Harrison Ford - that most decent of decent men - helps to carry the new film on his broad shoulders. With his blunt, Everyman features and sympathetically furrowed brow, he comes off as such a solid, good guy that it's impossible not to care about his upstanding character.

Most of the time, Soapdish is fairly amusing in a zany, anything-goes kind of way. [31 May 1991, p.5]

A daft pitch-black dark comedy about family dysfunction that plays out over painfully ugly family Christmas celebration.

Rarely has a movie been so sexual without being remotely sexy. Rarely has a guy who might be admired in a sex comedy as a "playa" seemed more pathetic with each fresh conquest.

Branagh and Williams are worth the price of admission, the former "wunderkind" of British stage and screen having a go at the pretentious, plummy Olivier.

In a genre - the animated holiday film - already overflowing with the sentimental, the silly Arthur Christmas is a most welcome treat to find stuffed into the cinema's stockings this holiday season.

The Descendants lets Payne show us the Other America and the Other Americans - little lives caught up in small but epic problems far away from the La La Land of Hollywood hype, sex and violence.

The musical comedy whimsically and often cleverly revisits the characters, their shtick and and the TV show and movies that made them most famous.

A stunning exercise in 3D and a delightful celebration of Scorsese's lifelong love of the movies, something he, like Hugo, developed on childhood.

Yelchin doesn't generate the same warmth or passion that Jones does. That is partly by design, as this whole affair was her idea, after all.

The rawboned Hawkes manages both charm and menace in the same look, and Dancy gives his character a testy, fearful edge that doesn't make him scary, but rather someone we fear for.

A winning "Robin Hood and his Merry Doormen" comedy about getting even. A cast of comedy specialists each deliver their comic specialties to perfection, delivering double-takes and one liners so well that you don't notice how clunky the actual caper in this caper comedy is.

"Gattaca" director Andrew Niccol's sense of the zeitgeist is as on the money as ever with In Time, a sci-fi parable that plays like "Occupy Wall Street: The Movie."

Thanks to Banderas and his Corinthian leather purr and writers who know how to use it, "Puss" is the best animated film of 2011.

Even lacking the laughs and romance, he (Emmerich) has delivered an entertaining eye-roller of alternative history.

Though it only rarely reaches the level of gonzo farce that it might have been, "Diary" is still an agreeably drunken stagger through the novel Thompson based on his formative year as a writer.

This compelling-acted film explains, better than any soundbite, why people have taken to the streets, "occupying" centers of finance. If their rage is unfocused, Margin Call suggests, that's with good reason. There are no real heroes or villains here, just human beings with human failings making BIG human mistakes.

This tiny Catholic school for women dominated the sport at a turning point in history, and this plucky, old-fashioned sports drama sets the scene and tells the tale with a lot of heart and a dash of wit.

What this film from the director of "The Devil Wears Prada" does manage is a gentle amiability.

A first-rate one-woman-against-the-system drama.

Brewer gave the film a little Southern hip hop, and brought in real Southerners Quaid, Andie MacDowell and Ray McKinnon to further Southernize it.

The leads are charmingly mismatched, but adorable enough to root for, as a couple. Forestier is a wildly uninhibited actress, sexy as all get out. She makes this girl dangerous, seemingly capable of anything.

Restless is far more precious than profound. But that takes little away from this soulful teenage exploration of love, life and death.

It isn't a great film. But it is a smart and high-minded one, wonderfully cast, with understated direction. Clooney is good enough in the lead to stir talk of a political future.

It's a plucky film that covers a lot of ground and uncovers this wonderful, ancient ritual that people of many faiths and from all walks of life take on.

Odds are you'll find something of substance, a few life lessons in between the laughs in 50/50.

One serious omission in the film - identifying what these seemingly prosperous alumni of the band do for a living and did with their lives.

Whatever the grownups say, Manyaka's Chanda is the one person in this village who understands how simple things really are, that it really does come down to Life, Above All.

Senna himself gives it its heart. I just wish I'd gotten a better handle on who he was before the film's checkered flag falls.

No, this isn't how it really happened. But director Charles Martin Smith ("Air Bud") wrings plenty of heartfelt tears and a few laughs out of this fictionalized account.

Best of all, the filmmakers took the time to give these hard men just the right things to say - not catchphrases, just lines that smell of blood and gunpowder every time Statham, Owen or DeNiro utter them.

Moneyball is a thinking person's baseball movie, and a baseball fan's thinking movie.

If Laugh at My Pain makes people take a second look at this perpetual third banana on the big screen, so much the better.

"It was a perfect tabloid story," the Brit Peter Tory, who covered it, remembers. "Kinky sex, religion, kidnapping, a beauty queen."

They (Refn and Gosling) have collaborated on a car picture that unnerves us with its idling quiet, and then pins our ears back when they stomp the accelerator.

Farmiga directs and plays this as a woman with questions. Thus, the tone is a bit all over the place - frank discussion and depictions of sex, but with an equally frank embrace of Christianity, talking the talk and walking the walk.

There is little urgency to this spiraling disaster. Soderbergh has made a lot of noise this past year about quitting directing and taking up a less collaborative, more solitary pursuit - painting. This is an anti-social painter's movie. Millions are dying, but he doesn't care that much. So why should we?

Warrior is a straight genre picture, a fight movie of the old school. But it's a mixed martial arts tale, and as such, it's the best MMA movie ever.

"The Debt," a very good 2007 Israeli thriller with Cold War and Holocaust connections, earns a nerve-wracking and entertaining Hollywood remake.

That makes Sarah's Key that rare Holocaust tale that punches through the cobwebs of history and its dry, inhuman statistics, and brings that terrible past to life.

The unfailing sweetness of Paul Rudd's lead performance makes what could have been another raunchy and rude R-rated farce a bracing change of pace in a summer of aggressive comedies about aggressive people, from "Bad Teachers" to "Horrible Bosses."

Entirely too literal, but it still manages to be a literally hair-raising piece of modern-style old school Gothic horror.

The Guard soars along on a script, like those by the other McDonagh (Martin wrote and directed "In Bruges" and the Oscar winning short "Six Shooter," both starring Gleeson) built out of verbal flourishes and Irish curses.

Fright Night can also boast of having the best vampire-villain in ages. The bushy-browed Colin Farrell was BORN to wear fangs.

The sweet, the comic and the tragic blend together most agreeably in the winsome French romance The Hedgehog.

The wildly improbable set-up is merely the jumping off point for an exploration of grief, guilt and redemption.

There's too much cheese, but there are still enough amusing action beats and funny one-liners to let one say, 30 Minutes or Less delivers, more or less on time.

Haters, head for the door. But Gleeks? Get your "Glee" on.

Davis and Spencer give faces and fully-fleshed out lives to women who must have been more than what they did for a living as The Help.

Audacious, violent and disquieting, Rise of the Planet of the Apes is a summer sequel that's better than it has any right to be.

The ending smacks of Hollywood rewriting of history. But The Devil's Double shows the political consequences of Uday's misdeeds, the delicate negotiations that keep the people with grievances in line. And Dominic Cooper delivers a career-making performance.

That it lacks the snap, crackle and kapow of the summer's better comic book blockbusters isn't surprising. With all this effort riding on a big, expensive and rushed studio summer picture, the real miracle is that any of them come to life.

As a Steve Carell comedy, it works. He plays the victim well, the guy romantically in over his head ever better. Surrounding him with people this funny - Ryan Gosling, who knew?

A brisk blast of bloody good fun, sci-fi with a little social commentary as subtext. Attack the Block is the movie that "Battle: Los Angeles" was not - thrilling, nerve-wracking and fun.

Chemistry is king. It's one reason the rom-com has long seemed like the toughest code for Hollywood to crack. But never underestimate the power of snappy, rapid-fire banter, the paving stones of the Hollywood road to romance.

The fourth comic book movie of the summer is the best comic book movie of the summer. Johnston has delivered a light, clever and deftly balanced adventure picture with real lump in the throat nostalgia.

Does well in capturing the cruelty of school life and the assorted "types" who inhabit schools there and here. But it's more twee than clever, more affectionate than romantic and more promising than satisfying.

It's a treat for children making their first trek to the multiplex and for parents and grandparents with fond memories of the Hundred Acre Wood.

The finale to the Harry Potter saga is, like most of the films in the series, a bit of a slog. But it's a generally satisfying slog.

The first funny film to give those "Bridesmaids" a run for their money.

Here's a documentary so slick, novel, touching and outrageous that your first thought might be "This has to be fake."

Zeroing in on Carr as the movie's "hero" was a smart move. He comes off as smart, confrontational and unconventional.

A perfectly pleasant but fluffy, inconsequential romantic comedy.

Moon delivers the popcorn in gigantic fist-fulls of fun.

It's a bit long to be as kid friendly as this educational and visually striking film is meant to be.

They turn more of the story over to the comic relief, the dopey tow truck Tow Mater, and get a sillier, more kid-friendly movie out of it. Yes, Cars 2 is better than "Cars."

The riffing, the one-upsmanship, the off-the-cuff zingers and the singing (ABBA, a great favorite of Coogan's most famous creation, the dizzy talk show host Alan Partridge) make The Trip an easy-going trek down a road well-traveled by these two.

Taken on its own merits, this profile of "Buck" Brannaman is a pleasant and touching but somewhat superficial insight to the man and his methods.

Not a neat and tidy thriller. It is a most engrossing one, commanding our attention even as the filmmaker tries to slip this or that hole in the plot past us.

J.J. Abrams, with Steven Spielberg producing, has made one of those jaw-dropping out-of-body summer entertainments that kids old enough to swear and see PG-13 films will remember on into adulthood.

If you're looking for a filmmaker to document, for all of humanity, "one of the greatest discoveries in the history of human culture," the great Werner Herzog is your guy.

Souffle-light and long on charm.

This is still a most original take on the consequences of following your own "yellowbrickroad" when you don't know, for sure, that there's an Oz at the end of it.

X-Men: First Class still sings the praises of Marvel Studios' marvelous quality control of comic book movies. It's good, clean summer movie fun where the money they spend is up on the screen - with actors and effects - so that we won't mind spending our money on it.

Never graduates to the uplifting tale it sets out to be.

A sequel that delivers more heart than laughs, and is, if anything, more visually dazzling than the 2008 original film.

An often moving and always disturbing film. Little is explained, motivations aren't explored. We miss them, at times. It's still a film of power, wit and thought-provoking ideas, one well worth seeing.

Incendies is occasionally compelling, but also overlong and vexing in the ways it draws out a "shocking" conclusion that we unravel long before the characters do.

The story isn't particularly organized. It's more a collection of scenes - than a coherent coming-of-age tale.

It's a bleak yet optimistic film, and Ferrell perfectly underplays his Carver anti-hero and delivers a rich, layered and subtle performance. And a funny one.

This is "Her Hangover," a smarter and sweeter stumble to the altar that never quite gets to Vegas, and doesn't seem to mind.

Greatest Movie isn't Spurlock's best. It plays like an overlong, overly cutesy TV news report (woman and man on street interviews included) on product placement.

A most deserving Oscar winner and a film that could provoke discussion anywhere it is shown, anywhere people of any age are being bullied.

The daft feather-light French farce Potiche is a period piece designed to remind us of just how far and how fast women have come in the Western world.

The funny moments outnumber the warm ones. There's a touch of religion and plenty of melodrama, especially in the contrivances of a cluttered and drawn out third act.

Has a lot of that winking wit we've come to expect from our post-"Spider Man" Marvel movies. It has a hunky, self-mocking young star, solid support from a couple of Oscar winners and the slick sheen that state-of-the-art effects can give you.

Absurdly long, absurdly over the top and absurdly absurd, Five Five - still manages to be more fun than any movie with its outrageous carbon footprint has any right to be.

It's a sturdy World War II yarn, with harrowing and heart-breaking moments sprinkled throughout.

13 Assassins is entirely too long and too talky. But the cat-and-mouse game of strategy, figuring out when and where to ambush the evil overlord's entourage, is fascinating.

A winning narration (read by Greg Kinnear) holds things together. And there's just enough script for a good cast to run with. Harris and Madigan lift the whole enterprise just by being who and what they are - great actors.

Stuffed to the gills with Perry's mix of the sacred and the silly and a serious dose of self-help for the self-absorbed.

Almost every shot is a postcard-perfect African vista, and every animal shown in majestic close-up.

Comical, colorful, wonderfully cast and beautifully animated.

May not be as emotionally compelling as John Ford's work ("The Prisoner of Shark Island"), but it's every bit as meticulously crafted.

A quietly compelling if not particularly emotional and sober-minded treatment of an infamous incident.

With Win Win, McCarthy has found his emotional sweet spot, a sweet and complex story to set it in and the perfect title for it.

Saoirse Ronan shines in the title role, a wily, physically-fit and lethal girl.

The best faith-based film ever made, an uplifting, entertaining and wonderfully-acted account of surfer Bethany Hamilton's life before and after a shark bit her arm off in the waters off her favorite Hawaiian beach.