If Joaquin Phoenix, who plays a lovelorn bachelor in James Gray’s Two Lovers, were 12 years old, the movie might make a touching, if not noticeably fresh, romantic drama for tweens. Not that adults don’t nurse unhealthy crushes and regress madly under the pressure of hopeless infatuation, which might be…

The smirky, overbearing, and subliminally hostile romantic primer He’s Just Not That into You — which sold a regrettable two million copies when it was published in 2004 — seizes on some partial truths about the gender wars and blows them up into evolutionary gospel, as follows: Since cave-dwelling times,…

Back in the early 1980s, when I was a graduate student in Boston, a prominent professor I knew was accused of sexually harassing a female colleague. This man was a compulsive flirt who couldn’t get within feet of a woman without coming on to her, so I wasn’t altogether surprised…

With his blazing white coat and pig-pink ears, to say nothing of the zigzag of lightning cut into his flank, the eponymous canine lead of Disney’s lively new animated movie Bolt looks a little bit real and a whole lot not. That’s not a failure of craft: Goofy and sweet…

On a double bill with L.A. Confidential, Chinatown, or almost any film made after 1970 about institutional corruption in Los Angeles, Clint Eastwood’s Changeling, a period drama based on a 1928 Los Angeles missing-child case, would come off as faintly geezer-ish noir lite. As LAPD scandals go, the case of…

A young woman fights off her brutal husband; a gun goes off; a marble spins on the floor where a toddler sits unattended. From B-movie beginnings, The Secret Life of Bees, a family drama set in the civil-rights-era South, chugs along pleasantly like a television special tailored for the crossover…

Undersize lapdogs make me grumpy even when they don’t talk, wear pink booties, and shop Rodeo Drive. So I came to Beverly Hills Chihuahua with poison pen at the ready — only to be won over by the exuberant charms of Raja Gosnell’s comedy about a snobby, privileged Chihuahua named…

Those who believe that Jonathan Demme went all soft with Philadelphia and never recovered might not be reassured by his latest movie, an ensemble tale of family pathology gussied up with vérité camera work, world music, and improvising actors both trained and not. You can find the worst and the…

I’ve always enjoyed ABBA — not in that post-hoc, so-bad-it’s good hip way, but innocently, the way I like Phil Spector. To this day, howling along in my car to that echoing, cascading, heavily overdubbed wall of sound makes me feel like a member of some dippy but joyous cathedral…

Mike Myers likes ice hockey. He also likes Deepak Chopra, a little too much. So he pulled together a bit of hockey and a whole lot of Chopra and called it a plot. Building a movie around the efforts of an also-ran celebrity guru to sort out the internal politics…

Nothing snaps a child’s head around quite like a dying parent, especially when the parent is a cantankerous old sod like Arthur Morrison (Jim Broadbent), whose nominally adult son Blake (Colin Firth) still clings to childhood grievances. Directed by Anand Tucker with the same quiet tact he brought to Hilary…

By all means, gather up the little ones and take them to this perfectly pleasant, very good-looking, modestly funny, dispiritingly unoriginal variant on the nerd-with-a-dream recipe that’s been clobbered to death in animated films for at least a decade. Hectic as ever, Jack Black voices Po, a potbellied panda who’s…

Behold Adam Sandler, in a passable Israeli accent and outsize codpiece, as Zohan the Mossad superheavy: catching barbecue fish in his butt crack on a Tel Aviv beach, repelling bullets with his nostril, sculpting hand grenades into toy poodles for delighted Palestinian children while making mincemeat of an Arab terrorist…

Oh, please — spoiler alert? Fine, I won’t tell you whether Carrie Bradshaw ties the knot with Mr. Big, even though you’ve already seen that gown flying around on the web. Given the Sex and the City vibe, some fans might be more interested in whether the frock — which…

“Things never happen the same way twice.” Thus boometh Aslan the lion (Liam Neeson), alias the Son of God, briefly popping his computer-generated shaggy head into The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian to pep-talk a bunch of discouraged Brits into fighting the good fight again. As in life, so in…

Film noir and melodrama cast a long shadow over Ira Sachs’s look back at the rotting heart of the Fifties nuclear family, but his movie rarely breaks a sweat. Slow, deliberate, and russet to a fault, this quietly controlled chamber piece, based on a 1959 murder mystery by British writer…

Like most wannabe heroes of the eager-to-please teen comedy, poor little rich boy Charlie Bartlett (Anton Yelchin) is too charming by half and not nearly quirky enough. Expelled from his ritzy private school, our blazered hero soon finds himself dispatched to a public school by his desperate single mother (Hope…

No celebrity hairdresser should ever be allowed near Colin Farrell’s eyebrows with a tweezer. Black, fluffy, and gloriously unilateral, they still aren’t the prettiest things about In Bruges — that honor falls to the Belgian city itself, known for its scenic medieval turrets, bourgeois tedium, and unfavorable comparisons to Amsterdam…

Faithful in style and spirit to the award-winning novel by Brian Morton, Andrew Wagner’s wise, observant, and exquisitely tacit chamber piece complicates every May-December, academic-novel cliché. A mutually dependent relationship unfolds between Leonard Schiller (Frank Langella), an old-school writer of the Bellow-Roth-Howe generation of realists; and Heather (Six Feet Under’s…

Re-reading Ian McEwan’s Atonement last weekend, my first thought was: I hope to God that Joe Wright — whose broadly grinning Pride & Prejudice made a mess of Jane Austen two years ago — doesn’t screw up this wonderful novel about lust, love, loss, and what art can do to…