The new Total Recall fails on the most basic levels: Its characters are dull, and its action is duller.

As it winds down to its quiet, haunting finale, Oslo, August 31st illustrates how all of us, even the most damaged and broken people, have a purpose to fulfill.

It's really just a dance movie, interrupted sporadically for PG-13 romance, bad acting, ridiculous dialogue and earnest "let's put on a show to save our homes!" spirit.

The body part joke to alien joke ratio seems slightly skewed in favor of the former, which makes the humor more than a little repetitive. How many different ways can one film say: "Men are idiots"?

It's a beautiful, strange tone poem about childhood and innocence, set in a strange but still recognizable world where the polar ice caps are melting, crayfish shacks float down rivers and enormous aurochs, an extinct breed of bison, are sloughing their way toward our tiny, adorable narrator.

This is not the sort of movie you can just leave behind in the theater. And like any true finale to a trilogy, the picture doesn't work nearly as well if you haven't seen the previous two installments: It's not designed to stand alone, and it pays off all that has come before with an exuberant, thrilling high.

To Rome with Love is so inviting, and most of its gaggle of characters so diverse and likable, it's doubly disappointing that Allen, who wrote and directed the movie, can't think of what to do with them.

Aggressively, defiantly stupid.

Part of the reason The Amazing Spider-Man feels so fresh and invigorating is that its story is so simple - anyone remember exactly what the deal was with Loki and that cube? - and its protagonist so relatable.

Ted is more of an idea than a movie, a string of jokes and homages starring a cartoon and some game actors whose performances are destined to be enjoyed in chunks, rarely from start to finish, during momentary breaks of channel surfing on late-night TV.

An irritatingly contrived drama.

If you can look past all the flesh and the thongs and the thrusting - and I admit that is an almost impossible task and probably not one you'd want to undertake anyway - what's most distinctive about Steven Soderbergh's Magic Mike is its sense of fun.

As Seeking a Friend for the End of the World crawls toward its sentimental finale, you're rooting for that asteroid to get here, quick.

This is a movie that manages to be light and funny and still transcend age, background and culture to treat with compassion our ability to behave in our own worst interests and still nurture hope for the future.

The film is precious and adorable, but it isn't naïve, and the movie breathes so deep that Anderson even gets a real performance out of Willis (this is his best work in years).

Brave has a manic, almost daffy energy and sense of humor.

Enormous in its scope and colossal in its stupidity.

That's My Boy more than lives up to its R-rating - including one gross-out gag repulsive enough to make you put down your popcorn.

Oddly tone deaf.

This is a quiet, powerful film about the lengths we'll go to for the sake of the people we love - and the depths we'll sink to for the sake of the ones we hate.

Hysteria never gets too preachy or ponderous, and there's something in the film to educate even the most learned viewer.

The script is so pre-determined it seems generated by a computer program, not human beings.

The whole of Prometheus - which was written by Jon Spaihts and Damon Lindelof, and rips off everything from "2001: A Space Odyssey" to "Event Horizon" - feels derivative and passé: The film is a shiny, high-tech relic.

By film's end, we're deep into Coen brothers territory, with an extra splash of Sam Raimi-level gore.

In Snow White and the Huntsman, this talented but woefully miscast actress (Stewart) is expected to rally an entire army of soldiers, even though she usually looks like she forgot the combination to her locker.

The question of why the law must always be upheld, regardless of consequences, gives this light, amiable movie a surprising heft and weight. You don't want to see Bernie sent to prison - the world is a better place without that mean old shrew - but murder is murder, right?

Men in Black 3 is so dull and empty, it's the first movie that has ever made me think "Thank God this is in 3D."

Seydoux says that when the film was completed and released shortly after the end of the war, it became a symbol of freedom.

What to Expect has no standout character who's consistently funny, and it must operate within the confines of a "kids are the most important thing in our lives" mentality, which is more tiresome ground, comedically speaking.

Battleship is a board game for children, so it stands to reason a film adaptation would also be aimed at kids. But did they have to gear it to really dumb kids?

The latest collaboration between Cohen and director Larry Charles proves the formula they created with "Borat" and then started to milk dry with "Brüno" has finally run out of juice. Time to move on, guys.

As for the Marigold Hotel, well, it's not the Delano. But overall it's a fine spot to spend a couple of hours.

The movie has an undeniable visceral power. It is also a loud, grating wallow in dime-store despair, a cheap and hollow button-puncher.

Depp and Burton are two gifted, like-minded artists whose affinity for oddball characters and humor makes them natural creative partners. But they also enable each other's laziest, most indulgent habits: Too often, they seem to be making movies to entertain themselves instead of the audience.

You don't have to love dogs to enjoy Darling Companion, but it couldn't hurt.

You should know right up front that even if you realize you're being manipulated you are probably going to weep anyway.

The Avengers has a knockout final 30 minutes, all gee-whiz crash and bang and eye candy that makes grand use of 3D and IMAX and all the other toys. But the Transformers movies did that, too.

The performances are all terrific - Stillman gets his actors to latch onto his absurdist vibe, then gives them wonderfully rich dialogue to play with.

For a good hour or so, The Raven is gruesome, ludicrous fun. Then it's just ludicrous.

It makes you laugh and eagerly wish for a happy ending without any preachy soul-searching. As a bonus, it's got a Van Morrison-friendly soundtrack, and the trailers haven't revealed the best parts.

You also see a man, flawed and imperfect, finding his way through with his music, constantly searching for his place in the world.

It's all about making everybody happy. If that's not grounds for a good relationship, then I don't know what is.

The most fortunate thing about The Lucky One is that despite a plot hole so big it could generate its own gravity field, it's still not a bad movie.

Detention has a frenetic visual style that's fun and appealing in a lot of ways, but there are way too many elements fighting for attention.

One of the scariest films I've seen in ages, although I cannot in all honesty explain exactly what the movie is about.

Monsieur Lazhar doesn't send you home depressed. Instead, the film leaves you hopeful, and even exhilarated, that even the most painful wounds can sometimes heal.

Pearce gets into his groove swiftly, owns it and remains entertaining throughout. The rest of the movie, however, would work better as a video game.

It showcases one of Whedon's greatest strengths: his ability to take previously disrespected genres - in this case the slasher film - and turn them inside-out and upside-down and every which way but loose.

The actors, many of them now in their mid-30s, look understandably fuller in the face and thicker around the waist. The jokes, too, are starting to show their age: They wobble.

Not a bad movie - everybody wants dreams to come true - but its platitudes sound awfully hollow sometimes.

Coriolanus is not by any stretch a hero, and yet Fiennes makes him magnetic, a warrior you can't look away from even when you might want to.

The Deep Blue Sea is a suffocating movie, and it's meant to be.

Musical Chairs is about overcoming impossible odds and never giving up and chasing your dreams – all that afterschool-special stuff - but it's also charming and upbeat, and it's stuffed with great, vibrant, insanely catchy music. No Bee Gees, though.

The Hunger Games takes no risks.

Delicacy bears a slight whiff of Anthony Minghella's fantastic "Truly Madly Deeply," but while Minghella's film is a romantic comedy classic, Delicacy hovers just this side of memorable.

As usual for the Dardennes, the plot is slight but loaded with hairpin turns of tremendous emotional power.

An intoxicating, world-class collaboration between a filmmaker (Spain's Fernando Trueba), two artists (designer Javier Mariscal and animator Tono Errando) and a musician (Cuban pianist/bandleader Bebo Valdés).

A surprisingly sappy misfire from brothers Jay and Mark Duplass, a hug-it-out, touchy-feely movie that succumbs to the maudlin sentimentality they had avoided in all their previous pictures (The Puffy Chair, Baghead, Cyrus).

The fact that the entire film is in Spanish, and Ferrell plays a Mexican named Armando, are two of the tamest elements in the movie.

This is the rare breed of Hollywood studio production that has the brash spirit of an independent picture and the sharp wit of a stand-up comic.

Eventually, though, Seeking Justice devolves into the usual business of chases and elaborate double-crosses that leave behind all vestiges of realism for the sake of popcorn thrills.

"The silence will kill you!" warn the posters for Silent House. That's only if the boredom doesn't get you first, though.

The movie also glows bright with life and hope, celebrating the innate human instinct to push onward and persevere, even in the face of incomprehensible evil.

This is the kind of colossally misguided vanity project.

Friends With Kids cheerfully earns its R rating on language alone, but always in service of a good laugh.

John Carter manages to be a ridiculous amount of fun, even if you are immune to the charms of Taylor Kitsch (Friday Night Lights) running around in what amounts to a stylish loincloth.

Tilda Swinton is the star of We Need to Talk About Kevin, and her performance is so complex and volcanic and transfixing that all of the film's flaws melt away.

Only in the execution does Madonna stumble: Despite the undeniable romance of the historical material, she has made a movie more concerned with how things look than how they feel. Which should not surprise anyone.

One of the problems with Rampart is that we've seen guys like Dave in movies and on TV for years now. The bad cop psyche has been delved into pretty deeply on all fronts, most notably in FX's brilliant series "The Shield."

Project X is an astounding, superlative movie about adolescence - a brutal, unapologetic comedy about the fantasy every high school kid carries around in his head about being popular and cool and beloved.

There's no real reason to see this movie. It's exhausting and pointless and not amusing enough to make up for its failings. You can do better. The filmmakers could have done better. Honestly, you're better off staying home and making hummus.

I haven't watched "Fargo" in a few years, but I still remember almost every scene. I saw Thin Ice two nights ago and cannot in all honesty tell you how it ends.

The action, which bookends the movie, is atrocious, defying all laws of gravity and physics and machine gun-edited into incomprehensible lunacy.

The second installment in a likable family franchise, Journey 2: The Mysterious Island makes a nice case to your kids that reading books is a good idea.

The good news is, The Vow is not excruciating.

Unfortunately, the film's climactic finale grows repetitive and goes on a little too long; once you've seen bodies flying and crashing through buildings once, you've seen it plenty.

Big Miracle even throws in an unexpected bonus, a surprise last-minute cameo that is funny without being the slightest bit mean, just like the rest of this hugely likable movie.

The movie has such a profound and compassionate understanding of human behavior, family ties and the way ordinary people respond when they're forced into a moral quandary, I can't imagine anyone not being transfixed by it.

In his first starring role post-Harry Potter, Radcliffe must carry the movie with little dialogue and practically nothing to play other than fear, constantly reacting to creepy toys that suddenly spring to life and reflections in windows that shriek unexpectedly at him.

Albert Nobbs is not a movie about gender politics; it's about trusting in the fundamental goodness of others and accepting one's need for companionship, and the way in which Close slowly reveals Albert's closed-off heart is poignant and often surprisingly funny, though never in a mocking way.

Man on a Ledge just made me think of an old Van Halen song: Jump.

Neeson is always compelling, even in a movie as ridiculous as The Grey.

Like a lot of anime, the movie remains entertaining even when you have no idea what's going on.

You need lots of gifted people chasing after the same bad idea to make a movie as colossally misguided as Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.

Steven Soderbergh has been telling interviewers that he's planning to take a sabbatical from filmmaking because he has lost his inspiration. His lack of interest is palpable in Haywire, a rote exercise in action filmmaking that is sleek and polished and instantly evaporates from memory.

The entire point of Carnage is to poke fun at the fragile civility of the upper-middle class - they're all animals inside! - but how much more fun would this material have been if the story hadn't been about polite white people?

The Iron Lady never delves deeply enough into the politics or the people, preferring instead to make us feel bad about the unfortunate way in which old age levels us all.

Joyful Noise is too tone-deaf to put its few blessings to good use.

There's a frothy, almost whimsical undercurrent quietly bubbling beneath the dead-serious story, and it finally bursts to the forefront in the ridiculously happy finale, which argues without the slightest bit of shame that crime sometimes does pay - really, really well.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is the anti-Bourne of espionage movies, a deliberate, cerebral, grim and utterly absorbing film that makes covert operations appear as unsexy as the Bourne films made them seem fast-paced and thrilling.

There isn't a moment in the movie where you don't feel Spielberg's passion, and this time, the film is worthy of his enthusiasm. It's a knockout.

We Bought a Zoo is the most formulaic movie Cameron Crowe has ever made: It is so generic, you could review it with a flow chart.

The relentless pace is a big part of the fun. Who ever heard of a slow rollercoaster, anyway? You'll have to ride this one in the theater, though. It simply won't be the same at home.

Chemistry is one of the few things left filmmakers can't fake with CGI, and the dynamic between Craig and Mara in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is so sensational, it instantly propels the movie beyond glossy, high-toned pulp into something far more affecting.

Something of an overlong, overblown, disorganized mess, despite being slightly better than its predecessor.

Shame is fearless in the way the most ambitious art often is, and to write it off for what it doesn't do is reductive and misguided. You don't just watch Shame: You feel it, too.

The wait for a great action movie is finally over. Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol is pure popcorn of the highest, most flavorful order, and it's good for you, too.

A fat streak of melancholy courses throughout Young Adult - who would have guessed the sight of a Kentaco Hut, one of those one-stop conglomerations of Kentucky Fried Chicken, Taco Bell and Pizza Hut, could be this depressing?