Kyle Smith

Mia Goth is as fine a name as can be imagined for the actress playing a creepy, hollow waif in A Cure for Wellness, and her name is practically a tag line for this fantastically eerie movie: “Me a Gothic!”

Miller is wincingly good at playing up the innocence.

Instead of trying to make Austen's life entertaining by pretending it was just like her work - as in the dull recent French movie "Molière" - Becoming Jane has a more astute appreciation of how Austen, or any fiction writer, works. There's a bit of stealing from life, lots of exaggeration, some wish fulfillment, mix-and-match character assembly.

Its personal, newsmagazine touch will make your heart ache for its cross-section of humanity.

How English is this movie? As English as a cold, rainy day at the beach. As English as the politeness that masks hostility, as English as a pie that contains meat, as English as secretly wishing you lived in some other country.

The eye-popping and entertaining The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader offers a merry seafaring jaunt together with plenty of adventures led by magically empowered kids.

Rising star Michael Shannon makes a riveting shamus hired to chase a runaway husband in the quiet but resonant little noir The Missing Person.

None of this is ever quite as great as it is in Spielberg’s work, but it’s reasonably close; the worst you can say about the movie is that it sticks to a highly potent formula.

The Way, Way Back is balanced, satisfying, wholesome. Dig in.

We may not need another IRA movie, but even so, Ken Loach's Brit-bashing historical drama The Wind That Shakes the Barley, winner of the top prize at Cannes last year, raises hard questions about Ireland's uncanny ability to kneecap itself.

The Coens, so cutting to so many of their characters, are gentler with Llewyn, inviting us to wander and wonder along with him as he ponders why he must forever play the jerk.

There aren’t enough movies in which Tina Fey fires an AK-47 while grinning maniacally. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot turns out to make excellent use of her established skills while revealing new ones: It’s “30 Rock Me to the Casbah.”

It’s Margaux, the tragic supermodel and failed actress who took her own life at 42, who emerges as the film’s fount of heartbreak in several stunning scenes.

There's a pleasing tension in the air as their relationship comes to seem like something of a contest: With two women this needy, who will out-crazy the other?

A viral blast of the American Dream. It's "Rocky" with a briefcase.

To keep this one-man show visually engaging, director Sophie Fiennes places the professor in sets and costumes from the movies, talking about “Full Metal Jacket” from atop a barracks toilet and “Brief Encounter” from a 1940s British train.

Writer-director John Gray, who created "Ghost Whisperer" on TV, is a son of Brooklyn whose love for the borough is as thick as a pint of Guinness, and he keeps finding fresh ways to present familiar plot points.

Roger Ebert makes an unusual candidate for a documentary: He was a writer, which isn’t cinematic, and not the swashbuckling kind. He didn’t go to war zones, just movies.

Isn't especially hilarious, but it has a warm sense of humor instead of a string of gross-out jokes. It'll be a cable mainstay.

Zombieland is still the funniest broad comedy since "The Hangover." Its yowling, marching, munching corpses are as scary as grad students and as hilarious as the plot of "G.I. Joe."

First-time writer-director Adam Reid has a lightly endearing touch as he allows the actors plenty of space to be warm without being cute.

De Palma is extreme, visceral, usually in bad taste but almost always riveting. De Palma's Redacted, a no-budget fake documentary that imagines the circumstances behind a real rape and murder of a civilian girl committed by US troops in Iraq, is a piece of anti-war propaganda whose aims I don't agree with, but it jolted me nonetheless.

Based on the true story of the world's largest counterfeiting operation, The Counterfeiters is full of the weird details that, though unsurprising on one level, are so jarringly wrong that they seem fresh: As a reward for producing 134 million pounds sterling, the prisoners get a pingpong table.

As Popper himself notices, his and the penguins' saga gets so endearing that it could have been narrated by Morgan Freeman.

It’s Peele’s first film, but it has none of the rough edges or self-indulgence you’d expect from a rookie.

"HP6" is suspenseful and artfully realized. It's a definite improvement over J.K. Rowling's dimly written and exposition-clogged book.

Best of Enemies illustrates how even literary swashbucklers can be reduced to schoolboy behavior.

Camp often means a lack of feeling and generalized disdain; not so in Spork, which has as much heart as "Sixteen Candles."

Harks back to a 1960s idea of what a horror film should be.

I didn't buy how The Next Three Days plays out - but I almost bought it, and that's good enough for a thriller.

Martin Scorsese's Rolling Stones "documentary" (i.e. concert film) is a first: the only Scorsese film that does not feature the Stones' "Gimme Shelter." Really. I think the Dalai Lama even hummed the guitar solo in "Kundun."

Like "Once," this film is a tender little piece of heartbreak.

White trash meets white collar in Extract, Mike Judge's workplace comedy -- which contains more reality than the last five documentaries I've seen.

The doggedness and good will of these men are irresistible as they pick up on the American dream, finding work and even college educations while trying to locate their missing relatives back home.

There are several adorable musical numbers that make excellent use of Adams. Segel's dancing is . . . well, he reminded me of a huge star: Big Bird.

An eyeball party. The score by Daft Punk, which veers from homages to Hans Zimmer's thundery work in "The Dark Knight" to a retro-'80s synth sound, surpasses magnificence.

This weekend, forget "Jarhead" - two hours of guys playing grab-ass in the shower and no chicks. If you're lucky, you can con your girlfriend into seeing Pride & Prejudice.

A hilarious Parker Posey provides her customary blast of brittle energy in Price Check, an engaging corporate comedy.

Fightville, you had me at "gladiator school."

The movie is so heavily weighted toward the Simmons character that no one else really gets to breathe. And though McBride's shtick is brilliant - he could get rich by playing variations on this character for the next few years, and probably will.

More like Disney's "Sleeping Beauty," somber, slow and elegant instead of frantic and dazzling.

As filthy as the back of a sanitation truck — but it has heart, too. Most of the comedy is funny, some of it is hilarious.

If (like me) you have a parental obsession with brainwashing your children to adore everything from Sinatra to “Shake It Off,” Sing may be your most effective weapon since “Happy Feet.”

Despite its excesses, Savage" is never unintentionally funny, just gritty and mean. The run time is more than two hours, yet it's also tight: no drag, no waste, no message.

Illustrating the many ways nuclear weapons could kill you makes Countdown to Zero one of the most frightening documentaries you'll ever see, or endure.

Steve Jobs is a tale of two men, not one: A more accurate, not to say wittier, title would have been “Steve Jobs and Aaron Sorkin.”

Rush, though it will win no trophies, is fine filmmaking, a smart, visually engorged, frequently thrilling tale of boyish competition — inspired by a true story. At heart it’s “Amadeus” on wheels, only this time Salieri is the Austrian.

Directed with great sensitivity by Norway’s Joachim Trier, the film is superbly, subtly acted.

Probably no studio mulls its “brands” as obsessively as Disney does, and The Jungle Book is very much a careful, calculated brand extension, not a reinvention. But that’s just fine: What better lesson to teach kids than respect for what came before you?

Somm does a fairly impressive job of making wine tasting somewhat cinematic despite its being essentially unfilmable, at least until taste-o-vision comes along.

This isn't Mamet at his finest, though, which leaves us with a script that is merely three times as smart as the average feature.

Nutty? Maybe. But a pungent blast of the cinema du bonkers is just what this summer's multiplexes need after weeks of bromide-stuffed retreads that are as smug about their lack of originality as packs of teen girls who dress exactly alike. Mock Jonah Hex if you must, but you can't say you've seen a lot of other supernatural Westerns lately.

Dafoe proves to have the right blend of ruggedness and sensitivity for this conflicted hero. The actor's habit of maintaining a lavishly styled coiffure in all situations, even when his character is meant to be sleeping in the rain for days on end, is becoming distracting, though.

An affecting and beautifully realized documentary.

The loose feel and sense for random comedy (as when a bore suddenly starts lecturing Coogan about the geological details of the cliff he is standing on) are spiffy.

So gripping and focused that it easily bests Hollywood movies with 50 times its budget.

The oddly compelling documentary Moving Midway is an engineering tale combined with a family history and a ghost story.

Forsaken in a cruel wilderness, a man looks to God and pleads for help. Receiving no answer, he says, "F- -k, I'll do it myself."

France's Declaration of War has it all: comedy, romance, fantasy, musical interludes and a child with a brain tumor. Wait - what?

A scary, inventive, exciting and breathless adventure that combines the best elements of “Children of Men," “Escape from New York" and “The Road Warrior," but leaves out the worst stuff - such as the story-clogging despair and political allegory in “Children," a movie that made apocalypse look like kind of a downer.

The film is as tender and endearing as a lamb, a lamb at rest in a fragrant atmosphere. It’s a film that has a determined, unironic respect for things past. It’s as if millennial hipsterism, with its feigned fascination for all things retro, took a surprising further step: actual respect for learning, for experience, for wisdom.

Lately, the Shakespeare plays on film tend to be either too self-consciously irreverent on the one hand or too stodgy on the other; Kurzel’s Macbeth takes a point of view without betraying the Bard.

I'm not, finally, sure what Leigh is saying - but she is a filmmaker with a voice.

Writer-director Jon S. Baird has devilish fun with the hilarious black-comic elements of Irvine Welsh’s novel, but the incessant bad behavior does get a wee bit monotonous, and the twist ending is disappointingly pat.

So why does the Democratic Party hate him so much? The answer, as this valuable (if blatantly pro-Nader) documentary makes clear, is hypocrisy.

War was both cruel and magnificent, as Churchill once put it. To Gibson, it still is.

Dazzling fun. Jerry is master of a new domain.

Like its star, the movie is too short and a little thin but just about perfect.

Mesmerizing, eerie and unpredictably weird.

Maher's sense of humor deserts him in the end, though, when in an apocalyptic montage of fire and hate (bin Laden, Pat Robertson), he suggests all religions are equally bent on destruction of the Earth. It's fatuous to suggest that the Iraq war was launched because of religion or that belief in the Book of Revelation is the same as organizing terrorist attacks.

It’s the sweet sincerity of Brooklyn that stamps it as both refreshing and nostalgic. The film is as welcome as a photo you just discovered of your mother before you were born, in which she looks prettier than you ever imagined.

Takes a bit of "Swingers" and a bit of "Manhattan" to create a slacktacular vision of uncertain youth in today's L.A.

Turns out to be formulaic and broad but also skillfully paced and big-hearted, with a sharp cast of comics that makes the most of a sunny script.

A wicked little horror film in which nearly all of the violence takes place in your head, In Fear expertly builds terror out of not much more than two people driving around in a car.

An open- and-shut case, but that doesn't mean it can't also be an entertaining one.

Like a Canadian "Six Feet Under," the indie dramedy Whole New Thing mixes characters (teen and adult, gay and straight, married and single) who seem both completely plausible and capable of anything.

Pity the crowds expecting another cute comedy like "Date Night" who wind up at Crazy, Stupid, Love. It'll be like asking for a burger and getting served escargot.

Top performances by Guy Pearce and Felicity Jones, though, make the film emotionally rich.

Imagine "Clerks" director Kevin Smith with a background in poetry and painting instead of comic books and bestiality jokes, and you'll have an idea of what to expect from an exciting new filmmaker named Sean Ellis, whose terrific debut is called Cashback.

In the compelling but slow-moving Iranian film A Separation, a downbeat family drama of no particular distinction gradually turns into a mystery that raises painful moral questions. There may be several guilty parties.

It's mainly about a supremely annoying French-born LA clothier who became a hugely successful artist without pausing to consider his utter lack of originality or talent.

In their refusal to be up-to-the-moment, the Narnia movies are bound to age beautifully, perhaps much more so than the two Shrek films Adamson directed.

Bloody horror flicks need not be anemic when it comes to intelligence. The victims of You’re Next, as well as their slaughterers, are reasonably smart and resourceful. Their clash may not be as nasty as the battles of academia, but there’s a lot more common sense involved.

Yousef’s story, which he retells in the documentary The Green Prince, is one of unimaginable courage and moral awakening.

The film, like the man, is never boring.

In a captivating climax, the movie turns attractively freaky, though somewhat marred by cheesy special effects, and there’s a huge debt to the immense leaps of “2001.” An abrupt ending feels frustrating and leaves questions floating in space. Then again, I’m using only 3 to 5 percent of my capacity, so what do I know?

Those expecting an exhilarating, "Pulp Fiction"-style wrap-up will also be disappointed. Instead, Flowers gives us the impression - as the end of "Traffic" did - that we've just taken a few turns on a merry-go-round of doom that is going to keep spinning long after the movie ends.

The film is shaky as a procedural, and the level of official corruption seems more Moscow than Melbourne. Yet as a fable of power, vengeance and betrayal it exerts a quiet, increasingly wicked pull, equivalent to that of the wrinkly but ruthless grandma.

Sharp little psychological thriller.

Director Griffin Dunne's adaptation of Dirk Wittenborn's fiercely personal novel ambles pleasantly through coming-of-age movie territory, then takes a jarring Agatha Christie detour.

The Miyazaki legacy is in good hands.

Any parent who has ever scrambled desperately to find a doll to appease a wailing child as though it were a life-and-death situation will appreciate the wit of this multilayered, dread-soaked chamber piece.

Revenge is a dish best served with bullets, high explosives and giant rolling flameballs. In Quantum of Solace, James Bond orders the revenge buffet, deluxe.

A passable French homage to the American crime epic, The Connection has plenty of visual style to go with stock characters.

Gives a taste of what it might be like to live inside Mike Tyson's mind.

The movie is an entertaining stroll through a colorful gallery of characters including, in villain mode, former Metropolitan Museum of Art director Thomas Hoving. "She knows nothing. I am an expert," huffs Hoving, who is so nasty he might as well be wearing a monocle - making Horton that much more fun to root for.

Filled with arch wit, the film is sweet and sorrowful at the same time. Like many indies, it lacks much of a conclusion, though writer-director James C. Strouse shows that simple ideas, ably executed, can make an endearing film.

The cheesehead noir Thin Ice presents Greg Kinnear in a role that's almost too easy for him: He's a morally flexible Wisconsin insurance salesman for whom honesty is the least-likely policy.