Farmiga has never been better than she is here. Rarely does she get to do comedy, and she and Clooney give Up in the Air's sustained air of engaging disengagement a heartbeat as well as a romantic charge.

Hardy is remarkable, however. This is an actor with a memorably expressive rasp of a voice, both blunt and musical.

Rock takes his Good Hair job as a documentarian seriously enough to be interesting, but not so seriously that the film groans with earnestness.

He could dance brilliantly right up to the end, it’s clear.This Is It may be a court documentary, but as a heavily lawyered portrait of an artist, it’s still pretty compelling.

Campbell’s film offers not surprises, exactly, but craftsmanship and low, brute, cunning satisfactions.

Doggedly, or rather wolfishly, the film doesn't go in for camp or mirth, at least until its misjudged and semi-endless wolf-on-wolf climax.

Damon is becoming one of the truest, most reliable actors of his generation. And Eastwood has more films in development, proving, at 79, that 79 is just a number like any other.

"Relief" is the word for it. It's a relief to see Robert De Niro giving an honest, effective starring performance in a project that does not stink and that, in fact, rises to a respectable level of filmmaking proficiency. How long has it been?

Stoopid fun, From Paris With Love doesn't do much for Paris or love, or your brain cells, but it flies like a crazed eagle on uppers and comes from the talented, propulsive schlocketeer Pierre Morel.

A nerve-racking noir from Australia.

What strikes me about the new Robin Hood, directed by Ridley Scott, is how its preoccupations and sensibilities lie almost precisely halfway between the derring-do of the 1938 film and the harsh revisionism of the '70s edition

She delivers a solid and easy star performance. Some young performers lack a relatable quality; Seyfried has it, even with those old-school, big-screen peepers.

The reason Just Wright works is simple. It finds ways to let familiar characters move around inside a familiar premise like living, breathing, likable human beings.

Garcia's calm, steady guidance behind the camera, along with his nicely finessed faith in a very good cast, makes Mother and Child a fuller and more satisfying example of this storytelling style than we've seen lately.

From director Ken Loach, England's longtime disciple of social realism, comes his most audience-friendly picture yet

Still, it's a pleasant surprise about an unpleasant guy brought to life by an ingratiating paradox, a movie star who has turned into a wily character man.

Extremely raunchy, Get Him to the Greek is also very funny

The way Lawrence captures a young woman's fear and resolve, often non-verbally, well … this is a considerable talent well on her way to a great career. It's for performances like this that moviegoers find themselves taking a chance on a title that doesn't have a fast-food tie-in.

Breathlessly paced bordering on manic, but propulsively entertaining.

A satisfying and movingly acted story.

Like the "Bourne" franchise to which Noyce's film is indebted, Salt is a combination of pursuit, evasion, name-clearing and a reversal or two.

The film is Nolan's labyrinth all the way, and it's gratifying to experience a summer movie with large visual ambitions and with nothing more or less on its mind than (as Shakespeare said) a dream that hath no bottom.

The interview sessions are all disastrous in one way or another; Let It Rain is at its wittiest when Michel flails around, grousing about his own divorce and child custody troubles without ever quite asking his interview subject an actual question

It boasts a generous exuberance and, as entertainment products go, it's surprisingly sweet.

At its best, Wright's film is raucous, impudent entertainment.

This movie's good. It's fast, deftly paced and funny.

So what is it? Primarily it's a showcase for Vincent Cassel, who dines out on the role and won a Cesar award (the Gallic Oscar) for his efforts.

I liked the movie mainly for Barrymore. The way she handles the crucial, early "I love you" moment (he's saying it to her, and the camera shows us what she's thinking), you think: This is one canny actress.

The funky, enjoyable Hamburg-set comedy Soul Kitchen is a celebration of co-writer-director Fatih Akin's home base, a spacious, moody city of apparently limitless industrial warehouse space - like Chicago.

Catfish is fascinating. At the same time, it emits a condescending, pitying odor.

The film is a success. It works. Greatness eludes it, yes. But greatness eludes almost every film adaptation of a major novel, which we must remember when confronted by a good one.

As pure, outlandish outlaw cinema it's undeniable.

The original was a very good thriller. The new one is simply a good one.

The result is both a success and a disappointment. It's Kind of a Funny Story, divided into neat little daylong chapters in Craig's stay, lacks the staying power and bittersweet layering of "Half Nelson" and "Sugar."

Genuinely odd in its mixture of bluntness and indirection, screenwriter Angus MacLachlan's study in biblical temptation is saved from its own heavy-handedness by a fine quartet of actors.

Demons of mediocrity, be gone! Here we have a shrewd sequel a touch better than the original.

With that kind of financial imperative it's something of a miracle the Potter films have been, on the whole, good. One or two, very good. One or two (the first two), less good. This one's good.

Surely the gentlest American film ever made about home-grown revolutionaries.

Bright and engaging, and blessed with two superb non-verbal non-human sidekicks, Tangled certainly is more like it.

Liman's sensibility isn't sophisticated enough to tease out the nuances of what must be a pretty interesting marriage; the movie is more about texture and surfaces and surface tensions.

The Dawn Treader doesn't so much reinvent the "Narnia" franchise as do what's needed, and expected, with a little more zip than the previous voyages.

Monsters is a sharp little low-fi monster movie operating from a tantalizing premise.

Its dramatic vexations are at war with Denis' prodigious visual skill. And the fight, ultimately, rewards the viewer.

The runaway train thriller Unstoppable is one of Tony Scott's better films.

It's relaxed without being sloppy, or patronizing, and in particular Witherspoon and Lemmon - sorry, make that Rudd - bring charm to burn.

The biggest change from the '69 "True Grit" is the best thing about this formidably well-crafted picture. Portis's narrator and heroine, 14-year-old Mattie Ross, runs the show this time, not the one-eyed marshal.

A small but, in its way, daring picture.

Rretains what made it work on stage, chiefly a disarming sense of humor amid the grimmest sort of personal crisis, and a pair of juicy leading roles.

It's Williams you never question, who makes every detail and close-up and impulse natural. She's spectacularly good.

For all the warmth emanating from the film's core, thanks to Broadbent and Sheen, I don't know if Leigh has ever made a crueler picture.

The acting's very strong throughout, though few would argue that the final half-hour satisfies either as suspense, or narrative, or social observation.

Modest in every way, the screenplay by Phil Johnston is enjoyable in the telling even when the details smack of contrivance.

Sleek and, until a stupidly violent climax, very entertaining, Unknown is the opposite of "Memento."

What's striking about the picture, I think, is its lack of violent threat.

Original, it's not. Exciting, it is. This jacked-up B-movie hybrid of "Black Hawk Down" and "War of the Worlds" is a modest but crafty triumph of tension over good sense and cliche.

Almost all of it works as wish-fulfillment fantasy.

I couldn't help but feel this adaptation needed more of the thing for which Jane herself yearns: a sense of freedom. At their best, though, Wasikowska and Fassbender hint at their well-worn characters' inner lives, which are complex, unruly and impervious to time.

The film offers plenty of good screen company along the way.

Source Code is a contraption, no doubt. But it works.

Nicely acted by all and photographed in creepy, cold, under-lit tones.

Potiche is very "Touch of Class" and "House Calls" in its comic vibe and trappings, and if you're old enough to remember those Glenda Jackson rom-coms, you'll probably respond favorably to Potiche.

The last 25 minutes of Thor aren't much better than the first. But that hour in between - tasty, funny, robustly acted - more than compensates.

The film works because the screenwriters, Elizabeth Hunter and Arlene Gibbs, have a knack for juggling a dozen-plus major characters without succumbing to the obvious class-warfare gags every 90 seconds.

Wiig's natural and savvy instincts to go easy, and let the audience come to her, serve her and Bridesmaids well.

Berge is a meticulous and intriguing host, though one gets the feeling he's relaying, very selectively, only so much of the messier side of his life with Saint Laurent. So be it.

Abrams knits together the ordinary stories of the mill town's inhabitants in a way that feels dramatic without showing their contrivances too obviously. And his casting of Courtney and Fanning was fortuitous, though Abrams' banter for the supporting kids grows tiresome in that "Goonies" way.

Those receptive to Godard's sense of humor will find Film Socialisme an elusive yet expansive provocation. Those less receptive will find it elusive, period.

Cleverly structured, Horrible Bosses works in spite of its cruder, scrotum-centric instincts.

I enjoy both Timberlake and Kunis; just this side of manic, they seem right together.

The component genre parts coexist, excitingly, without veering into camp or facetious desperation. Alien-invasion aficionados should be pleased. Western nostalgists may be pleasantly surprised. Fans of cowboys-versus-aliens movies, well, it's been a long wait and here's your movie.

While it's effects-heavy, the movie itself does not feel heavy. Consider it a fanciful extension of the recent and very fine documentary "Project Nim."

This sense of unruly behavior is mitigated, deliberately, by the gentleness and odd comic grace of July's presence and voice.

Davis is reason No. 1 the film extracted from Kathryn Stockett's 2009 best-seller improves on its source material.

Plenty gory, but graced by a jovial sense of humor and an enjoyably guts-centric use of 3-D.

It's sweet, and low-key. It's very '70s in its vibe, which helps when the script veers in and out of formula.

He's the anti-Michael Bay, the un-Roland Emmerich. No fake-documentary "realism" here; Soderbergh values the silence before the storm, or a hushed two-person encounter in which one or both parties are concealing something.

A rewardingly twisted hybrid of low-fi mumblecore and stylized thriller.

Scott Thomas can play these sorts of ice queens in her sleep, but I've long thought she's a more effective and nuanced performer in French-language projects than in English-language ones. The performance is laced with just enough wit to make it sting.

Some of it's schematic and on the nose. But the grace notes are what make 50/50 better than simply "good enough."

I would see The Ides of March again just for the way Jeffrey Wright takes command of the screen in the secondary role of a senator who is either a cipher, a sphinx, a two-faced sphinx, a lying sack of D.C. dung or a steely man of principle.

While I wish van Heijningen's Thing weren't quite so in lust with the '82 model, it works because it respects that basic premise. And it exhibits a little patience, doling out its ickiest, nastiest moments in ways that make them stick.

The films are not works of genius. They are, however, wily reminders of the virtues of restraint when you're out for a scare.

On the facile side, but it's well-crafted and smartly acted.

The film is an exercise in improbable contrasts. The more extreme the actions of the characters, the more contained and fastidious the director's technique.

For what it is - recessionary wish-fulfillment escapism, with a lot of highly skilled familiar faces in its amply qualified cast - it's fun.

It's entirely possible, maybe even inevitable, that Like Crazy will win over a good many moviegoers despite its bouts of semipreciousness. In the end, I was one of them.

I like the way DiCaprio and Hammer capture the little things - the byplay, the moments in which two men are "playing" FBI agents, partly for show, partly for real. At times, DiCaprio's macho posturing recalls a junior G-man version of Marlon Brando's self-hating homosexual in "Reflections of a Golden Eye."

The film is a river of pain, weirdly funny in places, as are all of Herzog's filmic essays.

At its best, though, The Muppets cuts back on the '80s-flashback self-consciousness and believes in the dream.

Rich and stimulating even when it wanders.

A tender and upbeat spirit informs the writing and the execution.

The most coldly compelling version yet of the tale dreamed up by the late Stieg Larsson.

Meryl Streep excels as Margaret Thatcher. And the movie itself does not work.

A lot of people have no use for Carnage, especially in its unapologetically hemmed-in film version. And yet there isn't a sloppily or casually considered shot in any of the 80 minutes.

In terms of its title, Haywire doesn't quite go there; it's more "Haywire-ish." But it's eccentric, and the on-screen violence is sharp and exciting - brutal without being either subhumanly sadistic or superhumanly ridiculous.

Call The Grey "Deliverance" Lite, with snow, and wolves. And call it a solid January surprise.

The film, a handsome nerve-jangler co-produced under the storied Hammer horror banner, amps up the scares without turning them into something completely stupid. Success!

Will The Innkeepers be enough for the young folk? These days there's little middle ground between the determined lack of gore in the "Paranormal Activity" franchise and the determined overabundance offered by so much else. West works in that No Man's Land, intelligently.