Joe Williams

While Banderas' dark intensity overshadows the potential poignancy of the story, Almodovar is such a skilled surgeon that he extracts a juicy nugget of pleasure from a purely distasteful premise.

Despite the title, My One and Only is irritatingly repetitive.

Finally the film tips its hand and becomes a bet-the-house warning about climate change.

To ensure customer loyalty, Hollywood should promote more movies about workaday life in the provinces, but until there's a new wave of midcoast comedies, Cedar Rapids is the big kahuna.

With its exploded notions of heroism, torture-rack dramatics and kamikaze gusto, it's a fiendishly entertaining flick.

May be too sterile and stylized to elicit real tears, but it's got brains and heart to spare.

Just misses living up to its name.

When a man whose wife was killed by cultists invites us to laugh at life's absurdities, the particulars are almost incidental.

We're left with an impression of a vivacious pioneer; but warm shouldn't have to mean fuzzy.

What's most conspicuously missing from this ensemble is some input from the advertisers who subsidize Wintour's tyranny, and the readers who are seduced into buying her beautiful four-pound paperweights.

Director Dereck Joubert gleans a valuable thread that connects us to these endangered creatures.

The rare film that flows from a wellspring of ideas.

There are audiences for movies that amuse us, and arouse us, and scare us, but the career of Todd Solondz ("Storytelling") raises the question: Is there an audience for movies that make us feel icky?

The fiery finale is good enough to leave the legions smiling. But when a movie is expected to lift an entire industry, "good enough" shouldn't be good enough.

Without the kindling of character development, Planes: Fire and Rescue is no smoldering success, but if Disney’s flight plan is to share Pixar’s airspace, it’s getting warmer.

If you root for documentaries with heart, The Other Dream Team is a slam dunk.

Indeed, most of the famous faces are surprisingly adept at singing. Even when the actors are not lip-syncing (which seems to be about half the time), the dense, clever lyrics are intelligible.

Like a Fishbone show or an LA weather forecast, the dark curtain rises, and there's a promise of more sunshine.

Although the story is mournful, the movie is buoyed by a heaven-scented surrealism.

Europeans have a taste for both the mechanics of trickery and the machinations of power, and the politically astute Spanish film "Even the Rain" belongs in the same conversation with Francois Truffaut's "Day for Night" and Pedro Almodovar's "Bad Education."

This movie is so tone-deaf it would only make sense in Vincent van Gogh’s missing ear.

This showcase for Wiig is sufficiently absurd to make real-world parallels laughable.

He's not in Mark Wahlberg's league, and 21 Jump Street isn't quite as funny as "The Other Guys," but by lampooning himself here, Tatum has bought himself a grace period to grow in.

For a nation at war with its own values, Fair Game is a compelling, pertinent and scrupulously true political thriller in the honorable tradition of "All the President's Men."

The edginess here isn't merely facile. Goldthwait's movies, including the under-appreciated "Shakes the Clown," are about reclaiming dignity from the dung heap. And he's found a fitting collaborator.

While director Michael Roskam lays the groundwork for a heist thriller, The Drop is fueled by character, not plot.

There's a running joke that this epic of also-ran heroism is set in eternally modest Toronto; but its real locale is an alternate universe without parents or the unhip.

The Hunger Games is dressed as a dark satire of soulless entertainment, but like Katniss' adversaries in the PG-13 hunting scenes, it doesn't have a distinctive identity or go-for-the-throat.