Cretton did fictionalize parts of the story, adding dramatic embellishments and narrative tissue. But his greatest feat may have been telling the story in such a way that viewer doesn’t leave the theater going, “Oh, some of these stories are so extreme, they might be slight fictionalization.” They’re too consumed by the ride.

Beyond that educational element and the delicate performances of Dancy and Byrne, I found Adam dramatically limp, predictable and in a curious way even retrograde.

It's an exceptionally well-made example of the kind of delirious, semi-Gothic, overcooked melodrama filmmakers from the Boot have long specialized in.

I'll Sleep When I'm Dead has its problems: As beautifully made as it is, Hodges leaves some crucial portions of the story maddeningly unclear, particularly at the end.

A terrific comic-book movie, the most completely satisfying and unsettling one I've ever seen.

There are times when even a director's worst impulses aren't enough to sink a movie, and somehow Lords of Dogtown stays afloat, largely because many of its actors transcend Hardwicke's heavy-handed storytelling.

You have to give Leatherheads this much: It's like no other comedy, or movie, out there these days. Clooney, one of our few old-style Hollywood movie stars himself, obviously loves old-fashioned moviemaking.

The dirtiest-minded American movie in recent memory -- and an honestly corrupt entertaining picture is never anything to sneeze at.

Make no mistake, this movie is a mess. But, wow, what a mess! It's an exploding piñata, full of low comedy and high drama, deliriously colorful fight scenes and vehicle chases.

In addition to possessing the most confusing title of the year, Canadian filmmaker Michael Dowse's high-energy dance-club saga It's All Gone Pete Tong arrives in an elaborate package of spoof and deception that should win the admiration of any practical-joke connoisseur.

A dragging, rhythmless piece of work.

Neither a masterpiece nor an embarrassment, but a workmanlike picture that sits, inoffensively, in the middling space between.

Some of the knife-twisting later scenes in "Don't Be Afraid of the Dark" feel almost campy, like winks at the audience or studious self-referentiality. None of this is quite enough to ruin a gripping, gruesome fable, which of course del Toro's fans and other genre buffs will rush out to see, but it does render the movie a minor muddle rather than a horror masterwork.

As a pleasant domestic comedy/action-adventure that, refreshingly, doesn't seem to hate its characters, Date Night is just fine. But is it good enough to merit hiring a baby sitter? I'd rather have some potato skins at the Teaneck Tavern.

A not-very-good movie about a fascinating and underexplored subject: the unknowability of a marriage.

There's a lot to admire in The Brave One. It just doesn't cut as deeply as it needs to.

Sloppy but cheerful documentary.

No one — not McMahon (or McChrystal), the military, the State Department, President Obama or the press — comes out looking good. And yet, none of these characters or institutions comes away looking all that bad either.

A stylish and muscular thriller with some nifty twists and turns, a wicked sense of humor, several terrific performances and not one or even two but three of the best car chases in recent action-flick history.

The Rum Diary is enjoyable enough, after its digressive, episodic and voyeuristic fashion. But neither Depp nor Robinson seems quite aware that Thompson's story - both in terms of his brief career in Puerto Rico and in terms of his life - was at least as much a story of tragedy and self-immolation as it was of genius.

Breaking and Entering is so bloodless that even Minghella's best ideas come off as wan and pale.

Spike Lee's explosive, near-masterpiece media satire balances between brilliance and incoherence.

A movie that opens with a sensational bang and then proceeds to pursue the Big Questions about life and death in lovely, lugubrious and increasingly off-putting fashion, until all its drama has been frittered away in a dreamy, drifty haze.

If you're dragged to the theater to be someone's not-dumb date, pack a crossword and a light pen. It'll be the only puzzle worth solving.

A frothy, sexy, '60s delight with a movie lover's heart.

I can't recall the last time a picture left me feeling so caffeinated.

A movie that's laughable without, alas, even being enjoyably awful.

Sructured like a Mad magazine parody where there's a promised joke in each frame. It doesn't add up to a movie.

Troy isn't so much a simplified retelling of "The Iliad" as a re-imagined version of it, told wholly without imagination.

In its quest to create "wholesome" entertainment, the movie industry is furiously turning back the clock four decades or so, to the days when men were men, girls were cute but knew their place and pencil-necked Poindexters stayed out of your damn face.

Whatever its flaws, Maleficent is a family-friendly Disney adventure that offers a relaunched and thoroughly delightful Angelina Jolie.

Carell's performance as Barry, is nothing short of magnificent.

"Bambi" meets "Godzilla": Disney goes for the goo in a by-turns gory and sappy new epic of computer-generated images.

Just the latest forgettable thriller that might have been enjoyable if only its conclusion lived up to its windup.

From a narrative and cinematic point of view, the problem with Joy is simple. Russell is almost totally uninterested in the story of how Joy Mangano explored a bizarre and unknown new business model and became its first self-made tycoon, and as a result we aren’t interested either.

Shifting his focus away from white kids seems to have done Clark good, because Wassup Rockers is the least sensationalistic, and hence the least moralistic, of his films. It's an enjoyable if haphazard picaresque.

You'll either find The Extra Man utterly charming or thoroughly mystifying, but either way Kevin Kline, playing a community-theater version of himself, with all the foppishness and Shakespearean pretension but half the talent and none of the luck, inhabits its peculiar soul.

Mercifully, as seen from 11 years later, Jayson Blair himself seems a lot less important, not to mention a lot less interesting.

Even in 3D, as the picture is being shown in some theaters -- Ginormica is a disappointingly flat character.

Beautifully worked out, and the movie's final sight gag, set to Charles Trenet's shimmery seaside masterpiece, "La Mer," is a gracefully orchestrated bit of silliness that's a visual love sonnet to Chaplin, Lloyd, Keaton and, yes, Tati.

It's when Stone engages in shameless editorializing -- when he lets his freak-flag point of view fly, rather than tempering it -- that W. is most entertaining and most vital. The rest of the time it feels too much like awards bait: stiff, arch and knowing.

The jokes are forced, almost mechanical, in their crudeness.

Hardwicke still manages to find the sweet spot where Gothic literature and the iPod meet and make goo-goo eyes at each other. Without embarrassment, she and screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg dig right into the almost generic simplicity of the story.

Edge of Darkness is somewhat stylish, and it's intelligently made.

This is filmmaking in a higher-IQ Disney style, frequently verging on terminal sappiness, all heart-quickening-guitar-music, coming-around-the-last-turn, legs-pumping-toward-glory stuff.

Almodóvar isn’t just flashing back, retro-style, to the era of “Pepi, Luci, Bom” and “What Have I Done to Deserve This?” He’s also returning to a core principle of that era and of his work, which is that human sexuality, as much as it drives us crazy and makes us do stupid things, is also a force for the liberation of the human soul.

I felt like dropping to my knees in the theater and praying for this smug, irritating fake-reality-TV show to go away, leaving these three terrific actors (and characters) in something resembling a real movie.

Probably the worst-directed film Spielberg has ever made. A peculiarly rhythmless piece of work, it seems to go on forever, though nearly every one of the scenes is cut off before it has been dramatically developed.

Brandon Cronenberg clearly understands that he has to deal with the legacy of his last name, and Antiviral feels to me like a perverse act of exorcism, half tribute and half cleansing ritual.

What will likely draw butts into theaters for Friends with Kids isn't one star in particular, but the sum of its comic pieces.

Despite looking, feeling and (especially) sounding expensive – this is one of the loudest summer spectacles of recent years – Man of Steel is second-tier and third-generation Chris Nolan-flavored neo-superhero material.

The 3-D film is flat, the CGI-enhanced characters oddly waxen. In the center of the action is Jim Carrey -- or at least a dead-eyed, doll-like version of Carrey -- playing Scrooge, the ghosts, a younger version of himself, and probably a dozen other parts. As a general rule of thumb, one Jim Carrey is plenty for any movie.

If Christensen's conventional plot is somewhat at odds with her downbeat realism, the idea that these characters are willing to fight like cats and dogs, and destroy each other and themselves, to avoid confronting their intense attraction to each other is totally convincing.

For the most part Yes buzzes with visual life and imagination.

Becoming Jane would have been more honest if it had been called "No Sex in the Country."

So gentle it barely has enough vitality to stick to the screen.

Bastardizes the source material to no good purpose, ending up with a strained combination of rah-rah, boy-bonding adventure and p.c. cross-cultural exploration.

High-style goofballing and globetrotting can get you pretty far, but maybe not as far as Johnson wants us to go.

Its too-muchness is also the source of its power; I was absolutely never bored, and felt surprised when the movie ended. It's an amazing, baffling, thrilling and (for many, it would appear) irritating experience, and for my money the most beautiful and distinctive big-screen vision of the year.

Even though there were moments in The Magic Flute when I wondered if Branagh hadn't truly gone off his rocker, I found its audacity exhilarating. [11 Sep 2006]

A very mixed bag. Despite some faint gestures in the direction of journalistic balance, it plays a lot like a two-hour infomercial for the Playboy publisher's historical importance, philosophical depth and personal greatness.

Dark Shadows offers potent atmosphere and delirious '70s fashions and hilarious gags and some really terrific performances, none better than Pfeiffer's triumphant return to the screen as a pitch-perfect family matriarch.

It's a perfectly cheerful time at the movies, without any hint of drama or surprise.

Disposable crap.

Along with Sheryl Lee, Morton is probably the best actress to have emerged in this decade.

Lee can't tell a story to save his life, but he's something of a visual magician, laying out glittering piles of goodies that you instinctively want to follow.

If "Cocaine Cowboys" was an epic, ironic yarn of murder and madness and the building of a boomtown built largely on drug money, Square Groupers is a more rueful tale.

A stodgy, moribund plodder loaded with stock characters that wouldn’t have felt edgy in 1983 and has about the same contemporary urgency as your average late-night rerun of “CSI: NY.”

The bad news is that Pitt, despite this film's high-minded intentions (there are Yo-Yo Ma cello solos on the soundtrack, and China expert Orville Schell acted as an advisor during the shoot), or more likely because of them, finds himself trapped in a long, earnest movie that fails to ever feel very alive.

Hellion offers a startling and memorable portrait of adolescent life in downscale East Texas suburbia, along with a white-hot breakthrough performance from teenage actor Josh Wiggins.

Watching The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, it struck me that weaving a touching little tale about a death-camp friendship is actually a pretty bad way to teach kids about the Holocaust.

As utterly disastrous movies go, this one's really got something.

Schumacher's crude bio-drama never comes close to asking the real questions.

2 Guns is both enjoyable trash and a fascinating snapshot of Hollywood’s current mentality when it comes to the United States government.

I’m being deliberately mean about a plot device that Curtis wants to come off as a goofy, harmless comic metaphor, but the idea that this implausible inherited trait is actually a cryptic, creepazoid form of domination over women is right there in the movie.

Some people will see Mr. and Mrs. Smith as cynical, but I think its heart is deeply romantic, admittedly in an anvil-on-the-head kind of way. It's a love story not for the faint of heart. In other words, it's a lot like marriage.

Safe is both a slavish imitation of cinema gone by and a movie for our time. I found it wickedly entertaining and perversely refreshing in its total lack of contemporary piety.

I would have hated Love Actually less if it had been a total, clumsy disaster; the problem is that Curtis does pull off some amazingly well-tuned moments, as well as some very funny ones.

Some fragments of that Dostoevskian romance linger on here: Just enough so that Wyatt and Wahlberg nail the climactic scene, when Jim is literally playing for his life, and make it momentarily seem to mean something. But not quite enough that you’ll remember what that something might be the next day.

Even as a nostalgia ride, Starsky & Hutch poops out before it ever gets going.

Great Expectations is a triumph because Cuarón's vision prevailed. He seems to be one of those artists capable of reminding us how we first experienced movies, as an overpowering enchantment.

Feels weirdly impersonal; very little love, or even true thought, shows up on the screen.

The picture is sharp, in a warm, fuzzy way, about the ways women can sometimes inflict cruelty on other women in the name of feminism. Feminism doesn't have to be the enemy of kindness, but sometimes -- alarmingly often -- it is.

If these new, allegedly topical movies are to make us feel anything -- to move us toward any action or even just toward any fresh realization -- they need to at least seem alive on the screen, instead of just courting our polite, measured applause.

It honestly shouldn't work at all, yet somehow on the strength of good humor and sex appeal ends up being one of the most enjoyable mainstream films of the season.

Its considerable charm lies in the way it fulfills, rather than bucks, our expectations.

Once you get past the question of why someone would make a movie this artificial in the first place and move on to the answer (purely for the hell of it), Sukiyaki Western Django is a blood-drenched, dynamite, often hilarious and uniquely weird big-screen entertainment.

Offers a mesmerizing, behind-the-music glimpse at a crucial and bizarre moment in rock history, and maybe in American cultural history, period.

At under two hours, the movie crawls by; at four, people would become fossilized to their seats.

May be a weightless picture, but it's hardly torture to sit through. Just watch out for those angel rays.

The resulting film directed by Scott Hicks is afflicted by terminal nostalgic drift. You come out of the theater with nothing more specific than half-pleasant memories of baseball gloves, Ferris wheels and vintage automobiles. I've had naps that were more exciting.

It takes a very clever schoolboy to make a movie as elaborately empty as Guy Ritchie's Snatch.

Not a great movie, but its daring and seriousness, its refusal to take refuge in the sort of irony that diminishes whatever it touches, its willingness to risk ludicrousness, may be elements that are necessary to achieve greatness.

The movie is an unpleasant slog, the gruesomeness working in concert with humorlessness to lend the whole picture a queasy deadliness.

It's the most original picture by an American director I've seen this year, and also the most delightful.

Cruise pedals hard through The Last Samurai, and the exertion shows. In fact, the whole picture is belabored and lumbering.