Burnt

“Burnt” is a cinematic grease fire, a food movie that starts sour and quickly turns rancid.

Aloha

Please tell me not every major American director will feel the need to decamp to Hawaii for a navel-gazing loll in the hammock.

American Sniper, The Gambler

American Sniper

The Gambler

War movies are not, as Daniel would say, my very favorite genre.

American Hustle

It's getting to be an annual tradition.

The Hangover Part III

While it doesn't approach the heights of hilarity and freshness attained by the original "Hangover," Part III of the trilogy delivers an unexpected number of big laughs.

The Place Beyond the Pines

As with director Derek Cianfrance’s previous picture, “Blue Valentine,” the whole of “The Place Beyond the Pines” is less than the sum of its parts.

Silver Linings Playbook

It’s uncanny how many of the truest and best movie moments are the quietest. Volume is so often a sign of desperation, of not having anything honest to say and so saying it louder. “Silver Linings Playbook” is above all a loud movie, full of hocking and shrying, carping and caterwauling – and false to the core. Plot, plot, two hours of churning, roiling plot – with situations too ridiculous even to think about, surprise twists that the densest viewers will have assumed from the beginning (the entire story arc, actually), and sketches of characters where the human beings are supposed to go.

The Words

"The Words" leaves you at a loss for words. There's nothing about it that's highly objectionable, but nothing about it that's particularly noteworthy. The script's structure has generated a fair amount of negative comment, but it's actually really simple: A celebrated author (Dennis Quaid) gives a reading from his new book, about a writer (Bradley Cooper) who finds a long-lost, anonymous manuscript that's several orders of magnitude better than his work. He palms it off as his own and becomes the darling of the literary world, only to be tracked down by an old man (Jeremy Irons in slab-thick makeup) who knows the real story. Zoe Saldana plays Cooper's wife, an offensively underwritten part; we know nothing about this woman except by relation to him and in reaction to him. (The same is true of the woman in the manuscript's love story.) None of the performances are especially fine or poor; the whole thing just sort of exists. Sometimes, when filmmakers think they have a prestige picture and don't (as is the case here), the effect can be vaguely embarrassing, but "The Words" is so pretty to look at you almost don't mind that it's as generic and insubstantial as its title.