Glosses over the depression and alcoholism that have bedeviled Walker as well as any relationships he might have had. But that doesn't make the film any less interesting.

The film is an exposé only of a filmmaker's senseless contempt for the military.

Salt contains many conflicts: intelligence vs. counterintelligence, blond Angelina vs raven-haired and . . . well, that's about it.

The third and weakest book in Suzanne Collins’ trilogy should never have been split into two films, but since that’s become money-grubbing standard practice for young-adult adaptations (“Twilight,” “Divergent”), here we are.

It's a welcome alternative to the homogenized Hollywood releases that proliferate during the holiday season.

This documentary, a love letter to their sisterly bond, gives a reasonably engaging look behind the scenes.

This is essentially a student film offering nothing but absurdly contrived coincidence.

Everything Must Go is cinematic pointilism. The big picture is familiar -- busted middle-age man, suburban alcoholic despair -- yet the details are so finely rendered that the overall impression is potently strange.

The conclusion feels too good-natured after nearly two hours of a minister who would need typed instructions to butter a baguette.

Would that all death be so peaceful.

This is the British way to mingle ideas and entertainment.

Fairly shapeless story.

Walking a tightrope between high farce and emotional truth, writer-director Gabriele Muccino's breathlessly paced Italian comedy The Last Kiss manages to stay just this side of melodrama.

A rare and welcome reminder of how original, provocative and moving a low-budget independent film can be.

What with the unexciting hand-held camerawork, and the off-putting script and lead performance, Francine remains as frustrating as its inscrutable title character.

Naz & Maalik does what all great New York movies do: ground unique, engaging stories in the middle of the glorious chaos that is our city.

Except for a couple of isolated, mildly subversive moments, Hanks is basically playing the genial host of “The Wonderful World of Disney’’ rather than an actual person.

Sally Hawkins is the heart and soul of Made in Dagenham, but another actress to watch for is the equally wonderful Rosamund Pike. She steals every scene she's in as the sympathetic wife of Rita's sexist boss (Rupert Graves).

Dan Stevens (“Downton Abbey”), as the Beast, has the heaviest lift. He’s emoting through a CGI veil that never quite feels real. But his cranky character is more engaging this time around.

Call it a spiritual Woodstock.

The best evidence of this troubled man's genius is provided by ample samples of his music, much of which will be familiar to fans of Warner Bros. cartoons from the '30s and '40s.

Director Matthew Vaughn, who did last year's delightful "Kick-Ass," doesn't do witty this time around, but he does keep up a spiffing pace while making the action blaze.

A wonder to look at, even as its increasingly pretentious manga-inspired story line outstays its welcome.

Hamer’s style is what might happen if Ulrich Seidl liked people, with immaculate balance in each shot, but the emotions in focus, as well. 1001 Grams is wise about both grief and the need for romance.

Clearly, the elder Scott’s aim is on the scares — and oh, what satisfying, terrifying, screams-echoing-down-a-ship’s-corridor scares they are. All the philosophical debate here belongs to the robots — which is possibly even more chilling.

Less an awful movie than a totally uninspired one. The under-5 set may find it funny, though I suspect their parents will be checking their watches a lot, as I did.

This one is a “different kind of superhero movie,” meaning even more fiercely attached to the mode of artistic expression known as “puberty.”

All the film provides is this bulletin: Lefties are angry about the things Lefties are angry about, chiefly corporate profits.

It’s almost impossible to resist The Lego Movie 2 for its continued everything-is-awesomeness, even if it does fall back on the trope of playthings terrified of being relegated to the storage bin.

The writer-director, who goes by the name J Blakeson, keeps the suspense level high for the first hour or so, but he then indulges in a few plot twists that strain credibility.

If we send Sally Struthers money, will she be able to stop this kind of suffering from taking place in Beverly Hills?

Frantic and out of control - and great fun to watch.

Rambles on for nearly two hours with subplots that go nowhere -- and half-baked leftist political commentary -- before focusing in for a quietly devastating climax.

A gleefully cunning comedy.

Acceptably diverting Saturday night at the movies, especially if you're willing to check your brains at the popcorn stand.

Despite the title, there is no nudity in the Chinese rom-com Love in the Buff, although there is a lot of risqué language.

Merely a passably amusing excuse to pass a couple of hours in an air-conditioned theater.

Director Ben Wheatley (“Kill List”) is masterful with arresting imagery set in a dystopian spin on the ’70s; less so with a compelling narrative.

In fact, for long stretches, especially during the first hour, it's as soporific as watching a bank of security cameras.

Seidl sternly rejects nuance. All the women are crude and insensitive, all the men are desperate and exploited. Despite copious full-frontal nudity, it’s an unrelievedly puritanical and didactic film.

Heisenberg's thriller ends with a chase across highways and through woods that will give viewers adrenaline highs of their own.

Fails to show indignation that rich white guys are trying to get even richer at the expense of a naive black kid from the ghetto.

Wild Grass is a French movie for people afraid of French movies.

Somewhere on the axis where David Lynch, Paul Thomas Anderson and Joey Bishop intersect, a man in a Salvation Army tuxedo wanders the Mojave Desert supplying anti-comedy to every cocktail lounge and prison in his path. This is Entertainment.

Twisters, the disaster movie starring Daisy Edgar-Jones, is an oddity in 2024: a reboot that’s actually worth your time.

A sweet, science-fiction family film with a loud environmentalist message (speaking of “Avatar”) that’s good fun. It’s also nicely self-contained.

The anti-Ben Stiller comedy: There's humiliation aplenty but no mugging, no abuse to the crotch region, no straining to be outrageous.

Mostly, this frantic film is yet another attempt at “Spinal Tap” silly. At times it goes for the heart of “Almost Famous,” and its sense of rock is that of a barely acquainted observer.

When the Powerpuff Girls blink those soulful dinner-plate peepers, you could forgive them anything - even their movie's wafer-thin excuse for a plot.

Director and writer Riley Stearns’ mediocre comedy aims to be a roundhouse kick at traditional masculinity, but doesn’t manage to take it down in any deep or insightful way.

Tender and often extremely funny.

The film's most memorable performance is by Eamonn Walker, who is scarily good as the singer known as Howlin' Wolf.

Perhaps no movie could do Muhammad Ali justice. But this overlong but sketchy biopic by Michael Mann, in which style repeatedly tramples substance, actually does the great man a disservice.

The film 12 and Holding brings you back to when you routinely said things like, "I'm going to kill you" or "We're soul mates" and meant it.

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.

The drawbacks to this often rhapsodically beautiful film lie not in the journey itself, but in the preachy detours taken along the way.

This reverential documentary, crammed with insidery art-world anecdotes, seems unlikely to convince the average viewer why it was so important that several male artists ventured out of New York at that time to push dirt around with shovels and bulldozers.

Kevin Smith's Clerks II doesn't take much notice of anything that's happened since the 1994 original. It's occasionally clever and gets a few points for originality.

The more dramatic revelations and tragic inevitabilities that turn up, the harder it is not to laugh. Give credit to its maker for directing with an earnestness suggesting a pretentious 22-year-old. Having passed through the phases of Interesting Apprentice, Mad Genius, Chastened Bankrupt and Shameless Wage Slave, Coppola at 70 may be the world's oldest student filmmaker.

Veers between mystery, comedy, philosophical inquest and medical/psychological drama.

The movie is neither an affecting romance (Coco even considers marrying Balsan because "I'd achieve social status") nor an inspiring success story. Chanel sold herself to one guy, happened to get customers through him, and took a start-up loan from another lover.

De Villa has created a truthful representation of a colorful community.

Find Me Guilty belongs to the odd couple of Dinklage and Diesel, whose volatile performance finally proves he is much more than an action star.

Like "Once," this film is a tender little piece of heartbreak.

A comic adventure that suffers from a dearth of both laughs and thrills.

Fox can't decide if Walk on Water is a terrorist thriller or a gay buddy story, and neither can the viewer.

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

If you're starved for on-screen nudity and sex garnished with art-film trappings -- The price you'll pay is putting up with the director's relentless Euro-pretension, manifested in a tediously contrived plot crammed with absurd coincidences, clunky symbolism and soap-operatic melodrama.

As a horror movie, even one inspired by the kitschy Hammer horror films of the 1950s, it's disappointing.

Has a sexy cast and is gorgeous to watch -- but it takes more than that to make a movie worth seeking out.

There’s little dialogue in this gem of a movie, but little is needed. Aman’s anguished face – which recalls Maria Falconetti in “The Passion of Joan of Arc” -- conveys all the information we need.

There’s a nice candor and sweetness about the players, especially Butterfield and Sally Hawkins as his mother.

Dickens was a sentimentalist, but even his happy endings are more nuanced than Polanski's brutal anti-sentimentalism.

Writer/director James Ward Byrkit, in his feature debut, achieves effective chills with only eight actors and a living room, intermixing quantum physics (shout-outs range from Schrödinger’s cat to “Sliding Doors”) with the very mundane human tendency toward bad judgment calls in a crisis.

The film looks back at “gay voice” throughout popular culture, starting with films of the 1930s and with TV icon Paul Lynde; it also plays a disheartening clip of a young Louis CK bellowing “f - - - - t!” in a routine.

Fake documentaries annoy me — why not put in the effort and deliver the real thing? — and this one is not only aimless and stiff, it also rings false.

Schwartzman is perfect as Kurt, simultaneously compelling, ridiculous and creepy.

Hanna doesn't go wrong immediately. It takes at least 2½ minutes.

There’s no shortage of brains, brawn, eye candy, wit and even some poetry in this epic battle between massive lizard-like monsters and 25-story-high robots operated by humans.

It raises tangled questions about whether it is better to live humiliated or arm yourself, yet for the most part it's dramatically inert, talky and directionless, and it ends quietly without saying much of anything.

Making mixed martial arts — described in the film as “the bloodiest and the goriest sport you’ve ever seen” — tame and lackluster is a challenge. But director Benny Safdie is up to the task.

Bennett, who’s been largely off the radar for a while, is heartbreaking and, eventually, fierce as her character begins to crave change.

It's a shame that the book "We Were Soldiers Once . . . And Young" fell into the hands of writer-director Randall Wallace ("Braveheart"), a filmmaker who wouldn't recognize subtlety and understatement if they were to attack him in the street.

At times, writer-director Cedric Klapsich seems to be trying to copy the frestyle of "Amelie," but L'Auberge achieves only a fraction of its charm.

The Warrior may be mighty of sword but he is exceedingly limp of writing. We never learn why he went bad in the first place, or what causes his sudden conversion. If the audience is expected to do most of the work, we should be paid $10.50 each.

Beautifully shot but a soulless cash machine, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 delivers no dramatic payoff, no resolution and not much fun. Hopefully we'll get that in the final installment next summer.

“First Steps” marks a slight improvement from the preceding trilogy of terror. But Marvel still can’t nail what should be one of its premiere attractions.

The Aggressives has plenty of character but no story; it would have done better to structure itself around a competition it briefly visits in which lesbians, in costume, compete to win prizes for looking masculine. That way the film would have had a direction.

It’s told in a woefully pedestrian way, with talking-head footage forming the bulk of this slow-to-develop film. Still, it’s a creepily fascinating tale.

Neil Jordan's Ondine has a split personality. It starts promisingly as a fantasy but ends disappointingly as a thriller.

Plus One is the latest evidence (see also: “Always Be My Maybe”) that the romantic comedy is making a long-awaited comeback, with some overdue modern tweaks.

Sucker-punches you. It appears to be an engagingly sweet romance, but it's really just about other movies.

The film tends to be pretentious and melodramatic; and Grant, better suited to comic roles, gives a heavy-handed performance.

Morbidly funny art-house horror tale.

Director Susanne Bier's chilly morality play is slow to get started, but once established, its three parallel stories comment provocatively on one another.

This isn't a story of Shakespearean proportions, but it's a sweet peg for this complex, carefully constructed gem.

A parable about greed. But don't let that serious-sounding description keep you away. It also is funny, knowing and immensely enjoyable.

What is Dick's excuse for outing one cable news anchor but not a rival counterpart who is far better known? The anchor isn't antigay, but Dick likes the other network's politics better. Hypocrisy? Your call.