Pete Vonder Haar

When the most sympathetic character in your comedy is a skinhead, you’re definitely on to something, and Jensen definitely is here.

The more unpleasant aspects of the case are minimized in favor of telling the story and highlighting the effects of the case on these four men. It drags in spots, but even if Fincher hasn't hit it out of the park, Zodiac is easily a stand-up triple.

Not just one of the best "comic book" movies ever made, but also one of the best films of the year.

Quite possibly Clooney’s best effort to date.

Changeling is an almost universally impressive all-around effort, and is the best "dirty underbelly of Los Angeles" movie since "L.A. Confidential."

Better than the first in some ways: the superfluous Agent Meyers is gone, Doug Jones is great as Abe, and Strauss is an amusing addition (if almost structurally identical to Kroenen).

Glendon Swarthout’s 1988 novel offered a rare approach to those Old West stories by shifting the focus to the women and children who often bore its brunt the worst, and Jones has — for the most part — successfully captured this, often in devastating fashion.

Star Trek is pretty damn enjoyable. By resetting the franchise to what is essentially Year One, Abrams has the luxury of...gently reshaping the core characters.

Far from being a mere polemic, The Ground Truth is bolstered immeasurably by Foulkrod’s almost exclusive use of interviews with actual veterans.

I think this one of the first King movies to legitimately give me the creeps.

The film's effectiveness is bolstered by juxtaposed scenes of fat and happy Americans and Europeans slurping up frozen chai lattes and clucking about how big Starbuck's is getting with scenes of children going into "therapeutic feeding centers" in the region where Starbuck's gets its coffee because they can't afford to by corn.

300 is a feast for the senses (well, two of them anyway) and an impressive technical achievement. More than that, it's a hell of a lot of fun.

Does it herald a renaissance in the action genre? Not really, but it's a welcome throwback to good old-fashioned, '80s-style lunkhead violence, and no one takes a punch, kick, elbow, or bullet quite like John McClane.

Surprisingly good.

A bleak and powerful movie, made all the more sobering by how much of it isn't fiction.

A genuinely engrossing film.

An arresting and disturbing piece of work that gets its message across without coming off as overly preachy.

What makes The Dog so compelling isn't Wojtowicz's cinematic imprint but the place in history that was very likely denied him by chance and his own irascibility.

Far and away the best of the Star Wars prequels (tough chore, that) and also holds its own with the hallowed films of the original trilogy.

Ultimately a story about the American mindset post-9/11, Right at Your Door is also a much more personal tale, as it forces all of us to consider what we would do if the chips were down.

The festival's audience is as integral a part of the proceedings as the music, and we get a rich portrait of the wide variety of pranksters, iconoclasts, and freaks that descend upon the West Country of England in the hundreds of thousands every year. Glastonbury offers an exhaustive look at what remains the largest event of its kind.

Stunningly animated, cleverly scripted, and genuinely humorous.

The Hallow offers plenty of scares and is unnerving from wire to wire, wrapping up the second act with a bang and red-lining the tension until the end.

Kinkle shows a deft hand at pacing and the gore is kept to a minimum.

So who did kill the electric car? There are many suspects, and as it turns out, most of them are guilty.

I thoroughly enjoyed the street level perspective of the world being destroyed, it just would've been nice if they hadn't crapped out at the end.

Hairspray isn’t all that bad, frankly. The songs are catchy, most of the leads are engaging enough (Blonksy and Bynes especially), and there’s just enough low-key subversiveness to keep everything from getting too saccharine.

Too often, the movie follows up Adams’ chaotic humor with weak slapstick and the incongruous love story.