Arthur Christmas stays sweet without becoming overly sentimental and is filled with sly details and smart action sequences.

For cinematic sojourners, Hugo is a trip to the moon.

An Oscar-ready collaboration between a great director and a star at the peak of his powers, but at its heart is a message in a bottle reading: "Trapped in paradise. Please send help."

The troupe's first film in more than a decade, is a more aggressively absurd antidote to what it calls "a hard, cynical world." Happily, it works.

The best thing you could say about Happy Feet Two is that it doesn't have any product placements or potty jokes. Other than that, this charmless Antarctic cartoon is what it looks like when hell freezes over.

Twilight fans who have followed the series will want to see "Breaking Dawn," and like Bella and Edward may find brief moments of pleasure.

A beautifully realized drama that gets to the essence of what it's like to be young, confused and in love.

J. Edgar is the kind of prestige production that apologists will call polished, but even the technical attributes are tinny. In the gay-geezers scenes, Hammer wears terrible old-age makeup, and the entire film is bathed in sepia tones as weak as its convictions.

The Women on the 6th Floor shouldn't work, but this efficient flick whisks away our cynicism.

The movie inspired theater critic Judith Newmark to write a sonnet in response.

Perhaps the spookiest thing in this slyly scary movie is the word-for-word way that Patrick's followers regurgitate his pablum.

Back when it was planned as an African-American "Ocean's Eleven," this project might have been edgy, but the script has been whitewashed into a generic caper comedy with pretensions of timeliness.

Shannon's powerfully imploded performance ignites one of the best films of the year.

In recording the timeless traditions of Jewry, he created a new one: the identity crisis that rides on the back of laughter.

Depp shows again that he truly understands Thompson by delivering a nuanced performance that is remarkably different, but subliminally similar, from the wonderfully outrageous turn he provided in "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas."

After a nifty setup, In Time mostly fails to deliver as it gets lamer by the minute.

Even if they don't provide much lift, these boots were made for amusement.

Toast is lovely to look at, evoking both the gray-green milieu of Midlands life and the sensuality of good food, but it's like a whipped topping with no base.

If you haven't seen a wasting disease in real life, you might think Restless is romantic. If you have, you might diagnose it as terminally cute.

In place of a rousing adventure, Blackthorn is a haunting ode.

For anyone expecting the second coming of Clouseau, Johnny English Reborn is a karmic catastrophe.

This true story fills a needed niche, spotlighting women's basketball in the era before Title IX promoted equal treatment.

Margin Call has a spectacular cast, and the 24-hour cycle of events gives the movie the compressed dramatic effect of a fine play.

An art-history lesson and a spiritual exercise disguised as a movie.

A solid sci-fi/horror hybrid, but this iceman doesn't deliver enough to chew on.

The larger-than-life actor is as emblematic of his country as Tom Hanks is of ours, and My Afternoons With Margueritte is his "Forrest Gump." Only better.

The Big Year puts the focus on people who aren't inherently interesting - or funny.

Footloose poses as a bold update, but it's shockingly out of step with the times.