The picture is well-crafted; it just doesn't breathe.

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.

Divided into three chapters in a largely unsuccessful attempt at structure, the voice and the style don't combine as explosively as they should to pick up the material's slack.

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.

Loose, flinty, and a little in love with itself, Perrier’s Bounty struts the fine line of self-consciousness drawn by neo-gangster capers like "The Usual Suspects," "In Bruges" and "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels."

The whole enterprise is surprisingly painless, albeit in an icy-cool, numbed-out way.

Without a strong story to dance with, all of those fabulous tracking shots, lovingly uncanny art direction details and flickering shafts of light can make The Innkeepers feel more like an exercise in craft than a scary movie.

Wait a second, is this a horror movie or an episode of The Hills?

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.

Timoner attempts - with talking heads, travelogues, and a little alarmist flair of her own - to articulate Lomborg's central idea that not doing enough good might be the same as doing harm.

It's that mean edge to Killing Bono's storytelling, none of it directed at the famous figure of the title, that makes it more than the film equivalent of someone's prize bar anecdote about the celebrity he knew (and could have been - nay, should have been) back in the day.

Too often the story feels like it's being mined for recycled beats.

Nothing says "Awards Season" like feel-bad cinema, and with Biutiful, Iñárritu hauls out the big guns. He also, maddeningly, has one hell of a weapon in his star, Javier Bardem.

The glorious mess that is Pat's family and community is the warmest, funniest aspect of Silver Linings Playbook.

This variation on the demon child subgenre has enough of the familiar and the new to be a decently good time at the movies.

I salute the effort to go somewhere strange in Mars Needs Moms; if only a fully realized idea - and not the same, barely concealed right-wing rap, different planet - had been the destination.

Radnor is an overprotective first-time director, and the final effect is like watching a film with elbow pads, a helmet and training wheels.

It's a low-blood-pressure version of the kind of thing James M. Cain used to do in his sleep, and its filmmaking accomplishment is as minimalist as its narrative ambition is minimal.

When the recessive style works with the characters and the kooky international-incident story, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen has an absorbing, old-fashioned sweetness.

Because of the movie's episodic structure and lack of expository detail, the visuals bear the greatest narrative burden.

It's still an obligingly tense, scruffy addition to the one-last-crime genre.

The result is more fancy than funky, but the directors' aim is true and occasionally hits its mark.

Scene by scene The Hunter, adapted from a novel by Julia Leigh, holds your attention like a pair of big, inquisitive eyes, or perhaps the point-blank scope of an automatic rifle.

It wouldn't go so far as to say it feels like you went through Jeremy's ordeal for nothing, but I did wish I had come to know as much about Dorff's character as I did about the size and shape of his nostrils.

To the Arctic uses spoonfuls of cuteness - featuring walruses and caribou, though polar bears are its primary animal stars - to make its fairly grim environmental message go down a little easier.

There is enough lurid, ludicrous subtext in the material to keep fans of such things happy. As trash, this is top of the line.

Foster's performance is crisp and forthright and surprisingly moving. There's something affecting about watching this disciplined, no-nonsense actress deliver her lines to a hand puppet - she's always game, if not exactly relaxed.

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