The mind-numbingly predictable, but admittedly watchable Hello I Must Be Going needed less whine and more surprise.

Plummer gives her strangest, most uninhibited screen performance to date. Playing Eunice, a wildly psychotic killer with a working-class British accent and a mysterious past, Plummer draws a streak of white-hot rage across the screen.

It does for hit men what "Up in the Air" did for frequent-flying corporate terminators, minus the comic tang.

May be Disney's most pointedly feminist effort since "Mulan."

Here's the thing: This movie would be easy to mock as maudlin and self-important, but there's something about it that can't be dismissed. The monologues may be theatrical and presentational - director Anne Emond made this film when she was 29 and too young to be subtle.

It's probably pointless to complain when a movie sets out to be stupid and actually is. (And the people who came up with a couple of these ideas think male models are dumb.)

It's extremely funny, one of the funniest films of 2012, with a particularly winning style - far-fetched, extreme and nonstop.

The final 20 minutes are the strongest, when Harmon comes to some realizations about his behavior. Unless you’re the biggest of fans, you may find yourself wishing that the film had reached this point earlier.

A playful, sexy piece of work -- just what the Bard might have conjured up for a movie adaptation of his beloved spring-fever comedy.

[Lange's] allure is staggering. If you've never seen her in this film - if you've never seen the young Jessica Lange, except in "Tootsie" - prepare to pick your jaw up off the floor.

Clearly, Peirce's motives are pure. She's not using the "stop-loss" issue as a wedge to make the government or the administration look bad. She's using it to dramatize an injustice and to advocate on behalf of the soldiers.

Fortunately, director Thor Freudenthal (“Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters”) eventually finds some truth, thanks to an exceptional cast headlined by two rising dynamic young actors, Charlie Plummer and Taylor Russell.

André Øvredal's dry horror-comedy Trollhunter is successful on multiple levels, with a brisk pace, excellent location work and a strong lead performance by Norwegian comedian Otto Jespersen.

The new version excels because it makes its teenage protagonist deeper and more mature — and its monsters extra frightening.

Falls victim to some surfing cliches.

Even when the movie is bad -- it's addictively so.

A courtroom drama with a compelling story and something peculiar about it, too: For most of its running time, there doesn't seem to be much in the way of a rooting interest. The audience isn't quite sure who it's for or against.

The results are mixed. Many of the films are too long, and even worse, the collection as a whole doesn't come to grips with the human scale of the tragedy.

Stolen owes its persuasiveness less to its substance than to the visual craft of Dreyfus and her celebrated cinematographer, Albert Maysles. In telling the story of an unsolved crime, they use every trick available to awaken and prolong suspense before a payoff that never comes.

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

The film is likely to attract new readers to the book — and remind longtime fans why they were attracted to the writings in the first place.

A half hour before the finish, Margaret loses altitude and starts looking for a place, any place, to land. Instead it crashes, in slow motion. But up until then, Margaret is committed and unusual.

We’re supposed to be taking a fun thrill ride here, with a little existentialism to boot, but Copshop can’t escape its arrested development.

The surprise is that Kindergarten Cop is delightful and entertaining, a cop movie with suspense, no blood and a lot of genuine warmth. The script is intelligent and plays to the unique strengths of Schwarzenegger as a star. [21 Dec 1990, p.E1]

There's an Impressionistic feeling to all this, and sometimes it plays like a travelogue -- Bush is trying to do an awful lot at once. But the material is so compelling that we keep watching.

Comes closer than any other recent animated film to the Looney Tunes ideal. Just as Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny entertained without either condescending to kids or lobbing adult jokes over their heads.

In many ways a beautiful movie, and yet in other ways it’s not very good at all. As an achievement in stop-motion animation, it’s stunning — seamless and detailed, so perfectly done that it’s easy to forget that you’re witnessing skill and not magic.

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.