All these characters make a beautiful mess together, even if McCarthy spends too much time tidying it up.

A good-hearted, funny movie.

All good humor must come to an end, and a love story has to be able to fall back on tenderness and sweetness eventually. Unfortunately, every time Beastly reaches for either of those things, it's ... really bad.

This is among the better Allen knockoffs of recent years, even if a few of its riffs seem hazardously off-key.

Everybody loves a do-over, but this could become tedious were it not for the undeniable chemistry of the two leads, whose dialogue crackles like cellophane.

An animated western that's effortlessly the most exhilarating flight of computer-drawn fancy since "Ratatouille."

You don't have to believe in the transmigration of souls to fall languorously in love with the Thai film that won the Palme d'Or at last year's Cannes Film Festival.

Lemmy gives the filmmakers enough time and candid access to create a profile of the man that goes deeper than just the sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll - even though in Lemmy's case, there's enough of a surplus of all three to power multiple documentaries.

Style over substance? Well, yes, but Dolan's a precocious talent (a decent actor, to boot), and at the advanced age of 21, has all the time in the world to deal with weightier matters. Heartbeats, meanwhile, is fluff - engaging, moody, visually snappy fluff.

Although the monks don't seek death, Of Gods And Men can be seen as an ode to religiously motivated self-sacrifice. But Beauvois deliberately leaves the story open-ended. The value of these men's lives, he's noting, is not defined by how they ended.

Still, the Farrellys have a distinct touch that carries their dubious premise across. They bring back the toilet humor of yore and make it shocking and funny again.

A highly respectable piece of genre entertainment, one with a little more class than most.

This is the story of two young people whose aspirations are of absolutely no interest to their elders. Zero Bridge is a fitting found title for the movie, but Tapa could also have called it No Exit.

Like zombie auteur George Romero at his best, Grau locks his sights on his social commentary of choice and goes after it with the zeal of a 19-year-old cannibal girl sinking an ax into the skull of her next meal. The result is messy, but it makes more than a meal.

The movie is a sharply observed if formally bloated addition to the canon of visceral tales from the Baltimore city - if "tale" is the right word for a movie that puts so much energy into the avoidance of plot.

Though cinematographer Flavio Labiano turns the city into an alien maze of steel and glass, his chilling work is undercut by a script with more logical craters than Martin's.

I Am Number Four's CGI sequences are murky and dark, its performances negligible, its script genuinely inept. There is, I should note, a puppy, which arguably keeps the film this side of completely unbearable, but just barely.

Canner's eye-opening, entertaining account of the search for the little pill that supplies the Big O is looney-tunes enough without the cartoon asides.

The shame of it is, all this ridiculousness might have worked under surer hands. After all, farces are supposed to be a little silly, and the audience, for lack of a better phrase, can be trained to just go with it. The trick? Don't treat us like a bunch of Palmers.

As a satire of the insurance industry, and more implicitly of religious hypocrisy, Cedar Rapids is mild stuff. But the movie has a nice lived-in feel, and a sense that its comedy has been earned.

Theatrically inclined parents will also appreciate a passing reference to the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Moving Co.

Kaboom's one-liners are snappy, knowing, and unexpected.

Hafstrom, on the other hand, has some serious work ahead of him if he wants any kind of absolution after this wreck.

The movie is crisp and contemporary enough to inaugurate another franchise for Statham.

However much Uxbal tries to help Barcelona's dispossessed, Biutiful doesn't really have anything to say about the modern world's economic migrants. Indeed, it could even be said that the movie exploits them.

Another Year is a stacked deck of a movie that draws a harshly unforgiving, sometimes smug line between boomers who've made good and those who've fallen by the wayside.

Cianfrance and his actors, Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling, have not made a cold or schematic film. They aim instead for raw emotional experience, one that's full of insight into the ways a relationship can go astray, but mostly feels like a slow-motion punch to the gut.

By the end of Somewhere, all I could summon up was a fervent wish-you-well - not for him, but for his beguiling elf of a child.