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.

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.

Beat by beat, Jack Reacher is just like Child's paperbacks in the best possible way: it's fast, fun, and smarter than it looks.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

Alex Cross is filled with accidental comedy, and while it's a mess in any traditional movie sense, it's has its moments of preposterous fun that come in the form of a nonsensical plot and a fabulously competent, scenery-gnawing villain.

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.

The first half hour of Here Comes the Boom is so good moviegoers might be fooled into expecting something better than an obvious wish fulfillment fantasy so patently implausible it's almost insulting.

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.

Taken 2 grabs everything that was surprisingly enjoyable about the original film and batters it into the ground.

The Paperboy is a nutty movie in terms of content, but it's also assembled in a demented fashion - there's a sense that literally anything could happen, and that its raunchy, heat-dazed story could wander down any path without regard to sense or an overall narrative.

The film is all for teaching as a calling. What it doesn't do is offer it the dignity of also being a job.

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.

In the least, and most significantly, Day of Reckoning should propel British martial artist/stunt veteran Adkins out of the niche genre world - action cinema's Adkins diet?

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

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.

It's the closest thing you'll find yet to a recreation of a video game sensibility on the big screen - which is in line with the franchise's source material - and makes for a memorably unsettling if not particularly satisfying viewing experience.

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

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.

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

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

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.

With the out-of-nowhere success of 2016: Obama's America, the nation could finally have a conservative counterpart to Michael Moore. I say the nation rather than the Republicans, because a balanced box office is good for us all, at least as a reminder of our right to oppose the current government and make a profit in doing so.

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."

An incomprehensibly garbled, derivative attempt at a horror flick from first-time writer-director Todd Lincoln.

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

One senses that the movie doesn't quite have the chutzpah to be what it wants to be - a "Fast and Furious"-like sequence of balletic car chases - so it periodically halts to wedge in some romance.

It isn't a movie - it's more like the world's most expensive, elaborate viral video, making a detour to the big screen before being broken up into more easily consumable segments to be consumed on YouTube.

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.

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.

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

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.

The two films have the same underlying bone structure, sure, but this new Total Recall is made of more serious, more humorless stuff. It looks simultaneously lavish and interchangeable in its explosions and shoot-em-ups with a dozen other recent action movies, and in its sci-fi stylings with a dozen others in the genre.

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.

It's not that The Watch is terrible – it's not not terrible, but there are sufficient diversions and more punitive ways to spend your evening – but that it's one of those smoke bomb comedies that seems to disappear even while you're watching, leaving no trace of itself behind.

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.

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.

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.

The picture coasts along quite nicely on the strength of its contemplative sensuality, its macaron colors, and the exquisite beauty of its three chief actresses, Léa Seydoux, Virginie Ledoyen and Diane Kruger. Oh, and there's nudity in it too, not to mention lesbian undertones – or are they overtones?

A sugary jumble of goofy voices, hyperkinetic action scenes and rote plot elements that rolls forward just enough to get us to the de rigueur pop song that plays over the closing credits.

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

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.

As sticky-sweet and textureless as a bowl of pudding, though an amused central performance from star Morgan Freeman continually finds nuance and the unexpected where there ultimately isn't any.

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

Stone's moralism, coupled with discreet but bloody beatings, shootouts and all manner of tawdry goings on, rings hollow. The picture is neither entertaining nor preachy – it is simply very loudly meh.

Crazy Eyes is the third directorial effort from Adam Sherman, and is, like his 2010 "Happiness Runs," based on his own personal experiences, suggesting he either has a staggering sense of self-laceration or a just as noteworthy lack of awareness about audience empathy.

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

The latest from brothers Mark and Jay Duplass (who co-wrote and directed) seems to expose the limits of a certain kind of realism by stretching them one man-child too far.

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.

With Tyler Perry gradually segueing toward non-drag leading man status with "Good Deeds" and the upcoming James Patterson thriller "Alex Cross," his latest appearance as the sassy, wisdom-dispensing matriarch of the title in Madea's Witness Protection has an aura of fatigued reluctance to it, as does the film itself.

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

It doesn't take long for Bekmambetov to wear out his welcome with a laundry list of generic-looking action sequences: When you've seen one vampire get stabbed in the eyeball, you've seen 'em all.

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.

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

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

I was with the movie every step of the way, right until the final credits began rolling – at which point I realized that the whole thing made no sense whatsoever, and that none of my nagging questions about what the hell was going on would ever be answered. There's a distinction to be made between being a dupe and being had.

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.

No matter how much good-hearted licentiousness follows in the rest of the movie, the opening sequence brings a unshakable sourness to the whole affair.

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.

None of it quite works, but it seems Beresford did his damnedest to try to pull it off.

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.

"Piranha 3D" was ridiculous, gory and fun, everything Piranha 3DD is not.

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.