Disney knows how to bewitch a crowd, but the sense that Tangled was made more by corporate mandate than artistic spark remains constant throughout.

Tediousness sets in eventually; there's only so much zoological abyss-gazing one can do.

Fincher's film tips much more in the indulging direction of crowd Comic-Con - delighting the franchise junkie above all other considerations.

Yet it still works like gangbusters - tears will be stifled by the end of the sibling vs. sibling finale - and most of the credit should go to Hardy, Nolte and Edgerton.

The true soulfulness of Sendak’s parable never emerges.

Inventive yet exhausting tale of two circus clowns.

Such a feature-length bludgeoning, even in the service of basic social and scientific literacy, is truly discomfiting.

The film lurches through narrative incidents: Battle scenes, political intrigue and a ticking-time-bomb love triangle are all pitched at the level of mundane competence and rarely get the blood racing.

Spelling may not be Quentin Tarantino’s forte, but his grasp of language (both verbal and visual) is peerless.

The stylistic conceit of keeping us entirely with the clones (so that we are as ill-informed as they are and never get to meet their powerful oppressors) only reveals what an empty-headed abstraction this tale was from both page and frame one

Cage is not quite Aguirre or Fitzcarraldo in the Big Easy. But his performance hits all the right mythopoetic beats, rising above the thin script and late-night-cable aesthetic.

Tony Scott almost wins us over with this fun thrill ride.

This isn't the NASCAR-fellating cash grab that is the Cars franchise, but it's still Pixar on preachy autopilot.

The doc’s breakout star is Vogue creative director Grace Coddington, a former model whose plain appearance (the end result of a horrible car accident) and frumpy clothing belie her genius for fashion. She counters her boss every chance she can get and provides the film with a much-needed emotional center.

Anna Wintour? Feh! There never was, and never will be, a style icon quite like Diana Vreeland.

Puzzling and provocative, Alps has a lingering power and an effect that is thrillingly difficult to define.

Though it holds your attention all the way through to an enigmatic, spiritually tinged climax, the movie leaves you wanting more than the Vega Vidals' secondhand artistry is able to provide.

First-time director Josh Trank, working from a taut script by Max "Son of John" Landis, indulges in some wild, witty spectacle, but he's equally adept with the tale's grimmer elements, especially when the introverted Andrew unleashes his inner Magneto and uses the city of Seattle as his tear-it-apart emotional playground.

It would be a Christmas miracle save for one lump of coal: an ear-shattering Justin Bieber song over the end credits. Gotta sell something to the kids at Yuletide.

The film isn't blinded by Candy's beauty and celebrity; it digs critically, if still empathetically, beneath.

The longer this "Abbott and Costello's Lethal Weapon" goes on, the more the fun dissipates - until a queasily violent climax, which, naturally, fully embraces genre stereotypes rather than dismantling them.

It's supremely annoying to see the ups and downs of romance reduced to archer-than-arch line readings and bloodless mortal kombat. What's more frustrating is that the film, adapted from Bryan Lee O'Malley's popular comic, is an endless visual delight.

It's especially disappointing when the story takes an inevitable turn to starry-eyed mush, dulling the sharp satire of the crazy, stupid ins and outs of romantic entanglement with an unconvincingly saccharine one-true-love-for-all moral.

It almost becomes comical to count the number of "who's holding the camera now?" reverse shots that the filmmaker haphazardly inserts to propel the story forward. Such visual ineptitude, like much else in this tediously cocky enterprise, is downright criminal.

The laughs are purely surface; the film's women's-lib pretensions seem grafted on as if to lend significance to a story that would benefit from a lighter, less cerebral touch. Still, it's hard to resist La Deneuve's charms.

This lifelong Tintin fan was more than pleased, even while having to acknowledge that the movie lacks the subtle state-of-the-world commentary that Hergé often smuggled into his creation.

Mostly though, it feels like we're watching a superficial gloss on Goodman's CV rather than a probing interrogation of his legacy. For the choir only.

The troubling turns the story takes, which are meant as a rebuke to happily-ever-after stereotypes, are much more interesting in conception than they are in execution.