The casting of Jespersen, with his sub-Wookie intonations and granite stare, is key: If this pillar of masculinity says there be trolls, I don't have to be bitten by one to believe it.

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

One thing My Week with Marilyn does get right is that women were as enchanted by her as the men were, if perhaps in a different way.

Furman keeps the drama taut when it needs to be, and loosens the reins easily when it's time to kick back - he has good control over the movie's rhythms.

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.

Minor but still quite enjoyable. And like other minor Woody Allen pictures it becomes more interesting when placed in their larger context.

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.

Everything in The Adventures of Tintin is meticulous - this is a Steven Spielberg movie, after all.

To paraphrase something Quentin Tarantino once said about Sergio Corbucci, Verbinski loves the uglies. They return the favor by looking almost beautiful.

It's the kind of movie whose value lies between the lines, not directly on them, and if the pleasures it offers are slender ones, at least there's something good-hearted about them.

Built for speed, and for an action-savvy audience who can appreciate a throwaway vengeance flick for exactly what it is.

So while X-Men: First Class at first takes its source material with just the right amount of self-deprecating seriousness, it founders in the second half, when it becomes overburdened with squirrelly plot mechanics and an excess of self-evident dialogue.

While Wesley is both too good to be true and an absence of a charisma on screen, Good Deeds is very fair to its two main female characters even as they're both entangled with the same man.

As in "Country Strong," Meester's crack timing and irresistible poignancy illuminate a part that would leave other actresses simpering themselves off the screen.

If only the director had learned Mr. Han’s most important lesson: Being still and doing nothing are two very different things.

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

Probably not as good as you hoped or as bad as you feared.

Garcia, despite creating yet another vibrant canvas for his actors, deflects the burden of this toughest and most modern of familial conundrums, offering instead the bland, regressive ideal of motherhood as not only redemptive but required.

Barney's Version is too much of a sprawl to have much of a lasting emotional effect.

The Five-Year Engagement is, for a movie in which a guy fakes an orgasm and (in a separate incident) stuffs a dead deer in his car's sunroof, very grown-up.

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.

8 is most coherent as a chilling confirmation of both the mind-warping power of an institution like the Mormon Church and the extent to which politics is, above all, a marketing game.

The problem is that just as we’re getting to know these characters as people, the movie pulls a veil over them: It loses its nerve and mutates into an only mildly compelling crime drama, albeit one whose protagonist is maybe more tortured than usual.

In its most tiresome moments, Noodle Shop overestimates the wit of its formal exertions, and feels less like a film than an exercise that will leave fans of the original comparatively cold.

The film's bleak conclusion becomes unbearable in context: Hypatia's death also signals the end of women in positions of intellectual prominence and the beginning of a period known -- not coincidentally -- as the Dark Ages.

Bay doesn't care about your soul, he just wants your money - but he at least makes sure you go home feeling exhausted and spent rather than vaguely dissatisfied. It's a fair exchange.

Amid the macho poses and reloading of his unbelievably enormous weapon, I was distracted by the notion of Brody’s participation as a kind of privately satisfying performance art (a similar impulse found James Franco doing a guest stint on "General Hospital").

Despite this provocative introduction Love Crime isn't some Sapphic French answer to "Disclosure."