Andrew O'Hehir

For me the breakthrough in At Any Price comes from 59-year-old Dennis Quaid, cementing his character-actor renaissance with what may be the nastiest role of his career.

This movie feels a little half-baked to me in the sense that it carries an exceedingly complicated intellectual agenda below the surface of a conventional thriller, and doesn’t execute either level as well as it might.

Michael Bay sends a clear message to those of us who've been making fun of him: He's been in on the joke the whole time.

Oblivion is a technical triumph rather than a philosophical breakthrough, demonstrating how beautifully digital effects can be blended with real people and real sets, demonstrating that neither Tom Cruise nor the 1970s will ever die, and announcing the unexpected arrival of a major science-fiction director.

As with any other movie, it’s all a question of what attitude you carry into the theater, and whether you’re prepared to go where Malick wants to take you. All I can tell you is that once I surrendered to the ebb and flow of Lubezki’s images, the elegiac and almost anti-narrative mode, the sweet-sad blend of romance, eroticism and tragedy and the hypnotic score – which mixes contemporary electronic pop with Berlioz, Wagner, Tchaikovsky, Henryk Górecki and Arvo Pärt – I really never wanted it to stop.

Brandon Cronenberg clearly understands that he has to deal with the legacy of his last name, and Antiviral feels to me like a perverse act of exorcism, half tribute and half cleansing ritual.

So Upstream Color is defiantly pitched in its own idiosyncratic key, but it bears the unmistakable influence of Carruth’s fellow Texan Terrence Malick and also of Steven Soderbergh’s early films.

Even these ludicrous notions illustrate the real point of Room 237, as I see it, which is that “The Shining” is a disturbing, complicated and highly unusual creation of pop cinema that works on many levels, and whose slow-acting toxin continues to spread through our cultural veins more than 30 years later.

As this wry, dry and glittering near-masterpiece proclaims, life is full of wrongness, but also full of mystery and wonder.

I never stopped being interested in The Place Beyond the Pines, and never stopped rooting for Cianfrance to make the hubristic ambition of his immense tripartite scheme pay off, even as it evidently falls apart.

The movie’s just too boring and middlebrow.

While Reality is a mixed bag of satire, allegory and melodrama, it’s a rich mixture that an American remake would likely never pull off. This is a movie that will reward multiple viewings, from a filmmaker of tremendous technical ability, humor and heart.

Fitzgerald’s influence could have crept in there by osmosis, and whatever other charges you want to level against Spring Breakers – such as incoherence, plotlessness, salaciousness and mind-numbing monotony – it has no lack of high concept.

This is a really lively, fun and high-spirited comedy. If you leave after half an hour.

The ABCs of Death is one-stop shopping for deviant cinema, a Pu Pu platter of perversity. It made me laugh hysterically, shout with outrage, wince with discomfort and yearn to hide under the sofa, all by the halfway mark.

Saying that Raimi’s trip to Oz is adequate eye candy with a good heart isn’t the same thing as saying it’s actually good. I was charmed at some moments, profoundly bored by others and almost never felt genuinely excited or emotionally engaged.

In the end The Silence is more like an intriguing work of misdirection than a great crime film, but it has a dreamlike and disturbing undertow you won’t soon forget, and Odar is unquestionably a director to watch.

In this classy, taut white-knuckler – largely shot inside a real-life decommissioned Soviet sub – Robinson asks us to consider more than the hypothetical possibility that the world nearly ended in 1968. He reminds us that we have no idea how many other near-misses may have happened in the behind-the-scenes history of the modern age and also, more troubling still, that long after the Cold War has faded into memory we continue to have difficulty telling the crazy people from the sane ones.

Stoker, which plays something like a remake of “The Addams Family” mixed with “The Paperboy” — but without the laughs of either – belongs in a special category of movie badness, or perhaps two different but overlapping categories. It’s a visually striking but fundamentally terrible film made by a good or (some would say) great director.

Rubberneck immediately put me in mind of the classic slow burn of vintage thrillers like Fritz Lang’s “M” and Michael Powell’s “Peeping Tom,” although Karpovsky and co-writer Garth Donovan have cited all kinds of other things, from “Michael Clayton” to “Caché” to “Fatal Attraction.”

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.

A troubling, exhilarating and ingeniously realized film that’s part stirring political drama and part devilish media satire.

Pretty much three well-staged action sequences strung together with the dumbest imaginable connective tissue.

Identity Thief reaches impressive heights of laziness and idiocy.

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.

Seriously, this is one of the strangest and most painful films in recent memory.

Warm Bodies is more a mild-mannered, emo-flavored romcom than a zombie movie. It has some tepid action scenes, a few swatches of genuine humor and a general spirit of cheerfulness, especially considering it depicts a future in which civilization has been destroyed.

The resulting film is both beautiful and fascinating, and offers a thrilling travelogue through a spectacular landscape few of us will ever see first-hand.