Keith Uhlich

The film attests to George Miller’s enduring aptitude for utilizing the ridiculous to achieve the sublime.

Skyfall has the feel of both a ceremonial commemoration and a franchise-rebooting celebration, especially in the ways it attempts to too cutely sync up the '60s-era Bond mythos (casual misogyny and all) with the more complicatedly "Bourne"-inflected recent episodes.

The ideologies underlying Andersson’s oft-astonishing succession of extreme wide-angle, vanishing-point tableaux are a decidedly acquired taste.

Watching the formerly spry Harris struggle to maintain a normal life (he's frequently glassy-eyed and jacked on painkillers) emphasizes the underappreciated sacrifices our men and women in uniform make in the name of vaguely defined ideals.

This handsomely made spook story (love those echo-prone hallways!) becomes less involving the more the narrative's mysteries are solved. By the time all the tarot cards are on the table, it's likely that you too will feel conned.

Cue those weepy violins. Indeed, you get everything you'd expect from this mostly saccharine melodrama.

This is prime Woody Allen - insightful, philosophical and very funny.

Terence Davies’s film is a rhapsodic portrayal of an upper-crust milieu in which words are wielded like weapons by people who might otherwise be pariahs.

Ai is a great subject for a documentary, and his charismatic certitude helps to offset Klayman's unfortunate inexperience behind the camera.

Yet it's impossible to shake the sense that what felt thrillingly, cohesively alive in the director's earlier movies plays here with more laurel-resting creakiness than go-for-broke verve. Russell's once-mercurial assets have become a formula.

This is a life lived, perhaps not always well, but certainly to the fullest.

About as deep as a kiddie pool, which isn't to say it's an unpleasant frolic.

When it comes to individual people and their hopes, fears and desires, Akl has a talent for both the surreal flourish and the grounded insight. In this case, the bigger picture and the larger point are what prove elusive, leaving the whole enterprise feeling sadly schematic.

End of the Century is at its best whenever Castro keeps things thematically and temperamentally woozy.

Once the undead start walking, however, the film loses some of its footing: Most of the bloodletting is staged with quick-cut inelegance better suited to the hack horror production of your choosing, though there’s still a potent air of hopelessness that lingers as the cast is winnowed away "Ten Little Indians"–style.

Bertrand Bonello uncannily utilizes burdensome signs and wonders for maximum insight and agitation.

Marielle Heller takes a script that many filmmakers would turn into cringe-inducing treacle and interrogates the sentimental trappings.

The creepiness builds with symphonic precision until reality truly is indistinguishable from fantasy.

Brava, Mia! The exceedingly talented Ms. Hansen-Løve (the writer-director of Father of My Children) is sure to win many more fans with her latest feature, an incisive, exhilaratingly frank examination of l'amour lost.

As subcultural anthropology, it’s unassailable. Yet the often ugly-looking DV aesthetic dilutes the cumulative effect.

David Lowery has a carefree, bordering on insubstantial touch, which gives rise to several rank absurdities.

The director races far too quickly to get to his ashes-to-ashes, dust-to-dust punch line. This is the film of a pretender, not a believer.

The running time may make you blanch, but Connie Field’s seven-part documentary about the history and eventual dissolution of South African apartheid is well worth the commitment.

Still, if any modern strip is worthy of an extended, Hobbes-style tongue bath, it’s this one.

As in his much-lauded "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days," the latest feature from Palme d’Or–winning filmmaker Cristian Mungiu takes a rigorous approach to the material. But where the previous film — about two women seeking a back-alley abortion — was a reductively dour slog, Beyond the Hills feels more caustically all-encompassing.

It's easy to think of comics, especially time-tested ones like Rivers, as mechanical laugh-generators. Stern and Sundberg allow her to reveal the deep-rooted humanity of those ever-present quips, and the effect is humbling.

Despite a committed performance from Palminteri (ripping through scenes like an aged bulldog), Debbie Goodstein's loosely autobiographical drama is as nondescript as made-for-pennies independents come.

The man himself has rarely been profiled without noticeable reluctance, though documentarians Molly Bernstein and Alan Edelstein delve fairly deep by allowing their subject to guide them where he may.