Rene Rodriguez

The movie kicks off with a wonderful setpiece that shows off Spielberg’s ability to tell a story primarily through visuals — is there any other filmmaker working today better at this?

Frida, the kaleidoscopic drama based on the life of the Mexican painter/feminist/icon Frida Kahlo, was directed by Julie Taymor, which is the movie's first blessing.

Yes, Pineapple Express is exceedingly crude, but it's never mean or lewd, and for all the drugs and gore in it, the movie is also strangely, unrelentingly sweet, even when its characters are bleeding to death.

Everyone in the movie is a buffoon or a dolt. No one is redeemable. The humor comes at the expense of the characters: You're always laughing at them, never with them. The Coens have never seemed this disdainful, this mocking, of their fellow man.

The movie is filled with graphic sex scenes that leave nothing to the imagination — this film would make even John Waters blush — but there’s more at work here than shock value and sensationalism.

Chungking Express is really a sly and perceptive examination of the effects of urban alienation on romance -- specifically in its scarily dense and overdeveloped setting of dazzling Hong Kong. Chungking Express meanders at times and occasionally annoys (you won't want to listen to California Dreaming ever again), but the movie is all of one mood, and it leaves you craving more. [29 Mar 1996, p.21G]

Despite its serious subject matter, North Country is a crowd-pleaser at heart.

Succeeds where so many other recent horror pictures have failed: It consistently scares you silly.

The House I Live In is a work of journalism, not propaganda: Jarecki has done his research and leaves it to you to decide what to make of it.

The movie, which is as low-key and subdued as Tewfiq himself, is something of a marvel: a precious work of minimalism that, instead of disappearing into itself the way so many small-scale comedies do, grows before your eyes into something profound and profoundly affecting.

Using a buzzy, unnerving score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, Citizenfour makes you share the same sense of shock and paranoia as Snowden spews damning information that implicates the White House in transgressions that extend beyond our borders into other countries.

Musical Chairs is about overcoming impossible odds and never giving up and chasing your dreams – all that afterschool-special stuff - but it's also charming and upbeat, and it's stuffed with great, vibrant, insanely catchy music. No Bee Gees, though.

Here is a crime drama that punches you in the gut, full on, and dares you not to blink.

A very complicated movie. It is also pretty wonderful.

One gigantic pile of cornball clichés, but there's no denying the movie works you over anyway.

This is more of an exercise in experiential cinema, as well as a blistering critique of a society that drives its poorest to unimaginable acts for mere survival.

There's nothing in Bounce you haven't seen before, but the movie is surprisingly unsentimental, the Paltrow factor cannot be denied.

Scorsese has crafted a luxurious entertainment that goes down like a flute of sparkling, silky champagne.

The strained, strange relationship between father and son ultimately becomes the emotional center of The Clan, culminating with an astonishing closing shot guaranteed to induce startled gasps. It’s a great, jarring moment that is the work of a filmmaker clearly in love with his craft — and a flavor for the darker side of human nature.

There's a terrible beauty to the work of Larry Clark, the controversial photographer turned filmmaker, that transcends chic nihilism.

Corbijn makes the familiar strange, focusing on details other filmmakers would gloss over.

Compared to manipulative tearjerkers like "Pay It Forward" or "Men of Honor," Billy Elliot is a model of restraint, one that earns its warmth the hard way -- by making us care about the people who are going through familiar steps.

This Is the End is a marvelously sustained, high-wire goof – a movie so nutty and daring, so crazy and out-there, that it feels like a low-budget independent except with big stars and a sizable budget.

Craven ("Scream," "Nightmare on Elm Street") is already a legend in horror film circles, but this is the first time he has tried his hand at a slick, relatively bloodless suspense-thriller, and the genre suits him.

The first of this summer's would-be blockbusters that deserves to be a hit.

Every time Riding Giants starts feeling a little too insidery for casual viewers, along comes another, even bigger wave, daring these puny mortals to conquer it.

Buoyed by a superlative soundtrack, ATL plays a familiar song about growing up, but hits notes that sound brand new.

There are no "Crying Game" switcharoos or "Sixth Sense" plot twists in store here. But knowing too much about Catfish beforehand ruins the experience.