Andrew O'Hehir

You may find yourself spellbound or colossally irritated; it's a close call either way.

Maybe Joan Rivers is a high-powered engine of self-debasement who will go lower than anyone else for a laugh and a dollar, and maybe she's a skilled actress who has spent her whole life playing one. Either way, yes, she's quite something. And I'd rather appreciate her from a distance.

What we see in Stanley Nelson’s urgent and necessary documentary The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution is the story of an organization that meant many different things to many different people, and that changed so dramatically during five years or so in the national spotlight that it could almost be described as reshaping itself month by month and putting forward a distinctive face at almost every moment.

Fiennes' crackerjack Coriolanus stays true to the clever, almost mean-spirited twists and turns of the story, and preserves the authentic flavor and texture of the language.

It’s all just a little more boring than it ought to be.

It’s a work of chilly wit and bleak metaphor, an artifice that invites the kind of analytical response where we pull on our chins and discuss how other people, more naive than we, will receive it.

If at first I tried to resist these hapless Pennsylvania teens who'd never even heard of David Bowie, for Christ's sake, I was won over completely by the time Patrick and Sam are ready to graduate and Charlie has faced down his demons one more time.

A haunting and riveting work, unlike anything else you can see at the movies and as such an explicit challenge to the unambitious, anesthetic character of most contemporary cinema. But is it easy, or delightful, or fun? It is not.

An extraordinary and original creation. It belongs alongside "Amores Perros" and "Memento" on a shortlist of 2001's most exciting revelations.

A ripping good yarn, like a Fitzgerald short story rewritten by John Updike, with an uproarious, impossible Hollywood ending.

Moving and surprising documentary.

Ultra-violent and ultra-stylish, Drive stands out in this year's Cannes competition for its calculated, hard-edged brilliance.

A movie so rousing, so real and so full of complicated emotions that it all feels brand-new.

A guilt-free, no-fat dessert from start to finish.

It’s gruesome and funny and dark and incredibly tense.

It's amazingly beautiful and it tests your patience; both things are par for the course with Reygadas, After that, you've either surrendered to his idiosyncratic sense of rhythm, or you're out of there.

A surprising, puzzling and in many ways brilliant work.

It’s shot through with sadness and beauty, with dry humor, with the certainty that even things meant to last forever actually don’t.

The scenes with Johnson and Wallace, although intrinsically interesting, drag down the drama somewhat, and...every minute we're away from the firecracker atmosphere of rural Alabama detracts from the overall impact.

If you have the patience to watch this film develop and unfold, like some bizarre night-blooming orchid, what you'll see is not just the last movie released in 2012, but possibly the most original of them all.

Any film that begins with one of those fake-news montages, where snippets of genuine CNN footage are stitched together to concoct a feeling of semi-urgency around its hackneyed apocalypse, already sucks even before it gets started.

It's a reassuring and delicious film, but in no sense an adventurous one.

The truly remarkable thing about this modest little movie is the revelation of how much change is possible within a relatively short time.

I felt like I'd been invited to a seven-course dinner, and all seven turned out to be cake – and then the host insisted on delivering a lecture about how cake would bring me closer to God.

An imaginative and largely intact retelling of this gory, troubling, uniquely sweet and uniquely dark vampire tale.

Terrifically choreographed, violent and amoral, but never wantonly cruel, Miss Bala is a knockout.

As "Birders" makes clear, and as Franzen would surely agree, birds and birders have always been among us and require no reinvention. What they have to offer us is what that heron offered me, for just a split-second – a sense that despite our best efforts we are still a part of nature, and not yet an alien species disconnected from the real world.

Its combination of dazzling cinematic craft, psychological insight and black humor make this one of the year's moviegoing musts -- and even or especially at her most deranged, Kim Hye-ja's amazing mother is profoundly, passionately human.