Fiennes works hard to keep the rhythm going: He stages hand-to-hand combat sequences and knife fights as if he were making a smart action movie, not adapting Shakespeare, which is precisely the point.

More helpful is Ice Cube's endearing performance as an aged sparring partner of Leon Spinks and Muhammad Ali who provides cover and advice for Kevin as he tries to hold onto both his wits and the ticket.

Perry weaves together not just the individual stories but their arcs, sustaining the emotional tenor across the progress of nine lives.

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

Turteltaub strives to show us realistic-looking magic, without realizing he'd be better off if he acknowledged that there's no such thing. Instead, we get human figures that emerge "magically" from swarms of cockroaches and sorceresses who dissolve into dust particles right before our eyes. It's the best CGI money can buy, and who cares?

Best in show is the final chapter, by "Jesus Camp" directors Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing. "Can A Ninth Grader Be Bribed To Succeed?" is as straightforward a title as the others are oblique.

The problem isn't just that the gags feel airless and pointless; it's that the performers - many of whom have done wonderful work in other settings - seem more bent on pleasing each other than on entertaining us.

The point of Babies, to the extent that it has one beyond allowing us to revel in unstoppable baby cuteness, is to underscore that infants everywhere are more similar than they are different, regardless of what country they’re born and raised in.

Tries too hard and ultimately achieves less. It's undone by its own inferiority complex.

Despite an admirable mastery of both Russian and French, Mikkelsen has no shot at making a proud (Russian!) musical genius a believably lovesick puppy.

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.

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.

Rao's ultimate achievements - including a balanced, doleful tone and moments of city symphony elegance - are undercut by the arrangement of her characters into narrative castes that cross paths but can't quite connect.

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.

There's a lot that works in Heartbeats - so much that its flaws stand out in disappointingly sharp relief.

What’s remarkable about Looking for Eric is the number of ways in which it ALMOST works.

The Tree of Life is gorgeous to look at. It's also a gargantuan work of pretension and cleverly concealed self-absorption masquerading as spiritual exploration.

If nothing else, Rio is unabashedly jubilant.

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.

Between the Truffautish voice-overs and Jacques Demy-style musical interludes, it's a wonder anyone in this sort-of drama, sort-of comedy ever gets any rest.

As Mr. Albert Nobbs, Close wears a discreetly waved cap of cropped ginger hair and the bright, blank expression of a small animal caught mid-nibble.

Bridesmaids is the Bride of Frankenstein of contemporary comedies, a movie stitched together crudely, and only semi-successfully, from random chick flick and bromance parts.

We Need to Talk About Kevin is a little too facile in the way it sets up the horrific climax: Just one look at this kid and you know he's trouble, yet no one besides mom can see it.

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.

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.

Del Toro loves his creatures. Maybe he loves them too much: He always wants us to get a good look at them, and that's one of the things that saps the spookiness from this Don't Be Afraid of the Dark.

Sometimes funny, sometimes shrill and wildly uneven, Bachelorette demonstrates film and television's continuing struggle to provide a platform for funny women in the realms of R-rated comedy and the tug-of-war between the desire to push boundaries and fears about likability.

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

Is it a coincidence that classic action is making its comeback at the same time Schwarzenegger is making his own? Hey, he warned us he'd be back.

Completely harmless and inoffensive, and at the very least, Shyamalan appears to be having a little fun here.

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.

Straining for a timeless, family-friendly tone, Allen winds up with something closer to an unironically -- i.e. absurdly -- wholesome rehash of "Leave it to Beaver."

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.

It's hard to tell what Wild Target is offering, besides the pleasure of its company.

The film presents the rare instance of a true story that has been fictionalized and yet seems bent on cleaving to its least useful facts.

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.

A well-intentioned, pleasant-enough picture that shoots off in too many directions to ever ignite.

In the end Red Tails is mostly about the coolness of flying. Its heart is in the clouds, instead of with the men at the controls.

Though the film concerns events contained within the roughly 50 square blocks of the East Village, it suffers from the narrative equivalent of urban sprawl.

In the end, the action sequences are just overblown and dollar-squandering, with no particular payoff in the entertainment department. The supporting actors - particularly Jones, Tucci and Luke - are the thing to watch here; they do all they can to keep the movie's gears running smoothly.

Despite this new expansion in scale, Immortals lacks the inexorable forward momentum of its role model "300," as well as that movie's audacious, gleeful fascism and oblivious, accidental homoeroticism.

Though the picture is lovingly and often quite strikingly shot and styled, there are too many dangling and swiftly clipped threads for the film to amount to more than another tasteful Sunday matinee set against one of the worst atrocities of the 20th century.

Unfortunately, Silver's movie doesn't cut deep enough: It glosses over some thorny questions and hammers too fixedly on others.

It's imaginative only in a stiff, expensive way. Scott vests the movie with an admirable degree of integrity – it doesn't feel like a cheap grab for our moviegoing dollars – but it doesn't inspire anything so vital as wonder or fear, either.

Kári relies too heavily on the fleeting rewards of situation for the film to come together as an involving story.

The scenes between the young actresses are the film's most compelling: Both first-timers, Manamela and Makanyane are possessed of extraordinary faces and plain attitudes.

Johnny English Reborn never quite ignites, even though it starts out promisingly enough.

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.

Despite its tai chi pace and genre-friendly characters, it's almost impossible to tell what's happening in the intriguing, intractable Road to Nowhere.

There's an enchanting, and very Western, musicality in Certified Copy, a mash-up that charms; Mad Decent - master masher, dj and producer Diplo's label - aptly describes it. (Diplo and Buñuel would've loved each other).

It's difficult to get a firm grip on most of what Disco and Atomic War, constructed in a mish-mash collage style, has to offer.

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.

Why can't heroines just be heroines anymore, instead of micromanaged personalities who may as well have the words "Role Model" tattooed across their foreheads?

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

The animation itself is technically gorgeous, a class act all the way. But there's so little to be found in the faces of the characters, or even in the way their limbs move (much of it adopted, cleverly enough, from Tati's own physical style), that it's not clear what we're supposed to feel for them.

It's a slender story of mourning that manages some lovely bits of mood while also being dreary and a little preposterous in its spareness.

Robin Williams, who's sometimes too overbearing in real-life live action, makes a great cartoon-character voice.

Had the movie been made with two different lead actors, I surely believe the movie would have been unwatchable.

Ferrell and Galifianakis both do what they've proven they can do so well in the past, while McDermott, clad in all black, is surprisingly good in a comedic role.

Like the Inuit and their many words for "snow," Jake has a thousand squinty faces and they all mean "Bugger off."

Takes forever to get going and then goes nowhere.

Peepli Live opens out slowly to encompass several factions of Indian society, including the press, local, state, and federal politicians, and the shady elements binding them all together. It's a meticulously engineered design that a show like The Wire took several years to execute; here the strain shows within the first half hour.

The film's feel-good message is undermined by its ultimate purpose: As a vindication of the rights of Jewish mothers to annoy their children as much as they please.

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.

So it's too bad 10 Years isn't, you know, funny.

The degree to which they are willing to share their bodies with the world, seeming to reach out for it with each impossible extension, drawing it in with every reeling arabesque, suggests a desire for engagement that is visceral, human, and true in all the ways this film is not.

While it's not quite enough to fuel a whole feature, the premise of Tucker & Dale vs Evil is a slice of meta-genre brilliance.

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.

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.

You can't help but feel that the ambition of Henry's Crime was determined by the near anonymity of its title - the movie seems to be ensconcing itself into the Witness Relocation Program.

Hickenlooper too often approaches his subject with the filmmaking equivalent of a wry chuckle.

Bella's an empowered badass in this last installment, wielding newborn strength while showing unusual self-control and learning to use her new abilities - and that's why things feel off.

The film also comes across like a rough cut that was never looked at as a coherent whole, and some segments that start off as promising become interminable while others feel entirely unnecessary. There's no pressure on or expectation for Tarantino to please anyone other than himself, and the film feels overstuffed with ideas that should have been pruned.

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.

Even at a generous running time that matches this season's other giant award candidates, Les Misérables seems like it's in a hurry, skittering from one number to the next without interlude. After Hathaway's early high point, it starts to feel numbing, an unending barrage of musical emoting carrying us through Valjean's adopting of Cosette, the latter's first encounter with Marius, the battle at the barricade and a last hour that can feel like it's a non-stop series of death arias.

It goes down like a canned but genial '80s comedy: Without fanfare or much nutrition; part of your balanced breakfast.

While Survival of the Dead does its best to work up a decent allegorical bent -- this time involving territorial pissing matches within a country under siege -- its power is diffused (and frankly, confused) by its execution.

Getting a movie's setup right is one thing. But following through on an intriguing premise is the hard part, and that's where Matthew Chapman's The Ledge, a thriller that wrangles with intricate ideas about faith and religious extremism, goes splat.

Despite these two actors' decent - and occasionally very charming - performances the film stacks the odds of the audience caring about Heigl and Duhamel against a narrative vacuum that favors eye candy and cheap effect over emotional logic.

Gere does his best to give Arbitrage an agitated energy, but Jarecki's fatalism works against the film.

Step Up Revolution is also not a movie you watch for its incredible story and dialogue. The film doesn't even share much connective tissue with its predecessors save for an appearance from Adam Sevani as Moose.

The Debt shortchanges itself severely with the weight it gives the portion of its story set further in the past.

The story of Pi and Richard Parker already has the clean simplicity of a myth and really doesn't require significant elaboration, but following in the footsteps of the source material, the film provides elaboration anyway, demonstrating a condescension to the audience that dulls the spectacle it punctuates.

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.

The divide between Tatum as performer and Tatum as actor gives the film an interesting unsteadiness.

Based on a true story which director Marco Amenta explored 12 years ago in documentary form, The Sicilian Girl feels powered by unfocused preoccupation, rather than by a more compelling creative ambition.

Mirren tricked out in mid-70's pimp wear -- ahead of her time, she even brandishes a cane -- has a certain charm, but novelty alone can't keep Love Ranch's tiresome tropes and plodding storyline from dragging the film down through the Nevada dust.

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.

Combines a deviously tragicomic take on the approaching annihilation of mankind with a irritatingly unconvincing and unnecessary love story.

A concerted effort to make a scary movie without spilling a drop of blood, Insidious is earnest to the point of suffocation about scaring you silly.

Designed to be both essential history lesson and costume weeper, Princess Kaiulani comes up short on both fronts: Deadly earnest intentions and lack of dramatic gumption ensure that the story of Hawaii’s favored daughter remains under-told.

Despite heavy-handed characterizations, Devine and Bassett make their stake in the union felt, and it's anything but superficial.

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!

Disappointingly ordinary film.

Unfortunately, outside of the proxy satisfaction it will give those who are dying to see the grim reaper let loose on the set of a very special episode of "Glee," the pleasures of Don't Go in the Woods can't quite compensate for its straggly bits.

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.

Trouble With The Curve is an ode to the old ways of doing things, both in terms of acting and baseball.

The movie muddles to a rug-pulling ending that doesn't, despite its efforts, shed new light on what's come before.