Certainly, this imagineered version of P.L. Travers’s life provides an orderly drama, but it’s uncomfortably reductive. It may be a small world, after all, but it comes in a lot more shades than Saving Mr. Banks suggests.

The best of The Desolation of Smaug is saved for the last, when Bilbo goes to steal from the massive fire-breathing dragon, Smaug. The orange-eyed beast is voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch, who, through a sludge of voice-altering electronics, seethes and preens between fiery exhalations; this scene is one of the few occasions in the film where anyone actually takes time to talk.

Although ably directed by feature first-timer Ruairi Robinson, and gamely performed by a cast professional enough to feign alarm and surprise, The Last Days on Mars ultimately confirms what science has already spent billions of dollars establishing: There’s just no life here.

Yet another smoothly produced doc for the foodie set.

If the downbeat plot is depressingly familiar, it’s partly salvaged by the quality of the performances.

This is a profoundly disturbing work. It should be essential viewing, particularly in high schools and universities, whence the next generation of policy makers will one day emerge, hopefully more enlightened than we have been.

Lee’s is more of a hard-edged, hammer-and-nail noir than Park’s existential horror, and it’s far less concerned with the internal state of Joe’s mind than the external havoc it creates.

The new Jason Statham movie Homefront aims to be retro, greasy comfort food but despite its lowly ambitions, there’s barely enough spice here to merit a decent burp.

It's hard to generate a sense of warmth when the plot points all feel so coldly calculated, and it doesn't help that the musical numbers are so pedestrian.

The director’s avoidance of anything resembling innovative framing or editing will probably pay off when Delivery Man eventually airs on television, where the flimsiness of its jokes and “serious” moments alike should feel less conspicuous.

Mostly, Nebraska impresses for its sure rhythms and artful balance of comedy and melancholy, resulting in Payne’s most satisfying film since "About Schmidt."

The result is not only a dramatic improvement over what was already an unusually smart and satisfying pop-cultural parable of insurgent 99-per-cent rebellion, but a very likely candidate for the all-time-great-sequel sweepstakes.

Short Term 12 is a triumph of modesty.

As a dystopian teen movie, Macdonald’s adaptation of Meg Rosoff’s young adult novel is refreshingly free of digital apocalyptics and unnervingly prone to random violence.

Schroeder’s film makes a convincing case that the fact that the characters have never been licensed has a lot to do with why it is still so precious to so many people.

Traditionally, Christmas movies are about the power of the holiday spirit to conquer all in the name of seasonal detente, and The Best Man Holiday, although sprinkled with bad behaviour and salty bon mots, is traditional right to the twinkly-tipped top of the tree.

It adds nothing to our understanding of "Howl," and the movie is exactly what the poem isn’t: ordinary.

The winner of Cannes’s top prize, the Palme d’Or, and the international critics prize at the same festival, the film was hailed as a breakthrough, a graphic and emotional love story, the first same-sex feature ever to win the Palme, in the week after France legalized same-sex marriage.

Directed by Brian Percival, best known for his work on "Downton Abbey," the film has the similar quality of a well-appointed historical soap opera.

Like the Irish film "Once," it’s a drama about the lives of musical performers who sing songs within the film to illustrate the emotional journey of a relationship. Broken Circle, though, is painted in much darker hues.

The Human Scale uses plenty of globe-hopping examples to make up for what it sometimes lacks in depth.

A good model of how superheroes can save the world without forced gravitas, and have fun doing it.

The film doesn’t feel like homework. Still, while its description of the problem is convincing, you wish it could offer more of a prescription.

There are the usual gaggle of embarrassing friends, a lot of voice-over and montages, a wedding, a funeral and wait … something’s missing. Oh, right. Hugh Grant.

Ambitious but generic martial-arts movie.

Well-intended but maladroit, with a clever premise and cute animation that are undermined by the trite sci-fi parody plot and manic, unfunny banter.

The movie is a preholiday trifle that’s mildly risqué and a lot sentimental.

Ultimately, the movie is not, to paraphrase the U.S. Army slogan, all that it could be. The climax is uninvolving generic eye candy, and the sequel-friendly coda is unconvincing.

The Summit is a mixture of the inventive and the misguided in its attempt to recreate the circumstances of the August, 2008, disaster on the world’s second-highest mountain, K2, when 11 climbers were killed.

The film, shot in black-and-white at canted angles, suggests an R-rated Twilight Zone episode with a twist of Fellini-lite, in a trite film school kind of way. Mickey Mouse is unlikely to be shaking in his big yellow shoes.

Ultimately, your nautical mileage may vary as to whether Chandor and Redford achieve the philosophical and emotional impact they intend, but in a movie that is a demonstration of the importance of trying, they definitely try.

Johnny Knoxville is now 42, and he’s clearly torn. He still wants to be a Jackass, but in a movie with an actual story that offers something even slightly more substantive than cringing at other people’s self-inflicted pain and humiliation.

A display of old-school muscle-buddy connivance that’s as flatly preposterous as it is shamelessly entertaining.

Thanks for Sharing might best be described as being like Steve McQueen’s sex-addiction drama, "Shame," if it were rewritten by Neil Simon at his most schmaltzy.

If we don’t have it all figured out, the story is charismatic enough. It is told in a level-headed way which avoids the emotional high highs and low lows – which is, as one of the film’s gurus advises his followers, the way to do it.

Far from the push-button catharsis offered by most Hollywood redemption tales, the work is sober and deliberate, a mix of visceral intensity and artful design.

Peaches Does Herself is constantly inventive, from the Road Warrior/Rocky Horror fantasy costumes, to the hump-happy choreography.

Touchy Feely seems poised to explore the same issues of embarrassing intimacy Shelton mined in her two last films, Humpday and Your Sister’s Sister. But here there’s a new fantastical element, the kind of magical device that might pop up in a minor Woody Allen film.

It is all so intentionally ridiculous that it gets boring, and you just wait for the next big cornball revelation to momentarily jolt you awake, like Sofia Vergara strapping on her machine-gun bra, or Lady Gaga’s appearance as a hit woman. Machete kills, sure. Unfortunately, he overkills.

Captain Phillips manages to expose us to a few things that are unusual in a thriller, including sympathy for the enemy and, in Hanks’s performance, the frailty that is the other side of heroism.

It’s humanizing and heartbreaking.

Occasionally, the cast rises above the material.

Runner Runner is a bad run of cliché clichés.

Clearly, Costa-Gavras has lost none of his kinetic pacing or his cerebral way with thrills. Unfortunately, the script later gets corrupted itself by a sexual melodrama that lacks both sense and sultriness.

A Touch of Sin is a distinct departure, dipping into the pulpy martial arts tradition in a scathing portrait of post-Maoist China, where money is the new religion and horrific violence is its by-product.

Gravity, a weightless ballet and a cold-sweat nightmare, intimates mystery and profundity, with that mixture of beauty and terror that the Romantics called the sublime.

On the Job feels marinated in hardscrabble reality. Action scenes throughout are unnervingly frenetic, with the tension amplified by the sheer density of the crowds.

Otherwise, Brody, Scott and Jenifer Lewis (as Montana’s imperious oft-married mom) give this formulaic material maximum comic spin.

If this review had to be in pantomime, it would be me head-banging and busting out some gnarly air guitar for an hour straight – and loving every minute of it. That’s how much fun this concert film is. But be warned: If you’ve never rocked-out to a Metallica song, or don’t even know what throwing the horns is, this movie is not for you.

The problem with car-racing movies, though, is that they are car-racing movies. Has any director found a way to spare audiences the eventual tedium of watching automobiles go around and around a track and instead capture the thrill of the sport?

Enough Said confirms filmmaker Nicole Holofcener’s status as one of America’s best stealth satirists.

Unfortunately, the film promises more fun and laughs than it delivers, and this meal tastes like too many that have gone before it.

What becomes increasingly apparent is that Gordon-Levitt hasn’t exactly decided what Jon’s problem is, in a character that seems partly an expression of male wish fulfilment.

Fittingly, it’s finally a film about transience and continuity.

Somewhere in literary afterlife, dear reader, Jane Austen has just rolled over and reached for her musket.

The 3-D is a pain, and the excitable editing, slo-mo and speeded-up action frustrate attempts to watch the athleticism on display, but the last half-hour takes it up a notch.

Subtly crafted and compelling, but it suffers from a case of split personality.

An ambitious, if uneven, experimental sci-fi romance that is less a thought-provoker than a dazzling juggling act.

Continuing directly from where 2010’s "Insidious" left off, Insidious: Chapter 2 follows the further misfortunes of the Lambert family with diminishing insidious rewards.

There isn’t a single genuinely sharp sequence in the entire movie. The casting of Robert De Niro as an ex-Mafioso hiding in witness protection is witty in only the silliest, most superficial way. It’s a joke with its own tinny, built-in laugh track.

Not much happens in Drinking Buddies, which, frankly, is refreshing.

Outré love stories are great, as are love stories that make viewers squirm. But they have to ring true emotionally, and despite its talented cast, Adore does not.

The quickest and easiest way to humanize an unlikeable movie character is to give him a lovable dog, and so it goes with Riddick.

Winnie begins as hagiography and ends in hellish confusion.

Évocateur is never less than watchable. At the same time, you have to wonder who’s going to watch it. In an era when fame seems measured in increments even shorter than Warhol’s 15 minutes, a 91-minute documentary about a bug-eyed, chain-smoking sociopath who soared high and fell fast so long ago smacks of folly and misdirected energy, like trying to make a biography out of a footnote.

At its best moments, Our Nixon captures the split-personality of the times, and the apparently innocent face of corruption.

By the time the movie actually arrives at its finest moment – a nearly two-minute single shot from the Mustang’s hood as it chases the villain’s van through dense traffic – you’ve become so numb to speed and sensation that you may barely notice.

Sadly, the movie’s lack of a clear identity – is it a thriller, soap, legal drama or action chase movie? – makes it difficult to understand why anyone should care.

Where Corneau flirted with erotic tension, De Palma flaunts it. Where Corneau went for nightmarish reality, De Palma does noirish dreams.

A charming oddity starring Paul Rudd and Emile Hirsch, often feels like an al fresco stage play. It’s an intimate two-hander with lots of dialogue, humour and poignant revelations, set against a backdrop of rugged woodland beauty.

There are sequences in Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai’s new film, The Grandmaster, that are as gorgeous as anything you’ll see on a screen this year, or perhaps this decade.

Character development and plotting are rudimentary, though the tongue-in-cheek never gets dislodged while the body count rises.

The World’s End isn’t perfect – – but its best moments leave the bulk of recent American “event movies” gasping in the dust.

Within this bloated fantasy hodgepodge, there are few grace notes: In the role of the creepy fortune teller, Madame Dorothea, CCH Pounder is evil fun. And a few special effects, including a Rottweiller who turns into a skinned hellhound, leave an impression. Otherwise, Mortal Instruments manages to occupy 130 minutes of frantic, numbing, activity.

A pitch-perfect comedy.

The Butler may be a sanctimonious cartoon, but it points to events in the civil rights struggle that were as grotesque and extraordinary as any fiction can invent.

If Jobs had been a producer on Jobs, he would have sent it back to the lab for a redesign.

Even in death, Kato has been harassed. In one of this movie’s many unsettling scenes, a pastor interrupts his funeral to condemn the dead man to eternal damnation.

Arriving at the tail end of blockbuster season, this cheaply produced sequel to the surprise 2011 hit arrives in plenty of time to claim the title of the year’s most unpleasant movie.

There’s a scene in a members-only club where Wyatt and Goddard meet, giving the two veteran actors the chance to go eyeball to eyeball for a couple of minutes of barbed dialogue. It almost makes the movie worth it.

By the end of the The Spectacular Now, you’re not quite ready to let these characters go. Instead, like director François Truffaut did with his character Antoine Doinel in a series of films, you want to check back with them every few years, to see how how they’re getting on.

Despite gorgeous visuals from an army of Disney animators, the film is one of the weakest the studio has produced in years and deserved a bargain-bin DVD release.

The scenes of Traynor threatening and battering his wife feel just as phony and unconvincing as the sunnier stuff that preceded them, partly because Sarsgaard – usually a fine and subtle actor – flies so over the top in his depiction of a creepy Svengali.

One of Blomkamp’s most unlikely conceits is a machine – apparently standard-issue in all of Elysium’s made-to-order McMansions – that can heal all injuries and infections at the flick of a switch. He could have used one to fix Elysium’s battered and broken screenplay.

Despite its explosive subject matter, the movie has been carefully calibrated not to offend anybody.

Not just a documentary about Internet privacy, but a non-fiction horror flick for anyone who blindly agrees to user licensing agreements online (a.k.a. everyone).

Woody Allen’s first Stateside production in nearly a decade is a sharply observed, post-economic crash comedy-drama that boasts a formidable performance by Cate Blanchett and addresses such pertinent real-world concerns as class, gender and corporate criminality in urban America.

The Canyons is actually anything but gratuitously sensational. On the contrary, it’s rather restrained, even conservative affair, far more interested in expositional conversation and a sustained tone of bleached-out melancholy than cranking up the heat.

Wahlberg, whose dim-bulb act was over-exposed in Pain and Gain, fares better here in a more heroic role. Stig is a hothead and a narcissist, but he’s also just a little bit smarter than he looks. The same goes for 2 Guns as a whole.

Only adults with 'Smurf-holm syndrome' could love this film.

The narrative meanders on occasion, the conceit can seem repetitious, the editing is loose. Nevertheless, buoyed by the naturalism of its exclusively young cast, the picture effectively gets into your head and under your skin.

Whether or not this flies in the unforgiving fan world remains to be seen. But for those less intemperately invested, The Wolverine will come as a welcome and bracing surprise: An almost human-scaled superhero movie about a guy who goes to die in Japan and ends up beating his way back to life.

Shot on a vintage Portapak video camera that actually predates the movie’s early-eighties setting and painstakingly crafted to resemble an analog artifact from a bygone era, Computer Chess is, ironically, a comedy about technological innovation.

As Jamie, an American drug tourist desperately seeking a hallucinogenic cactus, Michael Cera pours kerosene on his wet blanket slacker persona.

We feel the death on the platform so acutely not because it’s a stupid act of randomness, but hardly untypical racist violence, but because we’ve come to love this man.

Casting By is also something of an elegy for a lost era, when talent, even at its rawest, stood far above prettiness as the primary reason for getting the part.

How many Oscar winners does it take to save the world? Red 2 gathers together a collection of lauded thespians – from A(nthony Hopkins) to (Catherine) Z(eta-Jones) – and leaves them to float on a sea of action-flick clichés.

As more than one orca expert points out in the film, when you take a creature born to roam thousands of miles of open water and stick it in a pool to do tricks, there’s going to be some behavioural blowback. In Tilikum’s case, it’s actually described as a form of induced “psychosis.”