Betsy Sharkey

If anything, the film is a reflection of the Web zeitgeist, where observation comes easily but insight is rare. What saves the documentary from becoming a complete frustration is the sheer, stunning prescience of Harris.

It is the almost accidental way Tina and Chris go about going bad that provides Sightseers with its twisted humor and its unexpected charm.

It is a singular performance and a deeply affecting if imperfect film.

Between the writing, acting, directing and the rest, it works. Not crazy, not stupid, and filled with love. Period.

A visceral story of beat cops that is rare in its sensitivity, rash in its violence and raw in its humor.

The film's difficulties are in the roiling emotions that run through it. Intimacy and the interdependence required to survive a harsh environment are more easily achieved. Swank and Jones, in particular, are a very good odd couple, playing saint and sinner, sometimes reversing the roles.

For the most part, The East is a dizzying cat and mouse game with all sorts of moral implications.

The script, written by director John Slattery and Alex Metcalf, drifts too quickly into blue-collar cliches, leaving its interesting collection of characters only half-drawn at best.

Somehow it is the waiting - for the fall that you expect is coming, for the marriage you figure will fall apart - that makes Take This Waltz one to make room for on your dance card.

Land Ho! is full of surprises, rich in the way it noses around the rocky terrain of aging in an indifferent world through the engaging performances of its two stars.

Authenticity gives the movie its witty, heartwarming, hopeful, sentimental, searing and relatable edge. It is merciless in probing the tender spots of times like these, and tough-guy sweet in patching up the wounds.

Peli works at mining the unknown, the unknowable, like a minimalist, using small moments and virtually no special effects exceedingly well.

It is the interplay between Wasikowska and Eisenberg that gives "The Double" both its tension and its charm... Their struggle captivates, the resolution shocks, and you can't help but wonder what windmills Ayoade will tilt next.

Though it might not sound it, watching Kumiko brood is mesmerizing. Kikuchi uses her mournful eyes to take us to dark places, though she's equally adept at surprise and confusion, even joy when it comes along.

This raunchy unrooting of a settled suburban idyll exposes the considerable angst of emerging adulthood with a kind of scatological fervor designed to elicit oodles of inappropriate laughs. It succeeds.

Martin Scorsese has created a divinely dark and devious brain tease of a movie in the best noir tradition with its smarter than you'd think cops, their tougher than you'd imagine cases to crack and enough nods to the classic genre for an all-night parlor game.

The big action pieces, particularly the final face-off, are masterful both for their cleverness in bringing down the house and the detail jammed into every frame. Even composers Hans Zimmer, who's scored a zillion movies, and John Powell seem to be having more fun than usual.

When the writer-director is on his game, as he is in Ned Rifle, the effect is bizarre black comedy that is designed to set you thinking about what his satire is really saying.

From the clockwork comic timing to the movie's salty mix of the ridiculous and the reflective, This Is the End is stupidly hysterical and smartly heretical. Cross my heart and hope to die, it's funny as hell.

One of those documentaries that is sad and hopeful in equal measure and exceptional in its storytelling.

Haywire doesn't measure up to the best of the director's work - like, say, his Oscar-winning drug drama, "Traffic." But watching Carano kick, spin, flip, choke, crack and crush the fiercest of foes - mostly men about twice her size - is thoroughly entertaining, highly amusing and frankly somewhat awe-inspiring.

Zilberman's minimalistic approach fits the idea of the film better than it fits the actual film. It leaves this melancholy mood piece with some beautiful moments, but unlike Beethoven's work, A Late Quartet ultimately feels unfinished.

Smart isn't all it's cracked up to be and soon the movie is unraveling faster than all of Eddie's grand schemes.

Whether the San Pedro does its magic is of course the big question. Regardless, Silva works his, delivering not exactly the Holy Grail of road movies, but a very mellow summer high.

Furious 7 is the fuel-injected fusion of all that is and ever has been good in "The Fast and the Furious" saga.

There are so many ways in which Nowhere Boy, an emotionally raw and yet raucous, rockin' riff on John Lennon's turbulent teenage years, is such an entertaining piece of nostalgia.

Whatever the film's flaws, and like its protagonist, there are times when things get a bit out of control, watching Giamatti use Barney to wrestle with success, failure, friendship, love and increasingly with time is exhilarating.

In Continental Drift, the filmmakers have gone a little crazy too, but in a good way. Smack dab in the middle of things there's a big Broadway-style number involving pirates.

This is a film done right by just about every measure. The extremes of the story seep deep into your bones -- the beauty, the allure, the desperation and especially the cold in this world where life literally hangs on rope and what Mother Nature chooses to throw at you.

As pure of heart as its heroine, Cinderella floats across the screen like a gossamer confection, full of elegant beauty and quiet grace.

There is a great deal of playfulness between the couple that will touch the romantic in most.

This is a far more brutal film than Wheatley's first, 2009's "Down Terrace." Though it had crime at its center as well, it was balanced by a dry irony and far less blood. There is no offset in Kill List, with one scene so relentless in its gore that it makes the notorious elevator scene in "Drive" pale in comparison.

The archival game footage -- Cantona on the field, the roaring crowds -- infuses the film with that high-spirited sense of hope and heart that only a brilliant play when a game is on the line can deliver. Loach, a brilliant player at his own game, delivers the rest.

While his breakthrough documentary, "Dogtown and Z-Boys," cracked open the window on a largely unknown world in vibrant and visceral ways, Bones feels like an epilogue.

Here the filmmakers are in fine fettle, which goes a long way to make much of the low-brow silliness and slapstick infectious.

It's massive, all the retaliation and the world saving stuff. And it's convoluted. Frankly no one should have to think that hard to keep up with the Joes.

In taking Partridge to the movies, the writers go broader and deeper than they typically do with the story.

The Angels' Share leaves a warm glow.

The sheer audacity of Fast Five is kind of breathtaking in a metal-twisting, death-defying, mission-implausible, B-movie-on-steroids kind of way. Not complaining, just saying.

Make no mistake, it is lovely to look at this celebrity bedazzled bit of L.A. crime history for a while. But the movie ultimately leaves you feeling as empty as the lives it means to portray.

Amini has a powerful acting triumvirate in Mortensen, Dunst and Isaac to help him deal with the capricious nature of this particular tangled web.

Who would have thought one of the most amusing and oddly insightful romantic comedies would be built around the power and the potent pull of porn?

This is a movie that leaves you wanting more. To care more, to cry more, to love more.

Spurlock creates a good time along with some surprisingly salient observations as he tries to keep his balance on this very slippery slope.

The writer-director digs deeply and with a marked sensitivity, capturing the desperate, heartbroken humanity of the time and the place. But it is also a movie of frustrating stumbles — blunders that diminish what might have been a brilliant film.

Byzantium's appeal is not so much its bite, which could use some refining, but the emotional journey its undead take. In Jordan's hands, the vampires are so very human.

It's when the film detours into Irving's personal attachment to the birds, including photos of her as a child on the beach, that Pelican Dreams gets seriously off track. Fortunately, pelicans are interesting creatures and the time spent with the lens focused on them is payoff enough.

McLaughlin, who has a good eye for the minimal, manages to bring out the haunting beauty of empty places littered with the discards of forgotten lives.

Jackson's latest go at Tolkien's treasured "Hobbit" story gets closer to that rich alchemy of fantasy, adventure, imagination and emotion that made his "Lord of the Rings" trilogy such a triumph.

Quietly and movingly out of this world. Director Mike Cahill has woven sci-fi imaginings and quantum physics theories of parallel universes into a provocative meditation on the prospect of rewriting your life history.

The action is inventive, extensive and exciting, a bang-up job by cinematographer Mitchell Amundsen, one of the town's hot new shooters.

Though the indie falls short of its grandest ambitions, it is inventive in constructing its conceits. As to Moss and Duplass? It's hard not to love them — for better or worse.

What helps offset the predictable in this very predictable movie is a series of show-stopping numbers, so props to the folks who oversaw music and choreography. But the true saving grace is a few of the central players.

An unusually intelligent cut at the relationship game.

We look to documentaries like The Invisible Front — dense with detail, straightforward in laying out the issues — to put history in perspective. And in this case to illuminate a little-known page from it.

Bristling with dangers both corporeal and cerebral, The Debt is a superbly crafted espionage thriller packed with Israeli-Nazi score settling.

The pieces don't always fit together as neatly as you might wish, but if you let it, The Good Lie's heartwarming soul will win you over.

Some of the language is smart, sinister and ironic in just the right ways, particularly when Addison, Eric Bana's serial-killing mastermind, delivers it. In other cases, the dialogue is so ludicrously off - either unnecessary, or unnecessarily misogynistic if a cop is doing the talking - that it's hard to believe the same person wrote it.

The problem with The Runaways is that they went with the wrong girl.

It's lush and vibrant when Williams is onscreen, mostly fussy British discontent when she's not.

Far too conventional underneath all the trappings, you wish it would howl.

It's clear from first frame to last that the filmmakers decided to go broad, very broad, with a story that swings between hysterical, hyper-sexual, bizarre, surprisingly tender and just plain awful. This is one mixed bag of a movie.

Did I mention the dialogue? Well, really the armored car driver put it best when he said, "We're in trouble here…" No joke.

The cast Rush has assembled around Ferrell helps as well. There are tiny gems contributed by Laura Dern as the long-lost high school crush Nick looks up, and Stephen Root as a prickly neighbor with some unusual proclivities.

Hawkins' performance as "Dagenham's" unassuming heroine, an amalgam of several key figures who stepped up back in the day, is first-rate and already generating some Oscar talk.

A tedious two-plus hours. There were such possibilities in the origins idea.

The animation is snappy in the way it handles an extremely eclectic-looking bunch of monsters. The 3-D effects are nifty but, as with so much about "MU," not necessary.

The seriously out-of-control hard R dude is writer-director Nicholas Stoller, who apparently has major trust issues with his odd-couple stars, women and the audience. Did I forget anybody?

The film is very much like a home movie in trying to tell its story of families and feuds complete with the bad lighting, bad camera angles and meandering observations. Though you will wish for more polish and insight, its unruly action is hard to resist.

The Swell Season emerges as an incisive cut at fame's effect on the real-life music and romance of Hansard and Irglova. It's an accomplished piece of filmmaking from the trio, who are making their feature-length documentary debut.

It is the kind of film that leaves you limp, exhausted and feeling battered by the end. But its wrenching performances make the beating worth weathering.

The road is rocky when the story speeds up to take care of business, with the end a mad dash to tie up loose ends. Still, there is enough saving grace on these craggy shores to let the mists and the legends roll in and envelop you for a while.

If you can get past the gross invasion of privacy issues that would exist if this were real life and not just a frothy confection, what you have is some bittersweet fun peppered by bursts of sharp patter, the best between the boys.

Like an exquisite minimalist painting - its beauty will move you, its simplicity will fool you. For there are layers and complexities to be found in the film, like the many mysteries it slowly exposes.

Quartet is very much a performance piece, which plays to Hoffman's strength - as an actor he knows when to allow this excellent ensemble breathing room and when to tighten the belt.

Belle is greatly buoyed by Mbatha-Raw's performance. She infuses Dido with a confident and intelligent grace that keeps you engaged long after the tangled story has let both the actress and audience down.

In Enzo Avitabile Music Life, Demme has not given us an expansive film, and there are spots you wish he'd dug deeper. But there is such a well of emotion that the music alone is almost enough.

The writer-director becomes so intent on hammering home the parallels between economic decay, political disappointments and petty criminals, there is nothing soft, or subtle, about it. He should trust his audience more.

This is a smartly told story, and as fresh as any contemporary romance.

The film, like the tour, will satisfy the Conan cravings of hardcore fans the most, and prove an enjoyable enough diversion for the rest.

In a roundabout way, St. Vincent delivers, though less as a film than a platform for an object lesson by St. Bill in effortless acting.

Chow is actually an apt metaphor for the movie - indescribably irritating and only in it for the money.

The movie has a few bursts of energy and invention — a cleverly executed jailbreak is one. But the story drifts and the pacing drags, failing to gather much steam until the final moments.