Not Fade Away is a movie by a filmmaker who treasures his memories, cares about social history and relishes getting it right.

Promised Land is a fine place to start appreciating Matt Damon, who always makes it seem as if everybody else is acting and he's just going through the movie being natural.

Perhaps anticipating an older audience, most of the lessons are one-sided, with the old-timers seemingly harming the children while actually saving them.

Fans of Les Misérables wouldn't have minded if the movie were different, but better, or just as effective. The screen version demanded some reconception, some vision to make sense of its existence. Instead, we're left with a film that is conscientious in all its particulars and yet strangely and mysteriously dead.

The most consistently entertaining movie of 2012. It's 165 minutes long and shouldn't be a minute shorter, a film of surprises, both in story and in casting, and of moments of agonizing, teased-out tension. The dialogue is dazzling.

Despite a super-dark noir plot and respectable cast, Deadfall is a thriller that never quite delivers on its promise.

A tough movie about tough people for a tough audience. So prepare to get roughed up a little.

The film Cirque du Soleil: Worlds Away highlights both the strains of the franchise and the willingness to promote the brand at any cost - including a coherent narrative. It's a big promo reel, and not a carefully disguised one.

An average action film, made slightly better by Cruise, and more bizarre by Herzog, and more watchable by Pike, but still within the average range, a silk purse that still says oink.

The real problem with This Is 40 is its lack of truth, that Apatow wanted to express something about married life, and it eluded him. After all, no less than Kierkegaard once said that the actual dynamics of marriage are beyond the scope of art, and he was the best movie critic of the 19th century.

If one person survives and 6 million are killed, or one person gets out and 3,000 are crushed, it's not really a happy ending - or even an adequate representation of the larger event. This is precisely the challenge that The Impossible faces and never quite overcomes.

There are laughs throughout, but Guilt Trip isn't joke-happy. The humor is light and well observed, as when Mom keeps playing the audiobook of "Middlesex," and the son gets uncomfortable hearing about anything sexual in front of his mother.

Worth seeing, both for the ways it's timeless and for the ways it encapsulates an era.

The only way Bill Murray could seem less like Franklin D. Roosevelt in Hyde Park on Hudson is if the movie showed him winning a marathon.

The biggest strength of the movie is the chemistry between Cumming and Isaac Leyva, a first-time feature film actor with Down syndrome, who does as much to make these scenes work as the experienced actors he's sharing scenes with.

If you loved the earlier films, these are moments you will hold on to, but they're very few, and they're not enough.

A small and not particularly ambitious movie, but it's pleasing and exceptionally well made. It was directed by Stephen Frears, and while it's not up there with his best - "Dangerous Liaisons," "The Queen," "High Fidelity," "Cheri" - Lay the Favorite lavishes the same attention on the personal, on relationships, and, like most Frears films, it puts a woman at the center of the story.

It is probably unlike any movie you've ever seen, and in ways both bad and good. It is, by turns, inept and brilliant, shockingly amateurish and inspired. To see it is to sit there for long stretches amazed at how clumsy, fake and misguided it is. But then, five minutes later you might easily be riveted and moved by its awkward brilliance.

A pleasure to watch - a spot-on story about the agony and ecstasy of adolescent first love.

An audacious, messy and sometimes inspired look at an out-of-work poet struggling to find his way in post-Communist Russia, plays like a metaphysical Moscow version of "Mad Men" - on acid.

As a movie, it's not much. But it's the best showcase for his charm that Butler has ever had.

It's enjoyable enough, but how much you like it will depend on how much you like skateboarding and extreme sports.

In the end, there is something to be said for letting actors loose on a roller-coaster ride, but from time to time, someone needs to be operating the brakes.

The Collection is bloody, disgusting and ridiculous, but the one thing it's not is horror, not real horror, not in the sense of tense or scary. It's not cinema, either. It's not even fun.

Brad Pitt is in ecstasy here, despite the cool demeanor throughout. This is an actor who is never better and never happier than when he gets to be seedy, slick his hair back and wear a leather jacket.

The Comedy, one of the most self-indulgent, pretentious and unfunny movies of the year, is a mean-spirited piece of mumblecore that tries to provoke you, but only succeeds in boring you.

His personal efforts are praiseworthy, but if glacial melting is in fact the "canary in the climate coal mine" (his words), the movie might have given us a bit less of Balog and a bit more of the startling sequences he produced.

Hitchcock isn't ambitious or complicated. It's simple, does what it sets out to do, and gets out before anyone even thinks about checking the time. More movies should be made in its image.