Equal parts Hollywood meet-cute and quirky coming-of-age tale.

The grizzled veteran actor, naturally, elevates the material like a pro, yet the entire exercise feels thin and reedy, trading in geriatric sentiment instead of hard-forged emotion.

Both Project Greenlight runners-up, directors Michael Aimette and John G. Hofmann get the teen angst and Gaelic aesthetic right; too bad their third-act thuggery isn’t just routine, but ridiculous.

Storm’s remarkable poignancy is made all the more palpable by its restraint.

It’s unfair to blame Hess solely for condescension comedy’s bad aftertaste--he’s not the only perpetrator--but his particular brand is the most graceless.

The story is too rich in incident for Fabian, whose episodic TV-movie approach speeds through Laing’s lifetime of abuse.

Only Billy Connolly, as the boys’ way-of-the-gun pa, brings a smidgen of sobering gravitas to the proceedings, though he can hardly counter the pounding hangover brought on by all the mock-virtuous butchery.

West is far more adept at and interested in sustaining an unrelentingly ominous mood than in executing the genre-required spook shocks.

This shapeless series of unfunny vignettes (interspersed with pointless street interviews) deserves to be slapped hard.

Even when it’s shooting in the swing states, the film never finds drama, focus or any greater purpose other than some dubious horn-blowing about the SEIU being singularly responsible for electing President Obama.

Krakowski’s modestly charming culture-shock comedy has an unusual midpoint game changer, as it suddenly mutates into an intimate familial-generational drama.

Michael Jackson was obviously shooting for the moon right before his death, as you can tell from these stunning bits of concert spectacle.

What’s ultimately more impressive than the vigorous madcap action and innocuous humor, however, is Bowers’s willingness to address adult themes--alienation, regret, class tensions--with a directness that shows a surprising respect for his target young-adult audience

There’s nothing more boring than a life embalmed with halfhearted Hollywood bombast, which only makes the film’s fleeting pleasures stand out all the more.

There’s still too much flashback material here about apprentices and evil cops. But if you’ve ever raged at nameless, insensitive service people, you won’t mind seeing them strapped into a rotating turret, the shotgun cocking.

Vampirism is the new monstrosity du jour, and with Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant, tweener boys get their own testosterone-infused variant of Twilight.

(Untitled)’s onslaught of self-indulgent bohos and art-vs.-commerce clichés are as ersatz as their objects of scorn.

The new movie is a joke, a toxic cocktail of banal psychobabble, laughably arty slo-mo flourishes and unmotivated sexual violence that only brain-in-jar types could take as a serious statement.

It’s a judgmental tale whose only payoff is carpe diem drivel.

The new film sometimes feels too snazzy in its jittery cinematography, but the stunts make it through the budget upgrade intact.

Albou’s film conjures an irresistibly evocative atmosphere of stifling limitations, as well as a frank view of the female body that vacillates between carnal, sacrificial and beatific. Its caustic beauty is hard to shake.

Filmmakers from Jacques Rivette to Hou Hsiao-hsien have treated the City of Light like Alice’s rabbit hole; writer-director Hong Sang-soo similarly embraces the fantasy, but goes one step further in this extraordinary character study by fully erasing the line that separates the actual from the fictional.

Part alt–art-history lesson and part pilot for CSI: The Louvre, Peter Greenaway’s deconstruction of Rembrandt’s 1642 painting The Night Watch contends that the work is--after the Mona Lisa, Da Vinci’s The Last Supper and the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel--the fourth best-known artwork in the world.

The true soulfulness of Sendak’s parable never emerges.

Frightening statistics punctuate the film like death knells.

Numbingly simplistic in concept and execution.

Saavedra, in an incredibly vanity-free performance, never shies away from Raquel’s darkest edges and still forces us to empathize with the frustrations and stunted loneliness of a life lived in servants’ quarters.

Cutesy and generic, New York, I Love You is almost colossally inept at capturing five-boroughs flavor.