Michelle Orange

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.

Manages to surprise with a charm and wit all its own.

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.

The result is like a sugar rush after a visit to the vintage candy store.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Minor but still quite enjoyable. And like other minor Woody Allen pictures it becomes more interesting when placed in their larger context.

Built for speed, and for an action-savvy audience who can appreciate a throwaway vengeance flick for exactly what it is.

As in "Country Strong," Meester's crack timing and irresistible poignancy illuminate a part that would leave other actresses simpering themselves off the screen.

If only the director had learned Mr. Han’s most important lesson: Being still and doing nothing are two very different things.

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.

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

No longer silent but still the lesser talker between them, Ilya is marvelously fluent in spatial forms.

8 is most coherent as a chilling confirmation of both the mind-warping power of an institution like the Mormon Church and the extent to which politics is, above all, a marketing game.

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

In its most tiresome moments, Noodle Shop overestimates the wit of its formal exertions, and feels less like a film than an exercise that will leave fans of the original comparatively cold.

The film's bleak conclusion becomes unbearable in context: Hypatia's death also signals the end of women in positions of intellectual prominence and the beginning of a period known -- not coincidentally -- as the Dark Ages.

Off-handed and yet quite artfully observed, The Happy Poet's winsome deadpan offsets its skewering of class and sustainability issues, right through to a tricky ending that, like Bill himself, may not be what it seems.

Amid the macho poses and reloading of his unbelievably enormous weapon, I was distracted by the notion of Brody’s participation as a kind of privately satisfying performance art (a similar impulse found James Franco doing a guest stint on "General Hospital").

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

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.

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.

Loose, flinty, and a little in love with itself, Perrier’s Bounty struts the fine line of self-consciousness drawn by neo-gangster capers like "The Usual Suspects," "In Bruges" and "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels."

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.

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

Timoner attempts - with talking heads, travelogues, and a little alarmist flair of her own - to articulate Lomborg's central idea that not doing enough good might be the same as doing harm.