Michael O'Sullivan

Super Size Me is an anti-junk-food screed that manages to entertain even as it informs and alarms.

Good old-fashioned movie storytelling that steadily builds, over the course of nearly three hours, to a white-knuckle conclusion that satisfies on nearly every level.

A blend of gentle comedy and poignant drama.

Little Voice may be more of a confection than a square meal, but it's proof of how good a dish can be when the ingredients are of the highest order.

The spare and unsparing tone of I'll Sleep When I'm Dead makes it as existential -- and as original -- a whodunit as they come.

As exhausting as it is exhilarating to watch, the film in the end is less than fully satisfying.

Deliberate disorientation keeps the audience constantly off balance, and it's brilliantly effective.

It also has heart and soul, two commodities all too often in short supply in the field of garden-variety cinema verite.

The strongest magnet in this psychedelic morass is Johnny Depp who, as the story's antic, disgusting and seductive spirit guide, is impossible to look away from.

Not 10 minutes in, when Clarisse stops at a service station to chat with a friend who asks, “Running away, or what?” there are hints that all is not as it seems. That sense grows more steadily over the course of the strange and compelling film, a study of grief that somehow is at once moving and detached, in the way that people in mourning sometimes engage in denial-like displacement activities: behavior that’s inappropriate to the emotion at hand.

It's the story of changing chefs and changing seasons. It looks at food as not just something that nourishes our bodies, but as something that enriches our lives and our relationships.

The dance itself makes a much more powerful, and ultimately poetic, point. On the most superficial level, it serves as a blunt metaphor for the elaborate choreography of the rescue operation, which entailed its own intense rehearsals, undertaken in a scale mock-up of the Entebbe airport that had been re-created back in Israel.

Director Rodrigo Plá, working from a spare yet jangly screenplay by Laura Santullo, steadily builds suspense, craftily calibrating subtle shifts in perspective that allow us to alternate, seamlessly, between impartial observers and, as it were, active participants.

Meaty interviews with journalist Chris Hedges, for instance, lend the film needed context and a sense of intellectual detachment.

This familiar-sounding melodrama works because of the extraordinary performance, in the title role, by Alba August, a young actress whose every emotion is made manifest, like passing clouds or a burst of sunshine, on her uncannily expressive face.

The film deepens and grows more thoughtful — and, yes, sad — as its spotlight on the need for human connection — at any age — comes into focus. The stories of the four people at its center show Villagers to be more than statistics.

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.

Ender’s Game is more than a parable about bullying, or a disquisition on the concept of the “just war.” It’s also a rousing action film, especially in Imax.

The climate change documentary A Time to Choose takes what often seems like an oblique approach to the subject of global warming.

It's a gorgeous and, believe it or not, riveting documentary . . . about sheep.

Nine Days is, in the end, meant as a wake-up call: a bracing splash of fake seawater in the face that somehow, against all logic, feels like the real thing.

The violent, beautiful and powerfully watchable movie Monos — Spanish for monkeys — takes its title from the code name used by a group of teenage guerrillas.

Portman, a vegan, is the main tour guide to this challenging excursion to the world of slaughterhouses and CAFOs, which one commentator likens to petri dishes for antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

The film, for much of the first two acts, takes itself just about that unseriously, maintaining a jokey, self-aware tone that is nicely evocative of the original comics.

Director Neil Burger (“Limitless”) has crafted a popcorn flick that’s leaner, more propulsive and more satisfying than the bestseller that inspired it.

Though the setting is a retreat from the world, where not terribly much happens, within its confines Lorenzo gets an eye-opener about both human frailty and interconnectedness, courtesy of someone even more troubled than he is.

American Animals, while an entertaining version of a heist film at times, is no “Ocean’s 8.” Its signature moment occurs not during the reenactment of the inept crime, or its planning and antic aftermath. Rather, it comes in the middle of one of Lipka’s interview scenes.

To say that there is also a monomania to the film is, if anything, an understatement. But it is precisely that sense of tunnel vision that makes Fury Road such a pulse-pounding pleasure.