Filled with personal vignettes and famous-people testimonials, the film has a few too many narrative digressions, but it's a moving portrait of all-too-human personalities and the dogged optimism that keeps them going.

The movie shifts awkwardly from slapstick firearms training sessions to tender campfire kisses to straightforward suspense (who are those mysterious trench-coated figures?). Combined with unconvincing behavior from all of its characters, that's enough to leave this a disappointing realization of a potentially fascinating idea.

Discreet, delicate, and cautious, Monsieur Lazhar takes you by surprise -- and that goes for both the movie and the man.

Prometheus is breezy and comely and sufficiently clever to mitigate most qualms, and Fassbender, especially, is wonderful.

There's handmade and then there's amateurish. This, alas, is the latter.

Polisse won a jury prize at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival, but it's only a patchwork success.

If you've a mind to see a classic fairy tale rendered as an action movie, and if you want to see a sizeable handful of fine English actors have grand fun playing grizzled dwarves, there are worse ways to spend two hours than in the company of Snow White and the Huntsman.

It's a long film for such a familiar story.

So did the world need another "Men in Black"? No, not at all. But if there had to be one, then it's certainly a relief that it should be one as agreeable as this.

Offers a few laughs and a moment or two of drama, but it's finally more of a conceit -- and a familiar one -- than a film.

The whole thing has the feel of a fact-based dinner-table anecdote absurdly puffed up to feature length.

There are a few chuckles, a few head-scratches and, thankfully, very few missteps. It charms.

Slight but terrific. The intertwining of the sharply tuned actors and the guileless (and often hilarious) townspeople is seamless, the tale is sometimes despairing but never heavy, and the blend of drama, comedy and music is brisk and fresh.

There's almost nothing to Battleship beyond its grindingly dull, digitally rendered naval warfare.

The Dictator has a few laughs along its bumpy path, but not enough of them to indicate that Cohen has found a means to escape the shadows of his early career and forge a second act for himself.

Graham is the most affecting character by far, having returned to India for the first time in 40 years to track down an old lover. His story unfolds in surprising, deftly handled ways, and could easily have justified a film of its own.

The movie is directed with real confidence by Batmanglij. He lets his actors breathe, builds suspense in one group-purge brainwashing scene, and lets the mystery unfold in an immersive way that's probably a bit more compelling than its actual scripted payoff deserves.

'Bloodless' is the word for the whole enterprise.

The film wastes itself on silliness and scattered threads before very long, truly squandering a brilliant promise.

Even with the flaws of the final half, The Avengers is grand, brisk fun. It comes tantalizingly close to reaching the level of the very best comic book films of the current generation.

Goon is a hoot.

Comedy means different things to different people, but I'm pretty sure that most everyone agrees that it's best when it's quick and funny. The Five-Year Engagement is neither.

Befitting a film about Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven is dark and grisly and ghoulish. But it also has qualities that Poe's work never does: It's dull and mechanical and, most of all, phony.

It's better at being droll than laugh-out-loud funny.

This being an Italian film, and Gianni being such a hapless, kindhearted aspiring Lothario, make this perhaps the sweetest movie ever made about a guy trying to cheat on his wife.

It may, finally, be the best and last word on the man, his music and his myth that we ever get on film -- an estimable achievement in itself.

When it sticks to its central flirtation, the latest movie based on a Nicholas Sparks romance, The Lucky One, is blandly pleasant enough.

The potential for an interesting story is high. Unfortunately, Miller's autobiographical tale, as told in Blue Like Jazz, squanders this potential by failing to take place in a recognizably real world.