The new boys know how to create wonderful transformations in a character's expression with a deft stroke or two, and they have mastered the deliciously parodistic plasticity required by the movements of their ever twisting-turning-tumbling creatures. Their pastoral scenes still glow with the old Disney sweetness, and the ones of foreboding glower with the old relish for the grotesque. They satisfy an older viewer's nostalgic feeling for his childhood's delight while fulfilling the younger crowd's need for a kind of magic the movies too rarely even try to provide of late. It is never too early to learn that animation is still the best special effect.

AP2 starts out bright and clever--shagnificent, we might almost say--before sinking into a swamp of shagnation.

The film is full of sharp acting and home truths, but its ambition to be different finally surrenders to its need to be loved.

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

Loutishness without self-awareness remains loutishness--and it is finally depressing.

It’s worth half your attention. You might use the other half to mourn the memory of what movies, even enjoyably mediocre ones, used to be.

Slick and senseless.

The action sequences succeed in transporting one out of the theater and into a landscape of savagery and survival.

There are pain and honor in this performance, and they constantly rise up to redeem a film that is less probing, less thoughtful than its director's claims and aspirations for it.

In the end, I, Robot is just an assembly-line product of a not very advanced model.

No deep thoughts here; this is a product of shiny surfaces and glittering patter, the cinematic equivalent of a derivatives offering. Instead of whacking Wall Street, Stone gives it a poke that ends up as a tickle.

Weisz is a dazzling woman, but her beauty is barely noticeable in this role; her character's integrity and her mounting anger grab all the attention. In one scene Kathy finally confronts what she's up against and starts to cry. They are tears of rage, and the most powerful I've seen this year.

It is truly something to see; for among all the lives to be ruined it is a visual rhapsody, attentive to every nuance in the spectacular land and foliage around the family home, following the lives within as meticulously as it traces the dramatic changes in weather — from clear day to torrential showers — in one of the longest, most intricate and beautiful tracking shots in cinema.

The pleasures of Ballerina are both blunt and fleeting; you’re not going to remember the plot—or any of the performances, perhaps save one—five minutes after the end credits role. But the picture’s cartoonish brutality is cathartic.

The filmmakers throw in a few cheesy scares: mom in a monster mask, a baby sitter jumping in front of a camera. But the rest is pretty freaking cool.

Reynolds can't help looking rather shifty as he relates his story and Breslin, who was so wonderful in Little Miss Sunshine, is obliged to play a standard-issue wise child.

Phoenix is acting so hard you can feel the desperation throbbing in his veins. He leaves you wanting to start him a GoFundMe, so he won’t have to pour so much sweat into his job again. But the aggressive terribleness of his performance isn’t completely his fault.

As the movie goes on, the laughs are fewer and farther between, and for the last 30 minutes, not only did I not laugh, I wanted it to end so I could get back to my own boring but less precious life.

Director Harlin's only large mistake is staging the several violent deaths too authentically. They momentarily mar the high-speed implausibility of a movie that, like his Die Hard 2, agreeably combines the edgy and the genial.

Handsome, well-acted, richly textured adaptation of Alexander Pushkin's novel.

What Happens Later, directed by Meg Ryan, works so hard at trying to give us something fresh and novel that I couldn’t help wishing it were better: the cloud of dissatisfaction I felt after watching it kept trying to reshape its molecules into a better movie, albeit one that could live only in my head.

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.

Cumberbatch and Colman make it all believable, their jokes pinging off one another with delightful, rancorous buoyancy.

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle has a pleasant, affable spirit, and Johnson is wholly charming.

This is a test, requiring rapt concentration and acute attention, and repaying a hundredfold. For spectators dulled by the midget movies of an arrtstically timid era, the film may be a chore. For those on Malick’s rarified wavelength, it’s a wonder.

The film is full of attractive young performers. And there is a low-keyed conflict between them and a faculty that is trying to discipline their exuberance without stifling their spirits. If the film had concentrated on that instead of on hokey melodrama, it might have been far more engaging and truer to life.

The life and the lady have been slicked up and toned down, in the best tradition of such tears and tinsel sagas as The Helen Morgan Story and I'll Cry Tomorrow, in which lovers are long-suffering and steadfast, agents loyal, temptation rife and facts irrelevant. Billie Holiday, an artist, deserves a far better memorial.

The Accountant 2 is not, and is not trying to be, a movie about the realities of autism. Even so, it challenges us to think about how our brains work, why we do and say the things we do—and to recognize that even though we may think there’s a normal way to respond to social cues, not everyone is wired the same way.