Michael O'Sullivan

Yes, it’s handsomely shot, but there are long sequences where little happens. True to life, perhaps, but slow.

Super/Man is a weeper, to be sure, for the reminder it brings to fans that this Man of Steel was only flesh and blood.

A provocative and uncomfortable comedy.

Cartel Land reveals a culture that spans the border, full of death and dismaying behavior on both sides, but thriving all the same.

In the end, An Honest Liar becomes a far more layered tale than it starts out to be.

In addition to “pervert” — which Wojtowicz makes sound like a badge of honor — the film offers many other seemingly contradictory assessments of Wojtowicz, mainly from his own mouth: troll, Goldwater Republican, McCarthy peacenik, crazy man, crook, romantic. He was all of those things and more, as The Dog makes vividly obvious.

Chandor's film goes a long way toward making understandable - in vivid, cinematic terms - what exactly happened to make that first big domino fall over.

Listen Up Philip makes literary talent seem less like a blessing than a curse.

Adler nicely harnesses the mounting volatility of this situation, which builds to an intense if tragic conclusion.

If the metaphor of xenophobia and nationalism is obvious — and it is, to the point of eye-rolling — the telling of the tale has a certain poetry.

It’s a heady dramedy, albeit without terribly many tears or laughs, except those that arise, perhaps unintentionally, from the incongruity of Stevens being repellent.

No Sudden Move could also refer to the snail’s pace of social change. But race is just a subtext — albeit an enriching one — in a piece of entertainment that feels like watching, say, Ocean’s 11, but with a social conscience.

A well-crafted story with a unique voice. But its literary gifts are outweighed by its pictorial prosaicness. Dimming the screen in every shot is the unmistakable shadow of the page.

Much like the painter, who died without the recognition he deserved, the movie approaches greatness without quite achieving it.

Tim’s Vermeer makes a convincing case that Vermeer could have painted the way Jenison says he did. It also makes a pretty powerful ancillary point: that some people are both geniuses and geeks.

A balanced and deeply satisfying documentary assessment of his work, which is lavishly on display in hundreds of the artist’s images.

Black Souls has a deep and startling soulfulness that, despite its shocking conclusion, is profoundly moving.

The film’s writers, directors and stars lovingly impale bloodsucker mythology with the sharpened wooden stick of comedy. As with “Shaun of the Dead,” their satire is a crude but effective tool.

The filmmaking, by first-time feature director Dan Trachtenberg, is suitably claustrophobic and suspenseful, working up to a level of stress that may be unhealthy for anyone with a weak heart.

Eavesdropping on the glib conversations of witty urbanites can be a pleasant diversion, but after so much volubility, you might find yourself wishing that they would all just shut up and dance.

López elicits solid performances from the young actors, and her vision is clear and uncompromising. It isn’t always obvious, however, what the moral of this story is. There’s an air of wishful thinking to the way things work out, even if a traditional happy ending is elusive.

Maybe the whole endeavor is some kind of self-portrait of an artist who doesn’t know what he wants to say anymore, or how to even say, “I don’t know how to say what I want to say anymore.”

For much of the film, this is very funny and fairly original stuff, though Submarine starts to run aground about the time that Jordana and Oliver's relationship does.

In the end, Marguerite isn’t a comedy so much as a love story. True love, it seems, isn’t just blind; it must be deaf, too.

The film is probably of interest only to those viewers who, like Gondry himself apparently, already have an obsession with Chomsky.

You’ll be glad that A Hard Day isn’t happening to you, but you won’t regret observing it all from a safe distance.

Final Account aims to provide insight into the psychological mechanism that would allow otherwise good people to stand idly by (or actively participate in) the perpetration of mass murder. As such, it’s only partly effective, and frustrating.

It's the rare 2 1/2 -hour film that doesn't make you look at your watch once. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is such a film.