Ann Hornaday

With long, quiet takes in which he simply observes Johansson wordlessly taking in the world around her, Glazer infuses the everyday modern world with a surpassing sense of strangeness and doom.

Even at its most depraved, Joe’s journey, and her confession to Seligman, are still compelling enough to propel Volume II until the story becomes hopelessly over-plotted.

Seemingly unable to engage in self-reflection, let alone self-criticism, Rumsfeld is given virtually full rein to control the narrative by Morris, who is far more interested in letting the audience dwell inside his subject’s strangely attenuated moral imagination, rather than challenge it.

A baggy, at times brutal conglomeration of surprisingly deep character development and aggressively percussive action, The Winter Soldier is a comic-book movie only in its provenance.

In the capable hands of these fine filmmakers and actors, even its most bitter observations about life and aging are nearly always reliably balanced by moments of warmth, understanding and out-and-out screwball humor.

Viewers may not agree about what they’ve seen when they come out of Noah. But there’s no doubt that Aronofsky has made an ambitious, serious, even visionary motion picture, whose super-sized popcorn-movie vernacular may occasionally submerge the story’s more reflective implications, but never drowns them entirely.

There’s no doubt that Villeneuve can make a movie; he’s developed a strong cinematic voice. It’s tantalizing to imagine what he could do with a really fine story.

It’s impossible to dismiss von Trier as merely a hype-monger. He’s too damnably good a filmmaker for that. Watching Nymphomaniac is to be reminded of his superb skills in creating vivid worlds and characters on screen.

The wittiest jokes and cameo appearances are designed to soar far over the heads of young filmgoers and into the atavistic pop consciousness of their adult companions.

A compelling, complex, confounding film.

A compulsively arranged sacher torte of a movie, an elegant mousetrap of stories-within-stories that invokes history with a temperament ranging from winsome to deeply mournful.

When the film isn’t sloppily directed, it’s a series of lazy filmmaking tics, including fetishistic slow-motion shots of blood, water and sweat, as well as sundry dismemberments, impalings and decapitations.

For those willing to join Reggio in his extended meditation, Visitors offers a sublime, even spiritual experience, as well as a bracing reminder of cinema’s power to create a transformative occasion.

Don’t expect to see a great film, or even a very good one. Whether you discover a meaningful channel with which to continue your walk with the film’s protagonist, however, is strictly between you and your god.

A bracing, quietly exhilarating documentary.

Omar feels as trapped and enmeshed in hopelessness as the vicious political cycle it depicts.

Of Miyazaki’s many gifts as a filmmaker, perhaps the most subtle is the way he honors time and silence and stillness, values that are in lamentably short supply in most modern-day productions.

About Last Night may be about Daniel and Debbie, but it’s Hart and Hall who make it worth watching. They take palatable but not exceptional cinematic hay and turn it into comic gold.

For all its playfulness, the new RoboCop can’t help but lack the novelty of the original’s jolting mixture of dumb-smart irony and visceral pulp.

The Monuments Men often lets the schematic gears show, succumbing to threadbare formula and sentimental cliches rather than taut, sophisticated drama.

It’s difficult to believe a word of Labor Day, but then again you don’t have to in order to luxuriate in Winslet and Brolin’s bubbling, steaming chemistry.

The best thing about awkward moments, after all, is that they usually pass quickly. And, blessedly, just as swiftly forgotten.

In this vibrant, lyrical, graphic, sobering and finally soaring testament to aesthetic and political expression, Noujaim consistently provides light where once there was heat.

The Invisible Woman is less a conventional love story than a wise, often troubling contemplation of myriad modern impulses, from the lure of celebrity and public acclaim to the compartmentalizing of identity and the gender politics of Great Man-ism.

Branagh, who proved his action bona fides with “Thor,” does an inarguably competent job of choreographing a modestly intelligent espionage thriller, even if it’s impossible to identify anything new he’s bringing to an already groaning table.

What’s surprising is that Jonze has taken what could easily have been a glib screwball comedy and infused it instead with wry, observant tenderness and deep feeling.

The unevenness of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, and Stiller’s recessive characterization of the title character, keep it from being an all-out crowd-pleaser.

The Wolf of Wall Street remains one-note even at is most outré, an episodic portrait of rapaciousness in which decadence escalates into debauchery escalates into depravity — but, miraculously, not death.

The warmth that courses through American Hustle makes it irresistible, with Russell’s affection for his characters and his sharp-eyed evocation of their recessionary times, honoring their struggle, however dishonest, rather than denigrating it.

This soulful, unabashedly lyrical film is best enjoyed by sinking into it like a sweet, sad dream. When you wake up, a mythical place and time will have disappeared forever. But you’ll know that attention — briefly, beautifully — has been paid.

Buried inside this grab bag of hits and misses is a pretty good point about the descent of television news into a miasma of 24/7 speculation, fluff and, most of all, hype.

Go For Sisters is worth the time if only to witness the terrific chemistry between Hamilton and Ross, the latter of whom delivers a break-through performance as a woman of uncommon, almost regal, composure, even as she struggles to stay on the righteous path.

Saving Mr. Banks doesn’t always straddle its stories and time periods with the utmost grace. But the film — which John Lee Hancock directed from a script by Kelly Marcel and Sue Smith — more than makes up for its occasionally unwieldy structure in telling a fascinating and ultimately deeply affecting story.

Only someone with intimate knowledge of the Midwest’s singular cadences, social codes and confounding emotional stew (er, covered hot dish) of aggression and politesse could pull off something as masterful, meaningful and poetic as Nebraska.

Directed with rigor and sensitivity by Jason Osder, this is the kind of nonfiction film that proves how powerful simple storytelling and a compelling through line can be.

A well-acted, beautifully filmed, utterly depressing chronicle of revenge and thwarted dreams in post-industrial America.

At its core, this clever, wrenching, profound story underscores the tenacity of faith in the face of unfathomable cruelty. Evil may be good, story-wise. But virtue, at its most tested and tempered, is even better.

Sensory pleasures abound in Black Nativity, which is grounded by Forest Whitaker and Angela Bassett’s performances as Langston’s strict, God-fearing grandparents.

Despite its austere beauty, elegant triptych-like structure and faultlessly disciplined performances, Camille Claudel 1915 still raises more questions than it answers.

Everyone hits their marks with gusto and believability in Catching Fire... But the engine of the entire operation is Jennifer Lawrence.

You don’t go to The Best Man Holiday to deconstruct its flaws. You go for its myriad, adamantly un-cerebral pleasures.

Macdonald (“The Last King of Scotland,” “State of Play”) does a passable job of evoking post-apocalyptic atmosphere in How I Live Now, although the film suffers from uneven tone — is it a teen romance or wartime adventure? — and, ultimately, a regrettable lack of focus.

Vallée, working with a lean, lively script by Craig Borten and Melisa Wallack, neatly avoids excess, letting Woodroof’s terrific yarn stand on its own and getting out of the way of his extraordinary actors, who channel the story without condescension or manipulative cheats.

After Tiller does viewers the great service of providing light where there’s usually only heat, giving a human face and heart to what previously might have been an abstract issue or quickly scanned news item.

Hours, even days later, they may find themselves thinking of Adèle and wondering how she’s doing — only then realizing how completely this fictional but very real creation has winnowed her way into their hearts and minds. That’s great acting. It’s great art. And that’s why Blue Is the Warmest Color is a great movie.

Chandor’s attention to detail, and the expressiveness and utter believability with which Redford goes about the anything-but-mundane business of surviving, make All Is Lost a technically dazzling, emotionally absorbing, often unexpectedly beautiful experience.

A movie that, despite its strenuous efforts to appear hardened and sexy and sleek, is unforgivably phony, talky and dull.

Intense, unflinching, bold in its simplicity and radical in its use of image, sound and staging, 12 Years a Slave in many ways is the defining epic so many have longed for to examine — if not cauterize — America’s primal wound.

As a piece of filmed entertainment, The Fifth Estate shows why things like authorial point of view and visual sensibility are so essential in bringing such stories to life. Unlike its most obvious predecessor, “The Social Network,” this film doesn’t have much of either, and the weakness shows.

Captain Phillips is such an impressive dramatic achievement that it comes as a shock when it gets even better, during a devastating final scene in which Hanks single-handedly dismantles Hollywood notions of macho heroism in one shattering, virtually wordless sequence.

A film of modest ambition and workmanlike pacing, it breaks little new ground, either in form or content. Then again, that may be the point.

Thanks to Cuarón’s prodigious gifts, Gravity succeeds simultaneously as a simple classic shipwreck narrative (albeit at zero-gravity), and as an utterly breathtaking restoration of size and occasion to the movies themselves.

The film might take its name from poker subculture, but it lacks all the urgency, single-mindedness and swiftness that the title implies at its most literal. Runner Runner is a bummer. Bummer.

The wispy premise of Newlyweeds, written and directed by Shaka King, is kept afloat by its attractive, youthfully vital cast (along with some well-timed comic relief by way of some familiar faces).

As admirable as Moors’s oblique style is, though, Blue Caprice doesn’t offer the sense of catharsis or closure, let alone new information, that makes it more than a cold, if disciplined, directorial exercise.

Feisty, funny, fizzy and deeply wise, Enough Said sparkles within and without, just like the rare gem that it is.

Glossy, flossy and blithely secure in its own cheerfully fake worldview, Baggage Claim bypasses the intellect entirely, happy to satisfy on a silly, screwball, wish-fulfillment level. It could have been so much better, but for racking up undemanding escapist flyer miles, it’ll do.

Howard directs Rush with speed and jangly, jarring verve, bringing the races themselves to white-knuckled life and allowing the men’s stories to play out with only slightly predictable reversals, upsets and, inevitably, those hard lessons learned.

Try as it might to entertain serious notions of manhood, evil and original sin, Prisoners works most effectively as Hollywood hypocrisy at its most sleek, efficient and meretricious. It’s stylish, high-minded hokum.

Adore at its core is a bore, nothing more.

Short Term 12 is that rare movie gutsy enough to tell the truth about love: that it’s not a poetic longing or a magical-thinking happy ending, but a skill. And, the film suggests, we all have the capacity to learn it.

Closed Circuit is intriguing, even mildly diverting. That might have been fine for another film at another time, but in light of the here and now, this one should have been more.

Museum Hours is every bit as masterfully conceived and executed as the art works that serve as the film’s lively cast of supporting characters.

In a World . . . is a lot of fun, reflecting Bell’s own obvious love of piquant paradox and the music of the spoken word. But it also has a sharply observant streak that makes it as nourishing as it is endearingly nutty.

Like its own protagonists, Kick-Ass 2 can’t decide what it wants to be when it grows up: a vessel for unhinged vengeance and destruction or a meta-critique of those same impulses. In going for both, it winds up being neither.

A high-low tension runs through Elysium, not only in the narrative itself, but in Blomkamp’s own cinematic language, which can be lofty one moment and gleefully pulpy the next.

Computer Chess makes an affecting preservationist plea, in this case for a visual and material culture that, while not objectively beautiful, possessed its own form of buttoned-down passion — before it became obsolete by taking over the world.

It would be dishonest to claim it isn’t funny. The laughs may come in fits and starts, usually by way of sight gags and set pieces, but they do come. And then they go.

Blue Jasmine may not be a comeback in any aesthetic or professional sense, but it nevertheless feels like Allen has come back: to the psychic space and collective anxieties of the country of his birth and a real world that, for a while there, he seemed to have left behind.

2 Guns feels like it’s all been done before, whether by John Woo, Michael Bay or any number of their CGI-happy clones.

The Act of Killing is a must-see.

Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen delivers an astonishingly restrained and expressive central performance in The Hunt, an engrossing psycho-social drama by Thomas Vinterberg.

What makes it a must see is its timelessness.

A picaresque romance of self-discovery that delivers a near-constant flow of small delights until veering too far into screwball preposterousness.

The most objectionable thing about Only God Forgives isn’t that it’s shocking or immoral, but that it’s so finally, fatally dull.

Even though it earns an R rating for profanity and some risque material, it’s too meek and mild-mannered to qualify as brave, or even slyly subversive.

A big, lumbering, rock ’em, sock ’em mash-up of metallic heft and hyperbole, a noisy, overproduced disaster flick that sucks its characters and the audience down a vortex of garish visual effects and risibly cartoonish action. And you know what? It’s not bad!

Features one of the best endings in recent movie memory — and as we all know, endings are the hardest. If it takes some predictable twists and turns to get there, well then, accept it and move on.

This mishmash of styles, genres and tonal shifts makes for a dizzying pastiche best described in terms of the many movies it references throughout its nearly 2 1/2-hour running time, from “Little Big Man,” Buster Keaton’s “The General” and the Monument Valley-set canon of John Ford to “Dead Man,” “Rango” and “Pirates of the Caribbean.”

White House Down never quite seems to decide what kind of movie it wants to be, although by firepower alone it qualifies as this summer’s most cartoonishly bombastic exercise in sensory overload (so far).

Bullock and McCarthy and the chemistry they generate are far more compelling than the movie they’re in. Too often the sketches go on too long, and the coarse, abrasive tone quickly begins to feel repetitive and off-putting.

The result is a movie that, while no classic, can be credited with giving the audience something a bit more substantive than the usual disposable summer fare.

With Much Ado About Nothing, Whedon has crafted an endearing bagatelle, made with equal parts brio and love, ambition and pared-down modesty.

Like a seductively lambent hall of mirrors, The Bling Ring lays bare the venality of train-wreck celebrity culture, striving and self-deception by dramatizing a fact that’s as delicious as it is depressing.

Snyder tries to up the spectacle ante with ever more explosions, crashes, thermal blasts, topological realignments, gunfire and mano-a-mano fistfights. But the result is a punishing sense of diminishing returns and a genre that has finally reached the point of mayhem-induced exhaustion.

Rogen and his friends may have set out to celebrate virtue at its uneasiest, but they’re clearly still most at home with earthly delights.

Without the benefit of deeper psychological spadework, The Kings of Summer stays resolutely on the surface, resembling more of an extended sitcom than a memorable movie on a par with the films it references.

Primarily, What Maisie Knew is a showcase for consistently superb performances that, while utterly grounded in their characters, succeed in keeping viewers off-balance as to who will do what, and when.

The writing is so musical, so attuned to human frailty and aspiration, that I defy anyone to watch the movie without smiling — with amusement one minute, rueful recognition the next, but probably always with some measure of simple, undiluted delight.

With its ingenious structure, seamless visual conceits and mordant humor, Stories We Tell is a masterful film on technical and aesthetic values alone. But because of the wisdom and compassion of its maker, it rises to another level entirely.

The casting coup here is Benedict Cumberbatch, who exudes steely resolve and silken savagery as a villain on the cusp of becoming a legendary nemesis.

Childlike, fetishistic and painfully literal, Luhrmann’s experiment proves once again that it’s Fitzgerald’s writing — not his plot, his characters or his grasp of material detail — that has always made “Gatsby” great.

At Any Price finally hinges on tragedies, reversals and moral ambiguities of Shakespearean proportions, but they’re delivered ploddingly rather than as the intricate parts of an inevitable whole. At Any Price ultimately suffers from the very phenomenon it laments: Like Henry Whipple’s farm, it feels more mechanistic than organic.

A frantic, occasionally funny, finally enervating bricolage of special effects, explosive set pieces, sardonic one--liners and notional human emotions, this branch of the Marvel franchise tree feels brittle and over--extended enough to snap off entirely.

This is where a filmmaker’s taste and reflexive sense of balance makes all the difference. Southern culture may be on the skids in Mud, but Nichols’s sensitive portrayal is gratifyingly on the level.

If this strikes you as vaguely familiar, you’re right: Disconnect is a computer “Crash.”

Harrison plays Rickey with a jutting jaw, squinting eye and hoarse bark straight out of the Irascible Old Coot playbook, his character constantly invoking God and the almighty dollar to justify what became known as Rickey’s “noble experiment.”

Olympus Has Fallen at least possesses the frisson of timeliness amid otherwise hoary action-movie cliches.

Suffused with enormous compassion for the young woman at its center, this parable of awakenings shares some DNA with the art house hit “An Education” but has little of that movie’s nods to cozy humor and happy endings.

The filmmaker’s dedication to non-judgment occasionally militates against narrative drive: Beyond the Hills begins to sag in its middle sequences, when the repetitive monotony of Alina’s outbursts begins to yield diminishing returns. But he has made a film that’s worth even those wearying sequence.

A generic, fitfully funny mainstream comedy that doesn’t nearly get the best from its name-brand players but doesn’t qualify as a desecration, either.

About the movie industry’s misguided belief that it can distract the audience from a film’s narrative weaknesses with little more than flash and spectacle. That con might have worked with the rubes once upon a time, but in case Hollywood hasn’t noticed, we’re not in Kansas anymore.

Intriguing, if uneven, thriller.

No isn’t nearly as definitive or declarative as its title: It leaves viewers wondering whether they should cheer, shrug or shake their heads.

Safe Haven is one of those Valentine’s Day confections that satisfy your sweet tooth until you get to their weird, off-putting center. The problem with movies is that you can’t put them back in the box.

Both assaultive and tiresome, A Good Day to Die Hard barely registers on the action movie Richter scale. It goes bang, it goes boom, and then it blessedly goes away.

McCarthy’s willingness to go to the mat notwithstanding, it’s viewers who are likely left feeling punched in the gut.

Like a gel cap in a sip of orange juice, the psycho-pharmacological thriller Side Effects goes down easily, even if its long-term impact turns out to be barely dis­cern­ible.

It's Walken who grounds every scene with the kind of watchful honesty that has become his brand in late-career.

Hill and Stallone seem determined simply to prove that, even in their golden years, they're still tough enough to rumble with all comers. Bullet to the Head exposes that bravado for the pose that it is, and it's not a good look.

Smoothly navigating the perilous line between insufferably twee and heartbreakingly grim, Quartet is a subtle, sure-footed delight.

West of Memphis makes a lucid, absorbing contribution to an epic saga that Berlinger and Sinofsky first wrestled into an 18-year-long narrative that changed two lives and saved one. And it gives that epic an ending that's happy, sad, inspiring, infuriating, right and terribly wrong, all at the same time.

Amour is a must-see film that not everyone must see, at least right now.

Slick, sick, self-consciously stylish and defiantly shallow, Gangster Squad is one of those movies you can't talk about without invoking other (often better) movies. A lot of movies.

By and large, Zero Dark Thirty dispenses with sentimentality and speculation, portraying the final mission not with triumphalist zeal or rank emotionalism but with a reserved, even mournful sense of ambivalence.

Despite their Everyman appeal, Damon and Krasinski don't create much by way of emotional investment, instead becoming mirror images of their most mild-mannered, white-bread selves.

Breathes its own refreshing, occasionally demented, life into that time period, albeit in a pulpy, stylized cinematic language more akin to vampire-hunter cartoonishness than "Lincoln's" more classical reserve.

For better or worse, though, this adaptation of the mega-hit Broadway musical fits neither description, largely because it lives in that kinda-sorta, okay-not-great, this-worked-that-didn't in-between for which words like "better" and "worse" fall woefully short.

Turns out to be one of the most transportingly romantic movies of the year, one that finds the most stirring emotion in struggle rather than in ginned-up melodrama or easy resolution.

Anne Fletcher's lifeless comedy about an overbearing mother and her exasperated adult son, has no flawlessly delivered punch lines. It doesn't even have a hangnail.

In the vein of such recent classics as "The Lives of Others" and "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days," Christian Petzold's Barbara re-visits the quiet, everyday tragedies of the Iron Curtain era, when paranoia ran deep and for very good reasons.

Jack Reacher is a wildly ill-advised miscalculation, with Cruise's virtually unstoppable appeal butting uncomfortably against Reacher's alternately cocky and downright crude cynicism.

The problem with Hyde Park on Hudson isn't its suggestion of FDR's dark side. That complexity, and Murray's spot-on portrayal of a man juggling myriad pressures and demands, from petty to momentous, marks one of the film's greatest strengths. It's that Daisy rarely comes into her own as more than the pliant emotional helpmeet to the Great Man.

It's a bloated, shockingly tedious trudge that manages to look both overproduced and unforgivably cheesy.

A dreary, dismally unfunny excuse for a romantic comedy.

With grace, discretion and supreme tact, Nicks sweeps viewers to a climactic montage that wordlessly honors the best ways we care for one another. The Waiting Room bears poetic witness to an overlooked fact: America's health care system may be broken, but its people are anything but.

Killing Them Softly possesses a modicum of swagger and style, even as it perpetuates some of the crime genre's more tedious cliches, from slow-motion savagery to facile cynicism.

For all his creepy tendencies, Hitchcock is portrayed mostly sympathetically in Hitchcock, in which Sir Anthony Hopkins plays the corpulent British auteur with a combination of hauteur and playfulness.

Life of Pi is spellbinding while it lasts. Lee's film can be appreciated as many things -- a post-Darwinian meditation on coexistence as the key to survival, a reflection on the spiritual nature of suffering and transcendence, a beguiling bait-and-switch on the vagaries of belief itself.

But even appreciated simply as a little-known chapter of European history, it proves consistently engrossing, edifying and affecting.

While Wright's self-conscious theatricality and dollhouse aesthetic conjure comparisons to Baz Luhrmann and Wes Anderson, he outstrips both those filmmakers in moral seriousness and maturity.

Thankfully, this fractured fairy tale of mental illness, family drama, ragged romance and die-hard Philadelphia Eagles fandom has landed in the superbly capable hands of David O. Russell.

An electrifying, confounding, what-the-hell-just-happened exercise in unbounded imagination, unapologetic theatricality, bravura acting and head-over-heels movie-love.

Instead of a grand tableau vivant that lays out the great man and his great deeds like so many too-perfect pieces of waxed fruit, Spielberg brings the leader and viewers down to ground level.

From the first smoky notes of a theme song sung by Adele, it's clear that Skyfall will be both classic and of-the-moment.

Just in time for the holiday travel season, Flight brings audiences perhaps the most harrowing scenes of a troubled airplane ever committed to film.

Thanks to Lewin's light but assured touch, The Sessions never wears its theological preoccupations heavily, instead allowing transcendence to creep up on the audience quietly.

While Tom Tykwer, Andy Wachowski and Lana Wachowski haven't necessarily expanded on Mitchell's book, they've done a superlative job making it legible onscreen. Cloud Atlas deserves praise if only for not being the baggy, pretentious disaster it could have been in other hands.

Beauty Is Embarrassing stays true to White's own exacting standards: It's thoughtful, skillfully executed and pure pop pleasure, from start to finish.

Scrappy and unsubtle where "We Were Here" is elegant and nuanced, How to Survive a Plague isn't nearly as formally beautiful as its predecessor.

The film also begins to feel like a case of a director getting to revel in the very thing he's reviling.

This captivating, expertly machined political thriller jumps through every hoop the naysayer can set up: It's serious and substantive, an ingeniously written and executed drama fashioned from a fascinating, little-known chapter of recent history.

A sequel every bit as clumsy, ham-handed, outlandish and laughable as the original was sleek, tough and efficient.

So didactic that viewers are likely to feel less uplifted than lectured.

Thanks to the assured hold Johnson exerts over this ingeniously structured game of cat-and-cat, we'll go anyplace he has in mind.

Trouble With the Curve presents viewers with a frustrating change-up: What promised to be a modest, refreshingly unforced little comedy turns out to be low energy to a fault.

Never lets viewers fully inside Erik and Paul's world, a reticence that isn't helped by the actors' fey, restrained-to-a-fault performances. That and a frustratingly episodic structure make what might have been a raw and inspiring portrait of commitment and boundaries a surprisingly uninvolving, arms-length enterprise. Keep the Lights On lets go just when it should be holding you tighter.

That Detropia won't be just another well-reported urban obituary is clear from the film's arresting opening moments.

By bringing so much thought, verve and visual poetry to bear on two neurotics acting out -- rather than on the larger cultural story they anticipate and embody -- The Master turns out to be more of a self-defeating whimper than the big, important bang it could have been.

A whimsical, sad, diverting and altogether delightful exploration of how cinema can benefit, not only from glancing back at its own past, but by staying open to parallel forms of presentation and play.

There are few cinematic pleasures as satisfying to behold as an actor in a role that fits him like a Savile Row suit. Richard Gere offers just such gratification in Arbitrage, a silky, sophisticated Wall Street thriller that finds the actor utterly in his prime, wearing his age and accumulated emotional wisdom with warmth, charisma and nonstop appeal.

With warmth, unsparing self-awareness and that ineffable Everyman appeal sometimes called "relatability," Birbiglia proves to be as engaging a presence on the screen as he has been all these years onstage and over the radio waves.

Compliance is an extraordinarily assured, well-made drama, signaling a promising career for Zobel, an adroit filmmaker with a talent for taut pacing and staging. But it also fails its first test, which is that the audience believe every word of it.

With visions of "The Public Enemy," "Bonnie and Clyde" and even "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford" dancing in its head, the Prohibition-era drama Lawless winds up being equal to none of them -- even if it holds its own as a modestly respectable genre exercise.

Oslo, August 31st builds to an unforgettable climax, a bravura sequence that starts at a party, crawls through a variety of nightclubs and raves, and ends on a note of utterly surprising lyricism.

While Sparkle doesn't give the audience a lasting memory of Houston's voice at its most soaring, it does manage to provide a lingering sense of loss, mixed with celebration and grim irony.

Celeste and Jesse Forever engages in Bridget Jones-like comedy of mortification, sending its heroine down a path of self-discovery that ultimately seems more cruel than revelatory.

With The Bourne Legacy, Gilroy has brought characteristic taste and skill to a nearly impossible task: embracing the past without completely erasing it, thereby creating an invitingly complicated and open-ended future.

Tends toward the broadest possible takes on slapstick, sophomoric sexuality and post-"Hangover" raunch.

Hope Springs is a minor miracle of a movie. Within a Hollywood tradition accustomed to treating sex as something titillating, taboo, gauzily idealized or downright pornographic, finally someone has made a movie that treats it in the riskiest way possible: as the physical expression of intimacy between two flawed but recognizable adults.

The Queen of Versailles turns out to be a portrait -- appalling, absorbing and improbably affecting -- of how, even within a system seemingly designed to ensure that the rich get richer, sometimes the rich get poorer.

That Winterbottom has delivered a dud makes Trishna all the more disappointing, a rare unsatisfying swerve from an otherwise reliably provocative career.

For a movie so bent on skewering illusions, Ruby Sparks ultimately can't entirely let go of its own.

The Watch takes the same ethos of male bonding, obsession with sex and sardonic violence that has proved so profitable in recent years on yet another summer spin. The tires may be in need of changing pretty soon, but for now the jalopy still runs.

Most important, does The Dark Knight Rises achieve the impossible, which is to bring a cherished cinematic chapter to a close, yet manage to leave fans feeling not desolate but cheered? To that all-important question, the answer is an unequivocal yes.

Maybe the best way to describe Beasts of the Southern Wild is faux-k art. Even Hushpuppy's name suggests an author more interested in the folk- and foodways of a culture-with-a-capital-C than the people who comprise it. Too often, she and her peers are presented as curios to be exhibited rather than as fully realized -- if resolutely un-mythic -- human beings.

Savages is a B-movie striving for an A-plus, a decadently energetic summer escape with bloody action, bold visuals and bodacious attitude to burn.

The good news is that Garfield and Stone whip up a warm, convincing froth as two teenagers caught up in a beguiling case of puppy love. The not-so-great news is that by "reboot," the studio means taking audiences once again through every step of Peter's transformation into Spider-Man.

It's a nicely balanced blend of comedy, drama and athletic dancing that plies its trade with winking, unforced self-assurance.

Eventually MacFarlane's formula -- consisting of filthy, ethnically offensive jokes, scatological humor, tacky pop culture references and random cameos -- begins to wear thin.

Dick, whose films include a revealing expose about the movie industry's film ratings board, has created yet another galvanizing call to action with The Invisible War.

A strange little movie. Unsure whether it wants to be a quirky, sad-eyed indie pixie or a brassy, raunchy broad, it veers uneasily between the two, never quite settling into a comfortable or recognizable groove.

The conflicts, magic spells, chase sequences and reconciliations feel strangely by-the-book for a studio so well known for throwing the book out entirely.

It's a curio, ripe with dreamy atmospherics and intriguing mysteries, but little else.

Gerwig remains one of the most captivating new stars to hit the big screen, but she's still looking for a movie that deserves her.

Very little is simple in Your Sister's Sister -- not the emotions, the naturalistic tone or the unstudied, easygoing performances. But the film's pleasures are.

Rock of Ages gets too mired in plotty cul de sacs, manufactured setbacks and numbers that are all staged as show-stoppers. In the words of the Journey song that serves as a climactic singalong, it goes on and on and on and on.

All the God-talk and philosophical musings about morality and "meeting our makers" aside, Prometheus is primarily about delivering those visceral, terrifying jolts. That it does so without generating the taut suspense and moody atmosphere of its antecedents qualifies as one of its greatest failings.

Moonrise Kingdom is already shaping up to be this summer's art house sleeper hit, and no wonder: It traffics in the very kind of escapist spectacle -- in this case of a thoughtfully composed world brimming with whimsy, enchantment and visual brio -- that the season was made for.

Interspersing "real" people with professional actors, Linklater creates a vivid, gossipy Greek chorus that serves as a kind of collective unreliable narrator -- an altogether appropriate stance given the moral gray zone the sweetly confounding Bernie inhabits.

Even amid the hit-and-miss broadsides and laugh-free longueurs that comprise most of The Dictator, Cohen's acute hypocrisy-detector keeps on ticking, if barely.

As a lucid, emotionally involving portrait of the looming crisis surrounding water - supplies of which are dwindling as contamination rises - Jessica Yu's smartly constructed argument works less as a tutorial than as an infectiously impassioned call to arms.

Dark Shadows doesn't know where it wants to dwell: in the eerie, subversive penumbra suggested by its title or in playful, go-for-broke camp.

Dogs and the women who love them form the warm and gooey center of Darling Companion, Lawrence Kasdan's fitfully amusing comedy-drama.

Monsieur Lazhar resembles a clear, clean glass of water: transparent, utterly devoid of gratuitous flavorings or frou-frou, and all the more bracing and essential for it.

The Avengers has been executed with all the reverence the super-fans demand, as well as the winking, self-referential humor that has made it palatable for filmgoers disinclined to take a bunch of grown men dressed in spangles and spandex so very seriously.

Ambitious, affecting, unwieldy and haunting, it's an eccentric, densely atmospheric, morally hyper-aware masterpiece that refuses to follow the strictures of conventional cinematic structure, instead leading the audience on a circuitous journey down the myriad rabbit holes that comprise modern-day Manhattan.

I liked The Five-Year Engagement, and then I didn't, and then I did.

Director Scott Hicks lavishes good taste and sunsets on a story that - devoid of genuine tension, conflict or combustible chemistry between its two stars - just prettily sits there.

An all-star revue of some of the most physically stunning actors working in Hollywood, Think Like a Man is a pleasure if only on a purely sensory level.

A movie sure to reward the filmmaker's most die-hard fans, while doing little to quiet critics who found his work self-conscious to the point of insufferability.

This intimate, straightforward, often wrenching portrait of five families dealing with bullying and its aftermath doesn't hold many surprises at a time when such campaigns as "It Gets Better" and special programming on kids' cable networks are bringing the issue to the fore.

A pulpy, deceivingly insightful send-up of horror movies that elicits just as many knowing chuckles as horrified gasps.

Leery filmgoers can exhale: The Kid With a Bike may hew faithfully to the Dardennes' house style of spare, lucid storytelling. But without giving anything away, let's just say that with this simple, deeply affecting tale, they never set out to break your heart.

If the series's legions of fans miss a detail here or a sub-plot there, they'll still recognize its bones and sinew, especially in Jennifer Lawrence's eagle-eyed heroine Katniss Everdeen.

Like Marilyn Monroe and Judy Holliday before him, Tatum is sublime at playing dumb (as a dim pretty boy, he seems to be channeling Brad Pitt in "Burn After Reading"), just as Hill shrewdly deploys his body mass for maximum physical comedy (even slimmed down, with an Oscar nomination under that tightened belt, he carries himself with a fat man's comically elephantine grace).

With its shambling, felicitously contrived structure and Fellini-esque climax, it's some kind of Jungian slacker fable.

Even Strong's best efforts can't save John Carter from collapsing in on itself like a dead star.

Any resemblance to last year's breakout comedy hit "Bridesmaids" is purely intended in a film that seeks the same kind of liberated raunch but too often succumbs to talky, edgy-for-its-own sake glibness.

A surprisingly lush, endearing little film, in which a swelling sense of romanticism thoroughly banishes even the most far-fetched improbabilities.

Absorbing, inspiring and terrifically entertaining, Undefeated earns its title: It's a winner all the way.

Lynne Ramsay's thoughtful, unnerving film works its strange power over viewers who are likely to find themselves as compelled as repelled by its fatally flawed key players.

Between this film and last summer's "Horrible Bosses," Aniston's coyness - starring in explicit movies without having to be explicit herself - seems to be becoming her stock in trade. It's not a particularly commendable one, and Wanderlust does little to disprove that she's still a star more suited to TV rather than the big screen.

As this sloppy, scattered, utterly synthetic piece of Hollywood widgetry unspools, it becomes increasingly clear that the romantic tension at play exists mostly between the men in question.

Most vividly, The Swell Season captures the insistent, borderline-disturbing energy of fandom at its most rabid and psychically intrusive.

Conceived and directed by Madonna, W.E. is a gorgeous mess.

Man on a Ledge has its diverting moments, but by the time it has reached its too-pat final twist, it turns out to be a title desperately in search of a movie.

Like the man himself, Albert Nobbs is a sweet, sad, sensitive little film, a haunting reminder that each of us, on some level, is impersonating someone.

The setting and fatalistic musings of The Grey invite comparison to Sean Penn's stirring 2007 ad­ven­ture "Into the Wild"; in its more metaphysical moments, told in impressionistic flashbacks, it recalls last year's "The Tree of Life."

There's a fine line between precocious and insufferable, and it's a line continually crossed by Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.

One of the reasons Haywire is such a pleasure to watch is that its director, Steven Soderbergh, doesn't overplay the film's hear-me-roar subversions.

If viewers are left feeling just as impotent as many of the characters, that may be precisely what Jolie intended for a film that asks nothing more of its audience than to bear witness.

Can a performance be too good? Meryl Streep disappears so uncannily into former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady that her performance overpowers the movie it's in - a perfectly executed triple axel that renders everything else just featureless ice.

This invigoratingly fresh, optimistic film - which features the breathtaking debuts of director Dee Rees and leading lady Adepero Oduye - plunges the audience into a world that's both tough and tender, vivid and grim, drenched in poetry and music and pain and discovery.

Spielberg has created an appropriate showcase for the magnificent creature that emerges, one that recalls the great movie horses of yore in a story guaranteed to pluck, grab and wring viewers' hearts, but thankfully not break them.

Provides a welcome seasonal dash of wholesomeness and humor.

Sadly, Herge isn't around to see The Adventures of Tintin, Spielberg's crisp, richly rendered animated adaptation, which could be counted as both a success and a failure. Spielberg has brought Tintin to the big screen all right, but not quite to life.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo may want it both ways, getting its tawdry kicks while tsk-tsking those who deliver them in real life, but Mara's bristling, unbridled performance gives the film the ballast it needs to pull off that curious, undeniably engrossing, balancing act.

Mortensen has called A Dangerous Method Cronenberg's "Merchant-Ivory picture," but it just as often resembles a Woody Allen movie - literate, sophisticated and deeply concerned with sex and manners. (It's even mordantly funny, as an early scene at the Freud family dinner table attests.)

There's a place in the movies for wish fulfillment, no doubt, including the wish for it all to be over.

As a stylistic and narrative throwback, Alfredson's adamantly un-thrilling procedural reminds viewers of an era when viewers allowed themselves to be entertained by a good yarn about a few colorful or at least colorlessly compelling characters.

Le Havre is a playful parable that conveys profound truths about compassion, humility and sacrifice. It offers proof that miracles do happen - especially in Kaurismaki's lyrically hardscrabble neighborhood.

One of the weaknesses of The Sitter is that Hill doesn't develop much comic chemistry with the children.

Behind all the noisemakers and funny glasses, New Year's Eve - and everyone in it - is dead behind the eyes.

Fans of Fassbender's yummy performances in this year's "Jane Eyre" and "X-Men: First Class" should be forewarned that, although we see the handsome Irish actor in the altogether, Shame is strangely un-sexy.

The Artist is anything but mute, with a lush orchestral score and a little sonic wink at the the end; fewer movies this year reward listening - and watching - so lavishly.

Strangely, Scorsese's very passion for the subject matter turns out to be both a blessing and a curse for Hugo.

A shapeless collection of encounters with Texas prison inmates and their victims, what could have been a well-aimed examination of the most troubling contradictions of capital punishment instead becomes a maudlin, unrestrained wallow.

As von Trier's ultimate wish-fulfillment fantasy, Melancholia is a broodingly downbeat self-portrait but also the inspiring work of an artist of seemingly boundless imaginative power.

A pitch-perfect movie that threads a microscopically tiny needle between high comedy and devastating drama.

Nivola and Breslin make a terrific mismatched pair in a film that often resembles a mash-up of "Crazy Heart" and Sofia Coppola's "Somewhere," which may account for why it too often feels derivative and contrived.

All of it makes for a rollicking, outsize tale of overweening ambition and palace intrigue, but J. Edgar instead plays it safe in a turgid, back-and-forth series of tableaux that look as if they were filmed from behind a scrim soaked in weak tea.

After all, Like Crazy seems to say, haven't we all been there? Didn't it hurt? And wasn't it grand?

An improbably satisfying action comedy.

The weakest link here is Heard, who possesses the icy cool of Kim Novak but whose character never quite comes into fuller focus than as a hyper-sexualized object of desire.

Elizabeth Olsen delivers an utterly transfixing turn as the title character of this chilling psychological thriller.

With Anonymous, director Roland Emmerich gives us "Shakespeare in Luck." Make that "Dumb Luck": In this alternately entertaining and wildly ham-handed speculative romp.

Somehow, the comic chemistry never seems to ignite in The Big Year.

A must-see for any student of history, political rhetoric and film poetics at their most vagrant and revelatory.

Taut, unsettling, haunting and powerful.

Footloose never needed to be dragged into the 21st century, but Brewer has made it look and sound a little bit more like the real world.

Funny, moving, hip and transcendent all at the same time, The Way is both deeply thoughtful and enormous fun to watch.

The Ides of March is cynical when, with political figures and institutions at all-time lows in public opinion, cynicism is the last thing we need; worse, that cynicism isn't spiked with any new or incisive insight.

Restless is saved from movie-of-the-week soppiness by its plucky lead actors; by now we assume (correctly) that Wasikowska will infuse her character with lucid, clear-eyed warmth.

Considering that any one of those elements could have scuttled its fragile mix of drama, comedy and life-and-death stakes, 50/50 beats the odds with modest, utterly winning ease.

First-time director Anne Sewitsky may intend Happy, Happy as a Chekhovian chamber piece or romantic bagatelle, but her smugness about racism - and her glib symbolic resolution of the conflicts she raises - suggests an ambition that far outstrips her ability, at least for now.

Like a cold beer under a bluebird sky; like a flawless line drive on a warm summer's day; like a long, languorous seventh-inning stretch - Moneyball satisfies.

Low-key, sleek and sophisticated, Drive provides the visceral pleasures of pulp without sacrificing art. It's cool and smart. Some critics might even call it European.

Senna is what film critics might call a TMSI movie, as in: Trust me, see it.

There's a lovely moment with Mirren and John Hurt that helps send Brighton Rock toward its final note of tenderness. With so much style to burn, Joffe handles the tinge of Greene-ian ambivalence just right.

There are times when Our Idiot Brother possesses a loping, genial sweetness. But it lacks conviction, and it doesn't hold a beeswax candle to such similarly themed films as "You Can Count on Me" and "Momma's Man."

One Day often seems too tame for its own good, as if its spirited protagonists were censoring themselves in deference to a PG-13 rating.

Akin to watching a ring-tested champion punch far below his weight. What a comedown.

Hip, lurid and improbably lovable, The Guard is easily the best guy-love comedy of the summer, with Cheadle and Gleeson's riffs and repartee tumbling back and forth as if they've been trading lies over Guinness forever.

As affectionately as Taylor has brought The Help to the screen, and as gratifying as it is to watch Davis and Spencer bring Aibileen and Minny to palpable, fully rounded life, their narrative, like "The Blind Side" a few years ago, is structured largely around their white female benefactor.

What does The Future hold? Wonders, each of them weirder and more unnerving than the last.

As it is, the audience must content itself with baby poop, naughty words and the female anatomy at its pneumatic extreme, while Bateman and Reynolds's search for transcendence continues.

An absorbing, agonizing documentary about ambition, lust and anthropomorphism at their most heedless, records suffering and manipulation so extreme that description can barely do them justice.

With its contrived setups, preposterous coincidences and calculated sentimentalism, Crazy, Stupid, Love seems beamed from the same alternate reality as "Larry Crowne." We might enjoy the ride while we're on it, but it will seem like a visit to another planet once we're home.

A loving throwback to the classic westerns and sci-fi adventures of yore, this celebration of two of cinema's most revered genres doesn't stint in lavishing their most cherished conventions with even-handed affection and respect.

With such classics as "El Norte" and, more recently, "Sin Nombre" and "Under the Same Moon" having addressed the subject matter already and so well, viewers might be forgiven for asking just how many immigration movies we need. As A Better Life proves, as many as there are stories to tell.

If Kunis gets the showier role in Friends With Benefits, Timberlake proves a quietly charming stalking horse, finally claiming and fully owning the spotlight with a hilarious homage to the 1990s rap duo Kriss Kross.

Captain America might hold the most promise, not just of saving the world, but of saving comic book movies from themselves.

Tender, observant coming-of-age comedy.

With its heartening final note of hope and renewal, Deathly Hallows -- Part 2 provides an altogether fitting finale to a series that has prized the fans above all.

This fitfully funny but mostly dull misfire defines exactly where the line can be drawn between truly subversive humor and lazy cynicism.

Have you ever been trapped in the back seat of a car while the old married couple up front bickers and banters for hours? It's either sheer torture or, if the couple happens to be Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, wildly entertaining.

You know you're in the hands of a superbly gifted filmmaker when he can pull off a talking dog.

All too often the plot feels calculated rather than organic, the result of a time-tested formula rather than genuine innovation.

At its best, The Tree of Life makes the viewer lean forward, eager to enter Malick's own dreamy, poetic consciousness. At worst, it leads to the vague feeling that we're listening to the meanderings of someone who's not sure we're smart enough to keep up.

First Class happily delivers on the escapism and rich narrative texture the best of its predecessors have promised.