Apatow's film comes across as overstuffed and understructured, a collection of elements that hasn't really been assembled into a story and could do with the backbone.

Mohan's film may not manage anything out of the ordinary, but it does present a convincingly contemporary depiction of relationships and dating when the goalposts have been moved, or when we're at least trying to pretend they have.

For all that it is, as promised, about love, it's also a subtly punishing affair that grinds you into the ground as you watch an elderly couple deal with one member's slow deterioration of health and sanity.

The latter half of The Impossible is so disappointingly movie-ish, tying a bow on the events after portraying them too vividly to allow them to be wrapped so neatly. It wrings out tears with an industrious efficiency that leaves you feeling manhandled after the exhilarating, terrifying footage that's unfolded before.

Zero Dark Thirty makes you feel every step of Maya's journey, but it's her impressive achievement and that of the film itself that we're left contemplating, not her humanity - a stunningly well-realized whole with few soft spots to latch onto.

If gangsterism is just capitalism in a more raw form, then Jackie is the creature best suited for this world. He knows the rules and enforces them without prejudice, because it's just business and this is just a job. Killing Them Softly doesn't give that idea its intended sting.

Scripted by playwright Tom Stoppard, the film labors to fit Tolstoy's sprawling story into its two hour and ten minute runtime by drawing its characters with minimal lines.

The glorious mess that is Pat's family and community is the warmest, funniest aspect of Silver Linings Playbook.

This is Day-Lewis' movie, and he does with the meditative inner stillness of his character a wonderful thing - he finds a type of heroism that runs counter to all of the usual showy movie signifiers of such a quality.

Working with the great cinematographer Roger Deakins, Mendes also presents some stunning sequences of beauty in a film where you might not expect such a thing.

Turns out to be a disappointingly standard addiction story in its second half also serves as a reminder that Hollywood tends to be more invested in these types of self-serious movies than most actual audiences.

As is often the peril with movies of giant ambition, Cloud Atlas walks a crooked line between the glorious and the ridiculous.

One of the finest of the year, The Loneliest Planet is based on a short story by Tom Bissell that's itself inspired by a famous Hemingway work, "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber."

The film is heavily reliant on jump scares, but its best moments are the ones before them, when the tension builds without the benefit of escalating music to queue you in to the approaching shock.

The primary weakness of Affleck's film is the actor himself, who can't seem to find much in "exfiltration" specialist Tony aside from a dedication to his work and sorrow over the potential breakup of his family.

Set to a score by Carter Burwell that takes breaks for tunes like P.P. Arnold's "The First Cut Is The Deepest" and Linda Ronstadt's "Different Drum," existing in a start contrast from what's unfolding on screen, Seven Psychopaths is a ball.

It's probably too early to peg Frankenweenie as Burton's comeback vehicle, but it's certainly the director's best movie in twenty years.

Looper may not have the bell-ringing resonance of Chris Marker's "La Jetée," one of its touchstones, but it's a jaunty match-up of genre and character drama that's far smarter and more finely wrought than almost anything else in the multiplexes.

The two cops are cocky and funny and young, and it still takes a good half hour to accept that they may be as forthright and dedicated to their jobs as they appear to be.

What makes The Master such a singular experience, as dense as a mille-feuille, is that it is not Lancaster's story but Freddie's, and told as such, in layers that are sensorially rich but that do not always lead easily from one to another.

Physically it is a kick in the teeth, a depiction of poverty, sex and violence which crosses most known codes of acceptability.

This variation on the demon child subgenre has enough of the familiar and the new to be a decently good time at the movies.

As rollicking and rough as a drive down a dirt road with no suspension, Lawless is a tale of three-bootlegging brothers from Prohibition-era Franklin County, Virginia, who are, in the words of one character, some "hard-ass crackers."

Premium Rush is a half-entertaining, half-exasperating movie.

Pattinson does a quietly marvelous thing in finding vulnerability in Eric without making it seem like softness.

Like much of the movie, Norton's presence has a patient, diligent quality to it, as if what's on screen is just a slog to get through before some promised fun in the next installment.

Celeste and Jesse Forever creates a handful of likable and very human characters, so much so that halfway through you want the film to stop putting them through the emotional wringer so that you can just spend time with them.

Sugar Man is most interesting when it touches on the conditions that combined to draw a cult hero out of some decent music and a generously enabled, imagination-firing mystique.

In its own way and to its own detriment, William Friedkin's splattery, southern gothic return to the screen seeks to amuse as well as shake and stir.

As a whole, however, Ruby Sparks lands like a punch. It's a smart counter-jab to the many movies out there that put forth the myth that the world is full of quirky angels in ballet flats who are just waiting for some morose protagonist to come along in need of their love.

It's startlingly funny in an uncomfortable, envelope-pushing way that's all the more effective for how it sneaks up on you.

The Dark Knight aspires to the epic and reaches it on a number of impressive and less impressive levels. That it is a frequently, unnervingly glorious triumph of brawn over brains is not despite but in spite of Nolan's admirably stubborn - if persistently, risibly serious - insistence that the modern superhero can have it all.

There's a certain type of painful honesty that shines through in both their interviews toward the end and, particularly, in those with the staff.

The climax errs on the side of the overwrought and overdetermined, like an earnest adolescent's first attempt at a short story. And yet Papoulia's extraordinary performance lingers, as does the film's provocative existential fog.

With its small cast and focus on performance, Union Square promises to be a welcome showcase for Sorvino, and the early rhymes with Miss Linda are intriguingly open-ended.

Though it's a bit of an oddity, it's an affecting curio suitable for both Hardy enthusiasts and Winterbottom fans alike.

The writing is relaxed in the right places and heightened to a largely effective degree when it counts.

Despite this careful (and successful) depiction of a warm and decent person, Perry the pop star remains stubbornly two-dimensional.

Probably not as good as you hoped or as bad as you feared.

The success of this exuberant, affecting debut feature from director Benh Zeitlin depends on his ability to universalize the particular, in this case by drawing us into the perspective of a six-year-old girl living in squalor and feeling and uncertainty in the Louisiana bayou, then telling our own story from behind it.

The audience is never seen and only faintly heard. This puts a lot of visual pressure on a very inward performer. Young is a beast onstage, to be sure - he seems to re-grow an appendix for each song.

Take This Waltz is an unusually kind film about infidelity -- not because it sidesteps or shortchanges heartbreak, but because it doesn't let any one of its characters bear the full burden of blame.

One of the tricks of Ted -- perhaps its smartest one -- is that everyone, not just John, knows the bear can talk.

This is a straightforward family comedy-drama, a movie made for adults, and one that actually gives its actors – among them Chris Pine, Elizabeth Banks, Michelle Pfeiffer and Philip Baker Hall – something to do. That's more of a rarity on today's landscape than it should be.

The Invisible War might be best judged as a piece of activism, in which case it's already succeeding - after seeing the film in April, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta took the responsibility for sexual assault investigations away from commanding officers and put them in the hands of higher-ranking officials.

My heart belongs to Bear Elinor, whose movements and mannerisms are a tender echo of Human Elinor's – her character is designed and drawn just that carefully.

To Rome with Love - rangy, vaguely ridiculous and trepidatiously optimistic - is Allen's film for tomorrow.

It's a mark of Shelton's ability to create living characters from seemingly minor shared moments -- the ones that wind up meaning everything.

An elegantly observed, sleekly packaged look at an artist whose career-long balance of enigma and self-exposure culminated in a 2010 retrospective at New York City's Museum of Modern Art.

Seeing Tom Cruise swathed in leather pants and fake tattoos, as Axl Rose-style metal god Stacee Jaxx, is supposedly Rock of Ages' big draw. But the movie is much more fun when he's not around.

Manages to surprise with a charm and wit all its own.

While skipping the more shocking turns of something like "Happiness," Dark Horse does feel like a return to the fearless darkness of those earlier films, a tale of a loser who's fully drawn but never allowed to be lovable.

Safety Not Guaranteed is permeated with that aura of unfocused melancholy common to so many indies these days -- what are we all so damn sad about? -- but by tying it back to characters that don't seem popped from any too-familiar mold, the film allows its sense of regret, its alarm at time passing, to feel earned.

On the whole Bel Ami is highly watchable.

The picture sparkles, but in the nighttime way - its charms have a noirish gleam.

So why can't I love Moonrise Kingdom? For all the movie's technical meticulousness, the storytelling still has a wiggly-waggly quality, like a dangly loose tooth.

The picture is at least spirited, a jaunty trifle that's low on eroticism but high on cartoony coquettishness. Like the little motorized whatsit that is its subject, it does have its charms.

The Dictator, for all its liberal leanings, doesn't let anyone off the hook, not even well-intentioned liberals. Cohen comes right out and says things that most of us, in polite conversation, wouldn't dare. He knows it's the impolite conversation that really gets things moving.

It's a film that should be appallingly twee, but more often than not is actually scruffy and sweet, thanks to a nicely underplayed turn by Chandler Canterbury as the kid, Kelsey, and the chemistry between Jason Ritter and Jake Sandvig as hipster grifters Ben and Alan.

Documentaries don't have to be technically great to be irresistible, and Bess Kargman's First Position, which follows six young ballet dancers as they prepare for an elite competition, is a case in point.

The film is, underneath its surface of warm fuzzies, a precision instrument aimed directly at the heart of its intended, underserved older audience.

Last Call at the Oasis makes a convincing case that we're on the verge of both "Waterworld" and large scale Erin Brockovich-style scenarios.

It's still a kick to watch Kathleen Turner don a housedress and trade soothing pieties with Richard Chamberlain. The Perfect Family feels like it could have been more than that, but I suppose counting its blessings is the more Christian thing to do.

It's all rather casual - not unengaging, exactly, but lacking a narrative energy all its own.

The Five-Year Engagement is, for a movie in which a guy fakes an orgasm and (in a separate incident) stuffs a dead deer in his car's sunroof, very grown-up.

To the Arctic uses spoonfuls of cuteness - featuring walruses and caribou, though polar bears are its primary animal stars - to make its fairly grim environmental message go down a little easier.

Think Like a Man is rowdy and funny and showcases an immensely likable ensemble cast it uses to delineate its war between the sexes.

Inter-chimp and territorial fighting are facts of nature, but the extreme anthropomorphism of Chimpanzee makes what is natural feel bizarre.

It offers glancing pleasures of the atmospheric kind – the impact is the equivalent of a filmy cobweb brushing against your cheek. It tickles more than it bites.

By the end you feel you've learned something about the man, yet his mystique emerges intact.

Lockout is derivative and ridiculous and a good time, provided you can turn off higher brain functions along with any other part of you that might want to lodge a complaint about liberal borrowing from better movies.

Cabin in the Woods does what "Scream" only halfway managed, which was to find something new by looking back at the familiar - and at least in Whedon's world, the geeky ones are never first on the chopping block.

Bobby and Peter Farrelly's The Three Stooges is not particularly great, though it is possibly brilliant, a picture that goes beyond homage to become its own rambunctious invention - it's one big eye-poke, with footnotes.

Rather than rushing to determine the cause of death – of love, or of a country -- it stubbornly keeps listening for a heartbeat, even though there may not be one.

The picture is devilishly entertaining, not least because it's laced with just the sort of dumb raunchy jokes you hate yourself for laughing at. But it also preserves, to a degree, the elemental sweetness that made the original so distinctive.

Morgan Spurlock's latest documentary Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan's Hope plants a sloppy, moist kiss on the sweaty brow of geek culture's premiere event.

Scene by scene The Hunter, adapted from a novel by Julia Leigh, holds your attention like a pair of big, inquisitive eyes, or perhaps the point-blank scope of an automatic rifle.

Mirror Mirror has a great deal of energy and wit and color, so much that it sometimes threatens to go right over the top. Somehow, though, it always stops short of being just too much.

Crude, violent and deeply enjoyable.

The way salty-sweet comedy Turn Me On, Dammit! treats the hormone-addled turmoil of its 15-year-old heroine Alma feels something close to revolutionary. I don't want to overburden this mild-mannered 76-minute Norwegian debut, but it's true.

Bully is much better when it sticks to simple storytelling. And storytelling, not grandstanding, is the thing that just might grab the attention of, say, school administrators, people who can have some effect on how bullies are dealt with.

The picture is also weirdly compelling, maybe most notably for the way Dafoe's character - who is, in this respect, perhaps a stand-in for the Bronx-born Ferrara - seems to be grappling less with the idea that the world is ending than that the city is ending.

There's such a thing as having too much reverence for your material, and although Davies is an extraordinarily gifted and principled director, The Deep Blue Sea may suffer for that reverence.

There's a sliver of a plot to The Raid, but it's really not worth going over -- when the characters pause to talk, which is rare, it does tend to kill the film's momentum.

It wouldn't go so far as to say it feels like you went through Jeremy's ordeal for nothing, but I did wish I had come to know as much about Dorff's character as I did about the size and shape of his nostrils.

There's action here, too, and a great deal of vitality that feels true both to the spirit of Collins' book and to the idea of movie entertainment as it exists.

At what point do we stop applauding the Duplass brothers for their gumption and stick-to-itiveness and admit that, maybe, their storytelling just isn't so hot? Or that their characters sometimes seem more like groovy-cute constructs than believable people?

For now, 21 Jump Street is a small puff of fresh air simply because it's not, like umpteen other releases coming down the pike, based on a comic-book series.

The real strength of The Kid with a Bike is the cautious but generous warmth of its storytelling. Not much happens in The Kid with a Bike, but it leaves you grateful that the worst doesn't happen - with these characters, you might not be able to bear it.

When the recessive style works with the characters and the kooky international-incident story, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen has an absorbing, old-fashioned sweetness.

Spirit counts for something too, and John Carter has plenty of that, in addition to the requisite dashes of wit.

At its simplest level, Jiro Dreams of Sushi is a portrait of a master. In its deeper layers, it explores what drives us to make things: Beautiful, jewel-like things, or things that delight our palate – or, in this case, both.

What Cedar captures here is the way a father and son can be bound so tightly they almost choke the air out of one another. You can't exactly call it affection; it's that far more complicated thing we call kinship.

On the surface, The Salt of Life may seem like a movie made just for old folks. The trick is that it really is about the youth that stays with you, even when your aging body is working hard to convince you otherwise.

The Snowtown Murders is the latest and bleakest in a string of Australian crime films showing flashes of virtuoso talent, and has more than a little in common with David Michôd's 2010 hit "Animal Kingdom."

A small but extremely significant message in a bottle. That metaphor is almost literal: The picture made its way to Cannes via a USB drive -- which was smuggled in a cake.

While Wesley is both too good to be true and an absence of a charisma on screen, Good Deeds is very fair to its two main female characters even as they're both entangled with the same man.

Seyfried has spent too much time lately in vehicles that aren't worthy of her, "Red Riding Hood" being the most egregious example. Gone at least takes her seriously – except when, to delicious effect, it doesn't.