Love conquers all. Sadly, Yoo's film does not.

The sort of generic crime thriller - stick-figure characters, pointless muddle of plot, people entering and exiting SUVs and Lear jets with a sense of urgency - that feels like it could drag on forever, and drag us down into a purgatory of stupefaction with it.

A wildly suspenseful zero-g tale of survival 350 miles beyond the ozone layer, Alfonso Cuarón's space saga is emotionally jolting - and physically jolting, too.

The first date that James Gandolfini and Julia Louis-Dreyfus embark on in Enough Said - has to be one of the great getting-to-know-you encounters in movie history.

It's a tasty buffet of food gags, both visual and verbal. When they say "We're toast," they really mean it.

Rush, which marks a return to form (and more so) for Howard after plodding through adultery buddy movie comedies (The Dilemma) and Dan Brown sequeldom (Angels & Demons), is almost primal.

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.

There are a few nice scares in The Colony, and the female lead, Rookie Blue's Charlotte Sullivan, looks really, really cute in blond dreadlocks. But she can't save the movie, nor can her impressive costars, Bill Paxton, Kevin Zegers, and Laurence Fishburne.

It is by turns illuminating, exasperating, sloppy, redundant, a head-spinner, and a headache.

Populaire plays like a musical - you expect anyone, at any time, to break into song.

Ultimately, it's the romance that feels forced and phony, not the group meetings, the confessions, the anguished moments alone.

A devastating psychological thriller, Prisoners pulls us deep into our worst fear: the Amber Alert. Then it holds us under.

The Family is a film at once strange and intriguing. It can't seem to settle on a tone. The early eruptions of violence are treated as slapstick when they are most assuredly not. But the climactic showdown, which fairly cries out for a touch of humor, is played as a tense and grim action sequence.

Purely as an action film, Riddick is passable, if grueling. The problem is tonal.

Director John Crowley trots his crew around London, working up a suitable amount of suspense. And paranoia.

Smart, funny, and gross (often at the same time).

Though imaginatively directed by Harald Zwart, Mortal Instruments, which is adapted from Cassandra Clare's YA novels, is marred by significant flaws.

The Spectacular Now feels genuine in almost every respect, from the unflashy cinematography and the sparingly deployed music cues to the natural, unhurried performances of its two stars. They will get to you, truly.

Drug War is a deeply intelligent, exhilarating and eminently satisfying adult crime story, one of the best thrillers you're likely to see this year.

Jobs is a just-the-facts - and fiddling-with-the-facts - dramatization, forgoing any kind of deeper psychological exploration of the man and his motivations, his demons and dreams.

Hemsworth, who is Gale Hawthorne in "The Hunger Games" and the brother of the Hemsworth who stars as "Thor", has maybe one arrow in his acting quiver - he can look engaged.

For all its faults - and there are many, from shameless compression of events to milk the drama for all it's worth, to the gimmicky miscasting of several commanders-in-chief (Robin Williams as Eisenhower is especially egregious) - The Butler is an inspiring and important summation of the black struggle.

In the annals of sequeldom, Kick-Ass 2 has to be one of the lamest follow-ups ever.

A quiet, modest chamber piece more like "Moon" than "Star Wars."

The scene when she's (Blanchette) babysitting Ginger's boys and takes them to a diner - and confides about her electric shock treatments ("Edison's medicine"), her breakdowns, about the side effects of Prozac and Lithium . . .. it's genius.

The animated film has all the hallmarks of a straight-to-DVD project - inferior plot, dull writing, cheap drawing.

Among the slew of recent futuristic hell-in-a-handbasket spectacles, Elysium takes the cake.

An innocuously smutty road comedy.

Still Mine resonates in all the right ways.

With border crossings and familiar buddy-cop movie tropes (think Lethal Weapon, think 48 HRS, think The Heat), the Wahlberg-Washington express hits lots of comfortably familiar notes. And more than a few viciously uncomfortable ones, too.

Very few of us would like to think about the physical and emotional toll that life in captivity takes on these magnificent creatures. Gabriela Cowperthwaite's powerful, heartbreaking, and beautifully crafted documentary, Blackfish, forces us to do just that.

The Hunt offers a powerful, provocative study of mob mentality and the fabric of trust.

At a certain point, Bujalski - the mumblecore meister, gleefully pushing the envelope of credulity here - jettisons the mock-doc pretense for a Christopher Guest-like glimpse into a strange subculture of the everyday.

The To Do List is sex-obsessed, to be sure, but it's a chick flick, too. And in what it says about women (or girls) and men (or boys) and what they want, maybe it's a movie for us all.

Apart from Khodchenkova, who displays the acting acumen of a runway model and gives new meaning to the term Russian mole (she's the villainous vixen of the tale, suited up in high heels and slinky, scaly couture), the cast of The Wolverine is uniformly good.

In its long, punishing final act, Red 2 goes beyond its mandate as a lark to pose as a true action caper.

It shows us the everyday pressures and problems, the joys and pleasures, experienced by someone moving through life. And then that BART train pulls into Fruitvale, and the rest is history.

It works here and there. And then it doesn't.

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

Let's face it: Kids aren't a very demanding audience. If there's color, movement, and a high quotient of silliness, they're happy.

A sly, richly modulated, emotionally engaging, and brutally honest film.

Pacific Rim shares much with the Mexican filmmaker's "Hellboy" franchise - jokey and comic book-y, full of muscular tableaus with huge squads of people coming and going (and running for their lives).

If you were to judge Let Me Explain purely on its performance portion, filmed at Madison Square Garden during Hart's 2012 tour, the film would merit a full extra star. But at 75 minutes, it feels too skimpy to rave over.

If you're looking for quality prepackaged, predigested Hollywood family fun this summer, you could do a lot worse than Despicable Me 2.

A wild, wacky, wide-screen reimagining of the vintage radio serial and TV series, the film - with Armie Hammer in the hat and mask, galloping across Texas righting wrongs, and Depp as his trusty Indian sidekick, Tonto - is an epic good time.

The main flaw of White House Down is that it overstays its welcome, thanks in large part to a silly climax that seems to unfold in three laborious acts. At least, Tatum keeps his shirt off.

This profanely hilarious and tonally erratic spoof of buddy movies is funny as it begins in "Miss Congeniality 2" territory, funnier still as it zooms into "Lethal Weapon" climes. But it stops dead, and I mean that literally, when it takes a U-turn into a "Pulp Fiction" sinkhole of slapstick violence.

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

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.

Forster and his team have also mastered the discreet edit, leaving a lot of the blood, gore, and zombie slime to the imagination. (It's still a pretty convincingly creepy affair.)

Burshtein keeps the camera tight on the faces of her actors in a way that succeeds at making visible the invisible heat between the characters. The film's chaste eroticism and the community's deep respect for Shira's emotional and spiritual growth keep the audience in thrall.

At least an hour of Man of Steel's excessive running time is devoted to the sort of crash-and-burn, slamming-into-skyscrapers CG fight scenes that we've already seen in "The Avengers" and "Dark Knight," "Iron Man," and "Spider-Man." Man of Steel is just the same old same old.

Out-of-control hilarious.

The result is a film that deeply engages us on multiple levels. Not only do we wonder what Maisie knows and how she knows it, we want to get this seedling to a place where she won't have to be transplanted every day.

This is a movie that mines deep beneath the surface of human feeling. It will make you think - about love, about life, about two people who aren't real, except that they've become so for so many of us in this improbably successful indie franchise.

It's complicated. And it's fascinating.

The Internship itself would be kind of charming, too, if this Google-recruitment film, this 119-minute commercial for Googliness, weren't so downright creepy.

Brosnan is good, and he and Dyrholm erase any and all signs of contrivance in the plot, the script.

In truth, despite more corn than Mel Gibson grows on his farm in "Signs" (another Shyamalan effort), After Earth is worth a look.

There's a great movie out now about magicians, sleight-of-hand maestros, illusionists, card and coin tricksters. Now You See Me is not that movie.

The plot and dialogue are still stilted and stupid, but that only proves that Justin Lin, who has directed the last four F & Fs, has his priorities straight.

Most of it plays like Jackass.

The action is exhilarating, the visual effects spectacular - and spectacularly realized.

Despite the charismatic efforts of the British actor Ahmed, The Reluctant Fundamentalist gets bogged down in proselytizing and plot.

More a deification than a documentary.

Dense, richly textured, and emotionally fraught - uplifting and devastating in equal parts - Shane Carruth's masterful sophomore effort is an abstract, elusive, but emotionally engaging love story that's more tone poem than drama.

The characters' high-minded, if unsophisticated, patter clashes with the film's ironic-chic style, and it never manages to move beyond the late-night palaver of earnest, if naive, college freshmen.

A likable if not exactly groundbreaking comedy.

There are so many things wrong with Luhrmann's Great Gatsby - the filmmaker's attention-deficit-disorder approach, the anachronistic convergence of hip-hop and swing, the choppy elision of Fitzgerald's plot, the jarring collision of Jazz Age cool and Millennial cluelessness. But at the crux of things, the problem is that it's impossible to care.

A big, kabooming sequel that plays sleight-of-hand with its audience.

Yep, it's all fun and games until someone gets brutalized repeatedly. Before you can avert your eyes, it's Katie, bar the door and break out the chain saws.

No one is bad in The Big Wedding, but no one is remotely believable, either.

Mud is steeped in a sense of place, and the people inhabiting it. Southern. Superstitious. Suspenseful. Sublime.

Directed in steady fashion by Redford, The Company You Keep manages to keep its multiple strands of plot - and the people caught in them - from collapsing in a jumble of confusion. This alone, given the whirl of personal and political history going on, is an accomplishment.

By the end of the film, Leo is beginning to sound suspiciously like HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Robotic, and more than a little peeved.

Disconnect is an Eleanor Rigby movie. Look at all the lonely people. A "Crash" for the Internet age, Alex Henry Rubin's topical opus swoops down like an alien spaceship to investigate a disparate group of Earthlings living in close proximity in the suburbs of New York City.

Because Trance is principally about the thrill of the ride rather than the inner lives of the riders, it lacks that outlaw humanism specific to Boyle films such as "Trainspotting," "Slumdog Millionaire," and "Millions." In other words, it's an ingeniously built automaton, sexy as hell, and devoid of a heart.

This is a story about legacy, the sins of the father, the restlessness in our souls. It's powerful, it's bold, it hits you hard.

"There's nothing here!" screams Romina Mondello - Kurylenko's Euro gal pal, walking the deserted sidewalks of this Anytown, U.S.A. Boy, truer words . . ..

42 doesn't shirk from showing how daunting it was for Robinson to turn the other cheek, as Ford's Rickey tells him he must do, in the face of the insults and hostility.

The pair are scrappy and smart and riff off each other like a no-budget, indie version of Tracy and Hepburn. It's impossible not to like them, and there's absolutely no reason not to.

Alvarez triumphs because he made one crucial decision: Avoid digital animation and use only practical in-camera special effects. He uses every trick from classic Hollywood and invents a few of his own.

Based on reports of a real 2005 incident, it is a film that asks its viewer to consider the nature of good and evil, love and trust - and trust that turns into something like blind faith.

A sloppy, sentimental story line and pivotal plot turns that are only sketchily realized undermine the life-on-the-road misadventures.

An atmospheric Argentine thriller starring Viggo Mortensen in twin roles (literally), Everybody Has a Plan is in the vein of, if not on the same plane as, Michelangelo Antonioni's "The Passenger."

A silly, if fun, futuristic sci-fi romance.

It's a fun ride for the most part, with a bumping soundtrack and genuine moments of warmth and heartbreak. But one can't help but wish Gondry had simply let the camera roll, and let the kids speak for themselves.

On the Road is an honorable homage to the bennies-and-booze-and-bebop-driven hegiras undertaken by the fiercely dedicated anti-establishment duo. But in Salles, screenwriter Jose Rivera and company's effort to get the details right, they only get so far. And it's not quite far enough.

Any semblance of seriousness and verisimilitude suggested by the marketing campaign is quickly forgotten once director Antoine Fuqua's enjoyably tacky Die Hard-on-the-Potomac gets under way.

The movie is well-edited and lean, a fast-paced, action-filled bit of froth that manages to be diverting and surprisingly fun.

Admission works in stops and starts.

Am I crazy, or are Spring Breakers and "Oz the Great and Powerful" essentially the same movie? James Franco stars in both - a tattooed, gun-totin' gangsta in one, a charlatan magician in the other (you figure out which is which), and, in both, he's encircled by a bevy of Hollywood babes determined either to get witchy on him, or get that other witchy-rhyming word on him.

A political drama, a personal drama, a sharp-eyed study of how the media manipulate us from all sides, No reels and ricochets with emotional force.

A beautifully twisted, slow-burning psychothriller that may or may not all be taking place inside India's head.

By the end of their arduous journey, Lore and her siblings are changed. But it's the kind of change that will take years, perhaps generations, to understand, to heal.

With an attention to the telling detail that one finds in a great short story, Kiarostami guides Takanashi and Okuno - and then Kase - through the mischievous and melancholy tale. It is quiet. It is lovely. And it will stay with you for a long time.

The film is at once shamelessly transparent, manipulative, and far-fetched, and impossibly suspenseful. You'll want to take a shower afterward - that's how icky you'll feel.

The film has been directed in a murky, rhythmless fashion by Niels Arden Oplev.