Peter Rainer

Berlinger is after more than a true crime recounting here – the film attempts to explain, often lucidly, sometimes laboriously, how deeply entrenched Bulger was with the FBI and the police.

The documentary includes peerless clips of Billie Holiday and Lester Young from a TV show Hentoff coproduced as well as snatches of an interview with a young Bob Dylan, a clip of Hentoff on William Buckley’s “Firing Line” TV show, and lots more worth your time.

Mortensen, who reportedly put on thirty pounds for the role, starts out playing Tony like a big lug but as the road trip ensues he brings all sorts of subtle shadings to the role. He even comes to appreciate Doc’s artistry. In Tony’s eyes, he’s right up there with Liberace.

It may sound like faint praise to say that Enchanted is the movie of the year for smart and spirited 11-year-old girls. But a movie that genuinely respects that audience is not to be belittled.

Hugo is a mixed bag but one well worth rummaging through.

I enjoyed Whedon’s film both as a species of stunt and also as a legitimately entertaining entry in the voluminous Shakespeare adaptation sweepstakes.

Sweep aside the gross-outs and you've got the family values comedy of the year.

It's a beautifully modulated performance of a man whose presence, at times, seems on the verge of vanishing – not a bad attribute for a spy.

There's something inherently funny about the romantic predicament of Harry and Ron and Hermione. As if it wasn't bad enough having to deal with the Dark Lord and the Death Eaters and all the rest, now they have to square off against... raging hormones.

The scenes between Kong and Ann are much more than a goof: They're the soul of the movie.

Beyond being a showplace for crash-and-burn effects, Poseidon seems to be stumping for togetherness.

The film’s only real drawback, shared by its predecessor, is that it is simply too inventive. There must be more jokes and gags and throwaways per second than in 20 other comedies put together. It’s both exhilarating and exhausting.

A pretty good example of the kind of movie Hollywood used to turn out by the yard.

Puenzo may have started out to make something more ambitious than an intelligent, real-world horror thriller, but what she did achieve is still commendable. The melodramatics in this movie may be cooked up, but the fears it conjures are very real.

Right away in Miami Vice you know you're waist-deep in movieland.

It’s an important subject, lucidly presented.

Alarmist to an almost apocalyptic degree, the film is nevertheless packed with enough basic facts and figures to give any eater serious pause. Or at least any eater who indulges in sugar.

One of the bright sidelights to Juliet, Naked is the bemused way it deals with the crazy-making ramifications of hero worship.

I almost wish Cuarón had cast nonactors, or unknown actors, in the lead roles. It’s jarring having movie stars work up their Hollywood histrionics against such a glorious backdrop. None of these arguments should dissuade you from seeing Gravity, if only because what’s good about it is so much better than what’s bad. Visually, if not imaginatively, it sends you soaring.

The film is better than the recent "The War Within," which tried for the same things, but ultimately, and perhaps unavoidably, we are left face to face with the unknowable.

I was afraid at first that I would be watching a sobfest. I needn’t have worried. Nothing very grand is being attempted here, but there’s a core of feeling to what we are witnessing that keeps the sentimentality in check.

It’s a sweet, deliberately meandering movie, and it took me a while to connect with it. But it won me over because ultimately it conveys so well that feeling of estrangement that is both terrifying and comic for any farflung traveler.

Nanking, directed by Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman, does justice to this tragedy even though it makes the mistake of mixing the testimony of actual participants with staged readings from actors subbing for real people.

It’s a perplexing, fascinating, maddening movie, not quite like any other film biography of a famous painter, most of which tend to be equal parts ho-hum and hokum.

Greengrass is an expert hijacker, too. He hijacks our good sense.

Sokurov is a playful philosopher. If his playfulness is sometimes juvenile – as in those Napoleon scenes, or, worse, in the scenes of an actress playing Marianne, the spirit of France, exhorting, “Freedom, Equality, Brotherhood” – at least he’s not stuffy.

Director Ira Sachs, who co-wrote with Mauricio Zacharias, has a plangent feeling for the small-scale travails of “ordinary” people – who, of course, are only ordinary on the surface.

It’s a rueful and respectful tribute that stands on its own because of the extraordinary performances of Steve Coogan as Stan and John C. Reilly as Ollie.