The Ghost Writer is so rich you may feel you paid too little for your ticket when the whole thing meets its very Polanski-ish climax. Please don't tell anyone.

What happens when a genuinely dear John gets a Dear John? For the answer, just meander--no need for running or walking--to your local multiplex. That's where Dear John, based on the Nicholas Sparks novel of the same name, will be meandering on its downward path from sweetly tender to terminally turgid.

Still, the action is ponderous too. Mr. Morel is no Kubrick, or Tarantino, just as Mr. Travolta's caricature of John Travolta is no Travolta.

Adam Green's Frozen explores a tiny idea exhaustively, and I mean exhaustively.

Edge of Darkness was one of the most enthralling, intricate and genuinely thrilling productions in the history of the small screen. The big-screen version--directed by Martin Campbell, who did the original--offers an example of why the studios' numbers often add up, and why, at the same time, so many of today's Hollywood movies leave us cool if not downright cold.

The writing is semicoherent at best, and the buddies of this meandering road trip are not only mismatched but dislikable.

It's impossible to say who's more unhinged: Darwin, caught between faith and reason, or the filmmakers.

Extraordinary Measures requires extraordinary tolerance for bathos, bombast and plain old unpleasantness.

The story requires a greater leap of faith than I was willing or able to muster, since Eli is also a saintly pilgrim on a God-given mission to save a ruined world.

It's been a good while since I've seen a movie whose most powerful sequence was both unforeseen and entirely unpredictable as it played out.

The idea goes only so far--roughly halfway through the 98-minute running time--in staining narrative clarity. Daybreakers finally comes up with some comments on the predatory practices of Big Pharma, but that's an awful comedown from the blood-rushing brilliance of the early scenes.

Youth in Revolt is basically an absurdist ramble, but a terrifically likable ramble.

A severe and eerily beautiful German-language drama.

The movie as a whole is clever, and conspicuously overwrought. But Mr. Downey's performance is elegantly wrought; he's as quick-witted as his legendary character, and blithely funny in the lovers' spats—all right, the mystery-lovers' spats—that Holmes keeps having with Jude Law's witty Dr. Watson.

After listening to Jane and Jake talk it out in the interminable process of working it out—they explore their relationship as exhaustively, and exhaustingly, as any kids on Facebook—I found myself wishing for more shallows and fewer depths.

The movie comes on like a put-on--next to nothing happens for an excruciatingly long time--and ends as a fascinating dialectic between following one's conscience or following the law.

Much of the time, though, you're transfixed by the beauty of a spectacle that seems all of a piece. Special effects have been abolished, in effect, since the whole thing is so special.

The carnival is loud, brash, brassy, sexy and sometimes tacky or silly, but always entertaining.

Crazy Heart is blessed with so many marvelous moments, lovely lines and vivid characters.

I watched the film in an agitated space between engrossed and aghast.

A win-win situation in which a mainstream feature works equally well as stirring entertainment and a history lesson about a remarkable convergence of sports and statesmanship.

The best of Up in the Air--meaning most of it--is right up there with the fresh and sophisticated comedies of Hollywood's golden age.

The entire film is a seduction, one that draws us into a vanished world where Count Leo Tolstoy and his wife of 48 years, Countess Sofya, come to joyous, tempestuous life in a matched pair of magnificent performances by Christopher Plummer and Helen Mirren.

Between the two performances there's not a false note. Between the father and son there's an unbreakable bond. Though civilization has ended, love and parental duty shape the course of this fable, which is otherwise as heartwarming as a Beckett play shorn of humor.

Mr. McKay is in his mid-30s, and doesn't conceal it, so what's the point? By taking the KIND out of WUNERKIND, the movie also removes the WUNDER.

The sparkle is what's been missing in the star's (Cage) recent performances. What's not to love in a movie that transmutes Terence's moral squalor, and the squalid state of post-Katrina New Orleans, into darkly comic gold?

Mr. Almodóvar's love of movies informs every frame of this beautiful film.

Mammoth manages to be as affecting as it is heartfelt.