Joe Williams

The movie is an eyeful, especially in 3-D, but even with humans at the helms of the machines, it’s a hollow exercise in homage.

Ultimately Skyfall is rooted in tradition - and in British soil. A pastoral drive to Bond's boyhood home (in a kind of car that will delight purists) opens the gates to some psychological background, and given the true-love subtext of "Casino Royale," it's not surprising that there's an emotional payoff here.

Like a newborn planet, Melancholia is magnetically beautiful, but it's also an unformed mass of hot air.

It's more like a shelved episode of "Touched by An Angel." The sappy script is a disservice to the naturally effervescent Efron, whose character is so mopey he makes Robert Pattinson seem like a song-and-dance man.

A fanciful French cousin to Allen's "Zelig" and "The Purple Rose of Cairo," yet the fulfilled wish for a better life is high-concept absurdity without high-anxiety guffaws.

Until the sci-fi switcheroo, the versatile supporting cast puts Gary in such a ridiculous light that we can’t help laughing at him. Then suddenly this subversive movie challenges us to laugh at our own assumptions.

The reason District 9 reverberates so loudly is because its moral indignation is cranked to 11.

We can quibble about the punitive punchline of John Gatins' script, but keeping complexity aloft for so long makes Flight a miraculous feat.

When films are good, actors and directors get a lot of the credit that should go to the screenwriters. In the case of Silver Linings Playbook, which is one of the best films of the year, there is a popcorn bowl of glory to go around.

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.

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.