So fetishistic about high-powered weapons that it qualifies as an NRA wet dream, "G.I. Joe: Retaliation" pretty accurately reflects the franchise's comic book and cartoon origins, which is both a good and a bad thing: good if you're a 12- to 15-year-old boy, bad if you're just about anyone else. Still, Hasbro's concept about elite macho soldiers fighting weird, elusive villains has hit the mark with target audiences over the decades, and Dwayne Johnson's presence atop this sequel to the 2009 action nonclassic likely will propel it past its predecessor's $302 million worldwide box-office take.

Jaimie Trueblood / AP

Channing Tatum and Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson in a scene from "G.I. Joe: Retaliation."

After spiriting a defector out of -- where else? -- North Korea, Duke (a returning Channing Tatum) and Roadblock (Johnson) relax by -- what else? -- playing a video game. However, there's more trouble afoot. When last seen, the president of the United States had been displaced by a look-alike imposter installed by the sinister world domination-seeking organization Cobra, and now it's time to cash in on the charade. Sending the G.I. Joes into Pakistan to remove some nukes, the faux president then betrays America's best fighters by attacking their base, leaving just four survivors: Duke, Roadblock, Flint (D.J. Cotrona) and Lady Jaye (Adrianne Palicki).

PHOTOS: Senior Superheroes: 19 Action Stars Kicking Butt Past 50

While the president calls for global disarmament, the better to victimize those who might comply, more bad guys materialize, including Snake Eyes (Ray Park, of Darth Maul fame) and the ferocious Firefly (the imposing Ray Stevenson from HBO's "Rome"). A whole Japanese subplot involving ninjas and a strange guru (RZA of Wu-Tang Clan) seems like filler to allow the Joes time to lick their wounds and figure out how to get to the alleged president. But no matter what, director Jon M. Chu (the last two "Step Up" films, the Justin Bieber concert film "Never Say Never"), never forgets that his primary obligations are to whip together some sort of action sequence every 10 or 15 minutes and to make sure to provide close-ups and, if possible, practical demonstrations of as many fancy pieces of artillery as possible to make the heavy-ammo crowd drool.

PHOTOS: 26 of Hollywood's Most Popular Athletes-Turned-Actors

So in the midst of cartoonishly scripted and indifferently presented scenes devoted to good-guy intelligence work and bad-guy thuggery are two big scenes that are eye-popping for different reasons. The first, nearly an hour in, is one that makes the whole Japanese side story pay off; opposing teams of fearsome ninja fighters treat sheer rock mountainsides almost as parkour athletes use walls, jumping down into voids, throwing zip-line cords across great distances in order to slide from one cliff to another, many of them plummeting to their doom. It's like "Spider-Man" times 10 in a dazzling sequence in which conceptual novelty is strongly served by visual compositions and action choreography well beyond anything else in the film.

The other scene is equally arresting but in a rather more dubious way. Having agreed to help the G.I. Joe squad get to the evil president, retired Joe founder Gen. Joe Colton (Bruce Willis) invites the warriors to his home to offer them access to his personal arsenal. In every drawer, cabinet, closet and desk is a hidden trove of ever-more awesome weapons, a veritable candy store of firepower that's photographed in the lethal-hardware equivalent of a Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. The sequence climaxes and epitomizes the film's extreme idolatry at the altar of the gun, a posture that will be a massive turn-on for the target audience but might give pause to those who still care to remember that the "Dark Knight Rises" shooting happened less than a year ago.

EXCLUSIVE VIDEO: 'G.I. Joe: Retaliation' Featurette Digs Into the Explosive 3D

Chu and screenwriters Rhett Reese & Paul Wernick (Zombieland) clearly know their intended audience and what it wants: a less mechanized, more human-based younger brother to Hasbro's other cash-cow franchise "Transformers." Injecting the ever-personable Johnson into the proceedings helps a good deal, the returning Tatum and Byung-hun Lee (as Storm Shadow) are easy on the eyes and, for nonfans, it's by some distance easier to take any of the "Transformers" entries.

"G.I. Joe: Retaliation" was held back from its original 2012 release date so it could be converted to 3-D. Perhaps the bean counters know best as to whether this was worth the effort, but aesthetically the effect is negligible and sometimes, especially when the framing of action is tight, quite awkward and off-putting. This is 3-D that does not enhance a film that was not originally intended for it. The visual effects and CGI are highly variable, with one brief sequence toward the end of a major world capital being destroyed looking laughably cartoonlike.

Related content:

• G.I. Joe, G.I. Joe, how much trivia do you know?
• Slideshow: Toys, tastes and trends of '70s and '80s, including Joe
• What's your 'get off my lawn' moment?

Warner Bros.

Steve Buscemi and Steve Carell star as a Vegas magical team who've fallen on hard times.

REVIEW: If you're a fan of Steve Carell's portrayal of Michael Scott in "The Office," you'll love him as "The Incredible Burt Wonderstone." It's the same character. In both roles, he plays a handsome guy who's landed a position well over his head, and instead of sitting back and savoring the wondrous position he landed, he gets greedy.

In "The Office," he's running a paper company with absolutely no idea how to manage people or business. In "Burt Wonderstone," he's a nerdy kid grown up into a Siegfried-and-Roy style Vegas magician, partnered with childhood pal Anton Marvelton (Steve Buscemi). And he still has no idea how he got so lucky. Instead of savoring stardom and riches, he's grown cranky, tired of Anton, and of their stale magic show (they still enter to that ancient Steve Miller Band hit, "Abracadabra").

But now there's a new kid in town -- Criss Angel-meets-"Jackass" style street magician Steve Gray (Jim Carrey, looking like a 20-year-old punk Jesus). Gray goes for the gross-out -- sleeping on hot coals, pulling a bloody playing card out of a hole in his cheek. Burt and Anton aren't into that kind of act, but casino boss Doug (James Gandolfini, wonderfully doltish) is attracted to Gray's younger audience. And so just as Burt and Anton's friendship is falling apart, so is their professional life, the magical dreams they've had since childhood vanishing like coins in a magician's hands.

So now the plot is set: Burt must reunite with Anton, struggle back up the Vegas ladder, and make nice with beautiful assistant Jane (Olivia Wilde, in a nice role). Along the way, he touches base with the man (Alan Arkin) whose magic kit set him on this road when he was just a kid.

Warner Bros.

Olivia Wilde joins the two magicians as part of their Vegas act.

There were a million ways "Burt Wonderstone" could have messed up its tricks. But mostly it doesn't -- the cast is talented and the plot finds ways to surprise. Anton is treated cruelly by Burt, but it's satisfyingly funny that Anton himself turns out to have his own sense of clueless ego, giving starving Cambodian children magic kits instead of food. And while a more standard plot might have pitted Gray against Anton and Burt in some kind of direct battle-to-the-death, here they perform their final competing acts solo, and the bizarre information Anton picked up on his Cambodian sojourn actually comes in handy.

Burt and Anton are presented as an old-school act who never learned to adjust to the times. The movie's a bit old-school too -- light and mostly funny, not edgy and street, but solidly entertaining. Not full-on magic, but you'll pull more than a few laughs out of this hat.

Related content:

• Is 'Oz the Great and Powerful' too scary for kids?
• Ford, Fisher, Hamill in for new 'Star Wars'
• Terrence Howard: 'Iron Man' killed my career

REVIEW: No way is "The Last Stand," which opens this week, Arnold Schwarzenegger's last stand. His character, bordertown sheriff Ray Owens, jokes a lot about being old and creaky, but Schwarzenegger, 65, is far from retiring from the action-movie scene. There'd be no movie here without him in the lead role; with him, "The Last Stand" is an acceptable, if forgettable, 90-minute action film.

The FBI is apparently run by a bunch of bumbling idiots in this movie, unable to stop a drug cartel lord who escaped from their supposedly impregnable motorcade by way of a giant magnet and a sexy woman in leather (don't ask, just go with it). Now the cartel fugitive is in a super-hot Corvette that can go 197 mph, and is barreling towards Arnold's sleepy town like a rocket sled on rails, shooting up roadblocks and anything else that gets in his way. Anyone who's watched a car chase or two starts wondering why the FBI doesn't invest in a few spike strips or maybe just a bucket of nails, but thinking gets you nowhere in an Arnold movie.

Fortunately, Arnold's small town has Arnold, who's willing to take a 4 a.m. call from a cute waitress worrying that the crotchety old farmer (Harry Dean Stanton, hi, Molly Ringwald's dad!) is late with her milk delivery. (It's a clue!)

Arnold also has town gun-museum nut Johnny "Jackass" Knoxville, who conveniently possesses enough weaponry to take over several small countries. Those who still can't get the Connecticut school shootings out of their minds will be unlikely to find much comfort in the way high-powered weaponry is played for laughs here, with the audience roaring when an antique-store owning grandma blows away a bad guy.

Arnold also gets help from Luis Guzman, Jaimie Alexander, Rodrigo Santoro and Zach Gilford as a bunch of deputies who aren't used to anything tougher than getting a cat out of a tree. (They actually say that -- come on, couldn't we tweak that cliche to a rattlesnake out of an toilet or something?) They're nice kids, and Guzman's his normal goofball self, so it's a little alarming when they're actually put in danger.

But everything in the movie takes second place to Arnold, who's oddly charming with the townspeople and deputies in a "Kindergarten Cop" way. His accent is still full Arnold, meaning he says "ahm not gahna fot you" which could either be "fault you" or "fight you" (spoiler: it was "fault you."). He gets off a couple gems, as when he looks at Guzman flipping around some medieval weaponry and snorts, "What do you think you're fighting in, a crusade?" ("CRU-sade," in Arnold-ese.)

And when he faces down against the bad guy, either racing hot cars through a cornfield or mano a mano, on a bridge with no cartel henchmen or deputies in sight, it's almost worth the price of admission.

He'll be back. Don't you doubt it for a minute.

Related content:

• Schwarzenegger: Film violence not linked to school shootings
• NBC Latino: Luis Guzman on working with The Terminator
• Schwarzenegger talks about sex at 65
• See Schwarzenegger's dorky haircut, fake tattoos

REVIEW: The best hour of filmmaking you'll see all year is the final hour of Kathryn Bigelow's "Zero Dark Thirty," which has to be considered a favorite to take home this year's best picture Oscar.

It's easy to find reasons not to go to the film, which is hardly a light night out at the movies or an ideal date flick. It's long -- pushing two hours, forty minutes. The film's controversial torture scenes have been widely discussed, and they are indeed difficult to watch -- detainees are waterboarded, strapped into dog collars, shoved into tiny boxes. And even before those scenes, the film reminds us what started it all by playing gut-wrenching phone calls from people trapped in the World Trade Center after it was attacked on Sept. 11, 2001. "I'm going to die, aren't I?" one woman asks a helpless 911 operator.

Heavy stuff. Heavy, heartbreaking stuff. And not a movie for everyone. But "Zero Dark Thirty" is a majestic piece of filmmaking and like Bigelow's earlier Oscar-winner "The Hurt Locker," delves into a world that few Americans can even imagine. For most of us, the hunt for Osama bin Laden seemed for years like a fruitless quest, painful and frustrating when we thought about it, but not something that was constantly top of mind. But to the CIA agent played by Jessica Chastain (named Maya in the film), bin Laden was all she thought about, all the time.

Wrote critic Roger Ebert of the film, " There isn't a whole lot of plot -- basically, just that Maya thinks she is right, and she is." She is indeed, and the film manages to build on her slow gathering of evidence into a Jenga-like pile of information, with missteps along the way. Even though you know bin Laden was at the Abbottabad, Pakistan, compound, even though you know he was killed there by Navy SEALs in 2011, it's to the film's credit that events feel like they hang in doubt even once that dramatic final hour begins.

Chastain makes Maya feel like a real person, faults and all. She's not your typical suave James Bond-like spy. You're not sure you'd like her if you knew her, an opinion that's backed up by a great Washington Post piece about the real agent. (“Do you know how many CIA officers are jerks?” the paper quotes a source as saying. “If that was a disqualifier, the whole National Clandestine Service would be gone.”) She has a theory to which she is devoted, but always she carries with her the knowledge that she has seen friends die for similar devotion. 

Maya's challenges, though, only make the build towards the inevitable raid on the Abbottabad compound all the more dramatic. There's a trip to Area 51 (really!) to examine the special helicopters that'll be used, which allows Maya to meet the SEALs who'll be risking their lives because of her beliefs. ("I wanted to drop a bomb," she tells them sourly.)

Once the SEALs, and the Belgian Malinois dog they take along, climb into those two helicopters, it's impossible to take your eyes off the screen, or even breathe. Maya can only watch from the base, knowing their lives are in danger whether she's right or wrong, and that failure will be devastating. The attack itself may not be what you expected. The compound is cramped and dangerous, with threats around every corner and terrified women and children caught up in the raid. One of the helicopters crashes and must be destroyed, bin Laden's computer hard drives and journals must be shoved into bags, and the Pakistanis have scrambled their F-16s to investigate what the heck is going on. In the middle of the mayhem, a SEAL appears dazed, and when asked what's wrong, simply says, "I just shot the guy on the third floor." And all that's come before, the 9/11 phone calls, the torture, the deaths in the pursuit of other theories, all come down to the guy on the third floor.

In addition to Chastain, Bigelow gets marvelous performances from Jason Clark, whose fabulous performance in Showtime's "Brotherhood" is often overlooked; James Gandolfini, as likable and terrifying as Tony Soprano was; and Kyle Chandler, always so good whenever he's onscreen. At one point, Chandler's character tells Maya, "I don't (expletive) care about bin Laden! Protect the homeland!" Which is, of course, precisely what she thought she was doing.

"Zero Dark Thirty" opened in New York and Los Angeles in December to qualify for the Academy Awards, adds more cities on Jan. 4, and opens in still more locations on Jan. 11.

Related content:

• Acting CIA director shoots down 'Zero Dark Thirty' accuracy
• 'Zero Dark Thirty' among Golden Globe nominees
• Filmmakers: 'Zero Dark Thirty' has no agenda

REVIEW: There are reasons to see "Django Unchained." Christoph Waltz is excellent as a pre-Civil War bounty hunter who buys and frees slave Django (Jamie Foxx) and teams up with him to find his sold-off wife. Leonardo DiCaprio, as a disturbing plantation owner who stages forced fights between muscular slaves, is creepy in a way that would've horrified sweet Jack from "Titanic." Writer and director Quentin Tarantino has not lost one bit of his ability to deliver compelling, smart dialogue and set up situations where you simply have to see what's lurking around the next corner.

And there are reasons not to see "Django Unchained." Blood falls like snow, pours like rain, wraps scenes like a blanket. It hangs in drippy, nasty gobbets, it takes flight like a flock of seagulls. There are whipping scenes, a near castration, and other tortures inflicted on the slaves. Yes, the N-word is used 100+ times, but it's hard to argue that usage isn't historically accurate. The forced slave fighting, dubbed "Mandingo fighting" in the film, is horrific -- if you've ever wondered how a pure one-on-one, mano-a-mano beating can kill a man, here is your visual evidence.

"Django" shares some elements with Tarantino's "Inglourious Basterds." There's the satisfaction in both films of seeing the oppressed rise up against horrible historical tormentors. Waltz's German bounty hunter finds American slavery disgusting, so he stands in for the audience as the horrors unfold. When he strikes out for justice, we're satisfied. Another scene portrays a pre-KKK group as a bunch of bumblers who can't even see out of their hastily hand-sewn masks, nicely crumbling their would-be terror plan.

You can take "Django" as a romance, as Django fights to get back to wife Broomhilda (Kerry Washington). You can take it as a reminder of the horrors of slavery, writ bloodily and brutally by the hand of a filmmaker who knows how to present violence in a most cinematic way. You can simply appreciate the performances of Waltz, Foxx, DiCaprio, Samuel L. Jackson as a cruel house slave, and, in a goofy little cameo, Tarantino himself.

But when all's over, and the ending blows up in typical big Tarantino style, the three-hour film doesn't really hold together as a cinematic experience. Revenge and reunion don't mean a happy ending, not for former slaves in the pre-Civil War South. Elements of the film remind viewers of better Tarantino films, but big fans would be better off renting "Pulp Fiction" for the zillionth time, to remember when Tarantino put together pulpy violence and pop culture dialogue in a fresher, more complete way.

Related content:

• Spike Lee blasts 'Django's' take on slavery
• 'Django Unchained' stars rolled up N-word shield during filming
• 'Django,' 'Lincoln,' 'Les Mis' among Golden Globe nominees

REVIEW: There are movies and then there are movie experiences. "Les Miserables" is the latter. The audience I saw it with sat in mesmerized silence through the songs, the drama, the very miniscule speaking parts. They sat quietly when the credits rolled and then applauded with fervor, as if they were seeing the show live. If a Broadway musical isn't your thing, "Les Mis" won't convert you, but if you're open to it, the filmed version doesn't let fans down. It's not subtle, it's not small, but it shouldn't be.

The musical, based of course on Victor Hugo's 1000-page-plus 150-year-old novel, does an amazing job of skating between multiple plots. Hugh Jackman plays the released prisoner Jean Valjean, who spends the film fleeing the dogged Inspector Javert (Russell Crowe). Their lives criss-cross with that of a doomed mother, trickster innkeepers, an abused orphan and the young students of France's 1832 June Rebellion. That's a lot of happenings, even for a three-hour film, and newcomers to the "Les Mis" craze are bound to get lost once or twice, but stay with it.

So much of the movie rests on Jackman's performance, and he delivers. His singing is powerful and natural, and his performance as the haunted, redeemed Valjean drives the movie.

Anne Hathaway as Fantine isn't in every scene, but her fall from prettiest girl in the factory to wretched mother who sells her hair, teeth and body to save her child is stunning, a mini-movie all its own. The beautiful Hathaway keeps only her swan neck -- the rest of her turns dirty and ugly and sick and messy, a most non-Hollywood look for a red-carpet icon. 

Sacha Baron Cohen and Helena Bonham Carter play the Thénardiers, the conniving innkeepers who treat Fantine's daughter Cosette as their own Cinderella. Not all critics appreciate their bumbling slapstick, but it's remarkably toned down considering the actors in question. Their "Master of the House" is the musical's most memorable song (tied only with Fantine's "I Dreamed a Dream"), and it's hard not to leave the theater with it bumbling around in your brain.

So many other highlights. Isabelle Allen, the tiny blonde who plays a young Cosette, is a somber, sweet version of the musical's famed poster, and her grave demeanor suits her role. Her character grows up to be played by an adequate Amanda Seyfried, but Seyfried is blown off the screen by beautiful brunette Samantha Barks, who played the role of Eponine in the London production and reprises it wonderfully, touchingly here.

The plot that takes place on a Parisian barricade brings in a dozen or so young men with names like Scrabble words (Enjolras, Courfeyrac, Lesgles). But Eddie Redmayne as Marius, who pines for Cosette and is in turn loved by Eponine, is really the main one you need to know, and he rises out of a crowd of young faces with a soaring voice and a believable anguish as his brave rebellion goes horribly wrong.

Not everything works. Fans of the musical were amused by the casting of Russell Crowe as Inspector Javert. He can be a great actor, but he has an Australian accent and no stage singing experience (though yes, he sang for years with his own band). Every time he sings, it feels a little like a night at a Sydney karaoke bar. But the complaints are minor. Whether you've got the soundtrack memorized or only know it from Susan Boyle and George Costanza, "Les Mis" is a dazzling film experience.

Related content:

• 'Lincoln,' 'Les Mis' among SAG nominees
• Hathaway on 'Les Mis' premiere wardrobe malfunction
• Crowe bursts into song in 'Les Mis' trailer

REVIEW: The subtitle of this first of three "Hobbit" movies is "An Unexpected Journey." It's right there in the title! We know Bilbo Baggins is going on a journey! So why, then, does it take so long to get started?

After a brief explanation of how the film's dwarves lost their home to Smaug the dragon, we're reintroduced to the bucolic Shire and to Bilbo, kinsman of Frodo from "Lord of the Rings."

Bilbo (Martin Freeman) is content living his middle-aged hairy-footed Hobbity life, but adventure, in the form of Gandalf the wizard (Ian McKellen) and his band of rowdy dwarves, knocks and won't leave. It's here that the movie turns into a bizarrely drawn-out farce, where the dwarves run roughshod over Bilbo's tidy home, eating everything in sight, having burping contests, and playing Frisbee and hacky-sack with his mother's china. It's "Animal House Goes to Middle Earth!"

The first third of the nearly three-hour movie feels a bit like a children's TV special, thanks not just to the slapsticky dwarves, but to the way in which it's shot. It's the first major movie projected at 48 frames per second, rather than the usual 24. (Not all theaters can show the film that way, so you may not see this version.) It makes the images seem bright and unnervingly fake, a weirdly jarring result that is supposed to suck you into the film, but often just reminds you that you're watching one.

There's no real reason for Bilbo to abandon his safe Shire life to go adventuring, but it's in the script, so he does. And then the film settles into a groove, as the ragged little company meet up with mountain trolls, goblins, demonic wolves and more, with Gandalf and other members of the group, namely, leader Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage), filling in little pieces of the story as we go.

The most compelling of the confrontations comes when Bilbo meets up with Gollum, the creepy big-eyed ring-loving creature fans will remember from "Lord of the Rings." They play an abbreviated version of the book's riddle game, which goes on slightly too long but should satisfy book purists. (The actors could have used some enunciation lessons here though -- one riddle's answer is so slurred that even when it's repeated, it's unintelligible.)

"The Hobbit" is no "Lord of the Rings." It is a simpler, much shorter book meant for children, and there's a sense throughout this first film that this was forgotten, and that director Peter Jackson wanted to stretch it out into a darker, longer tale. There's much too much, for example, of wizard Radagast the Brown, a nature-loving simpleton who's only mentioned once in the book.

But the Tolkien films are not unlike the "Twilight" movies. If this is your world, if these are the books you cherished, here is your long-awaited gift -- your beloved and familiar characters larger than life. If you're not a devotee but want a good adventure -- well, maybe the second and third films will bring more of that. This first offering is decidedly a mixed bag.

Related content:

• Judge halts release of 'Hobbits' knockoff movie
• Elijah Wood: 'Lord of the Rings' changed me
• 'Hobbit' star says sets were awe-inspiring
• Ian McKellen: I never worked with Wood on 'LOTR'

Melinda Sue Gordon / The Weinstein Company

Brad Pitt in "Killing Them Softly."

REVIEW: A juicy, bloody, grimy and profane crime drama that amply satisfies as a deep-dish genre piece, "Killing Them Softly" rather insistently also wants to be something more.

Writer-director Andrew Dominik, whose extraordinary Western "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford" proved too long and arty for the masses, repositions George V. Higgins’ 1974 Boston mob-world novel as a metaphor for the ills of American capitalism circa 2008, a neatly provocative tactic. But he also shamelessly shows off his directorial acumen; unlike the leading character, who’s all business, Dominik makes sure you notice all his moves. Tight, absorbing and entertainingly performed by a virtually all-male cast topped by Brad Pitt, this Weinstein Co. release should generate solid mid-level business this fall.

PHOTOS: Cannes 2012: Competition lineup features "Cosmopolis," "Moonrise Kingdom," "Killing Them Softly"

A lawyer, professor and assistant U.S. Attorney who long investigated organized crime in addition to writing 27 novels, Higgins knew well of what he wrote. His first novel, "The Friends of Eddie Coyle," was made into a fine film and his third, "Cogan’s Trade,"  the basis of this one, consists of torrents of exceptionally vivid Beantown wiseguy dialogue with bits of plot tucked almost incidentally into the chatter.

Slideshow: Brad Pitt

Launch slideshow

Moving the action to decimated post-Katrina New Orleans without a tourist in sight, Dominik has done a keen, disciplined job of coaxing the plot out of the shadows while retaining the flavor of underclass lingo and attitude. With the background dominated by then-presidential candidate Barack Obama’s optimistic speeches stressing the availability of “the American promise” to all, some bottom-feeding criminals plot what looks like a no-risk scheme: Old-timer Johnny Amato (Vincent Curatola, the great Johnny Sack of "The Sopranos") hires unwashed kids Frankie (Scoot McNairy) and Russell (Ben Mendelsohn) to raid the regular card night run by Markie Trattman (Ray Liotta), who once robbed his own game and got away with it.

PHOTOS: Outtakes from Brad Pitt's THR cover shoot

While allowing these low-enders to emerge in all their miserable glory, Dominik also adds his own flourishes right from the outset, from striking lateral camera moves to amusingly supplying one of the young hoods with a pathetic little dog. Despite their general ineptitude, the boys pull off the job, but this is bad news for Markie, as it’s going to be assumed he’s run the same scam a second time.

At least this is what is suspected by the unnamed and unseen corporate mob, which has cog-in-the-system “Driver” (Richard Jenkins) engage shrewd hit man Jackie Cogan (Pitt) to deal with this disruption of business as usual. Needlessly, Markie gets horribly beat up, Cogan brings in another hired killer, Mickey (James Gandolfini) to help him with a double-killing, and plenty more blood gets spilled before order is, after a fashion, restored.

Although the plot bases are dutifully, if briefly, covered, this is a crime story like so many others in which it doesn’t really matter if you can follow who everyone is and why awful things are happening to them; it’s basically a given that everyone on view is guilty of something, so you can’t feel too badly when they come to grisly ends.

PHOTOS: Cannes Film Festival: Veterans ready to return to the Croisette

What matter more are style and attitude, which Dominik ladles on like sauce on ribs. Russell’s drug-addled disorientation is represented by multiple distortions of time, visual perception and sound; the pursuit of one victim is imaginatively covered entirely from the outside of the building in which the chase is consummated; Cogan arrives on the scene to the accompaniment of Johnny Cash’s “The Man Comes Around”; the just-scraping-by 21st century hoods drive late-‘60s/early-‘70s cars like a Riviera and Toronado; and one man’s execution is rendered from many angles in a slow-motion explosion of breaking glass and penetrating bullets so elaborate and prolonged that it resembles a self-standing art installation.

In a related way, some of the dialogue scenes, especially a couple of near-monologues superbly delivered by Gandolfini as a booze-guzzling, sex-obsessed, past-his-prime hit man, almost have the feel of brilliant, free-standing acting class scenes; they serve the film’s purposes, to be sure, but there’s a self-consciously showy aspect to them that makes you easily imagine students using them as audition pieces.

The film is terribly smart in every respect, with ne’er-a-false note performances and superb craft work from top to bottom, but it never lets you forget it, from Pitt’s pithy excoriation of Thomas Jefferson’s hypocrisy right down to his “Crime is the business of America” final line that is bound to be widely quoted. 

The film noir crime dramas of the late 1940s and early 1950s were about a palpable unease in the country, but this remained a subtext rather than the overt subject of the films. Here, Dominik explicitly articulates his intended meanings, which have to do with money, institutional rot and what happens when you don’t keep your economic house in order. Either approach is valid but, perhaps in this day and age, audiences need their messages to be quick and direct. "Killing Them Softly" delivers them that way.

Related content:

• VIDEO: Ray Liotta: 'I don't mind' playing bad guys
• Brad Pitt preps to fight zombies in 'World War Z'

REVIEW: The most publicly recognizable director during his lifetime has now, 32 years after his death, become the subject of two films set at nearly the same time: HBO's just-aired "The Girl" and now "Hitchcock." Both stress a creepy vibe concerning the master manipulator's obsession with his blond female stars, but Fox Searchlight's big-screen effort elevates itself well above that preoccupation by attentively and warmly examining Alfred Hitchcock's deeply complicit relationship with his impressive wife Alma.

This narrative directing debut by Sacha Gervasi remains absorbing and aptly droll despite a few dramatic ups and downs and, led by large performances by Anthony Hopkins and Helen Mirren, should prove a popular specialized attraction through the holiday season and beyond. 

PHOTOS: Fall Movie Preview 2012

While "The Girl" focused on the rotund director's infatuation with his discovery Tippi Hedren during the making of "The Birds" and "Marnie" in the early '60s, Hitchcock looks at the period just before, in 1959-60, when he made a bold departure from his normal methods with "Psycho." The lack of much detail about the production of this suspense classic is a disappointment on a certain level, but Gervasi and screenwriter John J. McLaughlin ("Black Swan") take the alternate tack of delving into their subject's imagined mental and emotional state at the time which, however speculative, exerts a lurid pull.

Perhaps the most fanciful of the script's constructs is proposing a weird communal relationship between Hitchcock and the notorious Ed Gein, the Wisconsin murderer, disinterment specialist and mother obsessive who served as the inspiration for Robert Bloch's novel "Psycho." As Hitch remarks to Alma at one point, “All men are potential murderers,” and Gein (Michael Wincott), in assorted encounters that variously take the form of nightmares and elementary psychological discourses, forces the director to confront his most morbid motivations, advising that, “You can't keep this stuff bottled up.”

STORY: 'Good Evening': 'Hitchcock' Opens AFI Film Fest to Awards Buzz

But if Gein found release in murder and necrophilia, Hitchcock found his in creativity, channeling his darkest thoughts about human nature into mass entertainment that played with audiences' fears and has given scholars a seemingly bottomless well of material to theorize about.

At the outset, Hitch (as he tells Janet Leigh, “You can call me Hitch. Hold the cock.”) is riding the wave of one of his greatest commercial successes, "North by Northwest," as well as producing the long-running television series, "Alfred Hitchcock Presents." All the same, he's agitated about the lack of exciting material (he rejects Ian Fleming's "Casino Royale" out of hand as just being more of the same spy stuff) and disturbed, at 60, of suddenly being perceived as old.

But the shocking, bloody nastiness of "Psycho" excites him, and the more everyone -- his studio Paramount, his agent Lew Wasserman as well as Alma -- tell him the story is cheap “horror movie claptrap,” the fiercer his determination to make it becomes. What could have been just insiderish stuff about budget and story disputes becomes quite entertaining as Hitch slyly maneuvers the discussions to the point where Paramount's Barney Balaban only grudgingly gives the green light to make the picture if Hitchcock will foot the entire $800,000 budget himself, in exchange for which the producer-director will get 40 percent of the gross.

Still, the Hitchcocks are forced to gamble their Bel-Air home to run with the director's hunch, increasing his sense of urgency and anxiety. Initially resistant, Alma finally throws her full support behind her husband, as she always has, revealing what eventually emerges as the film's dominant impulse, which is to spotlight Alma Reville Hitchcock as an essential partner in her mate's extraordinary success.

STORY: How Hitchcock May Finally Get His Oscar Revenge

A sometimes-credited screenwriter for Hitch but always a story editor and adviser, Alma is by now a bit fed up with standing in the background while her husband eats and drinks too much and indulges in fantasy romances with his gorgeous blond stars like Grace Kelly and Kim Novak. Out of a need to fulfill her own creative urges, she embarks on a collaboration with dashing younger screenwriter Whitfield Cook (who had contributed to the scripts of Hitchcock's "Stage Fright" and "Strangers on a Train"), which Hitch eventually suspects has become an affair. This might be utter fantasy on the part of the present filmmakers, but this torment, along with the stress of "Psycho," pushes Hitchcock to the limit, with the suggestion that it even feeds the punishment he wants to inflict upon the eventual audience.

The attention on his inattention eventually leads Hitch and Alma to a rapprochement and even a deepening of their clearly chaste marriage (they sleep in separate twin beds), no matter that it is about to be disrupted once again by the arrival of Hedren, as delineated in "The Girl." The best scenes in "Hitchcock" are the direct but nonetheless subtle and dryly witty exchanges between Hopkins and Mirren (who had never worked together before), with both actors keenly aware and expressive of the undercurrents in an enduring marriage that still needs tending just as Alma looks after her backyard garden.

Hopkins has the confidence and command get the viewer past the obvious dissimilarities between him and the man he is playing and pull you along for what is quite an engaging ride with this unique, colorful character. In many scenes, Hopkins speaks considerably faster than the deliberate Hitchcock is ever on record has having done, his outbursts betray the power of a more physically fit man, and, notably in a couple of later scenes, more of Hopkins emerges from behind the elaborate makeup and prosthetics than does his character. All the same, it's a compelling performance, one layered with the intelligence, craftiness and wit that are always associated with Sir Alfred.

The robust, voluptuous Mirren could not be more physically contrary to the short, birdlike Alma but, working on the same high level as her co-star, strongly registers the woman's frustrations, accommodations of her husband's difficult nature and her seldom-articulated desire to be recognized.

Due to legal restrictions, no footage from the actual "Psycho" could be shown, nor even re-created representations of any shots, which disappointingly shortchanges much depiction of the weeklong shoot of the much-discussed shower scene. Of the film's stars, Scarlett Johansson gives Janet Leigh an openness and game quality that is very appealing; Jessica Biel portrays Vera Miles as a woman who, having incurred her director's wrath by dropping out of the lead in "Vertigo" at the last minute due to pregnancy, can't wait to get out of her contract with him; and James D'Arcy is physically right and all nervous quirks and uncertainties as Anthony Perkins. Toni Collette's character of Peggy Robertson, Hitchcock's perennially loyal right hand in his office, doesn't quite get her due.

The film gets much mileage out of Hitchcock's virtuoso playing of the Motion Picture Association of America's chief censor Geoffrey Shurlock (an excellent Kurtwood Smith) in order to get some taboo material up on the screen. It also accords composer Bernard Herrmann proper credit for his immortal score and for overriding his director's objections to placing music (the chilling shrieking strings) over the shower sequence.

Gervasi, who directed the music documentary "Anvil! The Story of Anvil," displays abundant energy and visual tact at the helm, with great assists from cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth, production designer Judy Becker, costume designer Julie Weiss, editor Pamela Martin and composerDanny Elfman, who does not ape Herrmann so much as weave around him to dexterous effect. Location work on actual studio lots, primarily Paramount, brings a measure of authenticity entirely missing from "The Girl."

"Hitchcock" might be a work of fantasy and speculation as much as it is history and biography, but as an interpretation of a major talent's inner life and imagination, it's undeniably lively and provocative.

More from movies:

• Helen Mirren stands by her man in 'Hitchcock'
• 'Red Dawn' remake no one wanted has arrived
• 'Rise of the Guardians' a charming holiday tale
• 'Life of Pi' is a gorgeous, compelling film

REVIEW: The weight of its intellectual distancing device presses much of the life and feeling out of Joe Wright's and Tom Stoppard's adventurous adaptation of Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina." Dazzlingly designed and staged in a theatrical setting so as to suggest that the characters are enacting assigned roles in life, this tight and pacy telling of a 900 page-plus novel touches a number of its important bases but lacks emotional depth, moral resonance and the simple ability to allow its rich characters to experience and drink deeply of life.

The miscasting of the male romantic lead is also a problem in this intelligent and in some ways estimable attempt to make a different sort of romantic costume drama, one that will inspire sufficient curiosity and praise to make the grade as a solid upscale late autumn release for Focus Features.

One of the many ways Tolstoy's 1877 novel is so great is that it delves into all the stages and forms of life and love, from their exalted beginnings to stagnation and demise and everything in between. For reasons of length, most of the dozen film adaptations, including the 1927 and 1935 Hollywood versions starring Greta Garbo and the 1948 British edition with Vivien Leigh, focus on the adulterous love affair between the married Anna and the dashing cavalry officer Vronsky and cast aside the parallel story of landowner Levin's quest for a meaningful path in life.

Stoppard's concentrated adaptation happily finds room for Levin along with everyone else on the literal theater stage that serves as the starting point and home base for this drama of passion and society. Director Wright runs with the concept, not, fortunately, in the over-the-top Baz Luhrmann manner, but it in a way that is arresting, mannered, gorgeous, stifling, surprising and facile by turns. No matter how stimulating it can be to behold, however, ultimately the artificial settting makes the nature of the film antithetical to that of the novel; whereas the book is sprawling, searching and realistic, the film is constricted, deterministic and counterfeit.

To be sure, Wright, who broke in as a feature director with his sterling literary adaptations of "Pride and Prejudice" and "Atonement," both with Keira Knightley, cracks the visual whip in his role as ringmaster, propelling the camera through a combination of unvarnished backstage spaces, theater sets, elaborately designed film settings and, infrequently but liberatingly, outdoor locations, some of them actually shot in Russia. Much of the action, from intimate love scenes to ballroom dances, appears choreographed and the dialogue delivery often feels arch and slightly stylized.

“Sin has a price, you may be sure of that,” successful politician Karenin (Jude Law) tells his beautiful wife of nine years, Anna (Knightley). She is about to find out for herself. Devoted to her son Serozha (Oskar McNamara) but living a dutiful life of privilege in St. Petersburg society, she is immediately smitten upon locking eyes with the handsome officer Vronsky (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) at the train station in Moscow, where she has come to console the wife, Dolly (Kelly Macdonald) of her brother Oblonsky (Matthew Macfadyen), who's been caught cheating with their children's nanny.

With the numerous important characters dashing on and offstage and establishing themselves solely on the basis of deft instant impressions, rural denizen Levin (Domhnall Gleeson) turns up to ask Dolly's sweet younger sister Kitty (Alicia Vikander) to marry him. Rejecting him because she's entranced by Vronsky, Kitty is herself spurned at a grand ball by Vronsky, who takes the occasion to move in on Anna.

The exquisite wife hesitates for a time but capitulation is inevitable, just as is her husband's eventual discovery of the truth, which sends Anna into a sort of exile with her lover and, in short order, ostracism from society. Unfortunately, he first part of the story as whipped together here is more compelling than the latter, as the deterioration of Anna and Vronsky's relationship is too compressed and insufficiently detailed.

More than that, Taylor-Johnson is simply too young and one-dimensional to play a man of such reputation and sway. Often described as “callow,” Vronsky is certainly that in the hands of this actor, who was only 21 at the time of filming and lacks the weight and presence to convince as such a commanding figure; dying his hair blond only furthers his problems in a role played more authoritatively in earlier productions by the likes of Fredric March and Sean Connery.

Enough of Anna's romantic anguish over her ultimate fate probably remains to draw in younger audiences being exposed to this story for the first time. For the more academically inclined, there is a measure of interest simply on the basis of Wright's bold decision to impose the artificiality of the theatrical setting, to see what does and doesn't play. As intriguing as it may be in big set pieces such as the ball and in small details such as a child's toy train suddenly becoming a full-sized one on which crucial scenes are played out, the technique becomes palpably constricting in the second half, where the abridgments of Stoppard's script become all too noticeable.

Knightley gives Anna a decent shot but she lacks the mature beauty and inner radiance described in the novel; of all contemporary actresses, Marion Cotillard would come closest to an ideal Anna. Deglamorized, with glasses and a receding hairline, Law makes for a composed and accessible Karenin who's not too priggish and boring. Vikander, the star of the upcoming Danish costumer A Royal Affair, is a fine Kitty, red-headed and bearded Gleeson grows nicely into a sympathetic Levin (the sort-of Tolstoy figure) and Macfadyen excels as a vigorous, non-fuddy-duddyish Oblonsky.

From a craft and technical point of view, the film is immaculate, if inevitably somewhat airless and suffocating. It scores significant points for departing from the period piece norm but crucial components have been sacrificed in the process.

More from movies:

• 'Red Dawn' remake no one wanted has arrived
• 'Rise of the Guardians' a charming holiday tale
• 'Life of Pi' is a gorgeous, compelling film

REVIEW: Kids have complicated mental universes. Why can't all the dogs on the block be related, or each bathroom in the house be a different country? Grasp that, and it's easy to relate to the premise of the 3-D animated children's film "Rise of the Guardians," where Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Sandman and the Tooth Fairy all join together in an Avengers-like group to fight evil.

These are not your father's fairy-tale or holiday characters. Santa Claus (voice of Alec Baldwin) is Russian, the Easter Bunny (Hugh Jackman) is Australian, the Tooth Fairy (Isla Fisher) resembles a flying mermaid and the Sandman can't talk. The odd man out is Jack Frost (Chris Pine), who can freeze things with a touch, but can't remember anything about the human life he had before he took on his wintry role.

Jack is called upon to help the group battle a dark and creepy bad-dream-giving Bogeyman called Pitch (spookily voiced by Jude Law), who, with his horrific black nightmare horses, is like something out of Harry Potter's closet of villains.

The group's dynamics are fun and original. Santa's the boss, spouting Russian composer names as swear words. (I'm rooting for "Rimsky-Korsakov!" and "Shoskakovich!" to catch on with grade-school potty mouths.)

His sergeant-at-arms is the not-so-cuddly Easter Bunny, who knows his way around a boomerang more than a basket, and is perhaps the most annoying of the bunch. 

But it's the silent Sandman who turns out to be the hidden star of the show, sweet and tough at the same time, even though he resembles a spun-sugar madeleine cookie.

There's a dark undercurrent running through the film. Jack Frost has a tragic backstory, and until he hooks up with Santa's crew, he's kind of a cold little loner, getting his icy thrills from instigating snowball fights and sledding excursions for which he always has to stay invisible.

He's a natural addition to the Guardians, yet it takes him a while to feel he fits in. Kids relate to that -- who hasn't watched a group of established pals from afar and felt the holes in your own life all the more achingly?

The plot gets a little scrambled, but imaginative kids will walk out of the film with a whole new set of mental imaginings. My preschooler and I found ourselves wondering who else the Guardians hang out with. (Yeti figure prominently, leprechauns are mentioned.) Will there be a sequel where Baby New Year and Father Time play roles?

More movie reviews:

• 'Rise of the Guardians' director discusses rise to success
• 'Red Dawn' remake makes premise even dumber
• 'Life of Pi' is a gorgeous film rendering of novel
• 'Breaking Dawn Part 2' is a weird, wild ride

REVIEW: The recent failure of North Korea to even launch a missile successfully lends a comic air of preposterousness to the already silly premise of "Red Dawn," the long-delayed remake of John Milius’ fondly remembered 1984 action film. Dan Bradley’s reboot originally featured the Chinese as the villains, but hey, China is a lucrative film market while North Korea barely can keep its lights on, hence the post-production switch. In any case, this version is unlikely to strike a similar chord with young audiences while severely disappointing older fans of the original. It also contains far less resonance today than during the Cold War, with domestic problems seeming far more a threat than foreign invasion.  

The premise once again concerns a stalwart group of teenagers who band together into a ragtag guerrilla army opposing the nasty North Koreans who suddenly besiege their hometown of Spokane, Wash. Unintentionally echoing Mitt Romney’s campaign pronouncement that Russia is our biggest international threat, the film drops hints that they are also part of the conspiracy.

PHOTOS: Behind the Scenes of Marvel's 'The Avengers'

The opening credits are accompanied by a montage of news clips featuring the likes of Obama, Biden and Hillary Clinton warning about the threat of cyber-terrorism. It turns out that they were right, as it’s eventually explained that this vicious sneak attack was precipitated by a total shutdown of our computer grids.

The filmmakers don’t waste any time, beginning the action a mere 15 minutes in with frightening scenes of tanks and paratroopers led by the bloodthirsty Captain Cho (Will Yun Lee) suddenly occupying the placid town.

Video: 'Red Dawn' trailer

Dubbing themselves the “Wolverines” in honor of their high school football team, the town’s teens, raised on a steady diet of war-themed videogames, quickly take up arms to fight the invaders. Led by recently returned Iraq War vet Jed (Chris Hemsworth, who filmed this before hitting the big time as Thor), they include star quarterback and Jed’s kid brother Matt (Josh Peck); Toni (Adrianne Palicki), who carries a torch for Jed; tech geek Robert (Josh Hutcherson); head cheerleader Erica (Isabel Lucas); and Daryl (Connor Cruise), the mayor’s son. They’re eventually joined by a trio of retired Marines led by a gung-ho type (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) who utters such macho pronouncements as “It’s a good day to die, gentlemen.” That’s but one example of the generally risible dialogue, which includes Jed’s observation that “Even the tiniest flea can drive a big dog crazy.”

Chris Hemsworth, Sacha Baron Cohen among British GQ nominees

Director Bradley is a former stunt coordinator, which accounts for the well-staged action sequences that take up the bulk of the film’s relatively brief 93-minute running time. Unfortunately, DP Mitchell Amundsen, hewing to the now standard formula, uses shaky, hand-held cameras to photograph much of the proceedings, resulting in near incoherent visuals that quickly induce monotony.

Other than Hemsworth, who infuses his character with a credible gravitas, the young performers are wholly unconvincing in their roles, with Palicki and Lucas somehow managing to look perfectly made-up and beautiful even while engaging in the down and dirty action. Morgan provides his usual strong screen presence, and Korean-American actor Lee, once dubbed one of People Magazine’s “50 Most Beautiful People,” makes for a suitably hissable villain.

More from movies:

• 'Red Dawn' remake no one asked for is here
• 'Breaking Dawn Part 2' is a weird, wild ride
• Happy 70th birthday, Martin Scorsese