Audiences smart and tough enough to seek the film out will have their own reward.

The key selling point is Bayona's ten-minute reenactment of the tidal wave and its carnage, which is brutal, visceral and without peer. His visual mastery is almost enough to make up for The Impossible's conventional final hour and the empty feeling of trying to find the point of this whole exercise.

On the Road is rich with evocative period atmosphere and anchored by a trio of compellingly lived-in performances from Sam Riley, Garrett Hedlund, and Kristen Stewart. Nevertheless, it's another staid adaptation that misses the forest for the trees and confuses people into thinking that some novels truly are "unfilmmable."

A sharp shock of a film in an Awards season very full of movies so noble they become immobile. It's wildly unlikely to get much love from the Academy, and that's fine-bluntly, it's too good for them. With its bloody stew of history and hysteria, action taken from movies and atrocities taken from fact, Django isn't just a movie only America could make-it's also a movie only America needs to.

For fans, this is exactly how the story of Jean Valjean's transformation from thief to saint should be delivered: smothered in bombast.

A competent period costume drama, this intimate character study is light as air - and probably more suited to Masterpiece Theatre than as a major theatrical release.

Apatow has drifted further and further from comedy with every film, but This is 40 is the first where he hasn't even bothered to write any jokes. Instead of snappy dialogue, we get lazy exchanges.

The Hobbit is just good enough to make you aware of how it could have been much, much better. If you take your kids-while shielding them from various nonhuman bad guys getting decapitated both repeatedly and, worse, bloodlessly-they'll have a good time. Bilbo Baggins' quest for adventure and Warner Bros' quest for cash will take him through three films. But your quest for epic, truly entertaining filmmaking will be more successful if you just stay home.

A crime saga cobbled together from scraps of genre predecessors, Deadfall's unbelievable silliness escalates at every turn.

Playing like a mash-up between "Enter the Void" and "The Raid," Day of Reckoning is an uncommonly assured slice of bargain bin cinema, as arresting to watch as it is impossible to comprehend.

A masterwork from a master filmmaker.

What Audiard has created here is nothing less than the rare combination of high art and beautiful filmmaking with visceral power and gut-level emotional reality - it's like a symphony of fists, or a brutal assault by angels.

And so, nearly four years since it rolled cameras, the sun rises on another Red Dawn, which supplements the irresponsibility of the original with an incompetency all its own.

One of the best kid's films of the year, full of delight and action and charm and comedy.

A "Good Evening" indeed at the movies.

It's not much, but adult audiences starved for mature entertainment should be counted on to investigate this flawed, if admittedly heartfelt, work.

Every frame of silent, lip-biting, pent-up tension in the series has been holding its breath for this -- a 600-minute soap opera suddenly exploding into a Grindhouse slasher.

The result is a masterpiece of moving pieces, a dizzying and obscenely beautiful film that boils down Tolstoy's text to its most basic elements by making literal the theater of high society.

This is not really a biopic of the great President as the title might indicate, but rather a fascinating, savvy look at the inner-workings of the political process and how things in the White House get - or don't get - done.

It's a real film, and a fun one, made with gonzo good humor and plenty of action from the opening brutal battle over which the sound of The Wu-Tang Clan's 1993 single "Shame on a N***a" roars.

Consider it a force in the Best Animated Film Oscar race.

With a sure-to-be-talked about performance by Sean Penn and the dueling themes of overcoming depression and revenge against Nazi atrocities, This Must Be The Place is anywhere BUT the place for moviegoers who aren't in the mood for something different.

Silent Hill: Revelation 3D is the nadir of senseless seasonal cinema. But while Bassett's film struggles to say anything coherently, it gets the most important message across perfectly well: "Do not go to Silent Hill!"

In 1994, 16-year-old surfer Jay Moriarity braved the biggest waves ever seen off the coast of Northern California. His biopic, Chasing Mavericks, gets that fact right but changes everything else about his life in order to bowl audiences over in a saccharine tsunami.

Fun Size isn't good enough to ascend to those John Hughesian ranks, and its small holiday window means it won't scarf much box office. But at least first time feature director Josh Schwartz can expect a minor slumber party hit on DVD.

Killing Them Softly tries hard - and succeeds - to be a film of the now with its political parallels right in front of us. Yet it's also an invisible companion to the dirty business at hand - and it is a business.

While director Sam Mendes, aided and abetted by a crack technical team, delivers big-screen action with panache and style, something about this Bond feels a little off.

Paranormal Activity 4 may mean more of the same, but in a modern horror landscape too often made up of equal parts of gore and boredom and resigned straight-to-video, it's a chiller designed to be seen in a crowded theater, and that alone makes it superior to its peers.