Lisa Schwarzbaum

In making the radical artistic choice to tell the story as if it were being enacted by players on a stage, Wright falls passionately in love with his own fanciful artifices.

Family nuttiness, football madness, romantic obsession, and certifiable mental illness coexist happily in Silver Linings Playbook - a crazy beaut of a comedy that brims with generosity and manages to circumvent predictability at every turn.

Love and sex are scary in Bradley Rust Gray's over-Freuded exercise in semi-horror/gender studies.

Tobey Maguire's characteristic placidity makes a fine mask for a man who is thoroughly awful.

The title refers not only to particular music by Beethoven but also to the fictional string quartet of Yaron Zilberman's fussily genteel, overplotted Manhattan tale in which interpersonal stresses build to a crescendo when one of the foursome becomes ill.

One hell of a creepy little eco-horror picture.

The third starring the totally captivating cool cucumber Daniel Craig as Agent 007 - is both an elegy and a mission statement. It's also a great, long-lasting jolt of pleasure.

Flight opens with one of the most harrowing in-flight-disaster depictions of all time.

One of the year's most original and emotionally profound movies masquerades as the tiny story of a young couple who take a backpacking trip in the Caucasus Mountains the summer before their wedding.

Best part: Colorful Croatian-Danish actor Zlatko Buri´ reprises his role as the jovially menacing foreign heavy out to collect his dough.

An exhilarating puzzle, one of the grand cinematic eruptions of the year.

This is a tough-minded story of change that happens in almost imperceptibly tiny increments - as true growth so often does in reality.

In the face of such junk, the idea that Fox would proudly put himself on a punishing regime of severe diet and exercise to get prisoner-skinny-yet-crazy-muscled for the job of make-believe is vanity at best, obscenity at worst.

The high-low setting effectively reinforces the emotional geography of both lost souls. Gillian Anderson makes a brief, well-placed appearance as one of the rich.

This nadir of equal-opportunity raunch forces viewers to spend time with a needy yeast-infested adult who doesn't know how to go on a date with a man; her grating, neurotic monster of a best friend; and a third, random younger chick, who's crazy-upset about some tedious thing that happened with her boyfriend.

Russo-Young studies the strange species of affluent Angelenus erectus under a microscope that distorts every character into unbelievability.

A great subject goes a long way in this standard but effective entry in the amazing-kids documentary category.

The Sessions is first and foremost about Hawkes' virtuoso performance, one of those "My Left Foot"-y transformations that make audiences verklemmt and generate awards talk.

A cloddish, harmlessly drecky comedy from the Sandler factory of crude mush.

You know what happens in Taken 2, don't you? The same thing that happened four years ago in Taken, but different. (But the same.)

Willful, meandering, and intriguing, this Wuthering Heights is similarly headstrong.

What's new about the unsensationalized portrait of one-day-at-a-time progress (and setbacks) is the low-key energy of this drunks' tale, by and for a generation with a high tolerance for humor and a low tolerance for soapiness.

An energetically demented psycho-killer comedy set in faux-noir L.A., Seven Psychopaths rollicks along to the unique narrative beat and language stylings of Anglo-Irish writer-director Martin McDonagh (In Bruges), channeling Quentin Tarantino.

Frankenweenie is a cool little flipbook of historical Burtonian style. It even brings back old friends, including "Beetlejuice's" Winona Ryder and Catherine O'Hara.

This is a pretty, surface-y documentary rather than the kind of exciting one Vreeland would have demanded, declaring, "You gotta have style!"

It's the parental mush about trusting one's kid to make her own discoveries and blah blah blah (spoken in a Sandlerized version of a Dracula voice) that drains the movie of blood. What's left are platitudes, and Sandler singing a novelty song in a Transylvanian-accented falsetto.

The time swivels in Looper evoke some of Inception's fancy temporal tricks... But it's the glimpses of Children of Men-like societal dystopia that give the movie its real weight, and distinguish Johnson's third feature as a marked step forward.

Nerve-rattling in the best way, the sharp, visceral urban police procedural End of Watch is one of the best American cop movies I've seen in a long time.