Clooney and company work it too hard this time. You can tell they're huffing and puffing to stay afloat. But all I hear is: glug glug glug.

Rudolph, a comic force on "SNL," can speak volumes with the tilt of an eyebrow. She and Krasinski, of "The Office," are absolutely extraordinary. Ditto the film, which sneaks up and floors you.

Josh Lucas plays Haskins with a no-bull vigor that comes in handy when the script saddles him with all-bull platitudes.

The film is torn between a tough-minded plea for animal rights and edge-free, PG family entertainment. But its advocacy of kindness to man and animal is indisputable.

Damon is extraordinary. He's heartfelt performance has a tough core of intelligence and wit.

Wood, whose mostly mute turn is defined by his black suit and glasses, can only stare in stupefaction at Schreiber's jittery mix of broad laughs and sentiment. Audiences will share the feeling.

That remembrance of Saturday matinees past is there for a bit in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. Until it very much isn’t, and you’re largely left with what you imagine you’d get if you programmed a 21st century A.I. program to write up nostalgia-bait for the children of the late 20th century.

There are a few decent numbers left. Erivo still makes you feel like she owns this role. But for better or worse, For Good mostly feels like a mere reprise of the first film’s candy-colored cacophony, only with the volume slightly turned down.

For its first stingingly funny half hour, The Invention of Lying had me thinking that Ricky Gervais had finally found a way to bring his indisputable brilliance at TV comedy (The Office, Extras) to the big screen. Then the air went out of the balloon. What a shame.

The fact that Elemental can’t seem to get past its own elevator-pitch premise or avoid tripping over its teachable lessons, much less wring laughs and sobs from an opposites-attract love story, is a bit of a shock. It’s so busy trying to pen an op-ed that it forgets to give it a narrative structure and make it emotionally resonate. That’s just elementary.

Self-importance sinks this one like a stone.

The All-American imagery, coexisting with occasional shots of swastikas and socially-sanctioned cruelty, give it the feel of a surreal, funny fever dream about national purpose gone horribly awry.

Your chances for enjoying this will depend on giving up a search for depth and just strapping in for a B-movie hell ride.

Whatever qualms you might have about romanticizing mental illness, the misguided Benny and Joon thinks it's just darling.

The result is a potent and provocative movie that will keep you up nights.

Daybreakers, despite the star presence of Ethan Hawke and Willem Dafoe, is a B movie, with all the disreputable low rent, lowbrow pleasures that implies. I'll take that over pompous any day.

Samuel has made a movie that imagines a good-hearted sinner slouching toward salvation one desperate measure at a time. But he’s also made a mirror designed to let folks see themselves in this scenario for once.

An extended rom-com meet-cute that just happens to have monsters lurking about, The Gorge works best when its just the two leads staring at each through binoculars, bantering via sketch-pad scrawlings and letting their flirtations organically morph something more intimate.

It's a moody horror movie that favors metaphor over mayhem until its violent, chaotic final third, at which point the screaming starts in earnest. A bit more balance between gnawing guilt and plain old gnawing would have done this scare-parable wonders. Its bark is worse than its bite. But you hear every point that bark is making loud and painfully clear.

The movie honors King by raising fresh hell for a new generation. It will make you jump out of your seat, but what matters are the provocations you take home and can’t shake. That’s the stuff of nightmares.

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.

If you can't watch John Malkovich being John Malkovich, it's still a kick watching him play Alan Conway, a gay Brit who pretended to be the legendary and reclusive director Stanley Kubrick during the 1990s.

The pickings are slim for scares this Halloween season (Ghost Ship, Below), so The Ring wins first prize by default.

Too crude for the kids and not crude enough for connoisseurs of the "Something About Mary" school of hair jism and balls caught in zippers, Osmosis Jones seems doomed to fall between the cracks.

The Laundromat ends on a pre-credits image that feels destined to become a meme. Everyone’s hands are dirty, it tells us. Maybe it’s time hold folks accountable and clean up our act.

What makes the film worthwhile, despite its flaws, are those scenes of human and animal desperation that encapsulate the horrors of war.

Spinal Tap II: The End Continues is the sequel that many of us have waited for, if not exactly the sequel we wanted. It’s amusing rather than hilarious, gently ribbing rather than gutbusting.

Jessica Chastain is a shining star with acting skills that resonate beyond her beauty. She is at her fierce, unerring best, which is saying something, in The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby.

To be honest, I started hearing things, too. Just when Jones was delivering an inexcusably sappy speech about baseball being "a symbol of all that was once good in America," I heard the words "If he keeps talking, I'm walking."

Some may enjoy the slapstick, which plays like "Harold & Kumar Go to Old Peking," but this bloodless Coen crib job is simply not my cup of noodles.

You can’t accuse Dicks: The Musical of phoning in a half-assed take on material that demands you bring the big-dick energy or GTFO. But there’s a big difference between being loud and rude and being hilarious, cutting, or even clever. The movie keeps it up for a good long while. It could just use a few more inches.

As heartfelt as it is hilarious.

Sy and Cluzet are superb actors who demolish stereotypes about race and social class by finding a common humanity in their characters. Acting this good forgives a lot of sins.

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.

The result is commendably non-West-centric, but no less sentimentally conceived.

The heart of the movie is really in Jasira's moments with her father, a mass of contradictions that Macdissi plays with comic ferocity and genuine feeling.

Both a great excuse to stage brutal fight scenes and relieve a more-ripped-than-usual Jake Gyllenhaal of his shirt, this modern take on yesteryear’s guilty pleasure is twice as goofy, three times as violent and a solid tribute to both its predecessor and the art of bodily harm.

Byrne is sensational, finding the broken places under Justine's rebellious hot-mom surface. Nothing groundbreaking here, but there's something to be said for a fun time that won't let the laughs go down too easy.

The movie, however, is a crock.

The film rambles, but rambling with the mischievous Roos is still a tricky and winning proposition.

Owen, in a heartfelt, award-caliber performance, never goes soft. It's his core of toughness that makes the movie so funny, touching and vital.

There's a lot going on here. Maybe too much. The filmmakers can't draw coherence out of chaos. But Fey does.

Army of the Dead is neither the best of Snyder nor the worst. In whipping a bit of both extremes into a dependably watchable piece of pop froth that hits the appropriate marks, the movie strives for the expected relevance, offers the right amount of nonsurprise surprises, and distinguishes itself from the given rules of the genre just so that it, more or less, breaks even.

Don't worry. It just sounds like another bad Sharon Stone movie. Kinky Boots trips on its contrived plot, but this blend of trash and sass is a comfy fit.

No knock on McGregor and Harris — fine actors both — but they never hold us rapt the way the plot demands.

Bad Words, starring Jason Bateman in a tour de force of comic wickedness, takes sinful pleasure in rubbing our noses in the toxic joys of revenge.

Best known as Ed Helms' nagging fiancée in "The Hangover," Harris is just perfect without ever looking down on Linda's faith in God and herself. Her performance earns a special kind of glory.

Watching the legendary Pele display his footwork on the field (that bicycle kick!), you almost believe the soccer god could have singlehandedly stopped Hitler's troops in their tracks.

As directed with grit and grace by Rodrigo García, this quietly devastating film goes bone-deep.

The Human Stain is heavy going. It's the flashes of dramatic lightning that make it a trip worth taking.

You can kill the vibe of Minghella’s film with nitpicking, but Fanning rides the movie home to glory. She is simply sensational.

Amazingly, Gyllenhaal never cheats on his character's sense of dignity. Against the odds, he keeps you in Billy's corner. That's a champ.

It’s a shame that Instant Family reduces the complexity, pain and joy of parenthood to a multiplex-palatable family comedy. The real story is probably far more interesting … and hopefully funnier.

The film may offer a Cliff Notes history lesson and a scrapbook take on a life, but it does make you wish Shirley was still around, talking truth to power right now and offering one more aspirational example for those who might step up and disrupt.

The film feels overstuffed and way too familiar, with Burton repeating tricks from his greatest hits (think Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands). And the fun runs out much before the film ends. But stick with it just for those times when Burton flies high on his own peculiar genius.

Though the material isn't up to Mr. Show's high standards, some great laughs abound.

For something so reliant on dramatic engagement in addition to spectacle and giggles, Love and Thunder feels oddly unengaging; even the love and death aspects often feel like cold transmissions from distant sources.

Less like "Shrek," meaning hilarious and heartfelt, and more like "Shark Tale," meaning manic and exhausting, Madagascar will keep kids distracted without transporting them to wonderland.

What a bummer that a movie that paints itself as a scintillating, sexually-charged, art-world thriller ends in a swamp of failed intentions.

Taymor's visual and visceral flair makes Titus a grabber.

It's unmissable, flaws and all, because riveting suspense spiced with diabolical laughs and garnished with a sprig of kinky romance add up to the tastiest dish around.

What doesn't spark is the love story. Morton still seems soggy from her "Minority Report" role as a drenched pre-cog. Who wants romance in a future where glum is the word?

Favreau supplies the go-go-go that makes the movie stratospherically entertaining, even without 3-D. But it's the promiscuously talented Downey who adds the grace notes that make Iron Man 2 something to remember.

Built on a slender, one-joke whimsy -- and a tough one to buy into, at that.

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.

I don't know if 3-D could improve all movies (nothing could make "The Love Guru" funny) but it sure works here.

The fans show up for this kind of movie to watch Neeson knock heads with bad guys, and Moland lets him rip. There’s no dawdling over sentiment. If you want to see a snowplow used as a weapon of mass destruction, you’ve come to the right movie.

The something extra comes with watching Black and Blanchett match wits, especially the former; he radiates his signature comic moxie with glimmers of the dramatic chops he demonstrated in movies like "Bernie" (2011) and this year’s "Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot."

Whenever Zucker stops piling on battle scenes as if he were directing Braveheart, his film casts a romantic spell.

If nothing else, Charlie Says puts Van Houten, and to a lesser extent her sisters in crime, in the center of their own story.

Snow White and the Huntsman is definitely a missed opportunity. Sanders was on to something in taking the Snow White tale to its most menacing extreme.

Badgley, best known for playing "lonely boy" Dan Humphrey on Gossip Girl, is a revelation. He wears his role like a second skin.

The whole thing feels so stiflingly familiar that you wonder what has more spare parts, the robot or the movie it’s in.

This afternoon-TV special trying to pass as a real movie earns an extra half star solely for Samuel L. Jackson, who brings his usual fire to the role.

Binoche never falters. She's the film's fire and grieving heart.

To watch The Quiet One at this particular moment in time is to feel that not only is this a highly subjective take, but that you’re being a little jerked around here. Even the most diehard Stones fan is bound to leave feeling a little conflicted. It’s a documentary that lives up to its name in all the wrong ways.

If you're gay and/or eight years old, HSM3 is the movie event of the year.

Since this is a movie about deranged racists driven by a virulent strain of midcentury Christian moralism to keep children in cages while conspiring to disenfranchise the poor, that’s not going to work. Everything that happens in this movie could happen next month and it would be a one-day cable-news story that Fox would probably not cover.

There are bumps along the way, transitions from one medium to another will do that, but this filmmaker and his fierce foursome won't be done till they take a piece out of you. It's a gripping psychological thriller with a sting in its tail.

Foster keeps the party hopping, although more dark humor would have helped before she winds it down with sentiment and bromides.

A tart, terrific comedy that gives Harrison Ford his best and funniest role in years.

Rage, not righteousness, is the mode here, but the muted, disbelieving, draining kind. Simple answers aren’t on the menu.

Director Tony Goldwyn tries for the lyrical melancholy he brought to "A Walk on the Moon," but as Michael waits for days on Jenna's porch getting drenched (as irritating a scene as any in recent cinema), only the most rabid chick-flick fan will fail to notice that it's the movie that's all wet.

Jagger the actor is someone you want to see again. Eat your heart out, Madonna.

It's fun to see Sean Penn portray a playboy, like Bogart in "Casablanca," who hides his true heart behind a layer of cynicism.

Statham is always worth watching. But it’s in its closing scenes that this particular vehicle, Wrath of Man, earns its keep.

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.

Chastain digs deep, going beyond the call of scream-queen duty to find the passion that gives horror a pulse.

There's enough plot to stuff a miniseries, but Redford never loses sight of the human drama. Martyrdom is not conferred, nor is reinvention equated with redemption. Drawing skillfully on a first-rate cast, Redford builds a riveting, resonant political thriller that values the complexity of its characters and the intelligence of its audience.

The swerve into bizarre melodrama in the final third knocks the film permanently off course, reducing a potentially rich examination of religious extremism into a missed opportunity.

A film of wounding power. It stays with you.

Wobbly but well-intentioned broadside against racism.

Kearns' conflict is readable in Kinnear's every word and gesture. His performance is worth cheering.

You don't have to feel guilty for lapping up this froth. Just don't expect nourishment.

Stamp's award-caliber performance as a closed-off man on the brink of turning into stone is a miracle of subtlety and feeling. This is acting of the highest order. Redgrave partners him superbly, bringing warmth and nurturing humor to a role she refuses to play for easy tears.

Ledger's comic flair is a big plus in a film that is fanatically busy and fatally sexless.

War Dogs is that rare contemporary comedy that knows how to make a laugh stick in your throat.

The material shows its age when McCall goes all "Taxi Driver" to save a teen hooker (a scrappy Chloë Grace Moretz) from her pimps. But Washington and director Antoine Fuqua, who teamed for the actor's Oscar-winning role in 2001's "Training Day," keep the action humming.