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.