"WALL-E" had more charm, more soul, more everything. But there's enough merry mischief here to satisfy, even if you’re way past puberty.

Whatever you think of Dubya, he has balls. The movie doesn't.

Naughty and nice is a killer-hard combo to pull off. Stick with Rogen and Banks. They rock it.

Bummer. The vampires have no fangs. The humans are humdrum. The special effects and makeup define cheeseball. And the movie crowds in so many characters from Stephenie Meyer’s book that Catherine Hardwicke (Thirteen) is less a director than a traffic cop. But there’s a reason that Twilight has already become the movie equivalent of a bestseller: The love story has teeth.

"You're an awfully hard man to like, Hitler." Few serious films could survive a line like that. Max certainly doesn't.

The film goes slack when its screws most need to tighten. Luckily, Smith — flawless in accent and commitment to Omalu's worthy cause — grips you from first to last.

Gibson's acting has deepened. Too bad his comeback vehicle springs so many leaks.

Somehow, The Beach Bum is even nuttier, less logical, more visually beautiful and down-in-the-gutter uglier than the film you just imagined from that description.

Campbell keeps the action cooking and the suspense on a high burner in this compulsively watchable conspiracy thriller, while The Foreigner proves again is that Chan is the Man – now and forever.

[Keaton] delivers a chilling performance, imbuing what could have been a one-note nut case with unexpected reserves of feeling. The acting and direction don’t fill in all the credibility gaps, but they do make for classy, crackling suspense.

It's important to note what Portman the filmmaker is doing here. She is most assuredly not providing CliffsNotes to Oz's book, letting us see what Amos sees and only partially understands.

Minahan wants us to see ourselves in the dark mirror of this outrageously funny satire. He's built the laughs wisely so they stick in our throats.

In his sappiest film since 1989's "Always," director Steven Spielberg has come down with a case of the cutes that the whole cast catches.

An indelibly funny and touching comedy with a real sting in its tail. The laughs leave scars.

Caught in the slipstream between action and angst, Man of Steel is a bumpy ride for sure. But there's no way to stay blind to its wonders.

In a rare instance of truth in advertising, the movie actually is a good time.

The stunts dazzle until you miss the low-key charm and cost-conscious inventiveness of the original. Desperado is best when Rodriguez lets his playful side cut through the blare of a born filmmaker indulging his first chance at high-end Hollywood fireworks.

There are better adaptations of Wuthering Heights, and there are far, far worse adaptations of Wuthering Heights. Yet you will certainly not find a hornier version of this material than Fennell’s fast-and-loose spin on the torrid tale of Heathcliff and Catherine, childhood pals turned paramours who can never truly be together and genuinely can’t keep their hands off each other. It may in fact be the horniest literary adaptation ever made.

A throwback WWII men-on-a-mission adventure marinated in modern bloodlust and movie references, this particularly pulpy take on a Dad Cinema staple couldn’t be more violent and more derivative of past works. It also couldn’t be more of a blast to watch if you enjoy a certain strain of carbon-dated derring-do mixed with cheeky carnage.

The film's major sin of omission: the music.

A hand-me-down cast? Far from it. Masterson and Stoltz possess talent and charm to spare... Wonderful aspires to be little more than the hot-and- happening teen flick of the moment. At that it succeeds.

The Devil All the Time has the pretensions of a mythopoetic story that’s chipping away at a community’s dark underbelly. But here the misery is as belly-up and eager to be noticed as a house cat or a dead fish.

For all the spectacular settings and visionary designs, Cloud Atlas left me feeling disconnected. Sad. But that's the true true.

Hopkins and Mirren are acting pros in stellar form. There's no way you want to miss the pleasure of their company in a movie that offers a sparkling and unexpectedly poignant look at how to sustain a career and a marriage.

The actors can't perform miracles. Hot dogs are served in the final scene, but trust me, Hyde Park on Hudson is no picnic.

How did Cammell convince a studio to back a movie in which Julie Christie is violated by what looks like a copper Rubik's snake? Better not to ask, or to dwell on the film's less savory aspects, and soak in its moments of visionary hysteria, including the pulsating geometry of images borrowed from experimental filmmaker Jordan Belson.

Old isn’t trying to be fashionable, low-fi, artisanal horror of the kind that seems to be setting the tone for the genre in the indie world. This is, instead, a credibly old-fashioned movie in some ways, a creature feature with something more diffuse than a “creature,” per se, a monster movie in which the monster is an unlucky pairing of longitude and latitude.

The pleasures of Dark Shadows are frustratingly hit-and-miss. In the end, it all collapses into a spectacularly gorgeous heap.

It's a first-class ride. All aboard.

The modestly perfect antidote to a synthetic, overblown movie summer: a blast of exuberant fun that stays rooted in humanity.

The acting? Common and the Game score as baddies, but Hugh Laurie as an acid-tongued internal-affairs cop is disappointingly just House without the limp.

Foster's film doesn't doubt that money rules our lives. But it does wonder, provocatively, why we're dumb enough to let it.

Yesterday has its heart firmly in the right place. It’s the challenge to take it to the next level that’s missing.

While we do not condone the excessive consumption of alcohol, or sneaking spirits and other such beverages into a theater, or any display of public intoxication, we also do not think you should endure Ambulance while being sober.

You can be a pissed-off Tea Partier or an Occupy advocate and find something here to stoke your fat cat hatred; either way, catharsis is doled out not in a dusk-til-dawn homicidal free-for all but two harmless hours in a theater.

Seven Years in Tibet, however flawed, has feeling and purpose. It bears witness.

The film is rapturously beautiful, enticing us into a lush, aristocratic world.

The Zeitlins have dreamed since childhood of bringing their version of "Peter Pan" to the screen. Their collective imaginative powers are indisputable. But what started as a visually gripping, fiercely funny, and emotionally centered take on Wendy’s mission statement (“The more you grow up, the less things you get to do that you wanna”) ends in a chaotic clutter that deserves, well, the hook.

The power of this Holocaust tale sneaks up and floors you.

Demme can't sustain the fizz, but seeing a real filmmaker try and fall short is still more fun than watching a hack hit the mark.

Cate Blanchett is the spark that keeps this well-meaning but by-the-numbers biopic going.

P.S., adapted from Helen Schulman's novel, is Linney's show, and she makes it hilarious and haunting.

Hell, I really meant to at least like 2 Guns. But I couldn't. The movie just didn't make the extra effort.

Helgeland's script is hit-and-miss, not on the Oscar-winning level of his L.A. Confidential. Still, Hardy is a show all by himself, an actor flying without a net and having a ball. You will too.

Like a doggie in a window, this romcom relentlessly wags its tail so you'll fall in love and take it home. Not this time, puppy.

Only Vince Vaughn registers hilariously as John's boss.

Statham is still playing it safe in Safe, but vulnerability is showing through the cracks.

No spoilers, except to say that cheap thrills can still be a blast. Not enough to make up for Shyamalan's awful "After Earth," but it's a start.

Say what you will about this grand gesture at filtering Edward Gibbon’s history lessons through a lens darkly, it is exactly the movie that Coppola set out to make — uncompromising, uniquely intellectual, unabashedly romantic (upper-case and lower-case R), broadly satirical yet remarkably sincere about wanting not just brave new worlds but better ones.

The heavy plot sauce weighs down the movie. Director Lasse Hallstrom had similar buoyancy problems in 2000's bewilderingly Oscar-nominated "Chocolat." Here he lucks out big time with Mirren and Puri, two pros who know how to lift an audience over plot hurdles and turn a merely digestable diversion into a treat.

Aquaman is a mess of clashing tones and shameless silliness, but a relief after all the franchise’s recent superhero gloom. Any budget-busting epic that finds time to show us an octopus playing bongos gets a pass in our book.

What does matter, besides the collection of deranged characters who can’t escape their limitations, is the southern-fried atmosphere so resonantly captured by DP Steven Meizler (Contagion).

This is the sort of lazy, slapdash, self-impressed excuse for “edgy” entertainment that makes you enraged. It’s not even so-bad-it’s-good; this is so bad you’re tempted to kick those responsible for it right in the jingle bells.

Curtis ladles sugar over the eager-to-please Love Actually to make it go down easy, forgetting that sometimes it just makes you gag.

Wyatt keeps the action coming at a fast clip, but watching Jim repeatedly pursue a path of self-destruction for reasons never made clear grows wearying.

This much-beleagured cinematic universe has finally hit upon a winning film, and one that will be forever tainted.

The film feels more like a thesis than vivid drama.

Were detective Dave Starsky (Paul Michael Glaser) and his partner, Ken Hutchinson (David Soul), hot for each other when they started working undercover in Bay City?... you can watch Starsky and Hutch on the big screen and see subtext stiffen into hard and hilarious evidence.

Turns out a double dip of Zombieland goes down easy when you see it for the irresistible escapism it is.

Director Gus Van Sant finds the human side of a knotty issue. No polemics. Just the face of a new America in crisis.

In these times of pandemic isolation it’s no crime to look for the film equivalent of comfort food. Military Wives, though deeply reliant on formula and wrapped in a blanket of bland, fits the bill.

Best of all is Mark Wahlberg as Tommy, an angry post-9/11 firefighter so against Big Oil that he rides to fire scenes on his bike.

What a cast, indeed. And what a bust as persuasive drama.

Sergio is not a film about a saint or a sinner, but an attempt that succeeds more often than not to create a portrait of a man in full. Yes, it also occasionally puts him on a pedestal — but in these dark days, advocating for hope and idealism feels exactly right.

You always know where it's going even as it meanders for two and a half hours getting there.

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?

You don't have to be in vogue to enjoy this stylish ride through Bergdorf's. It's a surprise package to die for. Miele and his virtuoso cinematographer, Justin Bare, show how fashion can be aspiration, a model for dreaming the impossible.

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.

Inspired by a true story (translation: a lot of it is made up), the movie shucks its corn straight from the cob. But it's no less engaging for that, thanks to the enthusiasm of the young cast and the fusion of classic dance with hip-hop moves courtesy of Rich and Tone Talauega.

What makes it delicious fun is Posey, a party girl for the ages.

Unhappy with what Oliver Stone did to Jim Morrison and the Doors in his 1991 biopic? Here’s the doc for you.

Lightweight but utterly beguiling.

It’s not a bad film, just a generically bland one.

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.

The action and jokes pile up with exhausting repetitiveness. But Theroux and Franco make a truly hilarious team.

This is what it looks like when you Glee a beloved Broadway production to death.

What’s missing? Let’s start with intangibles such as heart, soul and the faintest hint of originality.

Sad to say, the bloom is off the rose.

The film stubbornly resists coming together as more than a series of hit-and-miss vignettes. Only near the end, in a stunning tableau that illustrates how individual desire laughs at the plans of God — and the ringmaster Frankie — does Sachs turn his wisp of film into something funny, touching and vital.

Tusk is a mesmerizing mess that will make Joe Popcorn yak. Jay and Silent Bob will love it.

In "Gran Torino," Eastwood took on the moral issues that screenwriter Gary Young and first-time director Daniel Barber studiously avoid. It's the difference between riveting and repellent.

It doesn't help that Damon and Cruz fail to generate sparks or that the second half of the film, in which John and Lacey face hell in a Mexican prison, feels bluntly edited to fit a two-hour running time.

What a shame, though, that the movie isn't a livelier business.

Ritchie's got something all his own: a go-for-broke energy that cuts through the cliches of the crime genre.

What we have left in Godard Mon Amour, after the laughs dry up, is a thin sketch of a filmmaker who inspired a hero worship in his young bride that dissolved in squabbling, as had Godard's first marriage to another of his leading ladies, actress Anna Karina.

Even Cate Blanchett can't save this misbegotten horse opera.

Radnor and Olsen are so funny and touching you want to say happythankyoumoreplease. What you get is frustratingly less. Still, to the movie's refreshingly uncynical credit, you feel for them.

Yes, you would watch these two in virtually anything. You just wish it wasn’t this. They deserve something sturdier and far less head-slappingly preposterous, and that’s the truth.

When the script, by Zwick, Marshall Herskovitz and John Logan, doesn't sabotage the images, and the great cinematographer John Toll turns action into poetry, The Last Samurai emerges as a haunting silent movie.

This movie hits all the wrong notes.

It's wickedly amusing for a little bit -- Robbins and Hurt really get into it -- but ultimately the film becomes what it's fighting: just noise.

Jessica Chastain isn’t just the reason to seek out The Eyes of Tammy Faye — she’s the only reason to see this curiously tepid biopic at all.

Screenwriters Jarrad Paul and Andrew Mogel, in an auspicious directing debut, are attempting to tackle emotional areas that can't be glibly resolved. Sure, they trip up a few times. But it's exhilarating watching them aim high.

Lacks the cumulative impact of "Boyz," since Singleton allows repetition and sermonizing to dull his theme about the infantilization of black males. But Baby Boy leaves you shaken.

As long as Green is onscreen, which is not nearly enough, Road Trip is easy to get revved up about.

Despite melodramatic lapses -- the gripping action recalls Walter Hill's 1981 "Southern Comfort" -- this is Schumacher's most ambitions film since "Falling Down" in 1993, and it plays to his strengths with young actors.

The movie starts out desperately wanting to be E.T. It ends by pretending it’s the second coming of Field of Dreams.

They Live, Carpenter’s 1988 paranoid freakout, deserves to be thought of as a masterpiece, an artist’s defiant last grab at substance before losing the thread. It’s a cheesy but lovable movie.