Lou Lumenick

You might not want to watch all of "The ABC of Love and Sex Australian Style," "Turkey Shoot" or "The True Story of Eskimo Nell," but the clips on view in "Not Quite Hollywood" are a hoot.

The musicians' stories, while quite entertaining, add up to a somewhat confusing chronology. Still, they're good enough that you wish Justman hadn't resorted to those tacky TV-style re-creations that mar so many documentaries these days.

Though Iris is extremely well-acted and beautifully photographed, some audience members may find themselves agreeing with Bayley's frustrated complaint: "I've never known who you are."

Highly entertaining documentary.

A great-looking but wearyingly cliched and confusing vanity production.

Everyone knows about the Holocaust, but few today have heard about what was infamous as the Rape of Nanking, when 200,000 residents of what was then China's capital were massacred by invading Japanese troops.

Gorgeously photographed by Peter Suschitzky, A Dangerous Method presents a vivid portrait of pre-World War I Europe that's at a considerable remove from the types of madness usually seen in Cronenberg's films.

Denzel Washington dazzles in his best screen performance to date as Frank Lucas.

You'll laugh, you'll cry -- the year's best movie.

Mud runs over two hours, climaxing with a shootout that belongs in a different movie. It’s a rare misstep in an art-house movie that will pull mainstream audiences along as inexorably as the Mississippi River. Go see it.

In his own twisted way, Lou is just as much a bloodsucker as Dracula, in a horror story that this tabloid veteran can attest is not as far removed from reality as you might assume.

Laura Dern — only nine years older than Witherspoon’s fresh-faced 38 — could also net a Best Supporting Actress nod for her outstanding work as Cheryl’s spunky and nurturing mothe.

This intriguing film is the best variation on "Vertigo" since Brian DePalma's far more polished "Obsession" (1976), which ranks with the best Hitchcock knockoffs of all time.

Overlong, poorly paced and woodenly acted film.

Anyone expecting a hard-hitting biography will be disappointed by Julian Schnabel's soft-edged, dreamy and relatively nonpolitical film.

Hits one out of the park.

Hilarious sweet and sour David Mamet comedy.

It's truly inspiring to watch Fred Knittle, 81 and tethered to an oxygen tank, perform a riveting solo of Coldplay's "Fix You" after his singing partner dies shortly before the show.

By the end I was getting a bit antsy from the rambling script and direction.

Weitz keeps the schmaltz in check, but it's clear pretty much from the outset that this immigrant family is fated never to find A Better Life north of the border.

Visually, this toon is all over the place. Rapunzel's glowing hair can look alarmingly like fiber-optic cable, but some backgrounds are the computer-generated equivalents of Disney's golden-age work.

Moves in a predictable path that includes some remarkable coincidences.

The joke is on arthouse audiences who show up for Funny Games, which is basically torture porn every bit as manipulative and reprehensible as "Hostel," even if it's tricked out with intellectual pretension.

Some of the plot twists don't really stand up to close scrutiny, but the sometimes over-the-top Joy Ride plows through them with such joyful glee, you don't really care.

What follows is a hilarious, slam-bang series of chases and battles that cross "Gremlins" with "Assault on Precinct 13," the two most prominent of many genre films quoted by Attack the Block.

If you’re going to invest three hours watching a movie about a convicted stock swindler, it needs to be a whole lot more compelling than Martin Scorsese’s handsome, sporadically amusing and admittedly never boring — but also bloated, redundant, vulgar, shapeless and pointless — Wolf of Wall Street.

It’s only a matter of time before someone turns Louise Osmond’s crowd-pleasing documentary, about people in a working-class Welsh mining village invading the snobbish “sport of kings,” gets turned into “The Full Monty” on four hooves.

This year's actress to watch is Elizabeth Reaser, who delivers a tour de force as a determined German mail-order bride who comes to 1920 Minnesota in Ali Selim's captivating indie Sweet Land.