A bizarre buffet of buffoonery, brutality and beautiful landscapes.

Like Ernest Borgnine, Philip Seymour Hoffman is an unconventional leading man with an Oscar on his mantle, and his bittersweet Jack Goes Boating has elicited comparisons with "Marty."

Waiting for Superman raises important questions while wearing a big red heart on its chest, but inconvenient facts are its kryptonite.

Tangled is lovely to look at, but if you're not a pre-teen girl, you may be distracted by the split ends.

In skewering the neuroses of New York bohemians, Durham has left us too little to care about.

Successful in small doses, but the full regimen needed more testing.

It's a triumph of streamlined design, but TRON: Legacy never enters the fourth dimension where it's worth a plugged nickel to humans.

You would expect an epic with brains and hearts. Instead we settle for sturdy craft, with a stellar cast struggling to breathe life into the cold material.

The saving grace of Biutiful is Bardem.

Barney's Version has episodes instead of plot, outbursts instead of wit and alibis instead of growth.

It's pure speculation on the filmmakers' part that Gaelic pagans were adorned with bones, blue mud and Mohawks, but the fire-dancing spectacle is a welcome respite from the beefcake of the journey scenes.

On a minute-to-minute level, it's an engaging mystery, the kind that rewards our participation with eye candy and adrenaline shots. But when we pull back for an overview, we see that it's flat and that pieces are missing.

Hits most of the markers of a flashback film but not enough of the beats.

Director Dereck Joubert gleans a valuable thread that connects us to these endangered creatures.

Strikes an uneasy compromise between liberty and justice. It marches at an efficient pace, but there's too much collateral damage to believability.

It's a compelling tale of surf and survival.

Call it "On the Lakefront." Or "Pretty-Good Fellas."

Notwithstanding some allusions to "Lady and the Tramp," the characters and their comic high jinks are nothing special, but the the getaway gives us spectacular 3-D images of the city.

With its references to other properties in the Marvel universe and to classic tales of redemption, this no-surprises summer movie might appeal to those who've been bitten by radioactive spiders or the Shakespeare bug.

Canadian director Denis Villaneuve knows how to stoke a hot debate about the legacy of violence. But in this case, where there's smoke, there's not enough air.

L'amour fou means "crazy love," but we don't learn anything crazy about these devoted lovers.

X-Men: First Class is a mutant movie, half fun and half fearsome. For those who have developed an immunity to fanboy hype, the contradictory traits may seem to weaken rather than strengthen this beast, but readers of the "X-Men" comics will hail an origin story as satisfying as "Thor."

The moral lesson that this movie feeds us smells fishy - because it's not in the book. But the backbone story about a guy who inherits some penguins is enough to tickle the kids.

Yet notwithstanding its derivative dolefulness and PG-13 timidity, The Art of Getting By is smart and sweet enough to become the favorite film of some Midwestern adolescent who wrongly believes he's already seen the dark side.

Cars 2 is like a gorgeous sports car with a toxic tailpipe, a busted navigation system and a loud stereo that plays only commercials.

A serviceable behind-the-scenes tour documentary with about as much insight as a talk-show monologue.

A tearjerking romance that belongs to another era, when female moviegoers wanted to be transported, not grounded in grim realities.

Trollhunter has a lot of down time as the crew treks to the fjords, but it's also got dryly subversive humor and, eventually, some impressive special effects.