Assayas conveys with great understatement an entire constellation of emotions in Summer Hours. I wouldn't have minded a little bit of overstatement.

Swinton's performance, and practically everything else about Julia, seems off – tone-deaf. She plays an out-of-control wastrel who enters into a kidnapping scheme gone horribly wrong, as does the movie.

The rags-to-riches-to-rags trajectory is shopworn, but the sibling rivalries are cantankerous and goofy and Bernal's Tato, who fancies himself a pop singing star, wouldn't make the first cut on "American Idol."

The young cast is mostly callow and TV-bland and the special effects don't quite seem worth that hefty price tag, but overall this is a presentable addition to the franchise.

I guarantee you, if Charles Dickens were alive today, he might well be writing movies but he sure as shootin' wouldn't have written "Ghosts."

Without her (Kelly Macdonald), the generally well-acted The Merry Gentleman would descend into terminal lugubriousness.

How does all this play out for those of us – i.e., me – who have not been staying up nights fretting over the origins of the X-Men and Women? The answer is: Fairly well.

The film works best when it focuses on the touching, crazymaking relationship between the two men.

For most of the way this is an eye-popping, not blood-curdling, experience.

In the end, this melancholy, inspiriting movie achieves a breathtaking emotional harmoniousness.

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

The movie, starring Rogen as a mall cop with anger management issues, is essentially a goony romp flecked with disturbing eruptions of violence.

A young adult romantic comedy with a sweetness and delicacy that lifts it out of its genre.

The film is deliberately old-fashioned in its approach; the story line is resolutely linear and the production values are deluxe. It all makes for a fairly enjoyable, if schematic, backstage extravaganza.

As the film plays out its melancholy story, we realize that what we are watching is far rarer than the usual sports flick.

My favorite voice/animation combo, however, is Stephen Colbert's very terrestrial president of the United States.

If you have a hankering for a pretty good Woody Allen movie and want to brush up on your French at the same time, Shall We Kiss? is the ticket.

I don't mind a movie where people spend a lot of time jawboning, but what they say had better be interesting. In Spinning into Butter we are spoon-fed the deep dark revelation that racism can exist as virulently in liberal environs as in reactionary ones. Alert the media.

Rudd is amusing enough; Segel, who towers over Rudd, is amusing, too, though the role seems to have been written for Owen Wilson. Maybe Wilson was busy. Lucky him.

For all the glam and swank, the film is essentially a bright, shiny, empty puzzle. The puzzlemaking by writer-director Tony Gilroy is clever but most frequently an end in itself.

Consistently good as long as it centers on Buck and his seriocomic travails.

Fukunaga has a fine, spacious film sense and a gift for action, but the doomy, heavy-handed plot devices and overwrought, overacted gangland set pieces betray a novice's hand.

This love letter to Valentino from director Matt Tyrnauer seems intended for the already smitten.

The best thing to come out of Sunshine Cleaning is the confirmation that Adams, one of Hollywood's most delightful comediennes, is also capable of piercing drama.

The best thing The Edge of Love could do for you is to send you back to Thomas's poetry. Dash this folderol.

A disconcerting melange, Tokyo Sonata begins rather conventionally before spinning into black comic, almost fantastical, terrain.

Although the film's visuals are a cut above, say, "Sin City," another serioso graphic novel-turned-movie, it has the same mood: a film-noir-ish soddenness punctuated by megaviolence. Watchmen is the anti-"Incredibles."

It's not only Phoebe whose daydreams go out of control. Daniel Barnz, the writer-director, also goes a bit flooey. There's a lot more perspiration than inspiration.