Ultimately “Mad About the Boy” is much like Bridget herself: endearing, silly, messy, wacky, kind. I like it… just as it is.

M. Night Shyamalan’s new thriller, Old, is campy, poorly written, candy-colored and subtle as Eurovision.

J.Lo has delivered an over-the-top song-and-dance camptacular, both gravely serious and deliriously funny, providing one cuckoo moment after another.

While not totally original, transitions to live action with real guts and reinvention.

The director has listed Jean-Luc Godard as an influence, which explains the movie's French New Wave exuberance.

Some will accuse Our Friend of being sentimental, and it is, but not in an “Oh no! The golden retriever was kidnapped!” way. It’s subtle. The wisdom of Brad Ingelsby’s script is that Dane’s assistance is unnoticeable until very late in the movie. His acts of kindness sneak up on you.

Freddie Mercury may have had the better voice, but it’s Elton John who gets the better movie. Rocketman, director Dexter Fletcher’s trippy new biopic about the flamboyant rocker is braver, deeper and more enlightening than last year’s slobbering piece of Queen propaganda “Bohemian Rhapsody” (which he also partly directed).

Weisberg is nonjudgmental, allowing his subjects to deliver the message that, for far too many people, the American dream is more of a nightmare.

By the end I was getting a bit antsy from the rambling script and direction.

The smartest movie to come out this year, and it could hardly be better cast.

The found-footage disaster flick Into the Storm is “Twister’’ for dummies, but by no means is that an insult. The new film is enormous fun if you’re in the right mood.

Nearly as good as the average episode of TV’s “Friday Nights Lights,” which makes it better than most movies and one of the better sports films of recent years.

If the title makes you wince, know the movie is a lot better than it deserves to be. You’ll actually care about what happens to the prickly blue dude, even if you never cared about getting to zone seven.

An oddity: an upbeat film about a cemetery.

The Nees lean toward the rat-a-tat comedy of “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” presumably knowing they can’t match the profundity of “Huckleberry Finn.” (Who could?)

The sensitive subject matter is handled discreetly by writer-director Chin-yen Yee, who never lets the story sink into exploitation or finger-pointing.

The film shows how quiet exteriors can mask deep interior lives, and how art feeds those lives. The view of art is richly intellectual, sometimes enthralling. But I confess, I liked Museum Hours best for answering a question I’ve always had: What is that guard thinking?

Director Jay Karas doesn’t exactly reinvent the wheel as he puts this odd couple through the paces of getting in shape and reconciling old wounds, but he’s helped by some laugh-out-loud quirk in Gene Hong’s screenplay, nice comic chemistry between the two leads and supporting players like J.K. Simmons.

Hugely entertaining because director Lasse Hallstrom and screenwriter William Wheeler have greatly embellished the "truth" in Irving's book about the hoax.

The plot has all the ingredients of a soap opera, but Bani-Etemad, who has been making movies since the '80s, is able to make it much more.

This is first and foremost a farce, not unlike Nichols' "The Birdcage."

With Treeless Mountain, Kim establishes herself as a first-class filmmaker.

Not as aca-mazing as “Pitch Perfect” (which made my 10-best list for 2012), the follow-up should have been cut by 10 or 15 minutes. First-time director Elizabeth Banks (who returns as a snarky announcer) doesn’t have the zippy comic timing of the first film’s helmer, Jason Moore.

This is mostly a sad and bloody tale, as the Panthers are decimated first by the machinations of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, and then by dissension in their own ranks.

If Michael Fassbender wears a giant papier-mâché head for most of a film, is he still mesmerizing? Happily, yes.

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.

A South Korean romantic comedy by Hong Sang-soo, who has been likened in style to France's venerable Eric Rohmer.

In Abuse of Weakness, Breillat, notorious for her sexually explicit films, casts the excellent Isabelle Huppert as her avatar, Maud, to tell the tale.