a sane movie about an essentially deranged situation.

This is the kind of it-can-mean-whatever-you-want-it-to-mean art film that I usually run from, but Carax is such a prodigiously gifted mesmerist that, if you give way, you're likely to be enfolded in the film's phantasmagoria.

It's slick stuff, but Lawrence, in her most high-low, sad-comic turn yet, is remarkable.

One of the many, many things wrong with Joe Wright's Anna Karenina, starring Keira Knightley as literature's most famous adulteress – take that, Emma Bovary! – is that one never feels the love. It's a conceit in search of a movie. It could just as easily have been titled "Décor."

Whenever Jones is on screen, the film's energy level kicks up several notches, an indication, I think, that Spielberg otherwise overdoses on directorial decorum.

He's 9Mendes) discovered his stride here, a blend of thrills and sabotage and deep-dish emotionalism. The powerful performances by Craig and Dench surely owe a great deal to his indulgences.

Sean Penn is one of those actors, like Nicolas Cage, who is best (sometimes worst) when he's over-the-top. Unlike Cage, Penn doesn't pour himself into dreadful commercial vehicles. No, his dreadful movies are usually not destined for the multiplex. Case in point: This Must Be the Place.

Zilberman's conceit is that these players, who mesh so beautifully in their music-making, are discordant in their personal lives. Those lives are constructed for maximum messiness, turning what might have been resonant drama into high-class soap opera.

The people who made Flight have done a courageous thing. With all the potential revenue to be had from in-flight movie sales, they have made a movie that is guaranteed to never be shown on an airplane.

The Loneliest Planet is not a perfect work of art, but it gets at something powerful: the way that life can turn us around in a flash, without warning.

Goldfinger happened upon a story far larger than he must have anticipated. The Flat is about the persistence of denial, and of hope.

The result is maddening, exasperating, occasionally exhilarating – and mostly boring.

Although stylistically and conceptually it never lifts itself entirely out of the realm of a made-for-television drama – don't expect "My Left Foot" – The Sessions is bracing. It's also one of the few movies to recognize that people with severe physical disabilities have sexual lives, too.

As inspirational academic stories go, it doesn't get much better than this.

Photographic Memory is about the permanence and impermanence of what we choose to preserve: on film and in our heads (which is often the same thing). I would like to think that one day Adrian might look at this documentary and see it as a supreme act of paternal love.

The movie has some powerful moments, but it's mostly superficial.