Tron: Legacy is not good, but it is amiable. While it seems less like a parody than the original, it is also silly in a not unpleasing way.

In ingenuity and charm, this DreamWorks offering isn't up there with "Kung Fu Panda," which remains the sharpest, fullest film from the studio. You may get the feeling that Megamind was made for, and possibly by, really smart six-year-olds. Nothing wrong with that; audiences of all ages can be tickled by the higher form of preadolescent humor.

This is the kind of movie you should never see twice, because so much of it is based in appall-me humor. Meaning you'll laugh the first time in the reflexive way you do when you can't believe how audacious the comedy is and how uncomfortable the situations are, whereas a second viewing would afford you an opportunity to feel kind of rotten about laughing the first time.

An expensive flop and the latest Iraq movie to be shunned by the mass audience, Green Zone was still the year's most visceral, thrilling entertainment.

It's a cocktail-party movie with a Molotov-cocktail finish: a tribute to the 88-year-old auteur's artistry - and his con artistry as well.

This is a true-life heist movie, and the thieves not only got away with their billions, they're still doing business. Pay attention and blow a gasket.

Kidman, in a career-best performance, and Eckhart lend pitch-perfect calibration to the couple's shared and separate agonies. It's as if previous treatments of the subject were a series of failed experiments, and Rabbit Hole is the Eureka! moment.

While Hathaway and Gyllenhaal have good chemistry, and director Edward Zwick moves the narrative along nicely, the film is too self-satisfied to be genuinely touching.

John Wells's The Company Men is a juicy, judicious drama, and one of the few current movies to address an issue that affects many of the people who will see it - or, because reality is too depressing, avoid it.

The pitch is enough to make you swoon, but the movie itself is curiously limp.

Somewhere has a lot of good impulses, and a salutary faith in an audience's patience; but the film's tone, in its script, performances and visual style, is studiously uninflected. It's a document of people seen remotely, maybe from outer space.

Obvious, though, is the word for Hopper's direction. It amplifies to rock-concert level every pained plosive in Bertie's speech, forces certain characters dangerously close to caricature.

This is your basic, and very enjoyable, Disney princess musical, an empowerment tale to teach bright, dreamy girls how to grow to maturity - and outgrow the adults in charge.

The results, while occasionally forced, are consistently amusing.

Dawn Treader, the name of the ship in the story, should here be rechristened Yawn Treader. If this movie were a bedtime book, the wee ones would be asleep by page two.

The screenplay, credited to three writers, has that over-doctored feeling to it, and we're asked to take on a larger redemption tale that undermines the truth of Bale's wholly unsympathetic portrayal of a drug addict and a narcissist. The Fighter's desire to show us what that awful combination looks like is overwhelmed by its urge to show us a Hollywood-style triumph.

Stuff still leaps out of the screen -- the snake striking a victim, cars sent flying by Death Eaters -- but few things in the movie lodge in the audience's mind or heart.

Me, I'm of two minds about a movie that wants to be a nail-ripping thriller and a statement on an artist's unholy communion with her role. It's reminiscent of older, better movies.

Engrossing and inspiring, despite being the kind of movie in which one of the first words you hear is cheeky.

Slick, well acted and engaging. It's also morally bankrupt--a film that makes you feel as though you've been taken for a smooth ride by the Hollywood machine and dropped somewhere very nasty.

What explosive mischief might they create? That's the premise of Morris' brilliantly incendiary new comedy Four Lions.

Morning Glory is a cut above most other recent light fare, but not a prime cut.

This is a survival manual turned into an existential prison-break movie; it cuts deep and, at its ecstatic climax, soars high.

For Colored Girls feels like the cinematic equivalent to putting a garish reproduction of the Sistine Chapel on the ceiling of your McMansion and calling it art.


Unlike the original, Paranormal Activity 2's pacing is uneven; it builds slowly and effectively before rushing too quickly, and at one point not particularly coherently, through the climax. But the jolts, when they come, are bigger, causing actual physical thrills and chills, at least for me.

What takes Conviction out of the "Erin Brockovich" inspirational orbit - and gives it fresh interest - is the fact that Betty Anne is never portrayed as a fish suddenly taking brilliantly to judicial waters. Instead of being a legal savant, she's a persistent lunatic tilting at windmills for the sake of a familial love no one else can quite understand.

The movie will divide some Eastwood fans, conquer others. The naysayers will be grateful that, from this healthy, workaholic actor-director, there is always the promise of a good movie - if not here, then hereafter.

So here's my second and final verdict on the movie: it's as captivating as its heroine.