Marc Savlov

What is notable, though, is the amount of compassion invested in the film by Cameron and co-screenwriter William Wisher. There's a fairly well-drawn moral message in T2 that was more or less absent in the first film.

A smallish cast peppered with a pair of bullish performances by both Platt and the lesser-known Gleeson. The two spark some chemistry between them, which is more than can be said for Pullman and Fonda's moribund performances.

Compelling, relentless cinema.

It's Cronenberg's film, but it's the actors who elevate Eastern Promises from mere thriller to some other, more disturbing plane.

This is classic Hollywood, at its best and worst, sticky rich and scabrous. It may not be the truth, per se, but it sure sounds good.

Minus much of the rose-tinted nostalgia his films have occasionally engendered. There is a nostalgic tone to the film, but it's a quiet, subtle one.

No matter how bad you may have it, you'll feel better about your own lot in life after watching the tumultuous sexual flailings of Marcela and Jarda (Brejchová and Luknár), a way, way, way down on their luck Czech couple.

It's a finely calibrated, spiraling lesson in what NOT to do when engaging in adultery, blackmail, arson, and general antisocial behaviors, and in its best moments it recalls the everyday darkness of James M. Cain: average people doing awful things in an amoral and uncaring universe.

Everything about this swift and gorgeous and tremendously enjoyable film is played out in a rush of staccato edits, crisp performances, and charmingly giddy subplots that coalesce into Spielberg's most purely entertaining movie in years.

The masterful Land of Mine slowly, almost without notice, transforms into one of the most viscerally intense anti-war films since Dalton Trumbo’s "Johnny Got His Gun."

While it initially feels like a known quantity (although mentioning the "M"-word – mumblecore – is both pointless and distracting), Beeswax proves to be much more than simply another extreme close-up of late-twentysomething naifs trying to gather enough energy to flail about, emotionally or otherwise.

Truly, this is some kind of wonderful. (Horrific, hilarious, disturbing … but wonderful.)

About a Boy knows exactly what it wants to do: It wants to make you smile, and grin, and then laugh with recognition, and it manages all three, again and again.

Feels feverishly dreamlike while keeping its subject firmly rooted in the present. If you desire a female empowering musical manifesto with both claws and kisses, here it is.

Fernandez is excellent as the maladjusted daughter, but the film's heart and soul is embodied in Galina's noble, understated performance.

The Good Liar is a pleasantly playful thriller hiding a seriously shady history close to its benighted heart.

Terribly Happy isn't, but it is wonderfully unhinged, and a painstakingly constructed meditation on a place where good and evil meet, mate, and make sour times sublime and, dare I say it, beautiful.

A bold (and lovely) experiment that will almost certainly bore most audiences into their own brightly colored dreams.

Frankenweenie is that rare film that's both kid- and adult-friendly.

It’s ridiculous and smart, hilarious and terrifying, difficult to swallow and probably a necessary antidote to the cacophonous history of a land that all too often seems anything but holy.

Absolutely harrowing, shocking in its sudden revelatory immediacy, and very, very well done, Black Hawk Down is one of the best depictions of the outright lunacy inherent to battle I have ever seen.

A spare, discomfiting score and uniformly excellent performances, and you have a quiet little masterpiece of dark and chilling beauty.

Many have already heralded Poirier as the cutting edge of the new French cinema, and while that may be overstating things a bit, it's worth noting that this is a road movie unlike any other you've yet seen.

The year's most viciously entertaining psycho-road-movie-revenge-'n'-wreckage-romance.

Ultimately the composition comes off as both overplayed and underdone.

You can't help but feel conflicted watching this superb documentary about the seminal New York-based punk rock vanguard, the Ramones.

It's a kick, it's a gas, and it gives the Rat Pack itself a run for its money.

By the time the film's abrupt conclusion arrives, you realize you've been watching a love story and not, as some might hope, "The Lord of the Rings: The Asian Edition."