Kyle Smith

A sickening horror parable disguised as a comedy of mores, the Netherlands’ Borgman is a rarity: a genuinely shocking, upsetting movie.

No one loves a broad comedy like the French, but Gallic touches of restraint tend to keep such light entertainment pleasing rather than blundering.

Poison Friends deftly sketches the fine line - is there one? - between "critic" and "loser."

I wouldn't want to see five movies like this one each week but it's a cheeky, madcap joyride.

For its wicked innocence, this is the finest rock movie since "Almost Famous."

A working-class hero of a film.

A mashup of Nick Hornby and Martin Scorsese? Why not?

In the most thrilling sequence of this consistently rousing old-school adventure, Heyerdahl grabs a passing shark with his bare hands, thrusts a hook into it, drags it aboard and guts it with a knife. Now that’s what I call entertainment. I haven’t seen such crazed brutality since Lou Lumenick’s review of “Movie 43.”

Like a lesser Python entry ("The Meaning of Life"?), it's alternately brilliant and frustrating.

Django Unchained might have been a revelation in 2005. But after Quentin Tarantino and others have spent years spoofing '60s and '70s genre movies, this mock spaghetti Western tastes like it came out of the microwave.

Thick-necked, booze-loving and angry men beat each other with their naked fists: so far, so Irish. But the feuding clans in the documentary Knuckle actually think their habits of antagonizing one another can be fixed by just one more problem-solving brawl.

Fans of deadpan comic fantasy writers like Douglas Adams and Kurt Vonnegut are likely to be intrigued by this lively little packet of weird -- then dive like a dolphin into Keret's loopy story volumes.

Essentially amounts to an extended interview with a psycho, fleshed out with background material that, while suitably shocking, is not always illuminating or even frank. The film is curiously shy about calling Varg what he is: a Nazi.

Laden with witty ironies, the film by Anne Fontaine suggests men may not play exactly the roles they think they do in women’s lives.

Cruise's Jack Reacher is a loner who doesn't smile, charm, love the ladies, aim his index fingers to the heavens or sing "You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling" in bars. Here he just snarls and kills people. Yes, please, and let's have more of the same.

The Young Victoria achieves a fine balance. I guess that's what you get when a film is produced by both Martin Scorsese and Sarah Ferguson.

The dialogue, while filthy, is wickedly funny, and sounds perfect coming out of the mouths of these beaten-down characters in their low-rent surroundings.

This is the British way to mingle ideas and entertainment.

Davies’ quiet, painterly film largely eschews musical cues that would heighten its emotional impact, but as it is, Sunset Song is captivating in its sincerity.

It's ragged, and at times it scrapes your comedy ganglia like a cheese grater. But 15 minutes or half an hour is an ideal chunk of time to set aside for truly inspired absurdism.

What's best about the film are its quick jumps from one depravity to the next as jazz rambles on the soundtrack: Youth is a candle to be burned at both ends, with (as it was once said about Bob Dylan) a blowtorch in the middle.

The smart indie comedy Diminished Capacity deals with three kinds of dementia: those relating to aging, concussions and being a Chicago Cubs fan. Tying those three things together is a task that the witty script does with surprising adroitness.

Baumbach seems mainly interested in capturing the whimsical rhythms of unformed post-college life, with money too scarce and roommates too ample — but he already did that, did it better and with more rueful feeling, in the much funnier “Kicking and Screaming,” the debut he made at 25 and one of the best films of the 1990s.

Red has more snappy joy in store than practically all of last summer's busted blockbusters.

Not since "300" have I seen such manly mano-a-mano-ing as the iron clash of wills in the docu mentary King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters.

The Romantics isn't as consistent or as well-rounded as its parent, "The Big Chill," or as entertaining as its less literate but more extroverted cousin, "St. Elmo's Fire," but with its tart dialogue and its perfect ending, it is sensitive as well as sagacious. It's a rare combination.

Bateman has rarely had the opportunity to play a snarling lawman, but with his cool aviators and his bristling putdowns he's perfect, too.

A rock bio minus the fun. The sex is guilt-stricken, the drugs are used to treat epilepsy, and the rock 'n' roll is about isolation and despair.