There’s stuff to like in “Multiverse”: amazing effects, surprise cameos, even the unexpectedly moving scene in which Wanda realizes she has, at last, become a monster. But there’s also stuff that’s just, for lack of a better word, annoying.

Freakier Friday is an inoffensive product with good intentions and a cardboard heart, but, these days, watching Curtis strut her stuff is an out-of-body experience all on its own.

Fans of Greenaway’s work — a mix of the brainy, the controversial and the grotesque — won’t necessarily be surprised by any of this. They may, however, be disappointed at how little of it actually works.

There are times when Our Idiot Brother possesses a loping, genial sweetness. But it lacks conviction, and it doesn't hold a beeswax candle to such similarly themed films as "You Can Count on Me" and "Momma's Man."

That said, what must be added is that, disappointingly, Night Falls on Manhattan doesn't quite add up.

Does 9 rival last year's "Wall E" as the best post-apocalyptic "cartoon"? The short answer is Nein. 9 is, however, a visual stunner.

An Upper West Sidey exercise in narcissism and self-congratulation disguised as a tribute.

May be morally tangled, pessimistic, lurid and foreboding, but it's also humanistic.

The oddest thing about this sweet but not entirely satisfying documentary is how little food is involved.

VIOLENT CRIME against women is not entertainment. "Star 80" was not entertainment. "Body Double" was not entertainment." And Jagged Edge is not entertainment. It is commercially packaged abuse. And we are supposed to call this anger art.

The colorful characters of Stoppard and Stalker loom large here, as detectives so often do — Hercule Poirot, Jane Marple — in such fare. But even larger is the shadow cast by Christie’s 1952 play, which provides a fun backdrop, if one rendered irreverently, for this diverting puzzle within a puzzle.

Despite the film’s heavy-handed effort at vindication, Renner manages to deliver a performance that is complex and satisfyingly contradictory.

The documentary transmits plenty of positive vibes, but it offers nothing fresh about the Fab Four.

Even if you’re not familiar with the source material, this Chinese production provides plenty of supernatural thrills for the modern young adult.

With its shambling, felicitously contrived structure and Fellini-esque climax, it's some kind of Jungian slacker fable.

Walter Hill's "Johnny Handsome" feels like a shiv jammed between your ribs in a prison-yard fight. It's clean and brutal and so ruthlessly efficient that it's opened a hole in you almost before you've realized it.

All of these make for engrossing, if hardly untold, tales. But what gives the lurid, titillating — and even, at times, fun — aspects of “Scandalous” a more sober edge are the journalistic implications, best articulated by former Washington Post reporter Bernstein, who calls the Enquirer’s frontal assault on truth and integrity “as corrupt as you can be.”

So Clooney and Pitt’s first outing as scene partners since “Burn After Reading” 16 years ago turns out to be a pleasing, if largely predictable, lupine lark.

The Angry Birds Movie 2 is not great cinema. But the animated sequel — inspired by the popular Angry Birds games, available on mobile devices and other platforms — goes above and beyond what is to be expected from such things.

Murray, though, is wonderful. He doesn't quite duplicate the manic madness of his "Saturday Night" bits, but his performance as Tripper, the camp's head counselor, almost makes the film's sophomoric humor worth sitting through. He's a master of improvisation, flitting from role to role - one minute a swaggering, would-be Lothario, the next a frenzied coach - with Morkian speed. He's also got a human side. When he's not clowning around he takes time to befriend a homesick 12-year-old camper (Christopher Makepeace), thus displaying a streak of responsibility that would curl John Belushi's hair. [13 July 1979, p.24]

You won't soon forget the therapist at Johns Hopkins who counsels recently homeless patients who've fallen into depression or substance abuse -- and then goes home to her own bitter foreclosure fight.

Dickerson's point in this passable but rather routine picture is that no one is exempt from the spidery grip of frustrations brought on by poverty and a life of depressed opportunities; that, given these circumstances, anyone can pick up a gun as the only answer to his problems.

After a somewhat tedious and overly episodic first half...Trumbo becomes a far more successful movie.

The more you lower your expectations, the more you'll learn to laugh.

The real importance of "Earnest" is the thrill of brilliant repartee. And as we laugh, an amazing thing happens: Oscar Wilde comes alive.

Torpid, syrupy melodrama from the Chinese director of 1993's "Farewell My Concubine."

It is a fascinating dance between style and substance.

Ultimately, we find ourselves looking for the wrong sort of clearing: a way out.