Richly inventive.

It becomes somewhat pleasantly watchable because the muddled script and dangling story lines are delivered and explored by truly charismatic actors who can, at least for a while, breathe life into something where none should exist...Even if they’re moping in a corner.

The Astronaut Farmer's goofy quality makes it totally endearing. It's also super entertaining. Critics are fond of referring to movies as a "great ride." With this one, the words couldn't be more apt.

Crazy plot aside, Tusk offers some thought-chewing ideas on human duality, both good/evil and man/beast.

Harry Brown has more to say, about aging, about old-school courtesy in collision with blind stupid violence, and about how sometimes pensioners on a fixed income get stuck in neighborhoods that turn dangerous.

A strange but oddly memorable film.

An elegiac, visually hypnotic film about love, honor, reverence for nature and the loss of tradition.

Dull but sweet.

Unabashedly sentimental, it's meant to touch our hearts in profound and important ways, but misses the mark by drawing too deeply from a pool of schmaltz.

Poignant and carefully observed, the Italian drama Facing Windows portrays two consuming, illicit romances: one in the present, the other kept alive in faulty memory. The long-ago relationship holds far more intrigue.

The big screen -- with that 3-D depth charge -- captures the strange magic of the "big top" Cirque in visual gulps.

As a film it plays like a heavy-handed morality tale one might come across on a middling cable network.

There's talent here, but for directing, not writing. If Ritchie wants to last, he's going to have to allow somebody else to write his screenplays.

Skids into absurdity, but it never quite gets boring. Movies like this rarely are.

The problem with “The Tiger’s Apprentice” is it sacrifices character and story for the repetitive mind-numbing action we have come to expect from such fantasy and superhero films.

In color, style and humor — even in its graphics and editing — it’s very much like a Godard film from the mid-1960s. Thus, the experience is like watching an actual Godard film — the first great Godard film since “Masculin Féminin” in 1966.

Can't be dismissed. Yet something keeps this movie from being completely satisfying: a disconnect between the plot and the point.

Attempts something startlingly original by melding light opera with soap opera.

Nostalgia for the groves of academe weighs heavily on Liberal Arts, which both exploits and undermines romanticized memories of campus life.

The back and forth, the listening and reacting between Mirren and McKellen, as each of their characters gauges the other and as we mark the incremental shifts and exchanges of power, is pure pleasure.

Cruise's undeniable star voltage makes it all palatable, and the film is gorgeous to behold and even to listen to, from the rolling green hills to the galloping horses to the "Lohengrin"-like theme music on the sound track.

You could blast for it, and you still won't find 30 uninterrupted seconds of truth in Baby Mama. The characters are lies. Their emotional workings are lies. The jokes are based on lies about human behavior.

Song to Song is Terrence Malick’s first truly awful film. In it, he does all the things that Malick does, except for all the great things that Malick does.

Showalter’s The Eyes of Tammy Faye, which credits the documentary as its inspiration, recreates some of the doc’s scenes almost verbatim. But while imitation might be the sincerest form of flattery, Abe Sylvia’s ambitious but shallow script has something spiritually missing — namely, a point to it all.

The brilliance of what Iñárritu does here is that, if you watch any scene in “Bardo” for 30 seconds, you will keep watching. But you have to be willing to give him those 30 seconds at the start of each scene. You have to work with him a little.

That Pride ultimately gets to you is more of a surprise than the outcome because it's not very well-constructed.

A ludicrous, yet oddly engaging documentary.

If there’s a weakness to The D Train, it’s only in the filmmakers’ ultimate choice to stop the pain right before the finish, as if any good might really come to the characters they’ve created. Perhaps the assumption was that, by then, audiences will have suffered enough. But some misery you really can’t get enough of, especially when it’s happening to other people.