Joe Williams

Waiting for Superman raises important questions while wearing a big red heart on its chest, but inconvenient facts are its kryptonite.

In recording the timeless traditions of Jewry, he created a new one: the identity crisis that rides on the back of laughter.

Congratulations, visitor. You have been randomly selected to beta test an entertainment-software product called “The Internship 2.0.”

Although it has some memorably disquieting scenes, this story of long-delayed justice is sustained by its melancholy more than its thrills.

Although it's a guilty pleasure, The Queen of Versailles is artful enough that both the prosecution and the defense could invoke it when the peasants cry "Off with their heads!"

Canadian director Denis Villaneuve knows how to stoke a hot debate about the legacy of violence. But in this case, where there's smoke, there's not enough air.

Love & Mercy is artfully but unobtrusively directed by Bill Pohlad.

True Grit is just a couple bloody gunfights removed from an old-fashioned Disney yarn. Yet it's still unmistakably a Coen brothers movie, from the stray weirdness of a bearskin-clad dentist to the bulls-eye delights of the dialogue.

You might expect a cartoon about a man and his dog to be strictly for kids, but My Dog Tulip, based on a memoir by J.R. Ackerley, has a psychological richness and anatomical explicitness that is very grown-up.

An art-history lesson and a spiritual exercise disguised as a movie.

Goodbye First Love is like a postcard from a lost Eden, a painfully pure oasis where we're not allowed to linger.

If you require a plot, look elsewhere.

With such supercharged material under the hood, a magnetic man behind the wheel and a nimble director manning the pits, Senna is simply the greatest sports film I have ever seen.

It’s an enigmatic and austere film from a region where political, sexual and religious repression are as stifling as the sooty air.

Most biographical docs contain a montage of old footage, but this one is especially haunting. As Campbell watches home movies, he has to ask Kim to identify the people on screen, including his ex-wives, his children and his younger self.

Few mainstream movies, let alone disability dramas, are so frank about sexual mechanics, yet notwithstanding the nudity, The Sessions isn't voyeuristic or sleazy.

The troupe's first film in more than a decade, is a more aggressively absurd antidote to what it calls "a hard, cynical world." Happily, it works.

One one level, Pride is as fake as a lip-sync revue, yet the emotions it arouses are real.

The most provocative thing in Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work is the moment during the opening credits when we glimpse the comedy legend without makeup.

That action is bloody, but Fiennes' choices as director are unassailably apt and artful. Coriolanus is a triumph.

I Am Love is easy to savor but tough to swallow.

Ultimately what makes Gone Girl so watchable is the three-headed monster of Fincher, Pike and Affleck. The director bathes the B-movie scenario in the queasy-green hues of a morgue, while Affleck flashes his million-dollar smile like a dime-store Dracula and the beautifully inscrutable Pike absorbs the light like a wax mannequin. If it’s true that Nick and Amy were made for each other, they were made in a fiendish lab.

Too modest to become a worldwide phenomenon, but sensitive teens and their older kin who pine for the '90s may want to take it for a spin on the dance floor.

Although the characters don’t lapse into stereotypes, neither are they sufficiently funny or fierce to engage us in the issues they raise.

As Refn is riffing on thriller cliches, he gets solid support from the ensemble. Brooks, a comedic standout since the '70s, makes a sympathetic villain, and Gosling stokes the young-Brando comparisons - instead of settling for Richard Gere.

With a mad captain at the helm, this documentary version of Jodorowsky’s “Dune” is probably more entertaining than what Hollywood would have done to it, with a clearer message: Our lives are like sands though an hourglass, so dream the impossible dream.

Yet if you’re old enough to read this and you find yourself at a screening, try thinking about the munchkins who worked so hard on the psychedelic scenery.

It’s not only a fresh and funny spoof of the movie business, it represents a real-life triumph within it.

In one of the most wickedly funny scenes in sci-fi history, Koba uses monkeyshines to bamboozle some gun-toting yahoos and scuttle the peace treaty.

With its mix of true-blood romance and full-moon madness, Let Me In should hasten the twilight of the twerpy pretenders.

It starts as a bittersweet parable about the cruelty of commerce, but the wonder of Searching for Sugar Man will not soon slip away.

Although Precious is based on a novel, it's an act of truth-telling on behalf of a character in hellish enslavement.

As the wife to a wolf of Wall Street, Blanchett shows us a lost sheep both before and after the slaughter. It’s not a pretty picture, but it’s twitching with life.

The conclusion of Christopher Nolan's superhero trilogy is a hugely ambitious mix of eye candy and brain food. If it doesn't have the haunting aftertaste of the previous serving, that's only because Nolan couldn't clone Heath Ledger. But beefy substitute Tom Hardy is a hell of a villain.

Like its neo-noir kin across the pond, The Guard is violent, profane and funny. But McDonagh is interested in more than mockery.

With a stellar cast and seductive look, Ex Machina is a sleek contraption for capturing our imagination.

Whether on stage or the screen, Much Ado About Nothing is a pleasure that passes like a midsummer night’s dream.

While we await the definitive documentary about the glut of garbage, Waste Land reduces this global catastrophe to touchingly human scale.

Of all the films to come out the conflict, Afghan Star is the most provocative, because its message that people are essentially the same is a dubious, double-edge sword.

Because of some sentimental backspin, Affleck doesn't quite hit it out of the park, but he may provoke the green monster of envy in lesser directors.

Iowa-native Gurira has had roles in TV’s “Treme” and “The Walking Dead,” but Mother of George should be the birth of a brilliant film career.

As an exercise in craft, it's surprisingly successful, thanks to the strong cast and the vivid depiction of a modern leader's security apparatus. But as a political statement or personal drama, The Ghost Writer is nearly invisible.

Only an artist at the midpoint between the maypole and maturity could concoct a comedy as potent as While We’re Young.

In a movie of murky surfaces and deep loneliness, the redemptive surprise of A Single Man is how it becomes a clear endorsement of the Buddy System.

The Messenger is the debut film of writer and director Oren Moverman, but it's worldly wise, with two well-rounded characters.

Mostly the movie is about process and perspective. Through the documentary lens, Richter's enigmatic paintings speak to us.

Gleeson is great as the troubled, conscientious priest, but until an abruptly shocking finale, his fatalism turns the ticking clock into a congested hourglass.

Just when this black-and-white, microbudget movie seems poised to spring an indictment of the Dickensian social order, it ends, but in a redemptive ray of color.

Duvall is a powerful actor, and this folksy fable could have been a career-capping feat, but the movie is toothless and slow.

The Immigrant is not unlike a Prohibition-era “Taxi Driver,” with Cotillard as the apprentice hooker, Phoenix as the sweet-talking pimp and Jeremy Renner (playing the theater’s magician, Orlando) as the would-be savior.

An artfully observant and unexpectedly moving documentary.

In telling a true story about hapless thugs who are the embodiment of Michael Bay fans, the director has made the most fiendishly enjoyable movie of his career.

Cunningham's answers to pointed questions about romantic love and religious faith are so open-hearted, we understand that he's bigger than just New York.

Broken Embraces is stylish and sly, an engaging exercise that gives us less than meets the eye.

Lovely to look at, and Vikander does nothing to derail her inevitable ascension to the A-list. But as a story, it evokes a word that no battlefield nurse would ever apply to her experiences: sterile.

The film is so masterfully controlled, we feel like we’ve eavesdropped on something like life.

When a place and its people are this stylish, we can't help but be drawn to them.

Surrender, earthlings. It’s the Guardians’ world and you’ll be happy to live in it.

With a child’s perspective on war, Lore deserves comparisons with “Empire of the Sun” and “Hope and Glory,” and with a feisty female protagonist it stands virtually alone.

This true story does a great service by honoring the memory of 22 brave men and women and by dramatizing the internal debates within the French population. But in staying true to life, it sacrifices some of the pacing and clarity of a conventional thriller.

These wars being fought in our name may be dirty, but this courageous film reminds us that as long as we have a free press, they don’t have to be secret.

Beautifully but simply wrought by director Cindy Meehl, this deft documentary is a poignant reappraisal of what it means to be human.

The debut creation of director Ritesh Batra, it’s a lovely little film from a place where the little things linger.

The film confirms it's hard to do brain surgery on a battlefield. But it doesn't take a brain surgeon to think it could go deeper.

Soul Power is both a funk-tastic time capsule and a timeless celebration of the human spirit.

Gibney is as dramatic a storyteller as the Hollywood directors with whom he competes for our attention, and he employs a big bag of tricks.

As they build up steam, two powerful actors keep us wondering whether this train is bound for war or peace.

Margin Call has a spectacular cast, and the 24-hour cycle of events gives the movie the compressed dramatic effect of a fine play.

A movie that will be discovered, embraced and shared with friends like a favorite record album.

Of course, there's a kind of reverse snobbery in touting cheap movies over polished ones. But if Not Quite Hollywood is not quite convincing, it is quite entertaining.

Sorry, partisans, but there’s nothing obvious about Obvious Child.

Jenison, who had never painted a thing in his life, does indeed produce a beautiful work, but we should never forget that Penn and Teller are professional bamboozlers, and their attempt to re-frame the definition of genius might be nothing but smoke and mirrors.

Like psychoanalysis, A Dangerous Method takes its time as it circles an opening to unexplored depths. To reward our patience, Cronenberg gives us some honey-hued eye candy and rich dialogue, but if you're seeking instant gratification, I prescribe "Shame."

Gilroy vividly evokes both the LA exteriors and newsroom interiors, and the action sequences are fraught with tension.

The ingredients are in place for a potent finale, but “Catching Fire” is watered down.

As an homage to an influential director, Submarine blows "Super 8" out of the water.

While the wilderness vistas are starkly beautiful, there’s no tangible sense of Strayed’s ultimate goal. (Why Oregon?) And the flashbacks, which include scenes of sexual misadventure and heroin use, are too brief to provide answers.

Like "The Squid and the Whale," this character study pushes the definition of comedy to the breaking point, and unlike the far less successful "Margot at the Wedding," it leaves us faintly smiling after the workout.

This Swedish sensation is a magic trick that jolts the murder-mystery genre back to life.

As in the mindless Man on a Ledge, the hero is never really in danger, we're the ones who are trapped.

Rango is iconic like a spaghetti Western, smart like a '70s conspiracy thriller and lively like a Coen brothers comedy.

Although this Swedish vehicle is thoughtfully engineered and has some vivid streaks of color, it could use a jump start to escape the vanilla ice.

While the rich people who violated a dead antagonist's wishes seem sleazy (especially when they refuse to be interviewed), transporting world-class artwork five miles to a bigger facility where more people can enjoy it hardly seems like the end of civilization as we know it.

Successful in small doses, but the full regimen needed more testing.

Unfolds like a fable instead of a believable slice of life. Mexican TV and film star Bichir gives a poignant performance, but he's distinctly more European than the cholos and Chicano laborers on the sketchy edges of the hero's plight.

Tangled is lovely to look at, but if you're not a pre-teen girl, you may be distracted by the split ends.

An exciting cloak-and-dagger thriller.

Perhaps the spookiest thing in this slyly scary movie is the word-for-word way that Patrick's followers regurgitate his pablum.

He’s like a globe-trotting Richard Linklater. And with Winterbottom’s first-ever sequel, his “Trip” films now rival Linklater’s “Before” series in charting how a twosome evolves over time. Plus, they’re bloody hilarious.

The most exhilarating film of the year is also the most exhausting.

Reilly is very funny as the sarcastic mentor, and director Paul Weitz strikes a loopy tone in the scenes at the freak encampment.

After we hear the hit parade that poured from rural Alabama and meet the men who led it to the top of the charts, we realize that Muscle Shoals could call itself Hitsville, USA.

Compared to other Marvel characters, Thor is a difficult sell.

This true story fills a needed niche, spotlighting women's basketball in the era before Title IX promoted equal treatment.

Kristen Wiig is the best sketch comic alive, and Bridesmaids should finally make her a movie star.

With the overlong, limp and lazy Spy, Feig has lost his mojo.

In steering a course between the rock of rude humor and the hard place of perilous drama, How to Train Your Dragon flies high.

An evolutionary leap forward, a visually exquisite film that doesn't ignore the truths of pollution and predatory survival.