Joe Williams

What makes Love Is Strange so special is that the challenges the couple face are more mundane than menacing.

Although the ratio of comedy to drama becomes increasingly weighted toward tearjerking, few of the emotional moments are realistic or effective.

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

A family flick that punches the right buttons like a trained seal.

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.

Although The November Man shows us some attractive people in motion, the cumulative effect leaves us neither shaken nor stirred.

The settings and supporting roles suggest that If I Stay started out as someone’s passion project, but the final product only requires its star to sleepwalk through buckets of schlock.

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

Land Ho! is a tepid little movie that goes almost nowhere, and if I had to sit in that rental car for one more boob joke, I’d rather jump into a volcano.

Gleeson is great as the troubled, conscientious priest, but until an abruptly shocking finale, his fatalism turns the ticking clock into a congested hourglass.

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.

Although the outcome is as predetermined as a prix-fixe menu, the storytelling is as smooth as goose-liver pate through a pastry nozzle.

Surrender, earthlings. It’s the Guardians’ world and you’ll be happy to live in it.

The film would be incalculably different if the lead role had been divided between two or three young actors for a conventional shoot. But Linklater’s patience allows us to see a thoughtful personality being formed both on and off the screen.

Like black coffee that's flung in our face, The Killer Inside Me silences the question of whether it's good or bad. But for darn sure, it's strong.

A film that aims for the stars and may have found one here on earth.

If cranking out this kind of mediocre, head-scratching blarney is the only option available to Hollywood veterans like Reiner, we have some friendly advice: Open a haberdashery.

Although Besson, the director of “La Femme Nikita” and the producer of “Taken,” indulges in some operatic violence, the film is more spacey than pacey.

Mainstream audiences will note that Hudson has never been better and that the tearjerking taps into something universal. For audiences seeking shelter from superhero carnage, Wish I Was Here is a lovely place to be.

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.

Directed by Steve James, whose “Hoop Dreams” Ebert hailed as the best film of the 1990s, it’s the kind of documentary the dying man wanted — honest, humane and inclusive.

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.

Doggedly indie but unpretentious, Begin Again is one of the best movies I’ve seen about the music industry and the ways it changes people whose paths diverge.

McCarthy and first-time director Falcone must have assumed that tossing a drunk and a dunce into a Cadillac would negate the need for a motive or even a script.

Chartered to provide both sides of every debate, CNN has positioned itself as the middle ground for discussions of current events. But without a knowledgeable teacher (or filmmaker) to lead such discussions into new territory, they devolve into noisy bull sessions.

Sorry, partisans, but there’s nothing obvious about Obvious Child.

Because the affable Wahlberg is making the sales pitch, you could kid yourself that this is just a high-tech vacuum cleaner, built to siphon loose change like popcorn. But our failure to understand the terrifying significance of the “Transformers” series is why we're in the age of extinction.

For real balance, the debate needs fiercely leftist truth-tellers in tri-corner hats, calling themselves the Organic Chai Tea Party.