Dana Stevens

Happy People's images of the Taiga, while often breathtaking, come from the standard visual language of nature documentary: in between interviews with villagers, cutaways to icicles hanging from branches or dawn breaking over an expanse of snow. It's Herzog's inventive use of voice-over that elevates the film above an extremely well-researched episode of "Nature."

Like most haunted-house stories, Mama gets steadily less scary as its (for the most part, fairly predictable) secrets unfold. But even if the beats are familiar, Muschietti sustains a remarkable mood throughout: wintry, elemental and stark, like a late Sylvia Plath poem.

A gleefully crummy buddy comedy that uses horror-movie conventions as catapults to hurl the audience down one "whoa, dude!" narrative wormhole after another.

The movie's curious capacity for self-erasure makes it a tough one to write about; less than 24 hours later, I recall it with all the clarity of something I half-watched on a plane with a hangover in 1996.

Lincoln does sometimes get a little sappy around the edges. Though his project here is clearly one of conscious self-restraint, Spielberg can't resist the occasional opportunity for patriotic tear-jerking, usually signaled by a swell of John Williams' symphonic score. But in between, there are long stretches that are as quiet, contemplative, and austere as anything Spielberg has ever done.

We're all familiar with the experience of seeing movies that cram ideas and themes down our throats. Les Misérables may represent the first movie to do so while also cramming us down the throats of its actors.

Django Unchained provoked a lot of contradictory feelings in me, including some that don't usually come in pairs: Hilarity and boredom. Aesthetic delight and physical nausea. Fist-pumping righteousness and vague moral unease.

In the quietly devastating Amour, Haneke's cool, dispassionate gaze feels, for the first time, something like love.

At its worst, This Is 40 feels like being condemned to watch two hours of someone else's home movies - overly long, self-indulgent, and bone-crushingly banal.

It's only at the very beginning and the very end that Zero Dark Thirty functions (brilliantly) as a ripped-from-the-headlines political thriller. Much of the rest of the time, it's a workplace drama about a woman so good at her job that most of her colleagues think she's crazy.

More time in Middle Earth is exactly what The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey provides - so much more that the movie starts to feel like some Buddhist exercise in deliberately inflicted tedium.

Hyde Park on Hudson has little more on its mind than hot dogs and hand jobs - which, come to think of it, would have made for a much catchier alliterative title.

The film is ultimately done in by Dominik's bursts of directorial grandiosity.

I wouldn't recommend Hitchcock to cinephiles seeking a bold new take on the master's life or work, but if all you want is to while away the afternoon in the company of some excellent actors in plummy period costume, Gervasi's film is not without its pleasures.

The movie's energy peters out in a series of book-club conversations about divine will, the power of storytelling, and the resilience of the human spirit. The ending's pious dullness is enough to make you wish you were back on that lifeboat, where the most pressing questions weren't spiritual but gastronomic: What's on the menu for lunch, and what can I do to make sure it isn't me?

It's a movie you're glad to inhabit for a full two hours, because it never stops surprising you - it's lopsided and spotty, but it's alive in a way that suddenly makes you remember to what degree most Hollywood movies aren't.

By the time the great vampire showdown finally got started, I was good and done with Breaking Dawn, Part 2. But the big action scene is so campily over the top - with one twist so unforeseeable - that it sent me out on a burst of grudging goodwill.

Skyfall leaves you wondering whether this incarnation of the character has anywhere left to go. It's the portrait of a spy at the end of his rope by an actor who seems close to his.

Where the book is sinuous and oblique, their film is galumphing and heavy-handed, its rare flights of lyricism stranded between long stretches of outright risibility. And yet there's something commendable about the directors' commitment to their grandiose act of folly.

Holy Motors, a movie that's beyond weird, and beyond beautiful.

This frank, funny, tender film both asks and receives more from its sex scenes than any movie I've seen in a long time.

It's at once a gangster movie, a buddy comedy, and a meta-fictional exploration of the limits of both genres - and if that sounds impossible to pull off, well, McDonagh doesn't, quite. But the pure sick brio of Seven Psychopaths takes it a long way.

Argo isn't quite on the level of the Sidney Lumet classics to which Affleck pays stylistic homage - smart and taut as it is, it lacks the broader political vision of a film like "Dog Day Afternoon." But Lumet lite still goes down pretty smooth.

Still, for me, Wuthering Heights' almost impersonal immersion in the light and texture and sound of the moors was the source of its vividness and necessity. In order for the art of literary adaptation to remain vital, we have to be willing to let directors throw aside the book and film their dream of it.

Looper felt to me like a maddening near-miss: It posits an impossible but fascinating-to-imagine relationship...and then throws away nearly all the dramatic potential that relationship offers. If someone remakes Looper as the movie it could have been in, say, 30 years, will someone from the future please FedEx it back to me?

The Master is above all a love story between Joaquin Phoenix's damaged WWII vet, Freddie Quell, and Philip Seymour Hoffmann's charismatic charlatan, Lancaster Dodd. And that relationship is powerful and funny and twisted and strange enough that maybe that's all the movie needs to be about.

Bachelorette places a trio of women front and center who are so irredeemably loathsome, it's kind of refreshing. At least until a conventional third-act redemption undercuts some of the movie's sharpest insights and funniest jokes.

Unfolds like the slow-motion dismantling of the world's most boring matryoshka.

It's the movie's affectionate portrait of female friendship, along with Miller and Graynor's loose, playful performances, that make this whole imperfect soufflé rise as high as it does.

Compliance examines, among other things, how misplaced faith in authority can lead to abuse on a systemic scale. It's a deeply moral movie about the failure of morality, as grueling to watch as it is necessary.

At heart, Frank & Robot is, true to its title, a buddy movie about the complicated relationship between a thief and his mechanized sidekick (a sleek, white, helmeted creature voiced with unsettling politeness by Peter Sarsgaard). But it's also a rueful and funny reflection on aging, death, parenthood, and technology.

Because I've long been captivated by Cronenberg's keen intelligence and highly personal cinematic vision, I took a strange pleasure in submitting to this movie's stilted but weirdly poetic rhythms. But I freely acknowledge that for others, enduring Cosmopolis may be less fun than a backseat prostate exam.

The result feels like a sketchbook, both in a good and bad sense; it's alive and spontaneous and surprising in some parts, underdeveloped and shapeless in others.

Thanks to Renner's smart, charismatic performance and a couple of elegant action sequences early on, The Bourne Legacy mostly holds its own as a late-summer thrill ride - but only if you're able to wipe your mind clean of the knowledge that it could have been something more.

The pleasure of watching McConaughey strut, preen, and menace his way through this Southern-fried black comedy (at least I think it's a comedy) isn't quite enough to save Killer Joe. The whole movie has something tonally off about it, not to mention a theatricality that works against it in a way Bug's didn't.

At over two hours and forty minutes long, with repeated scenes of bone-crunching violence and a maddeningly unrelenting percussive score by Hans Zimmer, The Dark Knight Rises is something of an ordeal to sit through.

Easy Money's big heist scene is the only action set piece so far this year that was so suspenseful I could feel my heartbeat in my ears.

This might be a fun summer blockbuster if only it even remotely needed to exist.

It's hard not to admire Zeitlin's ambitious vision, his do-it-yourself aesthetic, and the commitment of his cast and crew - a kind of utopian collective whose jobs often overlapped, as the local, nonprofessional actors collaborated on set-building and other technical tasks. But that doesn't mean the result of their labor is exactly what you'd call a "good movie."

At times this multiple-plot meander through the glorious labyrinth of the Eternal City can feel aimless, even lazy. But in the film's best moments, that willingness to wander works to its advantage.

It's a rollicking children's entertainment, gorgeously animated and wittily cast, and also an unusually astute exploration of the complex bond between mothers and daughters, a relationship that's often either elided or sentimentalized in children's literature and film.

As in "Humpday," this movie's dialogue moves with a freshness and spontaneity that sounds improvised, even as the precisely marked story beats reveal the writer/director's hand at work.

Once you accept the utter and profound inconsequentiality of Rock of Ages, there's much to enjoy in it, from Zeta-Jones' capable hoofing (as a dramatic actress I find her deadeningly dull, but the woman can dance) to Giamatti's sly performance as a calculating, gray-ponytailed rock impresario.

I was onboard with the gentle charm of Safety Not Guaranteed until these last few scenes, when the genuine trauma suffered by these characters - especially Kenneth, whose paranoia and isolationism seem like symptoms of real mental illness - gets glossed over in an unconvincingly Spielbergian happy ending.

Prometheus is more interested in piling on big questions than in answering them. It's deep without being particularly smart, although the dazzling design and special effects keep you from noticing that basic flaw until at least an hour in.

This elegantly hand-drawn caper doesn't have a lot to it - a little girl and her cat help break up a Parisian crime ring, un point c'est tout. But it moves to a different rhythm than the animated spectacles we're used to - it's sparer, less hectic, less cute - and the difference feels welcome and refreshing.

Snow White and the Huntsman, the first feature from British commercial director Rupert Sanders, has its work cut out for it if it wants to be a truly dull piece of junk - but it manages.

You might actively root for their collective demise, if you could rouse yourself to care one way or the other. Go gallivanting in Chernobyl and you get what you pay for, nimrods.

Moonrise Kingdom is fun: a gorgeously shot, ingeniously crafted, über-Andersonian bonbon that, even in its most irritatingly whimsical moments, remains an effective deliverer of cinematic pleasure.

The conventional meet-cute love story at the center of The Dictator feels like a bizarre concession to some nonexistent demographic that prefers its sick black comedy with a side of humanist sentiment.

This is the kind of summer movie that softens your brain tissue without even providing the endocrine burst of pleasure that would make it all worthwhile.

It's Depp as Barnabas that holds the movie together. The story may be less than coherent and some of the minor characters washouts, but when he's on-screen, there's energy and humor and that foppish sex appeal that (as in the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie) reminds you why you once liked Johnny Depp.

Because it pulls off the tricky feat of combining multiple pre-existing Marvel franchises into a reasonably entertaining and tonally coherent whole, The Avengers will likely be hailed as a kind of thinking fan's superhero film, the way Whedon's recent "Cabin in the Woods" functioned as both a horror movie and a critique of same.

Where "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" frolicked on the beach, this amiable but underachieving comedy just sort of blobs on the couch.

The thoughtful and leisurely paced Marley is an exemplary music documentary in almost every way - but the area in which it falls short is an important one. Like a surprisingly large number of films about musicians (whether biopic or documentary), this one is curiously resistant to letting the audience hear its subject's songs in their entirety.

Though its story may sound formulaic on paper, please take my word for it: Monsieur Lazhar, written and directed by Philippe Falardeau, is a sharply intelligent, deeply sad, and not remotely sappy film about both teaching and collective grief.

It's often funny and smart, but seldom deeply involving, and practically never scary.

Director Gary Ross' adaptation, co-scripted by Collins herself, isn't quite as crackingly paced as the novel, but it will more than satisfy existing fans of the trilogy and likely create many new ones.

It's deeply committed to its own weird conceit, diminishing returns and all.

21 Jump Street isn't a wild, fresh reinvention of the movie-cliché-spoofing genre - this isn't "Airplane!" we're talking about - but it's also not a drearily overfamiliar retread of it.

In spite of my general distaste for Friends With Kids, let me cast my vote on the side of those who liked the ending. I wish more of the film had had that scene's fresh mixture of casual banter and breathless intimacy, instead of sounding like half-remembered dialogue from a movie we've all seen too many times before.

This middle section, in which both Carter and the audience get a crash course in the politics, history, and theology of the Red Planet, is the movie at its most imaginative and most fun.

It's particularly exciting to get to see an inventive underground work like This Is Not a Film in the wake of Iran's first-ever Oscar win for Asghar Farhadi's great film "A Separation." It's becoming clear that the blossoming of Iranian cinema, which has been going on now for at least 20 years, is too strong a force for the government censors to contain.

Wanderlust is about two or three script passes away from being a consistently funny, dramatically coherent romantic comedy.

It's Schoenaerts' magisterial presence that carries the film. In between bursts of convincingly horrific violence (including a fight in an elevator that makes Ryan Gosling's in "Drive" look like a schoolyard tiff), Schoenaerts also shows himself capable of moments of great subtlety and delicacy.

The ultimate praise given to sports movies is always, "Even if you don't care about sport X, you'll care about these characters," and that's certainly true of Undefeated (I don't, and I did).

At times this gritty, intermittently gripping police drama feels like a follow-up to "The Messenger" - not just because of the thematic overlap (both films deal with grief, substance abuse, and self-destructive masculinity), but because Rampart's main character, the cynical, drug-abusing cop played by Woody Harrelson, might be the long-lost twin of the alcoholic Army captain Harrelson played in the earlier Moverman film.

If, on the other hand, you're not above acknowledging the trans-historical creepiness of a good dusty windup-doll shelf (Come on! It includes one of those hyper-realistic monkeys playing the cymbals!), this pokey, modestly budgeted thriller isn't without its shivery delights.

Albert Nobbs is the rare double drag king bill you could plausibly take your grandmother to. It's genteel, well-crafted, mostly sexless and frequently dull - a movie that, like its title character, never quite dares to let itself discover what it really wants to be.

I pretty much loved this movie from start to finish - risible implausibilities, insufficiently explained premise and all. An admirably spare survival thriller, The Grey (nice title!) abounds in qualities that are rare in movies of its type. It's quiet, contemplative, and almost haiku-like in its simplicity.

It finds a way to make the play's rich, dense literary language (just before the climactic battle, one character accuses another of "breaking his oath and resolution like/A twist of rotten silk") sound as terse and urgent as the dialogue in a tightly plotted action thriller.

Though Carano isn't without a certain glowering charisma, her flat line readings and apparent discomfort with dialogue-heavy exchanges make her seem like a refugee from a different, schlockier movie, the kind of low-budget, straight-to-video MMA rock-'em-sock-'em that might pop up on late-night basic cable and charm you with its rough-hewn amateurism and animal high spirits. As Haywire's long-seeming 92 minutes limped by, I found myself wishing I was watching that movie instead.

The kind of middling-but-watchable heist thriller that, days after seeing it, already feels like something you caught half of on a plane two years ago.

Asghar Farhadi's A Separation serves as a quiet reminder of how good it's possible for movies to be.

The Iron Lady is, to put it kindly, a shambles.

Was The Adventures of Tintin a movie that I personally vibed with? Not really. It felt overstuffed and busy, its charm a little calculated, its outsized budget a tad too ostentatiously on display. But it's a rollicking yarn told with scads of invention and energy, not to mention a technical marvel of the first order.

Fincher is a master of mood and atmosphere, but this chilly, efficient movie never transcends the shallowness of its source material.

Stiff, talky, and airless, a textbook example of that not-always-true cliché about the unfilmability of theater.

Even in the film's weaker stretches, the fierce presence of Tilda Swinton made it impossible to tear my eyes away.

The film's best moments are the quiet ones in which Oldman's ironically named Smiley provides the story with its wise, unsmiling soul.

Michael Fassbender's portrayal of Brandon, the rootless Manhattan sex addict in Steve McQueen's Shame, may lay claim to this year's title of most outstanding performance in a mediocre movie.

This slight but enormously likable picture seems destined to be an awards magnet.

Like Statler and Waldorf, older viewers may kvetch and cavil about the details, but when that red velvet curtain goes up, we wouldn't give up our balcony seats for the world.

Certainly the most genteel film Cronenberg has ever made, with period costumes worthy of Merchant/Ivory, no gore, and very little physical violence. But A Dangerous Method doesn't feel like a wimp-out or a sell-out at all. It's a fiercely thoughtful film, a movie of ideas that understands how powerful ideas can be.

Somehow, for me, this earnest, pretty movie never came to life on screen; it remained a curio in a cabinet, to be admired through a pane of glass.

One seriously sick little blockbuster.

It's such a disappointment that The Descendants isn't a better movie than it is. In this soap opera disguised as a comedy, Payne, who was always a master at balancing sharp satire with an essential humanism, has traded his tart lemon center for a squishy marshmallow one.

And yet - and yet - there's something about the solemn, gloomy, often overwhelmingly powerful experience of watching Melancholia. I'll give it this much: This is a hard movie to forget.

Whether unintentionally or by design, the movie never really makes a case either for or against the troubled figure at its center.

I just hope Neil Patrick Harris meant what he said when he took his leave of the boys in his Radio City dressing room: "See you in the fourth one."

The combined efforts of this fine ensemble cast make Tower Heist go down easier than it otherwise might, but the film's potential as a buddy comedy is sadly wasted.

Niccol's bizarrely stilted sci-fi thriller In Time, a movie so consistently flat-footed, with pauses between lines of dialogue so vast, that you begin to wonder if the whole thing might be a psychological experiment of some kind...Or has he just made a really dull movie?

What's disappointing about Anonymous is that it isn't dumb enough.

With its restricted one-night timeframe and a setting that rarely expands beyond the walls of the firm, Margin Call can feel like a dramatized version of those ubiquitous 2008 news photos of white men staring in horror at numbers on a screen. But in its best moments, this film reminds us that every one of those pictures contained its own story of compromise, corruption, and ruin.

Martha Marcy May Marlene took a good hour to start really getting on my nerves. Up till then, I kept cutting this maddening little psychological thriller break after break, because it has the outer form of a promising debut.

The Skin I Live In is a meditation on profound themes: memory, grief, violence, degradation, and survival - so why does it leave the viewer (at least this one) so curiously unmoved? Watching the parts of this multigenerational melodrama slowly fuse into a coherent (if wackily improbable) whole offers aesthetic and intellectual gratification, but little in the way of emotional punch.

Despite across-the-board bravura performances (especially by Philip Seymour Hoffman and Paul Giamatti as dueling campaign managers), The Ides of March somehow remains static and lifeless, like a civics-class diorama.

Scene by scene, 50/50 can be both amusing and moving, with the tightly wound Gordon-Levitt and the boundaryless Rogen forming an oddly complementary pair. But as a whole the movie never quite coheres, seeming to skitter away at the last minute from both full-body laughter and full-body sobs.