If “Spinal Tap II” doesn’t quite earn an 11 on a scale of one to 10, I’d say it rates a strong 7.

Mr. Bonneville, having a well of viewer good will on which to draw, makes a perversely convincing villain, the extent of whose offenses are progressively appalling.

Most of all, though, I wondered how much longer people will pay to see a walking, running, driving, diving, punning, smirking, swimming, skiing, shooting, parachuting corpse.

The fault is not in the co-stars; they've been brilliant before and will be brilliant again. It's in the laggardly pace, pedestrian writing and murky viewpoint of Ned Benson's feature.

The film succeeds on the strength of the boy, and the remarkable young actor who plays him, Kodi Smit-McPhee.

The film fulfills its feel-good promise, as long as it's seen as the fairy tale it was meant to be.

Like Thor's hammer, this ersatz epic bludgeons its victims into submission. What's more, it requires them to stare at the source of their punishment through 3-D glasses.

For all of Ferris's desperate struggles, and for all the director's efforts to emulate the remarkable verisimilitude he achieved in "Black Hawk Down," his new film remains abstract and unaffecting. It's a study in semisimilitude, more Google-Earthly than grounded in feelings.

As a first-time feature director, though, he (Ball) seldom lets the material speak for itself. Every shot is a statement, every scene sells an attitude.

The taste with which one is left is not savory, exactly, but it certainly lingers.

There's no scarier myth for males, and Mr. Lichtenstein turns various images of emasculation into a black comedy that flirts, fairly tediously, with pornography.

The main attraction, so to speak, of “Road House” is ne’er-do-wells getting their comeuppance, to put it as gently as possible. The amount and degree of fighting defy most rules of physics, respiration and orthopedics. But it is a fantasy, mostly, which is a blessing.

The movie snaps sharply to life every now and then, and its unfashionable decency really gets to you.

Adult Beginners presents itself less as humor than as a study in Gen-X sociology and psychology. What happens when people raised in relative ease and who expect to live an even better life than their parents are left emotionally unequipped for reality? It might be touching. It might even be important. But it’s not exactly a lot of laughs.

Isn't the best romantic comedy one might wish for, but it's more than good enough.

As for Ms. Fey, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot doesn’t serve her fully, but this is her best work yet on the feature screen.

The production feels tentative and underpopulated: I thought not only of Katniss Everdeen but of the marvelous pandemonium in Danny Boyle's zombie epic "28 Days Later."

This English heart-warmer isn't all that kinky. It's actually quite sweet-spirited, as well as unswervingly formulaic.

A good deal of the freshness comes from a grand, clownish slob played by Thomas Haden Church -- he's actually the smartest person of the piece -- while Dennis Quaid occupies the center with a mastery that's all the more notable for its humanity.

What we see, though, is the same old same old - beautiful faces turning gaunt and haunted, strung-out hero and heroine, stupid parents, de-tox worse than tox, descent to and return from the depths. Candy could be seen, I suppose, as a cautionary tale; take this as a cautionary review.

For precursors of Guy's perversity, one would have to go back to W.C. Fields, who made antic art out of his characters' abhorrence of children.

As an experiment in Academy Award psychology, Albert Nobbs is fascinating. As drama? It is, forgive us, a drag.

The book presented several special, perhaps even insuperable, problems for adaptation to the screen, and the movie, which was directed by Robert Benton from a screenplay by Nicholas Meyer, hasn't solved them.

It’s a win for Mr. Gyllenhaal, while the movie loses out to its clichés.

This attractive, superficial stab at biography, with Renée Zellweger in the title role, is more concerned with a lonely woman's quest for acceptance and love than with an author's worldly achievements.

So many movies these days are overworked or overblown: The Hammer feels genuinely tossed-off. It isn't a great movie, or even a consistently good one. Yet it gets to elusive feelings about failure and success, hope and mortality (and reveals a quietly subversive attitude toward the boxing-movie genre).

Thor: Love and Thunder is, like most of the Marvel films since Iron Man died, only intermittently amusing, a bit wobbly in its storytelling, thin in its emotional impact and more geared toward spectacle than coherence.

The plot really is basic, so the bafflement of the movie lies in its combination of visual riches and dramatic -- as well as thematic -- impoverishment.