Joe Neumaier

Can’t-look-away stuff, though it’s tough to believe your eyes and ears.

A fascinating and informative, if sometimes stodgy, documentary about the most secret wing of Israel's anti-espionage unit.

Amid all the hokey hill stuff, Lawrence's hard eyes and manner draw us in.

Intimate and intellectual, the film — with a title taken from J.D. Salinger — focuses on the type of person you pass on the street, see in a coffee shop or sit next to on the subway who makes you wonder what life he’s led. One full of melody and muse, it turns out.

Falls short of being revelatory, yet has a mysterious, sturdy power that grows on you.

The result is a film almost too reliant on its players to push it through.

Like the last gift buried under singing Billy Bass fish, dancing Coke cans, joke books and mounds of wrapping paper, there's a glimmer of fun in Four Christmases that almost gets vacuumed up with the tinsel.

Sadly, the film gets mired in traditionalism, something the man himself always railed against. But worth a look for seeing intellectual bravery (still) at work.

Director John Scheinfeld's film, utilizing interviews with friends and collaborators, hits a high note on Nilsson's friendship with Ringo Starr and his fear of stage performance.

Trippy in the right way, and wholly enchanting.

Winds up feeling like a form of emotional tourism. The images recall Terrence Malick, but the film fills "atmosphere" into dry narrative holes where a story should reside.

Like a more personal, less pretentious version of Alejandro González Iñárritu's "Babel," this spiraling dissection of circumstance, choice and fate is more about thoroughness of vision than tricky storytelling.

Director Samuel Maoz's gripping you-are-there feel does for tanks what "Das Boot" did for submarines, and that chokehold only gets tighter as this taut drama about the 1982 Israeli-Lebanese war goes on.

There’s visual poetry here and haunted performances from Mezzogiorno and Timi -- who plays two roles, and is especially gripping as Dalser’s grown son.

A quiet, oddly serene movie with a curious soul.

Even after experiencing the film, what they've gone through - and how they deal with it - deliberately remains a mystery.

High art swings sort of low in this watchable but thematically repetitive drama.

Director Lee Chang-dong's soulful, affecting film is as quiet as a tomb and has a disturbing, critical underside that's hard to shake off.

Haneke's superb cast provide beautifully measured hints at the disconnect between the ribbon's symbolism and the entire town's unspoken atrocities.

The film features plenty of elements that seem familiar from previous cinematic dystopian visions — class warfare, decrepit living, a feeling of terminal velocity — yet you can’t help but admire director Bong Joon-ho’s high-wire act.

Wiseman films it all without comment, letting the rhythm of the place tell the story.

Talk about style over substance: The sheer volume of musical, comic-strip and video-game influences, riffs and licks in "Scott Pilgrim vs. the World" can get exhausting, but they also are what lift this romantic coming-of-age tale from this world to someplace totally ... else.

The poetry in The Place Beyond the Pines can be elusive, but also easy to get lost in.

The movie’s spell is solid, even if it doesn’t soar to the heights it could.

Avatar clears the hurdle in terms of being optical candy. Its story, though, is pure cheese.

The final result somehow undersells a man whose life and death were watershed moments in the gay rights movement.

Watching Ushio Shinohara and his wife Noriko make their art, we’re reminded of how much life is inside even the most abstract of pieces.

There’s atmosphere here, but nothing else.