Joe Williams

Succeeds as both advocacy and entertainment by focusing on the family.

The movie is best enjoyed as a minor-key operatic, not a coherent story. While Law bellows blasphemous poetry, his director orchestrates a noirish light show with a cockeyed rhythm.

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

What enriches the recipe is that no one is quite as cagey as they seem. Colin is officially thuggish, but he's a blinkered romantic. Archie is a mama's boy, Meredith is gay, Mal is impotent, and Peanut wears dentures.

For modern moviegoers, the earthy Mr. Turner may seem like slowly steeped tea with an unpleasant aftertaste. But while some are impatiently waiting for the paint to dry, astute viewers will see a cinematic landscape bloom.

Post-Dispatch classical music critic Sarah Bryan Miller told me that Gould's music is as divisive today as it was 50 years ago, when the pianist publicly clashed with conductor Leonard Bernstein over the tempo of a performance.

Taking potshots at American Sniper is like shooting fish in a barrel. So why should war-weary Americans see it? Because Eastwood remains a masterful action director, and this may be his last hurrah. Because Cooper is one of our best young actors, and he poured a lifetime of craft into stilling his character’s heartbeat.

The inspirational movie named for Robinson’s number is too dignified to throw audiences a curveball, let alone a knockdown pitch, but its solid fundamentals make it a winner.

Two things that the British know that most Americans don't: Michael Sheen is the best actor in the English-speaking world; and soccer is the only football that matters.

Sometimes macabre and sometimes manipulative, but the way it speaks to the spirit is miraculous.

This thriller is both skillfully familiar and chillingly strange.

This deadpan police story produces unexpected chills.

Some may scoff when the boys exhibit traits and interests derived from the biological parents they never knew, but The Other Son is such a disarming feat that cynics will get left at the checkpoint.

In a poignant and potentially depressing film, it’s redeeming to see that when they are with their kindred spirits, even the saddest skeletons can dance.

One man’s mirth is another man’s poison, this critic can only consult his belly as the barometer. On a gut level, Ted 2 is a funny film.

While it's satisfying to see fat cats tamed by science and an enraged public, the movie misses the opportunity to sustain the pressure.

There will never be another Marilyn Monroe or Elizabeth Taylor, but Hollywood may have found a new Lee Remick in Mary Elizabeth Winstead.

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

Photography — and thus filmmaking — is painting with light. The connection is illuminated in the lovely Renoir, a twilight-years biography of the great French Impressionist.

Fortunately, Fish Tank feeds us more than crumbs and leaves us feeling like we've come up for air.

Scabrously funny yet essentially gentle, as the main thing that it's probing is our collective ignorance.

At its heart, this is a compassionate character study. Robbie’s tenderness toward his son and his remorse for a street fight are the raw ingredients of a ripening consciousness.

A genuinely touching and occasionally powerful film, not least because the boys are so disinclined to pity themselves.

Periodically deviating from its fly-on-the-wall aesthetic, the film does a noticeably better job than the Joan Rivers movie of incorporating old footage and photos to underscore its subject’s importance.

Brazenly funny in its own right - until it turns into a goody two-shoes.

Arbitrage is never the nail-biting thriller that it could have been.

Alba is a showstopper in a fringed cowgirl outfit. But nine years wiser, we know that pretty things aren’t always worth killing for.

While it's both too crude and too commercial to be mistaken for journalism, the good news is that the headliners deliver.