Director Cordero manages the not-bad trick of generating suspense while keeping the overall tone cool and collected.

I'll go ahead and call Drug War the best Hong Kong action movie since "Infernal Affairs" (the 2002 film that Martin Scorsese remade as "The Departed"), even though technically it's a Chinese film.

For starters, it's a movie to make you happy to see the next movie written, directed and starring Lake Bell. She has an engaging presence and has a distinct comic sensibility.

Although this leisurely tale of an aged French sculptor offers a few other small pleasures, in the end it lacks heft.

At its best, it's a good picture, and at its worst, it's almost good.

A weird mix of the refreshing and the dispiriting, Kick-Ass 2 is appealing in its brutal honesty and repellent in its honest brutality.

A nice idea for a movie, but has a mostly silly script and some of the craziest and most laughable casting imaginable. But the movie's main challenge is a simple one: It is very difficult, next to impossible, to build a movie around an inert, inactive character.

Even if a quarter of what Boreman claimed was true, she had a lot more coming to her than a sympathetic hearing and much prettier actress playing her onscreen. She practically deserved an apology from the male sex, and that, in a way, is what this movie is.

There's nothing new here about the conflict, but the film portrays the two sides fairly - both right, both wrong. Overall, The Attack is thought-provoking, even if it doesn't address how to solve the problem. We'll probably never know the answer in our lifetime.

The film provides an intelligently imagined future world.

Original, truthful and moving.

Airplane buffs are going to have a particularly good time; each of the planes seems to have an obscure real-life counterpart. And pop-culture junkies will appreciate a few sly nods as well.

Get past the comedy and there's something almost weird at the movie's core - a deep cynicism about family and a longing for family, both at the same time.

There are plenty of bad films to get riled up about in the summer. Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters isn't one of them. This is harmless tween-centric fun.

Blanchett in Blue Jasmine is beyond brilliant, beyond analysis. This is jaw-dropping work, what we go to the movies hoping to see, and we do. Every few years.

It's a complete mess, the spectacle of filmmakers blowing up their movie and everything in it, because they can't think of anything else to do.

The direction, by Ben Nott and Morgan O'Neill, is average, except for the surfing sequences, which are easily as striking as what we see in documentaries about the sport. Another positive is the soundtrack, with amusing high-energy rock tunes of the era.

There's so much torture and suffering in this movie, it starts to feel like "Zero Dark Smurfy."

It's a life worth remembering.

For the most part, Cowperthwaite keeps the preachiness in check, letting the scientists, former SeaWorld trainers and other witnesses tell it as it is. Indeed, the scary training scenes - uniformly gripping - do most of the talking.

Still Mine is uplifting and heartbreaking, a contradiction that results in the viewer exalting and being let down at the same time.

About halfway through Red 2, in the midst of all the laughs and action, suddenly Anthony Hopkins shows up, and he doesn't care one bit that nobody is going to notice his acting in a movie like this. He's going for the Oscar anyway.

A strange movie, in that it has the atmosphere of a comedy and some extreme characters set up to be comical, but there are really no funny scenes.

Ugly, gore-strewn and, ultimately, ridiculous.

There's some amusement in watching Michael Cera play an unalloyed jerk, but in the main this trifling film shuffles by with a few low-key jokes and observations, building to an abrupt moment of seriousness.

I'd be shocked if we see a better horror film in 2013.

The To Do List is a romantic comedy with no romance and little comedy, but with an ugliness of spirit that's surprising and unrelenting.

The Wolverine shows that, while originality would be nice, a little novelty and enthusiasm in the presentation of the familiar can be quite enough.