The mere phrase "Brad Pitt as Jesse James" makes for a kind of mini-reflection on the evolution of celebrity culture. It's a shame that The Assassination of Jesse James never goes much deeper than that tag line.

It has a gritty feel and a tight, methodical, one-thing-after-another tempo.

If these developments sound slight and meandering, so is the movie. Everything Must Go has a spacious, under-inhabited feeling.

The most memorable element of The Winter Soldier, besides Redford, is probably Scarlett Johansson, whose dryly funny Natasha at times comes perilously close to being … a well-developed female character?

Despite across-the-board bravura performances (especially by Philip Seymour Hoffman and Paul Giamatti as dueling campaign managers), The Ides of March somehow remains static and lifeless, like a civics-class diorama.

The movie is a polished muddle, fitfully amusing but with no spine.

A day and half after walking out with a sensation, primarily, of physical relief—at two hours and nine minutes, Pain & Gain makes for a long, loud, relentlessly assaultive sit—I find that my thumb is wavering at half-mast. I’m still not sure whether to mildly like or mildly hate this movie.

The film is overnarrated and in spots overwritten, but Brooks, who's primarily a screenwriter, does well with actors, and he has coaxed an extraordinary performance out of the young Jordana Brewster.

Lion goes again and again where you expect it to, delivering little more than the awards-season equivalent of "Homeward Bound."

Geoffrey Rush is fine as a gay drug dealer who serves as an enabling Santa Claus to the doomed couple. But in the end, Candy is a little too sweet and not quite harmful enough to the audience's health.

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

Coarse and chaotic remake.

Doesn't really work but has a good cast and great craggy ocean-framed scenery.

I'd have a lot more respect for Scott if he were actually the virtuoso he pretends to be. "Gladiator" had lousy, disjunctive action, and Kingdom of Heaven is even more maladroit.

It's a clever setup for a spoof of the espionage thriller, but despite the film's intermittent pleasures (Pitt's gum-snapping dolt chief among them), the result is oddly airless.

This is not to say that it is bad writing, shooting, or acting: It would need to be more ambitious to be bad. It is simply the most mundane sort of behavior presented in the most mundane sort of way.

There's a curious mismatch between the surface of the movie and what lies beneath it. Wong's technique is layered and detailed like a couture gown, but the story it hangs on is as generic as a seamstress's dress form.

As a non-South African, I can't speak to the accuracy of the movie's racial politics, but they feel insultingly vague.

It’s frenzied, briefly infuriating, and eventually, grudgingly, satisfying, but it’s like being force-fed fandom: Your belly is filled, but there’s no pleasure in the meal.

Denzel Washington is so powerfully earnest an actor that you never want to laugh at him -- even when you ought to be in stitches.

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

In LaBute's movies, people are either clueless dupes or psychotic manipulators, while art is meant to rub your face in unpleasant "truths." And I think he takes a little too much pleasure in that nose-rubbing.

Thoroughly second-rate -- which is to say that it waddles when it ought to whiz, clanks when it strives for cornball poetry, and transforms its august stars into something akin to a manic dinner-theater troupe.

A climactic twist that's among the stupidest I've ever seen-almost up there with another Costner movie, "No Way Out," and "The Life of David Gale."

Horrible Bosses doesn't quite qualify as a black comedy. Without the conviction to follow through on its own macabre premise, this underachieving little movie washes out to a muddy grayish-brown.

Albert Nobbs is the rare double drag king bill you could plausibly take your grandmother to. It's genteel, well-crafted, mostly sexless and frequently dull - a movie that, like its title character, never quite dares to let itself discover what it really wants to be.

King Richard is a Will Smith vehicle, through and through.

It more or less works.