The resulting film has some wrong notes and touches of preciousness, but mostly it's a moving and effective presentation of life under Nazism, as seen from an unusual angle.

It's not all bad. It's just part bad: It suffers from cliches and corniness, from the same kinds of scenes played over and over, and from more false endings than the last "Lord of the Rings" movie.

It's good nonetheless, an artfully arranged account of Hemingway's current life, mixed with footage shot by her late sister Margaux for a 1983 documentary about the family.

As good as The Motel Life is for the actors, that's how bad it is for the viewer.

The limits of Dallas Buyers Club are the limits most true stories come up against, which are the facts. A good story lands and reverberates. In real life, stories have a way of just stopping and leaving you a bit unsatisfied. The latter is what happens in this movie, but perhaps that couldn't be avoided.

The tales are worthwhile, but it's challenging to find a common thread among them that goes beyond vague generalities.

Bigger is not always better. Thor: The Dark World pumps up the action and special effects and loses some of the human element that made the original "Thor" something charming and unexpected. True, this sequel gets better as it goes along, but that's a very steep climb just to arrive at not bad.

In execution, the film is all sidekicks and sight gags, with little story cohesion or purpose.

A modestly entertaining martial arts melodrama with impressively staged fight sequences that help compensate for a stale plot and some less-than-stellar acting.

The self-consciousness that made the director's "Love Actually" a love-it-or-hate-it film is dialed way down. About Time is more of a love-it-or-like-it proposition.

It's a gallant battle against flawed material, and Hirschbiegel fights it to a draw.

Watching this film will leave you with some dispiriting questions about America and its values.

Whatever you may feel about each side, it's hard to watch as city officials order explosives to be dropped on the MOVE house (which has a bunker on top) - and then sit idly by as the resulting fire burns the entire neighborhood. You'll keep asking yourself: How did it come to this? And hauntingly, no one has any answers.

Despite its general intelligence and worthy performances, Kill Your Darlings makes it difficult to see how the Beats ever caught on.

Last Vegas is an entertaining movie with a lot of integrity, and it gives all of its actors - all heavyweights and Oscar winners - real moments to dig in and play something.

Make no mistake, Blue Is the Warmest Color constitutes a breakthrough, in addition to being the best film of 2013.

12 Years a Slave has some of the awkwardness and inauthenticity of a foreign-made film about the United States. The dialogue of the Washington, D.C., slave traders sounds as if it were written for "Lord of the Rings." White plantation workers speak in standard redneck cliches. And yet the ways in which this film is true are much more important than the ways it's false.

This is a multilayered film that not only exposes a man's contradictions - a do-gooder narcissist; a thoughtful, delusional activist - but also speaks volumes about the fringes on both sides of the political spectrum.

Both women are excellent, and they, as much as the movie's whodunit elements, hold the viewer until the finish.

There is history as it's remembered, and then there's history as it happened. This documentary gives us the latter, and it's a true education.

The uneven result is definitely not for prudish moviegoers, definitely funny for everyone else, and even approaches poignancy in one or two scenes.

It's possible there has never been anything like it. It contains memorable dialogue, vivid characters and several superb scenes, and yet it still manages to be wrong, a complete miscalculation.

At the end of the day, though, thanks to the moral complications expressed by the abortion doctors and patients, this movie gives us more than enough room to help weigh these issues on our own terms.

It's a tepid, quiet and uneventful film, directed almost in slow motion, with no narrative propulsion and with a succession of very similar scenes. The actors speak softly and pause a lot. And in the background is the steady hum of the soundtrack.

Well-intentioned but heavy-handed.

Director Doug Hamilton was given extraordinary access from the very beginning, so that we see Green Day composer and lead singer Billie Joe Armstrong having some of his initial meetings with Broadway director Michael Mayer, who conceived the show.

In a way, the new Carrie is almost too easy to enjoy. Everything discordant and all the nagging weirdness and strange feelings surrounding the original have been smoothed down, and what we're left with is a well-made, highly satisfying and not particularly deep high school revenge movie.

Not entirely successful or appealing - not exactly a delightful evening in the company of scintillating characters - but interesting all the same.