The movie's excessive and logistically goofy in a way "Taken" wasn't.

Director Guillaume Canet, who previously teamed with Cluzet on the excellent thriller "Tell No One," capably handles the sprawling cast.

Frankenweenie seems like a genuine effort to pass along this love to the next generation, and if one kid who sees it goes home and demands to watch another movie featuring a giant turtle, it will have done its job.

The movie's perfectly understated, warts-and-all sense of time and place will send any suburban Gen Xer in the audience flashing right back to their less-cautious days, when mix tapes did heavy lifting as calling cards.

This ode to indie legitimacy proves to be too cartoonish to feel real and not outrageous enough to be memorable.

Even when the details of their lives feel unbelievable, these actresses compel our faith and keep us watching.

What we have is a not-very-funny college comedy for tweens, full of unappealing characters and, although the musical arrangements are fun, some truly unimaginative choreography.

The only reliable smiles come courtesy of Steve Buscemi, a frequent presence in Sandler movies, here voicing an exasperated, over-extended werewolf dad.

While the third act inevitably bogs down a bit in gunplay and chases, there are more than enough moments of visual wonder and storytelling surprise to make it worth the trip.

More convincing are the performances from Jenkins and Allison Janney, as another of Jesse's old profs. Both these pros bring more depth to their supporting characters than either of the promising, but, alas, young, leads do to theirs.

Anderson, god love him, seems determined to make the "Great American Film." The Master isn't it, but you come away from it with the sense that may be on the right path.

One of the most lifeless and predictable movies you're likely to see this year.

Olivia Thirlby adds some humanity as the empath. And as the scarred queen of a drug cartel, Lena Headey chews the scenery, and some of her costars, with relish.

The script's contrivances and the director's lax handling aren't enough to hold you.

Zobel isn't a sadist about all of this as, say, Roman Polanski or David Lynch or Todd Solondz might have been. There's a humanity here, even for the restaurant manager. But that still doesn't make Compliance easy to ingest.

More seriously, Jarecki never quite pierces the skin of this world, capturing its shiny and grimy surfaces but failing to immerse us in its flaws; too often it's like flipping through a magazine story on the lives of the rich and corrupt.

There's a touch of whimsy to his misadventures, but the malfeasance he uncovers -- often using hidden cameras and microphones -- is anything but a joke.

The word 'samsara' means 'continuous flow of life' in Tibetan, and Fricke and company surely experienced that sensation in making the film, which took them to 25 countries in a span of five years.

A nitwit story about a nitwit author who has written a nitwit novel about a nitwit author who has published a nitwit novel which, in fact, he has stolen wholecloth from another writer whose personal behavior, as fictionalized in the novel-within-the-novel-within-the-film, can charitably be described as...nitwit.

This isn't the "Right Thing" in any sense.

The slowness and stillness in the film are, actually, a slow boil, and in Lie's taciturnity there is pain and even horror.

There's a terrific balance between human comedy and just-this-side-of-science-fiction in Robot & Frank.

As the action moves from Vienna to Paris to London to Denver to Phoenix and then back again, the vignettes blur into one another.

The film's climax is a bit of a jumble, but by then Hillcoat has built his world so vibrantly that it hardly matters. And the hard-charging soundtrack -- featuring Cave, Warren Ellis, Ralph Stanley, Emmylou Harris and Willie Nelson -- is an absolute blast.

The journey on which he takes us may not satisfy in the ways we normally ask of movies, but if it did it wouldn't be a Cronenberg, would it?

Director Bart Layton's film takes us to such strange and emotionally-charged places that we cannot believe that what we're seeing is real, even though it demonstrably is.

Slight but winning.

A rather routine thriller that's got two things going for it: the ticking of a clock and the clickety-click of bicycle wheels. Both impart a sense of exhilaration to a thin and even silly story, engaging you when, really, you ought to know better.