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

Although James and Madden are no Fred and Ginger when it comes time for the fabled ball, her breathy swoons and glitter-splashed décolletage and his personable imperviousness bode well for the couple's future.

Mr. Holmes is about how the past defines us. It is also very much about regret and trying to put things right.

It's a good thing not to know where a film is going - we need surprises, we need to be spun around a few times - and Ruby Sparks, which is about a writer and his muse, but then becomes more about the muse and her writer, is happily just such a film.

Thoroughly engaging.

Has a dreamy ominousness about it, and a sorrowfulness that speaks to the artificial intimacies of cellular communication, digital images and dial-up porn.

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.

It's a compelling piece of propaganda that argues for Shakur, whose 1996 murder in Las Vegas at age 25 remains unsolved, as a complicated individual, ambitious artist and magnetic personality by using the most persuasive weapons at its command: Tupac himself.

In the engaging Looking for Eric, Loach, the master of British kitchen sink social drama - tries a bit of imaginary whimsy.

It's easy to mistake the simplicity of plot and theme here for simple-mindedness - this isn't Pynchon or Proust. Kung Fu Panda 3 has the economy of a Zen koan, not to mention its inner harmony and wisdom.

The script by Andrea Berloff is stunning in its simplicity and aching details.

That's something else Ridley and his actors do: make you appreciate what a life it was - impossibly short, impossibly brilliant.

This is no-nonsense, let's-get-to-it business, and will probably be less satisfying, and less clear, to viewers unfamiliar with the source material.

A remarkable, thoroughly disturbing creepshow that burrows deep under your skin and refuses to let go.

The story is as basic as a peasant meal - and just as hearty.

As is the case with many English comedies, some of the film's slang is hard to understand. But Jennings' sprightly films proves that although England and America are countries divided by the same language, they are united by slapstick comedy.

While Weitz's story is diverting, the performances cut deeper than the film.

It's a rare window on an artistic collaboration.

Terminator 3 moves at not-quite-breakneck speed, and the shape-shifting, metal-melting special effects aren't exactly spectacular.

Transports us to a world that still had a capacity for awe, and that's the core of its charm.

Even if you don't give a shiitake mushroom about food, there's much to savor in this lively comedy with dramatic aftertastes.

The thing's a behemoth. And as the franchise thunders on, it's also becoming more and more a bore.

From its antagonists to its art direction, everything about Johnston's movie has a been-there, seen-that familiarity. Yet Evans' clean-cut idealism and objectives make old-fashioned patriotism look fresh.

What's not to like?

With the likes of Nicholson, Keaton, Reeves and Peet -- and a fleeting, funny few minutes with McDormand -- Something's Gotta Give is never less than entertaining. And once in a while it's sweetly, and extremely, funny.

Moderately compelling and clinical. This isn't "Breakfast at Tiffany's"; this isn't even "Klute."

A violent, sexy, crazy actioner about supermarket products that rebel against their human consumers, Sausage Party is one of the funniest and most deeply offensive movies of the year (it's obscenely funny), which lambastes America's most sacred of sacred cows: religion.

Moderately scary, moderately amusing, intermittently dull and obvious, Diary of the Dead is not groundbreaking, nor even ground-quaking.

It's a harrowing tale, but one that gets phonied up with unnecessary slo-mos, manipulative soundtrack cues, and unrestrained thespianism.

Little gem of a movie.

The moral of this softhearted tale is that family values can rehabilitate and tenderize even the toughest of birds. But you'll forgive me if I liked it less when Stuart smoothed Margalo's feathers than when Snowbell's fundamental cattiness made the fur fly.

Is Auto Focus a cautionary tale or just a morbid, voyeuristic foray into kitsch and kink? Whatever it is, it's not pretty - it's the cinematic equivalent of soiled, stained sheets. You'll want to run out of the theater straight to a Laundromat.

While most of the talking heads, including the funny and articulate Barbara Ehrenreich (herself a breast cancer survivor), are not likely to join runs and walks for the cure, Pool shows how such events create community and sisterhood.

Wiener-Dog has a satirical edge as sharp as any Solondz has fashioned, but it is also filled with disarming moments of absurdist humor.

Michael Keaton has this incredible, I’m-at-the-edge-of-the-abyss look that should be taught as "the hangdog" in drama school.

Blissfully, brainlessly satisfying.

Meta and messy, Seven Psychopaths does not hang together like "In Bruges."

Smart, curious and brave.

Phantom Boy will appeal to children who have the patience and imagination to immerse themselves in the film's wiggly animation.

The Bling Ring is Sofia Coppola's energetic, elegant, and entertaining take on this real-life story - a comedy, of sorts, if what it says about our obsession with the famous and the frivolous weren't so totally depressing.

Mostly, Dinosaur 13 is far too long, slogging along without momentum or suspense. These events would have been better handled in a single installment of Dateline.

The Trigger Effect asks some important questions about society's increasing reliance on technology (and how we take the high-tech infrastructure of daily life for granted), but the questions are wrapped in a bleak, humorless allegory about alienation and rage. [30 Aug 1996, p.03]

Bakula is the ideal surrogate for a perplexed audience. Similarly, Whitacre's exasperated wife, played by Melanie Lynskey, is drily funny.

This is Highsmith, and so things do not go as planned for her protagonists. The Two Faces of January - drop-dead gorgeous to behold - is not a merry tale, but a murderous one. Murderously good.

And tell me if I'm nuts, but another distraction: Doesn't the BFG bear a striking resemblance to George W. Bush?

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.

Crash fools around with chronology in a Tarantinoesque way that brings its story full circle. You could argue that as events, and people, merge, Haggis' spiky screenplay (cowritten with Bobby Moresco) gets to be, quite simply, too much.

It looks lovely in an art-directed way, and Eddie Redmayne, who won his Oscar earlier in the year for his portrayal of Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything, looks lovely, too.

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.

Pure, undiluted joy.

Abounds with zero-gravity action ballet, frisky interludes of sapphic foreplay, and weepy drama about doomed love. The film also has an irresistibly kitschy theme song: "Close to You," the treacly Burt Bacharach-Hal David smash by the Carpenters.

Jonathan and Christopher Nolan's adaptation of this novel by Christopher Priest offers three acts of exasperating muddle.

Is Spurlock selling out by pulling off this stunt? Is he biting the hand that feeds him? Is he working both sides against the middle? And does he think JetBlue is the best airline in the world? You bet.

The shared energy created by audience and performer that is so restorative to Garland is where the movie finds life.

Restoration moves from farce to spiritual parable to melodrama with such inconsistency that it could be a case study in 17th-century multiple personality disorder. [02 Feb 1996, p.05]

If Coixet's film is substantially more restrained than its explicit source material (Nicholas Meyer, himself a fine novelist and director of the second and best Star Trek film, adapted), it is no less provocative as a poetic meditation on love, sex and death.

The Hip Hop Project, a documentary about Kazi and the young men and women he mentors, isn't quite as successful as Kazi himself - a Bahamian orphan and teenage street hustler who turned his life around, and got folks like Queen Latifah, Russell Simmons and Bruce Willis to help out him and his project.

Brings too much of EVERYTHING to the table: It's the cinema equivalent of a long, winding, run-on sentence.

Tells Wilco's story so well that you'll leave the theater thinking the album is a work of genius.

An unexpectedly moving family portrait of cousins we didn't know we had.

Stunning, beautifully observed character study.

The British star of "Ali G" fame plays Ricky Bobby's arch-nemesis. His name: Jean Girard. His provenance: France. His sponsor: Perrier. Speaking through a set of nasty-looking, tightly clenched teeth in the faux-est of faux French accents, Cohen is hilarious.

All four performances are strong and nuanced, which makes the film oddly compelling. At the same time, all four characters are hard to like, difficult to care about. They're like car-crash victims in a demolition derby of narcissism and lies.

Funny things, images. While to depict something visually is not necessarily to endorse it, when Bigelow shows rape as she does in Strange Days, she does so from the rapist's point of view. It's kind of like making a movie about the dangers of the atom bomb that glamorizes the aesthetic beauty of the mushroom cloud. [13 Oct 1995, p.05]

So authentic are the subjects, so raw their emotions.

While it flirts with the ridiculous, the film manages to maintain a certain gravitas as its many stories unfold.

The Edge isn't particularly deep stuff, but Tamahori isn't a particularly deep filmmaker - he's just really, really good, with an affinity for the natural landscape that comes across brilliantly on screen. [26 Sep 1997, p.03]

The sequel is a dizzying succession of pranks, Candid Camera-like sketches, and, that old crowd-pleaser, the boys actively courting their own grievous harm. This is what you get when a generation grows up watching far too many "Roadrunner" cartoons while sitting on the couch eating bowl after bowl of Lucky Charms.

Some call Margot a comedy. For me, it is a tragedy impaled by comic moments.

Kick-Ass has punk energy, ace action moves, and a winning sense of absurdist fun.

Alternately intriguing then not, and, like its subject, features a lot of lip gloss and girl-on-girl zingers. And like most contemporary movies, Mean Girls has no ending.

It's a farce with heart, a meditation on identity, family and gender politics that has real faith in its characters - even when the characters themselves lack it.

Forget the end and there is much to enjoy here.

You get faux feelings -- but faux of the highest, giddiest order.

Basic as a home movie -- and twice as touching -- Charles Lane's Sidewalk Stories is a black-and-white silent comedy that pays tribute both to Charles Chaplin's The Kid (1921) and to the urban homeless. [06 Apr 1990, p.4]

Miami Vice, the movie, is an atmospheric muddle, as gorgeous and unintelligible as raven-haired stunner Gong Li.

It is possible to bring substance, as well as poetry, to the vignette form, but more often Paris, Je T'Aime is merely mundane.

For Piaf fans, La Vie en Rose is a must-see. For fans yet-to-be, Dahan and Cotillard's film is an opportunity rich with discovery.

Not only eight minutes shorter than its forebear, it's at least eight minutes better - less twee, less chatty, more action, more Elvish.

Another Earth has heft - emotionally, intellectually.

Don't come to The Amazing-Spider-Man looking for originality.

Unfortunately, David Koepp - the A-list Hollywood screenwriter (Jurassic Park, War of the Worlds) and decidedly less-successful director (Ghost Town, Secret Window) - can't find the right Looney Tunes-ish tone for his immersion into bike-messenger culture.

Unsettling, intelligent, and way-out-there.

As adorable and predictable a film as the Helen Fielding best-seller that inspired it.

A stage-y but likable ensemble piece.

To the delight of gadgetheads and the dismay of the rest of us, Spy Kids' paraphernalia is better developed and considerably more fun than its story.

Hackman's in it a lot, and he is, as almost always, great fun.

Pays homage to a sack of Christmas movies, from the department store Claus of "Miracle on 34th Street" to a standing-on-the-bridge-contemplating-suicide moment, a la "It's a Wonderful Life."

Whether it is truth, fiction or, most likely, a little of each, the story Weir tells is a powerful parable of man's charge for freedom and his humbling by nature.

Sisterhood is Stand by Me for girls, as sullen, plucky, melodramatic, exuberant, athletic, graceless, crafty, artistic, arrogant, modest, helpless and resourceful as its teenage heroines.

Cobb is an ironic and telling look at the machinery of myth-making and the chasm that can exist between image and reality. It is enriched by going further - into the impact on the relationship of two very different men. [13 Jan 1995, p.05]

Yates and Rowling skillfully weave their bleak – and very blunt-edged – message into the fabric of the story. It might be wildly out of place in a fantasy aimed at tweens, but it’s a welcome change from the usual vapid blockbuster.

The late John Hughes would have liked Bandslam, an upbeat high school musical that plays like a garage-band cover of "The Breakfast Club."

Unlike the previous two films in this series, Abrams is more concerned with his hero's heart than with his hardware. The result is a pulse-racing thriller that restores the human factor to the franchise, and to its producer-star.

Suave, witty and wonderfully acted ensemble piece.

As solid as Cranston, Leguizamo, Kruger, Bratt, and all the rest are, the built-in constraints of the movie format don't do their real-life counterparts full justice.

I smiled for the first half of the movie and started laughing hysterically when a supporting character hijacked it from its stars.

While its rather formulaic second half relies on clichés about underdogs' triumphing against the odds, The Idol opens with a terrific look at Assaf's childhood that has the feel of "Stand By Me."