Kyle Smith

Cool It -- complete with its own slide show and witty graphics -- amounts to a devastating rebuttal to Gore-ism.

Despite the lingering aroma of Victorian rot shrouding 1961, An Education is excitingly young.

A small but shattering film that marks its writer-director, Derek Cianfrance, as an artist of real depth, observes relationship dynamics at a molecular level, welling with as much understanding as Ingmar Bergman's "Scenes from a Marriage."

The surprise of Ted is that it goes for honest Spielbergian wonder, too, and even earns some tears.

For two hours of breathless drama, you forget you’re watching actors grunting like chimps and hope two rival civilizations can work together.

A bit more context about some of the topics the witnesses discuss would have been welcome, but Whitaker's stark, unshowy style is probably the most effective way to approach 9/11.

The sharpest, wildest and most unpredictable thriller I’ve seen this year.

Indignation is devastating, haunting and important.

Five people did escape, and they contribute their stories to the spellbinding documentary.

A dizzying lowlife saga that’s fast, smart, wicked, sort of ambitious and blazingly ironic. It’s as unpredictable as a Lindsay Lohan drive to the grocery store, as overstuffed as the pictures on Anthony Weiner’s Twitter feed and as hilarious as me on the bench press.

Miami Vice isn't an action flick but a neo-noir: tough, quiet, moody and hard.

Mighty entertainment that makes you feel sorry for the saps next door in the multiplex.

Few documentaries have covered such an important matter so convincingly and with such clarity. When it comes to public education, we are all New Jerseyans.

Blue Caprice takes a minimalist, documentary-style approach that proves harrowingly effective.

This small movie carries great allegorical weight as it echoes the Manson Family, the long list of failed utopian communes that culminated in Bolshevism and the one-child policy that in China has prevented the births of untold numbers of girls.

The details are true and funny, played brilliantly.

A long, messy cinematic novel full of hate, love, murder, ghosts, madness, poetry and Catherine Deneuve.

The movie could -- should -- be a symphony, and it frequently makes excellent use of spare classical music. When Brosnan pipes up, he is as welcome as a car alarm.

What "Rent" should have been, Once is: a Bohemian rhapsody.

An improbable but hilarious combine of losin’-it comedies and the rarefied, Europhile air of the Cinema du Twee.

In other words, this punkish, sleek film about beautiful kids wallowing in purloined Prada could have been written by a grumpy 65-year-old white guy in gabardine, provided he had a sense of irony. The Bling Ring is the bridge between Coppola and Bill O’Reilly.

Can’t possibly deserve your close attention. Yet it does, with distilled honky-tonk poetry and generous good humor. It’s one of the year’s best, most deeply felt films.

Frustrating, at times agonizing, the film is nonetheless dappled with a sad beauty. It’s one of the best documentaries of the year.

Rom-coms died because they weren’t very rom and didn’t have enough com. But Sleeping With Other People, which is both hilarious and emotionally alive, is as delightful as a first date that crackles with possibility.

It’s too bad that Keaton plays Kroc as a grasping, alcoholic sleaze as he builds the McDonald’s brand into an all-American empire, but I forgive the movie’s cheap shots because this is one of the most thorough and satisfying depictions of business — everything from quality control to cost-cutting and branding — ever put on film.

Unlike many films that hope to be called black comedy, it does not skimp on either the black or the comedy.

I laughed more at Seth MacFarlane’s sendup of ’60s Westerns than I did at all the other comedies I’ve seen this year, combined.

Everything Must Go is cinematic pointilism. The big picture is familiar -- busted middle-age man, suburban alcoholic despair -- yet the details are so finely rendered that the overall impression is potently strange.