Appreciate it instead as an exceedingly well-crafted fairy tale, alive with eccentric, overdrawn Dickensian characters and irresistibly wholehearted sentiment, and you'll enjoy perhaps the most accomplished and satisfying work of Brooks' career as a middlebrow entertainer.

But imagination and energy are often not enough. On balance, this is the dumbest of the entries in Hollywood's anti-consumerist new wave.

The 21st-century combo of screwball comedy and half-baked thriller in Wild Canaries isn’t exactly like anything you’ve seen before, and it offers an unpredictable ride that’s kind of fun, or at least sporadically simulates fun.

Watching it, I saw him from some new angles -- painful as well as celebratory -- and I realized that this isn't it: This, as with Elvis' posthumous career, is only the beginning.

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.

It's a fine example of the excellence of French genre film right now: A dark tale of revenge with an inscrutable heart, ice in its veins and an electric undercurrent of eroticism, it also might be the best-photographed picture I've seen so far this year.

It's mediocre and half-baked, with flashes of a potential good movie showing through here and there.

It's a consistently exciting piece of moviemaking, but it's not a pleasant experience; it's one of the few recent movies that have the power to leave you genuinely shaken up.

It's a magnificent miniature, a supremely tender work that's full of emotion and even sentimentality.

This is another mini-triumph from the resurgent Irish film industry, but much more than that it's a resonant yarn of love, loss, loneliness -- and things that go bump in the night.

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.