This cutesy film is overwhelmed by a sense of forced farce.

The overall tone is familiar, refried, redundant.

I don't want to scare anyone away, but Hope Springs, better than I expected, is a movie for grown ups that seems just the tiniest bit French.

Vapid, claustrophobic drama.

No scene lasts more than a few minutes, but the overall is effect is being subjected to 105 mins. of YouTube vignettes that someone has chosen. 360 is probably best appreciated or endured on a long flight similar to the one Hopkins takes in the movie.

It ends up being surprisingly touching, despite the fact that you start rooting for the cloyingly cute Celeste and Jesse to break up almost from the first frame.

The new PG-13 movie is a fairly close adaptation of the Verhoeven, and lacks not just the earlier film's newness but its vigor, density, humor and R-rated juice. It's like the dinner-theater revival of a classic play, whose single asset is to remind those present how good the original was.

You're unlikely to laugh much, and you may get an unexpected case of the non-art-imitates-bad-life creeps.

Ruby Sparks tries its damnedest to make a picture that seduces moviegoers into accepting it as their best imaginary friend forever. But the sweat shows more than the sparkle.

The full-bodied performances of Merad and Darroussin give everyone - everyone with an indulgence for old movies about old values - a reason to see this Well Digger's Daughter.

The steady wink wink of Queen of Versailles is wearing. I'd say Greenfield is exploiting a narcissist's willingness to talk endlessly about herself, but I think it just as likely that Jackie is exploiting Greenfield's willingness to listen. And to keep that wonderful mechanical eye focused on her.

McConaughey's fans might be shocked to see him in this role - more likely, they'd skip the opportunity - but they ought to give his performance a shot. The dimpled demon lover proves he can be just as seductive playing Texas's creepiest, craziest cop.

"The Avengers" is kid stuff compared with this meditation on mortal loss and heroic frailty. For once a melodrama with pulp origins convinces viewers that it can be the modern equivalent to Greek myths or a Jonathan Swift satire. TDKR is that big, that bitter - a film of grand ambitions and epic achievement. The most eagerly anticipated movie of summer 2012 was worth waiting for.

Well acted and acutely observed, the film doesn't try to be a conventionally satisfying coke-land action film.

Red Lights reaches for a "The Sixth Sense"-style twist and whiffs it completely.

The frenetic pace masks an emptiness; this Ice Age is just a collection of slapstick moments and fisticuffs.

It may be minimalist, but it isn't minor.

Savages isn't great cinema, but it's a very alive movie about people who probably ought to be dead.

Rarely do you see an actor harness such physical energy on the screen, much less dance at this level of intensity while converting raw muscle mass into raging sex appeal. But Tatum is the real McCoy.

None of this is new to us, but Garfield and Webb make it feel convincingly fresh and exciting.

The glossily photographed family drama People Like Us is not without appeal, but it has a major construction flaw. It's dramatic arc is predicated on the problem of accidental incestuous attraction. Egads.

This is no-holds-barred humor of the finest, grossest kind, centered around the theme of arrested development.

Mark down the date: June 27. That's when American moviegoers will see this perfect storm of a film, and the tiny force of nature that is Quvenzhané Wallis.

When Seeking took hold of me, completely and without warning, I was digging for tissues. It's a lovely surprise for the official start of summer.

Repressing its rage to tell an important story, The Invisible War identifies soldiers who are true heroes because they dared to fight for justice.

Other than Baldwin, Allen and Eisenberg - who is delightful - few of the performances are memorable. Page is miscast as a femme fatale, but adroit with Allen's lines, but the other women, Cruz, Pill and Gerwig hardly register.

Visually the most ravishing and complex Pixar movie, Brave evokes memories of Walt Disney's early experiments with the multiplane camera, but with the more persuasive intricacies available to CGI artists.

Watching this is like flipping channels randomly between a Masterpiece Theatre drama and a splatter film on Cinemax. If you're like me, you'll stick with the splatter.

Accepting Pawlikowski's mood of poetic seriousness may be a chore for some. Others will find this creepy little sonata a dream or nightmare worth succumbing to, and believing in.

Solondz's most waywardly endearing film - his gentlest triumph.

There is a looseness to the dialogue that suits the mood of the story-each character gets his or her own bombshell (or two) to digest and has to figure out how to cope with it.

Though it has moments where it rises to fun-awful status, with a hideous giddiness that turns moviegoers into rubbernecking motorists at a crash site, it's mostly just awful.

I did laugh. The movie is so disgusting it is worthy of the Farrelly brothers.

It is the movie's uneven writing-half funny and daring, half punishing and senseless-that proves to be Lola's biggest opponent.

He's neither a fun villain or a secret good guy; the movie feels like a senseless venture because, even with his pants down on top of Clotilde or manhandling Virginie, he's the dullest scoundrel around.

Touching, generous, sweet, this little slip of a movie puts you under some kind of spell.

Boldly and gaily sustained the madcap momentum for the whole of its eighty-few minutes.

My advice to Scott and Lindelof is, Try harder - to bring the characters as well as the creatures alive; to extend the grandeur of that music-of-the-sphere scene to an entire movie; to devise new horror-film money shots; and to scare the crap out of me.

A triumph of bravado over self-regard, Brody's performance won't earn him a Oscar to place next to the one he earned for "The Pianist" nine years ago, but it's the only thing that makes High School marginally worth catching.

Rare among the recent fairy tale adaptions (from "Mirror Mirror" to the dreadful "Red Riding Hood") the invigorating Snow White and the Huntsman actually breathes new life into an old story.

Not a great film but a warm one that pushes the viewer's emotional buttons so deftly it feels like a massage. My guess is that you will laugh and cry at all appropriate moments. Resistance is futile.

So creaky and out of touch it inspires pity. Its opening sequences are a near marvel of confusion, mayhem and embarrassments for its actors. If it was a person, you'd worry it had dementia.

The awfulness of What to Expect When You're Expecting, an ugly brew of guide book, reality television and romantic comedy, is of course, entirely to be expected.

Here's an audacious, inventive and character-driven blockbuster with some wit sprinkled in for good measure. It's fun, and filled with a surprising degree of intrigue and suspense.

Cheers for a Cannes director who has infused his technical mastery with radiant life. In the Museum of the World of Wes Anderson, the dolls are dancing.

If the film is to work at all - and it eventually does - the two 27-year-old leads must radiate enough star quality to obviate the ramshackle plot. They just about do.

Fans of the nasty Baron Cohen may regret his being borderline nice in The Dictator. But we should welcome his decision to stop being the best at something few others dare try and instead to inhabit a more familiar comedy style--just going denser, wilder, better. He pulls it off.

Unfortunately, Girl in Progress doesn't upend anything; it just makes us weary of its wisecracking, oblivious teen and her ditzy mom.

Could women stop war through the sedation of sex and drugs and a plot to bury every weapon in their community? Labaki has said she knows Where Do We Go Now? is a fantasy. But it's a good one, and this lovely film seems pertinent far beyond the landscape of the Middle East.

Attention must be paid to movie allure, in a star like Depp and his current harem. Angelique may be the only satanist among the women here, but they're all bewitching.

First-time director Kargman triumphs by picking characters who largely defy expectations.

Until The Raven almost literally loses itself during a chase in the city sewers, it nicely balances its literary gamesmanship with a R-rated thriller's mandatory gross-out tableaux.

The movie explores the basic debate over faith, the idea that we can feel a sense of relief in cynicism realized and turn around and face the horror of our lack of faith in the next moment.

Instead of exploring something bigger, like the origins of Bernie's need for the company of elderly ladies (which Hollandsworth touched on in Texas Monthly; Tiede lost his mother at age 3 and his father at 15), Linklater limits the story and mood to black comedy.

A cheerful entertainment, suitable for kids and parents of the brighter stripe. It's just not Nick Park great.

Five-Year has comic bloat. Virtually every character gets their own moment of stand up, but in most cases, the bits aren't funny enough to warrant the screen time.

The Avengers doesn't aim for transcendence, only for the juggler's skill of keeping the balls smoothly airborne, and in 3-D too (converted after production). At that it succeeds.

All three give performances that would suit a better movie than this pallid shocker with little heart and no bite.

It has plenty of charm and is filled with astonishingly intimate footage worth seeing on the big screen but is sketchy on details and dumbed down by cutsy, anthropomorphizing narration.

It has a gentle if unenlightening message, namely that we should all take time off to reconnect - the soundtrack tends to the Bonnie Raitt but the movie seems to subliminally hum "slow down, you move too fast" - and Keaton and Kline have decent chemistry.

As a person who removes a woman's clothing in the half light of a Southern afternoon, Efron acquits himself reasonably well.

There's nothing profound going on here; the truisms don't blossom into life-enriching truths. It's more like the person you meet at a bar who, on second glance, is surprisingly attractive. Call Think Like a Man a perfectly satisfactory one-night stand at the movies.

At the very least, it's awfully entertaining and for "Buffy" fans, reason to put down the boxed sets and run off to the cinema.

The Lady is still titled away from the churning melodrama of Suu Kyi's country and toward the intimate dilemma of a loving couple forced apart by circumstance.

Theirs was a ruthless Cinema of Cruelty; this is whimsy with a coating of corrosion.

It all sounds absurd and simplistic, but I dare you to watch the joyful delirium of the big dance number, set to an old Fred Astaire tune called "Things Are Looking Up," and not to feel an unexpected sense of rosiness. This movie may contain endorphins.

Guys and gals from the first film, now thicker and with incipient crow lines, pair up in more or less the same permutations as when they were young and shiny. The movie's message is that the way to face impeding maturity is to embrace your inner teen idiot.

Fumbles nearly every opportunity to be funny: the dialogue is flat, straining for wit it never achieves, and the pace is torpid when it should be bustling. But, the couture, darling, is hilariously divine.

A documentary as vivid as any horror film, as heartbreaking as any Oscar-worthy drama.

Wrath of the Titans, like its predecessor, is a slightly-better-than-OK mashing of one of history's great literary troves: the Greek myths.

The movie is a museum of emotions, brought to contemporary life through the director's artistry and his leading lady's fire. Here, they show us, is how people felt, and hurt, in another time. Their love and pain can touch us today.

I didn't believe a word of the film and found myself feeling nothing but (I'm sure this wasn't Kaye's point) detachment.

Can The Hunger Games, in the movie version directed by Gary Ross, successfully navigate the crossing from page to screen? Our answer: Eh.

It's pointed, a piece of domestic comedy that starts with the unappealing sight of an overgrown slacker hunched on a faux leather couch in a dingy basement and subtly winds its way into a tender, wise and completely delightful film about family.

The project loses traction toward the end, as the picture strains to become a full-blooded action film - the very thing it spends the rest of its time mocking. And yet 21 Jump Street earns my genial nod because of its limber, 120-IQ take on the whole notion of movie revivals.

Casa de mi Padre is flawed in that it wouldn't be particularly enticing in any language.

It's beautifully photographed and explained at every stage from market to table, a foodie's dream night at the movies. The gentle shaping of the fish and sushi could lull you into a trance. A hungry trance.

It's only when it takes an unfortunate wrong turn from playful wit into the dramatic and sentimental - Hallström's speciality - that the movie starts to unravel.

Even in a predictable horror film like Silent House, Olsen draws empathy like a magnet.

The result is that John Carter plays like an alternate, inferior version of "Avatar"…Plus fleeting hints of John Ford's "The Searchers" - for this is also a Western.

The movie looks like every other rom com, all spacious apartments and sleek, woodsy vacation homes, but it takes you through a wider range of responses to the relationships and characters than most.

It's no wonder the movie is no walk in the park, even with a pretty soundtrack by Badly Drawn Boy (again, like About a Boy). It never feels inspirational - it's too gritty and dark - and there isn't a single easy solution in sight for either Nick or Jonathan.

By our count, three of the core SEALs are maimed or dead by the end. A new baby is left without her loving father. The picture ends not with a parade but with a funeral. And that may be the toughest, most lasting image in this cockamamie, Pentagon-approved war adventure.

Wanderlust, a comedy that looks way better than it actually is set amidst the dreck of late winter releases.

Undefeated is well-edited by director Daniel Lindsay and beautifully photographed by his co-director T.J. Martin - the shacks of North Memphis look poetically disheveled as shot from a moving car - but it is telling that the coach emerges as the "star" of this documentary.

Arrietty brings the same magic to the mundane, elevating the ordinary confines of everyday life into sumptuous surprises. And while Arrietty lacks the sweep of "Spirited Away," "Princess Mononoke," or "Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind," it preserves all the trademark sensitivity to the emotional turmoil of adolescence.

Technically, movies don't give off a scent, but This Means War is so smarmy that it seems to reek of cheap cologne.

This sugary sweet chick flick is so rich in its ripeness and full in its foolishness that I look forward to groaning in happy horror when I inevitably see it again, whether while drinking or when laid low by the kind of flu whose symptoms include a desire to watch Meg Ryan rom coms on cable.

Simultaneously diverting and annoying.

I wanted very much for West's new movie to evoke films like "The Others" or "The Orphanage," which made me, in the moment at least, a believer in ghosts. The Innkeeper's payoff lacked that kind of oomph, and weirdly, the pairing of Luke and Claire brought movies about work relationships, like "Clerks" and "Office Space," more to mind than ghost stories.

It's a decent February movie that smartly extends Washington's God-on-the-run character.

Transcending Holo-kitsch, In Darkness is often a thrilling adventure picture - as if Anne Frank had found an "Inglourious Basterd" to help her make "The Great Escape."

It's silly enough that young teens are unlikely to be drawn to it unless they've got a thing for Hudgens or want to take an early peek at Hutcherson, who will soon be seen as Peeta in "The Hunger Games." He was great as a sulky brat in "The Kids Are All Right" but in Journey 2 he comes across as wooden, dull and though not yet 20, too old for roles like these.

The Woman in Black is a welcome addition to the old canon; renouncing innovation, embracing anachronism, it's almost "The Artist" of ghost movies. To anyone who fancies throwback stories of the supernatural, there's nothing so appealing as a well-preserved corpse.

Declaration of War is about being under siege from illness, but there is light at the end of the tunnel. This modern-day Juliette and Romeo find their own tragedy, but are not poisoned by it.

There may be no role Barrymore is better suited to than that of sanctimonious environmentalist.

What's unusual about the sometimes screwy but mostly smart and always heartfelt Perfect Sense - is its search for a middle ground.

True to its grim prospectus, The Grey dwells in haunted machismo to the very end.