Coming out of Pacific Rim I felt energized rather than enervated, excited to describe certain nifty details of the film’s wacked-out imaginary world to friends, maybe even ready to … sit through certain parts again?

Pecker is a breezy, agreeable picture--a charmer, thumbs-up, three stars--but there's something disappointing about a John Waters film that's so evenhanded and all-embracing, even if its sunniness is "ironic."

Like every Pixar movie, it’s entertaining, sharp, and visually inventive. But it lacks the thunderbolts of creativity that make the company’s best philosophical inquiries so electrifying. It never quite finds its spark.

A glorious, visceral mess -- The film is, by most criteria, an ungainly piece of storytelling. Yet it sweeps you up and hurtles you along like water from an exploded dike.

Has a nonsensical twist ending that almost wrecks it, but until then it has enough fast, hyperliterate venality to make it great fun.

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

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood is no biopic but a very narrowly cast reimagining of one specific relationship late in the life of a noted person.

Like Gekko, the film also feels urgent and strangely necessary.

A delicious plot twist is ginned up to serve as the film’s clever climax, but I was more interested in the relationship drama. For those of us who have survived our own rollercoaster friendships, T2’s trip is far more intense than Trainspotting’s youthful highs.

Although it’s technically about saving the world (again), Shazam! plays out at eye level, grounded by the belief that who people love and where they feel they belong is stakes enough. If that violates the exigencies of franchise filmmaking, so be it.

Good as it is, The Legend of Zorro would be a hollow feat without leads who are drop-dead-gorgeous movie stars and spectacular clowns.

Burton understands what the Beetlejuice-loving audience wants (Keaton stirring up supernatural chaos, Winona Ryder glowering in goth-girl chic, jump scares with eyeballs popping out of heads) and provides it in cheerful abundance, without subjecting us to lengthy origin stories or cumbersome expositions of franchise lore.

As the dress floats above the couple while they sleep at night, fluttering in its indestructible refinement and invincible otherworldliness, one starts to wonder: Doesn’t the dress deserve to kill better people? Reg and Babs aren’t hateful, exactly, but their pathetic drabness make a case that the dress is getting the raw end of the deal.

If one of the things movies are supposed to do is make you look anew at the world around you, you may never see your doughnut vendor in the same way again.

It's a movie you're glad to inhabit for a full two hours, because it never stops surprising you - it's lopsided and spotty, but it's alive in a way that suddenly makes you remember to what degree most Hollywood movies aren't.

This middle section, in which both Carter and the audience get a crash course in the politics, history, and theology of the Red Planet, is the movie at its most imaginative and most fun.

This is not a movie to see if you're contemplating tying the knot; it's a hard slog for those of us already entwined.

Just let Charlize Theron kick some ass, and leave the thornier moral questions for the sequel.

While Morris isn't interested in exonerating anyone, he clearly sympathizes to some degree with the MPs and deplores the military's fall-guy strategy, which punished these seven soldiers as exemplary "bad apples" while leaving all higher-ranking officers untouched.

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.

If, on the other hand, you're not above acknowledging the trans-historical creepiness of a good dusty windup-doll shelf (Come on! It includes one of those hyper-realistic monkeys playing the cymbals!), this pokey, modestly budgeted thriller isn't without its shivery delights.

Nearly every scene builds to some kind of climactic jump scare.

The film makes its primary case eloquently and elegiacally: The only thing more lonesome than a cowboy, surveying a land where no one understands him, is that same cowboy without a horse.

Source Code has a resonance that too many contemporary thrillers lack. Gyllenhaal invests Stevens with the simmering anger and grinning charm familiar to the genre, but also with a real sense of vulnerability.

Highest 2 Lowest moves with a swagger and self-confidence that perhaps oversells what the script actually has to offer, but it’s hard to resist the draw of seeing Lee and Washington collaborate for the first time since Inside Man in 2006.

For the two hours it lasted I wasn't asking any questions, only giggling, squirming, screaming, and swooning.

Hardly top-drawer Romero. In fact, it may be his worst zombie film yet. But even bad Romero is a far sight more interesting than the coolly sadistic guts-porn that currently passes for mainstream horror.

I had a fabulous time. Well, I did once I accepted that it was a campfest--a great Provincetown drag show of The Stepford Wives.