It's valuable for both the vintage footage Rostock has collected and for the observations provided by Belafonte, who is as charming, handsome and persuasive in his mid-80s as he ever was.

Prom has sweetness, nonthreatening conflict, and enough personality to distance it from the chilling anodyne of Disney's television vehicles.

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 vehicle may get a little jacked up along the way, but its passenger arrives in style: The kid's a star.

If you're like me, and you find yourself retreating to a safe place in your mind whenever human beings are being graphically decapitated on screen, you'll spend the majority of Centurion, horror maestro (The Descent) Neil Marshall's Roman bloodbath, on psychological lockdown.

Well-paced, well-performed and full of visual wows, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader bobbles a hectic story by stopping just short of committing to its grounding themes. Its hardly sacrilege, but it does seem like a shame.

A well-heeled French assassin chick who murders in exchange for diamonds? So '90s-era rejected Bond script, guys.

It's an amusing enough story, all right, and it adequately fills up Tabloid's 88 minutes - but a minute longer would have been too much.

Bichir - who played Fidel Castro in "Che" - resists the pathetic impulse, bringing dignity and distinction to a man who wakes up every morning knowing it's not just his burden but his job to be invisible.

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.

At times Jonah Hex carries whispery echoes of The Searchers and Sam Peckinpah.

The picture is so fluttering and tender, so guileless, that you almost can't believe it was made by an old hand like Van Sant. Then again, maybe you can.

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.

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

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

The funniest bits in the movie are, by and large, the small, offhanded gags stuffed into the corners.

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.

This is a film that transcends "good" or "bad," "like" or "don't like."

Genial and mild, The Big Year doesn't give in to the temptation to juice up its story with outsized caricatures or inflated dramas.

As it is, The Devil's Double, a handsome and occasionally dazzling thriller with at least one dynamo performance from its star, is ultimately dominated by its style.

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.

Cold Weather is partly a movie with an actual plot, not just a portrait of young twentysomethings adrift in unfulfilling circumstances.

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.

Though the movie is largely vanilla in its pleasures, film lovers will eat it up.

A small movie with modest ambitions, and accordingly, it packs only a modest emotional punch.

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.

Weir's artisan's sureness grants a bewitching calm - his trademark ambience - to this harrowing tale.

Tykwer is a director known for his visual inventiveness and style, and 3 has its imaginative moments, though they sometimes seem like attempts to goose up what's actually a fairly talky, cerebral drama.