J.R. Jones

Metal culture is a giant topic, and Dunn has made an ambitious stab at it, exploring the music's social, religious, and sexual implications.

The skillful Patrick Marber (Closer) adapted this gripping drama from a novel by Zoe Heller, and it's both literate and urgently plotted, with a voice-over from Dench that cuts like broken glass.

A dearth of game footage and a wealth of inspirational platitudes contribute to the sense of a powerful tale having already faded into yellowed newspaper clippings.

Ben Affleck directed and cowrote the script; his biggest gamble was casting his irksome little brother as a pistol-whipping tough guy, but the picture is so superbly executed in every other respect that Casey seems more quirky than miscast.

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.

Vincent Cassel sets a new standard for Gallic cool as the title character.

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

The climactic sight gag is lifted from Monicelli's movie like a diamond from a jeweler's window.

Dogtooth, a bizarre black comedy from Greece that won the Un Certain Regard prize at the 2009 Cannes film festival, involves a conventional middle-class family--mom, dad, teenage son, two teenage daughters--that turns out to be warped beyond belief.

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.

The message, unspoken but inescapable, is that a little sharing might feed wealthy and poor alike.

The illicit lovers in this eerie South Korean drama communicate whole worlds without ever speaking.

A flimsy setup dooms this from the start, though its sheer awfulness is something to see.

Thoughtful and complex.

Singer draws heavily on the 1978 hit that launched the Warner Brothers franchise, with Brandon Routh dully impersonating Christopher Reeve as the Man of Steel, Kevin Spacey getting all the good lines as the villainous Lex Luthor, and stock footage of Marlon Brando proving that death isn't always a good career move.

The emotions are as gritty as the Edinburgh locales, and the sex is dark, urgent, and deeply selfish.

The dialogue is multilingual but largely incidental to the action; the physical comedy is gracefully rendered and often magical.

John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath seems like the obvious inspiration here, in both its proletarian sentiment and its primal arrangement of characters against the harsh landscape.

Like her previous feature, "Look at Me" (2004), this relationship drama is mature and intelligent, but the character conflicts are so decorously handled that after a while the whole enterprise begins to seem more like a good waiter than a good story.

The elder Wexler keeps insisting that he won't sign a release for the film unless he approves of the finished product, so he must have been pleased with its brutally honest assessment of him as a gifted filmmaker who never realized his true potential.

Played by Ron Perlman, he's the most magnetic action hero I've come across in a long while.

No one breaks into song, but this fact-based legal drama about a battered Anglo-Indian wife on trial for murdering her husband is infected with a fatal strain of heaving Bollywood melodrama.

Pretty dispensable, though it has one of the best homosexual-panic gags I've ever seen.

Glodell seems to be reaching for the nihilistic buddy romance of a movie like "Mean Streets" (1973), but without the serious intent; despite all the roiling emotions, this begins to feel like a pile-up of macho fetish items and stylistic affectations.

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 outcome is never much in doubt, but Salvadori artfully choreographs the endless table turning, and the Moroccan-born Elmaleh capitalizes on his striking resemblance to Buster Keaton with a similarly comic composure.

It's a funny and frequently affecting reminiscence from a man whose TV antics obscured a long, respectable career as a stage actor and director.

The deft physical comedy is a pleasure, though the leering chauvinism becomes more embarrassing as the movie progresses. Mel Brooks never had it this good.