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

There's enough froth along the way to keep the memory of Will Ferrell's recent "Casa Di Me Padre" close at hand.

The problem with Chernobyl Diaries isn't that it's offensive, it's that it's dumb.

Most wonderful of all is Josh Brolin as the young Agent K. It's so easy to believe that Brolin could turn into Jones, given a couple of decades.

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.

Actually, The Intouchables isn't bad - its merely shameless, but at least it's overtly so.

Virginia is like a box full of someone's long ago summer vacation keepsakes: pretty, but representative of memories and meaning no one else will be able to grasp.

Actually, the picture is perhaps not quite as painful as you might be expecting, though probably not as enjoyable, either.

Svelte enough in its reassembling of familiar elements to be, for a while, as comfortably pleasant as sipping on what once used to be your go-to drink - until The Samaritan takes a jarring turn right out of Park Chan-wook, and from there takes a tumble into ludicrousness from which it doesn't recover.

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.

In the realms of pregnancy comedy, What to Expect When You're Expecting doesn't find new laughs, just layers on attempts at the tried-and-true ones.

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.

Parts of Dark Shadows look lovely. So what happened to the story?

God Bless America only wants to see the worst in people - in fact actively seeks it out in order to be disgusted, and that feels almost as bad as the behavior the film is critiquing.

Its occasional entertainment value aside, the picture is also blithe to the point of being flimsy.

Girl in Progress feels a little trapped by its own conceits: It plays with the idea that all rebellion is in some sense performed and makes a caricature out of the immature, attention-hungry mother, but it never liberates its characters from their molds.

Walks the jittery line between being exploitative and too sensitive, and while it's probably a relief that it tips more toward the latter, the movie also seems a bit unclear in its motives.

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.

The tiniest bit of Hudson's wrinkly-crinkly cuteness goes a long way, and in A Little Bit of Heaven, watching her waste away becomes slow torture. She's like an adorbs Camille.

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.

The picture is broken down into narrative chunks that ultimately don't tell much of a story – what you get instead is a series of mini-climaxes held together by banter between characters.

It's hard to say whether Sound of My Voice is a wholly bogus and pretentious indie enterprise or a weirdly compelling bit of low-budget storytelling.

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

A handsome-looking thing, with fairly grand period costumes and reasonably lavish sets. So much for production values: In every other way the picture is stiff and unyielding, hampered by a clumsy plot and diorama performances. The whole thing has the feel of a second-rate living-history exhibit.

It has neither the Red Bull–fueled crudeness of "Crank" nor the Frenchified lunatic vitality of the "Transporter" movies; it's not even as cheaply entertaining as the generic hit-man retread "The Mechanic." Safe shows Statham comfortably treading water, proving all the things he no longer needs to prove.

It was a stroke of genius, at least a miniature one, to cast Black in this role – he's made to play the affable teddy bear who could snap at any moment.

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.

The Lucky One aspires to but never reaches the grandly melodramatic heights of the über-Sparks adaptation "The Notebook," though a reconciliation embrace in an outdoor shower of some sort seems deliberately staged to evoke the earlier feature.

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

There's too much people and not enough dog in Lawrence Kasdan's Darling Companion, and even if you prefer people to dogs, that's a serious problem.

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.

As lukewarm as We Have a Pope may be as a piece of filmmaking, Moretti doesn't tread particularly gently into sacred territory. The picture could be more irreverent, but at least it dares to suggest that popes are people too.

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.

Even by the most lenient of genre standards, the behavior of the characters in David Brooks's ATM is ludicrous enough to make anyone grind his or her teeth in frustration.

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.

How much you enjoy Damsels will depend on your tolerance for Stillman's particular brand of duct-taped Sperry Topsider whimsy. It's a comedy! It's a musical! It's a trip down memory lane to revisit the blissful confusion of our - or someone's - college years!

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.

It would be a real shame, with this much money and this many effects artists, if there were not a few purely visual wows. Wrath manages exactly two, and not where you might expect.

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.

A movie about childhood nightmares that plays too much like an actual, incoherent nightmare to make a good movie, Intruders is a psychodrama divided against itself.

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?

Comes across like the creation of a precocious student. I don't mean that to be a damning critique, though Detachment is a mesmerizing misfire -- it's just that it has the uncomplicated earnestness and hyperbolic melodrama of teenage poetry.

For a movie with a comedic premise this simple – essentially: can you believe we made a movie with a premise this simple? – Casa de Mi Padre can feel pretty exhausting.

Some of the film's limpness is due to the fact that Cage plays Will in a minor weird key as opposed to one of his major ones -- there are no fits of operatic oddness.

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.

It doesn't help that even the pratfalls in A Thousand Words look tired and recycled.

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.

This is good-for-you, arthouse-style horror. Which doesn't mean it's necessarily any good.

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.

Jennifer Westfeldt's sort-of romantic comedy Friends with Kids is on to something, even if in the end it suffers from a failure of nerve.

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 Lorax is so big, flashy and redundant that it courts precisely the kind of blind consumerism it's supposed to be condemning. It doesn't trust kids to sit still and pay attention for even a minute.

A party disaster movie targeted at kids who find the "Hangover" franchise too sophisticated.

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."

There's no doubt that Being Flynn is an attempt at something painful and genuine – the movie itself yearns to make a connection, even if it can't quite locate the most effective channels.

You really need chemical aids to be able to sit through something so unabashedly half-assed.

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.

It's the kind of movie that makes the world feel like a smaller place, suggesting that the similarities connecting us across continents and cultures are more resonant than the things that divide us.

The plot might be summed up this way: America's having a war, and everybody's invited!

Wanderlust is an agreeable comedy that peters out halfway through.

The smugness of the film grows wearying long before the end. Just because the people on and behind the camera are willing to acknowledge what we're watching is ridiculous crap doesn't really change the fact that, well, it is.

Its triumphs are bittersweet, but they're irresistible.

Bromance or romance, This Means War feels like something scrawled by enterprising teenagers who developed their concepts of love and espionage from films and TV shows they caught over a few weekends of basic cable surfing.

It's a matinee treat for the very little ones, after all.

But it's to little Benny that the film's heart belongs -- an adorable kid who seems to live only half in this world and the rest of the time in his own imagination, Benny's on a regimen of Ritalin and Lithium and other meds that sometimes leave him even dreamier than is his norm.

It's an eloquent summation of the complexities and strength of their bond, and a poetic cap to the pair's fictional and real ups and downs over two films.

By the time he's putting the entire metro area on notice -- having thrashed his father and all the local bullies -- Andrew has no camera and the metaphor has run away with the story entirely. The crazy thing is it almost works.

Doesn't turn out to be as gauzily sentimental as its beginning (or its marketing materials) suggests.

Safe House is a twisted claw of a movie, a picture so visually ugly that, to borrow a line from Moms Mabley, it hurt my feelings.

Rather than beginning with the assumption that there is no possibility of our coming to know that kind of suffering exactly and using imagination and insight to truly take us inside the Lvov Jews' plight, Holland makes the base conditions of their confinement a narrative as well as aesthetic priority. And frankly it's boring as shit.

This is the kind of sophisticated storytelling you rarely get even in live-action movies any more, full of unexpected turns and unruly human complications.

This is a family movie, after all -- but you'll have to sit through some abrasively broad, unfunny exchanges to get there. Dialogue, alas, is the kind of thing that can't be enhanced by the wearing of 3-D glasses.

The picture is celebratory, in its own quiet way, as well as clear-eyed.

The pleasures of the period ghost story The Woman in Black are something like the creepy shiver of delight you get from Edward Gorey's illustrated poem "The Gashlycrumb Tinies."

Wheatley drops enough unnerving bread crumbs in the first two-thirds to leave you wondering where the hell he's headed, and even the big finale should be satisfying enough: It just belongs to a different movie, and it's unsettling in a way that doesn't feel earned.