Michelle Orange

The writing is relaxed in the right places and heightened to a largely effective degree when it counts.

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."

A brightly lit nightmare of patriarchy run amok.

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

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.

Aside from the showy, overwrought credits sequence, it's silly and self-conscious and still scary as hell.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

In catsuits, swimsuits, and skimpy underthings, Saldana is as potently elusive as a shadow can be.

Hill cuts a hilariously adversarial figure.

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

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.

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.

The result is way out there - so far that you won't quite recognize the terrain, and still feel strangely at home. The look has the impossible feel of a CGI soundstage: Not cheap, not even necessarily fake, just… weird.

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.

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

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.

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.

It's all sweet and very, very silly. I was surprised by the subtleties - both comedic and thematic.

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.

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

Country Strong rides pretty high in the saddle, confident in the remarkably realized world Feste has created for her characters.

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.

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.