Melissa Rosenberg's screenplay is faithful enough to Meyer's soap-operatic inclinations, but I kind of wish it weren't.

An imperfect, fascinating film about an imperfect, fascinating man.

It is a colossal bomb, an epic miscalculation, an excuse for actor self-indulgence and for what sounds very much like bad improvisation.

The film has some chuckles, if no belly laughs; it has some warmth, if no great heat.

Doesn't rank as a great film, but it's difficult to take your eyes off it, as you wonder what impossibly bizarre thing might happen next.

Watching the film one comes away feeling the bond that links these guys.

The worst kind of avant-garde film, one that hides its lack of commitment to the story, the characters and the genre under cover of being experimental. It mocks form and plays with form but offers nothing in its place, just boredom, emptiness and the oldest metaphor in captivity, about grass coming up through concrete.

But to be fair, Stone doesn't seem even to think he's offering the last word here. Rather, he's trying to offer the first word, or at least a first opportunity to hear the other side, unfiltered by television media.

In the end, Knight and Day isn't really about much of anything besides having a good time or perhaps the meaning of Tom Cruise-ness in the universe.

Visually, Jonah Hex is an orgy of overstatement: rapid edits, garish colors, harsh light.

Don't be fooled by the casual style. There is nothing casual about these emotions, or about the talent of these two filmmakers.

It's marred by loaded language and a propagandistic tone that undercuts rather than promotes its purposes.

I Am Love casts no spell and creates no narrative urgency. It's as compelling as mildly interesting gossip about people you don't know.

Let It Rain touches on class issues, feminism, immigration and the particular challenges facing a single, driven career woman in her 40s. But it's graceful in presenting its ideas, and what emerges is not a polemic but a kind of snapshot of modern-day concerns.

Toy Story 3 is a better film than "Wall-E" and "Up" in that it succeeds completely in conventional terms. For 103 minutes, it never takes audience interest for granted. It has action, horror and vivid characters, and it always keeps moving forward.

The film's final words are simple and to the point, and come from the retired cop, Seymour Pine: "You knew they broke the law, but what kind of law was that?"

A fine, fun remake of a movie that updates, transplants and reimagines the original without sacrificing its heart or goofy charm.

The A-Team is a Joe Carnahan movie, i.e., an experiment in propulsion and personality over substance and story.

It's one of the best documentaries ever made about show business, about what it really consists of and what it demands.

For at least a half hour, Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky is a brilliant and exciting film and seems almost sure to be one of the best of 2010. Then it becomes simply good. Then it becomes merely interesting. And then, about 15 minutes before the finish, it becomes dull and interminable.

This is one helluva drama, with one helluva star turn by Jennifer Lawrence as Ree.

The documentary shows the stranglehold that the teachers union has on politicians, particularly Democratic politicians. The arrogance and ignorance of some of these politicians is galling.

If this movie were a human being, it would be intelligent and sincere but so depressed as to be unable to get out of bed without a forklift.

For all its surface seriousness, Splice is a regulation monster movie. So however somber it gets, it's never truly thought-provoking, and however outrageous it gets, it's still always 20 minutes behind the audience. It's just too dumb to be serious and too slow to be entertaining. Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/06/03/MVKJ1DOO26.DTL#ixzz0pqYvhKuF

So comically fertile and yet so grounded in the reality of its characters that it's really a kind of marvel.

It's harmless.

Living in Emergency is sobering, in part because it powerfully conveys that, despite the group's heroic efforts, its impact is "a drop in a sea of oceans." There's never enough time, supplies or volunteers, but, as one of the doctors notes, "the demand is pretty much infinite."

Though the film seems less like a theatrical release and more like something that might play on an obscure PBS station at 2 p.m. on a Sunday afternoon, it's reasonably interesting as a personality study.