In the end, Malena is an unlikable and foul farce, unworthy of Tornatore's previously gentle touch.

Glaringly indebted to several earlier works and the film overall remains beholden to one established brand above all others: Tom Cruise.

While Draft Day is a very agreeable and predictable movie, it is also very timely.

With its painfully plain-spoken conflicts and eventually oversold gestures of kindness, Camp X-Ray may offer frustratingly little insight into the hazy world of wartime morality, but if nothing else, it suggests that Stewart may escape her own “Twilight”-shaped prison yet.

Streep delivers another of her chameleon-like transformations in appearance, accent, and manner.

What ultimately holds the film back, I believe, is its tendency to err too far on the side of that sweetness — it indulges too often in the hallmarks of the mediocre indie, the stuff a press release might call quirk, to level its more substantial points with real seriousness.

Some Velvet Morning is a horror film with no blood, with words the only weapon for 98% of the picture.

Stripped of the pretension of the overrated "Trainspotting," but it's also void of the earlier film's ambition or glimmers of real cultural insight.

About two lives in which transformation is a constant, destabilizing threat to freedom and sanity. That's a very provocative premise, though halfway through the movie Doyle and Walsh abandon its potential to go for easy laughs.

Breaks virtually no new narrative ground, yet treads the familiar territory it does cover with grace, style, wit and fun.

An embarrassing gut-punch of unfiltered schmaltz, but its sympathy for the devil-style humanism is well-meaning.

Accomplished, ambitious, and great-looking.

It's "The Hustler with poker and without soul...For all its flash and occasional sizzle, "Rounders" is a disappointment.

Exemplifies the subpar state of movies today.

LL Cool J... is downright scary -- a mix of coiled charm and underlying menace.

John Dies at the End is easily funnier than it is scary, and much like the drug at the center of the story, it offers one hell of a trip.

An essential entry in the cinematic canon of Spider-Man, complete with new villains, new questions, and new heartaches.

Though issues of politics and philosophy are touched upon, this is a film about the people inside the uniforms -- a story of human beings under pressure, forced by circumstance to make choices both impulsive and, on occasion, heroic. It's also the new year's single most satisfying movie experience thus far.

Lengthy passages are unrelated to any discernible narrative, and seem to exist in that interzone your mind travels through just before it goes to sleep.

It’s not exceedingly original, it is well-made and a solid entry into the subgenre.

Does a lot of little stuff right, and it sparkles at times.

Alas, despite the timeless concerns of adolescent bullying and burgeoning sexuality, Carrie as a film fails to become its own satisfyingly whole interpretation of coming-of-age horrors both literal and figurative. Its bloodshed may be all dressed up, but it ultimately has nowhere to go.

While Bounce may mark a sophomore slump for Roos, it's hardly the worst date movie out there.

This is a band that deserves better.

Something rare: a mess of a movie that is somehow infectious, and infectious not despite the mess, but because of it.

At best, White House Down is a sure-fire way to kill two hours, if not countless brain cells.

LUV is partly a story about drugs, guns and street crime, the legacies we pass on to our children despite our efforts to do otherwise. But it’s also about the things we pass on to our children with love: How to tie a necktie, hold a steering wheel, shake another person’s hand. And it’s about the hope that those things will win out in the end.

The surprising part is how, once you get over the crude humor that the teen-movie genre demands, Get Over It is a nice little movie.

Like the melancholy remininces of an old relative who lived through an exciting, even harrowing time, but no longer possesses the mental faculties to really flesh out the tale they're spinning.

A wonderfully witty homage to the very king of disco movies -- "Saturday Night Fever."

Enough pep in this picture to make it rise above teen-movie expectations.

A dopey but sweet-natured I-love-to-dance film, fits nicely into the downhill-since-"The-Red-Shoes" tradition of ballet movies.

Boasting a compelling cast of characters, Wasteland” is a very smooth feature film debut from director Rowan Athale, and one that invites repeat viewings.

Doesn't have a lot to offer that hasn't been done better -- and worse -- in hundreds of ghetto-sink shoot-em-ups.

A fireworks show with plenty of "oohs" but not a lot of "aah" -- the story is needlessly convoluted in places and storybook-simple in others, and the characters never make the leap from drawn figures to flesh-and-blood people.

We all have childhoods to remember. Art needs to do more than just remind us.

The kind of minor work that may very well speak greater volumes about (Stone's) thoughts and feelings right now than another masterpiece would.

Beautifully shot, full of lush, vibrant colors and expertly wrought sets...a club-kid's frothy date flick.

Monuments certainly isn’t unbearable to watch, but for all its quality pedigree and good intentions, the result is a frustratingly flat film that drifts from moment to moment with a curious lack of urgency and an overbearing sense of self-importance.

Naming aside, Epic could have been good, except that it wasn’t, it was stone cold terrible, something even a six-year-old might scoff at. I know, I’m just as sad as you are about the whole thing.

The gravity-defying harness maneuvers popularized in the U.S. with "The Matrix" -- ... look really cool, but seem out of place in a realistic gang-style action movie.

Funny, immediately and consistently engaging, and -- well done on almost every level.

Peeples saves itself from a complete belly flop, by the barest of margins, by leaning heavily on its initial strength of good-natured charm.

Jason Reitman’s adaptation of Joyce Maynard’s Labor Day is as consistently assured a piece of filmmaking as any we’ve seen from the filmmaker and very much in keeping with the decreasingly glib nature of his output.

RoboCop has sound and fury to spare and even an inspired idea or two lurking beneath that polished exterior, but much like its upgraded namesake, this watchable mess ultimately lacks a prime directive to call its own.

Bonello's decision to show rather than tell keeps the audience on its toes.

This film could have gone horribly wrong, but the characters and chemistry are strong, and as such Beautiful Creatures should be lauded for elegantly delivering a tale that at least feels fresh and vibrant.

his bleak and somewhat sadistic picture is the type of movie that unfolds like a slow car wreck. You know something bad is going to happen, you just aren’t sure what, or how, and when it eventually happens it is repulsive and yet you still can’t turn away.

An excellent coming-of-age story that is, for once, and very happily, focussed on a teenage girl.

It is highly likely you’ll forget the movie by the time you go to bed.

Best of all are the supporting players. Everett (who played the Prince of Wales in "The Madness of King George") is smartly urbane, giving a polished refinement to the stereotypical "gay best buddy'' role.

Despite its apparent compromises to noble finger-wagging (initially) and requisite fist-pumping (eventually), Waugh has fashioned a sturdy character-first entertainment out of Snitch at a time of year when those are all too rare to behold.

I see Austin Powers as Myers' desperate cry for help -- a plea to stop him before he does schtick again.

A too-familiar road.

Loses touch with its characters.

Simplistic on one level, indecipherable on another, it's a most peculiar muddle.

There’s just too much good stuff to dismiss White Bird in a Blizzard out of hand, even if it does have a somewhat dull and desultory plot.

Story. Character. They used to mean something to George Lucas.

A constant video rental for a community that aches to see itself as banal and generic.

Since it took 28 years to get it to the big screen, the fact that the end result feels rushed and hasty probably qualifies as irony.

An active affront to logic, placing us in a world we firmly know doesn’t exist.

Parkland mines some interesting scenes, if not in an entirely coherent fashion, resolving as more of an interesting concept than a fully rendered and effective film.

Eventually fizzles out badly.

The beats and trappings are all standard-issue, but the gags are funny enough, often enough, to offset such routine proceedings.

A.C.O.D. proves to be both a solid debut for Zicherman and a worthy vehicle for Scott and company, one that provides plenty of awkward laughs and generally gives the American farce a good name again.

The whole picture is lifeless and without consequence.

Shaft is a decent popcorn movie and Jackson rises to the responsibility of appearing bigger than life.

Baena takes a well-tread road, leaving behind the guts of his promising story and never capitalizing on the charms of either romance or his leading lady.

Hughley and Jones have an explosively comic chemistry together; her kooky, open-faced looks are a counterpoint to his whipcrack improvisations.

Crass and depressing drama.

Afternoon Delight will both depress and engage an audience, usually just depending on the minute of the movie you find yourself watching.

Steadfastly conventional.

The film itself is sly and smug in kind, fleetingly enjoyable for all of its old-school showmanship and high-tech hokiness.

Dark Skies is about the fragility of family, a muted meditation on how precious it is...it does affirm that genre filmmakers who work with their eyes, their hearts and their brains still walk among us.

The Purge: Anarchy expands on its predecessor, but the excellent news is that the sequel isn’t just bigger and badder and bleaker; it’s also better, smarter, stranger and tougher.

A sort of "Pretty Woman" for the underworld.

Atrocious comedy.

Utterly lacks the spark that makes caper movies fun.

A Stallone / Schwarzenegger film that isn't completely beneath them.

Drama, swift action, and low-key, character-driven comedy.

Ti West’s pointless new film The Sacrament, an exercise in talking loud and saying nothing, isn’t just bad, it’s infuriating.

Another droning formulaic thriller.

For a film that reminds use over and over that this is a whole new world, this movie feels awfully familiar.

If Broken City – the first film to be directed solo by Allen Hughes, one-half of the Hughes Brothers directing team – is a little flawed and cracked itself, it still squeaks by as a reasonably thoughtful piece of big-screen entertainment.

A tiny slice of bleak, black near-perfection.

The sound is great, the explosions are great, the look and feel could have been turned into something special. It’s the words and plot that are huge negatives here.

Here in the rotting depths of pulp horror/adventure territory, that's the entire point of the exercise.

What the film doesn't have, ironically, is a soul.

S-VHS isn’t as pants-pooping scary as the first, but it is funnier, tighter and slicker.

Riddick is a fractured skeleton of a script, with each distinct installment scratching its own itch.

Cooties, while suitably gross and buoyed by game performances, doesn’t exploit its concept nearly as well as it should.

It pulls off the tricky feat of being both commanding and subtle, emerging with its dignity intact.

These film-making provocateurs are divided between sweet and sour, between the romance of classic screwball comedy and Mad magazine on acid.

In the tradition of "Sunrise" and "Eyes Wide Shut," crises set the characters on a kind of dreamy, nocturnal journey through chaos and fear.

A strange combination of mental exhaustion and boredom.

The premise is provoking and well-conceived, confidently moving things forward until the increasingly knotty rules of the film’s universe eventually come to overbear the experience a bit in the homestretch.

A slumming Spike Lee is still better than most directors at the top of their game, but Oldboy isn’t just Lee’s worst movie, it’s practically his “Wicker Man”.

Quite shameless in imitating its predecessors.