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.

Inter-chimp and territorial fighting are facts of nature, but the extreme anthropomorphism of Chimpanzee makes what is natural feel bizarre.

The big problem with Iron Man 2, maybe, is that it so dutifully gives the people what they want, instead of giving them what they didn’t know they wanted.

Gallenberger tells Rabe’s story deftly, establishing essential elements of the man’s personality in subtle shorthand.

The plot of Cars 2 is both overly convoluted and thin, and it folds in so much unvarnished toddler-instruction that it almost feels like an educational film.

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?

Where Joffe purposely departs from "Brighton Rock" deprives his movie of the book's most revelatory element: Faith. Gorgeous, ambitious and daring as it often is, Brighton Rock has no soul.

Breezy and enjoyable.

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

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

Leaving is a bit too dry and controlled, as well as too relentlessly bleak, to be a satisfying melodrama.

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

But at the risk of overintellectualizing what probably is, at heart, just a bunch of overgrown guys acting out, I will venture that many of the gags in Jackass 3D show plenty of visual wit, if not brilliance.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Has just enough genuine warmth to compensate for the coolness you might feel toward its generic trappings.

That's eventually what Unknown is - violent, impersonal and comforting.

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's hard to know how much of what's wrong with Hereafter stems from Morgan's screenplay, which lacks the characteristic tartness (and brains) of other movies he's written, like "The Queen" and "Frost/Nixon."

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.

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.

The Extra Man is something of a love letter to the marvelous weirdos of New York.

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.

What he's missing in The Eagle is that spark of the insane - the slightly lunatic fever that makes us unable to keep our eyes off him (Channing Tatum).

As is often the peril with movies of giant ambition, Cloud Atlas walks a crooked line between the glorious and the ridiculous.