Lawrence Toppman

Warms the heart while chilling the bones.

Plays out like a sprinter competing in his first distance race: It bursts forth with tremendous energy, sustains itself for quite a while, loses steam near the end but finishes ahead of most of the pack.

The two leads don't have sexual chemistry together, but that's part of the point.

Melissa Leo is one of America's most underrated character actresses, and Frozen River confirms that opinion.

The movie ends so abruptly you might wonder if a piece is missing, and it relies on one extraordinary coincidence I couldn’t swallow. Yet scene by scene, I found people I knew or wish I knew: Ben’s romantic advice to the straight but awkward Joey would give any boy confidence about himself.

If you used this guy's umbilical cord for fishing line, you could land a world-record marlin.

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

As we bounce over rough seas on the Maersk, we know just what will be lost if the Somalis don’t keep their trembling fingers off their triggers. As the title suggests, this is not a movie about an incident: It’s a movie about a man who stays very real to us.

So wild an approach demands straightforward performances that don't draw attention to themselves, and that's what the actors supply.

A documentary that's as chaotic, rude and funny as the band could be.

Kids might get a charge out of the mayhem. I got the vapors.

Making a film with fine performances, adept direction, first-rate photography and a doltish screenplay is like starting a rock band with no drummer. The result may yield satisfying, even memorable moments. But every time you try to build momentum, the project falls apart.

He (writer/director David Gordon Green) fired his arrow straight at a worthwhile target, but it fell a little short.

You may not realize the imprint it has left until its last season comes to a close.

A middlebrow hybrid that should satisfy most fans of spy movies without blowing them away.

It mocks folk musicians of the 1960s, who could sometimes be full of hot air. It also acknowledges that protests 40 years ago, often spearheaded by bards and balladeers, blew much-needed fresh air into post-Eisenhower society.

Adams gives her best performance as a lonely woman who has to make a decision that will haunt her – though perhaps in a good way – for the rest of her life.

Comedy comes from an exaggeration of reality, not reality itself -- and on that score, Diablo Cody's first screenplay gets high marks.

After 30 minutes, I wondered why I was watching a drama about a quarrelsome couple who seemed so obviously wrong for each other. After 60 minutes, I knew. After 90 minutes, I cared. By the end, I was riveted.

They've made a thrilling traditional nautical picture from untraditional books.

The slender story seems overextended at times, with Lu finding new ways each week to insinuate himself into Yu’s life. Zhang doesn’t make a point once if he can make it twice, and the characters don’t change much over the middle hour.

Doris Day will be 89 in two weeks, which makes her exactly half a century too old to play the lead in Admission. That’s a pity, as perhaps only she could have done it justice – if it had been made in 1958.

Hanks gives one of his least showy and most credible performances.

Try as he might, (Hanks) is miscast in Road to Perdition, a partly satisfying gangster drama that amounts to less than the sum of its handsome parts.

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

It's a passably made, grittily acted slice of life in Texas that veers not an inch from the norm for this sort of picture.

If you see Hot Fuzz, you'll never again watch a Michael Bay film without howling with disrespectful laughter.

All performances remain irrelevant in the face of such expensive, explosive combat and destruction, and there the film excels: You will feel blown back into your seat, starting 40 seconds into the story.