Movie Reviews

'The Dictator' quality falls between 'Borat' and 'Bruno' ✭✭ 1/2

For most of its quick and extremely dirty running time, the new Sacha Baron Cohen offender "The Dictator" wages war with itself, crude nonsense up against crude nonsense that's really funny. Then comes the golden ticket, the speech of speeches, the scene in which the fictional North African dictator General Admiral Haffaz Aladeen addresses a gathering in New York City, recanting his barbarous ways with a heartfelt confessional. Read more »

'What to Expect When You're Expecting' is unexpectedly sweet ✭✭ 1/2

Pregnancy book-turned-film provides some tender moments "What to Expect When You're Expecting"is a"Valentine's Day"take on impending parenthood. Assorted couples cope with pregnancies planned and unplanned, adoption, and the epic change that is coming to their lives. Read more »

Goldthwait satire 'God Bless America' takes a shotgun to pop culture ✭ 1/2

With rudeness, cruelty and self-absorption now universally heralded American attributes, with cynical political opportunists, unworthy "talents" and lowlifes dominating reality TV, the time is certainly right for a "Falling Down" remake. Read more »

Diane Keaton and Kevin Kline can't save messy 'Darling Companion' ✭ 1/2

Like Freeway, the lovable stray dog at the center of this very teary comedy, "Darling Companion"has lost its way. Even the marquee ensemble anchored by Diane Keaton, Dianne Wiest, Kevin Kline and Richard Jenkins is not enough to rescue this motley mutt of a movie. Read more »

'Dark Shadows' a not so after-school special ✭✭

TV show that boomer kids loved returns as a pricey but low-energy film Some of director Tim Burton's costume parties are livelier than others, and the new "Dark Shadows" — from the man who gave us "Edward Scissorhands," "Sweeney Todd," "Alice in Wonderland" and other chalkface-makeup spectaculars starring Johnny Depp — feels like a place-holder, a meandering first draft of an adaptation of the supernatural soap opera that ran on ABC-TV from 1966 to 1971. Read more »

Cast makes 'Best Exotic Marigold Hotel' shine ✭✭✭

A comedy-drama saved by the casting bell,"The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel" arranges for a tiptop collection of British character women and men to bring out the best in a pleasantly predictable story. Wait. Shouldn't that be "unhappily predictable"? Not always, folks: Some projects are better off going easy on the surprises, and concentrating on a reassuring level of actorly craft. Read more »

'Jiro Dreams of Sushi' not just another food flick ✭✭✭ 1/2

The world's premier sushi chef gets his moment in the spotlight There's so much drooly food porn on TV these days, it takes an exceptional subject to arrest our senses and hold our attention. Now 86, Jiro Ono — the world's premier sushi chef — is that subject. And the lovely little documentary “Jiro Dreams of Sushi” honors Ono while making his culinary creations of horse mackerel, squid, egg, halibut, fatty tuna, “medium” tuna, lean tuna and gizzard shad, served in his 10-seat Tokyo restaurant, look like the most wondrous mouthfuls of fish on rice on the planet. Read more »

Review: Jockey biopic 'The Cup' loses its way

Despite strong acting, director Simon Wincer's film gets mired in details in telling the dramatic story of jockey Damien Oliver's win at the 2002 Melbourne Cup. "The Cup," the true-life story of jockey Damien Oliver's miracle win atAustralia's2002 Melbourne Cup just a week after the death of his brother, is a tale of heart-wrenching tragedy and uplifting triumph that never quite hits its stride. Read more »

Review: Teen comedy 'Girl in Progress' is just that

A young girl (Cierra Ramirez) plots her own coming-of-age tale amid struggles with her single mom (Eva Mendes) in the shaky yet charismatic 'Girl in Progress.' As self-consciously precocious teens go, the high schooler at the center of"Girl in Progress"is an exceptionally contrived example. But contrivance is the engine of this young-adult comedy, which pretends to deconstruct storytelling clichés while never really transcending them. Read more »

Movie review: Trying for 'The Perfect Family' and falling short

The drama about the imperfect union between real life and Catholicism is earnest and filled with self-doubt. Kathleen Turner is its single saving grace. Earnest and filled with self-doubt, "The Perfect Family,"starring Kathleen Turner, is a darkly comic family drama about the imperfect union between real life and the rigors of Catholic doctrine. Read more »

The gang's all here in 'The Avengers' ✭✭✭

The culmination of everything ever written, produced or imagined in the known universe, or something like that,"The Avengers"bunches together Iron Man, Captain America, The Hulk, Thor, the leather-clad assassin Black Widow, the lethal archer Hawkeye and the superheroes’ one-eyed wrangler, Nick Fury, for 143 minutes of stylish mayhem in the service of defeating Thor’s malevolent brother, the god Loki, who hails from the interstellar world known as Asgard (access through wormhole only), and who yearns to conquer Earth with an all-powerful blue energy cube called the Tesseract. Read more »

'Monsieur Lazhar': Trauma, tenderness in a Canadian school ✭✭✭

We want our stories about schoolteachers to inspire us, just as we crave inspiring teachers. Read more »

'Damsels in Distress' creates a world of archly articulate nostalgia ✭✭✭

College is a strange, serendipitous time and place: Events, experiences, strangers come swooping into your life like birds of prey and before you know it you're carried off somewhere wholly new. In "Damsels in Distress," writer-director-cinematic dandy Whit Stillman's first feature since "The Last Days of Disco" (1998), all the key females are named after flowers. Read more »

'Kid With a Bike': Tale of troubled child told with deft directorial touch ✭✭✭ 1/2

Emotionally full to bursting, "The Kid With a Bike"comes from Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Belgian brothers and masters of poetic realism whose movies, as they unfold, have the knack of fooling an audience that the artistry must've been easy to achieve. But think about it. How many so-called slices of life have ended up lifeless — death by earnestness — on screen? Read more »

'Five-Year Engagement': Engaging rom-com worth an 'I do' ✭✭✭ 1/2

A lot of terrible romantic comedies come along in a given year, and after five or six you begin to question your belief in anything — romance, comedy, movies, even terribleness itself. Before you know it you're trying to break the fever and hit bottom, deliberately, with repeated viewings of films co-starring either Katherine Heigl or Gerard Butler or, worse, their near-lethal joint effort, the Yugo of rom-coms: "The Ugly Truth." Read more »

When it comes to action, Statham's a 'Safe' bet ✭✭ 1/2

His Awesomeness, Jason Statham, has let it be known that he chooses his films based on the fight choreographer the producers hire. Often as not, that blows up in his face. Why else would the Human Bullet from Britain end up in dogs such as "War," "Transporter 3" and "Death Race"? Read more »

'The Raven': Once upon a drama, dreary ✭✭

Quoth the raven: "Eh." Read more »

With 'The Pirates! Band of Misfits,' the treasure's in the details ✭✭✭

Maniacally inventive and tightly packed, if not overpacked, "The Pirates! Band of Misfits" comes from the Aardman animation folks behind Wallace & Gromit, "Chicken Run" and, more recently, "Arthur Christmas." Their latest may be easier to admire than to love; it's more tone-funny and incidental-muttered-aside funny than, for example, your average DreamWorks smash, where every other comic beat ends with a cartoon animal getting bashed in the nethers and then quoting some inappropriate gangster movie. Read more »

'Footnote' mines scholarly intrigue ✭✭✭ 1/2

The deadpan world of Talmudic scholars sets the stage for brilliance A terrific deadpan chronicle of father and son Talmudic scholars beset by an escalating bureaucratic screw-up, Joseph Cedar's" Footnote" sets the tone for the battles to come in its opening sequence. Read more »

'Chimpanzee': Disney's in the swing with chimp's jungle tale ✭✭✭

Disney's 2012 movie offering for Earth Day is a gorgeous and technically dazzling look inside the world of chimpanzees — their use of tools, their nurturing instincts, their means of organization during fights and hunts for smaller monkeys, which they sometimes eat. Read more »

Steve Harvey's relationship rules come to amusing life in 'Think Like a Man' ✭✭✭

Relaxed yet lively, the byplay in "Think Like a Man" has some of the spark of director Tim Story's "Barbershop" a decade ago. The movie may be the very definition of contrivance, coming as it does from the blithely sexist relationship guide "Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man," co-written by radio host and comedian Steve Harvey. Considering its source, though, one of the more unpromising comedies of the year has turned out ... pretty funny. Read more »

'The Lucky One': Nicholas Sparks extends the bland ✭✭

You don't need a message in a bottle to get the word out: Author Nicholas Sparks knows his audience. Conservative moviegoers (along with plenty of centrists and liberals) take to the latest Sparks adaptation, gratefully. They know they're not going to get roughed up in terms of content, or ideologically insulted: Sparks writes best-sellers that treat military personnel with respect, churchgoing Christians likewise and red state backdrops with fond, photogenic care. Read more »

'Cabin in the Woods' provides snark and scares ✭✭ 1/2

'Buffy' alumni craft a horror homage with power to surprise A peppy horror mash-up with existential airs, "The Cabin in the Woods"goes completely nuts in its final half-hour and is all the better for it. Writers lie about this sort of thing constantly, but according to screenwriters Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard, who cut their eyeteeth on "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" among other credits, the script came together in three days, in the spirit of "Let's try that too." Read more »

Stand-up doc 'Bully' is more than a sum of its parts ✭✭✭

There are a hundred reasons "Bully"is a good film instead of a great one, but Lee Hirsch's blood-boiling documentary will very likely end up doing more than its share of good in this world. Read more »

Gamers will get a kick from maniacal 'Raid: Redemption' ✭✭ 1/2

Gamers will be slain, over and over, by the insanely violent multilevel bash "The Raid: Redemption," in which a skeezy 15-story tenement complex serves as the setting for a series of stabbings, slicings and a showcase for the Indonesian martial art known as Pencak Silat. Read more »

Nyuks outnumber laughs in 'Three Stooges' ✭✭

Moe, Larry, Curly return in a comedy long on pathos and violence Both sincerely affectionate and a tad eerie, the Farrelly brothers'"The Three Stooges"wonders what it'd be like to arm the most violent comedians of the 20th century with their familiar implements of comic torture against a modern-day setting, where sadistic slapstick has become as common as an unfunny "Hangover" sequel. Read more »

'Lockout': Space prison mayhem both vicious and silly ✭

Deep space isn't big enough to contain Guy Pearce, his impudent lock-jawed smirk and the deliriously cruddy "Lockout," set in 2079, a time when Zippo lighters will still be used with impunity, because who doesn't like that snappy click they make when you flick the lid open or shut? Read more »

'Blue Like Jazz' riffs in a shallow way ✭✭

The movies haven't shown much grace when dealing with matters of faith in recent decades. Hollywood steers clear of the subject altogether, and faith-based filmmakers tend to eschew reality to avoid letting their movies become too "edgy." Read more »

'Titanic 3D' a tale that never lets go ✭✭✭ 1/2

New 3-D secondary to a film that continues to transcend its script The ship so nice they sank it twice, the RMS Titanic has resurfaced from the icy depths of the Atlantic only to be subjected to a second dunking, this time with a 3-D up-charge, under the stewardship of Capt. James Cameron, master and commander. Read more »

This 'American Reunion' saves the best for last ✭✭

Sweeping aside the film's weirdest unasked question — who goes to their 13th high school reunion? — the characters created by Adam Herz for the 1999 hit "American Pie" return for a rather tired sequel called "American Reunion," in which poor, desperate Jim Levenstein's genitals once again get their ears boxed (metaphorically speaking), and Stifler's way with nubile 17-year-olds doesn't seem quite as obnoxiously sprightly as it once did, given that Stifler is now supposed to be in his early 30s and the actor, Seann William Scott, is 35. Read more »

'Coriolanus' on board with Fiennes' Bard -- 3 1/2 stars

Shakespeare's difficult work translates well to modern times With great power comes great responsibility, but powerful men often make for lousy, irresponsible politicians. (Insert personal observations on certain presidential candidates here.) With "Coriolanus,"one of William Shakespeare's toughest, most provocative studies in statesmanship, the dramatist created a tragedy (premiering in 1608) built upon the life of a fifth century B.C. warrior who, whether by excess of pride or by stubborn humility or an all-too-human mixture of both, had an infernal time adjusting to life off the battlefield. Read more »

Movie review: In 'Mirror Mirror,' Snow White is fair and tough

Julia Roberts shines as the jealous Queen and director Tarsem Singh injects some toughness into Snow White, played by Lily Collins. Encased in a coffin, waiting to be brought back to life: That's how Snow White spends a good portion of the folk story that bears her name. There's no such downtime for the princess in the snappy retelling "Mirror Mirror," a fractured fairy tale that occupies the divide between Disney and Grimm. Read more »

'Salmon Fishing in the Yemen' a pleasant adaptation without much meaning ✭✭ 1/2

Aggressively pleasant, the British comedy "Salmon Fishing in the Yemen"stars Ewan McGregor as Alfred Jones, a tightly wrapped Scottish fisheries expert pulled into a sheik-financed project to introduce salmon fishing to the Yemen Highlands, a long way from the land of plaid. Read more »

Madonna's 'W.E.' all dressed up, going nowhere -- ✭ 1/2

They split in 2008, but apparently Madonna stayed married to director Guy Ritchie just long enough to absorb his most grating cinematic instincts — shooting in every style, in an addled, shuffle-mode, falsely glamorizing way until all is chaos. And, astonishingly, boredom. Read more »

'The Hunger Games' adaptation hits the target ✭✭✭

The hypocrisy at the heart of "The Hunger Games" is irresistible. Novelist Suzanne Collins, whose trilogy has been decreed "awesome" by, among others, my 5th grade son, indicts violence and organized brutality as tools of mass-audience manipulation. Yet "The Hunger Games" wouldn't have gotten very far without its steady supply of threatened or actual gladiatorial teen-on-teen bloodshed: death by arrow, javelin, genetically engineered wasp, plus knives. And land mines. And fearsome dogs, conjured by the dogs of the totalitarian state. Read more »

More movie, less message would have helped 'October Baby' ✭ 1/2

It's ironic that the studio founded by the son of Hollywood pioneer Samuel Goldwyn should be the one releasing "October Baby." Apparently, the acquisitions department never took to heart one of Goldwyn the elder's most famous Goldwynisms: Read more »

'21 Jump Street' takes hilarious look back with Jonah Hill, Channing Tatum ✭✭✭

Most of the big laughs in "21 Jump Street"arrive in the first half, but take a moment to consider that phrase "big laughs." What was the last stupid Hollywood comedy — good-stupid, not stupid-stupid — to offer actual, audible, verifiable big laughs? Read more »

'Casa de mi Padre': Will Ferrell spoof misses something in the translation ✭✭

Riding on fourth-fifths of a joke, the Spanish-language telenovela spoof "Casa de mi Padre" stars a raven-haired, straight-faced Will Ferrell as a naive Mexican rancher, brother of a skeezoid drug trafficker played by Diego Luna. Read more »

'Jeff Who Lives at Home' a dreamy slacker who's looking for a sign or two ✭✭✭ 1/2

"Jeff, Who Lives at Home" could be just another quirky, abrasive and unconventional relationship comedy from the Duplass Brothers, the fellows who gave us "The Puffy Chair" and last year's "Cyrus." It starts with the assertion — by Jeff (Jason Segel), the title character — that "everyone and everything is interconnected in this universe." You know, he says, like that life-altering (and daft) M. Night Shyamalan movie "Signs," a film that's become Jeff's obsession. Read more »

'Being Flynn' a microbudget labor of love

Opening today, "Being Flynn"is the un-"John Carter."It is small and prickly, not large and Martian. Writer-director Paul Weitz, whose credits include the very good "About a Boy" and "In Good Company," shot his adaptation of Nick Flynn's memoir (which had a different, family-newspaper-hostile title) in five weeks on very little money. Read more »

There's fun to be had in 'John Carter,' but it's swamped by details ✭✭

Set on Earth and Mars, the new science-fiction bash "John Carter"isn't much — or rather, it's too much and not enough in weird, clumpy combinations — but it is a curious sort of blur. And it was directed by Andrew Stanton, making his live-action feature debut after the Pixar successes he helmed,"Finding Nemo" and the splendid "Wall•E." Read more »

Let us never speak of 'A Thousand Words' again ✭

The problem with Eddie Murphy? It is not a problem of talent, or fearlessness. He has plenty of both. But in "A Thousand Words," shot back in 2008 and now available for your viewing displeasure, he's a first-rate talent stuck in yet another third-rate piece of blech, written by Steve Koren, who shoveled us the Adam Sandler leavings "Click" and "Jack and Jill," and directed by frequent Murphy collaborator Brian Robbins, whose resume includes "Norbit" and "Meet Dave." Read more »

Cast and potential audience grow, but plot predictable in Westfeldt's 'Friends With Kids' ✭✭

When an idiosyncratic talent seeks a wider audience for her work, there's a danger in trading the offbeat for something more on-the-nose. This is what has happened in"Friends With Kids,"a smooth but frustrating third feature with an extremely good ensemble cast. Read more »

Iranian Oscar nominee Farhadi offers riddles without answers in 'A Separation' -- 4 stars

Some films wear their artistry so lightly they appear simply to be happening, the inner workings of the story guided by an unseen hand. In "A Separation," the stunning drama from Iran and the foreign-language awards contender of the season, the hand belongs to writer-director Asghar Farhadi, making his fifth feature since 2003. Read more »

'Silent House': Horror remake retains scares, doesn't need logic ✭✭ 1/2

A horror movie that works cuts through analysis, shrugs off opinions and snobbery, and eschews complexity — either in technique or in budget. You know it works when the hairs on the back of your neck rise. You know it works when others in the audience — as if moved by the spirit — talk back to the screen. Read more »

'The Lorax' gets the look right, but Dr. Seuss book's heart gets short shrift ✭✭

The new animated feature "The Lorax,"known in its entirety as "Dr. Seuss' The Lorax" to keep it straight from "John Grisham's The Lorax," does a few smaller things right but the bigger things not quite. I've come to fear these movies. I love Seuss so much, even his second-shelf works. Who doesn't feel protective of authors and illustrators they love? And not just because we were young when we made their acquaintance. Read more »

'Project X' like 'The Hangover' for teens -- and just as sensitive ✭✭

"Project X"is the movie equivalent of that good-looking, well-off teenage boy your gut tells you to keep away from your teenage daughter. Something sets off the warning bells — that he has lost his mind to his hormones, that he objectifies women in the worst way, that he's too casual with the homophobic slurs. Read more »

Police story charts a slide downhill for a rogue cop in 'Rampart' ✭✭✭ 1/2

"Rampart" patrols some familiar streets, but this jarringly intimate study of a dirty Los Angeles cop sliding, crazily, down the drain has a distinctive new-cliche smell, pungent and alive. The story, which is more about observation than propulsion, suits what interests the filmmakers most: the scary charisma and dazzling hubris of Officer Dave Brown, played with wholehearted ferocity by Woody Harrelson. Read more »

'Pina': 3-D accompanies dance, beautifully -- 4 stars

In "Cave of Forgotten Dreams," director Werner Herzog explored the Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc caverns of southern France, using a 3-D camera. The movie was quiet but magnificent. Now another director, Wim Wenders, has turned a 3-D camera on a similarly exotic and unlikely subject: the dancers of northwestern Germany's Tanztheater Wuppertal, colleagues of the late German dance-theater choreographer Pina Bausch. Read more »

Movie review: 'Gone'

Amanda Seyfried stars in a listless would-be thriller that never generates any suspense or energy. The title of the somnolent new thriller "Gone" may be generic, but it packs plenty of information about the movie into its lone word. Read more »

Paul Rudd's riffing can't save 'Wanderlust' ✭ 1/2

Paul Rudd stands in front of a bathroom vanity and riffs a string of vulgar, not-very-funny euphemisms for the intercourse he plans to have with Malin Akerman's character in an outtake that's part of the closing credits of "Wanderlust." It's a part of the process with any Judd Apatow production — raunchy, riffy runs, comic actors firing away in an effort to top each other and what's in the script. Apatow's ethos: "The funniest line wins." Read more »

Recruiting tool wrestles with its gamelike focus in 'Act of Valor'

Made with or without U.S. Department of Defense cooperation, fictional films about the American military favor narratives in which (mostly) men buck authority, risk their necks in bouts of jealous infighting and go the lone-wolf route in pursuit of the enemy. Read more »

'Secret World of Arrietty': An animation style worth borrowing ✭✭✭ 1/2

Builds on the success of 'Ponyo,' 'Howl's Moving Castle' for Studio Ghibli Compared to so much American animation, which seems hellbent on putting a global audience of addled kids in a paradoxical manic stupor, the work ofJapan's Studio Ghibli sets its own pace, establishes its own, meticulously observed realms of the fantastic and respects a moviegoer's senses — any moviegoer's, of any age. Read more »

'This Means War': Witherspoon in the middle of spy vs. spy vs. sense ✭

Some movies nimbly match romance, violence. Not this one. In "This Means War,"the CIA operatives played by Chris Pine and Tom Hardy fall for the same woman, a consumer products tester played by Reese Witherspoon. At first the boys agree to let the best agent win, seduction-wise, while Witherspoon's Lauren puzzles through her feelings regarding her suitors, whom she believes to be a cruise ship captain and a travel agent, respectively. Read more »

'Safe House' a bumpy ride, with Denzel in the driver's seat -- ✭✭ 1/2

Early on in the derivative but fairly absorbing blur titled "Safe House,"set in Cape Town, South Africa, Denzel Washington's Tobin Frost, a spy in from the cold, is brought to a Central Intelligence Agency safe house so that he can be asked a few questions about the super-secret intel he has in his possession. Wordlessly, Washington sits in a chair, as a supporting player (Robert Patrick) prepares for the waterboarding, and in one five-second progression Washington smiles, drops his head, lifts it back up — and his face has morphed into that of a man who has killed and will be killing again very soon. Read more »

'The Vow': Foggy on everything but the feelings -- ✭✭ 1/2

Two new products — and that's what they are — at the movies this week present packages of nearly identical quality (eh), transcended by their respective top-billed stars who happen also to be excellent, crud-elevating actors. This is an excellent skill to hone if you're both an actor and a star, because a significant portion of most careers is spent elevating crud. Read more »

'Journey 2' gets wasted in paradise -- ✭ 1/2

Sequel squanders Verne adventures, Hawaiian backdrops In its own sweetly bombastic way, the 2008 remake of "Journey to the Center of the Earth" did the job, the job being a 21st-century 3-D bash starring Brendan Fraser — an actor who gives his all to the green screen, every time — and loosely based on the 19th-century Jules Verne adventure, a natural for the movies. Its script proceeded from the idea that Verne, science fiction visionary, was in reality writing about real places and genuine fantastic phenomena only disguised as fiction. Read more »

'Chronicle' offers some fantastic action in found footage -- 3 stars

Teenagers acquire super powers and, being teenagers, videotape themselves as they learn what they can do in"Chronicle,"an entertaining comic-book movie without the comic book. Read more »

Big surprise: Whale tale 'Big Miracle' is a winner -- 3 stars

The success of last year's "Dolphin Tale"proved this theorem: Imperiled marine animals plus true-ish story plus workmanlike sincerity plus happy ending equals a hit. Will the equation hold for director Ken Kwapis' whale movie"Big Miracle"? Read more »

'The Grey' a Liam Neeson howler, in a good way -- 3 stars

The title "8 Million Ways to Die" was already taken, so "The Grey" had to settle for "The Grey," named for the plus-size wolves waging war on the desperate human survivors of an Alaskan wilderness plane crash. Tough situation. Frostbite. Wolf bite. Drowning. Falling from great heights. Harsh outcomes abound for both man and beast. Read more »

'Albert Nobbs': 2 performers triumph in gender masquerade -- 2 1/2 stars

"Such a kind little man," coos the bustling owner of a quaint 19th-century Dublin hotel, regarding her most sphinxlike waiter, the servant played by Glenn Close. Read more »

'Man on a Ledge': Myriad improbabilities ground this heist film -- 2 stars

A man edges along the 21st-story ledge of a midtown New York City hotel. He's an ex-cop and a convicted thief on the lam, straight out of Sing Sing, and he's threatening suicide. Sam Worthington, of"Avatar" and"Clash of the Titans," plays this character, Nick Cassidy, and it is odd to see Worthington on a precipice without winged beasts or blue friendlies buzzing about his head. The only thing buzzing in "Man on a Ledge" are little gnats of narrative improbability. Read more »

'Haywire': Heroine Gina Carano can kick it, and hard — 3 stars

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. Read more »

'Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close': Post-9/11 film milks viewer emotions with impunity -- 1 1/2 stars

"Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close" transforms the carnage and unruly grief of Sept. 11, 2001, known to its preteen Upper West Side Manhattan protagonist as "The Worst Day," into an occasion for interborough healing and emotional encounters of the cheapest kind. If actors this good cannot overcome their material, then we can only say: Tom Hanks, Sandra Bullock … Max von Sydow, Zoe Caldwell, Viola Davis, Jeffrey Wright, John Goodman… thanks for your honest efforts in the service of a fundamentally dishonest weepie. Read more »

Heroism loses to Hollywood in 'Red Tails' — 2 stars

"Red Tails"squanders a great subject, reducing the real-life struggles and fierce heroics of the Tuskegee Airmen to rickety cliche. Some of the action is fun. But if something about that statement doesn't sound right, well, there's your chief problem with "Red Tails." It sets out to ingratiate without provocation or complexity. Read more »

'Iron Lady': Meryl Streep's exacting performance buoys an offbeat biopic -- 3 stars

Some movies arrive pre-stamped with a consensus opinion. With "The Iron Lady" the consensus so far is this: Meryl Streep excels as Margaret Thatcher. And the movie itself does not work. Read more »

'Joyful Noise': Dolly and the Queen make familiar music — 2 stars

Assembled from spare parts of "Footloose" and "Sister Act," the serviceable gospel contraption "Joyful Noise" takes place in an economically hard-hit Georgia town, where the multiracial members of the Divinity Church Choir raise voices and spirits under the direction of their beloved choirmaster, played by Kris Kristofferson. We see him in action in church in the opening credits, though he suffers a heart attack well before "written and directed by Todd Graff" hits the screen. He's dead within seconds. Graff, who made "Camp" and "Bandslam," has a lot of plot to wrangle, and he does not waste time. Read more »

'Contraband': Intriguing personalities animate a so-so remake — 2 1/2 stars

Playing a reformed cargo smuggler sucked back into the game, Mark Wahlberg is the star of "Contraband," a fairly entertaining remake of the 2008 Icelandic thriller "Reykjavik-Rotterdam." And a reliable star he is. Audiences develop relationships with actors over time, through good scripts and bad; this one's neither good nor bad, exactly. But Wahlberg has the presence, the glower and the laconic line readings to guide us through a mess of pain, painlessly. Read more »

'Carnage': Four parents simmer and boil over in a New York apartment — 3 stars

Filming a play usually means making it less hermetic by "opening up the action," allowing the characters to take their dialogue for a walk, or a drive — something conventionally cinematic. Read more »

'The Devil Inside' review: Any actual horror seemingly exorcised

Tired faux documentary 'footage' and poorly executed exorcism scenes are just a few of the problems 'The Devil Inside' can't shake. People of the world: If you find some footage, leave it be. You will likely be doing the rest of us a huge favor. "The Devil Inside" is the latest in the apparently endless supply of "found footage" fake documentaries that present themselves as cobbled together from the artifacts of a hapless filmmaker on an especially doomed project. Read more »