Rene Rodriguez

In The Monuments Men, director George Clooney takes a wild, stranger-than-fiction true story and turns it into a dull, prestigious slog.

A manic and at times surprising comedy that has more imagination and creativity than all the Transformers pictures combined.

The movie lets you make up your own mind about this vivacious, likable woman, who is doing her best not to surrender to her inner loneliness.

You expect something far different and better than the same-old.

Unlike "A Separation", in which Iranian culture and mores played critical roles, the theme in The Past is more universal and spelled out in the title.

Her argues that sometimes, crazy can be wonderful.

Shirley MacLaine pops up as Walter’s ever-forgiving mother, and Wigg kills in an elevating sequence in which she sings David Bowie’s Space Oddity at a karaoke bar. Penn only gets one scene, but it’s a great one, and it reminds you how funny of an actor he can be.

If it had been a drama, The Wolf of Wall Street might have been unwatchable: There’s simply too much of everything. But Scorsese and screenwriter Terence Winter (The Sopranos, Boardwalk Empire) hit on the genius idea to turn the story into a riotous comedy, one that keeps topping itself everytime you think it can’t possibly get crazier.

The lack of effort, right down to the unimaginative title, is dispiriting.

Saving Mr. Banks is two movies crammed into one cumbersome, overlong drama.

Like his con artists are prone to saying, American Hustle works from the feet up, and the fun is intoxicating.

Inside Llewyn Davis is one of the Coens’ smallest movies — this one doesn't have the broad appeal of "True Grit" or "No Country For Old Men" — but like Llewyn’s music, it comes from the heart and it is deeply felt. It is also one of their best.

Go for Sisters is minor Sayles, and the movie occasionally meanders. But the characters stay with you, particularly Bernice and Fontayne, whose relationship is beautifully transformed over the course of the film.

Jackson has become too distracted by his digital toys to give his characters the same weight and importance he used in the Rings trilogy.

The Broken Circle Breakdown manages to pull off a small miracle, using joyous music and tenderness to tell a tragic story that moves you but doesn’t depress you.

Scott Cooper, who directed and co-wrote Out of the Furnace, empathizes with people who feel their lives have hit a dead end (his previous film, "Crazy Heart," earned Jeff Bridges an Oscar as a washed-up country singer who had given up on himself). These are difficult characters to dramatize.

The movie has a longing melancholy that leavens the humor — it’s a surprisingly sad, gentle comedy.

One of the surprises of Spike Lee’s Oldboy is just how dark the film dares to get.

Has the ring of classic Disney seamlessly combined with a modern-day sensibility.

Homefront is done in by uninspired action scenes in which Statham’s athletic prowess is rendered unwatchable by hyper-editing, a shameful reliance on child-in-peril cliches to move the story forward, and so many loose ends that you wonder if 20 minutes were accidentally cut out from the movie.

Gibney even convinced Armstrong to sit down for one final interview in May. In it, he comes off as somewhat contrite but also victimized, as if he were being single out for something everyone does.

Narco Cultura isn’t a documentary about runaway crime: Its actual subject is far stranger.

Catching Fire is a work of thoughtful, emotionally engaging sci-fi — everything that its predecessor The Hunger Games was not.

Sunlight Jr. is what is often described as a slice-of-life drama, but this one is more of a tiny sliver, and it doesn’t leave you with much to chew on.

This is a straight-up portrait of a man who figured out a way to cling to life longer than anyone expected and, in the process, learned to let the world in.

Unlike most pictures about people living on the fringe, The Motel Life is never drab or depressing.

All is Lost is more fun to think about than it is to actually watch: It’s a testament to a great actor, an experimental piece of cinema and a bit of a bore.

The sexual content may be excessive (the movie could have gotten by with just one scene instead of three) and the running time a bit indulgent, but Blue is the Warmest Color grows in power and intensity.

There’s a fleet and funny comic-book movie nestled inside Thor: The Dark World. You catch glimpses of it here and there.

Paradise: Hope plays better if you’ve seen the previous two movies, so you can savor the reach and scope of Seidl’s trilogy. But the film stands alone as a tender portrait of adolescence at its most vulnerable and how we manage to survive it, even when surrounded by predators and wolves.

One of the best things about 12 Years a Slave is that McQueen renders all the characters with the same depth and complexity as his protagonist.

Bad Milo! directly envokes a number of earlier pictures Vaughan clearly adores, including "Basket Case," "It’s Alive" and even the workplace satire "Office Space." But the movie fails to ground its promising (if preposterous) scenario in any kind of recognizable reality.

This Carrie becomes less involving as it goes along, ceding its emotional power to special effects and unconvincing gore, and culminating with a closing shot so lame and uninspired, it’s as if the filmmakers just gave up and called it a day.

Escape from Tomorrow is more of an experimental film than a traditional narrative, but intrepid viewers — or anyone who has ever visited a Disney park — will enjoy getting lost in this dark house of happy horrors.

In Captain Phillips, director Paul Greengrass pulls off the same remarkable feat he accomplished with "United 93": He takes a true story in which the outcome is already known and transforms it into a gripping, wrenching, devastating thriller.

The combination of youthful irreverence and military indoctrination is jarring.

Parkland is wildly uneven, although compulsively watchable.

In its early moments, the movie evokes everything from "The Social Network" to "Casino." By the end, the film has become as exciting as a game of Old Maid. R-rated thrillers are hardly ever this dull and listless, but this movie manages to eradicate all of Timberlake’s charisma and makes you flash back to Affleck’s "Paycheck"/"Gigli" era. How does this even happen?

Gravity is a celebration of the primal pleasure of movies: It shows you things you’ve never seen before, transports you out of the theater and out of your head, tricks you into believing what’s happening on the screen is happening to you.

Blue Caprice only spends a few minutes reenacting their crime — the movie shows us exactly how they did it in just a couple of scenes — because the facts of the case aren’t the movie’s focus. Instead, this lyrical, frightening film is a portrait of a man consumed by self-hatred who decided to take it out on the world.

This remarkable documentary argues that art can also be the glue that binds disparate souls.

Rush is the kind of Hollywood studio production that has sadly become all too rare — a smart, exciting, R-rated entertainment for grown-ups that quickens your pulse and puts on a great show without ever insulting your intelligence.

Don Jon is nominally a love triangle between a woman, a man and his laptop, but the movie is much more thoughtful and substantial than that, and it takes a compassionate and humane approach to all of its characters, even when they’re at their most despicable.

Director Stuart Blumberg’s movie, which features a surprisingly starry cast, comes off as superficial and trite.

Only genuinely talented people can make pictures this bad and misguided. “This whole thing is unacceptable,” Lil remarks at one point. That goes for the movie, too.

The wonderfully sad, exhilarating ending proves this filmmaker knew exactly where he was headed the entire time.

Too bad, then, that after two hours of such relentless tension, Prisoners starts revealing its secrets to progressively hokier effect.

The Family is the rare breed of pitch-black comedy that effectively uses violence for laughs or gasps, depending on the situation.

All the actors are strong, but Wilde is particularly good as the impetuous Kate, who doesn’t realize how incredibly selfish she has become. The actress’ great beauty could have been a distraction, but her performance is so complex and alive that she blends right into this world of ordinary, working-class people with modest aspirations who are trying to find happiness but often go about it in all the wrong ways.

What Passion ultimately lacks most, ironically, is passion, the artistic fervor that distinguished all his best pictures. This one feels like a throwaway by a gifted filmmaker who has run out of ideas.

The entire movie bears the whiff of a vanity project — a modestly budgeted bone Universal Pictures threw at Diesel so he would keep starring in Fast and Furious pictures. Those movies are bank; Riddick is rank.

Getaway makes the Transformers movies seem like they were shot in slow motion. You see all these vehicles smashing into each other, but the movie is never thrilling.

The Grandmaster sets aside traditional story structure in its last 15 minutes and becomes one of the filmmaker’s free-form visual poems, suffused with melancholy and compassion.

Although there are several stretches in the movie in which Seidl seems to be repeating himself, the director is carefully building toward a knock-out final scene in which the inscrutable, often annoying Anna becomes beautifully, poignantly human in front of our eyes, like magic.

Lowery has a lyrical style of storytelling that is delicate and subtle yet suffused with emotion and atmosphere. It’s gentle and pointed at the same time. Ain’t Them Bodies Saints wafts over you like a dream, leaving behind a lovely, melancholy trace that hurts.

The performances by Teller and Woodley are so strong that when the tone starts to darken and the characters make some radical discoveries, all the usual trappings of adolescent angst melt away: You feel like you’re watching two real, complicated people.

Molloy occasionally goes overboard with her realistic approach to storytelling (there’s a sex scene that is way more graphic than it needed to be), but mostly Una noche thrums with the vibrant energy of restless youth taking their fates into their own hands, for better or worse.

You’re Next is built on such an enormous pile of guff, it’s practically insulting.

The World’s End builds to an unexpectedly witty, funny climax that flies in the face of most films of its genre, and although its humor is not for all tastes, no one can say this crazy picture doesn’t have the guts to live up to its title.

Start with a heaping helping of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." Throw in some "Percy Jackson," a dash of "Twilight," a spoonful of "The Vampire Diaries" and a sprinkling of "Harry Potter," and you end up with The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones.

In The Act of Killing, director Joshua Oppenheimer pulls off the impossible: He confronts great, incomprehensible evil and puts a human face on it.

Jobs works much better as a history of Apple than it does as a portrait of the genius who dreamed it up.

Lee Daniels’ The Butler is creaky and sentimental and schmaltzy. The movie lacks any of the unhinged qualities of Daniels’ previous films (The Paperboy, Precious, Shadowboxer).

What seemed edgy and brash in Kick-Ass is now routine and old-hat. The first movie was a brash satire on formulaic comic-book movies — exactly the sort of picture the sequel turns out to be.

Blue Jasmine, which is easily Allen’s best and most powerful movie since 2005’s "Match Point", is filled with terrific performances, including Hawkins as the sweet-natured Ginger.

Lovelace is a timid gloss over on a hardcore subject — a movie that takes a wild true story and shoehorns it into a formulaic mold.

Elysium, the second movie from writer-director Neill Blomkamp, isn’t quite as inventive or fresh as his knockout debut, 2009’s "District 9." But the new picture is cut from the same cloth — furiously exciting sci-fi, carefully considered and loaded with allegories and social commentary.

Today, 54 percent of Sea World’s whales have Tilikum’s genes, which is a terrifying thought.

The phrase “casting is everything” has never felt truer than it does with 2 Guns, an unremarkable, standard-issue shoot-em-up that rests entirely on the charisma of its two stars.