Brosnan, who finds the truth in his character, is quite affecting. And Mulligan, gamely defining a surprisingly undefined young woman, is like a sunbeam piercing the gloom.

The Warlords, ultimately, tries to speak to the futility of war - but it does so by staging one gargantuan dustup after another.

Clash of the Titans is ancient Greece at its cheesiest. It's a big hunk of feta comin' at ya in 3-D.

The three parallel love stories of daughter and dad, girlfriend and boyfriend, sister and brother, are nicely handled. Robinson is a sympathetic director of actors, allowing almost everyone their dignity. For the most part, she keeps this emotionally charged story in the schmaltz-free zone.

If time and space hooked up and got so hammered that they staggered beyond inebriation into delirium, the result would be Hot Tub Time Machine.

There are two questions to ask about a film such as Chloe: Is it erotic? Yes. Is it good? Yes, until it devolves into third-act pretentiousness and preposterousness.

As for the scary business - it is, indeed, scary, delivered with an intensity that will make you think twice the next time you find yourself driving alone, or opening a closet door when no one else happens to be around.

Has two or three booming and intense action sequences that may leave the littlest audience members more quaking than charmed. But the notion of having a pet dragon - just like a pet whale, or a pet lion - is a scenario that should appeal to children of all ages.

A fascinating, albeit self-congratulatory, account of how Disney's fabled animation department was reenergized and reimagined between 1984 and 1994.

Tennant aims for a contemporary version of "The Thin Man," wedding the banter of sparring spouses with sleuth work. To say that he falls short of the mark is understatement.

As an account of how for-profit big business literally rips a consumer's heart out, Repo Men is too graphic for me.

What's not to like?

The movie has workmanlike, uninspired direction from Thor Freudenthal (Hotel for Dogs), who gets an especially lovely performance from Capron.

Rife with nightmarishly violent and horrific behavior. It's intense, graphic, frightening.

Greenberg, with Stiller's sad and self-mocking portrait at its core, is well worth getting to know.

If you're a fan of the indomitable Canadian rocker - high-pitched voice, proto-grunge guitar, total immersion in the music - then you want to see Neil Young Trunk Show on the big screen, for sure.

Despite Sigismondi's fresh eye, feminist perspective, and rapport with actors, The Runaways feels like a long-form music video, recycling every trope from the doomed-rocker handbook.

A gorgeous operatic tale of obsession and madness.

A pleasant taste of Roman life.

In the wake of the Oscar-winning "The Hurt Locker" - a far better film, and one with a less strident, less obvious agenda - Green Zone arrives looking strangely anachronistic.

Despite its title, The Exploding Girl is an oddly tranquil experience.

Fortunately, the actors are so likable that these wincingly unfunny moments don't spoil the party.

Wait till the DVD release.

Charged up with stormy melodrama.

If there were truth-in-titling, Burton's movie rightly would be called "Alice in Narnia: With Stops at Disneyland, the Shire, Rohan, Naboo, and Oz."

The title Brooklyn's Finest is drowning in irony, of course, but Fuqua's moves are less obvious: His film is classical and gritty, his violence makes you want to duck and run.

Gorgeous work, and its imagery and themes dovetail perfectly: a story about creating art, artfully created.

You want to cut Cop Out some slack because it's just so darn eager to please. So let's grant that it will make a reliably fun companion when it's on cable 10 times a week.

Olyphant has a cool, amiable vibe, kind of postmodern Jimmy Stewart, while Mitchell brings intelligence and quietude to yet another role that doesn't deserve such consideration.

If Malik doesn't remind you of Al Pacino's Michael Corleone on his journey from innocence to corruption in "The Godfather" saga, well . . . he should. A Prophet is similarly, startlingly momentous.

As a movie, Steal is as finely wrought as the decorative ironworks that hang on the walls of the Barnes between Picassos and Seurats. Yet as a narrative of the facts, it is as one-sided as a plaintiff's brief.

A surprisingly moving drama - a throwback to the small, character-driven indies of yesteryear.

There are many many fine performers here, including the terrific Patricia Clarkson as the elusive Rachel. But Shutter Island is not so much a character study as it is an atmospheric thriller.

May not be great cinema, but it nonetheless deserves attention.

Loaded with Hitchcockian hugger-mugger, this is a genre Polanski clearly revels in.

The Wolfman feels like a film reedited and reworked so many times it has lost all narrative rhythm and suspense.

A diverting action fantasy that modernizes the stories of demigods and monsters.

It is a pleasant, undemanding movie that takes place over 18 hours on V-Day and considers Very Attractive People whose romantic destinies converge, diverge, and cloverleaf like the interstates threading through California's Southland.

The film has two curious subplots and supporting performances that feel tacked on rather than organically part of it.

With a thumping score and whirling cinematography, District 13: Ultimatum delivers two or three awesomely choreographed chase-and-fight-and-chase-and-fight-again sequences. The dialogue (in French, with subtitles) is not this movie's strength, nor should it be.

Morel and his crew certainly know how to stage action: the fight scenes and shootouts, the stairwell pursuits and motorway mayhem, are as good, if not better, than anything to come out of Hong Kong in a long time.

If you actually sit through this enervating ordeal, you'll swear that time is Frozen.

Ajami brings its audience into a world where the cultural conflict is fierce, emotions run high, yet the hopeful vision of peaceful coexistence shines through the cracks.

Strange and gloomy.

An inert comedy starring Kristen Bell as a workaholic unlucky in love, When in Rome is a rom-bomb.

This white-knuckle adventure is a literal and metaphoric cliff-hanger that gets a spectacular foothold on an unforgiving mountain.

Jon Amiel's moody, and strangely moving, vignette of the naturalist is something else entirely. It is more about Darwin, father and husband, than Darwin the scientist.

For this dynamic to work, the actors need to be of complementary temperament and equal power. This is not the case.

Presented with an economy and emotional cool that add to, rather than subtract from, its dramatic impact, The Girl on the Train reverberates with a quiet, seductive power.

Michael Lembeck directs with the subtlety of a sledgehammer, pounding every joke and cliche until they are flat, flat, flat.

Though not as lyrical as "The Road," which benefits from both its visual artistry and its humanist perspective, The Book of Eli employs the genre conventions of the western to make mythic its principal character.

The plot may be forgettable, but the execution is frantic and funny. The Spy Next Door is a movie that will bring smiles to kids - and their grandparents.

Ultimately, 44 Inch Chest has very little on its mind.

It's oppressive and claustrophobic, confused and scary in there. But it's also compellingly real.

While the characters are B-movie thin, the dialogue standard-issue, and the CG and matte effects only passable at best, it's undeniable fun to behold the likes of serious thespians Hawke and Dafoe slumming around in this cheeseball stuff.

Usually Amy Adams can work all kinds of magic with her wide-eyed gaze and wistful smile. But these attributes aren't assets here, they are distancing devices.

Some tacky animated sequences notwithstanding, Youth in Revolt is smart, cool and frequently hysterical.

Unlike "Caché" and "Code: Unknown," where Haneke's investigations into societal and spiritual despair resonated with poetic force, The White Ribbon doesn't resonate at all.

With a clamorous soundtrack and a whirl of elaborate chases and busily choreographed fight scenes, this is Sherlock Holmes with Attention Deficit Disorder.

I enjoyed the spectacle of middle-aged people making spectacles of themselves.

Vintage Terry Gilliam, a pour not to all tastes but one certain to please lovers of "Time Bandits" and "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen."

This cunning and provocative Romanian film requires patience, but its rewards are many: It's hard to imagine how a scene in which a police captain barks an order to bring him a dictionary can be loaded with suspense, but, really, it is.

The whole thing is rather insipid. But Thomas makes it smoother and more palatable than it deserves to be.

Here is a movie with everything going for it and nothing working.

Avatar delivers. Combining beyond-state-of-the-art moviemaking with a tried-and-true storyline and a gamer-geek sensibility - not to mention a love angle, an otherworldly bestiary, and an arsenal of 22d-century weaponry - the movie quite simply rocks.

A spectacle where A-list talent strives mightily to elevate a C-plus effort.

If the film itself isn't brilliant, its star most definitely is.

Splendid, smile-inducing fun.

Crazy Heart is the real thing, and a real gem.

It doesn't help any that Wahlberg, looking perpetually dumbstruck, is among the clunkiest line-readers working in movies today.

As always, Freeman is a one-man charm offensive.

A Single Man is like a big coffee table book on grief, loneliness, and loss - and mid-20th-century home design.

You would think any movie with the word "salmon" in the title would have to be funny. Think again.

A heartbreaking film that speaks to the lifelong aftershocks of war, and to the powerful bonds of family and of love.

Ryan may not be admirable, but Clooney makes him relatable. It's his deepest and nakedest performance.

More strident than funny, the film illustrates that old French proverb, "Marriage is like a cage; one sees the birds outside desperate to get in, and those inside desperate to get out."

De Niro's minimalist performance has maximum emotional impact and succeeds in unifying the episodic film.

Set exactly a century ago, The Last Station is a droll tragicomedy starring those battling Tolstoys, whose family is unhappy in its own way.

The Road isn't a masterpiece...But I cannot think of another film this year that has stayed with me, its images of dread and fear - and yes, perhaps hope - kicking around like such a terrible dream.

The film billed as the first Disney animation to boast an African American "princess" is really about a resourceful bootstrapper in New Orleans, a young woman allergic to the fairy-tale pap spoon-fed to young girls.

It runs a fast 88 minutes, is broad as the waistlines of its stars, and is remarkably family-friendly if you don't mind bathroom humor.

Linklater's film adaptation succeeds in bringing the flamboyant Welles to life.

An uninspired computer-animated feature that may satisfy undiscriminating pipsqueaks and nearly no one else, Planet 51 is a low-IQ E.T. in reverse.

Given this swoon-inducer, Summit Entertainment would be well-advised to set up fainting couches in the multiplex lobby and provide smelling salts to those who need them.

An engaging if transparent tearjerker of the first water.

A one-of-a-kind experience that boasts a twice-in-a-lifetime performance from Nicolas Cage. The actor has not gone this deep into the abyss since "Vampire's Kiss" (1989).

A melodrama painted in the saffron-and-turmeric hues of a Bollywood musical, Broken Embraces is the Spanish filmmaker's homage to Hitchcock's "Vertigo," that moody account of obsessional love and double lives.

This is magnificent filmmaking, and a magnificent film.

This film that imagines the end of the world not as a whimper but as an implosion is a preposterously diverting, instantly forgettable, big-screen video game.

Witty and wonderful, Fantastic Mr. Fox is the perfect Thanksgiving entertainment.

Think of the film from director Adam Salky and screenwriter David Brind as "Pretty in Pink" crossed with "Cruel Intentions."

For all the film's gritty verisimilitude, The Messenger is not the great Iraq War movie that Kathryn Bigelow's "The Hurt Locker" is.

Awash in nostalgia and amped-up male camaraderie, Richard Curtis' Pirate Radio takes a great story - the hugely popular offshore radio stations that illegally broadcast pop and rock in 1960s Britain - and turns it into an aggressively irritating floating frat-party romp.

It's a view filtered through a prism of memory and emotion, but one well worth investigating.

You go to a Daniels movie not to be entertained, but edified. While not everyone goes to the movies for self-improvement, you will leave this one having witnessed phenomenal acting.

A mildly scary, totally meaningless excursion into the realms of psychological horror and alien-abduction conspiracies.

Visually immersive but emotionally uninvolving.

Has a glorious good time satirizing the extravagant lengths to which the military and intelligence establishments will go if they think there's a payoff at the other end.