There's really no focking place for the franchise to go anymore.

Like most primates, Nénette is both fascinatingly familiar and strange, capable of almost human expressions yet totally unknowable (as well as massive and hairy).

Those of us who dig the comedian's hyperactive persona may feel that the meter is now officially running on his amiable rocker-doofus act; everyone else will simply marvel that a Christmas season could produce such an unfunny, unentertaining lump of coal.

This routine animated feature is a perfectly fine thing to waste.

The film works to inform as well as to preserve an air of mystery around Bernstein, an apt approach that occasionally slips into the willfully opaque. By all accounts, this secretly important man was tough to live with, but not too hard to love or admire.

Phillips goes too far sometimes (border-jail breakout?), but his new direction is promising.

This is fertile material for a darkly comic indictment. Instead, we get recycled cynicism (politicians are hypocrites! more dirty money, more problems!) and Spacey's gallery of impersonations-W.C. Fields, Stallone, Reagan-in lieu of a flawed, flesh-and-blood human being.

Easily the most gracefully performed grief-porn you'll see this season.

The difference between a movie about emptiness and an empty movie becomes abundantly clear.

To make a Western now is in itself a subversive act. Improving, embellishing and reclaiming an old-fashioned oater from the vintage studio-cheese bin with such humor and vigor seems truly, truly ballsy.

The profusion of Dudes is - pardon the apt pun - game-changing. By turns a fierce megalomaniac and a Lebowskian monk, Bridges supplies more soul than any sci-fi sequel deserves.

Yogi Bear on the big screen feels not just needless, but wasteful.

Listen to the rhythms of "Broadcast News" - from Holly Hunter's daily crying jags to William Hurt's cock-of-the walk patter - and you'll hear how romantic comedy can approach an art form, a roundelay that requires the ear of a conductor. How Do You Know, James L. Brooks's latest, has such tone-deaf passages that it feels made by a totally different man.

To Cool It's credit and its detriment, the movie establishes that Lomborg quickly made enemies, without spelling out exactly why he's so loathed besides refusing to toe the Green Party line.

Tony Scott almost wins us over with this fun thrill ride.

Like a stumpy limb requiring quick cauterization via steam pipe (our first cringe), the Saw series is begging for closure.

What starts as an intriguing reverie ends as a hollow allegory.

The film definitely gets it up, but has some commitment issues.

The Rock deserves better than this ho-hum revenge picture.

That the duo will work their way back to each other is never in doubt, although Chazelle doesn't succumb to easy sentiment. If anything, he moves too far in the other direction, aiming for a wizened ambiguity that doesn't entirely come off.

With both hostility and compassion, the damaged duo slowly come to understand themselves and their respective pain-a familiar path that's energized by subtle lead performances, a tactile sense of place and surprising insight into the way people connect as they help each other heal.

We know how these bargains turn out, so all we're left to do is watch pretentious exchanges about grief pile up, laugh at the way the movie exploits its Indian-girl-as-innocence-personified notion and wish that Eddie Marsan's giddy cameo as Hell's personal weapons dealer were much, much longer.

The funny thing? It all works reasonably well, especially if you have a yen for the urbane register of city kids and their amazingly cool parents.

Firth is exceptional in letting us into his dissolving pride.

Shoah's ultimate legacy, however, is being the final word on the Final Solution-one that renders every well-intentioned dramatic re-creation of such horrors into repulsive Ausch-kitsch by comparison.

This Age-of-Aquarius relic's dedication to utopian ideals is great; this superficial portrait, however, is merely grating.

The doc's straining for a larger, Varda-esque metaphor about the sad humans on the sidelines is ill-advised.

You still leave hoping he ultimately found peace and enlightenment, two things he graciously gave to those of us who hung on his every word.