There's no disputing the ingenuity and even the brilliance of this mind-bending mashup, which begins as a gritty recession-era marriage drama - the opening scene features a couple arguing about whether they have the money to get the Jacuzzi fixed - and then descends into ominous violence and finally total insanity.

In the end, Tupac: Resurrection gives us too much raw Tupac, and yet somehow not enough. He remains a mystery -- one who still sells lots and lots of records.

You slip into the movie so easily that by the time it reaches its emotional climax, you're unprepared.

Perhaps only a marginally effective movie about 9/11, because, I suspect, there can be no such thing as an effective movie about 9/11 -- at least not right now.

The damn thing is, Ridley very nearly makes this insuperable obstacle work to his benefit. He delivers a flawed, ambitious and deeply peculiar portrait of one of the 20th century’s most enigmatic musical talents, in the year before he ascended to rock-god status, that resembles no other pop-music biopic you’ve ever seen.

There's way too much plot here getting in the way of the story, which makes it tough for Alfredson and cinematographer Peter Mokrosinski to focus on the series' strongest elements. Of course it's the character of Lisbeth that has made these books and movies into a worldwide phenomenon.

If you can tolerate watching it once, it will burrow into your brain and never get out again; your only recourse will be dragging your friends into the nightmare and seeing it again.

Pleasurable.

Unmistaken Child stands above most others in offering us an intimate look at Tibetan Buddhism in action, with no external commentary or narration.

Pedestrian but appealing.

A scared-straight after-school special, but actually good.

Streep isn't playing Julia Child here, but something both more elusive and more truthful -- she's playing our IDEA of Julia Child.

I enjoyed Age of Ultron more than its predecessor, despite the fact that it’s almost exactly the same thing. This was probably a result of adjusting my expectations: I wasn’t sitting there waiting for Whedon to revolutionize the genre, or to turn an overdetermined comic-book movie into a Noel Coward comedy. He delivers a clean and capable entertainment, with a handful of distinctive flourishes stuck to the margins.

Captain America is exactly what the third week of July needed: a curiously fun, surprisingly imaginative and unashamedly old-fashioned yarn of skulduggery and adventure.

Pretty damned irresistible. What begins as a winning workout in a highly familiar genre -- the white-ethnic, big-city family comedy -- gradually gains both screwball momentum and emotional power, and delivers an unexpected punch by the time it reaches its climactic pileup of characters and revelations.

Irritatingly moralistic romantic comedy.

Frequently beautiful and intermittently haunting and could be called a meditation on aging and mortality, an intimate study of a peculiar variety of fame and a portrait of a genuinely remarkable person.

I hated this movie; I wish I could unsee it and will it out of existence. But that’s not the same as thinking it’s worthless or corrupt or entirely inept. It’s more like a massively self-indulgent prank, inflicted on the world by some reasonably intelligent young men, which makes it the most bro-tastic project of all time. Mo’ bro than this, no es posible, amigos.

A limp and dreary experience, at least after you get past its intriguing premise. It's poorly written and woodenly acted, completely formulaic and hopelessly imprisoned by both its genre and finally its form.

It's both a supremely controlled exercise in form and tone and an intriguing exploration of the ways new technology intersects with age-old questions of dominance, control and individuality, particularly in the school setting.

Hits every color note just right. It's a visual antidepressant.

Kinnear's performance has to be one of the most sympathetic acts of decency one actor has ever extended to another. Crane always wanted to be a real, respectable movie actor. Channeled through Kinnear, he finally gets his wish.

Casting Barrymore as Cinderella is an inspired idea, and a tribute to director Andy Tennant's ability to see through the public's perception of Barrymore to her essence as a performer.

It’s no ordinary movie: Rabin, the Last Day is a disorienting mixture of drama, documentary and meticulous re-creation, and very little of it takes place on the last day of Rabin’s life.

Fast Five is a fantasy that in no way resembles real life; ordinary morality doesn't apply, and the audience knows that as well as the filmmakers do.

The film has moments of real brilliance and pathos; flawed as it is, Seven Psychopaths isn't like anything else you'll see this year, or any other.

A neo-vampire movie for tender-hearted preadolescent girls who are afraid of sex. If that's your thing, go for it. But there's something genuinely creepy, and not in the good way.

This is not one of those Eisenhower-Little Rock moments where you get to feel warm and fuzzy about the power of the state being on the right side of history.

Not for the first time in his career, Soderbergh has made a mainstream film that is simultaneously a thought experiment.

Here’s the thing about Crimson Peak, which is lurid and ghastly and immensely enjoyable and frequently spectacular and also thinner and less substantial than it wants to be, like a meal eaten in a dream.

A subtle, underplayed psychological drama with terrific work by all three actors.

These interlocking stories don't move along as swiftly or as urgently as they should, and much of the dialogue thumps along on square wheels.

This is a sweet, lively and funny movie rather than a fully realized one, but it makes clear that Gordon-Levitt has a natural feeling for cinema and should do more of it.

Although I have mixed feelings about The Eye, there's no question the Pangs have a natural talent for cinema. They create bright, unfussy images and work terrifically with actors.

Bend It Like Beckham is supposedly a movie about youth; its biggest shortcoming is that it rarely feels young.

Next to the Hong Kong action picture So Close, nearly every Hollywood thriller of the summer looks like an elementary-school project thrown together the Sunday night before it was due.

The Prestige is a trick box with too many false bottoms. Ultimately, the last one simply gives way -- leaving us with a hole, and a little residual darkness, but not much else.

An alternately charming and frustrating comic entertainment.

While excellent in many technical respects, is a muted, pretty, anesthetic concoction that's never fully satisfying.

Trapero makes naturalistic films with plenty of sex, violence and dark humor; in Carancho you can see the influence of 1950s film noir, the ballsy renegades of 1970s American cinema (especially early Martin Scorsese) and a little touch of the Coen brothers.

The wonder of Sherrybaby is that we can admire Sherry's exuberance and evident love of life -- and the extraordinary actress who portrays her -- without really being sure where she's going.

With Landline, Robespierre once again proves herself to be one of the funnier filmmakers working. Just as important, she proves herself to be one of the more empathetic directors out there.

Imaginative and intricate, but it's also joyfully casual, maybe to the point of being a little messy in places. But even its flaws work in its favor.

By the end of Trembling Before G_d, you desperately wish that at least some of DuBowski's subjects would see the light.

An affable entertainment, both a celebration and a satire of lowbrow pleasures.

An oddly graceful combination of fairy tale and romantic comedy, set in a forgotten corner of the world.

May be very much about feelings, but it's made with a drab, juiceless, tasteful efficiency that distances us from the characters instead of drawing us closer to them.

Part of what makes "ackass Number Two so frighteningly watchable -- even against your better judgment -- is the way the guys delight in one another's bumps, bangs and bruisings: First, they feel one another's pain; then they laugh like hell.

With Kick-Ass, there are more cheap thrills, gory explosions and superheroes than a movie geek's YouTube mash-up.

An impressive but exceptionally disturbing feature debut from Australian director Justin Kurzel that pushes the new wave of Aussie crime films up a notch.

There's a sly intelligence at work here -- in the writing, the filmmaking and the acting -- that makes it deeply pleasurable to watch.

Never lets us forget that it's a nonmainstream story about a nonmainstream subject, when ideally, it should simply be a story about a person. The picture too often feels like a lesson in tolerance.

A sophisticated, subtle adult entertainment that is also a compliment to the audience.

It's a mishmash of decoration, drapery and debauchery that's both deeply pleasurable and kitschy.

Jack Nicholson is at his best playing a burned-out border patrol officer in a small Texas town.

Mann turns Miami Vice into an exploration of tone and mood, and he makes that enough.

Dahan's filmmaking damn near sabotages the performance.

This is a rip-snorting, barrel-riding adventure movie — perfect for all ages, as they say (though it isn’t for very young kids) — loaded with fast-paced fight scenes, great-looking effects and enjoyable and/or scurrilous supporting characters.

If you're willing to take this voyage with Fiennes into the psychic landscape and working life of one of the world's greatest contemporary artists, it's a trip you'll never forget.

Pretty good summer flick!

Horror fans will celebrate Stake Land, and future horror-film directors should go to school on it. The flame is still burning -- and it keeps the undead away, at least for a while.

An engaging, well-made docu that admirably captures the singular importance of its subject.

Dark, sleek, funny and creepily infectious, the genetic-engineering horror-comedy Splice is a dynamic comeback vehicle for Canadian genre director Vincenzo Natali, who made a splash a few years ago with "Cube."

The script is teasingly, pleasingly raunchy in places.

So often loose and funny that you'd have to be pretty stingy not to get some pleasure from it.

Rodriguez is that rare filmmaker who doesn't draw a hard, fixed line between entertaining kids and grown-ups -- he knows that in order to understand what will delight kids, you have to know what will tickle adults as well.

There's something offensive about how Mamet continues to win praise as a serious filmmaker with such a joyless picture, a picture that -- intentionally -- gives the audience so little.

How many human beings among us are capable of making a comedy with wit and intelligence that also takes bold pleasure in unabashed silliness? I think this is what happens when you let an elf loose with a movie camera.

Following four players through the first season of Miller's regime, Browne captures not just a high-energy sports spectacle played out in the bowling megaplexes of outer suburbia but, even more interestingly, a clash of cultures between bowling's hallowed past and its possible future.

There’s nothing disgraceful about The One I Love, and if you’re just in the mood for a VOD time-waster, you could do worse. But despite the agreeable lead performances, it doesn’t quite repay your 90 lost minutes of life.

Clearly designed to be an action thriller with emotional underpinnings. But you can't get blood from a stone, no matter how hard you squeeze. And so Cruise, a huge box-office star, is the single bright, blinking emblem of the failure of Mission: Impossible III.

Mystery Men is supposed to be an action comedy, but there isn't nearly enough of either.

I didn't need to understand every word to see what a beautiful film this was - each camera shot a carefully composed masterpiece that immerses the viewer in a realm of luxuriant imagination.

Assaf’s pop-culture transcendence was a coming-of-age moment for Palestinians, a sign that they could triumph in the most delicious, delightful and unlikely of contexts, despite a broken society built on institutional hopelessness. Abu-Assad’s films make the same point, in a darker register.

The movie is a hilarious, riveting must-see about a family as it breaks down almost all the way and then reinvents itself.

Aladag's point, I think, is that no matter how righteous we may feel about this kind of zero-sum cultural collision, for the human beings involved it often results in unbearable tragedy.

Hope Springs is an oddly ambitious blend of bland humor and startling insight into the realities of married life. It's something like Ingmar Bergman's "Scenes From a Marriage," as translated into the universe of the Lifetime Network.

I Am Legend is a blockbuster like no other, one that finds its grandness in modesty. It's a star vehicle with a star who knows his place in the universe.

Although these vignettes are unified visually -- they're all in black-and-white and they all have the same gorgeous, silky visual texture -- they were shot by several different cinematographers.

At 2 hours and 20 minutes Les Miserables is an unholy slog. It's the sort of movie where, when a title pops up saying, "Ten Years Later," you sink down in your seat certain it's going to be 20 before you get the hell out of there.

Not a major Herzog work or one that will draw a large audience, but a must-see for those who suspect (as I do) that he's one of the greatest talents now working in this medium.

For a first feature, this surprisingly likeable film might just revitalize Schnabel's persona in art circles, as well as make a splash with hip young filmgoers.

A remarkably evenhanded story about an eager young activist who was drawn down a slippery slope toward property destruction and violence, and who wound up as a baffled defendant in a widely publicized federal terrorism case.

This is a conventional political documentary with a conventional view of what happened in the Buckeye State and why, but it's no less fascinating for all that.

A potent and well-executed drama.

Lee Daniels’ The Butler is big, brave, crude and contradictory, very bad in places and very good in others, and every American should see it.

This version of the Potter saga is fun and harmless rather than memorable or imaginative. That's certainly no crime.

So bloodless that it feels like an act of arty dishonesty.

It might be too slow and morbid for American viewers without an existing interest in the subject.

The movie chickens out. In the Valley of Elah could have been really interesting -- and really daring -- if it had focused on Hank's realization that his own child, supposedly a good kid, had perhaps committed the kinds of atrocities that would make any decent human being recoil. The movie (which Haggis also wrote) dances around that territory, but doesn't dare to march straight into its terrifying maw.

Terrifically acted, reassuringly formulaic, and moderately amusing.

Lovett's film is a finely balanced and loving work of history, which never tries to sugarcoat elements of the explosion of gay sexuality three decades ago that may seem excessive or disturbing to some contemporary viewers.

About midway through Denzel Washington's new film The Great Debaters comes a raw and terrifying scene that exemplifies why the movie's worth seeing, despite its hackneyed and awkward story.

Is it, on some level, '70s-style horror schlock dressed up with contemporary gimmicks? Sure, but don't act like that's a bad thing! It's schlock with honor, schlock with a conscience, schlock that speaks to the way we live now.

You come away with the sense that you should have come to care (or at least to know) more about its central characters than you do.

Like a truffle in a fluted paper cup, a small delight made with care and attention to detail.

I'd put The End of the Affair just beneath the top rung of Jordan movies or Greene-based films (it's no "The Fallen Idol" or "The Third Man"), with Moore the critical element that makes it necessary viewing.

I wish one-tenth of the films I saw were made with this much craft and integrity, this much intuitive understanding of where to put the camera, how much of the story to explain in words (not much) and how much to trust his outstanding cast to carry the film with their voices, faces and bodies.