The Watch

Sometimes when a movie has a 15% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, yet 70% of the audience likes it, it’s the critics who are wrong. That’s the case with “The Watch,” a critical punching bag for 20th Century Fox that happens to have a lot of the biggest out-loud laughs of the year. The movie stars Ben Stiller as Evan, a Glenview, Ohio Costco manager and do-gooder about town who forms a neighborhood watch after a Mexican employee is mysteriously killed the night after he earns his U.S. citizenship.

The Queen of Versalles, Wagner's Dream

The Queen of Versalles

Wagner's Dream

“Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people.” – Eleanor Roosevelt

After seeing the hit documentary “The Queen of Versailles,” about timeshare king David Siegel and his trophy wife, Jackie, a former Mrs. Florida, you may feel the way you do after wasting a Sunday in bed with a pint of Haagen-Dazs Chocolate Peanut Butter, watching an E! True Hollywood Story and a marathon of “The Girls Next Door.” (You do know that feeling, don’t you?)

Searching for Sugar Man

One of the great, rare joys of going to the movies is the delightful sensation of being surprised, even once but sometimes several times, by the changes in direction a story takes. Such is the case with the mind-blowing documentary “Searching for Sugar Man.” It’s best to enter as I did, knowing little or nothing about a shy, mysterious, black-clad singer named Rodriguez, who released two albums in the early 1970s that garnered favorable comparisons to Bob Dylan, then disappeared from the world.

Dark Horse

Time has passed by the hateful and deeply unfunny director Todd Solondz. The festering misanthropy of his debut feature, “Welcome to the Dollhouse,” has curdled and coagulated into something truly rancid and devoid of laughs. Jordan Gelber plays Abe, a hapless loser, approaching 40, who works for his father (Christopher Walken, catatonic) and lives with Dad and Mom... (Mia Farrow, who’s still done nothing of value since leaving Woody) in the bedroom of his childhood, now a shrine to ThunderCats merchandise.

Ruby Sparks

The objectification of women is not only the theme of the ludicrous and dreary romcom “Ruby Sparks” but its sustaining vision. Paul Dano, the most mannered and false young actor working in Hollywood, plays the vaguely antisocial author Calvin Weir-Field, whose first novel evoked comparisons to Salinger but who’s getting nowhere on his next. Until, that is, a wisp of a dream in which an apparition of a young woman beckons to him, and he can’t stop writing about her.

The Dark Knight Rises

Christopher Nolan's trilogy-concluding "The Dark Knight Rises" assaults the viewer with the unrelenting bass thump of a Hans Zimmer score (which also marred "Inception"), its queasily violent vision of a downtrodden Gotham held hostage by an unremarkable villain, and endless, nothing-special scenes of hand-to-hand combat, CGI effects, and green-screen projections. At 165 bloated minutes, it's boring beyond belief.

Trishna

Last year, the protean director Michael Winterbottom made my top 20 with the unexpectedly hilarious and vastly underseen "The Trip," a mash-up of a buddy road comedy with the verbal one-upmanship of stars Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan, whose dueling impersonations of Michael Caine were alone worth the price of a ticket.