Joe Williams

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.