Joe Leydon

Deftly employing the power of suggestion and an emotionally potent sound design, Body at Brighton Rock is a well-crafted thriller with some crafty tricks up its sleeve.

Undemandingly entertaining, director Mark Bristol’s well-crafted indie can be savored as a heaping helping of palate-cleansing sherbet, best enjoyed between viewings of bigger and louder but by no means better movies. And yes, that’s meant as a compliment.

Working from a formulaic script by Steven E. De Souza, Hark employs a variety of visual stratagems to keep the action fast and flashy.

Looks, sounds and fascinates like an exceptional episode of a true-crime TV series.

The narrative itself, however, is not without its bumpy stretches. The Iron Orchard is satisfyingly involving and entertaining as a whole — call it “Giant Lite” and you won’t be far off the mark — and the performances are sufficiently compelling to ease a viewer through some abrupt and elliptical transitions.

Ronnie is more complex, and much scarier, than the kind of self-deluding boob auds usually encounter in comedies of this sort. With the invaluable aid of Rogen, who's never been better, Hill sustains an impressive degree of tension between seemingly contradictory elements.

This latest entry in the 11-year-old horror series duly adheres to tradition by providing inventively grisly demises for various characters.

Preservation ultimately impresses as an arrestingly suspenseful thriller that takes clever narrative twists and turns while moving through familiar territory.

Has more than enough across-the-board appeal to attract mainstream auds unfamiliar with source material.

A golden opportunity to witness the "unplugged," after-hours George W. Bush at his most congenial. "George" offers a portrait of a gregariously charming and self-mocking fellow who's perfectly at ease in his own skin, and who's no less slick and savvy a politician for being willing to make himself the butt of jokes.

A solid and affecting piece of work.

Tread abounds in memorable images and interviews that range from darkly comical to deeply disquieting.

There's something perversely fascinating about helmer John Hyams' freewheeling yet deliberately paced mashup of noirish mystery, splatter-movie intensity, first-person-shooter vidgame and "Apocalypse Now"-style surrealism.

An undemandingly pleasant, mildly amusing fantasy.

Very much in the tradition of "Slap Shot," George Roy Hill's raucously funny and foul-mouthed 1977 laffer about the misadventures of a minor-league hockey team, Semi-Pro scores big laughs with the rowdy play-by-play of hard-luck hoopsters struggling for professional survival.

Gleefully commingles slapstick and scatology, satire and sentiment, in a free-wheeling farce aimed at making auds laugh until they're thoroughly ashamed of themselves.

Picture inspires respect for its first-rate performances, artful construction and meticulous understatement.

With appreciably greater emphasis on action than its predecessors, and clever use of 3-D trickery to enhance storytelling as well as offer spectacle, Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs could prove the third time really is the charm.

Slow-burning buildup, lack of explicit mayhem and overall low-tech approach may strike cineastes as amusingly quaint.

The pacing gradually accelerates after a leisurely first act, so that The Attorney easily sustains interest, and often stirs emotions.

Affecting performances and effective storytelling are the hallmarks of Fat Kid Rules the World.

Chronic cynics and inveterate snarkers would do themselves — and everyone else — a great big favor by steering clear of Mission Mangal, an entertaining and ingratiating feel-good movie about the 2013 launch of the Mangalyann space probe, an against-all-odds triumph of the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO).

In an era when similar genre pics increasingly resemble videogames, musicvideos or glossy commercials, the blunt, brawny simplicity of helmer Jean-Francois Richet's storytelling style seems positively novel.

The pic is less than fully satisfying as a conventional performance cavalcade, but sustains considerable interest as a behind-the-scenes overview of a musically and culturally diverse event.

Slick, straight-ahead action-thriller that marks a small step back and two bounding leaps forward for toplined Jet Li.

Overall package is potent. A few rock-the-house scenes of slam-bang derring-do -- are nothing short of sensationally exciting.

A solidly made and conventionally satisfying Western.

Refreshingly and unabashedly sincere in its embrace of Western conventions and archetypes, this pleasingly retrograde sagebrush saga should play exceptionally well with currently under-served genre fans.