Tonal inconsistency is the iceberg that sinks The Pretty One. The film is a mashup of wacky comedy, romance and sorrowful elements that would tax a more seasoned filmmaker than first-time writer-director Jenée LaMarque.

If you think of Pompeii as a ride, a conveyance for special effects, and not anything resembling an emotional experience, indifference can almost be a good thing.

the movie comes perilously close to implicitly justifying the killing that sparked the plot - a killing, by the way, that is close to senseless.

Here is a culture in which female strength, having no outlet, must become distorted or lethal. In Therese and her aunt, we find two manifestations of the same disease.

Miyazaki is arguably at the Kubrick/Polanski level, where his lesser films still yield great rewards. Even during the moments that don't soar, The Wind Rises continues to satisfy.

The director takes an unpromising premise - the switched-at-birth plot - and gives us something that's touching and unexpected.

It is partly a failure, but mostly it succeeds, and the film's aspiration is so enormous that that's enough for a moving experience.

Daring and gutless at the same time. It's daring in that it's a romantic movie that's willing to be coarse. It's gutless in that it refuses to paint any of its characters in a negative light, even temporarily.

The update is a different kind of failure, too much endless and not enough love.

RoboCop is no canned remake of the 1987 action film. It's a reimagining that responds to everything that has changed in American life over the past 27 years, addressing new threats and exploiting new anxieties.

The movie is a wonderful surprise, cleverly written and executed brick by brick with a visual panache.

The reversion to formula takes a pleasing comedy and drops it down a notch, but That Awkward Moment is still very easy to like.

Stranger by the Lake has no rating, but if it had, it would earn an NC-17 ten times over.

The film depicts a treasure hunt, only in the sense that the movie has to have a running story. But it doesn't really trade on suspense or adventure, and in the few places Clooney pushes it that way, it doesn't feel right.

This is win-win for everybody, but it's too win-win - a setup that short-circuits drama, that shoehorns a situation into a precooked formulation: He's a real prisoner and she's an emotional prisoner, and each offers the other the possibility of freedom.

It's a lovely film that grows along with the characters. At first, it seems like a pleasing but inconsequential comedy. But it deepens as their connection deepens and opens up into a place of poignancy and insight.

Taking a stand would have made the film stronger, and might even have been helpful to young Pug and his peers.

Gimme Shelter is an attempt at something grand, and though it doesn't get halfway there, it covers some ground.

G.B.F. has been unfairly slapped with an R rating, but the film is about as scandalous as a "Glee" episode. It's suitable for young teenage girls, who apparently are far more at ease with the times than the homophobic folks at the MPAA. Don't let their rating fool you: The movie may be thoroughly modern, yet it's old-fashioned, too.

Forgettably mediocre, but it's not atrocious.

Even with its thrifty set pieces and smaller ambitions, this attempt to reboot the series based on Tom Clancy characters does the most important thing right: It almost always feels like a Jack Ryan movie.

August: Osage County was a three-hour play that felt like two hours. It has been made into a two-hour movie that feels like a month.

Lone Survivor, from start to finish, is a tale of disaster, of bad luck and bad communication, perhaps even faulty planning, though that's hard to say. So the movie loses the common touch of average folk trying to get by, while also losing some of the pleasure of watching a crack unit at work.

The documentary is exclusively about Ullmann and Bergman as human beings and about how they got along.

Very good at pointing out the social difficulties surrounding the Dickens-Ternan relationship, the power dynamics within it and the lasting effects of it.

Caught in the Web is of little interest as entertainment, and if it were set in an unimportant or overly familiar country, it would be entirely forgettable.

Jia is passionate about his characters, but that never compromises his considerable artistic control.

Despite its worthy subject, this feature by veteran Brazilian director Bruno Barreto has a bluntness that's at odds with Bishop's personality and work.

A serious documentary about this gloriously trashy trailblazer.

The Past makes conventional movies feel artificial. Watching the characters interact in this movie feels like "Here is real life," and real life just happens to be strangely compelling.

Elba's performance is commanding and physically meticulous. As he ages through the film, he takes on the stiff gracefulness of the elderly Mandela, so familiar to us from news footage.

If, while watching The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, you start wondering why Ben Stiller is acting strange, the answer comes during the closing credits: "Directed by Ben Stiller."

Grudge Match at its core is an affront to the cinema gods, an attempt to capitalize off two iconic films for a few cheap laughs.

The story is too slender for its two-hour running time, and the pace is lugubrious, as though everyone in front and behind the camera were depressed. But the biggest obstacle is the protagonist (Joaquin Phoenix), who is almost without definition.

It is the best and most enjoyable American film to be released this year.

Lenny Cooke is humbling, as well as a cautionary tale for young people thinking they can make the big time.

Every time it threatens to devolve into sentimentality or cynicism, someone is there to take the reins.

The Coens, with this film, are like people who fly all the way to Paris on vacation and then eat at McDonalds every night, because that's what they know. Why bother making the trip at all?

American Hustle is David O. Russell's best film, one that finds him in that ideal zone of spontaneity and complete control.

Yet it's very funny, a disappointment only to those who expect to see something bold and new.

The film is too intelligent and well-crafted to dismiss and too good to hate. Some people will love it, and at worst, most people will like it a little.

Results are all that matter, and the result here is that The Desolation of Smaug fails in almost every way, as a story, as an adventure, as a piece of art direction and as a visual spectacle.

The veteran filmmakers, siblings Lisa and Rob Fruchtman, accentuate the positive, while acknowledging the obstacles. They also realize Rwanda's trauma can't be denied - a handful of women recount harrowing stories of their experiences during the genocide and its aftermath. Some have parents or husbands still in prison for war crimes.

Only when it makes the claim for Page as a pivotal figure in American culture does it overstate the case and become tiresome.

It's dull in the precise way that life can be dull. To watch it is like sitting in on a staff meeting, listening to people talk on and on and on. Professors are used to talking nonstop, and in a few cases in At Berkeley it's rather astonishing to hear them repeating the same ideas over and over, instead of just coming to a point and stopping.

It shambles and ambles, seemingly without focus or pattern, from one thing to the next. Yet at the same time, it's predictable, not from moment to moment, but in its outlines.

Not so much a documentary as a rambling interview, almost all done in animation.

Oldboy is an immersion into pure twistedness. The purity of its twistedness is its saving grace.

Black Nativity is a just-OK feature film that, as an hour-long television special, could have had the makings of a classic.

Homefront has craft and humor behind it, but not much in the way of inspiration. Think of a dessert with lots of calories and no nutrition.

Philomena is a wiser movie than it seems, with much to say about justice and forgiveness and the healing of wounds over time. Actually, it says next to nothing about any of those things, just implies its messages with a light hand.

The studio made a great film.

It's the story of a young married couple undone by a family tragedy, but the film loses its way, at one point turning into a political harangue.

Nowhere near the worst film of 2013, but it is definitely the most exhausting.

An authentic piece of Americana. There's no lying or condescending from this director. Nebraska feels pure.

Best in its first hour, when it concentrates on the politics and the specific horrors of Panem. It becomes more conventional in the second half and loses steam, but it's always heading somewhere.

Armstrong acted like a demon, but it becomes clear there were very, very few angels associated with the sport in the 1990s and early 2000s.

By the end you can't help but wonder whether it was a good idea to keep the youngsters under camera scrutiny for more than 12 years.

Drama is as much about perspective as it is about events, and the angle provided by How I Live Now turns out to be self-defeating.

The film is merciless in showing the obstacles faced by a down-and-out couple in strip-mall Florida, but there's a modicum of hope in the genuine love the characters share.

The resulting film has some wrong notes and touches of preciousness, but mostly it's a moving and effective presentation of life under Nazism, as seen from an unusual angle.

It's not all bad. It's just part bad: It suffers from cliches and corniness, from the same kinds of scenes played over and over, and from more false endings than the last "Lord of the Rings" movie.

It's good nonetheless, an artfully arranged account of Hemingway's current life, mixed with footage shot by her late sister Margaux for a 1983 documentary about the family.

As good as The Motel Life is for the actors, that's how bad it is for the viewer.

The limits of Dallas Buyers Club are the limits most true stories come up against, which are the facts. A good story lands and reverberates. In real life, stories have a way of just stopping and leaving you a bit unsatisfied. The latter is what happens in this movie, but perhaps that couldn't be avoided.

The tales are worthwhile, but it's challenging to find a common thread among them that goes beyond vague generalities.

Bigger is not always better. Thor: The Dark World pumps up the action and special effects and loses some of the human element that made the original "Thor" something charming and unexpected. True, this sequel gets better as it goes along, but that's a very steep climb just to arrive at not bad.

In execution, the film is all sidekicks and sight gags, with little story cohesion or purpose.

A modestly entertaining martial arts melodrama with impressively staged fight sequences that help compensate for a stale plot and some less-than-stellar acting.

The self-consciousness that made the director's "Love Actually" a love-it-or-hate-it film is dialed way down. About Time is more of a love-it-or-like-it proposition.

It's a gallant battle against flawed material, and Hirschbiegel fights it to a draw.

Watching this film will leave you with some dispiriting questions about America and its values.

Whatever you may feel about each side, it's hard to watch as city officials order explosives to be dropped on the MOVE house (which has a bunker on top) - and then sit idly by as the resulting fire burns the entire neighborhood. You'll keep asking yourself: How did it come to this? And hauntingly, no one has any answers.

Despite its general intelligence and worthy performances, Kill Your Darlings makes it difficult to see how the Beats ever caught on.

Last Vegas is an entertaining movie with a lot of integrity, and it gives all of its actors - all heavyweights and Oscar winners - real moments to dig in and play something.

Make no mistake, Blue Is the Warmest Color constitutes a breakthrough, in addition to being the best film of 2013.

12 Years a Slave has some of the awkwardness and inauthenticity of a foreign-made film about the United States. The dialogue of the Washington, D.C., slave traders sounds as if it were written for "Lord of the Rings." White plantation workers speak in standard redneck cliches. And yet the ways in which this film is true are much more important than the ways it's false.

This is a multilayered film that not only exposes a man's contradictions - a do-gooder narcissist; a thoughtful, delusional activist - but also speaks volumes about the fringes on both sides of the political spectrum.

Both women are excellent, and they, as much as the movie's whodunit elements, hold the viewer until the finish.

There is history as it's remembered, and then there's history as it happened. This documentary gives us the latter, and it's a true education.

The uneven result is definitely not for prudish moviegoers, definitely funny for everyone else, and even approaches poignancy in one or two scenes.

It's possible there has never been anything like it. It contains memorable dialogue, vivid characters and several superb scenes, and yet it still manages to be wrong, a complete miscalculation.

At the end of the day, though, thanks to the moral complications expressed by the abortion doctors and patients, this movie gives us more than enough room to help weigh these issues on our own terms.

It's a tepid, quiet and uneventful film, directed almost in slow motion, with no narrative propulsion and with a succession of very similar scenes. The actors speak softly and pause a lot. And in the background is the steady hum of the soundtrack.

Well-intentioned but heavy-handed.

Director Doug Hamilton was given extraordinary access from the very beginning, so that we see Green Day composer and lead singer Billie Joe Armstrong having some of his initial meetings with Broadway director Michael Mayer, who conceived the show.

In a way, the new Carrie is almost too easy to enjoy. Everything discordant and all the nagging weirdness and strange feelings surrounding the original have been smoothed down, and what we're left with is a well-made, highly satisfying and not particularly deep high school revenge movie.

Not entirely successful or appealing - not exactly a delightful evening in the company of scintillating characters - but interesting all the same.

So chalk Escape Plan up as a pretty good action movie given an extra edge by the intelligent use of its two main actors.

Dosunmu is an up-and-coming director; Mother of George is his second film after the much-lauded "Restless City." He's got the visual part of the job down for sure.

As a movie, Escape From Tomorrow is at best pretty good, but the way it was made makes it something unique, possibly memorable.

A revenge-fantasy Western that wants to luxuriate in its B-movie roots but suffers from dull direction and an even duller central performance.

That's a lot of talent and star power at play here, made all the more conspicuous in that they don't really get much to work with. Not only is the movie just so-so, but the parts themselves aren't much.

The hits just keep on coming in Muscle Shoals, a hugely entertaining, perhaps overlong, documentary about the renowned recording studios in the small Alabama town of the film's title. It's mandatory viewing for fans of the classic rock, soul and rhythm and blues of the 1960s and '70s.

Rarely do two lines go by without Fellowes changing something, always for the worse.

As much as Machete Kills is a reunion and continued revival, it also represents a sort of gentrification of the exploitation genre. It's probably time to move on and let a new generation of kids take a crack at making bad films.

This is an intense and complicated story, and the film doesn't rush it. It lets it unfold and build, methodically.

Leong is a San Francisco native, and the documentary has a strong local feel. Lin's high school basketball coach Peter Diepenbrock and his shooting coach Doc Scheppler are interviewed extensively, as are both parents and Lin's brothers.