Django Unchained might have been a revelation in 2005. But after Quentin Tarantino and others have spent years spoofing '60s and '70s genre movies, this mock spaghetti Western tastes like it came out of the microwave.

It's worth seeing the movie for Hathaway alone.

All great films have imagination; this one also has the sense of experience.

It's a one-joke movie, if "Jewish mothers are annoying" is a joke. But just as a film about boredom should not actually be boring, no movie should credibly simulate the experience of being stuck in a car with Barbra Streisand for eight days.

Like the fictional Clarice Starling in "The Silence of the Lambs,'' Maya is a consummate professional who brilliantly performs her job in an often hostile work environment.

Things go awry in the last act, as the movie stops dead for more songs and a tragic coda that seems forced and trite, rather than the three-hankie finale we've all earned. Still, Cumming is wonderful.

The film thwarts any pat expectations you might glean from the town's bad economy and these checkered backgrounds. The teenagers are refreshingly gentle and clean-living; they don't drink, they don't swear and they certainly aren't having sex. All three are religious, a fact that is neither emphasized nor underplayed.

While Caplan works well in theory as an antiromantic-comedy heroine, director and co-screenwriter Michael Mohan just doesn't give her enough to do.

If the poor really interested such filmmakers, these movies would have something to offer other than lugubriousness masquerading as seriousness, and clichés presented as hard truths.

Oddly, though, for a film so dedicated to celebrating what he can still accomplish, his early performing career gets a lot more emphasis than the music still being composed. And that's a pity, because what little we hear is entrancing.

Not everyone will be in tune with the movie's sick sense of humor, although it's sometimes hilarious.

The film is one-sided and at times unfocused, but it makes a lot of sense politically.

This is grim, bleak material that at times is monotonous, but its woe feels authentic.

Painful, misshapen and a little gross. It's an enlarged prostate of a movie.

Piles on enough eye candy and action sequences to please fans, plus more humor than the three "Rings" films - even if it only occasionally achieves the trio's grandeur.

Director Jacob Rosenberg makes heavy use of family photos and talking heads, but the person we want most to hear from, Way himself, is largely missing. Go figure.

In addition to the magnificent music, the movie takes its rumpled charm from Fry's unfeigned fanboy manner.

Too much of the film is taken up by creaky plot devices and one sibling vowing to track down and talk to another one to resolve a problem.

One of those movies that comes "straight from the heart" - the heart of the hack screenwriter's manual that pushes formulaic structure to cover up a lack of compelling characters, genuine emotion or actual humor.

The performances are so uniformly good that it's a shame the characters are stuck with such a listless plot.

Frears has a lot of fun with the bad tempers and high spirits of this crew of adrenaline junkies, and though the story falls a little flat, the script is sprinkled with dry wit.

Nuanced work by the great John Slattery ("Mad Men") as an emotionally distant dad isn't enough to sustain more than sporadic interest in Brian Savelson's underwritten, slow-moving indie, which plays distressingly like a photographed off-Broadway drama.

Half as long and twice as much fun as the self-important "Lincoln," Roger Michell's charming sex-and-politics comedy Hyde Park on Hudson is basically a frothy tabloid take on presidential history. And for my money, that's a good thing in a season filled with puffed-up prestige pictures.

What you get instead of soccer is almost two hours of late-stage syphilis.

There's nothing you haven't seen before - and better - in Deadfall, which would seem to appeal mostly to fans of snowmobile chases.

The movie is trying to do far too much and doesn't do anything well. "Ambitious" isn't the word here; "random" is more like it.

The plot is predictable, as complications line up like jets awaiting takeoff. Even the camera work is predictable: The attractive-girl's-scary-boyfriend-suddenly-pops-up shot; the morning-after, face-in-the-pillow shot.

A fantastically entertaining biography.