Ella Taylor

As naked and bitter and mesmerizing a display of self-pity as you've seen outside as Edward Albee play. By the end of this willfully grimy yet oddly beautiful movie, Billy and Layla have earned grudging sympathy.

There is so much to admire and empathize with in Stephanie Daley that it feels almost boorish to quibble about whether the film needs to come packaged as a murder mystery.

With its ludicrous parallels and brisk, funny script (pardon my provincialism, but it sounds all the funnier in Danish), Italian for Beginners is full of larky charm while drawing its emotional vitality from urban loneliness.

Imamura has said that Warm Water Under a Red Bridge is a poem to the enduring strengths of women. It may also be the best sex comedy about environmental pollution ever made.

The climax Shortland offers us is much harder to take than Seiffert's gentler vision, yet far more evocative of the bitter price paid by the children of the Third Reich for the sins of their parents.

The film is not emotionally subtle, but it is beautifully shot, by cinematographer Declan Quinn, with a grainy, impressionistic eye that mimics a perpetual dance of shards of remembered experience.

Scahill is right to focus on the price American security efforts have cost in human rights — and human life. Yet there are difficult questions hovering just outside the frame of Dirty Wars. Short of pacifism, and given that there is no such thing as a truly clean war, what would count as an "acceptable" level of collateral damage?

This is a very funny film about a creepy, excruciatingly lonely world.

Under the charmless direction of Mark Rosman, the actors seem to be frozen at the rehearsal stage, with the blessed exception of a sublimely funny Jennifer Coolidge as the Botoxed horror of a stepmother.

Seldom have form, content and cultural sensibility been so excitably aligned as in this fascinating, exasperating film about the unholy marriage of power politics and global business.

Resolutely descriptive, It Felt Like Love doesn't exactly have a plot, which feels absolutely right for a film whose elliptical yet intensely focused visual style seem to flow directly from Lila's consciousness.

Loses focus and sags into a how-we-got-through-it family procedural.

Had this idea been pursued to its conclusion instead of the pat, wishfully ready-for-TV ending we're fed, the movie would be a standout.

A quietly devastating song.

Shuttles between schoolboy humor, calculated savagery and, at the end, a rank sentimentalism in which love all too easily conquers all.

More than anything, though, Living in Emergency leaves us wanting to know more about what makes these four people tick differently from the rest of us -- we who balk at anything riskier than signing petitions and joining Facebook protest groups.

Bier's portrayal of the brothers' interplay holds few surprises, and the exploitation of the war between East and West is vulgar, contrived and borderline racist.

The film is not a biopic or a portrait of a famous marriage so much as it is an imaginative essay on what made a union between two radically different people work as well as it did.

The Mother winds up unpersuasive, in large part due to writer Hanif Kureishi, who visits on all his mopey characters such calculated savagery, it's hard to care much for them or to get onboard for the hope implied in the hastily stitched-on ending.

The star of the film is a matter-of-fact, highly perceptive Indian woman, Soma Mukhopadhyay, whose autistic adult son is now a published author.

Mitchell brings respect, tenderness and a generous helping of his antic wit to Rabbit Hole, not to mention a rare gift for adding visual radiance to a talky stage play.

The script is so intellectualized that I couldn't help feeling I was witnessing not two complex people locked in struggle, but the opposed souls (and classes) of Germany: Sophie, emblem of the cultured, tolerant and enlightened humanism of the middle classes duking it out with Mohr, resentful member of a disenfranchised proletariat from whose ranks sprang Hitler's most loyal quislings.

Quietly devastating.

A waterlogged little jewel of a Chinese movie that you must rush out and see at once or else.

Greenberg is on every level the work of a more mature filmmaker, and quite possibly a happier man.

By staying focused on the children -- frightened evacuees from the London Blitz whose parallel war in Narnia both taps into and finally quiets their unspoken terrors -- Adamson keeps faith with the humanity of Lewsis' tale.

The film is as lively as a cricket and often very funny, but it's not for the cyberpunk crowd.

Far from a spontaneous movie -- the passage of this relationship is mapped from the get-go -- but it is warm and deep, and its visual style bespeaks a new maturity in Leconte.