Kyle Smith

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.