You'll empathize with Plowright's appropriation from Dorothy Parker: 'What fresh hell is this?'

By asking the audience to take far too much on faith, Dark Shadows can only be an interesting failure.

Currish...the film's niche audience is indiscriminate aging dog lovers; people lovers should look elsewhere.    

Plenty fun: as per the Jackie Chan standard, it's total nonsense, but unpretentiously entertaining and occasionally ingenious.

A mood piece, as abstract and engrossing as the many Bach piano selections laid on the soundtrack.

It's quite possible that The Avengers has more action than any movie ever made...[but] for all its thrill-ride clutter, The Avengers is just about as simplistic as them fightin'-robot pictures...

Pessimism, sweetness, raunch and loopiness make for a pleasantly offbeat blend.

The airy Novak makes a strong impression, Stewart's comic chops remain in fine fettle, and the distinctive supporting cast can't be beat...

This story framed as a historical account of the only woman to stand up to Napoleon doesn't quite conquer our interest, though it is itself an intriguing piece of Hollywood history due to the presence of Brando in an iconic role.

A reasonably entertaining miniseries...made with obvious attention to (if not always success in) pleasing genre fans.

A next-generation Scream, a self-referential horror film that tongue-in-cheekily deconstructs its own genre.

'How Green Was My Valley, How Smart Was My Horse.'

Predictability is the fatal flaw of any American sequel, and while this one comes closest in tone to the original film, that's a decidedly double-edged sword.

Let me begin by saying something nice about Cameron Crowe’s We Bought a Zoo: kids will probably like it. Okay, that’s all I’ve got.

This exquisite realization is as vital as can be in depicting the timeless tortures of the romantically damned.

By toning down his excesses for a mass audience of largely children, the self-billed Tarsem hits his sweet spot, serving up lavish sets and costumes to create a fantasy world that doesn't make us want to scratch our eyeballs out.

Largely concerned with the prickliness and delicacy around legacy, and the attendant patrilineal complications...But it's as much about the egotism and dysfunction of academia, reflected in the complex personalities of Eliezer and Uriel.

It's simply difficult to throw in with the film's reality-if not its essential story, then its details: Being Flynn feels indie art-directed instead of observed.

Though the jokes are strictly standard setup-punchline stuff, the cast brings a freshness to the material.

Williams is better than the picture, but within the screenplay's constraints, she nails every possible nuance of physical and emotional expression. It's dazzling work, and reason alone to spend ninety-nine minutes 'with Marilyn.'

'It brings out my happy.' For kids facing a potentially rough adulthood, it's probably a message worth hearing, maybe more than once.

The haunted House may be a built on a shaky foundation, but its scare tactics are sound, and its gimmickry is enough to stand out in a crowded genre neighborhood.

An annoying provocation with too little to say, a serious credibility deficit, a whiff of misandry, and a miscalculated, unseemly gusto for abusing its hero. Instead of having catharsis, the audience just gets had.

Despite the odd sharp observation, somehow J. Edgar comes off like the Max Fischer Players' production of Serpico...

A Rod Serling-esque social allegory for these days of economic collapse, environmental sea change, and increasing talk of 'end times.'

Spike Lee called 1992's Malcolm X 'the picture I was born to make,' and star Denzel Washington referred to the titular civil-rights leader as 'the role of a lifetime.' They're both right...

Perhaps the title sets an expectation Ken Kwapis’ movie can’t quite deliver.

If the mere mention of the blue-footed booby sends you into paroxysms, The Big Year is the film for you.

Intensely juvenile, casually sexist, and blatantly stupid in ways that few if any over the age of 'T for Teen' or bereft of a Y chromosome could enjoy.

Though it does thrill with intense, close-cropped action photography, swift editing, and vivid sound design, The Grey makes as much of an impression by being unexpectedly emotional.

The surprise every morning of when that face was finally on: it was somebody that wasn't me. You know, I never thought of how masculine or feminine she was.

Except as a tool for pediatric grief counseling, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close amounts to a fetishization of its own trappings (the boy, NYC, 9/11) more interested in Oscar than Oskar.

Finds Soderbergh keeping it simple, stupid, by filling the story's hollowness with kick-butt action and elements of style.

This fable of the disposable performer rising above his class transcends ordinary fiction to be an expressive visual record of the art of bullfighting: primal, brutal, repellent and magnetic in equal measure.

A stylish genre exercise...one might just as well say the L.A. story unfolds at the corner of Michael Mann and David Lynch.

Proof plays cleverly with the arcane mysteries of game theory, and if it's only a game, happily, it's one worthy of exhibition.

Condurache and Weisz’s 'small corrections' make a big difference in steering the movie right, enough to make The Whistleblower a decent entry in the genre of political passion plays.

[Faris] and Evans deserve better than a string of rom-com clichés, including the surprise date in a closed sports arena. Unless you’re Justin Beiber and Selena Gomez, it couldn’t happen to you.

A slow disintegration of the thin veneer of social niceties, revealing the human animalism underneath. Like Reza's equally popular Art, God of Carnage isn't as deep as it would have you believe, but both plays are catnip for actors.

50/50 isn’t interested in defeatism, except as one inevitable way station of the film’s appealing emotional ramble.

Oldman's mid-film music-video performance of 'My Way' before a neon staircase compares favorably—as a revelation of character through performance—to Robert De Niro's framing monologues in Raging Bull.

What Killer Elite never manages is to convince us of its sociopolitical import...or its emotional resonance.

While it's unspooling, it has enough visual snap, narrative tension, and humor for a satisfying 'drive-in movie' diversion.

An orgiastic celebration of Glee concocted by its own creators...sort of like the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, but with more hot air.

Shares with...Get Smart roughly the same ratio of silliness and satire, which is to say heavy on the former and light on the latter.

Justified remains one of the most satisfying hours on television, creating a illusion of the social margins of Southern life that's convincing enough that we want to believe in it.

The film's self-conscious gestures in the direction of fish-out-of-water comedies, buddy-cop movies and Westerns don't amount to much in and of themselves, but they tie together as a functional clothesline for character comedy and left-field drama.

A charmer in its gee-whiz, irony-light resuscitation of the movie serials of the '30s.