In its best moments, Aquaman is transportive. There are worse ways to spend a Saturday afternoon.

Enough of Curtis' lovably crazed characters do succeed in finding love in all the unlikely places that you leave the theater with your heart humming happily. He has his dark -- well, darkish -- side under control. Which is to say that he is an Englishman, well practiced in masking pain and absurdity and descents into sheer goofiness with mannerly behavior, sly irony and stiff upper lips.

This wisp of a movie turns out to be more thoughtfully affecting than many a more high-flying film.

Starsky & Hutch has moments of hilarity a little greater than you might expect of a movie that is just out for a lazy good time.

Left-wingers in the mainstream media - by which I mean me - are supposed to lap up a movie that plays to our farm-loving, tree-hugging prejudices. But even we know that well-meaning does not automatically equal good movie. Some organic life is needed. And the only crop Promised Land harvests is Capra Corn.

It’s "Identity Thief" with flying piranhas, or Plains, Trains & Automobiles on foot.

There are a few good scenes—an intricately executed train wreck, for example—but the movie is notably slack where it should be zestful.

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

Sergio’s intentions are pure, and the movie is pleasingly old-school in the way it merges political drama — and tragedy — with romance. Sometimes, though, the burden of playing a dedicated servant of the people appears to be too much for Moura: the performance feels stiff and stately, as if he’s considered every breath. Moura makes us see the gleaming role model, but it’s much harder to see the man underneath — and you can’t leave a legacy without first having had a heartbeat.

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.

Heart and art can make a beguiling pair. Those are mostly missing in this strained hybrid, which is less Bollywood than Follywood.

There are a reserve and a realism in Huston's work that make her very modest film more affecting than you might expect.

Barefoot in the Park is one of the few plays to be reincarnated on-screen while playing on the Broadway stage. Happily, it loses little in transition.

Wright's performance is the key to a movie that pulses with the sick thrill of historical discovery. The Conspirator reminds us that. when we surrendered so many of our Constitutional rights and judgments after 9/11, it wasn't the first time.

And while the new Lion King is slightly easier to take—maybe because these heavily CGI-enhanced “real” lions don’t have the same cartoon humanity of the earlier version’s animated ones—the picture still has a manufactured, preachy sheen. This is calculated virtuousness masquerading as imagination, though it’s easy to be sidetracked by how adorable the cub Simba is.

Tawdry but compelling.

A film worthy of being displayed on a screen eight stories high.

A perfectly coherent, handsomely rendered couple of hours, animated in particular by Damon's good performance -- shrewd, innocent, angry, wistful and, above all, likable.

O.K., Ritchie mistakes flash for style. Perhaps that's the price you pay for storytelling exuberance. If he keeps making films as down and witty as Snatch, we may learn to forgive him.

As for Blanchett, she's simply wonderful. She has played her share of queenly figures, but her acting essence is, emotionally speaking, plain-Jane. She's a straight shooter, with an uncanny ability to find a character's spine and communicate it without fuss or feathers.

In its lesser moments, of which there are more, Liberal Arts calls to mind more the spirit of an alumni magazine, so bathed in nostalgia for academia that you expect autumn leaves to flutter down to the theater floor.

A movie that demands our surrender -- to its energy, to its bold-stroke moviemaking, to its acting (particularly by Cruise and Watanabe, who blend musing and graceful muscularity) and, above all, to its romantic vision of a lost world.

This is a comedy with the old-time blend of wit and sentiment. Years from now, when you stumble across it on TV, you could persuade yourself that, back in the two-thousand-oughts, they made pretty good movies.

This is potentially moving dramatic stuff—or at least bracing melodramatic stuff—but Showalter’s dramatization has a glazed, glassy-eyed surface, like a Pee-wee Herman movie without any of Paul Rubens’ surreptitiously sophisticated kindergarten wit.

The picture still meanders and drags, and sometimes Iñárritu’s lofty ideas come off like a hot-air balloon that deflates and gets stuck in the trees. You wish he could just move on with things already. And yet there are some magnificent visions in Bardo.

The Adam Project should be fun, but it’s sabotaged by its unwieldy ambitions. Forget the complexities of time travel, of wormholes and the laws of physics. This movie can barely get from point A to point B without tripping over itself.

The world may have seen the outcome, but it’s still convincing, a story of courage without platitudes, and it features one of Antonio Banderas’ best performances in years.

The actors emote up a summer storm. Maguire’s otherworldly coolness suits the observer drawn into a story he might prefer only to watch. DiCaprio is persuasive as the little boy lost impersonating a tough guy, and Mulligan finds ways to express Daisy’s magnetism and weakness.