Kenneth Turan

This is one grand adventure, and, animated or not, those are always welcome.

American Sniper is at its best when it deals with the assembly-line-of-death relentlessness of combat for Kyle, how it simultaneously consumes him and wears him down, and how, to his wife's distress, it turns the civilian life he returns to between tours of duty into the aberration, not the norm.

Headhunters is a dark adult entertainment, a wild and bloody adrenaline rush of a movie that deals in gleeful grotesqueness and over-the-top implausibilities.

It sounds paradoxical but, if done right, films about a life ending can be the most life-affirming films you'll see. Truman, a great success in its native Spain, is definitely done right.

No matter what is going on, Hansen-Love's talent for bringing us inside a specific world makes Eden an experience we all can connect to.

While governments and politicians dither about global warming, the world’s undersea coral is moving toward a devastating death. If you don’t believe that, or don’t think it really matters, Chasing Coral presents the evidence with beauty, intelligence and a surprising amount of emotion.

Guillermo del Toro is more than a filmmaker, he's a fantasy visionary with an outsized imagination and a fanatical specificity, a creator of out-of-this world universes carefully conceived down to the smallest detail. His particular gifts and passions are on display in the long-awaited Pacific Rim and the results are spectacular.

Smart, thorough and thoughtful, this disturbing film unfolds like a slow-motion nightmare that has taken half a century to fully reveal itself, a trenchant examination that deserves to stand next to compelling Israeli documentaries on similar themes, including “The Law in These Parts” and “The Gatekeepers.”

It tells a story irresistible to our age of rampant voyeurism and reality TV, yet it also has a potent emotional core that cannot be denied.

Made with gusto, daring and visual brilliance, this stripped-down, jazzed-up “Richard” pulsates with bloody life, a triumph of both modernization and popularization.

Tells a tale that is stranger than fiction several times over. Viewers of this remarkable documentary will be astonished at not only what this art looks like and why it's forbidden, but also where it is and how it got there.

Most fun of all, however, is basking in Chappelle's ability to be effortlessly funny. Whether he's making believe he's a pimp in a Dayton clothing store or charming little kids in the Bed-Stuy day-care center that was concert headquarters, his personality infuses the film with infectious good feelings.

Truly, there can be nothing as complex as the simplest human relationships, and nothing as satisfying as a film that understands that as this one does.

Though Kidman doesn't hesitate to make Grace high-strung and as tightly wound as they come, she also projects vulnerability and courage when they're called for. It's an intense, involving performance, and it dominates and energizes a film that would be lost without it.

Colliding Dreams is a film of ideas and a film of history, a thorough and engrossing look at the root causes of the tortured relationship between Israel and the Palestinians.

As its name promises, The Great Beauty is drop-dead gorgeous, a film that is luxuriously, seductively, stunningly cinematic. But more than intoxicating imagery is on director Paolo Sorrentino's mind, a lot more.

After watching Charles Ferguson's powerhouse documentary about the global economic crisis, you will more than understand what went down - you will be thunderstruck and boiling with rage.

Both a step back and a step forward from the trends of modern animation, it feels like a classic even though it's just out of the box.

The most frankly sensual movie in memory. Winner of five Cesars, the French Oscar, including best picture and best actress for its luminous star, Marina Hands, it has found the soul of the celebrated D.H. Lawrence novel.

If this labor-of-love portrait is any indication, forgetting Frank Zappa is not going to happen any time soon.

Most of all, Wallace & Gromit retains the clever, one-of-a-kind sensibility that made its shorter predecessors so delightful. With every studio comedy looking for a formula for success, it's refreshing to find a heroically whimsical film that succeeds by following no formula known to dog or man.

The Wind That Shakes the Barley turns out to be a more complicated, more dramatically potent story than it appears at first. It's concerned at its core not with how bad the British were but with what the cost of dealing with them was for the Irish.

For all its gifted collaborators, "Film" was not a match made in heaven. But for moviegoers who care about film not just as a title, Notfilm can be unreservedly recommended.

A blood-chilling dark comedy with unexpected moments of both fury and warmth, a strange, brooding and very accomplished film that sets us back on our heels from its opening frames.

One of the most dramatic and emotional of sports stories gets the expert film it deserves in The Russian Five, a documentary that is moving in ways you won’t see coming.

Bridge of Spies is a consummate professional's tribute to a gifted amateur, a smooth entertainment with a strong but subtle political subtext that's both potent and unexpected.

Man Bites Dog defines audacity. An assured, seductive chamber of horrors, it marries nightmare with humor and then abruptly takes the laughter away. Intentionally disturbing, it is close to the last word about the nature of violence on film, a troubling, often funny vision of what the movies have done to our souls.

[Lee's] work is less strident here, more controlled, less in-your-face explosive than for instance “Do the Right Thing,” but for all of that, no less penetrating, no less troubling. Given his passion, there’s no way it could be otherwise.