Nick Pinkerton

Director Alan Parker (still living) nicely describes the tightrope teeter of Cardiff's hothouse imagery: "It's great art, and then it will be kitsch, and then it will be art again." Or is he summing up cinema itself?

One senses that The Guard is McDonagh's eulogy for the brusque, warts-and-all character of a passing generation of tough, working-class Irishmen, much as Clint Eastwood's "Gran Torino" was for vintage Americanism.

A Pacific shore whose rolling tide is rendered as a field of static is the final, remarkable image - though the water cycle film might work best on loop.

Vision is more immediate and immersive when dealing in the jealous attachments among sisters; when circumstance and politics tear Richardis from Hildegard, Sukowa's performance rears to towering heights of abjection.

Good for Nothing has a nice comic sense of the brushfire eruptions of Western violence.

An epic by Scandinavian standards, Manus's period re-creation is lavish-but the too-polished rental décor doesn't create a living past.

Although it doesn't worry itself with dialectic complexities, Hotel Transylvania succeeds on the level of entertainment.

It's the latest installment in what now forms a lightly likable trilogy of films based on Jeff Kinney's Wimpy Kid books.

Though Wanderlust finally laughs off the real discomforting conclusion that it's edging toward, it's gut-busting funny when mocking their hopeless options.

With a small, well-chosen cast, sly script, and slippery, ambivalent characters, The Last Exorcism gives a welcome titty-twist to the demonic-possession movie revival.

Despite the efforts of many interviewees to seem broad-minded, Nicoara has a knack for ferreting out moments that reveal actual Romanian attitudes.

de Oliveira's film is a musical of a sort, its quietude occasionally lifted by work songs or chorales.

French director Céline Sciamma doesn't quite have the stun of discovery--mortified adolescent sexuality is something of a national specialty, after all--but she inexhaustibly endeavors after the indelible image.

This self-consciously modern movie contains classical pleasures.

And when the F-14s came out for a triumphant flyover, I looked around the room to find the moron who was applauding only to realize that it was me.

Kekilli, more than an unofficial spokeswoman for rebellious Euro-Muslim youth, sells a simple and deterministic story through her sheer presence and precise reaction shots.

The best bits - the powerful instrument called Five Blind Boys of Mississippi, for example - more than speak for themselves.

Here is the irony: Trouble With the Curve embodies all of the values it espouses - it is an old-fashioned, proficient, amiable, and decent movie - but it has no instinct.

Performances are made crystalline through a sixth sense for camera placement and curt cutting from director John Flynn, whose 2007 passing was little noted, though his no-BS way of laying down a story is a rare commodity in any era.

Splice is a queerly funny movie, attuned to the absurd.

All of this builds into the film's last image, Elena's family finally welcomed into Vladimir's apartment, as the cautious, controlling, abstemious bourgeoisie are overtaken by the heedlessly fertile lower orders, the temporary inheritors of a terribly weary earth.

These self-imposed limitations prevent Teddy Bear from having the breadth of a great work, but they give it the coherence of a good tale, simply told.

Park's view - clearly inscribed in his well-structured, practically chapter-headed ("After Hours," "Payday," "Back at the Village") documentary - is that the hideous working conditions and low wages are due to man-made avarice; the workers, though, tend toward a fatalism based in religious predestination.

Although the movie is overreliant on chintzy-looking and rather corny historical reenactments, these are counterbalanced by anecdote-rich interviews, including descendants of Huberman's first orchestra, human testament to the family tree of Israeli musicianship that he planted.

If Iron Fists is sometimes badly made, it is refreshingly badly made. It has a homemade charm that comes from a sense of having gestated in a lifelong obsession.

Di Gregorio's performance sets the tone of dim hope and quiet forbearance, telling the story through reactions: an ever-accommodating smile that shades into a wince; sparkling, heavy-lidded eyes betrayed by vexed brows.

Here, the familiar tale is retold with concessions to feminist self-determination and camp humor, bending the Grimm Brothers' tale without infringing on its basic beauty.

Cage will likely not earn a second Oscar here, but he and director Jon Turteltaub (National Treasure) make leftovers into fine PG malarkey with their hokey naïveté and prankish hocus-pocus.