Ella Taylor

Leaves you with a bland message -- titillation may get your wicky-wack going but love and partnership stay the course -- but the way it gets you there is divine.

Too bad for Gilliam and everyone involved, but in the departments of spectacle and schadenfreude, great fun for us.

And at its loony best, Wiig and Mumolo's script hurls a torrent of bridesmaid-zilla set pieces at us, playing out like a "Sex and the City 3" read-through gone deliciously awry.

Bollywood meets The Godfather.

Though Kippur seems a creature radically different -- more nakedly autobiographical, more naturalistic, more forgiving -- from Gitai's highly conceptual and stylized body of work, there are clear thematic continuities.

Squeak(s) by to make Loser justify the price of admission.

As it turns out, Shrek 2 is one of the funniest movies I've seen in years. But I'm far from sure that it's a kids' movie anymore, even though, like its predecessor, it's a thoroughly sugared-up reading of the book, by veteran New Yorker cartoonist William Steig, on which both films are based.

An entertaining tour of this endearing, infuriating absolutist's life and legacy, guided by talking heads more pro than con, prominent among them the former Nader's Raiders who split over their leader's disastrous insistence that there was no difference worth talking about between Democrats and Republicans, yet retain enormous affection for his wit, integrity and incorruptible sense of mission.

Adequate but unremarkable animated tale.

Laila’s Birthday is beautifully shot and overlaid with a spare, lyrical score that lends rueful emphasis to Masharawi’s exasperated fidelity to a chronically malfunctioning city.

Marvelously conciliatory film.

By the end of this mercifully short excuse for a horror movie, you'll be wishing the beast had chowed down on the entire ensemble.

Designed neither to warm your heart nor shelter you in the comfort of liberal guilt, the movie does what so many style-conscious, "subjective" documentaries have long forgotten how to do. It shows you a world, and stays the hell out of it.

The resulting documentary, Finding Vivian Maier, might better have been titled Constructing Vivian Maier — not because the filmmakers came up empty-handed, but because what they found out sheds too neat and tidy a light on her unsparing, yet warmly sympathetic portraits of the denizens of Chicago's seamy underside.

Genuinely touching.

I was with Roger Dodger all the way until its vile hero had an 11th-hour burst of insight that defied all belief. I didn't buy it, but I do want his therapist's phone number.

For a film about death and endings, A Prairie Home Companion is a cracking good time - a warm, golden bauble within which to shelter, like the radio show that inspired it, from the misery and ennui that engulf us in and out of the multiplex.

Payami uses an exquisitely delicate juxtaposition of long shots and close-ups, mobility and stillness, music and found sound, comedy and pathos to suggest both the longing for self-expression and communication, and its limits in a repressive society.

The movie's staccato pacing, lent emphasis by Dario Marianelli's haunting score, evokes the cycles of tedium and terror that make the journey so unnerving.

Unlike the object of its scathing attention, Kirby Dick's documentary about the Motion Picture Association of America's ratings board is merry and bright and loads of fun.

As a tactfully quiet story of mother-daughter estrangement and psychic rescue, Solas can hardly fail to excite the longing so many of us have to right domestic wrongs.

Washed in a honeyed 1950s glow, Waitress has a mildly puckish way with outlandish baked goods and pert dialogue, but the movie is memorable largely for the contrast between its innocent sweetness and the savagery of its maker's premature death.

The movie is a great piece of populist outrage and a dangerously good comedy about a looming American tragedy.

This gifted actress (Charlize Theron), who hasn't always chosen her roles well, treats this as her big chance to show what she can do, and she's convincing enough that you're not constantly looking for a Hollywood star of more than average pulchritude under all the cosmetic baggage.

As pristine a distillation of Palestinian rage as I've seen outside the evening news.

The kind of art film that's rarely seen anymore -- the kind that trusts the audience to be as intelligent as the director.

Immensely moving.

A thrilling example of the cunning political allegory woven into vivid concretism that invigorates contemporary Iranian cinema, Mohammad Rasoulof's Iron Island takes as its monumental central image a sinking ship, symbol of decaying autocracy and the faint hope of liberation.