It's no wonder young musicians say they learned to be rock stars from This Is Spinal Tap. It came to satirize and stayed -- and stays on -- to celebrate.

Wall-E is an improbable delight, a G-rated crowd-pleaser.

One of those half-straight, half-spoof comic-book extravaganzas that don't ever work, and what's neat is that this one does--beautifully.

At its headiest, it’s like Singin’ in the Rain with a souped-up engine, but even if Baby is the Gene Kelly of the getaway car, watching Baby Driver always feels like watching someone else do the driving rather than being behind the wheel yourself.

Long Shot feels like something new, too — a brogressive rom-com that mixes inconvenient boners and aerodynamic cum with extensive observations about sexism and a rare romanticization of the male helpmate.

What emerges from the chaos may be uneven and at times ridiculous, but it's never boring.

Book Club may in the end be little more than an excuse for a senior sex comedy, and a somewhat sleepy one at that, but at least it understands the weird energy of enjoying something you know you shouldn’t.

The director’s sometimes absurd bravado — along with Forest Whitaker’s grave, wise performance in the title role — is what gives this outsized and sometimes lumbering film its irrefutable emotional power.

Ultimately, it has less in common with "Blair Witch" than with such quivering lumps of sentiment as "Ghost" and Field of Dreams."

I love Nicholson here because he lets Keaton take the movie--and his relative reticence is very attractive.

It's depressing that this first movie in years to dramatize the American Revolution has so little to do with the politics of secession and so much to do with pop-culture themes of vigilantism.

Quinceañera is a rare bird of an indie, a sharp-eyed analysis of class conflict that still manages to leave you as choked up as a proud auntie on her niece's 15th birthday.

It comes by its screams honestly, earning them with incremental, at times agonizing gradations of old-fashioned, what's-that-noise-in-the-hallway suspense.

The laughs are fuller when they're rooted in authentic desperation, and the premise is yeasty enough to keep the film from sinking into facile hopelessness.

It’s all a lot of poppycock, and yet! Despite all this carping, Downton Abbey: A New Era was as satisfying a filmgoing experience as I can remember. Perhaps the nonsensical narrative lowers viewers’ defenses so the emotional anvil can land all the harder.

Sure, Música stomps its way into some cheesy pitfalls, but it’s also an unusually refreshing rom-com.

Once the premise had been established and the leads began to interact, I stopped totting up the inanities and had a good time.

A religious conspiracy disguised as a romance.

An extremely pleasant, consistently amusing diversion that is never as uproarious as you might hope. But don't panic, as the Guide would say. In a pinch, it will do.

It's a measure of Brooks' stature that he survives the self-sabotage and comes through with his most engaging performance in years.

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.

Of all the twists in Catfish-the most surprising of all is what an honest and thoughtful film it turns out, against all odds, to be.

But there are scenery chewers and there are Michelin-gourmet scenery chewers, and Pacino has a three-star feast.

The movie, without seeming to realize it, turns into a romantic parable about the joys of being absorbed by a conglomerate.

Even when Prince-Bythewood (Love and Basketball) tries to pack too much around the edges (including critiques of record-industry sexism and the mechanisms of black political fundraising), the romance at the movie’s center remains credible and vibrant.

Becomes increasingly unwatchable -- not just bleak but punishing, as if the director wants to fry your circuits along with his characters'.

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.

Harron, working from a script she wrote with Guinevere Turner, doesn't solve the inherent problems of that narrative, but she evades them quite elegantly. She's made a poem instead of a biopic, an ode to intuition, iconography, seamed stockings, and star power.