It's populated with characters who seem to have no interior life -- only a devotion to the pursuit of sensation via the eternal party. And, in his own oblique way, Korine offers commentary about just how empty that world is.

Why would a movie studio try to stop critics from reviewing movies? It's called a review embargo -- and it seems a little self-explanatory. But still, I'd like to take this opportunity to discuss a little movie-critic inside-baseball stuff. Perhaps we can get a larger discussion going.

Arnel Pineda was a former street kid in the Philippines, singing in a cover band in a Manila club. Suddenly, he was singing in front of 20,000 people in a stadium in Chile -- as frontman for Journey.

Emperor doesn't reimagine history so much as use it as the jumping-off point for a fictional historical romance set against the backdrop of impending war, when everything seems more vital and in-the-moment. Except for this sometimes plodding film.

The Silence is chilling stuff, the kind of thriller -- like The Vanishing, let's say -- that leaves you stunned and gulping.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but as someone who was working as a rock critic for the first decade and a half of Journey's existence, I always regarded them as unexplainably popular, an at-best thoroughly mediocre hit-making machine.

James Franco, the Energizer bunny of actors, plays Oscar Diggs, a small-time magician in a second-rate traveling circus first seen doing his show to a small crowd in the black-and-white Kansas of the early 20th Century.

Though Ray Winstone has been a TV star in Great Britain since the mid-1970s, a lot of Americans got their first sighting of the beefy British actor with Gary Oldman's 1997's Nil By Mouth or 2000's Sexy Beast.

Phantom supposedly is based on actual events. But that doesn't lend it weight, authority or even a modicum of dramatic sense.

A roiling visual extrusion rendered from computer-generated imagery, Jack the Giant Slayer makes you long for the days of Ray Harryhausen.

Chan-wook Park's Stoker is audaciously, in-your-face creepy and exhilarating in a way few films have been since David Lynch's Blue Velvet. Because it's not just the creepiness -- but the way Park gets you involved in his world so that you can't look away.

A Place At the Table, with talking heads ranging from Jeff Bridges to Tom Colicchio, all of them articulate and impassioned, is a film that should make you furious.

While this could nominally be considered an action film -- because of a couple of shoot-outs and car chases -- Snitch is more a dramatic thriller with violence thrown in.

Getting a movie made is an Olympian task. Getting a movie made and released is even tougher. So Alex Karpovsky's accomplishment -- writing, directing and starring in two movies that are being released the same day as a double-feature -- seems positively Herculean.

There are a number of people whose work I admire involved with Inescapable. So allow me to say some nice things about them before I talk about what is so wrong with this movie.

There are a lot of things that are popular and commercial, but aren't very good. Or are just good enough. Consider Justin Bieber: It's not that the kid isn't talented; it's that he's only just talented enough.

Alex Karpovsky actually has two films out the same day: Red Flag and Rubberneck. They also happen to be surprising and compelling, in very separate ways.

According to box-office pundits, A Good Day to Die Hard will be the big box-office winner this holiday weekend. If the predictions hold true, this film confirms the conventional wisdom: People want what's familiar, no matter how hackneyed and repetitive.

Cheap, amateurish and sometimes just plain hard to watch, Beasts enjoyed a wave of overwrought critical hosannas, going all the way back to when the film first was shown more than a year ago at the Sundance Film Festival.

When he plays Boyd Crowder on FX's wildly entertaining Justified, Walton Goggins is the charming face of evil, the yin to the yang of Timothy Olyphant's Raylan Givens.

Based on the first in a series of books by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl, Beautiful Creatures (opening Thursday) hopes the "Twihards" can shift their focus from the undead to the magically endowed.

Shortland's film has an occasionally detached, whispery quality, as the camera focuses on the nature around Lore and her group. These Malick-like moments take us out of the story, for better or worse, depending on your point of view.

The only thing Identity Thief steals is your time and your expectation of inventive comedy. The concept may be high, but the yield (in terms of laughs) is depressingly low.

Dear Steven Soderbergh: Please don't stop making movies. Your name is high on the list of filmmakers whose careers I'm thankful have coincided with my career as a movie critic. And Side Effects is further proof that you are at the height of your powers as a filmmaker.

Jonathan Levine's Warm Bodies won the weekend box-office race for a couple of reasons. It's a romantic comedy that works, for one thing. For another, it's a smart reworking of Romeo and Juliet.