Actually, the wonder The Polar Express induces feels something like a coma.

It's hilarious, and contains some of Mamet's best dialogue. And that somehow, by making a racist, murderous, Everycreep his protagonist, Mamet is able to produce some of his most penetrating psychological and spiritual insights.

Nothing is surprising, that is, except the fact that the film has a big heart, a core of sweetness and tremendous cinematic ambition.

Conveys an intense sculptural loveliness with something moving beneath it, maybe a sense of menace. And it's leavened, like once per hour, with a teeny dash of humor. This isn't nearly as immediately likable or showy as "Cremaster 3," but in a quiet way just as spectacular.

The morbid and gripping war film Blessed by Fire, from the Argentine filmmaker Tristán Bauer, is well worth a look.

Ultimately, though, it's a little schizo, like a depressed dude in a clown suit, or a Theodore Dreiser novel hopped up on not enough happy pills.

His final scenes with Lucy and with his own dad are both surprising and shattering, and I was left humbled by the film's honesty.

It's an awfully enjoyable, hip little B-movie.

To say the film doesn't quite recapture the thrill of the novel is like saying that soda pop doesn't really have the same kick as heroin.

You're just sitting there, somewhere between mildly amused and fairly bored, watching the filmmakers squander Hollywood's most eccentric character actor and a lot of very fine specimens of the order Rodentia.

Completely deranged, and the portrait it paints of our beloved country depicts a dangerous place full of neurotics and obsessives. But lots of fun, with porn, booze, backyard barbecues and elaborate revenge schemes!

A very gentle picture, intended to soothe us, not to jolt or shock us. But it's so gentle that it lacks any discernible energy; sometimes it seems there's barely enough tension in the story to keep the images from sliding off the screen.

This is the kind of movie where most people know what they want and are pretty sure what they will get, that being “more of the same, please.”

The great strength and great weakness of the Yes Men, not to put too fine a point on it, is that they’re a couple of dorks. Their props, costumes and supporting materials are invariably crude – but they are sincere and unafraid, or at least unafraid enough to brazen it out.

Lomborg has clearly been stung by the suggestion that he's a front man for know-nothingism, and Cool It is an agreeable and partly successful attempt to repair his image.

The movie seems to proceed from somebody's notion that it would be hilarious to see a black guy and a Chinese guy working together.

Despite its schizophrenic nature and often disagreeable characteristics, Broken English has flashes of something. You might say it has an integrity of purpose, if not of execution.

Maybe it's only half of what it could be, but at least it's a healthy half. And in this era of mainstream cookie-cutter moviemaking, that's a feat in itself.

Matchstick Men isn't even remotely intricate; it's not even particularly interesting.

This is definitely a formula movie, lovingly and even obsessively so, made by someone who obviously enjoyed “American Pie” and numerous other raunchy-sweet teen sex comedies of the ’90s, and wished they existed for girls.

With one foot in the grind house and one in the art house, the smarts in Freeway are more than equal to its visceral kick.

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service is the only Bond film that gets beyond the dirty boy’s-book spirit of the series to a core of real emotion. It also has what are probably the best action sequences of any 007 adventure.

Highly amusing for grown-ups, too.

A romance for the deeply romantic, which means that some people will certainly view it as cynical.

This isn’t a perfect movie, but it might be the perfect summer movie for 2015.

A triumphant movie about failure.

The sort of small, independent-minded picture that so much of American indie cinema strives, and often fails, to give us. It's a conventional picture, but it feels so deeply alive that it's practically a novelty.

Bale’s performance is absolutely letter perfect, and he disappears into the role.

I found it gorgeous, opaque and disturbing in roughly equal portions, but it was a riveting experience all the way through.

There are moments when Cage (with his perpetually worried eyebrows) and Caine (with his inherent emotional elegance) carry the picture admirably enough.

Pearce may be the other big star in Traitor, and while his performance is serviceable, it doesn't cut deeply. Taghmaoui, as a radical motivated by moral certainty, is the real actor to watch here.

Full of imaginative, outrageous and egregiously insulting 3-D gags.

Offers the most intense visual experience I've had at the movies all year.

A bigger problem is that since the movie is a straight remake that reprises many of the original's scenes, we have those scenes playing in our heads, and the Russos' execution just isn't up to Monicelli's. It's painful to see gags that worked so beautifully fall flat, or wither and die because of indifferent timing.

Cholodenko and her actors pull it off; the performances here are like a wary ballet, ruled as much by the mysterious magnetic attractions and repulsions these characters feel for one another as by anything so dully explicable as psychology or standard rules of social conduct.

This is a love story, all right, but it has less to do with the flaws of capitalism than it does with Moore's unwavering fondness for the sound of his own voice, and for what he perceives as his own vast cleverness.

I enjoyed it immensely, flat-footed dialogue and implausible situations and all. Which doesn't stop me from believing that in its totality Secretariat is a work of creepy, half-hilarious master-race propaganda almost worthy of Leni Riefenstahl, and all the more effective because it presents as a family-friendly yarn about a nice lady and her horse.

This movie isn't just stupid, it's offensive in its stupidity.

An important human and artistic testament -- a calm meditation on something no one can consider calmly.

The 1996 kidnap drama Ransom traverses the parameters of public life in America, from the image public figures present to us to the image they never intended us to see. Neither one tells the whole truth. Luckily, Ransom isn't content with surfaces..

For me, the meticulous style, the fascination with ritualized (and ludicrous) violence and the film-geek self-referentiality all seem like markers of a film made by a young man, for other young men. If I were 23, and full to the brim with dark-hearted existentialism, I might love it too.

The kind of smart, openhearted comedy that doesn't come along every day.

Isn't as uproarious as it pretends to be. The foul language, the constant repetition of words like the aforementioned "boobies" -- look, they've even got me doing it -- doesn't feel daring or cathartic, only canned.

While Keating's agenda is clearly hostile, and Giuliani's political committee is eagerly trying to do counter-propaganda, this isn't a campaign of character assassination or innuendo, but rather a dutifully constructed biographical film about a tremendously skilled prosecutor and politician.

What results is a patchy, uncertain motion picture, full of incidents and images but fundamentally unfocused and superficial.

Above all a cracking good yarn that earns its laughter, its wonder and its tears.

The Incredible Hulk suggests only that we've bottomed out on special effects: They're not necessarily getting better -- they're just getting bigger. Technically, Leterrier's Hulk is as realistic-looking as a rampaging green giant could be. But that doesn't make him credible.

As events in Mr. Jealousy grow more entangled, there is no corresponding escalation in the pace of the movie, and Baumbach misses out on some laughs...But Mr. Jealousy is one of those movies where the less assured passages are a good sign, the mark of a director trying something new.

This is a performance of great subtlety, not a caustic caricature: Rat (Cusack) still believes in something, probably still in some Platonic ideal of poetic possibility.

If Enduring Love doesn't make sense as a thriller, it's equally nonsensical as the parable it wants to be.

Seeing these four actors launching Reza's zingers at each other at high speed is pretty much worth the price of admission all by itself, and one thing you always know about Polanski is that he won't waste your time.

The sex scenes -- intense, affecting and emotionally raw -- are the best thing about this frustratingly limp movie.

Despite the lurid content, this is a beautifully made film that reaches for moral seriousness and resists facile judgments.

Anti-Americanism is a small matter when a movie is anti-human. Dogville is as total a misanthropic vision as anything control freak Stanley Kubrick ever turned out.

For me the breakthrough in At Any Price comes from 59-year-old Dennis Quaid, cementing his character-actor renaissance with what may be the nastiest role of his career.

A lean, clean killing machine that supplies some dark, late-summer thrills and chills and breathes new life into a seemingly extinct franchise.

If Elysium isn’t the post-millennial sci-fi masterpiece I was hoping for, it has tremendous resonance and is pretty doggone good for its category.

Bale gives a remarkable performance in a movie I can recommend to no one, because the sight of him is more distressing than any of the allegedly deep themes of the picture.

Taken on its own terms The Wolverine is the cleanest, least pretentious and most satisfying superhero movie of the summer.

At times, the movie feels less like a coming-of-age tale and more like an extended promo for the Chinese tourism bureau.

Funny People is an ambitious, misshapen picture that feels like two, maybe even three, separate movies uncomfortably jammed into one.

Gandini makes it seem as if the nation of Dante and Fellini has been conquered by "Girls Gone Wild." As hyperbolic cases go, that's a pretty delicious one, but it's not quite true yet.

A trifle but an exceptionally civilized, charming trifle.

The good news is that Alfredson finds his footing in The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest and delivers a rousing, grueling, almost operatically scaled finale to the series.

It's a two-hour episode of the show, except with better production values and a nicer wardrobe for Scully.

Perhaps understandably, these artifacts of a vastly different ideological and economic era -- have become kitsch objects, the focus of a half-horrified nostalgia, in the midst of the feverish Chinese boom.

The picture starts off slick and amusing, gets convoluted, draggy and strange round about the midway point, and ends up just plain ludicrous.

In his dazzling and luxuriant new thriller Femme Fatale, De Palma turns trash into chic. It's a sexy, violent, glamorous, sinfully funny movie with a surface as hard and brilliant as diamonds.

But if the storytelling is murky, the filmmaking is stunning and, more important, the passion for this city -- its people and landscape -- is pure.

Feig’s Ghostbusters is a goofy, free-floating romp with an anarchic spirit of its own, a fresh set of scares and laffs and a moderate dose of girl power that is unlikely to seem confrontational to anyone beyond the most confirmed basement-dwelling Gamergate troll.

It's a warm, intelligent and highly contemporary comedy with just the right amount of edge, a terrific ensemble cast and a big, fuzzy golden retriever ready to knock you down and lick you like a giant lollipop.

The problem -- as anyone who gets home from the movie in time to catch even a portion of "NYPD Blue" can tell you -- is that the genre that Lumet invented has buried him alive.

Actually, the problem with wunderkind director Shane Acker's "stitchpunk" animated fantasy 9 isn't so much that it bears a sped-up, dumbed-down resemblance to "The Lord of the Rings," although it does. It's more that Acker's dark and whimsical creation, so clearly in the tradition of his mentor Tim Burton, is wondrous to behold but offers only an indifferent and generic mishmash of quest fantasy and post-apocalyptic science fiction when it comes to story.

The scenes between LaPaglia and Weaver, directed and played with a straightforward austerity that occasionally moved me to tears, make up for every one of The Guys flaws.

Ends up being nothing more than a stifling morality tale dressed up in peekaboo clothing.

As lightweight as it is, it's easy to feel real affection for the movie.

Masterfully paced and constructed, and the performances are memorable.

This film stands as an intimate, terrifying document that renders an incomprehensible slice of recent history in human terms.

A clean and agreeable biopic that restores some vitality to a fascinating episode in 20th-century cultural and political history.

This well-cast adaptation somehow feels obvious and overblown.

Just when you think The Clearing is too simplistic to have any dramatic edge, the actors dig in and flesh out the stark framework of the story.

Reconstruction has a poetic sensibility, as well as an old-fashioned Continental appetite for romance, that makes it distinctive.

Nolfi's dialogue is lean and often funny, while Damon and Blunt play appealing and clearly delineated characters drawn together by the kind of old-fashioned romantic passion you don't often see in contemporary movies.

Surprisingly and pleasantly unflashy, a straightforward picture that makes a distinction between classiness and bling.

Warm Bodies is more a mild-mannered, emo-flavored romcom than a zombie movie. It has some tepid action scenes, a few swatches of genuine humor and a general spirit of cheerfulness, especially considering it depicts a future in which civilization has been destroyed.

Edward Norton's dopey directorial debut gives interfaith romance a bad name.

Frank Coraci's '80s-nostalgia comedy is predictable and unevenly paced, and it lunges too often for the easy joke.

There's a vivid comedy to this family's emotional state of siege, an easy confidence to Honoré's camerawork, and plenty of beautiful bodies.

Reygadas is an undeniably important artist hewing his own path, but who is also self-consciously playing to the tastes of a tiny elite audience that craves obscurantism, confrontation and heavy-handed symbolism. Still, I really want you to see this. Then I'll have somebody to talk about it with.

What is the point of making a movie that’s just like the dopiest, broadest and most reductive grade of guy-oriented comedy, except with women?

A masterful accomplishment...teems with its own sense of life, crackles with daring, walks the tightrope between satire and pathos with a rare assuredness.

The movie works neither as a comedy nor as a lame melodrama -- its entertainment value is embarrassingly feeble.

The wonder of Tomorrowland – and with all its flaws and its hidebound Disney formula, it really is wonderful – is that Bird’s tale of nostalgia for the lost future manages to recapture some of that original, optimistic meaning without losing sight of the newer and darker one.

It’s an enormous relief to have a lightweight but non-insulting date movie to recommend in this arid season. This isn’t a movie that requires your full attention at every second – although when Dyrholm and Brosnan are on-screen, you won’t be able to look away – but it’s a nifty entertainment that’s always easy on the eyes and gains just a bit of dramatic weight as it moves forward.

All those guys are a blast, and the dark-hearted idiocy of Red is mostly quite enjoyable.

There are some indignities that Drew Barrymore should never be made to suffer.

Spartan is the same old stuff, but now it's been thoroughly Mametized, like a spray-on treatment you could spritz out of a can.

Basinger's debasement in the early part of the film is unpleasant to watch, and it's an unsettling bump in the context of the entertaining sheen of the rest of the picture. So much of Cellular is right on the button. If only it hadn't gotten its wires crossed.