Michelle Orange

What anchors Two Days, One Night, and eases its gaps, is Cotillard's extraordinary performance.

The imperatives of history are manifold, and this film is among the most urgent of them. You cannot look, and you must look: This happened. They were human beings. All of them.

Even more than it wants to inform Inside Job seeks to enrage.

At 84 he describes himself as being kept alive by young women's laughter and infernal baby-talk, marking off perhaps his final, groaning aspirational standard. Almost makes me feel sorry for those men still trying to keep up.

The success of this exuberant, affecting debut feature from director Benh Zeitlin depends on his ability to universalize the particular, in this case by drawing us into the perspective of a six-year-old girl living in squalor and feeling and uncertainty in the Louisiana bayou, then telling our own story from behind it.

[A] powerful, exacting depiction of Egypt's struggle for meaningful change.

There are a couple of scenes of pure, sentimental genius, as well as appealingly boggled turns by Rudd and Wilson.

"A chimp could not have a better mother," Terrace declares of his decision. The people in this film say stuff like that a lot.

Because Animal Kingdom is so richly suffused with atmosphere and style, you could almost float right past the deficiencies in its story in an admiring trance.

In its own way and to its own detriment, William Friedkin's splattery, southern gothic return to the screen seeks to amuse as well as shake and stir.

Tectonic pacing builds to a series of imperceptible and yet earth-moving moments in Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, a habeas corpus procedural stretched across two and a half discursive hours.

It's as subversive and penetrating a treatment of the British character as we get on the big screen, and it's why I don't mind that Leigh keeps them coming 'round with the reliability of the cocktail hour.

With Huppert as her paradoxical lightning rod, Denis courts class and colonial tensions until they fly apart in the last moments of the film.

The vehicle may get a little jacked up along the way, but its passenger arrives in style: The kid's a star.

Waiting For Superman may rub a little raw here and there, but if it stirs that memory in enough voting and tax-paying Americans, it has at least begun to do its job.

It's a matinee treat for the very little ones, after all.

An earnest and occasionally poignant attempt to penetrate Rebney's potent man-on-fire image and explore the impact of becoming an Internet sideshow.

There are no simple denials, nor anything simple at all in Last of the Unjust. Only stories, recovered and retold, of a reality beyond their reach.

There's enough froth along the way to keep the memory of Will Ferrell's recent "Casa Di Me Padre" close at hand.

Bold, weird, and a little stalkerish in its intensity, Luca Guadagnino's third feature is an open cinematic buffet, as ready to satisfy as it is to displease, depending on your taste and appetite.

Sugar Man is most interesting when it touches on the conditions that combined to draw a cult hero out of some decent music and a generously enabled, imagination-firing mystique.

Slick without feeling over-determined, Racing Dreams evokes -- just as, oddly enough, "Toy Story 3" does -- the more general feeling of childhood on the precipice.

The Dark Knight aspires to the epic and reaches it on a number of impressive and less impressive levels. That it is a frequently, unnervingly glorious triumph of brawn over brains is not despite but in spite of Nolan's admirably stubborn - if persistently, risibly serious - insistence that the modern superhero can have it all.

Like the recent "Perrier's Bounty," The Guard feels like it might play better at home than overseas.

Heavy with pop allusions and references to other crime underworld movies, including The Godfather and Chinatown, Zootopia is impressive in its visual conception and scope: At once straightforward and densely layered with wit and incident, it manages a lively clip and the odd fresh joke.

Veering between the windswept and the simply windy, The Tempest, I suspect, will provoke purists and only intermittently win the attention of less interested parties.

A dump is a dump, but it's immediately clear that these are working people who are making the best of their options and who have built a shared camaraderie out of that determination.

Despite its tai chi pace and genre-friendly characters, it's almost impossible to tell what's happening in the intriguing, intractable Road to Nowhere.

The Town lacks Gone's operatic ambitions. And the irony is that that lack of a grand or even grandiose plan keeps this very good film from being a truly great one.

We also gain a keen sense of how chess in particular helps otherwise academically challenged kids find a way into their own brains.

Soft-spoken and stoical, Brannaman is a firm but sensitive presence in front of the camera and facing down a spooked horse.

Hansen-Løve’s gifts for mood and eliciting controlled, empathetic performances are well-suited to her sensitive material, and ultimately overshadow the film’s difficult and uneven central characterization.

Proof that Ruiz was still teeming with ideas himself, Night is a characteristic work of surreal wit and circuitousness—and the filmmaker's winking but mournful goodbye.

Divided into three chapters in a largely unsuccessful attempt at structure, the voice and the style don't combine as explosively as they should to pick up the material's slack.

Bichir - who played Fidel Castro in "Che" - resists the pathetic impulse, bringing dignity and distinction to a man who wakes up every morning knowing it's not just his burden but his job to be invisible.

The story had great optics but not a lot of action, I suppose, though as a child who walked around in towel-fashioned headdresses to simulate the long hair my mother wouldn't let me have, Rapunzel's was the story I longed to thrill to on the big screen.

Warmly observed and solicitous of its audience to the point of caress, Win Win is as comfortable an experience at the movies as you might have this year.

To muddle through confusion, boredom, vaguely formed interest, brief elation, and confusion again is to experience the work as its creator intended.

An elegantly observed, sleekly packaged look at an artist whose career-long balance of enigma and self-exposure culminated in a 2010 retrospective at New York City's Museum of Modern Art.

The effect recalls the beguiling lightness of the good old Disney, where clever visual and thematic feats are deftly interwoven and yet tossed off with an insouciance that favors playfulness above all.

Farmiga closes in on moments that express mood and character so lightly and perceptively that you don't notice them gently - sometimes too gently - moving the story forward.

Rather than beginning with the assumption that there is no possibility of our coming to know that kind of suffering exactly and using imagination and insight to truly take us inside the Lvov Jews' plight, Holland makes the base conditions of their confinement a narrative as well as aesthetic priority. And frankly it's boring as shit.

Hill cuts a hilariously adversarial figure.

The audience is never seen and only faintly heard. This puts a lot of visual pressure on a very inward performer. Young is a beast onstage, to be sure - he seems to re-grow an appendix for each song.

Ultimately -- and perhaps fittingly -- Cropsey is most effective as a study of Staten Island and its inhabitants, specifically the half-life of grief as it is manifested in a self-contained community.

The story's obvious and various potential is left to stand on its own, and the scares are largely uninspired.

The film's delighted affinity with Ungerer's well-turned perspective does lend an advertorial slickness to what might have been a more challenging study of a fascinating and famously elusive subject.

It's all rather casual - not unengaging, exactly, but lacking a narrative energy all its own.

Watching True Legend, a wuxia film crossed with classic vaudeville, it's hard to figure out who's borrowing from whom anymore.

The main and most enjoyable difference between the second installment and the first is the greater opportunity the latter provides Cassel to sketch some dimension into the coded mythologizing of his character.

A brightly lit nightmare of patriarchy run amok.

It's a mark of Shelton's ability to create living characters from seemingly minor shared moments -- the ones that wind up meaning everything.

The complementary tone of droll but freighted psychodrama she strikes in Tiny Furniture feels like a significant but precarious achievement. I feel a pinch of worry for her - as I did for Aura - looking into a future of Rudins and Apatows.

To say too much about what actually happens would be to rob you of the film's risks and narrative ripostes. What should be noted is that Capotondi makes ambitious use of an unreliable narrator in a way that is rarely seen in modern films.

An awkward, frequently transcendent document whose sense of rhythm, purpose, and narrative is as unlikely as it is ultimately persuasive, and whose fascination with moments of haunted impermanence signals, perhaps more than anything else, the mark of its maker.

Mostly it's frustrating; the film is an episodic jumble that runs hot and cold not in some implied thematic synchronicity with its subject's character but as part of a misguided approach that assumes the audience will find whatever Mesrine does, in whatever order and with whatever emphasis, inherently fascinating.

Though the film concerns events contained within the roughly 50 square blocks of the East Village, it suffers from the narrative equivalent of urban sprawl.

Peepli Live opens out slowly to encompass several factions of Indian society, including the press, local, state, and federal politicians, and the shady elements binding them all together. It's a meticulously engineered design that a show like The Wire took several years to execute; here the strain shows within the first half hour.

Dark to a specific point of dullness or even opacity, Solondz requires patience, as always, but indulgence as well. He relies on your remembrance of his other films and characters but also on your willingness to overlook his redeployment of tactics that range from puerile to mildly -- and somehow always self-skeptically -- profound.

The climax errs on the side of the overwrought and overdetermined, like an earnest adolescent's first attempt at a short story. And yet Papoulia's extraordinary performance lingers, as does the film's provocative existential fog.

By the time he's putting the entire metro area on notice -- having thrashed his father and all the local bullies -- Andrew has no camera and the metaphor has run away with the story entirely. The crazy thing is it almost works.

Arthur Christmas is a Grinch-style story of rekindled Christmas spirit told from inside Santa's compound at the North Pole.

As a character study Solitary Man, like Ben, has no center. What he amounts to is a pretty consistent set of attitudes and behaviors which, while shocking, are not all that interesting.

Physically Watts is of course a decent match for the even more aggressively glamorous Plame; in spirit, it would seem, they are even closer. In the field Plame was first and foremost an actress, a pretender whose belief in her pretending was often of mortal consequence.

A sweeping theme writ small and somewhat gnarly, The Milk of Sorrow is, as Llosa has written, about "unresolved, violent, personal and collective memory" and a "metaphor for breakdown."

Fittingly, there is something both thrilling and deeply unpleasant about looking at Galella's body of work -- there is casual genius in some of the captured moments, a combination of access, timing, and luck, with the subject almost always carrying most of the image's weight.

The writing and directing debut of Italian actress Marta Mondelli, is a classic example of a director who wanted to make a film but lacked a story that demanded telling.

As Gibney and Spitzer are at pains to point out, it's a story as old as Icarus: Man rises to power; man makes enemies; man gets greedy and is undone.

Scenic, inventively playful, and successfully serious when it wants to be.

It looks more like your teenage world than such films generally allow, and it's not pretty. It's beautiful.

Although this is a film about the influential women in Lennon's life, it succeeds equally in its evocation of the family Lennon built among his boyhood mates.

July is more of a presence than an actress, or even a believable persona.

Insofar as Ushpiz succeeds in putting the most provocative, salient, and damning aspects of Arendt's work into a lucid context, she exposes the limits of her own approach.

Carancho moves into heist mode in its final act, and the lovingly balanced, placid frames give way to thrilling turbulence.

Change may be elusive, Optimists confirms, but the will to make it blazes.

Heady, creaturely, and looking for trouble, Splice is also a sovereign creation: Conceived and midwived by Vincenzo Natali (Cube), it suggests the pure-bred Canadian love child of James Cameron and Margaret Atwood (I see David Cronenberg presiding over the baptism).

Former "Frontline" producer Brian Knappenberger's fascinating, incisive social history of the online network known as Anonymous.

Straining for a timeless, family-friendly tone, Allen winds up with something closer to an unironically -- i.e. absurdly -- wholesome rehash of "Leave it to Beaver."

The scenes between the young actresses are the film's most compelling: Both first-timers, Manamela and Makanyane are possessed of extraordinary faces and plain attitudes.

Ferrell as Nick Halsey still feels like a fresh idea, a testament to the actor's reliable but rarely tested mettle as much as his long parade of post-2006 buffoons.

Too often the story feels like it's being mined for recycled beats.

The roots of romantic feeling, as explored in Wild Grass, Alain Resnais's jazzy ode to cinema and the love impulse in later life, are equally, spectacularly random.

At its finest and most affecting, The We and the I is a window onto youth’s forever moments

Most successful are the scenes involving Marcus and Iris, a 10-year-old girl who grew up fatherless and watchful of her tumultuous surroundings.

Garcia, despite creating yet another vibrant canvas for his actors, deflects the burden of this toughest and most modern of familial conundrums, offering instead the bland, regressive ideal of motherhood as not only redemptive but required.

Without a strong story to dance with, all of those fabulous tracking shots, lovingly uncanny art direction details and flickering shafts of light can make The Innkeepers feel more like an exercise in craft than a scary movie.

Fright Night glides into its first climax with some funny touches but without building much structure or suspense.

Directors Jason Sussberg and David Alvarado present a study of two eccentrics without pushing too hard against their premise.

Wait a second, is this a horror movie or an episode of The Hills?

The result is more fancy than funky, but the directors' aim is true and occasionally hits its mark.

Scene by scene The Hunter, adapted from a novel by Julia Leigh, holds your attention like a pair of big, inquisitive eyes, or perhaps the point-blank scope of an automatic rifle.

The result is the double shrift of a thinly sketched background and a story that has trouble standing up on its own.

Perry weaves together not just the individual stories but their arcs, sustaining the emotional tenor across the progress of nine lives.

With some focus and critical perspective, The Source Family might have documented more than a spectacle of its time.

The result is a shaggy rise-and-fall story that is deceptively well-wrought, playing at times like an extremely hip, deep-access concert film.

Ultimately, the effort, however rough in patches, is to be admired. We need our best minds on this subject, in all arenas, and Beautiful Boy is another jagged, early piece in a puzzle whose borders haven't formed yet.

If you're like me, and you find yourself retreating to a safe place in your mind whenever human beings are being graphically decapitated on screen, you'll spend the majority of Centurion, horror maestro (The Descent) Neil Marshall's Roman bloodbath, on psychological lockdown.

The casting of Jespersen, with his sub-Wookie intonations and granite stare, is key: If this pillar of masculinity says there be trolls, I don't have to be bitten by one to believe it.