This sweet little tale is as informative as it is entertaining for its target audience, the very youngest of the Muppet franchise's fans.

It becomes, after a while, little more than a mind-numbing bloodbath.

A cheaply made science-fiction movie that enters the atmosphere without ever igniting.

Bailey nails the iconic moments (that head toss) and the high notes, but also her character’s combination of spunk and innocence. She delivers a lovely performance that’s all the more accomplished for being delivered amid crashing waves, sweeping vistas and the crushing expectations of generations of fans. As a new generation’s Ariel, she makes The Little Mermaid her own — with confidence, charisma and oceans of charm.

Overwrought and overthought, this Carmen somehow winds up being underbaked, as Millepied throws various ideas at the screen, with precious few taking hold with any conviction.

Time has been good to the brave blend of stark realism and Hollywood production values of this drama, inspired by the writings of the young girl who continued to believe in the fundamental decency of mankind even as her family hid from the Nazis in an Amsterdam attic. [07 Nov 2004, p.N03]

If you can suspend your incredulity for a moment, What If has its bright moments. And that’s thanks in large part to its leads, who manage to do what Radcliffe has always done well: conjure up a little magic.

As it unreels, The Ref keeps getting dumber, and, unfortunately, it simply wasn't that brilliant to begin with.

It canters along, content to follow the Rules of Cute and Fuzzy Horse Movies.

I don't think the ending is up to the rest of the movie, but Grant and Barrymore are great together, and the movie has both zing and song.

At times, Unfriended really clicks — but ultimately, it’s a drag.

With “1982,” Mouaness gives viewers an immersive, ineffable sense of what it feels like to have the world shift under your feet before you even know it.

A handsome-looking if occasionally dull affair.

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.

Vicious and hypocritical as it is, The Gauntlet remains an entertaining sort of disreputable show, considerably more proficient and interesting than junk melodramas in a dogged vein.

It's an eroticism of nastiness -- triple-X fare for dirty old men in raincoats. If you resist this sleazy gorefest, you'll be right to feel proud of yourself.

Whatever good intentions were brought to bear in Cruella are lost in an overlong, awkwardly shaped mash-up of coming-of-age drama, caper flick, action adventure and fashion world sendup.

Even Thompson, the one you look forward to watching, is disappointing.

The best thing about all of this is Bettany.

The movie is an epic adventure with a rigorously moral point of view.

It's hardly a muckraking piece but more a celebration of racing at the high end and the extremely prosperous folks who play it.

A surprisingly lush, endearing little film, in which a swelling sense of romanticism thoroughly banishes even the most far-fetched improbabilities.

It’s a movie about exploring the vast, “dark continent” of the ocean’s deepest places (to quote Cameron, who produced and narrates the film) that ends up feeling claustrophobic. Much of it was shot inside a metal sphere the size of a fitness ball.

Too raw to be entertaining, too entertaining to be dismissed, it’s one of the weirder mainstream releases to come along in some time.

This was a man who needed no help standing out from the crowd.

Bekmambetov handles these narrative bumps with ease, infusing even the hoariest -- and goriest -- of horror movie cliches with equal parts macabre fascination and jaunty humor. The film lives up to its hype with a style, swagger and substance that will appeal not just to the fanboys (and girls) but to their uninitiated friends as well.

Even with a gimmick engineered to orchestrate endless bursts of Looney Tunes-style hyperviolence, “Novocaine” lives up to its name, all right — a tedious action-comedy so numbingly bland, you feel the pain of its 110-minute run time even as its protagonist can’t feel a thing.

Even if it’s not quite as thrilling as it first seems, Complete Unknown poses questions that practically beg for animated conversation about the fantasy of leaving it all behind — and what that might look like if someone actually did it, again and again.