Ernest Hardy

By the time the movie ends, having traversed numerous plot twists and character revelations, the viewer is emotionally drained in a bittersweet sort of way.

Stranded in superficiality, the film is a lifestyle commercial.

An illuminating, infuriating document that paints McKinney as a true American heroine and patriot and confirms your worst fears about just how rotten our "democratic" process is at its core.

Although character arcs are a little too abruptly truncated as the story moves, Natali never fumbles the big picture.

The tragic ending they tack on to the film reinforces the same fear-mongering notion of cause and effect that gives the Church its power to abuse and exploit, and the film winds up muffling its own powerful protest.

A diabolically enjoyable documentary on unearned self-esteem.

Director Ryan White has crafted a deceptively simple film that should almost immediately win viewers over with its low-key charm.

Less would have been more, and this film is sabotaged by its maker's unchecked pretension.

At the film's center is Emily Watson's pitch-perfect performance as Margaret Humphreys, the real-life social worker who in 1986 stumbled over the hidden practice.

A film whose sense of urgency and purpose is utterly engrossing.

What's made powerfully clear is that we've reached a dire point of crisis that, while largely rooted in economics, is about so much more than dollars and cents.

In a sterling ensemble cast, (Elfman) just about walks off with the movie.

Unfortunately, whenever the story quiets down for exposition or to move the plot forward, it all becomes a grinding and often confusing bore.

In watching Soul, it helps to be a Spandau fan, of course, but the smart, layered contextualizing and historicizing of the group within the film makes it a gift for any pop-culture aficionado.

Intelligent, moving film.

Like "Run Lola Run," Drift circles back on itself to present a trio of possible outcomes, but it's R.T. Lee's sterling performance that rivets.

As exasperating as it is insightful. The film ultimately falters, though, because it's so resolutely old-fashioned.

Told in an elliptical style with a pacing and jagged rhythms that take some getting used to, the thrust and power of the film lies in its poetic imagery.

Though sprung from the mind of a woman, the film plays like a hetero male fantasy of tortured love.

The jokes fly so furiously that it'd be impossible for a single weak performance (Graham) to unravel this very funny film.

Tightly directed and well acted (even though many characters are cut-outs from every war movie you've ever seen), The Front Line shoehorns little known history into a familiar format, and it works.

Appalling because it never transcends its adolescent-boy glee at being allowed entry to the highly sexualized arena of prostitution.

An intellectually steelier case against Bush, his cabalistic administration and the Iraq war than Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, Hijacking is even more chilling because it eschews the heartstring symphony conducted (albeit very effectively) by Moore and sticks to irrefutable facts and no-bullshit analysis.

The film trots out a who's who of great thinkers - Jane Goodall, Stephen Hawking, Margaret Atwood, assorted scientists and historians - who are riveting as they walk us through the question of whether we will or can survive progress. The anticapitalism prognosis is grim, and the hope offered is slim indeed.

Has its own sense of logic and integrity that demand a kind of begrudged respect.

The viewer is meant to chuckle at the escalating violence-ringed absurdities (the kidnapping of a bafflingly passive drug dealer who winds up becoming a road-trip buddy, for example) and at Ray's brutish philosophies, but the chuckles are few. Though the film starts out modestly amusing, it very, very quickly lists into tedium.

Shot on digital and layered with animated segments, performance footage and clips from Smith family home movies, Family Movie unfolds with a gentle, justified confidence in the power of its subject.

There are so many complicated political, religious, and cultural issues swirling around Yoni's story, and Follow Me keeps them on the sidelines. It is pure hagiography.