Joe Neumaier

Melancholy, often muddled documentary.

Rarely has any film, fictional or documentary, captured the hypnotic effect of voices on the airwaves like this chronicle of Bob Fass.

The stories are horrifying, but essential to hear. Kirby Dick’s important documentary puts a personal face to the staggering numbers.

The result is a stunningly nervy sequel that vaporizes any worries that Abrams’ terrific 2009 reboot was a fluke.

If you don’t love monkeys already — and really, we all should — then Monkey Kingdom will swing you in the right direction.

Like its antiheroes, this slacker tragedy has moments of calm and originality that are sadly obliterated by a tendency toward the extreme. Still, in a kind of reverse apocalypse, the movie's toughest stretch is its first two-thirds, a navel-gazing, semi-romantic nothing-a-thon that falls away in time for the movie to emerge from the ashes.

Mostly, though, there’s hopefulness here, and determination to win a fight worth fighting.

50/50 pulls no punches in its depiction of living day-to-day with illness. There's pain and fear, no question. But this dramatic comedy is also warm, honest and, most especially, funny.

This uneven but often charming movie produced by Spielberg gets so many things right, including its practiced naivete. What's missing, however, is a crucial sense of connection to itself.

What the movie captures overall looks like a scene from a sci-fi, postapocalyptic nightmare.

Their devotion to their art is admirable, and the film gets under the skin, if never really in our blood.

The genuinely sweet nature of this sometimes clunky movie is mixed with a little sass, and wins you over.

Slow West isn’t a grand epic of that genre. It’s more like “McCabe & Mrs. Miller,” “Dead Man” or the recent “The Homesman,” using familiar signposts to tell a simple, compelling, terrific story.

Comes upon a few quirky solutions and movie-ripoff scares before settling into a kind of coma.

Every parent in New York should see this movie and then ask why, when solutions exist, our woefully broken school system has yet to be fixed.

Director Hiromasa Yonebayashi did a wonderful job adapting “The Borrowers” into “The Secret World of Arriety.” But this slow-moving film, also from a book, tends to plod rather than float.

If one performance could tilt a movie the direction it needs to go, John C. Reilly's expertly left-of-center turn in Terri is it.

Its hard sell wears you down and draws you in, even as you know you're being manipulated.

A twisty Italian thriller that takes some liberties with its now-you-see-'em/now-you-don't plot points, but no matter; the way director Giuseppe Capotondi keeps us guessing is deliciously, maliciously deft.

Winstead and director James Ponsoldt add something gripping and modern to the cinema of recovery, a well-mined genre that can still, it seems, yield thoughtful surprises.

For better or worse, the blood and bone-crunching remains most prominent.

Freeman is so in-tune with the former South African president's persona you can't take your eyes off him.

Crucial viewing for realists and alarmists both.

The film, unfortunately, hasn't the depth Malkovich brings to his performance.

The politician who almost pathologically asked the question "How'm I doin'?" clearly never needed a view outside his own. Which is as New York as it gets.

This contemplative drama draws strength from day-to-day ordinariness and a terrific lead performance from Paul Eenhoorn, yet sadly falls short.

A gripping documentary about how unnecesary real estate development can change the soul of New York, brings us inside the lives it touches.

Donald Sutherland's passionate rendition of a speech from Trumbo's 1971 film "Johnny Got His Gun" (based on his novel) is worth the price of admission.