Applause is a very minor film with a massive performance at its center.

The high school comedy/drama morphs into a slasher movie, then morphs into a time-traveling/body-switching/world's-about-to-end science fiction story. Everyone on the set must have been chugging Mountain Dew between takes. I suspect that the editor was hooked up to an IV of the beverage.

An understated story of coping with emotional blows that offers a compelling portrait of a decent man.

Coiro, who directed and co-wrote the film with Ritter, has a firm hold on snappish humor and bookish references, but the whole thing sags under a creaky narrative structure.

Taylor's film is never boring, and it has some beautiful, thought-provoking moments. In a genre in which preaching to the choir seems to be the norm, this film is a welcome entry.

You can almost say it simulates an experience of brain injury in the audience: Nothing adheres, nothing connects. It's just nonstop cuteness, poses and emptiness - with nothing logically following from one moment to the next. It would be exaggerating to call it torture, and yet why split hairs?

The Lady is a portrait in moral and physical courage, a sort of analysis of what constitutes greatness.

Most of the time Lockout is pleasant enough, not something to recommend to a friend, but enjoyable in the moment. Guy Pearce has a lot to do with that, as the most impervious action star imaginable.

It's just not enough to say that The Three Stooges is the death of comedy. Rather, it's the death, burial, putrefaction and decomposition of comedy. It is where comedy, once alive, ends up as dust blowing in the wind, like something out of a really bad Kansas song.

By the time the ride is over, director Drew Goddard and co-writers Goddard and Joss Whedon will change course three or four times, nodding and winking but never losing momentum.

To my eyes, the whole thing looks sad, like something people might cling to in the absence of religion - or a kind of religion in itself, minus dogma or salvation, but with lots of people standing around dressed like total goofballs.

This Is Not a Film isn't just a film, it's a strong one. It's also an act of political defiance, a moving personal document and a meditation on what film is and can be.

The movie is harsh, nasty and vulgar like you wouldn't believe. And often, it's hilarious.

American Reunion isn't a total wash. Its one saving grace is Eugene Levy as Jim's dad.

The film is full of low-key but telling observations, mostly about Gianni's plight but also about modern life in general.

A mostly compelling documentary about that rarest of breeds, an appealing politician.

The plot is spare, but unsettling imagery elevates The Hunter to the level of pure cinema.

It's a strange film, very original and very good. Just by virtue of the subject matter, it can't help but be erotic, and yet eroticism is not the movie's purpose.

If you don't guess the big twist in the first 30 minutes, Intruders is half of a good movie. If you do, it's about a third of a good movie. Either way, there's a whole lot of bad movie to contend with.

Rachel Weisz - in what has to be the performance of her career, and there have been lots of good ones - plays an intelligent woman in the grip of a lust that's too big to handle or suppress. She can either ride the tiger or be devoured.

This is a movie in which whole sequences consist of nothing but guys fighting stiff computer images. Such scenes would be boring even were they done well, but these scenes aren't done well.

Cleverness won't carry it. Nothing less than overarching vision is required; otherwise, the audience will laugh for 10 minutes and then start to check out. And that pretty much states the problem of Mirror Mirror.

The image that finally lingers is one shown repeatedly: a close-up of fingers gently pressing a piece of fish onto a handheld oblong of rice, painting it with a single brushing of sauce and laying it on a plate, after which the preparer steps back. We're left to contemplate the pristine creation and envy Jiro's lucky customers.

Iko Uwais is not exactly a household name, but the Indonesian heartthrob appears to be well on his way with The Raid: Redemption, a clever, action-packed film that showcases his movie-star looks, low-key charisma and breathtaking martial arts skills.

Israeli writer-director Joseph Cedar imbues his tale of academic maneuvering, misunderstanding and mystery with the zest of passion and the zing of intrigue, It's a vivacious film, having its little fun with suspense-flick conventions (including Amit Poznansky's bouncing score) that build to a climactic finish.

What it means in practice is that, with a Dardennes movie, nothing much seems to be going on - until everything seems to be going on. We watch events at a remove, and then, at a certain magical point, we are in the story, and we don't quite know how they did it - again.

This is better than any of the "Twilights." It features a functioning creative imagination and lots of honest-to-goodness acting by its star, Jennifer Lawrence.

Fake It So Real isn't just for wrestling fans. It will appeal to anyone compelled by the documentary medium's ability to tell stories.

The New Zealand feature Boy almost pulls off the trick of merging cartoonish humor and '80s pop culture with a story glancing at deeper family issues. The film has an appealing 11-year-old hero, but in the end feels half baked.

Kill List has a slow build, but don't be lulled into complacency. This is one of the most violent and disturbing films you'll see in an art house.

The latest Audrey Tautou film, Delicacy, is sensitive and well acted and fits under the general category of "good movie," and yet it would be hard to get excited about it.

Think of The FP as the occasion for a party. You need to find a room full of people who get the joke and see this movie there, because audiences will be laughing so hard they'll be screaming.

Apart is an attractive-looking piece of work, and I'll always admire any genre film that errs on the side of understatement.

It's really strange, and it's really subtitled.

The Duplass brothers keep making miniatures that contain universes. They seem to be casual, but they're dead serious. They seem to be stumbling around finding stories by accident, but their movies are thematically rigorous. They seem to be presenting matters of little consequence, but the stakes are always huge and life-changing.

This film is even better if you come in with no spoilers and low expectations.

Good chemistry between the lead actors and nice supporting performances help Friends With Kids survive a formulaic story and just-OK filmmaking.

Most important, the relationship between P-Orridge and Lady Jaye comes off as heartfelt, and "Ballad" makes you feel something. Just like art.

The nonprofessional cast is convincing, especially Lacej, whose Rudina registers more strongly than Nik.

A handful of acting moments aside, Being Flynn is a drama without much in the way of rewards.

Silent House feels relentless, suffocatingly tense and almost unbearable. And that's a very good thing.

The opening to John Carter is a dud, a battle between airships made of woven bamboo, bursting into computer-generated flame over a sandy terrain. There's nothing to see, nothing to think about, nothing to care about, and nothing to feel, just emptiness. The emptiness is never filled over the course of 132 long, barren minutes.

The film's emotional complexities don't allow for much of the canned sentiment that normally gets dished out in romantic dramas; what emerges instead, over several reels, is endearingly tender and complicated.

If nothing else, you'll surely relish the extravagant rhetoric used by Ali Mahdavi, the club's artistic director, to describe what is basically a tasteful nudie revue.

For Tim and Eric, what's funny is what's odd, ultra-cheap, pathetic or scurvy - and what's funniest of all is that some people just don't get it.

Undefeated is filled with wonderful narratives, which impressed academy voters enough to garner an Academy Award this week. It's a credit to directors Daniel Lindsay and T.J. Daniels that the personal stories of the kids and coaches resonate more than the wins and losses.

It is a very good performance in a very bad movie.

You know what? The whole thing is harmless.

With most movies, the question for viewers is: Who should see it? With Project X, the most pressing issue is: Who shouldn't see it?

There seems to be a pretty good film lurking around inside Bullhead, which makes what we actually see on the screen all the more frustrating.

In Darkness is an extraordinary movie, and somehow good art creates its own uplift.

The documentary is not always fascinating, but Tuschi's ultimate thesis - that Khodorkovsky, who started out a shady businessman, ultimately emerged as a hero, willing to go to jail for his convictions - is a persuasive one. Clearly, the man is a political prisoner.

A lot of what takes place in Roadie feels overly familiar, and the film could have been a wallow in pathos except for the performances, especially that of Eldard.

So this is a good comedy, as bad as it can be and still be good, but good.

For what it is, it's well done, well filmed, well outfitted with ordnance and, well, exciting. However, in script, characters and plot, Act of Valor offers only the barest minimum.

With a handful of blackly humorous jolts and some game performances by a good cast, Thin Ice is a watchable, if not terribly original, piece of Midwestern noir.

The film boasts an original score by Cuban pianist and composer Bebo Valdés, who was featured in "Calle 54."

What's missing is any real menace - the signature Miyazaki freak factor that turns spirits into monsters and parents into pigs.

The best thing Harrelson brings is his own sweetness of disposition, which somehow never goes completely into hiding.

An ugly, misguided exercise.

The documentary Hell and Back Again may be the closest most civilians ever get to the reality of the war in Afghanistan.

There are some compelling performance moments, and it's sad to watch these talented and basically nice people drift apart. But overall the film seems like a collection of bits and pieces, and it's hard to see how it could have much resonance for non-fans.

It plays like a string of cliches linked together to form a movie with not a single moment of surprise or originality.

If the characters weren't so well drawn, if the effects weren't so convincing, and if the upshot weren't so ghastly, the moral component wouldn't carry any weight. But Trank tells his tale with an emotional and visual crispness that gives the superhero genre its best crack at naturalism so far.

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia is boring, but not in the usual way of boring movies. It is colossally, memorably and audaciously boring.

Even viewers who are an easy touch for romance movies will find this heavy-handed.

For a time, Journey 2 becomes a lost episode of "Lost," then it becomes "King Kong," minus the ape. Then it becomes a ukulele music video featuring the Rock's take on Israel Kamakawiwo'ole's "What a Wonderful World."

Whatever else W.E. may be (lousy, a waste of time, tin-eared, sleep-inducing, occasionally laughable, etc.), it's sincere and ambitious.

Safe House is an idea for a movie. It's a few blustery gestures in the direction of a story, with five good actors doing their best, trying to hold up the barest frame of an idea, while investing the surrounding emptiness with all the truth they can muster.

Big Miracle is not the most sophisticated adventure film, but compared with most family movies, it's practically something out of Noel Coward.

Fiennes thrives under his own direction, but such is his sense of balance that everyone else thrives, too.

Don't expect an in-depth study or exposé in Carol Channing: Larger Than Life. But director Dori Berinstein does capture the essence of Carol as one of those creatures of the theater that when you see her onstage, you know you've seen something special.

Writer-director Patric Chiha directs the proceedings with incredible restraint, which works both for and against him. Yes, it allows the actors to shine with some subtle, quiet moments, and prevents things from going over the top, but somehow Aunt Nadine and restraint don't belong in the same sentence.

Unabashedly weepy, lyrical in tone, and yet it cuts through the melodrama and stands as an honest depiction of young people who don't know all the answers but have the intellectual capacity to figure them out.

If, in the end, the movie fails to generate much beyond several crackling jump scares and a nicely gothic mise-en-scene, it has enough mood, and enough Radcliffe, to carry us through the mist.

Though the movie drips and aches with good intentions, I do wonder how lesbians may feel about seeing lesbianism presented as a mere traumatized distortion of female heterosexuality.

Bala, by the way, means "bullet." Laura Zúñiga, the real-life beauty queen on whom the film is loosely based, was called "Miss Narco" in the Mexican press.

What a treat to find a movie so bright-eyed and true - without a trace of bathos - in its depiction of such a harrowing subject.

Man on a Ledge doesn't aim high, but what it aims to do, it does. It grabs the audience's attention, engages its anxieties, stokes its resentments and, at the finish, sends people out saying, "That was good."

A handsome but gabby take on the standard survivalist thriller that's more concerned with lofty metaphysics than which poor blockhead is about to bite it next.

With excellent animation, gobs of action, mystical mayhem and more twists and turns than you can count, Fullmetal Alchemist: The Sacred Star of Milos - the latest installment of the anime sensation from Japan - is not likely to disappoint its fans. Or the uninitiated.

The film's subject, a whistle-blowing research scientist who played a key role in the fight to regulate tobacco, deserves to be celebrated.

Moaadi is the standout here, subtly evoking filial worry and fatherly pride in one scene, popping off with rage in another: He's believably decent, believably flawed. A Separation touches on religious strictures and the role of women in Iran, but it does so with a light hand and not a twitch of condemnation.

What's missing is any hint of realism. There's no grit to it anywhere.

It's a far better thing to remember Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close than to watch it. Looking back, much of what is irritating, precious and tiresome about the movie recedes and drops away, while all the movie's virtues, which are considerable, rise to consciousness. There are good things here - just be prepared to blast for them.

Beautiful in a girl-from-the-neighborhood sort of way, Carano inhabits Soderbergh's elaborate frame with wit, physicality and just a hint of ironic distance, the suggestion of someone who's not overawed by the opportunity or taking herself too seriously.

The first Russian musical in more than 50 years, Hipsters is appreciated best as a curiosity.

The film isn't half as deep as intended, but parts of it are very funny - someone actually barfs onto a stack of art books - and the parts that aren't may as well be.

Like most ruckuses, it is frequently loud and not always intelligible.

Let's start by admitting three things: that Contraband is a ridiculous movie, that it wasn't meant to be a ridiculous movie, and that it's an enjoyable movie. One of the things that makes it enjoyable is that it's so ridiculous.

Imagine a biopic about Ronald Reagan that leaves out Gorbachev but instead dramatizes his years with Alzheimer's, and you'll get an idea of this film's misplaced focus.

Unless you're a fan of Fishbone, Everyday Sunshine is probably just a documentary about a band you've never heard of, whose music you probably will not like. But there's a bigger and more interesting subject at work in this film. It's a movie about what it's like to almost make it in the music business, but not really, not quite. It's about coming close and watching it slip away.

The film is a vehement drama and a fitfully amusing snark fest set to Nicola Piovani's jaunty circus music. It winds up only half-succeeding at both.

A mix of the powerful and the ridiculous, and eventually the ridiculous wins. The movie deals with a big subject that has received scant treatment in movies - the genocide in Bosnia in the 1990s - giving voice and testimony to what happened there. But the ill-conceived fictional elements take the picture right off the rails.

The film benefits most of all from Rees' careful screenplay, which dances that shifting line between fear and emergent hope. One of Alike's poems says it best: "Even breaking is opening. And I am broken. I am open."

A mystical masterpiece about a lonely man who helps a widower perform last rites for his wife, is an astonishing, haunting, sensual, lyrical, bleak and ultimately beautiful road-trip movie.

Affecting at times, but finally feels overblown and heavy-handed.

The film is sweet. Its observations of life in the aftermath of death ring true, especially for anyone who's traveled the contours of mourning. And although it doesn't rank among Crowe's greatest films, it's a better, tighter, more disarming piece of grief work than his baggy and zigzaggy "Elizabethtown."