Spirit counts for something too, and John Carter has plenty of that, in addition to the requisite dashes of wit.

Ifans takes dorky, grandiose dialogue and turns it into something almost - well, Shakespearean.

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.

Ultimately the movie ridicules the culture that compels what Cedric the Entertainer calls grown-ass men to dress up like comic-book characters, as well as the Christian attempts to co-opt that culture.

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

Aside from the showy, overwrought credits sequence, it's silly and self-conscious and still scary as hell.

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.

It's a film that should be appallingly twee, but more often than not is actually scruffy and sweet, thanks to a nicely underplayed turn by Chandler Canterbury as the kid, Kelsey, and the chemistry between Jason Ritter and Jake Sandvig as hipster grifters Ben and Alan.

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

Smith isn't up to doing anything other than setting up caricatures and then knocking them down.

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.

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

The picture is rambunctiously affectionate; Guiterrez may go for the broad joke, but never the cheap one.

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

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.

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.

Redgrave puts all she’s got into something other actors might just toss off or throw away. She’s present every moment; this is an actress who doesn’t have a second to waste.

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.

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.

It deserves to be seen on a hot Saturday afternoon in a theater (preferably an air-conditioned one) peopled with other people, the way many of us used to see movies as kids.

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

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.

An ungodly mess that's great fun to look at for about 15 minutes and exhausting the rest of the time.

There are some body-horror gross-outs if you're into that sort of thing, but mostly what you get are a bunch of too-obvious leftovers from the "Alien" stockroom, including a selection of moist innards, slimy tendons, dripping fangs and the like.

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.

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.

Moretz brings some natural gravity to a role that hasn't been adequately fleshed out.

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.