Joe Williams

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.

Because VanDyke wasn’t embedded with the American media, Point and Shoot has some priceless front-line footage, including a chilling scene where he must decide if he’s willing to kill for someone else’s cause. But without a rigorous editor, it’s “How I Spent My Summer Vacation.”

Co-directors Andrew Droz Palermo and Tracy Droz Tragos let the painful stories emerge naturally, without prodding questions or talking-head experts who place the boys’ grim lives in the larger context of the post-industrial economy.

One part personal mystery and one part art-appreciation class.

The macabre comedic undertones are reminiscent of a Coen brothers film like "Blood Simple." But a more apt comparison is to an obscure Canadian bank-heist flick called "The Silent Partner," in which teller Elliot Gould pockets some loot from thief Christopher Plummer. Both movies imitate an American idiom with a provincial accent.

How could you not marvel at a movie that includes a revisionist explanation of the JFK assassination, a football stadium floating over the White House and the sight of Richard Nixon firing a .45 at a villain in a Christ-figure pose?

Amy Schumer is so scary-good in Trainwreck that it almost seems risky to speak her name.

For all its professionalism, I found it as cold as the ice rink at Rockefeller Center.

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.

This deadpan police story produces unexpected chills.

Like other so-called "mumblecore" movies, including Bronstein's own "Frownland," this is an unnervingly intimate glimpse of dysfunction, with a shaky-cam aesthetic and seemingly improvised dialogue.