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.