Dana Stevens

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.