Bang and Debicki are grand, and we’d be lucky to watch them in any movie. But it’s Jagger’s witchery you remember. Pleased to meet you — and at this point, there’s no need to guess the name.

Vivid, relevant and of elevating scariness.

A banquet of creepy, gory or grotesque incidents is on display in Hannibal. but this superior sequel has romance in its dark heart.

Harold and Kumar are pothead patriots in the first feel-good torture film.

The Onion Field is a serious and most uncompromising movie. It lacks, however, the sort of disciplined craft that might have made it a powerful and affecting one.

He (Tony) could be a self-destructive hero out of a Dostoyevsky or Mailer novel. That portrait gives Iron Man 2 its fascination. The rest is a cluttered, clattering toy story.

A Pixar movie is always lively, and this might be the studio's liveliest (and loudest) yet - but its leanest in terms of warmth and heart.

Neither the acting nor the story matters much here; the movie is simply the sum of its 3D effects.

Little Big League was a movie for kids that never talked down to its target audience. It gave equal weight to issues that could easily be expected under these unusual circumstances.

The big problem is that Neeson drops out of the story for long stretches, and the movie needs him: None of the drug-biz guys, not even the classy, serene White Bull, can match his craggy charisma. When he’s absent, the landscape is very cold indeed.

Even at its best, Robin Hood is only mildly diverting. There is not a single moment of the hilarity or deep, eerie fear that the Disney people used to be able to conjure up, or of the sort of visual invention that made the early features so memorable.

The Santa Clause presents us with an Anti-Claus, Tim Allen of Home Improvement, hard-edged, discomfitingly frenetic and spritzing cheerless one-liners.

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.

If Lorne is nothing else, it’s a portrait of a guy who knows when to zig and when to zag.

The cluttered climax, in a Mother Bates cellar, explains little of the killers’ psychology; for that you have to read the book. But it does let Neeson assert his primacy as the cinema’s most graven, grieving, grievous senior citizen — a figure who doesn’t so much star in his films as haunt them. This ghost of a movie star is never more at home than when walking among the tombstones.

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

Almost every actor in it outplays the material they're working with, particularly Jason Bateman. Horrible Bosses would be worth seeing if only for the pleasure of watching him delicately bat indelicate comedy around.

Mama is clumsily written and choppily edited, but Chastain doesn't have a bad scene in it, and you can see why she chose to be in this supernatural ghost story.

With a welcome mixture of juice and grit, the movie dramatizes the lingering conundrums of young people in the time of the Vietnam morass.

An adoring tone and the familiar slo-mo, wide-angle baskebatics.

It twists it, shakes it and stands it on its ear. But as before, the film's technical brilliance is the least of its appeals. Satirically acute, intricately structured and deftly paced, it is at heart stout, good and untainted by easy sentiment.

Remarkably Bright Creatures is a movie, like its cephalopod supporting star, with a gentle soul and an elusive spirit. It might not stick with you long, but it leaves a delicate print behind.

Schrader's development of the frame-up story is mechanically melodramatic, and Gere, essentially a boring actor, doesn't help much either. He just cannot carry a picture, even when his passivity and gentleness well serve some aspects of his character, as they do here.

If The Equalizer is the hit it should be, it will give this veteran action star his very first movie franchise. In the sequel, Denzel-McCall could make things right in Ukraine as Obama’s Secretary of Defense and one-man army.

A reboot of an A-level spy series seems too pretty-good to be true. Shadow Recruit occupies this weekend’s movie screens as familiarly and reassuringly as a Walther PPK fits in the hand of James Bond.

It’s bad-gal blasphemy of the highest order.

Cecil B. proves how a dose of smart bad taste can be jolly good fun.

A big fat yam of a picture richly candied with VistaVision (Paramount's answer to CinemaScope), Technicolor, tunes by Irving Berlin, massive production numbers, and big stars. Unfortunately, the yam is still a yam.