Nathan Rabin

Iron Man is the rare comic-book movie that makes the prospect of a sequel seem like a promise instead of a threat.

Funny excuses an awful lot, and at its best, Hamlet 2 is nothing short of hilarious.

Block Party is largely a giant love-fest, which is fitting given the staggering amount of simpatico musical and comic talent on display, though some conflict surfaces nevertheless.

Like many social issue documentaries, Food, Inc. is better at addressing problems than offering solutions: its endorsement of organic food in particular feels a little flimsy. Nevertheless, it’s entertaining and fast-moving enough to make audiences intermittently forget they’re consuming cinematic health food.

Brilliantly photographed by William H. Daniels, Brute Force is both a humanistic personal drama and a bravura piece of genre filmmaking.

Where the prequel is weighed down with noble intentions, Caballeros boasts a breezy, exhilarating lightness and a refreshing undercurrent of perversity.

The four protagonists aren’t about to let something as minor as the complete breakdown of society get in the way of having a good time, and their fun proves infectious.

Though the filmmaking is pedestrian, The Camden 28's timeless truths come through with resounding power.

As a comic heist film, The Italian Job is diverting, though slight. As a feature-length advertisement for the MINI Cooper, however, it's an unqualified triumph.

In a heartbreaking, scene-stealing performance, Wilkinson plays his bipolar character's manic delirium as a heightened form of awareness, a life-affirming source of moral clarity in a cloudy and corrupt world.

Attack The Block turns its modest budget into a virtue by focusing on character, especially the surprisingly charged, complicated dynamic between enemies-turned-allies Whittaker and Boyega.

Everything here is pitched relentlessly toward uplift, but at least that uplift is genuine, the product of one visionary's indomitable will and a musical universe he brought into existence through vision, dedication, and plenty of stubborn hard work.

In spite of the out-of-place pregnancy subplot, Smashed is a film of pummeling intensity and bruised emotions.

Superman argues convincingly that everyone should have the right to a good education, not just folks lucky enough to score winning numbers: It should be a birthright, not a matter of chance.

Ron Perlman returns as the film's loveable title character, a demon gone good who's tough on the outside but tender underneath, with a soft spot for kittens, candy, and babies.

Crazy Heart could use more rough edges, but while it’s a little too sentimental and tidy, Bridges’ humane, deeply empathetic lead performance makes it easy to root for one man’s redemption.

A low-key, tough little thriller punctuated by casual bursts of brutality and deadpan humor, Charley Varrick is informed by a quiet professionalism that suits a movie about feds and criminals doing their jobs, whether that means laundering money, making fake passports, or robbing banks.

I wish the film had made its points a little more artfully and implicitly, rather than simply sticking them in McDonald and McKinney’s mouths, but Brain Candy has an overarching satirical vision that makes it much more than just an assemblage of mostly funny running gags and stand-alone bits.

A funny, boozy, ramshackle party.

Like "Upstream Color," Sun Don’t Shine owes a sizable debt to the philosophical lyricism of Terrence Malick. Working wonders on a tight budget, Seimetz uses handheld cameras and tight compositions to create an air of claustrophobic intensity interspersed with moments of ragged beauty.

Filled with shadows both literal and figurative, Night Moves elegantly combines the hard-edged pessimism, crackling banter, and all-consuming darkness of classic noir with the paranoia and bitterness that characterizes so much '70s cinema.

Sometimes feels like an all-time classic short film stretched to feature length, but it’s blissfully short, and it peaks at the end with a groovy cartoon during the closing credits.

It's a relentlessly downbeat, well-acted melodrama that's easy to admire, but intentionally impossible to enjoy.

At two and a half hours, it's a bit too long, but it's probably the most emotionally authentic film noir since The Grifters.

With Dad and his last writer-director effort, "Sleeping Dogs Lie," Goldthwait has accomplished the formidable feat of making wry, tender, fundamentally sweet comedies about the human condition that just happen to center on acts of autoerotic asphyxiation and bestiality, respectively. That isn't easy.

Superfly is in many ways classic pulp, but O'Neal and Mayfield push it toward a sort of epic grandeur.

Not As A Stranger taps into the raging fury and animal sexuality lurking underneath Mitchum’s quiet-storm demeanor; the film’s redemptive arc requires him to realize what he has in a good, wholesome woman like de Havilland, but Mitchum’s bedroom eyes and leering swagger suggest that he really belongs to a femme fatale like Grahame, who undoubtedly tumbled out of the womb clutching a cigarette in one hand and a glass of scotch in the other.

In its third act, this funny, bittersweet, tonally assured coming-of-age story grows unexpectedly poignant as Rolleston comes to realize he doesn't need a super-cool buddy or co-conspirator in his misadventures. He needs a father, and Waititi's stunted man-child is fatally unsuited and unqualified for that role.