Movie Reviews

The new romance film "The Vow" suggests love means never having to say you can't remember your spouse's name.

The moon is made of tinkling gold stars – and you can reach it by climbing a ladder.

He must have joined "The Agency" with an eye toward excitement, exotic locales and danger.

Cast and crew err on the side of silly in "Journey 2: The Mysterious Island," the amusingly childish sequel to that unlikely 2008 hit "Journey to the Center of the Earth."

Daniel Radcliffe acquits himself reasonably well in his first adult big-screen role, a man haunted by "The Woman in Black."

Teenagers acquire superpowers and, being teenagers, shoot video of themselves as they learn what they can do in "Chronicle," an entertaining comic-book movie without the comic book.

There are stories that by their very nature force you to confront the possibility that people aren't entirely horrible.

"Man on a Ledge" doesn't aim high, but what it aims to do, it does. It grabs the audience's attention, engages its anxieties, stokes its resentments and, at the finish, sends people out saying, "That was good."

To say that "Albert Nobbs," starring Glenn Close as a woman passing as a man in 19th century Ireland, is a portrait of conflicted soul doesn't begin to touch the murky depths of the difficult character that is the pale center of this painful-to-watch film.

Spitting and stammering, clawing and convulsing, her jaw jutting forward and her eyes popping out of her head, Keira Knightley is a frightening force of nature in "A Dangerous Method."

"The Grey" yanked me upright in my seat. It is, even as melodramatic and sometimes implausible entertainment, the best studio movie in a long time.

"Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close" is a handsomely polished, thoughtfully wrapped Hollywood production about the national tragedy of 9/11 that seems to have forever redefined words like "unthinkable," "unforgivable," "catastrophic."

Despite stunning aerial scenes and good intentions, the George Lucas-produced "Red Tails" is grounded by clumsy dialogue, a meandering plot and the occasional jarring anachronism.

In Hollywood terms, "Carnage" is relatively tame violence-wise. A pet hamster may be in peril, a bunch of tulips get mauled and a cellphone gets abused, but that's pretty much it.

"The Flowers of War," a melodramatic tale of unlikely heroism set during the Japanese invasion of Nanking, is affecting at times but finally feels overblown and heavy-handed.

Steven Soderbergh is nothing if not versatile – a director who seems like he can do everything.

In "Shame," Steve McQueen's mournful portrait of an addict hitting rock bottom, Michael Fassbender plays a man committing suicide by accumulation, seeking self-annihilation through the compulsive pursuit of sex.

"Joyful Noise," sort of a "Glee!"-meets-gospel music choral competition musical, makes a pleasant enough racket.

That "tale as old as time, song as old as rhyme" returns to the screen, now in 3-D. But "Beauty and the Beast," the greatest animated film ever made and one of the screen's great musicals, hardly needs this sort of sprucing up.

There is far more softness than steel in "The Iron Lady," starring Meryl Streep as British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

Mark Wahlberg delivers the goods in "Contraband," a B-movie about smuggling in boozy, corrupt New Orleans.

The question at the heart of "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" is simplicity itself: Is there a Soviet secret agent at the very highest echelons of British intelligence?

"The Artist" is the wonder of the age, as much a miracle as "Avatar," though it comes at things from the totally opposite direction.

Steven Spielberg has made a pretty fair living over the decades making audiences cry. And the Oscar-winning director of "E.T.," "Schindler's List" and "Saving Private Ryan" isn't immune to that impulse, either.

Current films are reviewed each week to provide parents a guide to decide what may be appropriate to younger viewers.

Sometimes, reacting to a movie is all about the expectations you bring with you walking into it.

Buster Keaton isn't dead, he's alive and well in Finland, where under a new identity he pursues his own particular brand of deadpan absurdism to wonderful effect.

Filmmakers mess with viewers' childhood memories at their peril, so Steven Spielberg is taking a risk tackling Tintin.

Hollywood has commandeered Sweden's big literary export, "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo," without compromising the story's Scandinavian roots or its top-of-the-world, Seasonal Affective Disorder sense of barrenness, even hopelessness.

You probably knew someone like Mavis Gary in high school. If you didn't date her, then you most likely hated her. Beautiful, statuesque, popular, occasionally cruel and not unintelligent, girls like Mavis ruled the school – and seemed poised to rule the world.

When it's done right, as it is in "Young Adult," there is something absolutely mesmerizing about watching a train wreck unfold on screen. When the wreck in question is a narcissistic beauty played to scheming, sour, downward-spiraling perfection by Charlize Theron, cringing is definitely called for, but so is laughter.

Guy Ritchie's 2009 "Sherlock Holmes" might have sent the purists into fits of dismay, but at its core it was a creative, cleverly anachronistic premise: It reimagined Arthur Conan Doyle's dauntless, staunchly proper detective as the star of a contemporary Hollywood action blockbuster, complete with exploding fireballs, chockablock special effects and mixed martial arts fight sequences.

Luckily for Tom Cruise, "Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol" is one of his finest action flicks, just what's needed to potentially restore some of this fallen star's box office bankability.

Werner Herzog does something great reporters know how to do: He listens. He pays attention during conversation.

'Valentine's Day Redux" – or as it's officially known, "New Year's Eve" – purports to be about a night on which the "entire world comes together" to celebrate.

One more reason to hate the '80s: All the terrible comedies being made that pay homage to that vacuous decade.

Current films are reviewed each week to provide parents a guide to decide what may be appropriate to younger viewers.

The past two years, Hollywood has not exactly been a generous Santa Claus when it came to Christmas films.

Thelma Schoonmaker, Martin Scorsese's longtime editor, warmly greets a reporter outside their Manhattan offices ahead of a screening of Scorsese's new 3-D fairytale, "Hugo."

Adult fans of the Muppets try to get the gang back together to save their old theater.

Depression finally seems to have brought out the best in Lars von Trier: "Melancholia" is his strongest work in a while, a devastatingly beautiful, operatic mixture of all his signature themes and visual schemes.

George Clooney doesn't put a foot wrong except on purpose in "The Descendants," a pitch-perfect movie that threads a microscopically tiny needle between high comedy and devastating drama.

The big-screen revival of The Muppets, cleverly titled "The Muppets," is a generally charming exercise in nostalgia. The musical comedy whimsically and often cleverly revisits the characters, their shtick and the TV show and movies that made them most famous.

"Arthur Christmas" is a spirited, comically chaotic and adorably anarchic addition to the world's over- supply of holiday cartoons. It's very British, in other words – from its producers (Aardman, the folks who gave us "Wallace & Gromit") to its voice casting to the slang slung by the assorted Santas in this 3-D computer-animated farce.

Martin Scorsese's "Hugo" is a children's film for grown-ups – grown-up film buffs.

The exhilaration of first love and the pain of its denouement burst forth with aching tenderness in "Like Crazy," Drake Doremus' millennial- generation "Love Story," which took top honors at Sundance earlier this year and opens today at the Tower.

Let's get the bad stuff out of the way first: Taylor Lautner remains an unreliable, wildly uneven actor.

The prospect of writing a bad review of "Happy Feet Two" is about as appetizing as kicking a puppy.

In Clint Eastwood's new film, "J. Edgar," a 1930 movie theater audience makes its preference clear.