The ending leans to soap opera, but Van Sant, revisiting the closet-genius theme of "Good Will Hunting" is too keen an observer of character to let this funny and touching film go soft.

Draws an electric performance from Peter Mullan.

All the Old Knives is brief enough, politely suspenseful enough, for its stars to carry without much hassle.

The Photograph comes down with a teary case of "The Notebook," laying on flashbacks that yank us out of the present, where our stars live, and into a past riddled with sentimental clichés.

We have plenty of information about the idea of the Notorious B.I.G., but Biggie: I Got a Story to Tell offers a rare look at the actual human being behind the legend.

Fall is a straightforward survival thriller with just enough personality to glue you to your seat.

Down in the mud with the guys, Moore finds the heart of her character and a career beyond vanity and hype. She's never looked better.

It's still a first-class charm assault.

Despite the lofty tone of his literary, artistic and metaphysical allusions, Greenaway is working the same streets of human depravity as John Waters; he's just more pretentious about it. At best, Greenaway's film is a provocative and diabolically funny foray into the roots of passion and cruelty. At worst, the symbolic bric-a-brac gets so thick you lose sight of the characters.

The Wachowskis have put together a mix of culture, kung fu, sci-fi and speculation, that makes them the warped wonders they are. When the film ends with a "To Be Continued," the hooks are in for The Matrix Revolutions on November 5th. Maybe I've been programmed to say it, but I am so there.

It’s decent if often frustrating debut, buoyed by a star that’s shouldering a lot of the needlessly complicated narrative burden. We can’t wait to see what Tøndel’s fourth film looks like.

It's hysterically, gut-bustingly funny.

In the end, it’s not just that you’re watching a satire sans teeth — it’s more like you’re sitting through a version of Shattered Glass where Stephen Glass feels kind of bad about all those stories he made up.

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

The Woman in Black doesn't break new ground, but in its suggestions of fine film ghost stories, from "The Innocents" to "The Others" and "The Orphanage," it works you over with riveting restraint.

A rip-roaring action adventure.

Fanaticism is Dannelly's target, not faith. That's what makes his film a keeper: It sticks with you.

The role is a beast, and Cranston, in a tour de force of touching gravity and aching humanism, gives it everything he's got. It's astounding to watch, and an award-caliber performance from an actor who keeps springing surprises.

Amid the clamor from outraged purists and Shakespeare spinning in his Stratford-on-Avon, England, grave, you should notice that Luhrmann and his two bright angels have shaken up a 400-year-old play without losing its touching, poetic innocence.

Though Exit is often bold and imaginative, it is also curiously lifeless. The screenplay, by Desmond Nakano (Boulevard Nights), which combines the novel’s six separate stories, never adds up to a coherent whole.

Drags and sags at 124 minutes. Luckily, the movie never runs on sitcom empty. How could it, with a terrific cast.

Reynolds is like a puppy dog who moonlights as a male model, or maybe vice versa. He’s the only reason to see Free Guy, but you already know this going in.

Hart is a comic fireball. Don't leave till after the final credits when he and Hall bust a few more hilarious improv moves.

Bridges in particular is quite excellent, taking his character's surface sweetness to at times almost psychotic extremes.

In the case of Una, the play's the thing, with the stage production coming at you in a rush that doesn't allow the characters or the audience to take a breath. In this personal hell of Harrower's creation, there is no exit. The movie, however, keeps opening the door and letting the air in.

The best hip-hop film of all, taking on obvious targets (misogynist lyrics) and sacred cows (political rap) alike.

Plane is, in essence, the Frontier Airlines of action films: It’s cut-rate to a fault, makes you endure a lot of unpleasantness on the way to its final destination, and still leaves you with the distinct feeling that you didn’t even get what you paid for.

In a perfect world, viewers would get college credit after watching Lynch/Oz. You may not walk away any closer to a degree, unfortunately, but you will definitely land over this rainbow with an entirely different view of a maverick filmmaker’s work, as filtered through Hollywood canon fodder.

A deeply touching human story filled with humor and heartbreak is rare in any movie season, especially summer. That's what makes The Help an exhilarating gift.

You can feel the narrative hitting predictable beats like it was upshifting an ATV’s gears, from infatuations with the outlaw life to blowing off good influences, getting sucked into the game to bad decisions leading to bodies dropping.

It’s tough to shake the feeling that you are watching human mouthpieces lob rhetorical talking points in the name of achieving some sort of profound insight and, more often than not, failing to hit their targets.

With this cast, you are guaranteed moments of inspired lunacy. It's still fun watching Cleese get caught with his pants down. But the material seems familiar and overworked.

Kazan’s technique drafts seductive promises that the empty-headed Dream Lover can’t keep.

With the Bard’s words, Henry roused his soldiers to action: “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.” With this mediocrity, it’s more a case of how the war was wan.

Whether the ideas they’re toying with here offer a booster shot of relevance to a modern slasher story is, frankly, debatable. What we can say is: congratulations on being both first out of the gate and an instant subgenre footnote.

We’re sure this will inevitably be sequeled into oblivion. For now, however, it’s a welcome transfusion of fresh blood into a genre that could definitely use it.

This is Kidman’s show. She neatly negotiates every twist the script throws at her, even when the plot slams into too many dead ends. This is a movie star who knows how to stay the course, no matter how twisty, tangled or down and dirty it gets. She’s dynamite.

Like Vardalos and Corbett, who play their roles with vibrant charm, the film, directed by Joel Zwick, is heartfelt and hilarious in ways you can't fake. It's a keeper.

A fine case ... but none weighty enough to keep this fluff from evaporating as you watch it.

That the performances are uniformly outstanding is a tribute to Rob Reiner, who directs with masterly assurance, fusing suspense and character to create a movie that literally vibrates with energy.

It's rare that a a movie leaves you pinned to your seat, wanting to see it again -- right now, this minute -- to work out the pieces of the puzzle. Unbreakable is one of those movies.

Wilson drops the ironic smirk to give a sincerely affecting performance. His scenes with Murray provide the ballast when the script veers off into unconvincing pirate attacks and animated sea creatures.

She's glorious, as she always is. But even Ronan can't totally cut through the academic stuffiness that comes with this posh literary adaptation.

What elevates The Rental is the dynamite acting from the four leads.

The Interpreter bristles with the smart, steadily engrossing tension that marked such 1970s goodies as "All the President's Men," "The Parallax View" and Pollack's own "Three Days of the Condor."

Look at it through the lens of a dual star vehicle that isn’t afraid to sacrifice coherence in the name of cheap thrills, and this bird only slightly sings off-key.

It’s content to be just one long, sick joke without a punchline, designed to occasionally punctuate a stylishly nihilistic P.O.V. with a lot of OMG moments. You may love it or hate it.

So it's a shame that in the end Madden can't keep the tear-jerking from drowning this delicate cinematic flower. The book knew how to hang tough. The movie, not so much.

Amirpour dips into an seemingly bottomless supply of signs and symbols to show us an imploding society all too recognizable as our own, and you'll marvel at hallucinatory brilliance of her images. Yet The Bad Batch never finds a way to fuse its scattered intentions into a cohesive whole.

But for all its visionary brilliance, the movie version of Interview never lets us close enough to see ourselves in Louis. We're dazzled but unmoved.

Stupendously exciting and emotionally engulfing... With probing intelligence and passionate feeling, Cameron has raised the adventure film very close to the level of art.

This little-hyped thriller emerges as a dark-horse winner by reminding us of how pleasurably exciting a popcorn movie can be when it's populated by actors who are in it for more than an exorbitant fee.

For all the humor, passion and decency Gibson invests in the film, The Man Without a Face doesn't add up to much more than a pretty reminder not to judge a book by its cover.

Contact aims to be a film of ideas but serves too many of them half-baked.

Remember "Limitless," the 2011 thriller in which Bradley Cooper becomes a whirling killer dervish from a drug that lets him access 100 percent of his brain? Well, Lucy is basically the same movie with Scarlett Johansson in the Cooper role. It's not a good trade-off.

Sinfully funny.

It's a tale so used, abused and broken you can hear it wheezing.

Delpy is boundlessly appealing. And Rock is acerbic fun, notably in the imaginary debates he stages with Obama. But the frenzied cross-cultural gags take the piss out of the real subject: how blood ties can turn love into a battlefield.

Even when the script slips into sentiment, Peirce sticks with her troubled, questing soldiers, and through this raw and riveting movie, they stick with us.

Debate all you want about whether this movie actually teaches you how to train a dragon. What this movie is actually trying to accomplish, beyond a shadow of a doubt, is how to train their audiences to keep buying the same thing over, and over, and over again.

Shepherd wants to say something profound about the effect of a deceitful government on human values. But it's tough to slog through a movie that has no pulse.

From the lowercase lettering of the title to the deadly familiarity of the plot, there is much to grate on your nerves in this TV Afterschool Special trying to pass as a real movie.

Hackman and Hoffman, old pals in their first film together, make a lively business of their one scene together -– in a toilet, no less. The rest you can flush.

This Burt Reynolds offering is a look at both prison life and the sport, and offers two hallmarks of classic 70's cinema: gritty, no holds barred action – and Reynolds' chest hair.

Margaret, for all its flaws, is a film of rare beauty and shocking gravity.

The ending is a TVish cop-out. But until then, watching Wood sweat emerges as a pulse-pounding experiment in terror.

There’s a whole other movie happening within Good Fortune‘s attempt to Aesop-fable its way to some moral about a modest life being a more fulfilling one even if you’re forced to live in your car. And when Reeves gives you a glimpse of that story, in which someone truly learns that humanity is both painful and blissful in equal measures, and anchors it all with a truly divine turn, well — you feel fortunate that get to witness that.

This funny and touching movie depends on two can-do actresses to scrub past the biohazard of noxious clichés that threaten to intrude. Adams and Blunt get the job done.

The result is a failed and lifeless experiment in which everything goes wrong.

An almost-there comedy with diverting compensations.

Whether you buy the ending or not is something between you and your own personal suspension-of-disbelief deity, but you can’t say that the star doesn’t commit to selling the character’s arc 100 percent. Insanity suits her.

Told in five chapters and across multiple storylines, Tost’s first feature is an admirably weird and engaging odyssey that’s like Tarantino meets The Sugarland Express (with a healthy dose of Smokey and the Bandit). It’s brimming with ideas and winning turns, in particular Sweeney and Hauser, whose romantic chemistry is terribly endearing, and McClarnon as the deadpan-hilarious face of anti-colonialist vengeance.

It's not perfect, but it is a gift to Sam Elliott – and to us.

Sam Rockwell has yet to find a movie as good as he is (Moon comes closest). He's still looking.

Rowdy, raunchy, hilarious, absurd, deeply depressing and profoundly human – often all at the same time – Slap Shot is refreshingly devoid of phony uplift or showy monologues. There's no jerking of tears or pulling of heartstrings, no big lessons to be learned beyond the harsh reminder that sports is a business; the passion of its fans and the heroics of its players are ultimately less important than the clang of the cash register. It's the rare combination of both team-spirit uplift and period-appropriate downer.

Make no mistake: This is really one man’s look back in anger, sorrow, joy and sentimentality. “Robbie Robertson on the Band” would be a more accurate description.

You may feel, with its immersive 3D set pieces and screensaver imagery blown up to IMAX proportions, that you’re entering a bold new world. But transportive is not the same as transcendent. The piles of ash here looks and sounds phenomenal. What you would not give to feel some actual fire burning behind all of this.

It looks like a documentary...Don't let anyone tell you more.

Want your skin to crawl? This one's for you.

The new Count moves with the smooth, plastic efficiency of a TV miniseries. Inspiration and originality may be in short supply, but the movie gets the job done.

Mamet's incendiary writing and the potent performances are teasingly ambiguous. Though he exposes the widening gulf between the sexes, Mamet leaves the audience to find ways to explain it. That's what makes Oleanna such a powerhouse; it's a brilliant dare.

Broken Arrow delivers the hippest action fun around. Travolta's "Dr. Strangelove" exit will blow you away. Ditto the movie.

Veering between sentimentality and exploitation with a few misguided stops at raunchy sex farce, Reign Over Me never finds a tone to suit its purpose.

Somewhere along the road of development hell, the movie settled for delivering standard-issue jolts for jocks.

An animated fluffball that does everything to drive you crazy and ends up by being totally irresistible.

When is a movie fall-down funny even when some scenes fall flat on their fat ones? When it's Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues.

Hirsch opens his heart to the role. And Dorff, matching the depth of feeling he showed in Sofia Coppola's "Somewhere," excels at digging deep into Jerry Lee's pain.

The expression here is one of shared humanity regardless of background, gender identity, race or creed. The common language being used here is cinema.

You’ve seen this before. Think of it as a potent dose of sci-fi/horror Methadone to keep the withdrawals at bay.

The disappointment is that the movie wields so much and achieves so relatively little.

Erivo is not the only reason to see Drift. But the actor most certainly is the reason to see it ASAP.

Ron Hagen’s camera work captures the delirium of carnage that drives out rational thought. Ignore the prudes who think you shouldn’t make films about things that scare you. It’s a first line of defense. This Aussie Reservoir Dogs opens up a brutal world that needs to be understood.

Credible? Not really. But Cage and Rockwell play off each other with devilish finesse. And Lohman (White Oleander) is on fire -- she's a comer.

The estrogen overload damn near did me in.

Does Carey go too far? Duh. But why gripe when you can't stop laughing?

Hero heads for the high ground of the dark, sorrowful comedies of Preston Sturges (Hail the Conquering Hero) and Frank Capra (Meet John Doe). Credit the film then for having a goal, even though it loses sight of it with disturbing rapidity.

Hamstrung by a script that seems determined to stop at all the big moments in Frida's life (she died in 1954 at age forty-seven) without giving anything time to resonate.

We get bracing bro banter, pectoral flexing and the whole gang going wild on Molly. Good times.