Just sweet enough to avoid being negligible.

When Kandel revisits his childhood neighborhoods in Vienna and Brooklyn and ruminates in his sprightly way on the past, the full measure of his humanity comes through.

This documentary about the evangelical belief in biblical prophecy is both overly ambitious and skimpy.

This is a half-baked movie about a half-baked person, but it has a fine, melancholic afterglow.

It’s an M. Night Shyamalan movie with a PhD. Or maybe an MA.

If you are not already familiar with Williams’s best plays and film adaptations, this musty magnolia of a movie won’t encourage you to seek them out.

This is certainly the grubbiest Holmes in movie history.

Both actors are a lot better than this material requires – or deserves.

The best moments in “Parnassus” are not otherwordly but worldly. It’s a movie about a dying magician and the death of magic. This is a subject that obviously means a lot to Gilliam, and he makes us feel it in our bones.

This intermittently terrific cerebral thriller does, indeed, hinge on the proper use of dictionary definitions, but the film is really about the oppressive blahness of small-town, postcommunist Romania. In such surroundings, parsing definitions can almost stand for high drama.

If I never felt entirely transported by Avatar, it's probably because the story thudded just as often as the imagery soared. But Pandora is still a good place to park yourself for three hours.

Deft and fast-moving, but shouldn’t a musical have at least a few songs you can hum on your way home?

Blunt and Friend strike a few flinty sparks, and Julian Fellowes’s script has its share of dry-as-dust witticisms. Most of the time, though, it’s a stiff pageant.

It's a sophisticated fantasia that adults should enjoy equally. (In other words, it's the perfect family entertainment.)

Bridges draws us deeply inside Blake’s moment-to-moment heartbreaks. He makes us root for him as we would root for a dear friend. Ultimately, his triumphs become our own.

As the murderer, Stanley Tucci is intensely creepy but, like almost everybody else in this movie, he’s more gothic figment than flesh and blood.

Invictus has an understated grace, but too often it comes across as hero-worshipy.

It’s a dirgelike odyssey sparked by Julianne Moore’s overheated turn as George’s best friend – a welcome respite from Firth’s clenched emoting.

Jake Gyllenhaal…the film’s only piece of believable acting.

This is a movie about, among other things, pain, and it's made by someone who understands its expression.

What may have started out as a comedy devolves into quasi-Stephen King territory.

De Niro, trying his ordinary-guy best not to be mannered, gives one of his most mannered performances.

The Last Station isn’t all that it should be, but whenever these two actors are onscreen, it’s like a great night at the theater.

By turns antic, frantic, and dull, "Pippa Lee" is unconvincing – emotionally, dramatically, filmically.

The novelist Cormac McCarthy was served well by the Coen Brothers' adaptation of his novel "No Country for Old Men" but comes a cropper in The Road, a lugubrious trek through postapocalyptic debris.

One of the sweetest and most heartfelt movies ever made about a life in the theater.

It probably won't make a jot of difference to all the screaming tweeners lining up to see this movie, but The Twilight Saga: New Moon is not wonderful.

Best performance, minute for minute, comes from Adriane Lenox, whose cameo as Michael's drug-addled mother is the film's standout.