Andrew O'Hehir

Friedkin's still got it - the "it" being his ability to infuse every frame of the film with powerful ambiguity and doubt, and also his ability to attract terrific actors and propel them in unexpected directions.

It's mediocre and half-baked, with flashes of a potential good movie showing through here and there.

With this sober, mournful, gorgeously mounted and marvelously acted drama, Miike connects himself to the greatest traditions of Japanese film and to the period of historical self-examination that followed the debacle of World War II. And he also crafts one hell of a fable of heroism.

If The Dark Knight Rises is a fascist film, it's a great fascist film, and arguably the biggest, darkest, most thrilling and disturbing and utterly balls-out spectacle ever created for the screen. It's an unfriendly masterpiece that shows you only a little circle of daylight, way up there at the top of our collective prison shaft - but a masterpiece nonetheless.

Easy Money may well be the crime film of the year, or the decade.

Like a Theodore Dreiser novel for our time, infused with the vivid, vulgar spirit of reality TV. It often had the sold-out Eccles Center howling, but also has elements of profound tragedy and allegory.

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.

Savages is enjoyable in a way that's almost but not quite intentional camp; it's like eating a dinner made by a 7-year-old, with cake for every course, interspersed with Jell-O, Pepperidge Farm goldfish and chocolate sprinkles.

Pretty good summer flick!

The point of watching the film, and the only reason to see it, is the experience of watching it, which sounds tautological or something, but is just true. It's a powerful visual and sonic creation with unforgettable characters, set in a heartache-inducing imaginary vision of American community, worlds away from hyper-technologized urban existence.

In a universe of Hollywood comedies that seem determined to insult the audience and pander to the basest form of post-adolescent fantasy, Ted feels almost sophisticated.

Magic Mike is a fascinating film, one of his (Soderbergh's) best in recent years.

When Vikram Gandhi set out to become a guru, he didn't expect to really become a guru. But that's what happens in his slippery, ambiguous, tense and finally moving Kumaré, which is officially termed a documentary but could also be considered as the video corollary to a thorny work of performance art.

There's definitely some empty-calories, summer-movie fun to be found in this ludicrous genre mashup, most of it courtesy of maniacal Russian director Timur Bekmambetov, who stages hilarious, imaginative, almost free-form action sequences like nobody in the business.

Take This Waltz is frank, erotic, often very funny and sometimes startling, with an underlying tragic sensibility.

Moms and girls everywhere deserve this movie, absolutely, and I hope they have a great time. But they also deserve much more, and much better.

Rock of Ages is an effulgent celebration of fakeness. It isn't trying to be real; it's trying to be faker than any fake thing has ever been before.

I really enjoyed watching Prometheus almost the whole way through, and I'm looking forward to seeing it again. It's an enjoyable thrill ride, slicked up with a thin veneer of Asking the Big Questions. But do its so-called heroes really have to be such blithering New Age idiots?

I resisted this derivative mishmash of classic fairytale and modern epic fantasy for as long as I could, but ultimately it swept me up into its geeky but manly embrace and carried me away on a white charger.

It's a marvelously constructed personal journey, both wrenching and bittersweet, whose emotional ripple effects stay with you for days and weeks afterward.

Rapturous and hilarious.

Let me come clean right now and tell you that I enjoyed The Intouchables quite a bit. If you're looking for a lightweight summer change of pace, with just a smidgen of Continental flair, here it is.

It's kind of endearing and kind of asinine.

A breakthrough movie after its own fashion, a mysterious existential thriller that's brilliantly acted and masterfully directed, without a second of wasted screen time.

Its shameless and nonsensical combination of ingredients finally won me over, after a fashion, when I realized that its gung-ho Navy-recruitment propaganda and retrograde gender politics shouldn't be taken any more seriously than the ZZ Top, AC/DC and Billy Squier songs on the soundtrack.

Although the character of Aladeen seems awfully predictable by Baron Cohen standards, the movie itself veers from one hilarious, absurd and patently offensive setup to the next.

A wonderful adventure film that's no less thrilling for its modest scale, and a film whose emotional power and intelligence sneak up on you.

Laranas does cultivate a mood of distinctive menace and mystery, not to mention a convoluted and ambitious chronology.