To Rome with Love

“To Rome With Love” is Woody Allen’s richest work in years, brimming with great ideas cleverly realized and chock-full of outsize laughs. It marks a welcome return to form for Woody after the mediocre “Midnight in Paris,” whose mass appeal lay primarily in the sort of name-dropping he lambastes here.

Brave

The Disney-Pixar collaboration “Brave” features the upstart’s first female protagonist, a willful Scottish mop of red hair named Princess Merida (Kelly Macdonald), whose mum (the redoubtable Emma Thompson) and pop (Billy Connolly) arrange for three lords’ buffoonish sons to battle for her hand but who has the gall to want to choose her own love, whoever (and whenever) ...it may be. Macdonald and Thompson are too good for the whiny back-and-forth between Merida and Queen Elinor, a mélange of Glaswegian and Encino Birmingham High. The plot takes a turn to the bizarre when a woodcarving witch (Julie Walters) spells Elinor into a bear, which leads to tiresome computer-generated animal fights set to AC radio-ready tracks. “Brave” is dark and short on humor and not much fun for kids or adults. It screens with the deserving animated-short Oscar nominee “La Luna.”

Gerhard Richter Painting, Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present

Gerhard Richter Painting

Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present

There is truth in advertising to the title of Corinna Belz’s documentary “Gerhard Richter Painting,” approximately two-thirds of which consists of uninterrupted, nearly silent tracking shots of the octogenarian painter in the studio, applying wide swaths of titanium white and lemon yellow... paint to rollers and to his trademark giant squeegee, with which he turns vivid, colorful paintings into harder, more abstract and scraped-off pieces. At least one critic has pooh-poohed these sequences as literally watching paint dry, but to me the rare sight of a master painter at work was the most interesting aspect of the film. Richter the man is much less so – despite some powerful emotional traumas in his past – and he doesn’t provide much useful insight into the artistic process or art in general.

Bonsai

The Chilean import "Bonsai" is the kind of movie you'd walk out of on an airplane - just for a change of scenery. It's the sort of arch, pseudo-intellectual picture in which the main characters talk about having read all seven volumes of Proust's "Remembrance of Things Past." Well, I'm here to tell you, I fucking hate Proust, and the only thing more soul-crushing than talking about reading "Remembrance" would be actually reading it. "Bonsai" is a literary romantic comedy that's more sexual than romantic, more detached and sardonic than genuinely amusing, and more interested in dropping literary names than exploring substantive themes. As I said of "The English Patient," it requires infinite patience for the sparest of pleasures.

Rock of Ages

Adam Shankman’s “Rock of Ages” keeps the streak alive: No good movie since “Aladdin” has relied for laughs on reaction shots from a monkey. Shankman has assembled a kitchen-sink cast for his affectionate homage to 80s hair metal, of whom approximately one (Mary J. Blige) can actually sing. The rest vary from barely passable (Catherine Zeta-Jones as the mayor’s wife, who’s intent on shutting down Sunset Strip, Tom Cruise as debauched rock god Stacee Jaxx) to unspeakable (Alec Baldwin as the proprietor of the Bourbon Room, Russell Brand as his lieutenant, Paul Giamatti as Jaxx’s venal agent).

Your Sister's Sister

Lynn Shelton’s “Your Sister’s Sister” is the best American feature film so far this year, an unexpected small treasure that delights you with its quietly perceptive emotional acuity and pitch-perfect humor.

Prometheus

The first, great-looking hour of the 3-D and IMAX-enhanced spectacle "Prometheus" had me sitting straight up in my seat, nerve endings fully engaged by director Ridley Scott's vision of cave paintings by early man, spanning continents and millennia, pointing to a distant planet that may hold the secret of the origin of humanity. The script adverts to several of the most fundamental questions of our existence, from natural selection to the existence vel non of a deity to whether we are fundamentally good or evil.