With an emotional depth roughly equivalent to that of his lacrosse stick...

With great power comes the responsibility to make a decent movie, but the mysterious force running through Chronicle is the power to supersuck.

Completely lacking in imagination and purpose, this vanity project might suffice as a home movie, but it's hardly worth the expense and bother of seeing it in a theater.

Return comes briefly to life when John Slattery of "Mad Men'' turns up as an acerbic yet sympathetic reclusive drunk whom Kelli meets during court-mandated rehab. But it's not enough for a film that limps along to a pretty much preordained climax.

A sumptuous masterpiece by one of the greatest moviemakers of all time.

Yunus would seem to be a prime candidate for a movie about his work. Unfortunately, director Holly Mosher's by-the-numbers documentary Bonsai People isn't the answer.

How cheap-looking is the modern-day romantic tragedy Private Romeo? Take a couple of friends to see it, and the amount you spend may exceed the amount the filmmakers did.

With cheesy-looking effects including a ride on the backs of giant bees and dubious literary references, Journey 2: The Mysterious Island comes dangerously close to giving books, never mind 3-D, a bad name.

Chico and Rita beguiles first and foremost as a bebop romance that evokes a bygone era as well as, or maybe even better than, "The Artist."

Safe House may strike you as a brilliant movie, provided you've seen fewer than, say, 10 spy thrillers.

These two stars bring believable chemistry and emotion to a film that might otherwise wilt under the weight of so much melodrama.

The Pruitt-Igoe Myth doesn't offer easy conclusions.

Sexploitation and art blend uneasily in Crazy Horse.

There's little sense of the Carol Channing beneath the overdone makeup - if there is one.

The Innkeepers is no masterpiece, but you may well leave with your nerves expertly jangled.

Banal at the beginning and preposterous at the close, the British horror film Kill List jumbles together wildly incongruous ingredients to create a dramatic mush.

Would the Mayans have predicted the end of the world in 2012 if they'd known it would inspire not only "The Tree of Life'' and "Melancholia'' but an endless supply of more dreary depictions of end-times like this one?

An interesting debut for director Pesce, although it isn't worth running out to see. Wait for it to hit the small screen.

This jagged blob of a movie features a solo dance in the 1930s scored to the Sex Pistols' "Pretty Vacant," several scenes of a rich Manhattan woman chatting with the ghost of Wallis Simpson and a Sotheby's auction that draws a crowd reaction of the kind associated with "Family Feud." Yet I found the movie fascinating. Except for the boring bits.

It's an exciting, charming and often quite funny family film.

Erstwhile boy wizard Daniel Radcliffe works no magic as a grieving lawyer in The Woman in Black, a creaky haunted-house story that's strong on creepy atmosphere but woefully deficient in the scare department.

After Fall, Winter would play better minus at least half an hour of flab.

France's Declaration of War has it all: comedy, romance, fantasy, musical interludes and a child with a brain tumor. Wait - what?

What follows is a jumble of cop- and heist-movie clichés, dotted with appearances by actors you liked in something else.

Forsaken in a cruel wilderness, a man looks to God and pleads for help. Receiving no answer, he says, "F- -k, I'll do it myself."

As North Korea undergoes a highly publicized change of leadership, The Front Line proves timely. In fact, one of the movie's army commanders looks like the north's new baby dictator, Kim Jong-un.

It's unfortunate that director Whitney Sudler-Smith seems to have spent more time on his own hair than his interview prep.

Director-writer Shimon Dotan takes this iffy story and makes it nearly unwatchable by jumping back and forth in time, using screens within screens and bouncing between color and black-and-white.

This strange and eerie noir is more a collection of knockout scenes than a fully realized story.

Haywire is a wannabe, or rather a wanna-B, and that B is for "Bourne." As each imitator comes and (rapidly) goes, my appreciation for the best superspy franchise deepens. Even top directors - in this case Steven Soderbergh - can't figure out the trick.

A well-acted, well-directed (by TV veteran Anthony Hemingway) popcorn movie with great aerial battles and solid dramatic scenes that hold your attention for two good hours.

The French affection (affectation?) for conversational film reaches absurd proportions in the talkathon Domain.

Romantic comedies are often as contrived and irritating as Loosies, but few feature a lead character so lacking in appeal.

Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Brazil's reformist two-term president, gets the once-over-lightly treatment in Lula, Son of Brazil.

The only possible relief from director Xavier Gens' abusively bleak survivalist scenario is how implausible it is.

Latifah, a formidable actress who's almost always better than her movies, easily dominates this hokey cross between "Glee'' and "Sister Act.''

Contraband aims to be dumb fun but gets only the first half right.

The title It's About You is something Kurt Markus claims Mellencamp told him when he commissioned the film. With the elder Markus' self-important, egotistical narration rarely shutting up, it was a fairly prophetic remark.

For a sex movie, Norwegian Wood is about as dry as a pocketful of sand. Even for a film set in a land that considers paper folding an exciting activity, this is dull stuff.

It's sad to see Quaid in sloppily directed (by Martin Guigui) dreck like Beneath the Darkness less than a decade after the performance of his career as a closeted married man in "Far From Heaven.''

Soulfully directed by Michael Cuesta ("L.I.E."), Roadie is short on narrative momentum, but it's a perfectly attuned character study of this rock relic and his middle-aged sorrows.

Cinematographer Mohammad Davudi's nighttime shots of jammed Tehran highways help convey the society's dehumanization. Scenes of a vast forest outside the city, where Ali releases tension by hunting, are powerful in their own, sparse way.

Patient viewers will be rewarded, as long as they pay attention. Lots of what at first seems inconsequential is actually of great import - but Ceylan isn't letting on. And yes, the cinematography is impressive.

Director Gaby Dellal gets respectable performances all around, especially from Dekker as the hapless, grief-stricken father, but they can't elevate Angels Crest, beyond its one obvious and depressing note: It is very sad when a small child dies.

In the compelling but slow-moving Iranian film A Separation, a downbeat family drama of no particular distinction gradually turns into a mystery that raises painful moral questions. There may be several guilty parties.

Sincerely directed by one woman (Phyllida Lloyd, who did "Mamma Mia!") and smartly written by another (Abi Morgan), the film stars an unsurpassable Meryl Streep, whose ability to empathize with her characters has never been more gloriously impassioned than it is in this titanic performance.

The hit man's narration is compelling and frightening on its own.

This is a look at the joy, confusion and heartbreak of adolescence that's both culture- and locale-specific and, at the same time, universal.

Zhang Yimou, one of China's best-known filmmakers, deserves a great big lump of coal in his holiday stocking thanks to his ludicrous soap opera The Flowers of War.

It's the dancing that makes Pina a visual delight. It should appeal to dance mavens, and to folks who have no idea what a pas de deux is.

Vincent Bal's film should appeal to kids, cat lovers and felines. I give it two stars, and my cat, Audrey, gives it three meows.

So the film is a head-spinning mix of dead babies and romantic dinners, pillow talk and mass executions. Blood and honey don't taste right together.

About as artistically profound as those framed 3-D photos of the Twin Towers emblazoned with "Never Forget'' that are still for sale in Times Square a decade after 9/11.

Genuinely charming, treacle-free family films are tough to find these days, so I'm happy to heartily recommend We Bought a Zoo as heartwarming holiday fare that even jaded adults can share with the kids.

It's not a knock on Steven Spielberg to say he is history's finest maker of children's movies. His capacity to evoke simplicity, awe, beauty and unconditional love are his genius, and his vision of the children's story War Horse is a gorgeous, majestic fable about a boy who yearns to be reunited with his steed.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is, as you'd expect, rubbish, but the word is slightly too kind. The David Fincher film (like the very similar Swedish one - released in the US just last year! - and the book) is not even good rubbish.

Thankfully, Tintin is Spielberg at his most playful and unpretentious.

Unfortunately, Albert is so good at being unobtrusive, he nearly disappears from his own story, making it hard for us to get invested in it.

Addiction Incorporated delivers a hard kick in the butts to the tobacco industry.

Like the lovely indie "Weekend," this small-scale story focuses on a couple of days in a possibly blossoming romance. Unlike that movie, it's full of gender stereotypes and all-around bad behavior. There's no one here to root for.

Depravity and addiction can be dramatic and fascinating, or they can be as they are in this week's indie filthathon Cook County.

It really couldn't have been easy for Jason Lee ("Almost Famous") to keep a straight face while saying, "I'm not in this for the money.''

The film also wastes the coiled intensity of Jeremy Renner, as the newest member of the IMF team with a none-too-compelling past. Bird does keep audiences guessing whether Renner is the only leading actor in Hollywood who's even shorter than Cruise.

So moron-friendly they should have called it "Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Checkers." The skill level in the script is elementary school, my dear Watson.

The contrived script lacks subtlety, rendering most characters as stereotypes.

Thick-necked, booze-loving and angry men beat each other with their naked fists: so far, so Irish. But the feuding clans in the documentary Knuckle actually think their habits of antagonizing one another can be fixed by just one more problem-solving brawl.

Holland has said that she wanted her harrowing and rewarding epic to run long so it would make viewers feel that they're in the sewers as well. In this, she succeeds.

I still can't believe I Melt With You went there. Over the top, off the hook and just plain bonkers, it makes its mark.

In this pretentious art-house downer version of "The Bad Seed," the only surprise is that the folks didn't ship the little monster off to the looney bin before he reached puberty.

Thanks to his (Oldman) mastery, and Alfredson's, no film this year left me hungrier for a sequel.

It's smart, funny, agreeably perverse and simultaneously abrupt and exhausting.

I have zero reservations about telling you how much I loathed New Year's Eve, a soul-sucking monument to Hollywood greed and saccharine holiday culture.

It also boasts a killer breakout performance by comic Patton Oswalt as a former classmate who becomes Theron's unlikely co-dependent and sometimes co-conspirator.

The editing (by Kitano) and lensing are stylish and guaranteed to keep viewers hooked through the final rubout.

I'm not, finally, sure what Leigh is saying - but she is a filmmaker with a voice.

A little humor would have helped leaven a movie that is frankly often very difficult to watch.

Moreover, in attempting to update the play to a buzzing CNN world, Ralph Fiennes proves that as a director, he makes a fine actor.

A root canal seems a more pleasurable way to pass two hours than this interminable vanity knockoff of "Traffic" about troubled Angelenos.

Despite copious full-frontal female nudity, House of Pleasures isn't mere sexploitation. Rather, it's a gorgeously filmed portrait of a bygone era, with painstaking attention to period detail. On the downside, the movie is overlong.

A documentary hardly anybody has been waiting for.

The political intrigue behind the documentary would make for a great movie of its own.

At its best, Romantics Anonymous is a love letter to everyone who's ever felt hopelessly awkward about being in a relationship, which is just about all of us.

Literally the kind of movie they just don't make anymore, Michel Hazanavicius' French-sponsored charmer The Artist is a gorgeous black-and-white love letter to silent Hollywood with old-fashioned English intertitles and just a single line of audible (English) dialogue.

As the movie drags on, though, it takes on a throbbing, sick monotone. This isn't a concert, it's a bass guitar solo, all thumping blackness.

Gorgeously photographed by Peter Suschitzky, A Dangerous Method presents a vivid portrait of pre-World War I Europe that's at a considerable remove from the types of madness usually seen in Cronenberg's films.

Ho-ho-huh? Arthur Christmas is an animated kiddie comedy that delivers all the wonder you'd expect in a movie about a guy delivering one package. Maybe they should have called it "UPS Man: The Movie."

Young Hugo (Asa Butterfield), a boy who literally lives inside the clocks he manages in a grand Paris train station in the 1930s, embodies one problem that bedeviled even Dickens: He's boringly nice.

Brilliantly playing doomed '50s sex bomb Marilyn Monroe, Michelle Williams gets under the skin of the troubled yet vulnerable icon in a way no one else ever has.

There are several adorable musical numbers that make excellent use of Adams. Segel's dancing is . . . well, he reminded me of a huge star: Big Bird.

Fascinating though it is, the movie is thin on historical materials.

O'Grady is very good, but she can't make the hard-to-watch Rid of Me dramatically credible.

An oddity: an upbeat film about a cemetery.

Good enough to almost overlook a so-so ending.

The generic plot is redeemed by exciting action sequences, good-looking location photography and a hot sex scene involving a femme fatale named Lea (pixie-haired Melanie Thierry).

Even at a supposed celebration, the well-bred and well-off aren't really happy at all. So the title is ironic. Thanks for that profound insight.

True, the stars are very good at what they do, but so what?

"Happy Feet" was one of the greatest and most original animated films, but the sequel can't even decide what it's about for the first 40 minutes.

Still, it was a beautiful wedding.