Betsy Sharkey

The kind of comedy that goes down easy even as it looks at the hard stuff.

Meanwhile, Mirren, that grande dame of cinema, just seems tired. And who could blame her? She's in the midst of this disaster, literally and figuratively dying right in front of us. Made me want to cry, just not for Arthur.

You might want to tuck Damien Chazelle's name into your memory bank if his filmmaking debut, the terrific jazz improvisation that is Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench, is any indication of what his future might hold.

Though the fun is not so much in who wins or loses the girl - it's the playing that matters, and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World definitely has game.

The movie is intimate in its telling, sweeping in its issues and stumbles only occasionally.

The Lego Movie is strikingly, exhilaratingly, exhaustingly fresh.

Between Lelio's ingenuity in staging the film, an extremely clever script co-written with his frequent collaborator, Gonzalo Maza, and the pumping disco that interjects its opinions and assessments of each situation, Gloria is one of the most enjoyable movies to come along in a while.

For all of the eccentricities that come in any telling of an artist's life, Cutie and the Boxer's real magic is in so beautifully telling a familiar story of husbands and wives.

Watching this film feels like a genesis moment — of sci-fi fable, of filmmaking, of performance — with all the ambiguity and excitement that implies.

Deeply moving and devoid of melodrama, These Birds Walk is as pragmatic as its subjects.

In the end, 127 Hours is one man's incredible, unforgettable journey; it took the extraordinary alchemy of Boyle and Franco to also make it ours.

Coogan and Brydon are either quite brilliant at this or just serving up slight variations of their very witty selves. Either way, their travels and squabbles are great fun to watch, the countryside is bucolic, the food mouthwatering. You just wouldn't want to go on a real road trip with them.

By far the film's deadliest weapon is McConaughey. The way the actor leans into threats, dropping his voice, wrapping eloquence in sinister tones, is skin-crawling. The muscles in his neck literally seem to tense one by one. And if the eyes are the window to the soul, you really don't want to peer for long into his. It is not an easy performance to watch, but it is unforgettable.

Miles Teller and Shailene Woodley, as high school seniors Sutter and Aimee, bring such an authentic face of confidence and questioning, indifference and need, pain and denial, friendship and first love, that it will take you back to that time if you're no longer there, and light a path if you are.

Not "An Affair to Remember," mind you, but a welcome change from the Nicholas Sparks brand of mush that has overtaken the hearts-and-flowers corner of movieland.

It is an imperfect film about this imperfect world. But if "Mister & Pete" doesn't make you rethink the social safety net that fails these kids, and so many others like them, book some time with a cardiologist.

In the hands of two of the craft's best, the most ordinary of moments become illuminating, penetrating.

All the talking would be fine, but the dialogue is preachy, the drama too earnest and the action kind of sluggish, though it's hard not to get a jolt when Johnson jumps behind the wheel.

The filmmaker constructs a growing sense of dread with the calculated precision of a classic horror movie.

That meandering dialogue can be difficult to control, and at times the film feels as if the director has stepped away from the vehicle, leaving it to veer off the path. Still, it's an experiment that works more than it fails by giving Gosling and Williams both the motive and the means to create something extraordinary, a valentine that actually says something true about being in love.

Top Five is fully loaded. The laughs are earned, the intelligence never disappears, all the performers shine. But Rock is the diamond — raw, rough and rare.

There is a lot of hope in the air in I Wish, but the film never feels sappy. The very appealing score by the Japanese indie-rock group Quruli brings a kind of upbeat energy that matches the clean, open style of director of photography Yutaka Yamazaki, a frequent Kore-eda collaborator.

A buoyant and disarming drama about sons and fathers, death and dying, living and loving and all the ways we find ourselves starting over, hoping to finally get it right.

Joaquin Phoenix and the terrific acting ensemble that joins him in this pot-infused '70s-era beach noir create such a good buzz you can almost get a contact high from watching.

The 17-year-old so completely captures the innocence, cynicism and rage of a child of poverty and divorce on the edge of adulthood that it feels as if you are spying on Mia, so achingly real, so tangible does her world seem here.

In "Django," Tarantino is a man unchained, creating his most articulate, intriguing, provoking, appalling, hilarious, exhilarating, scathing and downright entertaining film yet.

It is the way in which the writer-director uses the specter of vampires and vices to take an off-center cut at Iranian gender politics and U.S.-Eurocentric pop culture that sets the film apart.

Like everything else about this lovely film, life, love and emotional growth are marked out in lush, languid, luminous terms.