Tom Hooper's terrific, Oscar-worthy film is not merely a spot-on period piece; it's also a heartfelt study in the shadings of courage, a film about duty and friendship that's often warmly funny and sometimes painful to watch.

Sitting through Little Fockers is a soul-sucking, dispiriting experience.

The best way to approach Joel and Ethan Coen's eagerly awaited True Grit is to lower your expectations, then lower them a bit more. The problem is not the movie, which is a terrific, no-nonsense, straightforward western. The surprise – or vague disappointment – is the prevailing lack of Coen-ness in the movie.

Curiously, TRON: Legacy makes the same mistake the original did: All the best stuff comes in the first act. The rest of the movie is as exciting as an overnight round of computer coding.

The movie is all surface and trades on fortune-cookie wisdom.

The actors are fine: It's their long, arduous trek that lets the movie down.

Unstoppable is the slowest, talkiest movie you'll ever see about a runaway freight train loaded with toxic chemicals.

Doesn't quite avoid the pitfalls of its genre, but at least the movie has the decency to make you laugh on its way to a foregone conclusion. Also, did I mention the sex?

Sets out to be a study of grief and how to overcome it, but it rings too false to offer much hope - or entertainment.

Tangled packs old-fashioned Disney magic as endless as Rapunzel's locks.

Reminiscent of Showgirls minus the sex, nudity, sleaze, bad acting and horrible dancing, Burlesque is a typical A Star is Born story.

Bold and intrepid film buffs: The gauntlet has been thrown. Here's something you don't see every day - thank goodness.

Some of the creations these chefs produce defy belief (and make you wish you could jump into the screen to have a taste).

Only two characters are worth much notice; neither is a prince, and one is a really big mouse, which tells you something sad about Narnia's royal family.

The film suffers from a severe lack of urgency and emotional engagement. You can't get involved in a movie in which the characters all seem to be harboring double identities.

A lot of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part One feels like slushy set-up for the climactic all-out battle due in theaters next summer. The movie doesn't even give us the expected cliffhanger ending, although I'd be lying if I said I'm not eager to see how everything turns out.

This is a deeply inspirational movie about the human spirit's refusal to give up, but it is also a portrait of a man too much in love with life to let go without a fight.

The Next Three Days might have fared a lot better if the screenwriters had stuck to "The Next Two Days."

Someone apparently forgot to tell Harrison Ford he was starring in a comedy when he was cast in Morning Glory.

With such a large cast, none of the actors is able to turn her character into a fully realized person.

In some ways, better than its book.

Starts out feeling formidable in scope and theme but ends up awfully small and precious.

Stone isn't the straightforward thriller it appears to be, but the alternative turns out to be dull and lifeless. At least the title is apt: Like a rock, Stone has no pulse.

An exuberant, disarming entertainment.

It is a startling film in structure, style and story, but most of all in the simplicity of its plot -- which, once revealed (and that takes a while) is a horror story for cineastes. [03 Feb 1983, p.C8]

Excels at bringing on the high-power pyrotechnics.

This is a film about depression, though, and it comes awfully close to trivializing its subject by suggesting that all Craig needed, really, was a cute girl to like him back.

Sometimes I suspect there is secret high-stakes contest in Hollywood among filmmakers to try and come up with a movie without a single original idea. If so, Life As We Know It is a contender.