The film deftly explores the story's complex moral issues from several sides.

While the stories the film tells are lively and never uninteresting, they fail to ignite an emotional explosion. The reach is also too broad for a film.

Harnessing the wizardry of 3-D IMAX to magnify the sheer transporting wonder, the you-are-there thrill of the experience, the film's payoff more than compensates for a lumbering setup, laden with cloying voiceover narration and strained whimsy.

Becoming Bulletproof is as enjoyable as it is inspiring.

This carefully-crafted tale of collective psychosis, satanic ritual abuse and pseudo-science, starring Ethan Hawke and Emma Watson, is satisfying as a compact, if over-cautious, horror-tinged psychological thriller. But it's most interesting beneath its polished, doomy surface, where complex concerns about the cultural origins of our fears are skillfully explored.

Like many science-fiction films, Star slowly but surely reveals itself as a parable of our self-destructive times – an artsy Interstellar with a threadbare narrative rather than one that’s forever running on hyperdrive.

Rising to the challenge of delivering a rousing finale, Hosoda does sock over a spectacular climactic battle on and below the streets of Tokyo with imaginative aplomb.

An engrossing real-life adventure that brings much-needed attention to an important environmental issue.

The story's quiet power comes from its sensitive observation of the characters as normal, emancipated young modern women, with healthy desires and curiosities, whose supposed transgressions are imagined and then magnified in the judgmental minds of others.

Whatever you have to pay, it's too much.

The general air of slipshod incompetence thus torpedoes the intriguing concepts underlying Lewis's screenplay.

Izzo, who co-starred with Roth-the-actor in Aftershock, is a fine genre actress, standing out from a cast of blonde women with her naturalistic performance and signs of courage and initiative.

One wonders if A Brave Heart might have been more effective as a short film than as a feature. The characters and the story compel our attention, but the film runs out of steam before the end.

This time around, greater attention has been paid to story and character development (while scaling back on all the sight gags) and the substantial results give the ample voice cast and returning director Genndy Tartakovsky more to sink their teeth into, with pleasing results.

The film’s bracing ground-level truths, by turns hopeful and despairing, challenge Beltway anxieties about the “porousness” of the border and shake up preconceived notions about Americans’ relationships with their southern neighbors.

It will not teach you very much about either autism or Metallica, but you will leave the theater smiling.

Argento seems to have learned from the experience of her overwrought first features, or maybe from life itself, that there is more to childhood than Gothic horror, and the mischievous moments of being a kid captured in Misunderstood show a filmmaker who is maturing in the direction of audience appeal.

Far less sensationalistic or cutesy-provocative than its title suggests, the film borrows its subject's infamy to add gravity to some family drama but does so in a good-hearted way.

It is tightly in sync with protagonists who find it impossible to move on despite distractions that might be catalytic in other films.

The film conveys the sense of hanging out with a band despite the fact that we almost never see them talking to us; a mood of creative ferment overrides any detailed narrative, and although its time period includes a massive tour for the group's latest album, this is definitely not a concert film.

Given the vacuity of the script, it must be admitted that Hathaway achieves something of a triumph. She’s always engaging and keeps the character on a human rather than superhuman scale.

Endearing performances, accomplished low-budget filmmaking and a distinctive urban setting all add up to an appetizing offering.

What fun there is falls to Jackman, who gives the grand old man of pirate characters plenty of fresh and unusual wrinkles and emerges better than the others simply by virtue of playing a two-dimensional, rather than one-dimensional, figure.

There's little sense of personal investment from the director, but Egoyan does what he can to keep the story moving forward, without getting bogged down in its implausibilities, which are too many to count.

It is unsettling in its depiction of the dark underbelly of the country, where a culture of hate paved the way for violence and tragedy.

So comprehensively does the film fail to represent the labyrinthian literary wonders of Amis’ book that it scarcely seems worthwhile to detail its universal shortcomings.

Lolo has a solid laughs-per-minute rate and enough twists to overcome the occasional screenplay hiccup.

Lindholm here makes yet another modestly scaled but effective drama that asks more uncomfortable questions than it answers.