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.

Even if Dolphin Tale hits every note square on the nose - or maybe because it does - watching it is surprisingly pleasurable.

Dark to a specific point of dullness or even opacity, Solondz requires patience, as always, but indulgence as well. He relies on your remembrance of his other films and characters but also on your willingness to overlook his redeployment of tactics that range from puerile to mildly -- and somehow always self-skeptically -- profound.

Aside from his usual bold color schemes, Almodóvar has managed a remarkably restrained telling of what's in essence a sci-fi psychosexual melodrama set in the very near future of 2012 Toledo.

Sleeping Beauty is best experienced as a piece of fragmented poetry rather than a strict ideological tract.

Those of us who love Michael Caine have to recognize that his capacity for coldness is part of what makes him great. And in that respect, what he does in Harry Brown is something of a bookend to his extraordinary, and extraordinarily chilly, turn in Mike Hodges' cold-blooded 1971 Get Carter.

This picture belongs to Jason Bateman, who, after years of playing the second or third banana (and plenty of times being the best thing in a given film), finally gets to show off his considerable gifts as the co-lead in a mainstream comedy.

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.

The picture could be so much better than it is, and yet it's also the kind of movie that makes you want to grade on the curve, adding extra points for good intentions.

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.

The plot is worked out with care, and it takes its time, unapologetically, in a manner that's perfectly suited to thinking adults. The whole enterprise reeks of class.

It's all sweet and very, very silly. I was surprised by the subtleties - both comedic and thematic.

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.

It's painful to watch a movie like Dream House - well-acted, beautifully shot and directed with extraordinary care and attention to craft - only to realize that the story, the alleged backbone, is absurd.

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.

The very woozy nature of the story itself works.

Physically Watts is of course a decent match for the even more aggressively glamorous Plame; in spirit, it would seem, they are even closer. In the field Plame was first and foremost an actress, a pretender whose belief in her pretending was often of mortal consequence.

Puss in Boots doesn't have and doesn't strive for the soul of a Pixar film, but gets pleasure enough out of its own characters and the way they move through this cleverly realized world.

Scenic, inventively playful, and successfully serious when it wants to be.

Is it entertainment? Is it satire? Is it art? It's probably a little of all three, and yet ultimately not quite enough of any.

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

The love Segel has for the Muppets is a genuine, perceivable and positive quality that suffuses this good-hearted revitalization of the franchise, and if some wish fulfillment sneaks in there too.

Country Strong rides pretty high in the saddle, confident in the remarkably realized world Feste has created for her characters.

Waiting For Superman may rub a little raw here and there, but if it stirs that memory in enough voting and tax-paying Americans, it has at least begun to do its job.

The roots of romantic feeling, as explored in Wild Grass, Alain Resnais's jazzy ode to cinema and the love impulse in later life, are equally, spectacularly random.

Because Animal Kingdom is so richly suffused with atmosphere and style, you could almost float right past the deficiencies in its story in an admiring trance.

Burns handles the more dramatic moments - divorce, accidental death, betrayal - with invention, using abrupt cuts and impressionistic editing to keep the film from settling into a rut.

The economics of star casting aside, what would Take Shelter have been like with James McAvoy or Mark Wahlberg or Jake Gyllenhaal at its center?

The result is a shaggy rise-and-fall story that is deceptively well-wrought, playing at times like an extremely hip, deep-access concert film.

Even the gags we've all seen before are handled so deftly you almost forget how ancient they are.

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

The picture's finale isn't as smart as it ought to be. Cornish tries to make a damning social statement, but the only thing you take away from the movie is how cool it is to kick alien ass.

Naranjo keeps the action tense but understated; instead of allowing explosions and shootouts to pile up, he rations them in taut doses.

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.

It's either genius or madness to put Diesel and Johnson in the same movie, or the same scene. They're both enormously appealing performers.

The result is like a sugar rush after a visit to the vintage candy store.

There's even a shootout sequence that plays out, from start to finish, while our hero is in flagrante. That's something I don't believe I've ever seen in a movie.

Sometimes, maybe, it's a little too unoffensive: It's Kind of a Funny Story is so gentle, so anxious not to put a foot wrong, that it doesn't have much sticking power. But its casually compassionate perspective is also what makes it work.

Although this is a film about the influential women in Lennon's life, it succeeds equally in its evocation of the family Lennon built among his boyhood mates.

As Gibney and Spitzer are at pains to point out, it's a story as old as Icarus: Man rises to power; man makes enemies; man gets greedy and is undone.

The casting of Jespersen, with his sub-Wookie intonations and granite stare, is key: If this pillar of masculinity says there be trolls, I don't have to be bitten by one to believe it.

Eat Pray Love works quite serviceably as a light comedy and a pleasing travelogue.

One thing My Week with Marilyn does get right is that women were as enchanted by her as the men were, if perhaps in a different way.

Furman keeps the drama taut when it needs to be, and loosens the reins easily when it's time to kick back - he has good control over the movie's rhythms.

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.

Minor but still quite enjoyable. And like other minor Woody Allen pictures it becomes more interesting when placed in their larger context.

These are all people you feel you've met before in other movies, if not all at once. But the movie's saving grace is that they don't always behave as you expect them to.

Everything in The Adventures of Tintin is meticulous - this is a Steven Spielberg movie, after all.

To paraphrase something Quentin Tarantino once said about Sergio Corbucci, Verbinski loves the uglies. They return the favor by looking almost beautiful.

It's the kind of movie whose value lies between the lines, not directly on them, and if the pleasures it offers are slender ones, at least there's something good-hearted about them.

Built for speed, and for an action-savvy audience who can appreciate a throwaway vengeance flick for exactly what it is.

So while X-Men: First Class at first takes its source material with just the right amount of self-deprecating seriousness, it founders in the second half, when it becomes overburdened with squirrelly plot mechanics and an excess of self-evident dialogue.

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.

As in "Country Strong," Meester's crack timing and irresistible poignancy illuminate a part that would leave other actresses simpering themselves off the screen.

If only the director had learned Mr. Han’s most important lesson: Being still and doing nothing are two very different things.

Aside from having murder on their minds, these three are a lot more well-behaved than the "Hangover" guys.

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

Garcia, despite creating yet another vibrant canvas for his actors, deflects the burden of this toughest and most modern of familial conundrums, offering instead the bland, regressive ideal of motherhood as not only redemptive but required.

Barney's Version is too much of a sprawl to have much of a lasting emotional effect.

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.

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.

8 is most coherent as a chilling confirmation of both the mind-warping power of an institution like the Mormon Church and the extent to which politics is, above all, a marketing game.

The problem is that just as we’re getting to know these characters as people, the movie pulls a veil over them: It loses its nerve and mutates into an only mildly compelling crime drama, albeit one whose protagonist is maybe more tortured than usual.

In its most tiresome moments, Noodle Shop overestimates the wit of its formal exertions, and feels less like a film than an exercise that will leave fans of the original comparatively cold.

The film's bleak conclusion becomes unbearable in context: Hypatia's death also signals the end of women in positions of intellectual prominence and the beginning of a period known -- not coincidentally -- as the Dark Ages.

Bay doesn't care about your soul, he just wants your money - but he at least makes sure you go home feeling exhausted and spent rather than vaguely dissatisfied. It's a fair exchange.

Amid the macho poses and reloading of his unbelievably enormous weapon, I was distracted by the notion of Brody’s participation as a kind of privately satisfying performance art (a similar impulse found James Franco doing a guest stint on "General Hospital").

Despite this provocative introduction Love Crime isn't some Sapphic French answer to "Disclosure."

The story had great optics but not a lot of action, I suppose, though as a child who walked around in towel-fashioned headdresses to simulate the long hair my mother wouldn't let me have, Rapunzel's was the story I longed to thrill to on the big screen.

Thus ends one of the most understated shark-attack sequences, ever; it's almost Bressonian, except it's not boring.

The picture is well-crafted; it just doesn't breathe.

It's all just too cute for words, and more's the pity. Because in the end, No Strings Attached is more meaningful for what it does rather than for what it says along the way.

Divided into three chapters in a largely unsuccessful attempt at structure, the voice and the style don't combine as explosively as they should to pick up the material's slack.

It goes through all the motions, properly and efficiently, and yet it's missing some core warmth. Watching Real Steel, I kept thinking of Brad Bird's retro-modern cartoon "The Iron Giant," and of how that picture humanized a metal alien so effortlessly.

Loose, flinty, and a little in love with itself, Perrier’s Bounty struts the fine line of self-consciousness drawn by neo-gangster capers like "The Usual Suspects," "In Bruges" and "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels."

The whole enterprise is surprisingly painless, albeit in an icy-cool, numbed-out way.

Without a strong story to dance with, all of those fabulous tracking shots, lovingly uncanny art direction details and flickering shafts of light can make The Innkeepers feel more like an exercise in craft than a scary movie.

Wait a second, is this a horror movie or an episode of The Hills?

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.

Timoner attempts - with talking heads, travelogues, and a little alarmist flair of her own - to articulate Lomborg's central idea that not doing enough good might be the same as doing harm.

It's that mean edge to Killing Bono's storytelling, none of it directed at the famous figure of the title, that makes it more than the film equivalent of someone's prize bar anecdote about the celebrity he knew (and could have been - nay, should have been) back in the day.

Too often the story feels like it's being mined for recycled beats.

Nothing says "Awards Season" like feel-bad cinema, and with Biutiful, Iñárritu hauls out the big guns. He also, maddeningly, has one hell of a weapon in his star, Javier Bardem.

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

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

I salute the effort to go somewhere strange in Mars Needs Moms; if only a fully realized idea - and not the same, barely concealed right-wing rap, different planet - had been the destination.

Radnor is an overprotective first-time director, and the final effect is like watching a film with elbow pads, a helmet and training wheels.

It's a low-blood-pressure version of the kind of thing James M. Cain used to do in his sleep, and its filmmaking accomplishment is as minimalist as its narrative ambition is minimal.

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.

Because of the movie's episodic structure and lack of expository detail, the visuals bear the greatest narrative burden.

It's still an obligingly tense, scruffy addition to the one-last-crime genre.

The result is more fancy than funky, but the directors' aim is true and occasionally hits its mark.

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.

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.

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.

There is enough lurid, ludicrous subtext in the material to keep fans of such things happy. As trash, this is top of the line.

Foster's performance is crisp and forthright and surprisingly moving. There's something affecting about watching this disciplined, no-nonsense actress deliver her lines to a hand puppet - she's always game, if not exactly relaxed.

In the Land of Blood and Honey is gratifyingly short on lectures and, interestingly, on history lessons.