J.R. Jones

In the end, his deadliest weapon turns out to be other people’s trust, something with grimmer philosophical implications than all his acts of violence combined.

Winterbottom, a Brit who's shot several films in India, carefully notes the local customs and mores that contribute to the young woman's tragic fall.

Jannicke Systad Jacobsen, a documentary maker directing her first fiction film, demonstrates a sure sense of tone, and Bergsholm is memorable as the misfit teen.

"The whole universe depends on everything fitting together just right," declares Hushpuppy, the fierce, nappy-headed girl at the center of this extraordinary southern gothic.

Unfortunately for Polley, Take This Waltz is a good film serving mainly to remind us that "Away From Her" is a great one.

This fourth installment is a complete reboot, returning to the web-slinger's creation story, and Garfield, more than any other factor, contributes to the sense of a bleaker vision along the lines of "The Dark Knight."

MacFarlane gets an impressive amount of comic mileage from having a plush toy talk like a Boston low-life, though for gut laughs nothing compares to the brutal, frantic, and completely wordless fight scene between Wahlberg and his little buddy in a cheap hotel room.

The movie develops into a painful story of one generation inflicting its selfish compromises on the next. The three leads are uniformly excellent, and the strong supporting cast includes Mark Duplass and Philip Baker Hall.

Dick focuses on a handful of women who were sexually assaulted while on active duty, but they're only the tip of the iceberg; according to the film, which draws all its statistics from government reports, more than 20 percent of female veterans have been assaulted.

In movies like "Happiness" and "Storytelling," Todd Solondz has staged some pretty horrifying courtships, but the one in this seventh feature is surprisingly gentle.

Scafaria, making her feature debut as writer-director, scores numerous laughs off the social dislocation that follows as people realize the apocalypse is imminent (there's a funny sequence at a suburban house party where no taboo goes unbroken).

The thing runs more than two hours, but this is the sort of project that's indemnified against charges of excess.

In some mumblecore movies the semi-improvised dialogue can be engulfed by hipster irony, but the acting here is so skilled, and the emotional terrain so rocky, that Shelton manages to break past the genre's narrow social parameters to a moving story of grief, betrayal, and devotion.

The story provides great roles for Jack Black as the sunny title character, Shirley MacLaine as his dyspeptic victim, and Matthew McConaughey as the good-old-boy D.A. who prosecutes the crime. But some of the best performances come from real-life residents of Carthage as they share their recollections on camera.

As with the earlier movie, this one turns in on its own morality like a Möbius strip, endorsing kindness by practicing slaughter, and pulls us along for the ride. Detractors will call its reasoning ridiculous, and they'll be right - though I doubt that will bother Goldthwait, who makes a living being ridiculous.

This may conjure up unpleasant memories of Guy Ritchie's "Sherlock Holmes" movies, but Ritchie could learn a lot from director James McTeigue (V for Vendetta); this is multiplex fare to be sure, but McTeigue manages to popularize 19th-century literature without completely vulgarizing it.

Waititi's comic vocabulary hasn't changed much-there's a lot of voice-over narration illustrated with ludicrous, cartoonish tableaux - yet the kids' genuine longing for their no-good dad elevates this above simple deadpan humor.

Into this cauldron walks the title character, a gentle Algerian refugee with his own history of terrible loss, and as he tries to take over the dead woman's class, his rocky relationship with the kids pushes both him and them to new levels of empathy, understanding, and forgiveness.

Because the first narrative is so crushingly generic (which turns out to be the point), most of the amusement derives from trying to figure out what the second one is all about. I'm not sure I ever did, but the climactic one-two punch of special-effects chaos and meta-movie chin stroking should have the fanboys trembling with delight.

It's clichéd, ridiculous, and very entertaining.

Singh is much more skilled as a visual artist than a storyteller, and his artistic fortunes seem to rise and fall with the inspiration of his screenwriters. In this case he's lucked out with Mellissa Wallack and Jason Keller, whose witty script retells the story of Snow White from the perspective of the wicked queen.

Seann William Scott is the best comic Neanderthal in Hollywood (American Pie, Role Models), and he's found the perfect story in this fictionalized adaptation of a memoir by minor-league hockey brawler Doug Smith.

Davies adapted a classic 1952 play by Terence Rattigan, whose centenary is being celebrated in Britain this year, and though you might have trouble sorting out the film's competing levels of authorship, one element attributable solely to Davies is the strategic use of music and quiet on the soundtrack.

Even as a hagiography, though, it's pretty interesting: Fishbone predated-and outlived-the early 90s "alternative" boom that provided it with a brief marketing hook, yet the band truly embodied alternative music's underground ideal, challenging listeners of all races and musical persuasions.

Her (Westfedlt) directing debut is a funny and emotionally credible.

Being taken under Apatow's wing may have been a big career break for writer-director David Wain, but this lacks the sharp personality of some of his earlier movies.

Their inexperience with thrillers is evident here in the cluttered exposition at the beginning and wholesale revelations at the end. In the middle, though, there's a pretty suspenseful stretch.

The rudimentary 2-D animation doesn't allow for much character nuance, and the story isn't exactly fresh. But directors Fernando Trueba (Calle 54), Javier Mariscal, and Tono Errando conjure up some vibrant set pieces.

This documentary about Crazy Horse, the legendary Parisian nude cabaret, is so warm, colorful, and sensuous that it seems like a real anomaly for the highly disciplined filmmaker.

A heart-wrenching performance from Brenda Blethyn sustains this 2009 drama by French writer-director Rachid Bouchareb.

Robert Wieckiewicz is good as the conflicted protagonist, but the most valuable player here is cinematographer Jolanta Dylewska, who turns in handsome work even though most of the action transpires in inky blackness.

Harrelson returns in Moverman's second feature playing a similar character, a bullheaded LAPD officer whose long career with the force is unraveling amid a succession of brutality complaints, and although the role offers the same macho quotient as the earlier one, it's counterbalanced in this case by funny, observant scenes of his gyno-centric home life.

Ramsay seems to be seriously intent on probing the outer limits of a mother's love and forgiveness, but the boy (played by a trio of child actors) is so unremittingly evil that the movie begins to feel like a grotesque remake of that old John Ritter comedy "Problem Child" (1990).

Writer-director Celine Sciamma breaks little ground here, but her story is nicely scaled to the gender-rigid world of childhood, where boys playing soccer together take as much pride in their spitting skills as any scored goal.

The movie is hugely compelling on a moral and emotional level - I was completely hooked - yet it also revealed to me in numerous small and concrete ways what it's like to live in a contemporary theocracy.

Bale admirably shoulders the burden of Western identification figure, but the heart of the story is the ongoing tension between the schoolgirls and the hookers, who see in each other aspects of womanhood that are out of their respective reach.

There's a good deal of pleasure to be had in the clockwork precision of her hand-to-hand combat, which Soderbergh often shoots in profile to showcase her wall-climbing backflips. The story surrounding it is comparably smooth, skilled, and mechanical, though a lot less memorable.

The dialogue is superior, though, and director Roman Polanski has cast the characters well; Foster is particularly impressive in a stridently unattractive role, as the pinched, angry liberal who's orchestrated the meeting but doesn't get quite the apology she wants.

This conceit works precisely because Thatcher's popular appeal was so deeply rooted in nostalgia for the days of empire, and Streep, no fan of Thatcher, nicely undercuts the poignancy of her current condition with flashbacks that reveal her brittle arrogance in office.

The movie is quite enjoyable, though, redeemed by Crowe's trademark sincerity and assured handling of oddball character actors.

This effort often manages to duplicate the magical pantomime of the era; a lovely scene in which Bejo drapes herself in the arms of a hung jacket as if it were a human lover could have come straight out of a Marion Davies picture.

As usual with the series, the movie combines a plot line a toddler could understand with gadgets that would baffle an engineering Ph.D.

This is jammed with cliches but completely engrossing, in the manner of a movie ardently in love with its own bullshit.

Actor John Turturro follows his charming and colorful travel documentary "Rehearsal for a Sicilian Tragedy" (2009) with this assured and freewheeling look at the music of Naples (2010).

Unfortunately, this comeback movie, a labor of love for mush-headed screenwriter and star Jason Segel, errs on the side of sweetness and nostalgia; except for a few good zingers from balcony dwellers Statler and Waldorf, there isn't much here for mom and dad.

Scorsese transforms this innocent tale into an ardent love letter to the cinema and a moving plea for film preservation.

Apocalyptic visions are nothing new in cinema, but they're almost always epic in scale; Von Trier's innovation is to peer down the large end of the telescope, observing the end of the world in painfully intimate terms.

Herzog's wrenching interviews with the victims' relatives, may not turn anyone against capital punishment, but they're gripping nonetheless. Incidentally, the spiritual inquiry Herzog aims for here has already been rendered onscreen, in Steve James and Peter Gilbert's powerful documentary "At the Death House Door" (2008).

The one mystery Black and Eastwood can't solve is Hoover's love life - perhaps because the solution is too simple to be believed.

This indie drama starts off as a sexy little date movie, but once the lovers have been separated it grows steadily more complicated and mature.

This time the quest plot involves Asian-American pals Harold and Kumar chasing after a Christmas tree to replace one they've accidentally burned down, but that's only an excuse for the relentless barrage of tasteless gags, most of them damned funny.

Durkin reveals how the sisters have been pulled in opposite directions by the death of their parents. But the story structure also nurtures a creeping, finally unbearable dread that may have you looking over your shoulder all the way home.

Chanodr has said that he wanted to portray the 2008 financial meltdown in all its complexity, assigning everyone a fair share of the blame. But the real strength of his debut feature is how persuasively it depicts the fishbowl world of high finance, whose executives seem incapable of seeing past their towering salaries and privileged lives.

A precious scrap of American history.

Writer-director Jeff Nichols maintains a cagey balancing act for much of the movie, refusing to specify whether his protagonist is a prophet or a madman, yet in the end this doesn't really matter: the storm inside him is plenty real.

Clooney directed with an actor's appetite for vivid star turns, and he certainly gets them from Ryan Gosling, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Paul Giamatti.

Even in its truncated state, this is pretty gripping stuff; just think of it as an epic commercial for the director's cut DVD.

Sentimental, obvious, but well-nigh irresistible, this jubilant comedy equates England's bland cuisine with its sexual inhibition and suggests we could all use something a little more tasty (at dinnertime, that is).

What begins as a one-night stand deepens, over the next two days, into a genuine romance as the young lovers embark on an epic dialogue that touches on the most profound questions of love, commitment, honesty, and identity.

Like many other comedies about serious matters, 50/50 grows more dramatic in its second half. What really impressed me, though, was how easily Reiser could pivot back to comedy at a moment's notice without seeming cheap.

The real protagonist of Moneyball, however, is Beane himself, played with great charisma by Brad Pitt. (With this movie and "The Tree of Life" competing against each other, Pitt could wind up cheating himself out of an Oscar this year.)

The cruel imperialism of the war is just the sort of thing that stokes Sayles's liberal ire, which is one reason the movie so often recalls his proletarian masterpiece Matewan (1987).

Soderbergh's treatment of the Internet turns out to be the most provocative aspect of Contagion. Like the virus, which destroys any cell it encounters, misinformation spreads rapidly online and tends to cancel out information that might save people.

The injustice of the girl's thwarted career goes only so far, though Feret pushes it in some interesting directions.

This is affecting and thematically pointed but much more pat than the situation that precedes it, in which two different realities must coexist uneasily on the same screen.

Director Oliver Schmitz is particularly attentive to the superstition and ingrained sexism that make life miserable for these people, though he also seems to view women as the country's best hope.

This absorbing PBS-style documentary by Joseph Dorman follows Aleichem from his early years in the Russian shtetl of Voronko through the pogroms that would drive the Jewish diaspora of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

This remake is good fun, aided in no small degree by Colin Farrell's strutting, dead-eyed performance as the bloodsucker.

This is worth seeing, but only if you think you can tolerate the precious voice-over narration from the couple's wounded cat, delivered by July in a high, scratchy voice.

Reilly's performance here is hilarious: he's located the character in the bursts of shouting he uses to do his job and the warped sense of humor he needs to deal with the weird kids sent his way.

Morris's trademark device of superimposing giant type over his talking heads - Willing! Manacled Mormon! - often made me wonder if Morris were exposing the world of tabloid journalism or participating in it.

Diaz, costars Jason Segel and Justin Timberlake, and a sharp supporting cast manage to deliver a crappy good time, mercifully devoid of any heart-tugging teacher-student subplots.

This documentary on the history of gospel music can't measure up to George T. Nierenberg's colorful "Say Amen, Somebody" (1982), but it's so jammed with great archival performances, most of them included in their entirety, that it's worth seeing.

Possibly the touchy-feeliest cowboy movie ever made.

Wexler emerges from all this with the commonplace wisdom that laughter and a positive outlook both prolong life and make it worth living, though his vocal concern with his own aging keeps the film from growing pat.

The most daring aspect of the film, fully realized in Bello's grave performance, may be the notion that a parent can invest endless love in a child and one day find him unfathomable.

Ayoade owes a debt to Wes Anderson (Rushmore), but the parents here are so beautifully written, and Hawkins and Taylor particularize them so well, that the movie manages to hold its own.

The documentary begins to lose its shape as Siegel ponders the spiritual and cultural impact of the honeybee, but it does succeed in flagging a potentially critical problem.

A sense of reconciliation is Malick's great accomplishment in The Tree of Life, affording us equal wonder at grace and nature alike. 

This slam-bang remake of a 1963 feature by Eichi Kudo builds slowly, accumulating characters and themes, then explodes into a prolonged and masterful battle sequence inside a deserted town.

Woody Allen's bad movies often seem to be taking place in some kind of upper-class fantasy world, which may be the reason I find this upfront fantasy to be his funniest, most agreeable comedy in years.

It's still fun to watch, but the first one was better.

Near the end Press poses a couple of personal questions that pierce the old man's defenses in the most painful and revealing way, suggesting a much more complicated emotional wellspring for the work that consumes his life.

Bridesmaids is hilariously funny, but what makes it exhilarating is how boldly it defies that conventional wisdom about what men and women like.

Subplots involving the heroine's resentful husband and rebellious teenage daughter never amount to much, though the story builds toward a satisfactory, if formulaic, climax when the woman dares to compete in a tournament against a succession of smug bourgeois men.

Partly funded by the Humane Society, this gripping documentary by Michael Webber rips the lid off a scandal that periodically turns up on local newscasts but then disappears from public consciousness.

The real standout is Kevin Kline as secretary of war Edwin Stanton.

Less a biography than a diplomatic history of Britain in World War II, the movie draws a satisfying narrative arc from his extended campaign to rally President Roosevelt and the American public to Britain's defense.

"A Film by David Schwimmer" is not the sort of credit that fills me with anticipation, but I must admit he's done a solid job with this queasy drama about the rape of a 12-year-old Wilmette girl.

None of this makes any sense if you think about it, but the idea is so much fun that thinking about it may be your last impulse.

A thoughtful and admirably nuanced moral drama.

The new version of Jane Eyre is far and away the best I've seen, thanks largely to the skilled young actress Mia Wasikowska.

Some might call this movie a step backward after Burger's previous feature, the painfully honest Iraq war drama "The Lucky Ones," but as a stylish intrigue it's hard to beat.

The result is pretty entertaining, though most of that entertainment derives from Katz's skillful exploitation of gumshoe formula.

Alternately harrowing and humbling, this is a story of ordinary men whose compassion is tested in the cruelest, most profound fashion.

The premise of this South Korean import may call to mind that of another, Bong Joon-ho's recent suspense film "Mother," but Poetry is another bird entirely: true to the title, writer-director Lee Chang-dong is principally concerned with rendering emotions that seem inexpressible.

Funny, scary, and exuberant, Kaboom delivers the goods as both a generational marker and a tale of things to, uh, come.

The movie might have amounted to no more than a sunny eco-parable, but it begins to bite harder when the catadores, captivated by their sudden importance, face the unhappy prospect of returning to their previous existence.