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.