A satisfyingly fresh take on a character we all only thought we knew well.

Has potential to be fun and meaningful, but it's not exactly a novel idea. In fact, it feels like a literary-minded "Lars and the Real Girl," the 2007 dramatic comedy that starred Ryan Gosling as a man who falls in love with a sex doll, and which coasted along on its charm and smarts.

The result is a movie that, in its best moments, is delightful. It does lose a significant amount of steam halfway through -- likely due in part to its two hours of running time.

Age of Ultron -- for all the eye candy and mindless entertainment it has to offer -- stays safely within the franchise's established parameters. Here, there are no real surprises.

If you're a mom or dad bringing your own little primates to the movie, that's a good thing.

There's a certain triteness to the overarching message -- secrets will keep us apart, and the truth will set us free -- but the kind of sweetness and earnestness that's on display in City Island makes such quibbles easy to forgive.

Seizing the role, and the screen, Gelber actually makes us care what happens to his surly, thoroughly unlikable character.

Messages, metaphors and micturation aside, the journey is the thing, and in this case, “Sasquatch Sunset” is a pretty good journey — and thus a pretty good thing.

Some of those detours are fun ideas - like Marty's O. Henry-esque tale of the Amish psychopath. Mostly, though, they feel out of place, like so much filler that distracts from the half-developed main story. Call me crazy, but I need more from my movie.

Watching it, one gets the feeling that Coppola knows these vampiric types all too well. What unfolds feels like a cross between "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous" and "Natural Born Killers," and a film that is far more disapproving than glamorizing of the go-go-go Los Angeles lifestyle -- but fascinating nonetheless.

A small, wonderfully minimalist film that nonetheless packs an emotional wallop while delivering a beautifully heartbreaking portrait of the power of human connection.

The truth, however, is that for much of Soderbergh's film, it's all as yawn-inducing as its premise.

Spurlock banks on his charm and likability -- and it's that charm and likability that make The Greatest Movie Ever Sold so much fun to watch.

Admittedly, it won’t likely supplant 1971’s “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” in many people’s hearts as the definitive cinematic adaptation of Dahl’s “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.” Still, it is a delight in its own right, a sweet, funny, colorful and suitably wondrous burst of family-friendliness.

It's all good, goofy fun.

Visually stunning.

It's easy to forget that you're watching a sci-fi film at all. That's because it's just a shade or two from not even being a sci-fi film.

The result is a simple film -- one that doesn’t try to do too much from a story standpoint, perhaps to its detriment -- but one that has a definite sense of time and place. Every step of the way, it feels honest and genuine. In this case, that makes all the difference.

Beautifully shot, but terribly dull.

The problem is that the film must re-establish a great deal of mythology, much of which is already familiar to most moviegoers. Unfortunately, Webb's film never quite makes usshake the feeling that we've done all this before.

A very human story and a very well-told one -- which, in the end, makes it very hard to forget.

Is Premium Rush a two-wheeled "French Connection"? No, not by a long shot. (Although it does include a racing-beneath-the-el-train homage.) But when it comes to lightweight, synapse-free action fare, Premium Rush delivers.

A surprisingly embraceable courtroom drama.

Part "The Great Escape" and part "Lawrence of Arabia, " Weir's epic The Way Back is ambitious in scope, grand in vision and rich with examples of the resilience of the human spirit.

Cruise and Hoffman, who previously worked together on "Magnolia," are quite good in M:I:III. Cruise has a couple of powerfully emotional moments (neither involving Oprah Winfrey's couch or a silent birth), and Hoffman is a treat in an uncharacteristic tough-guy role. [5 May 2006, p.24]

Sommersby's admirable script, by Nicholas Meyer and Sarah Kernochan (based on a story by Meyer and Anthony Shaffer that's in turn based on "Martin Guerre"), turns what might have been merely a pretext for melodrama into a provocative exploration of the meaning of identity. [05 Feb 1993, p.L27]

The music, of course, is the engine that makes the whole exercise go, tapping into a genre-spanning collection of tunes, but every bit as important to the film's success is its unexpected humor, which flirts with raunchy but stops juuuust short of crossing any lines that would have earned it an R rating.

Mary Poppins is Mary Poppins; magic is what she does best. And magic is precisely what she delivers in a film that is -- since we're borrowing so much from the 1964 original -- nothing short of supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.