As a phenomenon, the hip-hop, breakdancing, sidewalk graffiti and rap music culture lends itself well to a comic book approach and to his credit director Sam Firstenberg doesn’t try to interject too much reality into the picture.

A thoroughly entertaining comedy delight about young marriage.

A documentary that recaps Hamilton’s life in compelling fashion without adding anything of special novelty or depth (though much of the surfing footage is spectacular), it can feel like you’re seeing a perfectly fine devotional sports biography that doesn’t elevate the saga it’s telling to the next level.

Following Zhu’s peculiar white rabbit is never less than an intriguing experience, but in the end, it feels like a hollow one.

Lacks the stylistic attention to psychological distress that might have lent it maximum impact. Instead, the pic is amiable, kinda charming, visually routine, and incisive in individual sequences.

This methodical courtroom drama is charged with impassioned performances and an unimpeachable liberal message. But its stodgy emphasis on telling over showing will limit its reach to Civil War buffs and self-selecting older viewers.

Plenty entertaining and occasionally very funny, “Ninjago” nonetheless displays symptoms of diminishing returns, and Lego might want to shuffle its pieces a bit before building yet another film with this same model.

Has a relaxed poeticism to it; it's a sweetly naive, adolescent Hemingway fantasy with a star-making performance by Shawn Hatosy and good ones from everyone else (including Caan).

A hagiographic portrait of the standup comic and social satirist who never quite reached beyond cult status in the U.S., American: The Bill Hicks Story might have impressed more of the unconverted had it included more performance footage of its subject.

Solid performances and some genuinely sharp humor elevate writer-director Rob Burnett’s second feature.

This teen romance proves perilously short on substance, insight and novelty, unless you count its characters being afflicted with a case of "Juno" mouth.

The movie has a universalist spirit that’s wired into its very form. It turns doing the right thing into a fizzy and elating high-camp showbiz high.

Favreau’s most important responsibility in overseeing the remake was simply not to mess it up. Which he doesn’t. Then again, nor does he bring the kind of visionary new take to the material that Julie Taymor added when staging the Broadway musical. That makes Favreau’s “The Lion King” an undeniably impressive, but incredibly safe entry to the catalog — one whose greatest accomplishment may not be technical (which is not to diminish the incredible work required to make talking animals look believable), but in perfecting the performances.

It’s unusual for a typical Illumination broad comedy to include a heartrending message that makes parents feel less alone in their very real, visceral struggles. It’s just cloaked in a shenanigans-soaked romp about what pets do when humans aren’t looking.

Emerges as an overproduced novelty pic that looks and feels more like a company promo reel than an engaging piece of storytelling.

There are a few surprises in Frankie, and the movie, in its placid way, wants to deliver a tug of revelation of what life is about. The trouble is, life at the end of this day doesn’t look very much different than it did at the start of the day.

Thornton carries the film with relaxed authority, though the earnest tone doesn't let him explore the nuttier aspects of a character who, from any reasoned distance ought look more screwy than heroic. Madsen is radiant.

An utterly bizarre, weirdly compelling story of manimal love that stakes out its own brazen path somewhere between “The Fly” and “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.”

Bleak, gripping, sporadically exciting drama.

A noble cause does not a good movie make. Pic repeatedly drowns its impassioned message with music, creating an awkward hybrid between history lesson and concert documentary.

This potentially intriguing story winds up being dull and at times faintly silly.

A half-broken adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's great modern Western novel. Neither dull nor exciting.

The star plays Doyle as just rough enough around the edges to warrant the character's setbacks, but not so unpleasant that the twinkle in his eye is extinguished.

The few who saw the embalmed adaptation of "Snow Falling on Cedars" will recognize the same stifling approach brought to this more accessible material by director Scott Hicks.

Only partially succeeds in interweaving questions of family loyalty with historical memory and the fate of Italian Jews in WW2.

Tech elements, including music, lensing, costumes and production design are blazingly impressive and strikingly evocative on all levels.

Notable for Kimberly Elise's ferocious lead performance and for the bigscreen exposure pic affords the charismatic Bishop T.D. Jakes, who plays himself and upon whose works the film is based.

There's plenty for both the eyes and intellect to groove over in Secret Things, a taut, juicy, low-key feast of sexual and office politics filtered through helmer Jean-Claude Brisseau's customary blend of expedient formality and all-stops-out baroque behavior.