As inconsequential and virtually indistinguishable sub-Judd Apatow white-boy comedies fueled by prison-rape gags and pants-pissing anxiety around black people go, Horrible Bosses is pretty solid entertainment.

I'm not quite saying that the unabashed squareness and silliness of Larry Crowne are negatives. They're almost admirable in themselves, and certainly constitute a selling point.

As a performance-art act of juvenile Id-fulfillment, it's magnificent.

A fun, silly, kid-friendly summer popcorn entertainment.

A gripping, mysterious use of no-budget cinema at its finest, and an intimate character study with surprising emotional power.

What's clear from the film is that there's a massive, almost tribal demand for O'Brien's brand of slightly more upscale comedy (maybe less so for his rock-star stylings), and also that being that famous doesn't do wonders for anyone's personality.

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.

Tells the story of a love affair and a new family, and reminds us that even billionaires are not omnipotent.

A haunting, beautifully told tale about a genuine American original.

It's all just an embarrassment, the kind of pointless slog you'll encounter on Netflix in two years and wonder, How the hell did that get made?

For all the CGI action sequences and butt-rocking Dolby sound effects, in fact, Green Lantern is most satisfying when it sticks close to stodgy comic-book archetype.

There's no story beyond the utterly formulaic and not the slightest semblance of realism, but your kids will enjoy it if they're young enough and pretty easy to please.

Rossi's film makes a compelling case on behalf of the traditional values of journalism.

My eyes never left the screen and my attention never wandered; in a restricted, technical sense of the term, Kidnapped is a masterpiece. But I make no claims for its moral value or for any cathartic or redemptive qualities.

Under the guise of being nothing more than a quasi-documentary about two comedians cutting up and scarfing gourmet cuisine, The Trip may be the wryest and most affecting of all the recent movies about middle-aged male angst.

At its best when it feels specific to its setting; Erik Wilson's often lovely cinematography captures the distinctive, watery light and raw weather of the Welsh seacoast in winter, and Hawkins, as always, captures a character who is completely specific in terms of class, place and period.

It's an expertly constructed thrill ride with wonderful atmosphere and tremendous good humor; if its heart of gold is artificial, that won't stop you from enjoying the heck out of it.

A sad, sweet, funny and ultimately unforgettable love story about a man and a woman and a father and son, and also ranks among the most affectionate and sensitive portraits of homosexuality ever crafted by a straight person.

I was startled to look up the running time and discover that X-Men: First Class is only 104 minutes; the second half is so clunky it feels much longer.

More broadly this is a resonant, vivid and finally heartbreaking tale about the universal difficulty of marriage and the endless self-delusion of the human condition, driven by a trio of amazing dramatic performances.

It's a dumb, ugly and, most of all, painfully unfunny movie.

The Tree of Life is pretty much nuts overall, a manic hybrid folly with flashes of brilliance. But even if that's true it's a noble crazy, a miraculous William Butler Yeats kind of crazy, alive with passion for art and the world, for all that is lost and not lost and still to come.

Marshall delivers old-fashioned swashbuckling action-movie thrills more than computer-engineered grotesquerie.

Allen seems to be paying attention in a way he hasn't always done in recent films, and has found a way to channel his often-caustic misanthropy, half-comic fear of death and anti-American bitterness into agreeable comic whimsy.

It's a movie that succeeds, often beautifully, not by forcing its characters to be as naughty and gross and pathetic as men are. It soars by letting them be as naughty and gross and pathetic as women are. Three cheers for equality.

It's refreshingly honest, depicts the kinds of American lives not often seen on-screen and shows us a familiar star in a striking new light.

If it plays in any theaters beyond New York and Los Angeles, that'll probably come as a surprise to its distributor (the estimable Lorber Films). None of that diminishes the power and intensity of this claustrophobic mini-masterpiece of the Japanese antiwar tradition, which blends a B-movie aesthetic, brilliant use of montage and documentary elements and a scathing critique of nationalism and militarism.

I suppose the perfect ending to the chapter would be to report that The Beaver is a masterpiece. It isn't quite, but it does offer an astonishing and resonant performance by Gibson, who spends most of the movie playing two simultaneous characters, often in the same shot.

Branagh's completely at home in this kind of inflated family drama, of course, and the three guys yell, sulk and brood in their ridiculous costumes to fine effect.

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.

A would-be tween-oriented hit so scrubbed and sanitized and not worthy of paying attention to that it can barely be said to exist at all.

Visually spectacular, with wide-screen cinematography from Nobuyasu Kita, impressive, full-scale sets and special effects and exhausting, immersive action scenes, 13 Assassins is pretty nearly the samurai classic it sets out to become.

My first thought was: It's a temple, a church, a cathedral -- maybe the first one ever built -- and the better-known ones in Rome and Jerusalem and Istanbul are just later versions of the same thing.

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.

You know how they say to find one thing and do one thing well? Well, Pattinson's thing is glowering. It doesn't help matters that the movie itself is so painfully mediocre.

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.

It's a brilliant work of cinema, a nonfiction film as intense and visceral as any drama, and an emotional and moral experience that feels horrifying and exhilarating at almost the same moment.

It's almost really cool, without quite being really cool.

Misfires on multiple levels but isn't all that terrible.

Hanna is almost a terrific movie, or a partly terrific one, but all its giddy, improvised wonder resolves into nothing more than a ruthless, symmetrical story about a murderous monster.

Gingival surgery would be more fun than watching this brain-draining, spirit-sucking attempt at a stoner spoof, which combines the cutting edge of frat-boy wit, the excitement of a mid-'80s made-for-TV action flick and the authenticity of a Renaissance Faire held in an abandoned field behind a Courtyard by Marriott.

In this quiet, beautiful and terrifying fable about a group of lost pioneers, Reichardt combines epic ambition with a focus on intimate, personal detail.

Mostly it's got a barely tolerable level of metaness.

Everything we learn about Stevens and Christina and Goodwin by the end of the film comes from their actions, not their words. That lends Source Code an elusive, almost arty shimmer beneath its glossy, action-movie surface.

The pleasant surprise when you actually watch Insidious is that it turns out to be a moderately effective suburban-family creep show, majorly in debt to "Poltergeist" and "The Exorcist" and capturing at least a little of their spirit.

Super is occasionally brilliant, sometimes awful and terribly confusing overall.

Sucker Punch doesn't all work by a long shot, but it confirms my sense that Snyder belongs near the top of a very short list of directors who are trying to reinvent a personal, auteurist vision of cinema at the most commercial, mass-market, attention-disordered end of the spectrum.

It isn't the shifting narrative focus of Miral that's the problem, nor is it the purposefully provocative pro-Palestinian perspective. It's Jebreal's screenplay, which uses every scene as a vehicle for delivering news headlines or condensed political rhetoric, and seems incapable of capturing a specific emotion or an individual personality.

It's rare enough to see a Hollywood movie made with this much attention and personality, let alone one that balances comedy and darkness as well as this one does.

The hit-to-miss gag ratio is atrocious, and we spend most of the movie hanging out with these borderline-agreeable characters, waiting for something to happen.

Begins as pseudo-realism before descending into weird and mangled wank-job fantasy.

Jane Eyre is a passionate, impossible love story, one of the most romantic ever told. But it's also a cold, wild story about destruction, madness and loss, and this movie captures its divided spirit like none before.

Reasonably effective.

It's strange and stupid and half-compelling and sometimes beautiful.

I don't begrudge Take Me Home Tonight or the whole "I Love the Eighties" juggernaut its fight for its right to party, but there is something touchingly off-base about it.

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.

It's hyperactive, often hilarious and ultimately exhausting.

What he (Beauvois) conveys, through austere but spectacular visual language, magnificent liturgical singing and an ensemble cast headed by the terrific French veteran actors Lambert Wilson and Michael Lonsdale, is something of the "why."

Compared to, say, your average Adam Sandler movie it's a master class in film comedy. Oh, you will laugh. You may not forgive yourself for it easily, but you will laugh. You may well laugh to the point of pee stains in your underthings, and if you think that's gratuitous you have no idea.

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.

It was boring and silly but not atrociously bad. No, that's much too glowing; allow me to back up and rephrase. It is atrociously bad, basically.

Often hilarious, although I found it so amped-up and overly broad that I was exhausted before the movie was over.

An Adam Sandler comedy, which means it bears only a superficial relationship to the customary conventions of moviemaking, and also that there's no use getting all worked up about that.

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.

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.

Combines memorable images of the gorgeous, rugged wilderness, meticulous sound design that emphasizes the characters' isolation, a dash of dark wit and a dose of madness.

Nearly as enjoyable as the original. Its not-so-secret weapon is the poised, calm performance of Yen, who somehow manages to play Ip as both character and archetype.

Whatever his faults as a filmmaker may be, Cameron would never make an adventure flick that felt this bland and generic.

Inside of five minutes I felt an urgent, blinding hatred for almost all its grotesquely overprivileged characters.

Sells itself as a traditional Hollywood riches-to-rags comedy -- overdressed brat gets taken down a peg, falls in love with a hunky prole, and learns that love is more important than shoes...So why is Hollywood returning the favor by making such dreadful movies for Latino audiences?

It's by far the funniest and warmest movie Araki has ever made, with much less juvenile angst and much more command of his craft.

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.

If it's a nonsensical patchwork quilt, it's mostly a watchable one.

Applause may present as gritty European realism, but the struggle inside Thea is almost theological in scale, and worthy of Milton or Kierkegaard.

I'm not sure whether Howard and screenwriter Allan Loeb are to be commended for aspiring to something odd and original, or condemned for a result that's so messy and miscellaneous.

A lot of this is compelling, after its didactic and heavily thematic fashion, but if you strip most of it away, along with Roger Deakins' handsome cinematography, you're left with the conflict between Jack and Bobby and something like "Shop Class as Soulcraft: The Movie."

But when people have sex in a movie -- that wasn't, you know, made in Hungary and meant to convince you that life is meaningless -- isn't it a good idea to make it seem kind of hot? Because on that score, No Strings Attached is a near-total failure.

A pitch-perfect blend of darkness and sweetness, built around a masterful performance by a great actor.

Entirely watchable and often pretty fun, in a mishmashed, patchy kind of way.

Offers an introduction to the lean-and-mean, social-realist Romanian storytelling style that's built around a charismatic young actor and a familiar genre.

Off the top of my head, I'm guessing that Season of the Witch claims a place in the top five all-time bizarre and pointless homages to art cinema.

An intimate, gorgeous and wrenching portrait of a working-class marriage in what may be a state of terminal decay.

Bruno Dumont's Hadewijch is one of two small-release art films this season that deliver nuanced and fascinating portraits of faith.

A fascinating, mature, beautifully crafted work of art, from a director who continues to surprise us. Sofia Coppola has absorbed the Italian avant-garde more completely than her father ever did, and has made a film about celebrity in the vein of Antonioni and Bertolucci, a film about Hollywood in which she turns her back on it, possibly forever.

A winning western with just a few dark eddies beneath the surface, one that features a star-making lead performance and some spectacular photography, but falls just short of being great.

They kill me, these guys. No, seriously. If they make any more of these movies, they might as well kill me.

That's the culture we live in, where the once-proscribed Pleasure Principle has become iron law and where the recycled, bloated, fish-belly emptiness of something like TRON: Legacy carries boredom to extravagant new heights.

In essence, the movie is an ungainly but irresistible romantic-triangle comedy built around Rudd, Reese Witherspoon and Owen Wilson, with Nicholson rambling around its periphery like a demonic bear, part comic relief and part distraction.

An oddly listless and downbeat affair, setting these two beloved eccentrics adrift in a road movie that's rarely funny enough to connect as absurdist comedy and rarely compelling enough to work as recession-era male-bonding melodrama.

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.

If a movie can be both exciting and boring at the same time, that movie would be Unstoppable an adrenaline-infused runaway-train flick that perfectly distills director Tony Scott's talents and limitations.

Saw 3-D is in 3-D. Really, really bad 3-D.

It's a disorientingly beautiful movie at times, which promises -- as Denis always does, I think -- that human madness and human love will balance each other out, in the fullness of time.

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.

However you slice it, Monsters is a dynamite little film, loaded with atmosphere, intelligence, beauty and courage.

This is a quirky little comedy, not a film that will change your view of reality or anything, but it's funny, wrenching and sharply observed, with a dispassion that suggests a real artist is at work.

It's a warm, richly funny and highly enjoyable human story that takes an intriguing sideways glance at a crucial period in 20th-century history.

Her (Taymore) interpretations and interpolations range from brilliant to indifferent to extremely silly; as Taymor surely knows, there's nothing especially revolutionary in asking Helen Mirren to play the central role of Prospera.