question: Tangerine shatters casting conventions and its filmmaking techniques are up-to-the-minute, but it's an old-fashioned comedy at heart -- and a pretty wonderful one at that.

numbered reviews: 1. What tips the scales in justifying the movie's screwball-comedy approach is the sheer human vitality of the people on screen, especially Rodriguez and Taylor.
2. ...has humor, tawdriness and a strange, persistent beauty.
3. Low-budget but accomplished. The high dramatics on display are effectively told.
4. Smart, antic comedy that's eager to offend.
5. Pure hipster catnip.
6. Told with simplicity but deep empathy, Baker's film sports a refreshingly sober, grown-up worldview that refuses to judge, sensationalize, or do anything other than show lives as they may be, and perhaps are.
7. "Tangerine" has generated interest partly because it was made using iPhones augmented by other devices. But technology can only take a film so far - it's the story that really matters.
8. The iPhone cinematography (by Baker and Radium Cheung) gives the film an immediate, almost documentary-feel appropriate to its focus on action...
9. ﻿I don't know whether a real-life Sin-Dee and Alexandra would approve of the way they're presented in Tangerine. But I think they might appreciate the dignity these characters award themselves and the ambiguity they're sometimes allowed.
10. As one character observes in "Tangerine," Los Angeles is "a beautifully wrapped lie." Baker has created a fitting homage to artifice and the often tawdry, tender realities that lie beneath.


question: Its cast tries hard, but Old Dogs is a predictable, nearly witless attempt at physical comedy and moral uplift that misses the mark on both counts.

numbered reviews: 1. This imbecilic, mean-spirited farce, which sneers at adults, leaves you wondering: where are the Three Stooges when we really need them?
2. This excruciating comedy tests the limits of how many shots to the crotch a movie can show, or an audience can absorb.
3. Like rancid leftovers, this bland, contrived comedy is a toxic turkey, a buddy/family film gone wrong.
4. Old Dogs is beyond saving. The only humane thing to do is to put it down.
5. An often riotously funny slapstick farce that ought to appeal to moviegoers of all ages.
6. A slack, sagging 88 minutes still feels rushed, with what must have been scenes trimmed down to micro-blip montages, and a final scene playing out over the credits; it feels like even the people making Old Dogs wanted to be done with it.
7. Incredibly dull and generic.
8. Clueless-dad comedy is forgettable family fluff.
9. Exactly as funny as you'd expect a movie to be that stars John Travolta and Robin Williams as two bachelors who must suddenly take care of precocious 7-year-old twins, and that was directed by the man who made Wild Hogs.
10. We have reached a point in our moviegoing life where the two most horrifying words a studio can mutter are "Robin" and "Williams."


question: Val Kilmer delivers a powerhouse performance as one of rock's most incendiary figures, but unfortunately, Oliver Stone is unable to shed much light on the circus surrounding the star.

numbered reviews: 1. Kilmer is convincing in the lead role, although he never allows the viewer to share any emotions.
2. Not exactly Stone's finest hour, but a worthwhile portrait of 1960s (counter) culture and the self-destruction of an icon.
3. The attempts to plumb Morrison's sensitive side, his (pretentious) philosophical bent and his struggle to channel his considerable talents positively are something of a blur in the trippy kaleidoscope.
4. Whatever reservations one may have about this exhausting, dark-side-of-the-'60s epic, there can be little doubt that Stone has captured a particular, bombs-away brand of rock & roll excess with definitive candor.
5. The film really proves only that Jim was a bad drunk and a worse friend, and that in no way was his life exemplary.
6. Intense biopic full of drugs, sex and rock'n'roll.
7. Val Kilmer gives the performance of his career as Jim Morrison in Oliver Stone's biopic, so it's a shame the surrounding film lets him down.
8. Val Kilmer does, however, pull off a remarkable impression of the troubled vocalist, although he's more convincing on stage than he is in his drunken, drug-fuelled reveries.
9. Stone is not the most subtle of directors, but he has the ability to translate his passion for subject matter (he's an unabashed admirer of Morrison) to the screen with a strong visual flair. That talent in evidence here.
10. After the first hour or so of The Doors, the only door I wanted to see was the one marked ''EXIT.''


question: Slow and mostly devoid of the stellar chemistry between its two leads, The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest is a disappointingly uneven conclusion to the Millennium trilogy.

numbered reviews:
1. Much of it still plays like bad Thomas Harris...
2. A pick-up after the second film, if not as assured as the first. Rapace sets a high watermark for Rooney Mara in David Fincher's remakes.
3. One final course of Europudding that may leave audiences feeling less satisfied than simply tired and bloated.
4. It's a brisk conspiracy thriller about the moral deformations wrought by Sweden's neutrality during the second world war and the cold war, and the role of leftwing journalists to bring out the truth from a labyrinth of national intrigue.
5. A more apt title would be 'The Girl Who Sat Quietly in a Dimly Lit Room'.
6. This is the most disappointing end to a trilogy since Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 3.
7. Anyone who has invested in the trilogy will savour the mixture of dread and anticipation as the cat-and-mouse game reaches a stirring conclusion.
8. A bunch of evil old men get their comeuppance in 'The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest,' but the girl who messes with their nest does hardly anything at all.
9. The third and worst of Stieg Larsson's trilogy is poorly directed, under-energised and unthrilling.
10. A compelling mix of 70s-style conspiracy thriller, courtroom procedural and psychological drama...