Director James Watkins knows how to make a body jump out of its skin, even if he does use the face-reflected-in-the-mirror/window trick once too often. At the same time, the film is kind of, well, silly.

Entertaining enough for the trick-or-treat crowd, but a bit more bite wouldn't kill it.

The exercises are genuine, and so is the hardware. But the script undermines the sense of authenticity at every turn.

Can a performance be too good? Meryl Streep disappears so uncannily into former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady that her performance overpowers the movie it's in - a perfectly executed triple axel that renders everything else just featureless ice.

Sometimes feels like a horror movie with a contact high.

Hiddleston steals the show here, making wickedness and treachery look a heck of a lot more fun than virtue.

Silly and slapsticky, Love in Space is too busy devising absurd set pieces to develop the characters or make their mutual attractions plausible. That makes it much like recent Hollywood rom-coms. It seems Chinese filmmakers have learned more than just a few phrases from American movies.

Overlong, unnecessarily sex-obsessed and downright nasty at times, This Is 40 feels haphazard and unfinished, despite a few moments of laugh-out-loud humor.

The Watch takes the same ethos of male bonding, obsession with sex and sardonic violence that has proved so profitable in recent years on yet another summer spin. The tires may be in need of changing pretty soon, but for now the jalopy still runs.

Despite all the swooping and spinning and swinging in The Amazing Spider-Man 2, Garfield looks less like a kid having fun than like an actor entangled in a corporate web that, at least for now, he can’t escape.

Parker the movie, like the man, delivers exactly as promised.

In the end, what mars "Timothy Green" most is its middle-of-the-road approach. Its appealingly quirky, fairy-tale-like center is so coated with sugar, it cloys. It's not that "Timothy Green" is odd, but that it isn't odd enough.

And that's the moral of this story. Or one of them, anyway. Clash's success is shown as the result of a combination of talent, gumption, pluck, misadventure, supportive parents, following your dreams, luck and, yes, love.

Director Gao Xiaosong doesn't do anything surprising with this melodramatic material, but the movie boasts sumptuous costumes and several nifty action sequences.

Director Jeff Prosserman's retelling borders on reprehensible, as he attempts to heighten an already powerful tale with a parade of needless bells and whistles, from flashy camera work to melodramatic reenactments. What a shame, because the story is truly astonishing.

A lightweight but enjoyable yarn.

The biggest travesty isn't that the movie fails to stir "Rudy"-caliber emotions. It's that there was a meaningful story hiding behind the guise of a less serious genre.

Considering the clichd storyline and lackluster acting, maybe it's South Beach that deserves top billing on the "Revolution" poster.

Her approach to the material is fresh, considering her focus on the messy, muddy landscape as a metaphor for the story's unbridled relationships. But with so much attention paid to mood and imagery, emotions seem to get lost in the wind.

If it touches on notions of scientific arrogance and the question of what makes us human, it ultimately does so lightly, and with a mix of eye-popping action and loopy good humor.

There's lots of extraneous plotting -- which, however fact based, is handled in such a pre-fab manner that it feels phony.

Trouble With the Curve presents viewers with a frustrating change-up: What promised to be a modest, refreshingly unforced little comedy turns out to be low energy to a fault.

Childlike, fetishistic and painfully literal, Luhrmann’s experiment proves once again that it’s Fitzgerald’s writing — not his plot, his characters or his grasp of material detail — that has always made “Gatsby” great.

A generic, fitfully funny mainstream comedy that doesn’t nearly get the best from its name-brand players but doesn’t qualify as a desecration, either.

Where the film might have found its greater meaning is in the interplay between Sarkozy's public and private lives - an especially fertile ground here, given that wife Cecilia (Florence Pernel) was a key adviser and their very public separation threatened his eventual run for president.

It's not going to shake up the fright-flick world one bit, but The Innkeepers may earn affection from genre-lovers whose memory reaches back to before "The Blair Witch Project."

With visions of "The Public Enemy," "Bonnie and Clyde" and even "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford" dancing in its head, the Prohibition-era drama Lawless winds up being equal to none of them -- even if it holds its own as a modestly respectable genre exercise.

More stomach-churning than soul-chilling. The list of on-screen atrocities includes attacks by nail gun, electric carving knife, chain saw, shotgun, crowbar and chunk of ceramic from a broken toilet tank, used as a crude bludgeon.

Crafted by writer-director Jill Sprecher and co-writer sister Karen - a filmmaking duo who are sometimes jokingly referred to as the "Coen sisters" - it will erase any lingering memories of "Fargo."

Does it matter that Maggie might be a charlatan if she's truly capable of helping people? That's the film's most intriguing, and open-ended, question - not the more gimmicky one that will leave you hanging, and probably disappointed, at the end.

A few more bucks (or a little more thought) for the script would have been a better investment than faking Seattle. The characters are introduced so quickly, and their personalities are so thin, that what happens to them has little weight.

At times, the movie has the look and feel of the cheaply made late-night commercials that it mercilessly, and occasionally hilariously, mocks.

The plot itself is predictably divorced from reality, containing more holes — and smelling staler — than month-old Swiss cheese. All of which means that Stallone and Schwarzenegger end up having to do all the heavy lifting.

Alex Cross isn't meant to be analyzed too deeply. The title character probably sums up the best strategy for appreciating the film's modest pleasures when he says, "Don't overthink it; I'm just looking for a bad guy."

His screenplay for Beautiful Creatures is sharp and witty, considering the needlessly complicated source material. His cast is stellar, and the chemistry between his young stars magical. But too much of rest of the movie, like Thompson’s monstrous mother, is an unholy mess.

Killing Them Softly possesses a modicum of swagger and style, even as it perpetuates some of the crime genre's more tedious cliches, from slow-motion savagery to facile cynicism.

Maybe the best way to describe Beasts of the Southern Wild is faux-k art. Even Hushpuppy's name suggests an author more interested in the folk- and foodways of a culture-with-a-capital-C than the people who comprise it. Too often, she and her peers are presented as curios to be exhibited rather than as fully realized -- if resolutely un-mythic -- human beings.

Extended scenes are dominated by heavy dialogue, while the lighter moments are relegated to montages of prancing across a beach, for example, which simply aren't that effective at buoying the drama.

Cirque du Soleil: Worlds Away has plenty of eye candy... What the movie lacks, unfortunately, is coherence.

Dogs and the women who love them form the warm and gooey center of Darling Companion, Lawrence Kasdan's fitfully amusing comedy-drama.

Schemel's life story contains many interesting pieces - growing up as a lesbian in a conservative rural town, battling a lifetime of drug addiction, spending years in proximity to Love - but Hit So Hard often finds her as an extra in her own film.

The lens through which the The Intouchables was filmed may be too rose-colored for some people's taste, but the window that these talented performers throw open -- a window onto the strange and touching friendship between two very different men -- is crystal clear.

Almost everything about Smurfs 2 signifies an improvement over the original.

They're enough to elevate the film above its somewhat by-the-numbers plot and add a little juice to its slightly sluggish forward momentum.

The relationship is the best thing about the film, which otherwise feels hopelessly sad and tawdry.

While this reboot is fun, it’s also forgettable and occasionally infuriating.

The film also begins to feel like a case of a director getting to revel in the very thing he's reviling.

There are elements worth celebrating. The movie is thankfully less self-serious than the mopey “Twilight” films. The Mortal Instruments revels in its own camp. But there is plenty of room for improvement. The action flick is overly long, complicated and, even by teen romance standards, cringe-worthy in its cheesiness.

Sin City: A Dame to Kill For is as visually imaginative as its predecessor.

Like a gel cap in a sip of orange juice, the psycho-pharmacological thriller Side Effects goes down easily, even if its long-term impact turns out to be barely dis­cern­ible.

Rogen and his friends may have set out to celebrate virtue at its uneasiest, but they’re clearly still most at home with earthly delights.

Scrappy and unsubtle where "We Were Here" is elegant and nuanced, How to Survive a Plague isn't nearly as formally beautiful as its predecessor.

There’s tension to be wrung from the premise, but Luketic is content to telegraph his movie’s juiciest twists, concentrating instead on applying a sleek visual sheen usually reserved for shampoo commercials.

The unevenness of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, and Stiller’s recessive characterization of the title character, keep it from being an all-out crowd-pleaser.

It feels like each and every moment bursts forth with urgent dialogue, and yet what does anyone actually say?

Compliance is an extraordinarily assured, well-made drama, signaling a promising career for Zobel, an adroit filmmaker with a talent for taut pacing and staging. But it also fails its first test, which is that the audience believe every word of it.

The fact that this overlong, often preposterous comedy succeeds at all (which it does, only occasionally) proves that the Vaughn/Wilson charm can still work a measure of magic.

Celeste and Jesse Forever engages in Bridget Jones-like comedy of mortification, sending its heroine down a path of self-discovery that ultimately seems more cruel than revelatory.

The movie itself is a tad overheated. In the lurid, swampy, yet almost perversely engrossing follow-up to director Lee Daniels's "Precious," the temperature is set to "sizzle." Ironically, it could have used a little more time in the oven.

Like its own protagonists, Kick-Ass 2 can’t decide what it wants to be when it grows up: a vessel for unhinged vengeance and destruction or a meta-critique of those same impulses. In going for both, it winds up being neither.

When the jokes work, it's for a simple reason: The four actors playing the couples are seasoned veterans of film comedy (although each is more than capable of handling dramatic roles, as well).

Smashed never really rises much above the level of a dramatic public service announcement. That's not so much because of its tone, but because what it's announcing isn't exactly news. Alcoholism is a disease. Alcoholics aren't bad people. Quitting is hard.

It's a shame that the plot proves to be such a head-scratcher when so many elements of the film seem promising.

Despite their Everyman appeal, Damon and Krasinski don't create much by way of emotional investment, instead becoming mirror images of their most mild-mannered, white-bread selves.

Branagh, who proved his action bona fides with “Thor,” does an inarguably competent job of choreographing a modestly intelligent espionage thriller, even if it’s impossible to identify anything new he’s bringing to an already groaning table.

The movie feels at once too busy and too derivative. That’s no easy feat, but it’s also one sequel-makers probably shouldn’t aspire to.

Never lets viewers fully inside Erik and Paul's world, a reticence that isn't helped by the actors' fey, restrained-to-a-fault performances. That and a frustratingly episodic structure make what might have been a raw and inspiring portrait of commitment and boundaries a surprisingly uninvolving, arms-length enterprise. Keep the Lights On lets go just when it should be holding you tighter.

The question isn't whether Toys in the Attic is any good. The question is: good for whom?

It's Walken who grounds every scene with the kind of watchful honesty that has become his brand in late-career.

The latest genre exercise from slasher-flick prodigy Adam Wingard (“A Horrible Way to Die”) is at times bloodily entertaining. And if the central plot twist isn’t all that clever, at least the movie offers some motivation for its mayhem.

For all his creepy tendencies, Hitchcock is portrayed mostly sympathetically in Hitchcock, in which Sir Anthony Hopkins plays the corpulent British auteur with a combination of hauteur and playfulness.

The movie Vulgaria is not one for the kiddies. Then again, the description "for mature audiences" doesn't seem right either. The Hong Kong comedy, a broad, cartoonish -- and decidedly filthy -- satire of moviemaking is as sophomoric as they come. It's also pretty funny, in an unapologetically over-the-top way.

The movie builds a moderate, if less than monumental, level of spookiness, regardless of your ignorance. It’s a workmanlike piece of suspense.

There's nothing terribly surprising about Special Forces, a moderately gripping action flick about a group of commandos on a mission to rescue a pretty blonde who has been abducted by the Taliban. Nothing, that is, except that it's French.

Try as it might to entertain serious notions of manhood, evil and original sin, Prisoners works most effectively as Hollywood hypocrisy at its most sleek, efficient and meretricious. It’s stylish, high-minded hokum.

There's more waiting than lightning in Waiting for Lightning, a nonetheless watchable-enough documentary about the preparations leading up to professional skateboarder Danny Way's historic 2005 attempt to sail over the Great Wall of China on a skateboard.

A martial-arts ad­ven­ture with more video-game and comic-book DNA than the traditional kung fu flick, Tai Chi Zero is good, if empty-headed, fun.

Watchable, if cliched.

Olympus Has Fallen at least possesses the frisson of timeliness amid otherwise hoary action-movie cliches.

Closed Circuit is intriguing, even mildly diverting. That might have been fine for another film at another time, but in light of the here and now, this one should have been more.

The film's title suggests the wry irony of hindsight: We've come a long way, baby, but we're not there yet. Any Day Now could do with a little more of that astringent humor and a little less sap.

The people of 2022 may “release the beast” by slaughtering their fellow Americans. In 2013, that’s still what we go to the movies for.

Maybe the ultimate goal of Tomorrowland remains obscure because once you know where the story is headed, you realize it’s a familiar tale. The movie can conjure up futuristic images, but the story is nothing we haven’t seen before.

Loud, overstimulating and hard to take in all in one sitting, it feels like the vacation that you’ll need a vacation from.

The most enjoyable moments of an otherwise oddly joyless film actually belong to Jake Johnson and Lauren Lapkus, who steal the show in an especially amusing scene during a panicked evacuation.

At Any Price finally hinges on tragedies, reversals and moral ambiguities of Shakespearean proportions, but they’re delivered ploddingly rather than as the intricate parts of an inevitable whole. At Any Price ultimately suffers from the very phenomenon it laments: Like Henry Whipple’s farm, it feels more mechanistic than organic.

As a piece of filmed entertainment, The Fifth Estate shows why things like authorial point of view and visual sensibility are so essential in bringing such stories to life. Unlike its most obvious predecessor, “The Social Network,” this film doesn’t have much of either, and the weakness shows.

Luckily, a strong supporting cast makes up for the protagonists’ tepid interactions. The brilliant duo of Kevin Hart and Alan Arkin steal the show.

Glossy, flossy and blithely secure in its own cheerfully fake worldview, Baggage Claim bypasses the intellect entirely, happy to satisfy on a silly, screwball, wish-fulfillment level. It could have been so much better, but for racking up undemanding escapist flyer miles, it’ll do.

Even as Cecil lives his life slightly adjacent to history, building a heroic film around him requires herculean effort.