Once Singer dispenses with the introductory pathos and gets to the nuts and bolts of Stauffenberg's plan, Valkyrie becomes an admirably modest and compact suspense thriller.

It's cast, down to the smallest role, with genuinely funny performers, people who understand how to time a joke, deliver a setup, underplay a deadpan glance.

Frustratingly anemic, the filmmakers hiding behind their good taste and sensitivity. They might as well have gone for broke, since Plath and Hughes' daughter accused them of monstrous exploitation anyway.

When I was 7 and saw "Over The Top," I saw no irony in its moniker, even during a slow-motion close-up of two battling hands. While Real Steel is similarly ludicrous, I predict it will play like a masterpiece with 7-year-olds.

War Machine is unexpectedly flat and disjointed, and it’s hard to know whether to blame this on Michôd (an Australian director best known for his excellent 2010 crime melodrama, Animal Kingdom) or the general bad vibes around the project.

You could do worse than this fast-paced, cheerfully ridiculous, generally satisfying romp.

One of the least entertaining satires ever made.

Though I found Hereafter meandering and occasionally sentimental, I couldn't help but admire Clint Eastwood's ambition in taking on-headfirst-the greatest fact of human existence.

The sheer novelty of the enterprise is probably why Once Upon a Time in the Midlands has gotten so many rave reviews when it's actually sort of … middling.

I had a hard time maintaining interest in (let along liking) any of these self-involved Hollywood twerps, and scene after scene is a grating mixture of self-aggrandizement and masochism.

The premise is admittedly a killer--fun to think about, fun to see realized, not so fun to see screwed up in the last half-hour.

The mixture of cartoony stylization and regional realism is completely original--and a testament to the genius eye for color of the great cinematographer Roger Deakins and the designer Dennis Gassner.

Often plays like what it is: a clunky toga-and-sandals picture, with Hollywood compromises abounding.

Its fancifulness is at times too clunky, its pathos too strained. But Barnz has a secret weapon, one that's 4 feet tall and looks to weigh about 60 pounds: Elle Fanning.

This is really a movie about the evil spell Jolie casts on us — it’s both a celebration and a demonstration of her formidable movie star might.

So why did I feel such affection for this scruffy, hokey little movie? Maybe it's the same logic that applies to wine-drinking itself: Sure, a great claret would be ideal, but an OK rosé is better than washing down your dinner with water.

This tawdry freak show is a telling substitution for the actual stupidity mocked in Veber's original. Roach's remake manages both mean-spiritedness and timidity the same time. That's some feat-moviemaking for boneheads.

The Recruit is like vaudeville night at Bellevue.

Joy the movie never cohered, for me, into a story with forward motion. The minute the film begins to find its footing in one tonal register, it switches to another.

The richly multilayered picture tends to have a gently immersive effect, akin to a stroll through the world's most expensive diorama.

Like Tina Fey's Sarah Palin, Stone's George Bush gets his best lines straight from the source.

This movie could have been an effervescent neo-screwball romance, "Bringing Up Baby" with nut-sack jokes. So there's no blaming the subject matter for the fact that Zack and Miri feels so dispiritingly graceless.

As a life lesson for teenage girls, Twilight (excuse the pun) sucks. As a parable for the dark side of female desire, it's weirdly powerful.

As a ravishingly photographed, high-minded meditation on the potential of art and therapy to exorcise the vilest sort of psychological poison, it is positively riotous -- an Everest of idiocy.

Nevertheless, I’m So Excited (in Spanish, the title is Los amantes pasajeros, meaning both “the fleeting lovers” and “the passenger lovers”) looks fabulous, talks dirty, and sometimes makes you laugh, which is really all you can ask of a fleeting lover.

It's only fitting that we emerge from Series 7 feeling both entertained and implicated.

Isn't a disaster, but after an entertaining start it congeals into something icky and fake, and it leaves you thinking that Spielberg and his team of screenwriters (Sacha Gervasi and Jeff Nathanson, from a story by Andrew Niccol and Gervasi) missed the real story.

In spite of my general distaste for Friends With Kids, let me cast my vote on the side of those who liked the ending. I wish more of the film had had that scene's fresh mixture of casual banter and breathless intimacy, instead of sounding like half-remembered dialogue from a movie we've all seen too many times before.

If this version of Superman is to have a future — as Warner Brothers seems convinced he will, having already green-lit the sequel — I hope Snyder will dial back both the casualty count and the Krypton mythmaking and instead focus on establishing a fictional Earth that’s rich enough to be worth saving.

It's the movie's affectionate portrait of female friendship, along with Miller and Graynor's loose, playful performances, that make this whole imperfect soufflé rise as high as it does.

Nearly every line of dialogue in this adaptation of A Christmas Carol comes directly from the story. What interpolations there are have to do with juicing up the transitions between scenes with unnecessary, but not obnoxiously intrusive, action.

For better or worse, it’s a Brontë adaptation for the era of Instagram and TikTok, second screens and viral memes.

No one's asking for a song-by-song re-enactment of the concert, but Lee's refusal to focus even for a moment on the musical aspect of the festival starts to feel almost perverse, as if he's deliberately frustrating the audience's desire.

Like Anderson, Johnson has a fine eye for color, great taste in music, and a knack for painterly compositions, but the world he creates is airless and ultimately empty.

Where the book is sinuous and oblique, their film is galumphing and heavy-handed, its rare flights of lyricism stranded between long stretches of outright risibility. And yet there's something commendable about the directors' commitment to their grandiose act of folly.

I wouldn't recommend Hitchcock to cinephiles seeking a bold new take on the master's life or work, but if all you want is to while away the afternoon in the company of some excellent actors in plummy period costume, Gervasi's film is not without its pleasures.

I watched it not as a critic preparing to summarize its merits or flaws to an audience of readers curious whether it was worth their time to see it, but as a sickened and disappointed fan, saying an unsentimental but still sad goodbye to one of her cultural crushes. Under those circumstances, I Love You, Daddy seemed less like a movie than like a series of symptoms presented, with shocking directness, for the viewer’s clinical consideration.

Hyde Park on Hudson has little more on its mind than hot dogs and hand jobs - which, come to think of it, would have made for a much catchier alliterative title.

It's Depp as Barnabas that holds the movie together. The story may be less than coherent and some of the minor characters washouts, but when he's on-screen, there's energy and humor and that foppish sex appeal that (as in the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie) reminds you why you once liked Johnny Depp.

It's easy to imagine why Pelham's producers wouldn't want Scott's professional but dull picture to be compared with the 1974 classic.

There's something cynical about Ayer's attempt to preserve Ludlow as a hero after scene upon scene meant to show, with heavy irony, how lawlessly he enforced the law. You can't lionize your "Dirty Harry" vigilante and expose his hypocrisy, too.

It's a good, thoughtful horror picture--and thiiis close to being a very good one.

Wendy recognizably reflects Zeitlin’s vision; it’s less a follow-up to "Beasts" than a kind of echo of it. The mistakes the movie makes, and the ways it fails to fulfill its predecessor’s promise, make me want to say something critics rarely express: I wish that the studio had meddled a little bit more.

I wish it were as much fun as its prospectus. The truth is that The Truth About Charlie gets increasingly tiresome.

There's a car chase that's more fluid and inventive than the much-touted freeway sequence in "The Matrix Reloaded," and the stars are nimble enough to make their acrobatics credible--no matter how many stunt doubles the picture employed.

Subtitled “A Fable,” Megalopolis can be read as a parable of what happens when you let artists take over the world, and while that may not run more smoothly, it’s a heck of a lot more interesting.

Wan not only embraces the inherent silliness of a hero whose signature power is talking to fish; he revels in it, finding the childlike awesomeness at its core. You can still see every plot beat coming from miles away, but it feels like destiny rather than repetition, the fulfillment of a promise every movie makes and few deliver on.

It's too florid, too calculated, too too. Here's my emotional declaration: I love Richard Curtis' work. But I can't help feeling that the Bard of Embarrassment could use a touch more shame.

There are no comic highs, as in a Mike Myers parody, but no action highs, either.

Fluid and lyrical and thoroughly transporting.

Like "Spartacus," this movie is engaging because it's actually about something: the love of learning, the clash between science and religious faith, and the grim fact that political change often proceeds on the foundation of mob violence and genocide. Agora engages more effectively with this kind of big historical idea than it does with human drama.

Russell is a manically inventive writer-director--maybe the most fearless talent of his generation. It's not a contradiction to say that I admire him more than ever while pronouncing Huckabees an unmitigated disaster.

The movie also has some embarrassing laugh-free stretches, but Faris holds everything together with bubbly intelligence, unexpected line readings, and a few deft pratfalls.

Forget the thin characters and showoffy temporal structure. Rendition's worst flaw is its political deck-stacking.

Careening from bathos to bromance to naked sexytime, the movie is like a mashup of three or four different movies, at least two of them fairly unpleasant. And yet Love and Other Drugs is so sincere and unjaded about its mystifying purpose that it keeps our gaze fixed on the screen for the full two hours.

The ironic distancing makes it hard to get emotionally caught up in the sad story of Kenney’s self-destruction when the film enters "Leaving Las Vegas" territory.

Less a movie than an extended re-enactment from a History Channel documentary, the movie is stagey, preachy, and long on exposition.

Uncanny singing animals aside, a secondary effect of the film’s commitment to zoological verisimilitude is to place the voice actors in a relatively powerless position. It’s a strange choice to assemble an all-star cast from various walks of celebrity—actors, pop singers, rappers, comedians—and then make their only contribution a verbal one.

It's a schlock melodrama dolled up in arty frontier vestments.

All its themes are laid out like index cards on a screenwriter's bulletin board, and each plot turn seems so inevitable that you'll think you saw this movie in a previous life. (You did.)

Baby Mama is the most disappointing movie of the year so far--which, granted, isn't saying a lot in mid-April.

Even at his most indulgent, Malick brings something to the movies that no one else ever has, a way of looking at the world that is easily imitated but has never been equaled. It’s worth sifting through the sometimes half-baked philosophizing and breathy poeticism to see through his eyes.

Noise is never quite as smart as it tries to be. But as summer and its mouth-breathing blockbusters loom large on the horizon, there's something touching about a movie that even tries.

The movie seems to love its main character without bothering to understand her.

Rambling and conflicted as it is, it's one of the most entertaining African-American comedies of manners ever made.

It's coarse, primitive, regressive, often very stupid, and sometimes, against all odds, really a hoot.

This isn't an objectionable movie, just a mild, obvious, and rather limp one, with plenty of little jolts but no ejaculatory payoff.

Idlewild has moments of sticky sentimentality and stretches of dull exposition, but you've got to give it this: It's unpredictable.

It is, as I suspected, a gargantuan hunk of over-art-directed kitsch, but it makes for a grandiose, colorful, pleasure-drenched night at the movies.

Like the monsters at its center, it’s built from parts that don’t always fit together, but dammit: It’s alive.

Unlike your average comic-book blockbuster, The Hulk isn't a bad cartoon. It's a bad modern Greek tragedy. It's a swing at the moon that looks (and smells) like green cheese.

For all the contemporary relevance of the issues it explores, there’s something morally and aesthetically muffled about The Reluctant Fundamentalist: Nair is so busy making sure we never lose sympathy for her handsome and charming protagonist that the film ultimately founders in a tangle of humanist platitudes.

Volcano is just another $100 million genre movie, and a pretty lousy one, to boot.

At times this multiple-plot meander through the glorious labyrinth of the Eternal City can feel aimless, even lazy. But in the film's best moments, that willingness to wander works to its advantage.

Milla Jovovich is not quite up to the task of playing a nuanced and thoughtful Joan.

It’s just a deeply misguided mode of franchise-building.

Groove offers the most wholesome vision of orgiastic oneness imaginable -- it's a raver's version of "The Love Boat."

Has anyone involved in this disaster ever heard a real story?

Snyder’s Justice League is more, more, more in a way that most films wouldn’t dare, and, after a year of no theaters at all, a movie that makes me long to return to a multiplex—to see more movies that commit so completely to a vision that it’s impossible not to be swept away.

The scale of the enterprise is thrilling; it's too bad the movie is so muddled on so many different levels.

With its featherweight premise, casually amoral heroes, and exotic locales, it conjures up an era (the '60s and '70s) when twisty, romantic heist pictures were routinely ground out as tax shelters.

It skips lightly over the surface of its rich material, more preoccupied with making pretty pictures than dipping below the surface so that you can experience the world through the eyes of its traumatized, yet increasingly savvy, heroine.

Misanthropy can be incredibly entertaining, so long as that hatred draws blood. But that extra percentage point of venom has skewed Clowes and Zwigoff's aim.

The screenplay doesn't lack for memorable zingers, and thanks to Cody's script and Streep's performance, Ricki emerges as a complex, self-contradictory person (even if most of the supporting characters don't).

Sarah spends her downtime drawing her friends and family in her sketchbook - the art is by Brown - and the figures she makes are not stylized or caricatured but just well-observed, scruffier versions of real life. It's fitting that those same drawings adorn the opening and closing credits of this sweet and sympathetic movie.

The movie itself is not unsatisfying, though it’s less fun than previous Jackass films, and has a worse title.

The Australian actress Radha Mitchell is the only reason to see the movie: She has an extraordinary open face and a way of mixing dreaminess with sudden bursts of lacerating emotion that recalls Jessica Lange.

The humor of Brüno is arguably crueler and more misanthropic than "Borat's."

Duchovny is rather endearing and Driver's absolutely enchanting.

By exposing on the top-down class-warfare origins of the annual event, the prequel elaborates on the series’ earnest political commentary — and exposes its limits as well.

The only surprise about U-Turn is the good reviews it got from people who should know better.

ATHF can seem brilliantly deconstructive one moment and stupefyingly boring the next--or to provide a more accurate ratio, it can follow five brilliant seconds with five straight minutes of boredom.

The credits had just started and I was already looking for a barf bag.

In some strange way, I admire the enterprise. Like his Gerrys, Van Sant doesn't seem to know where he's going to wind up when he embarks on these journeys. The ether that seeps into his head might be the price we have to pay for his keeping his mind so open.

What's meant (I think) to be a "f*** you" to action-movie conventions reads instead as a "f*** you" to the audience. Observe and Report tickets should come with a free breath mint, because however hard you've been laughing, that ending leaves a seriously bad taste in your mouth.

Magnificent Seven has one and only true goal: It’s a new Hollywood crack at good, old-timey entertainment.

Maybe the movie would work better if, like Se7en, it were set in an unnamed noir city instead of a real police department with real abuses, or if the script relied on more than genre shorthand to sell its noxious ending. As things stand, however, the only way to enjoy The Little Things is to ignore the big things.

The movie's more than cute, funny, and (at 81 minutes) brisk enough to move families in and out of the multiplex in mass quantities, like the social insects we are.