No matter Bateman and Reynolds make The Change-Up seem a lot better than it is. Each earns a star in my review. The movie would be literally nothing without them.

The movie rises and, at times, even soars. This is all - and I do mean all - thanks to what human actors in league with computer technology can now achieve to bring the apes to life. No more guys squeezed into monkey suits and talking in posh accents. Performance-capture makes all the difference.

This is a breakthrough star performance from a terrific actor getting a chance to let it rip.

It's hot, fierce, funny, vicious and ready to bite, baby.

What makes Crazy Stupid Love a cut above is actors who let pain seep into the laughs. Here's a comedy you really can take to heart.

It looks slick, pricey and starry – Indiana Jones teams up with James Bond for a gunfight with space demons. But even Harrison Ford and Daniel Craig can't save a movie that's all concept, no content.

Another Earth offers imagination and provocation to spare.

Here's the funny thing: Despite all the Captain America rah-rah in costume and indestructible shield, the movie is at its best when the story sticks with skinny Steve.

Their banter is fun at the start until it becomes relentless.

What an exhilarating gift to watch Harry and Company go out in a blaze of glory and amazing grace.

Larry Crowne is more than a missed opportunity. It's alarmingly, depressingly out of touch.

Here's a hit-and-miss farce that leaves you wishing it was funnier than it is. Why? Because it wussies out on a sharp premise.

The dialogue is witty and spiked with delicious malice. At least it is when Pierce delivers it.

Transformers: Dark of the Moon - high on any list of the worst blockbusters ever - is a movie bereft of wit, wonder, imagination, and any genuine reason for being. Watching it makes you die a little inside.

This movie will get under your skin.

Lasseter is back behind the wheel, and you can feel his love for all things automotive in every frame. No humans blot this anthropomorphic romp. Cars do all the talking.

Bad Teacher keeps running away from its combustibly nasty premise. Damn shame.

Page One is a vital, indispensable hell-raiser.

Hal claims that a Lantern's only enemy is fear itself. The thought of a sequel to this shamelessly soulless Hollywood product scares me plenty.

This movie, a true beauty, will put a spell on you.

Blazing performance will burn in your memory. Same goes for the film.

Ayoade, the British comic making a remarkable feature debut with his adaptation of Joe Dunthorne's 2008 novel, blends mirth and malice with deadpan brilliance.

McGregor goes bone-deep in a performance of shining subtlety. And a never-better Plummer is simply stupendous, refusing any call to sentiment as he shows us Hal's resonant lunge at life. Mills works the same way. Beginners is one from the bruised heart.

In this cheerfully perverse origin tale of Magneto, Professor X and their mutant team, Vaughn delivers a fireworks display of action, smarts and fun, plus a touch of class from actors who can really act.

Like its predecessors (Badlands, Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line and The New World), Tree delivers truths that don't go down easy. No one with a genuine interest in the potential of film would think of missing it.

How could a 2009 raunchfest that slapped a grin on my face I couldn't unglue degenerate into a cold dish of sloppy seconds?

What's fresh about Midnight in Paris is the way he (Allen) identifies with Gil's idealization of the past, of the Paris that represented art and life at their fullest.

Marshall deserves props for putting the "show" back into the Pirates business. But face it, he's polishing a giant turd.

As played by the spectacular Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Hesher is the id run rampant.

Ferrell delivers a performance of implosive intensity that rings true in every detail.

Kristen Wiig is an indisputable goddess of comedy. And this rowdy fem-friendship movie she stars in and wrote with Annie Mumolo is infused with the Wiig brand of wicked mischief.

The half-star rating goes to John Krasinski for heroically rising above this vile dung heap of a movie.

Moralists, beware. Hobo looks like a garish cartoon puked up by a filmmaker overstuffed with cheap thrills and celluloid scuzz. What's not to like?

The Beaver, directed by Jodie Foster from a script by fearless first-timer Kyle Killen, is operating on a plane far above multiplex formula. This flawed but heartfelt movie has the power to sneak up and floor you.

Hemsworth, an Aussie actor with a vocal command to match his heaving brawn, doesn't just play the role, he owns it. I'm expecting both sexes will feel his impact.

Fast Five will push all your action buttons, and some you haven't thought of. So what if you hate yourself in the morning.

Prom has its modest delights, chiefly its young cast.

A devastating mystery thriller from Quebec filmmaker Denis Villeneuve that grabs you hard and won't let go.

A brightly-colored, dizzying pinwheel of 3D animation in which nothing much happens. Sounds like summer is here early.

Spurlock says he's not selling out, he's buying in. I'm buying into Spurlock. As ever, he makes you laugh till it hurts.

It's all in the telling. Gruen provided grit and pungent detail. The movie settles for gloss.

Between a diabolically funny start and a surprise climax, Scream 4 offers nothing more than a series of gory deaths that grow tiresome with repetition. The rating is a hard R, but Craven and Williamson keep it soft at its core. "Scream 1" is still the only keeper.

Who's the idiot responsible for this fiasco? You can't blame the Tea Party, an organization of 9 million that the film's producers are exploiting to get butts into seats. There's an object lesson in objectivism for you.

The film pivots on McAvoy's powerfully implosive performance as a man trying to grow beyond his own prejudices. His scenes with Wright, under Redford's nuanced guidance, give this film its timely resonance and its grieving heart.

Reichardt has crafted a haunted dream of a movie to get lost in.

Nothing works. Nothing.

Gordon, who died shortly after the first Arthur, never had to see the luckless 1988 sequel that made his beloved characters seem like strangers. The new Arthur, insipid when it should be infectious, leaves the same deadly impression.

As Hanna confronts her past, the movie becomes like nothing you've ever seen. I'd call it a knockout.

An emotional powerhouse.

Working from a tight script by Ben Ripley, Jones creates scary, hairy, high-octane tension. Disbelief? Suspended, until the logic lapses kick in later. It's a small price to pay for a ride that starts at wild and accelerates from there.

Here's a better than average spook-house movie, mostly because Insidious decides it can haunt an audience without spraying it with blood.

The performances are uniformly terrific, finding the specific details that create a universal truth.

Looks aren't everything. Case in point: Sucker Punch, a dazzling visual design that goes tone-deaf every time it opens its dumb mouth or makes claims to profundity.

Rogen is a nonstop hoot, but it's the byplay between Frost and Pegg that roots the laughs in characters we care about. That's right: characters. No anal probes.

This is rock-solid entertainment. McConaughey, a cunning mesmerizer in the courtroom, steers this Lincoln into what could be a hell-raising franchise. More, please. Soon.

It's a wet dream for anyone who's ever dreamed of getting an edge on the information highway. The worst side effect is that you won't believe a word of the damn thing in the morning. Fair exchange.

This movie wins you over, head and heart, without cheating. It's just about perfect.

Fukunaga, son of a Japanese father and a Swedish mother, is a filmmaker to watch. He has reanimated a classic for a new generation, letting Jane Eyre resonate with terror and tenderness.

Even wild man Gary Oldman, as a priest ready to eighty-six the wolfman with silver nail polish, can't liven up this humorless hogwash. And it's just sad to see the legendary Julie Christie stuck playing the grandmother.

One raucous night, one raunchy party, "American Graffiti filtered through "Dazed and Confused" and the Shermer High films of John Hughes.

Rango is like nothing you've ever seen.

What Dick rendered potent, Nolfi renders preposterous.

As Joe blurs the line between reality and the supernatural, his haunting and hypnotic film exerts a hold you don't want to break. It's a beauty.

It's a lame trailer, but the movie itself is much, much worse.

Patrick Lussier is listed as The Director, though I saw no evidence of anyone in control.

ignore the pileup of implausibilities and Unknown becomes a diabolically entertaining con game. Does it jerk you around? Yes. Suck it up. The ride's worth it.

Cedar Rapids had me smiling at hello.

It's the perfect Valentine's date night movie, but only with someone you hate.

What we do see is mom, dad, Braun, Usher, vocal coach Mama Jan Smith and the burgeoning Team Bieber claiming they only want the best for the boy as he goes through a punishing 84-date concert tour. Group hug.

The movie ultimately reveals itself as a pretender with no balls. Creatively, it's all wet.

Sucks bad, real bad.

Araki constructs the hot-blooded Kaboom as a high-wire act without a safety net. Go with it.

It's hard to deny that The Rite is guilty of sins against its audience.

The result is just good enough to pass as an action flick you watch with the forgiving gaze that comes from too many beers and too little sleep.

The director, 66, brings his passion for precision to every frame of the film, refusing to hype or Hollywoodize the detailed richness of the story.

What's in this cliché grab bag for moviegoers? Well, Portman and Kutcher are a cute mismatch. She's short to his tall, sassy to his sweet, etc. I dried up here. So does the movie.

Rosamund Pike is perfection as Barney's true love, and Dustin Hoffman makes magic as Barney's randy dad. It's acting heaven.

Miles below the Woodman's class. It's possible that a more astringent script could have provided fuel for the actors and A-list director Ron Howard.

The Green Hornet doesn't suck. But don't expect it to hang together either, what with the clashing tones and melting logic.

At one point, Black puts out a fire by pissing on it. It's my job as a critic to piss on this dumb excuse for a movie. Consider it done.

This lame-ass chick-flick sampling of "Crazy Heart" is more like country Kryptonite.

The real plague is the movie, a sci-fi hodgepodge of bad history and worse special effects.

Shot hand-held with a poet's eye by Rodrigo Prieto, the film is relentless but as riveting as the world a remarkable actor lets us see through Uxbal's eyes. Bravo, Bardem.

Just watch the magnificent Manville, in a raw and riveting award-class performance that exposes a grieving heart under siege. Her last scene is quietly devastating. So is this intimate miracle of a movie.

Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams give two of the most explosive and emotionally naked performances you will see anywhere. Just know you're in for a workout.

Upchuckingly unfunny.

Wells is a wonder with actors - Cooper and Jones earn top honors - and a filmmaker with an instinct for the emotions that bleed between the lines. This haunting movie hits you hard and right where you live.

As in "Lost in Translation," Coppola keeps an eye out for the broken places. That's when Somewhere is really something.

What makes True Grit a new classic for the Coens is the way the brothers absorb the unfairly unsung Portis into their DNA, like they did with Cormac McCarthy in "No Country for Old Men." True Grit is packed with action and laughs, plus a touching coda with an older Mattie, but it's the dialogue that really sings. Great filmmaking. Great acting. Great movie. Saddle up.

Spacey holds center. He's a bonfire.

Nicole Kidman is just astonishing in Rabbit Hole - subtle, fierce, brutally funny, tender when you least expect it, and battered by the feelings that hit her when she forgets to duck.

Bridges has a fine time playing with himself, so to speak. Add Garrett Hedlund as Flynn's son Sam, the rebel who zaps himself into the server to find his lost dad, and director Joseph Kosinski has a recipe for adventure that should delight gamers. Non-techies are on their own.

Director Tom McGrath keeps the action spinning and trips lightly over the bummer spectacle of watching a bad boy go good.

Recipe for nutso fun: Mix Zach Galifianakis with Robert Downey Jr. Apply the same mold John Hughes used for "Planes, Trains and Automobiles." Have Todd Phillips stir with wack-ass abandon. Don't worry about missing ingredients, like plot. Serve to an audience ready to lap it up.

a bang-up ride that means to wring you out. Mission accomplished.

Anne Hathaway and Jake Gyllenhaal are hotties with talent. And they maneuver through the daunting maze of shifting tones and intersecting plots of Love and Other Drugs like the pros they are.

It's the work of a filmmaker with a stunning future.

Two men alone create an epic landscape of feeling in one of the very best movies of the year.