Lawrence Toppman

The coolest film in town offers industrial espionage, power struggles, thwarted romance, betrayal and suspense - and best of all, it's true.

If this new film doesn't quite go to 11, it's a healthy 8½.

Most movies about people passing themselves off as the opposite sex can't sustain the illusion, but "Nobbs" does.

A feature film as odd, personal and sometimes mundane as his (Pekar) comics.

(Cusack) has never been more effective onscreen.

His height didn't stop independent writer-director Thomas McCarthy from casting his friend in The Station Agent, scoring a triumph for both.

Another of Charlotte native Ross McElwee's musings about his family, history (this time the tobacco industry) and life. It may be his best.

A wicked comedy with just the mildest amount of pathos to season the blend.

Penn, one of Hollywood's most famous iconoclasts, must have felt instinctive sympathy with someone who told the whole world in general to leave him alone.

You'll be disappointed if you expect famed leftist Oliver Stone to apply a coup de grace to this man.

The movie is the usual kind of film biography of a respected figure from the distant past - honorable, oversimplified, handsome.

South African director Neill Blomkamp set and shot the film around his native Johannesburg, so parallels to apartheid leap to mind. Yet the script he wrote with Terri Tatchell applies to any culture that bluntly excludes another.

A potent environmental message wrapped up in an irresistibly cute romance between robots.

Examines Muslim family's religious warfare.

The film's an irresistible time capsule of that Camelot summer, blending girrrrrl power, social consciousness and faux-'60s pop with the fizz of a soda jerk whipping up a root beer float.

Veteran documentary-maker Louise Osmond directs with flair. She gives us just enough of the history of Blackwood to show what Dream Alliance means to the place, and she gets us inside the horse’s head.

I have never seen elementary schoolers more passionate about education than the ones I met at a school in rural Kenya, not far from the shadow of Mount Kilimanjaro.

A love story more involved than I can easily explain.

Chi-Raq is indeed interesting, challenging, provocative and consistently entertaining in its outrageous depiction of life in modern Chicago. And nobody in mainstream filmmaking today except Spike Lee could or would have done it.

Has more twists than the Pacific Coast Highway and more layers than a stack of silver-dollar pancakes. If you can wrap your mind around one unlikely condition, the picture provides unalloyed pleasure for connoisseurs of cinematic con artists.

The film was reputedly inspired by Japanese teens who trolled chat rooms to find predators, made assignments, then ganged up to beat offending adults.

The songs are pure joy, for them and for us.

Deniz Gamze Ergüven, who makes her feature debut as writer-director after a couple of short films, tells the story exclusively from the girls’ point of view – both emotionally, as they have all our sympathy, and physically, as almost nothing happens that one of them could not be seeing.

Reflective, touching, intimate portrait of a samurai facing action in his waning years.

Brilliantly interweaves stories that take place decades apart, and features stellar work by three of the best English-speaking actresses: Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore and Meryl Streep.

A taut, consistently surprising political thriller with a sting in its tail.

The filmmakers beautifully balance goofy moments with Gothic darkness.

If we admire anything about him, it’s entrepreneurship; there’s something uniquely American about a guy outrunning his own death by turning suffering into profit. And as a judge asks, why shouldn’t a dying man be allowed to try any remedy for his disease?