Andrew O'Hehir

A compelling, compact melodrama that packs an emotional wallop. It's my nominee for sleeper surprise of the summer, at least so far.

As Hanna’s fans already know, she’s back onstage with a new band called the Julie Ruin, who sound terrific. Today she can be a singer, a musician, a poet or an artist, but we can’t ask her to be a revolutionary.

Durkin seems to be aiming for a Hitchcock-style thriller that has the unsettling psychological and narrative ambiguity of, say, Michael Haneke's films, with an ending you can read in many different ways. If he doesn't quite get there, it's still a remarkable feature-directing debut.

Haneke's new Funny Games has a current of bleak humor that comes through more clearly when you're not reading subtitles. It remains a horrifying, implacable mind-fuck, liable to be widely misunderstood and widely despised.

I am not the first to make this joke, but The Trip to Italy may live up to the “Godfather: Part II” analogy, at least insofar as it’s better and tighter than its predecessor.

Attack the Block hovers in that uneasy zone between eager-beaver likability and trying way too hard to be cool, but it captures its gritty setting with unusual affection. Science-fiction buffs seeking a change of pace and fans of British pop culture shouldn't miss it.

This telling of the tale possesses enormous cinematic energy and a killer supporting cast full of hilarious delights.

While "Ballplayer" is certainly unsettling, must-see viewing for baseball fans - a nonfiction follow-up to Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck's outstanding 2009 feature "Sugar" - it's a vibrant tale, alive with color and texture, that's far more than a sports movie.

It's winsome, sentimental and lovely in a minor-key way.

It’s a highly capable sequel that drinks long and deep from the established Marvel legendarium and brings back all the key players from Kenneth Branagh’s 2011 hit “Thor.”

There’s an honesty and ferocity to Heaven Knows What, a refusal to flinch from depicting the marginalized and despised underbelly of a caste-divided city.

I enjoyed this movie more thoroughly, and more liberated from frustration and ambivalence, than anything Godard has made in at least 20 years. It provided me with an interpretive frame that may even lead me back to another crack at “Notre Musique” (2004) and “For Ever Mozart” (1996) and most of all the extraordinary 1988-1998 video documentary series “Histoire(s) du cinéma.”

I'm being completely sincere - and entirely complimentary! - when I say that The Muppets represents a career high point for Segel, the comedian who reveals himself to be a whimsical writer, capable singer and dancer and appealing straight man.

It certainly is possible that Gere’s memorable performance as George – one that is far more physical than verbal, and that pushes the star’s legendary charm in unexpected directions – will put him in line for his first Oscar nod. George is never a cliché of homelessness, and neither the actor nor the film ever makes the expected or automatic choices.

Dense with pathos, poetry and humor, this is Park's finest work to date. His stomach-churning climax -- which depicts gruesome bloodshed without directly showing it -- simultaneously gratifies and indicts our most primitive instincts.

So stylized and slow-moving (even at a spare 75 minutes) that you may have trouble adapting to its hypnotic rhythms -- but if you can, there are sumptuous visual rewards to be found, plus the faintest emotional uptick right at the end.

McCarthy has much more to discover about herself as an actor and an avatar and a cultural signifier, and I hope she doesn’t get trapped by one role, one genre or one franchise. But her campaign of conquest is going well.

May indeed induce dizziness, sweating and hot-and-cold flashes among politically minded leftists.

The influence of early Alfred Hitchcock is all over this movie, translated in unusual and original fashion.

It’s masterfully shot and edited, with a brooding soundtrack and a mysterious, dreamlike undertow – and, when all is revealed, it’s not even half as interesting as it seems to be.

There is a balancing act at work here that sometimes makes the film seem too careful, but I found it a lovely and supremely moving experience, a haunting symphony in a minor key if not a knock-your-socks-off masterpiece.

It's an unholy mess, simultaneously too Gothic and too sarcastic, that preaches liberation and delivers only puritanism. It's a craftsmanlike but robotic imitation of "interesting" filmmaking, only in patches, and by accident, the real thing.

It's a fascinating human story and a film as pure as ice water

As irritating as Lake Placid sometimes is, it also has an easygoing sense of fun, along with one of the more memorable movie monsters of recent years. The mismatched ingredients blend into a blissfully, stupidly surreal summer cocktail.

I personally find the Russo brothers’ lightning-fast action scenes difficult to process — it’s as if cinema editing now exceeds the speed of human brain functions — but they’re undoubtedly exciting and skillfully constructed.

A dark and mesmerizing immersion into a distinctive world.

This is an elegant, powerfully emotional and courageous film, worth seeing entirely on its own artistic terms, and also for what it conveys about the complexity of African-American life and the resurgence of African-American cultural expression.

Bourdieu's cast is terrific throughout. Any fellow academic brats out there will especially appreciate Jacques Bonnaffé, one of the greatest French comic actors, in an imperious turn as the severe, guru-like professor.