Andrew O'Hehir

I suspect this movie will sharply divide Nichols' existing fan base for reasons I can only allude to vaguely in a review; I loved it, or almost all of it, but I can understand the uncertainty.

If you want a movie that eviscerates “The Hunger” and eats its bloody insides while daring you to look away, here it is.

Vidal vs. Buckley was pretty much a clown show. It was also total TV gold. Those two guys went viral when that adjective only referred to actual disease; they invented the YouTube clip decades before the Internet was even a gleam in Al Gore’s eye.

A sprawling, overstuffed, formulaic but highly entertaining story of pop stardom.

What If could be the breakthrough film that underappreciated Canadian director Michael Dowse (“Goon” and “It’s All Gone Pete Tong”) has been waiting for, and at any rate it’s a sparkling screwball highball, perfect for a late-summer weekend.

Solidly made and sometimes quite moving chronicle of a working-class family in Tehran.

Combines memorable images of the gorgeous, rugged wilderness, meticulous sound design that emphasizes the characters' isolation, a dash of dark wit and a dose of madness.

Bridge of Spies is itself a form of historical whitewashing, albeit one less noxious and harmful than the customary American variety. I liked the movie a lot – it’s one of Spielberg’s most measured and most adult films in years.

If it's all reasonably familiar indie-comedy terrain, it's delivered at a brisk, economical clip with plenty of laughs, and a series of running gags that keep getting funnier.

Here’s the thing about Crimson Peak, which is lurid and ghastly and immensely enjoyable and frequently spectacular and also thinner and less substantial than it wants to be, like a meal eaten in a dream.

Once you adjust to Listen Up Philip, it’s also invigorating, disturbing and frequently hilarious, but that adjustment’s not entirely painless.

A marvelously compressed and immaculately constructed work.

An electrically paced and brilliantly acted death-row thriller.

This is a deliberately chilly and nerve-wracking experience, and one of the bleakest portraits of American society seen on-screen in the last several decades.

There's no disputing the ingenuity and even the brilliance of this mind-bending mashup, which begins as a gritty recession-era marriage drama - the opening scene features a couple arguing about whether they have the money to get the Jacuzzi fixed - and then descends into ominous violence and finally total insanity.

An impressive but exceptionally disturbing feature debut from Australian director Justin Kurzel that pushes the new wave of Aussie crime films up a notch.

It's hilarious, and contains some of Mamet's best dialogue. And that somehow, by making a racist, murderous, Everycreep his protagonist, Mamet is able to produce some of his most penetrating psychological and spiritual insights.

His final scenes with Lucy and with his own dad are both surprising and shattering, and I was left humbled by the film's honesty.

Among the most depressing films ever made...It's a stomach-turning tale of globalization at its very worst, though what any of this has to do with Darwin is unclear to me.

It has a nobility and modesty, along with a refreshing lack of cynical attitude, that you rarely find in independent films these days.

Highly entertaining and skillful documentary.

There's no other filmmaker, living or dead, who could produce a futuristic sci-fi nightmare, a hipster comedy, a haunting film noir and a cartoon, all in the same movie.

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

The damn thing is, Ridley very nearly makes this insuperable obstacle work to his benefit. He delivers a flawed, ambitious and deeply peculiar portrait of one of the 20th century’s most enigmatic musical talents, in the year before he ascended to rock-god status, that resembles no other pop-music biopic you’ve ever seen.

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.

I would simultaneously argue that Sheil and Greene go off the rails several times during Kate Plays Christine, most notably in their overly artful and self-conscious attempt to re-enact the shooting but also that they get viewers closer to the real Christine Chubbuck than I would have thought possible.

A film that stands out for its passion, ambition and clarion-call sincerity, even amid the contemporary onslaught of political documentaries.

I don't know whether to call it interpretive dance for dudes or performance art or just a highly developed form of wanking. Who cares? It seriously rocks.