Kimberley Jones

Director Roger Michell and his frequent writer Hanif Kureishi (their last film together was Venus) regularly dance to the very cliff’s edge of despair, and only for the grace of good casting do you not wish they’d just jump and get it over with.

Teenage is an art film – an engrossing one at that – so it isn’t required to respect Queensberry rules vis-à-vis documentaries.

The bestselling first book in yet another dystopic Young Adult series, Veronica Roth’s Divergent is engrossing enough to devour overnight, and flimsy enough to forget by morning light. Neil Burger’s film adaptation faithfully reproduces the same effect.

Marshmallow nation, you may now exhale: Rob Thomas did ya right.

The Grand Budapest Hotel is nothing short of an enchantment.

The spirit of the thing – the way it champions intellectual curiosity and critical thinking – warmed this nerd’s heart tremendously.

Isaac and Olsen are both mesmerizing actors, and Lange and Felton also do very good work in supporting roles, but their collective gameness – all that acting their pants off (sometimes literally) – is underserved by the film’s script and direction.

It’s the funniest, friskiest date movie in a good long while.

There’s probably a movie out there that can call a happy, anatomical truce between Viagra-hopped, horizontal-dick jokes and heart-on-the-sleeve love stuff, but this ain’t that.

Do we ever get the whole truth? Only this: The past is never the past. In Farhadi’s wounding worldview, the past is the present and, most certainly, the future, too.

Branagh might as well have opened a can and dumped it on a plate, the ridges of a factory-line production still perfectly hatched on a gelatinous cylinder of crud.

The richly hued CG animation is quite nice – a mix of hyperdetailed character work and painterly cityscapes and pastorals – and the script putters along with small but regular amusements.

If in previous films "Adaptation" and "Being John Malkovich" Jonze seemed a little squirmy about sex, his treatment here is fully adult and keenly sensitive to the complexities of sexual intimacy – how it relates to emotional intimacy, whether or not a flesh-and-blood body is required to achieve it.

Shot in winter grays with no warming ambers and the whiff of tuberculosis hanging around all the players, Inside Llewyn Davis is a chilly thing – a nominal comedy in brisk shivers.

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is a very pretty production – pretty colors, pretty scenery, pretty bromides – and a busy one, too, which helps distract us from the sad fact that the movie is generous and humane but not all that interesting.

Frozen can count in its favor visual grandeur, two energetic young women as co-leads, and a couple of plot twists that place the film a cut above your average princess fare.

The Hunger Games franchise, both in print and onscreen, has been exceptionally clever about cozying away imaginative space for fans to fill in the blanks and cast themselves in the rich drama. That this latest film leaves us hungering for more only means that it’s working.

High spirits mark the first half of the film; quite simply, these guys are just fun to be around – most especially Howard, all half-lidded, cat-who-got-the-cream coolness.

Audience fortitude aside: This is compulsively watchable stuff, a masterstroke of thoughtful direction and thought-provoking performance.

After the recent rash of superhero end-spectacles as long-winded and self-serious as a term paper, the limited ambition of The Dark World’s climax is a relief. It scuttles all term paper aspirations and instead humbly lobs a thesis statement-slash-open invitation: Let’s have some fun, shall we? And so we did.

Blue Is the Warmest Color has its wobbles, but Exarchopoulos will knock you sideways.

The movie moves episodically, leisurely, through roughly a decade, and that feels like a gift: to nestle in with these extraordinary, ordinary people and get to know them.

I’m in Love With a Church Girl is not unambitious: It crams into its two hours terminal illness, money laundering, a DEA sting, clubbing, a prolonged coma, and lots of Bible study. But the action – punishingly turgid, spread-it-on-a-cracker cheesy – feels inauthentic, ginned up only to promote the film’s come-to-Jesus messaging, and to call the acting amateurish does a disservice to hard-working amateurs everywhere.

The film finds some momentum once the bodies start dropping – but maybe that was only the sweet relief in knowing the end was nigh.

The issue of late-term abortions tends to inspire polemics from both sides of the debate; Shane and Wilson’s approach – sensitive, measured, workmanlike – is a welcome one.

Thrillers don’t come much more nondescript than this: If Runner Runner were a color scheme, it would be beige, with an accent wall in taupe.

There isn’t a false step from the quietly devastating Farahani; her tour-de-force performance carries the film through its rocky stretches.

Rush, a film about two real-life titans of Formula One racing in the Seventies, splits its narrative between these oil-and-water personalities, which feels about right: It's only half of a good movie.