Peter Rainer

As hig concepts go, You Don't Mess With the Zohan" takes the cake.

Hartnett has been stuck in the young-adult heartthrob mode for some time now, but this comic thriller may launch him into meatier fare.

At its best, the movie makes you feel like a kindred spirit.

I have always felt that Almodóvar was at his best as an artist when he was at his most playful. Volver is about deadly serious matters of the heart, but it often has a screwball spirit. The darker things are, the funnier.

The Canadian actress and director Sarah Polley set out to make a straightforward documentary about her mother, Diane, who died when she was 11, but by the time Stories We Tell was finished five years later, it had become unclassifiable.

So many movies these days are being linked, often quite tenuously, to current politics. Let this new film be no exception. I am happy to say that Ice Age: The Meltdown points up for toddlers the dangers of global warming.

What rescues the film from melodrama is that Legrand drew on extensive interviews with psychologists, emergency police personnel, female victims, and batterers. The bone-deep chill of real, observed experience cuts through this film and gives it a verity that at times reminded me of Frederick Wiseman’s harrowing documentary “Domestic Violence.”

The real halo here belongs to McConaughey. He does justice to Ron’s story and to his own quicksilver talent.

It's a great piece of work in a movie that, whatever its failings, deserves to be seen even if you swear undying allegiance to the BBC mini-series.

For most of the way this is an eye-popping, not blood-curdling, experience.

Within its limited compass, ’71 packs a punch, and the lack of political bias does give it a more encompassing feel.

At its best it shares with Stone's finest work a feeling for the imminence of death and salvation.

I call it art. And as long as I’m on the subject, I think the Grand Canyon is the greatest sculpture I have ever seen.

It’s a feminist musical crime thriller about a transgender cartel boss. Doubly surprising is that, for all its strangeness – or perhaps because of it – the mashup often works.

Assayas conveys with great understatement an entire constellation of emotions in Summer Hours. I wouldn't have minded a little bit of overstatement.

Gustave’s protégé, the “lobby boy” Zero Moustafa (played as a young man by Tony Revolori and as an adult by F. Murray Abraham), is as much an enigma as Gustave.

Keep your ears tuned for Helen Mirren as the imperious Dean Hardscrabble. Hogwarts would have loved her.

Black, who wrote "Lethal Weapon," makes his directorial debut, and he puts a fresh spin not only on that film but also on a whole slew of films noirs.

Made-up horror movies have nothing on Countdown to Zero, a documentary about nuclear security that won't make you sleep better at night.

War Witch is most effective not when we are looking in on Komona but when we are inside her head. When she says that, in order to survive in the rebel camp, she “had to learn to make the tears go inside my eyes,” our identification with her is total.

The Booksellers is a documentary for people who treasure the sheer look and feel of books. It is for anyone who has ever spent way too much time in used and rare bookstores teetering on tall ladders or squeezing through narrow, tome-filled aisles in search of that most precious of commodities: the book you didn’t know you needed until you found it – or, to be more precise, it found you.

Almost a textbook example of how to do more with less. It's about aimless people who suddenly find their aim.

Most of all it’s about talking. It’s practically a nonstop jabberathon. What rescues the film from tedium is that much of the talk is enticing.

Zahs, a genial obsessive, is a lot of fun, and so is the movie.

McKay is very good where it counts the most: He understands these immigrants from the inside out, and, against all odds, he allows us to rejoice in their hopes.

The overfamiliarity of What Doesn't Kill You is redeemed by a full-scale performance from Mark Ruffalo.

Although von Trotta seems to regard von Bingen – played with a cool ferocity by Barbara Sukowa – as some sort of medieval feminist precursor, there are enough fault lines in the portrayal to subvert hagiography.

The cumulative effect is somewhat overwhelming. How could it not be?