Ian McKellen

Runs hot and cold, but mostly satisfies with its "upgraded" science-fiction razzle-dazzle.

In the callused hands of director David Mackenzie...the rigorously tough-minded Asylum lives up to its potential as a modern masterpiece of psychological terror.

A full-fledged mutant jamboree, but one that blunts thematic and character development in favor of narrative expediency.

Too measured to be lively, too skittish to be provocative, too dramatically slack to be more than a ploddingly literal book-on-film.

In the show's grand tradition of family entertainment, with scary creatures, exciting chases, chaste romance (with a buxom companion), and more than a few choice laughs on the off chance anyone might start taking the show too seriously.

What makes [it] more than just a thrilling science-fiction actioner is the past-present poignancy allowed by time travel and astral projection, indulging everyone's fantasy of telling a younger self what he or she needs to hear.

Narratively bereft...thematically redundant...[but] fans of the series and fanboy grumblers may have to agree that The Battle of the Five Armies is often entertaining.

McKellen dazzles...Mr. Holmes spins a tale about the falsely drawn lines between stories and our perceptions of real life, between celebrity image and genuine persona, and between upper and lower classes.

Pound for pound, scene for scene, there’s not a sequence here that the original film doesn’t execute better in the clean lines of hand-drawn animation and the crisp vocals of the original cast.

The Nicholas Searle novel Hatcher adapts features a shopworn story with easily anticipated plot twists, resulting in a soggy and largely pointless exercise that gets by on its consummate cast and some witty dialogue.

An elegiac valediction for Shakespeare’s genius...a celebration of the centuries of scholarship that got us here...[and] an ode to parental love, complicated as it is by ego.