J.R. Jones

The video is narrated by Taylor, who magnanimously presents Newcombe as a Byronic hero, but ultimately proves that the pursuit of success and the pursuit of cool can be equally pointless.

This melancholy romance is the first Almodovar feature I’ve ever really liked, an expertly fashioned melodrama that steers mercifully clear of his usual puckishness and star-mongering.

Funny, smart, and complacent.

Modeling the movie after the show itself grows problematic near the end, when Stern and Del Deo, anticipating that climactic, gold-suited kick line, try to whip us into a frenzy on opening night.

A superior nail-biter.

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.

Excruciatingly narcissistic.

A respectable entry in the Bicycle Thief school of art-house cinema, which uses a child's coming of age to explore an era of political and social turmoil.

If a bullet hadn't killed John Lennon, this Beatles-scored musical might have.

Period westerns are so unfashionable and costly that they usually require a top-drawer script to get off the ground -- and this one, adapted from an Elmore Leonard story and its 1957 movie version, travels with an arrow's clean arc.

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

Having defused the fairy tale, first-time screenwriter Leigh Dunlap pads this out to 96 minutes with stale high school politics and the usual claptrap about believing in yourself.

Possibly the touchy-feeliest cowboy movie ever made.

Pegg and Wright are out of their depth in the second half, when they try to engage the more disturbing elements of Romero's movies, but their disaffected slacker take on the genre is a welcome alternative to the usual bloodbaths.

This is intelligent, committed, and politically provocative, though its narrative puzzle box may prompt you to throw up your hands and let Exxon go on running the world.

An explosive but scrupulously journalistic drama about the radical group that terrorized Germany for nearly 30 years.

Naturally, age and infirmity are a major subtext of Shine a Light (and, really, any movie featuring Keith Richards). No matter how cadaverous the Stones appear, they keep climbing onstage, and I’ll miss them when they’re finally gone.

The scenes of family squalor are memorably persuasive, but any filmmaker ending her movie with the heroine throwing a crumpled poem into the ocean needs a few more writing courses.

Akin perfectly captures the antic pace, eccentric personalities, and fickle fortunes of the restaurant game, and his vision of the Soul Kitchen as an all-night bacchanal is irresistible.

Director Laura Dunn presents a surprisingly sympathetic portrait of Bradley, but her advocacy is clear enough in the primal images of natural beauty and her subjects' heartfelt statements of respect for the landscape.

Danish director Susanne Bier elicits wonderfully intimate performances from her actors, and this 2004 drama has so many genuine, low-key encounters it manages to overcome a contrived and familiar plot.

If you come to this expecting the philosophical depth and psychological detail of Tolstoy’s work you’re sure to be disappointed, but as an actors’ romp it’s delectable.

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.

The visual monotony of talking heads and stock footage is interrupted occasionally by the spectral charcoal drawings of veteran Si Lewen, though his art is used to full advantage only when he describes the liberation of Buchenwald.

As bad-taste comedies go, this is more clever than gross.

Visually witty, flawlessly played romantic comedy.

Never really delivers on that promise, mainly because its scenes of two brilliant men discussing the nature of the subconscious can't compare with Cronenberg's visual rendering of that subconscious in earlier movies.

John Cameron Mitchell directed, making an impressive detour in style and subject matter after his flamboyant "Shortbus" (2006) and "Hedwig and the Angry Inch" (2001).