No great shakes, The Baxter nonetheless has a quiet loopiness going for it. And it has the absence of a laugh track going for it, too.

A film of haunting eloquence and justifiable fury.

It's a good story, a sad story, a story of triumph and prejudice and terrible hypocrisy. And Cumberbatch aces it all - another smartly realized but deeply soulful performance from an actor who seemingly can do no wrong.

This is very much Anderson's film. The publication of the novel made Wharton's reputation. The release of The House of Mirth should do the same for Anderson.

The three (human) leads are perfection. Bridges' Howard is as breezily garrulous and glad-handing as Cooper's Smith is laconic and withdrawn. Maguire's Pollard has haunted eyes and orangey hair that makes him look like a human jack-o'-lantern, and establishes his own unique rhythm and less-is-more style.

No manner of bizarre distraction can keep Anchorman's hapless hero from his mission: "I'm going to do what God put Ron Burgundy on this earth to do," he declares. "Have salon-quality hair and read the news!"

Ain't nothin' but a party, y'all.

Fresh, funny and perceptive.

"Rebel Without a Cause" with a debate club, Better Luck Tomorrow is a sharp, smart slice of suburban angst among the high school overachiever set.

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

Baumbach, whose films include the searingly funny, autobiographical "The Squid and the Whale" and the brilliantly uncomfortable "Margot at the Wedding," writes wry, sharp, poignant stuff.

The delightful G-rated film has a story line simple enough for pre-schoolers to follow and comic sensibility complex enough for adults to savor, with an emphasis on howlingly bad (by which I mean good) puns.

Like "Tremors," only ickier, Slither is a tongue-in-cheek horror flick that skewers the genre while delivering seat-squirming scares.

The fascinating aspect of the rambling and involving film is how Ralph and this no-nonsense dame who married Dad become confederates.

Foxx makes what he does look effortless. He's the reason to see Collateral, as he walks into the frame and walks off with the picture.

Effie Gray is peculiarly compelling, even if the issue of sexual repression, all the Victorian manners, seem light-years gone and close to unfathomable.

All about the wacky borderlands where reality and invention intersect. But there are no safe demarcations -- no demilitarized zone, no Berlin Wall -- to cue us to which side we're operating in, or that Barris is operating in.

Both the leads are scarily good, and Ozon imbues his troubling tale with jarring blasts of light and the sun-dappled beauty of the natural world.

The film - despite being a half-hour too long - is a rocking, rolling supernatural spectacle.

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.

The transformation of Reynold's lawyer from a bumbler and stumbler to a victorious litigator, sticking it to an entire nation, is the stuff of a Frank Capra/Jimmy Stewart pic.

Fever Pitch works. At times, it works brilliantly.

With the exception of one sequence, this PG-13 movie is so youth-friendly that I thought I might take my 10-year-old. But that sequence, upsetting for those of any age, makes the movie better suited for mature 12-year-olds and older.

Mostly this elegant little film is a case study in the inconsistency of thoughts and feelings. Here, moralists break commandments, intellectuals act emotionally, and cynics have moments of idealism.

This seriously funny group portrait of third-generation clam diggers (and their wives and sisters) is fresh as today's catch and about as tasty. Its '70s soundtrack positively swaggers.

It is a fever dream of a movie, tracking its subject as she tries to maintain control, maintain her composure and her sanity, and as she tries — shellshocked, quaking with grief, but also fiercely determined — to shape and secure her husband’s legacy.

A small, intimate micro-budget effort, Altered Minds boasts terrific production values, pitch-perfect performances, and an eerie soundscape of found noises that evoke the feel of a surreal nightmare.

At times Let It Rain recalls one of those Katharine Hepburn comedies where the New Woman gets cut down to size so as not to intimidate the Old-School Men. Yet the film so likably deflates the pompous and pumps up the humble that it's hard not to like.

It's a tale of survival and kitsch that will win you over.

The troupe deserves every bit of its worldwide renown, and it makes this Imax trip one well worth taking.

It's a heavy-metal opera with humor.

My Best Friend, not surprisingly, is about what it means to have friends - and not to have them, to be alone. It's about connection, about trust and vulnerability. That Leconte's little film is a mild-mannered farce, makes the heartache funny, but really, this is serious stuff.

As funny as it is sick (and it's plenty of both).

Orphan, with a perverse plot twist at the end, will keep you on tenterhooks from its nightmarish opening scene to its chilling last frame.

With its moody, noir lighting and poetic voice-over, Flame rehearses virtually every element of the classic genre piece: violence, sex and romance, gunplay, spies, betrayals, a femme fatale, and a murderous Gestapo officer.

Delightfully creepy suspenser.

It's human drama, high and mighty.

Manages to pull off a couple of startling surprises.

Slower and talkier than the five Potters that came before - but not necessarily in a bad way - Half-Blood Prince is a bubbling cauldron of hormonal angst, rife with romance and heartbreak, jealousy and longing.

The plot is canny, but it would be little more than an ingenious springloaded device were it not for the performances by Howard and Iures.

Few movies are as eloquent in their performances and their art direction.

It's one of the great have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too performances of the year.

Man, oh, man, much of the dialogue is so heavy, and heavy-handed, that you can see fine actors such as Derek Luke and Michael Ealy buckle under the weight. Clearly, Lee fell in love with McBride's words and couldn't bear to cut them, even when the visuals made those words redundant.

It's an involving journey, remarkably free of sentimentality, deepened by the performances.

Director Jennifer Yuh Nelson, who oversaw the elegant title sequences from the first film, likewise gives Kung Fu Panda 2's series of flashbacks a different look, harking back to Chinese shadow puppetry and delicate watercolors. With its mix of vibrant CG and classical elements, the movie dazzles.

Stands apart from the trite conventions of most coming-of-age drama chiefly through the originality of Pool's approach and the honesty and conviction of Karine Vanasse's portrait of Hanna.

Seething, searing tragedy of unmannerliness.

Don Jon is about a man's unwitting search for intimacy, for real connection in a world where everyone is connected - by social media, by the Internet, by TV and computer and smartphone screens. That's not exactly an original idea. But Gordon-Levitt goes at it with gusto, and style. Give the guy some props.

Skyfall is certainly the most cultured Bond film to come along in some time. It's also the first of the three Craig endeavors to seriously (and wittily) acknowledge its pedigree.

Let the Fire Burn does not glorify MOVE. What it does do is force us to consider why and how this surreal event - a city bombing its own citizens, leaving innocent children dead - occurred. And ask, could something like it ever happen again?

Mixes the intimate, indie vibe of "Daytrippers" with the absurdist screwball streak of "Superbad," to winning effect.

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

The Cartel does what good reporters are supposed to do: follow the money.

Air Doll covers some of the same ground as that other postmodern Pinocchio story, A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, while avoiding its facile sentimentality.

In Little Odessa, Gray proves that you can go down what looks like a familiar road and make it seem much less traveled. [30 June 1995, p.06]

A Monster Calls is an engrossing tragic fantasy, sustained by genuine sentiment.

The Next Three Days is genre fare - no pretensions, no nonsense.

Blending facts, anecdotes, and no little conjecture, Elvis & Nixon finally finds the two American icons face to face, sharing M&M's and Dr Peppers.

One of the most suspenseful, terrifying, and devilishly original horror pics in recent memory.

A clever, fun, and affecting romantic dramedy about love and rock-and-roll.

Cusack is especially good in a role that's got more (and less) going on under the surface, while Peet offers up another coltish, trash-mouthed vamp.

A coming-of-age film that has the jaunty mood and egg-cream flavor of a Philip Roth memoir.

Scary Movie 3 is a veritable time capsule of of-this-moment kitsch, schlock and bad taste. And it's funny, too.

Adoration, Egoyan's most affecting film since "The Sweet Hereafter."

A throwback to the days when gangs met in clubhouses instead of crack houses, raced go-carts instead of stolen cars and brandished slingshots instead of semiautomatics, The Little Rascals is the best 1936 movie made in 1994. [05 Aug 1994, p.03]

While Smith gets into Ali's head and under his skin, the movie around him has more footwork than punch.

Loose, eminently likable stuff.

Relative newcomer Parker Sawyers (Zero Dark Thirty, Survivor) is terrific as Barack, embodying the character in each line and gesture without mimicking the real Obama.

Casey's big brother has made a tough, taut mystery.

At a certain point, The Homesman will take you by surprise. By the end, a ferry ride across the Missouri River, it will take your heart.

The effectively creepy Stir of Echoes, is enough to make your blood chill.

Beefed up and twanging like a true cowboy, Cooper nonetheless carries the full weight of his character's achievements - and the questions that come with them - as he tries to find his footing back on Texas soil. If American Sniper fails at being a truly great film, it is no fault of its star.

JCVD juggles humor with whomping martial-arts moves and a kind of melancholy star turn from the melancholy, muscular star.

A satisfyingly moody, melancholy, madcap live-action romp.

Theron proves the master of operatic hissy fits, Blunt lets the pain show beneath the glacial cool, Chastain brings her usual Juilliard-schooled commitment to the occasion, and Hemsworth is Hemsworthian, if oft-times incomprehensible, delivering his lines in a gorse-y whorl of vowels and consonants.

Solitary Man is a wafer-thin film with a river-deep, mountain-high performance from Douglas.

It's a wise and endearing little film.

In a sense, Everyone Else traces, over a stretch of days on the sunny Mediterranean, the whole trajectory of a relationship. It's a marriage in miniature: courtship, consummation, conflict; love and hate; the longing for freedom vs. the need for companionship.

A deft, affecting drama about childhood sexual abuse and its lifelong scars.

Winner of a prize at the Cannes Film Festival in May, the quiet, solemn Climates is a bit like those towering ancient columns that Isa photographs to show his class. The fragmented architecture is beautiful and striking, but also extremely dated.

His (Mamet) direction is unobtrusive, unflashy, and always willing to allow the hilarious cast all the room it needs.

What's admirable about Save Me is that it grounds its religious and cultural debate not in vilifying one side but in sympathizing with both.

The plain, reportorial style of Lost Boys -- which simply records its subjects in various settings and situations -- results in a film that doesn't preach, doesn't politicize.

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

The music is symphonic, the cinematography spectacular, the narration — ay, there's the rub. In Oceans, the latest Disney nature documentary, the voice-over almost manages to turn the majestic into the mundane. Almost.

Lean's classic is something of a picnic compared to The Railway Man, which contains horrific scenes of torture.

Heigl, a double-dip of praline with caramel, is so beautiful that initially you don't notice her comic chops.

Frost/Nixon is not the epic gladiatorial face-off, the ricocheting verbal shoot-out that writer Morgan and filmmaker Howard imagined.

What this slow-moving but fascinating two-part portrait does do is hunker down in the jungles and mountains of Cuba and (in the second part) Bolivia, capturing in keen, almost Zen-like detail the trudging and trekking, the recruiting and strategizing, the fighting and the philosophizing.

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.

Engagingly odd and full of sad, funny moments.

Kinnear does what he's done in the past: You underestimate the guy's acting chops, and suddenly, strikingly, he floors you.

Monster brings the horror stories of everyday life down to a recognizable level -- even as the actress inhabiting that story remains startlingly unrecognizable.

Undefeated is undeniably inspirational stuff.

Paradise Now plays like Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot," but with explosives.

It's not just the grainy stock and bad sound - technically, we've come a long way. It's the cheesy sex, the awkward edits, the hammy symbolism, the mix of art-house aesthetics and exploitation cliché. Strange creature, this is.

Unexpectedly fresh, alive, and vibrant - and wonderfully traumatizing.

The filmmaker, whose career took off with a very different sort of Holocaust film, 1990's Oscar-nominated "Europa Europa," understands that most of these stories arrive at a point of unspeakable, incomprehensible horror.