Kyle Smith

It's strange enough to be raised by your aunt. For young John Lennon, things get stranger still when he finds himself dating his mother.

It’s a small movie, but in his third feature, indie writer-director Chad Hartigan proves he is a major talent, imbuing the interactions with wit and warmth and charm.

This movie doesn't get huffy, it gets laughs.

It’s a captivating throwback that promises to lead the genre away from sci-fi flash and trickery. I’d rank it beside “X-Men: Days of Future Past” among the best X-Men entries.

Sicario, which combines dizzying action scenes with a taut script, ravishing photography and an otherwordly musical score, is a knockout.

Turns out to be one of the most absorbing films of the year. Plus it has lots of wiener jokes.

This is all as pure and sunny as lemonade.

Not that a film as taut and exciting as this one needs punchy dialogue, but Black Sea has that, too.

The Wrestler offers something to pretty much everyone in the audience. Much like "The Sopranos," it creates a world that might make you feel utterly at home or exhilarated by strange horrors. Maybe both.

Lymelife, set amid marital decay and teen frustration, isn't quite the "American Beauty" of the 516 area code, but it'll do.

A deeply felt evocation of a place and a people by writer-director Matt Porterfield, who set this largely improvised film in his own lower-class Baltimore neighborhood.

Werner Herzog looks at the death penalty in Into the Abyss, and as is almost always the case, to look through his eyes is to marvel.

Don't let the quiet, indie stylings of The Place Beyond the Pines fool you. This is a big movie with a lot on its mind. Slowly, it unfolds into a kind of epic.

Coppola works in weird ways, but the real Versailles was so much weirder.

There is too much funny here for a movie (even though it continues into the closing credits). Step Brothers should be a TV show.

It’s a rare film that locates viciousness and kindness on both sides of Northern Ireland’s Troubles.

File this one in the same category of edgy Long Island comedies as the equally smart 2009 Alec Baldwin film "Lymelife."

The movie all but proclaims U2 the world's best rock band. Somewhere, Mick Jagger's jaws are grinding.

Like a Pixar movie shorn of the cutesy and manipulative aspects that marred “Inside Out,” the animated remake of The Little Prince, hitting theaters and Netflix, is as fragile and beautiful as the beloved rose guarded by the wee fellow of the title.

Actors tell us that dying is easy, comedy is hard. But comedies about dying are hardest of all.

A cinematic enchantment, a low-key 1970s-style kids’ movie brimming with sincerity and heart. It’s one of the best films of the year.

The exhilarating documentary Sunshine Superman, which melds gorgeous aerial photography of Boenish’s jumps with sublime musical cues, finds in Boenish a kind of poet-adventurer, equal parts pixie and desperado.

The Last King of Scotland is a parable shocking in its truth, jolting in its lack of sentimentality, Shakespearean in its vision of the doctor's catastrophic flaw.

As a former president of the United States remarked, "Childrens do learn," and what they learn in the heartbreaking yet thrillingly hopeful documentary Waiting for 'Superman' is that adults are finally starting to notice how badly kids have been betrayed by teachers unions.

The excruciating and the hilarious mingle nearly to perfection in this marvelously visualized and deeply felt British film.

Bouncy vocal rearrangements of pop songs, sparkling choreography and a hilarious script make for a movie that's made to be obsessed over, seen 50 times, quoted as devoutly as such sacred texts as "Heathers" and "Bring It On."

Two fins up for The Cove, a documentary that whales on evil Japanese fishermen who kill dolphins for lunch meat.

McAleer is an expert practitioner of cinematic jujitsu.