It would be even better if Eastwood followed his character's lead and emphasized "real issues" over "human interest" in a story that touches on important social problems without doing much to illuminate them.

Fails to score a checkmate.

While you can't fault The Dancer Upstairs for lack of ambition, its tantalizing ingredients add up to a less impressive package than I'd hoped for. Malkovich should select a more manageable subject the next time he sits in the director's chair.

Offers much food for thought.

I will never be comfortable with the concept of Bosch as charming prankster. Just one look at the paintings will cure you of that notion.

The doc is longer on historical interest than original insights or analysis.

The conceit here is that if a boy and a girl love the same music, that means they're in love. Who am I to argue with such poetic whimsy?

I wish the film had gone even further into loopiness. Like Ant-Man, the film, directed by Peyton Reed, comes in two sizes – it’s sometimes big on laughs but often small on risk-taking.

As it is, “Mockingjay,” a big bore, suffers from being the transitional event before the big showdown.

Blithely entertaining but almost completely devoid of rigor.

Throughout it all, however, I couldn't escape the feeling that this movie belonged on television instead. It has the immediacy, but also the shallowness, of an extended TV episode. Talking heads proliferate and pontificate.

Kushner's proactive stance on gay rights is prominently aired and, to a lesser extent, so are his musings on the Arab-Israeli situation. His participation in the screenplay for Steven Spielberg's controversial "Munich" did not make it into the film.

Yedaya's prizewinning debut film is acted and directed with uncommon psychological realism.

It would have been wonderful if Lee had consented to an interview for this documentary, but at least we have, among many others, her 99-year-old sister Alice, until recently a practicing lawyer in their hometown of Monroeville, Ala.

More sugary than satisfying.

A revealing, often amusing, sometimes disturbing look at the history and politics of marijuana use in American society.

The timing is slack and the jokes repetitive. But, like most Will Ferrell movies, it has enough riotous moments to carry you through the dull stretches.

Lively documentary about McGovern's disastrous run for the US presidency. The interviews with him are worth the price of admission.

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

Some of the set pieces are ravishing, more often they're ravishingly clunky.

State of Play is far from a great movie, but it's sentimental in all the right ways.

The wonderful Polish actor Jerzy Stuhr plays the harried papal spokesman. It's a marvelous movie until the halfway point, when it unaccountably devolves into silliness.

Goony, so-so comedy.

Schmaltz this thick requires a director who can at least make us feel that our tears are not being shamelessly jerked. But St. Vincent is too clunky to hide its tear-slicked tracks. Maybe that’s a good thing. At least that’s more endearing than being worked over by a smooth operator who knows exactly which buttons to press.

Stirring on religious and humanitarian levels, and very timely notwithstanding its 1979 setting.

This is the 10 zillionth film about a friendly-seeming villain invading a contented home, but exploitation of child abuse and baby-stealing make this one a particularly nasty business.

Some may find the movie too crowded and preachy to serve as a meaningful history lesson, but it will delight anyone who thinks our cynical age could benefit from recalling the vigorous idealism and venturesome artistry of a bygone era.

As director, Harris takes this classical sense of the western too far, though, until it seems that the movie is carefully trying to keep the genre alive.