Dana Stevens

Careening from bathos to bromance to naked sexytime, the movie is like a mashup of three or four different movies, at least two of them fairly unpleasant. And yet Love and Other Drugs is so sincere and unjaded about its mystifying purpose that it keeps our gaze fixed on the screen for the full two hours.

For all its echoes of Frank Capra and Charlie Chaplin (as well as Ford), the movie is also a love letter to modern Tokyo, whose alleyways and skyscrapers are drafted with flawless precision and tinted with tenderness and warmth.

Mr. Corneau, an eclectic director with a mildly perverse sensibility, turns the conflict of cultures into a psychodrama that is at once lighthearted and intense.

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.

Many American viewers may take Haneke at his word and walk out midway through this grueling ethics exam of a movie. But much as I may resent the facile polemics of Haneke's shame-the-viewer project, I have to respect the way that he nailed me, trembling, to my seat.

Much more effectively terrifying than the usual overplotted, underwritten Hollywood thriller.

Epic in size but claustrophobically narrow in scope, The Wolf of Wall Street maintains a near-exclusive focus on the greed and self-indulgence of its proudly rapacious hero.

Leconte's visual instincts are so impressive that they outstrip his story, leaving us flushed and dazzled, but also, as after a long night of champagne and baccarat (to say nothing of other irresponsible pleasures), hungry, tired, and homesick.

The French Dispatch is a movie made with such deliberate, patient skill, and such brio, that its meandering structure and oddly low emotional temperature come off as intentional choices rather than errors of artistic judgment. Even if it’s not my favorite flavor of Wes Anderson licorice, nothing is there by accident.

See it because it's f---ing hilarious.

As unsettling as it can be, it is also intellectually exhilarating, and, like any good piece of pedagogy, whets the appetite for further study.

That El Perro is so unassuming is part of what makes its humane, sympathetic story so satisfying.

The accidental poignancy of Make It Funky! comes from juxtaposing the charisma and dignity of those musicians - and the knowledge of how much great music New Orleans has given the world - with the unavoidable images of devastation from the last two weeks.

Immerses you in violence and agony, but it may leave you with a curious feeling of detachment.

By allowing the stories to play off one another and allowing layers of meaning to accumulate before we even notice them, the filmmakers capture some of the essential strangeness of life -- the way our relations are governed by laws that remain invisible to us until art reveals their workings.

In the end, Loser disappoints.

Like many musicals, The Blind Swordsman works better in individual scenes than as a whole. Mr. Kitano is not the most disciplined storyteller, and the plot meanders along tangents and stumbles into flashbacks, losing momentum for long stretches in the middle.

Certainly Shrek 2 offers rambunctious fun, but there is also something dishonest about its blending of mockery and sentimentality. It lacks both the courage to be truly ugly and the heart to be genuinely beautiful.

Spy lampoons sexism without abandoning sex — a tough tone for a comedy to strike but one that Feig and McCarthy manage to accomplish with both a sense of justice and a sense of humor.

Hardly a work of state-of-the-art virtuosity, but rather an example of quiet, confident craftsmanship that tells a sweet, charming tale of intergalactic friendship.

A slow-burning suspense thriller about a trio of eco-terrorists conspiring to blow up a dam, it’s directed by Reichardt with the concision and elegance of a chess master.

It’s a humanist crowd-pleaser with just enough historical heft to count as something more than a small family drama, and it’s also a deeply personal labor of love that, even if it never quite knocks your socks off, seems too sincere and too beautifully crafted to hate.

Civil War often leaves the audience feeling trapped in an all-too-realistic waking nightmare, but when it finally lets us go, mercifully short of the two-hour mark, it sends us out of the theater talking.

Some of these revelations feel like clever reversals, others like calculated rug-pulls, but we never stop caring about what happens next.

If you have any affection at all for traditional American music, the movie itself -- is pretty close to heaven.

A hallucinatory tour de force of color, perspective and scale, virtually encapsulates the history of Japanese animation.

Mr. Bernal's soulful, magnetic performance notwithstanding, the real star of the film is South America itself, revealed in the cinematographer Eric Gautier's misty green images as a land of jarring and enigmatic beauty.

I wish there were more films every year like Morris From America, the kind that surprise you by revealing a hidden side of something—an actor, a genre, a situation—you thought you had figured out.