Kyle Smith

The anti-Ben Stiller comedy: There's humiliation aplenty but no mugging, no abuse to the crotch region, no straining to be outrageous.

Your enjoyment will hinge entirely on whether you think the album is a masterpiece or a bore.

I haven't seen a timelier or more important film this year, and the film's passion for school choice could hardly be more warranted. Along with documentaries such as "The Lottery" and "Waiting for 'Superman,' " the film comes with a background sound of the ice of inertia cracking.

The line between honey and syrup is a fine one, I'll grant you, but "Best Exotic Marigold" was on the wrong side of it. Quartet carries a noble glow, as serene and beautiful as sunset.

The funniest movie of Smith's I've seen. It's "When Harry Did Sally."

Nearly as good as the average episode of TV’s “Friday Nights Lights,” which makes it better than most movies and one of the better sports films of recent years.

Not as aca-mazing as “Pitch Perfect” (which made my 10-best list for 2012), the follow-up should have been cut by 10 or 15 minutes. First-time director Elizabeth Banks (who returns as a snarky announcer) doesn’t have the zippy comic timing of the first film’s helmer, Jason Moore.

Among cheesy sci-fi movies meant to make you think, I'll take Surrogates over "District 9." Both are highly derivative, but in the course of recombining the basic chromosomes of "Blade Runner," "The Matrix" and especially "I, Robot," Surrogates nudges the robo-thriller in an interesting direction.

This is Beatty’s first film in 15 years, a project he’s been working on for 40 years, and it’s immensely pleasing to see him in such fine form. Or, as his obsessive-compulsive subject would say, such fine form. Such fine form.

Najafi stages action scenes with an intense, queasy beauty and elevates what is in its outlines a routine crime drama to near-operatic proportions.

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.