Rene Rodriguez

Sometimes, love can feel like hate or annoyance — it is, as the title states, strange. But sometimes, more often than not, it can be a wonderful thing.

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.

Impossible to resist.

Blancanieves is funny, inventive and daring enough to change the story’s ending, going out on a note of bittersweet, unexpected melancholy.

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.

Does the movie bear any relation to the video game? Not much. Do the dinosaur effects steal Jurassic Park's thunder? Keep dreaming. Will kids want to see it? Depends on how big Nintendo fans they are. Super Mario Bros. is like watching somebody else play a video game: It's flashy, colorful and wholly uninvolving. [29 May 1993, p.5]

The sound never loses its urgency, its sense of immediate danger, straight through to the closing shot of the film.

Impossible to watch passively. It may be a work of pure fiction, with the requisite preposterous plot turns, but it still has the air of a ''what if?'' scenario, and it is perfectly, thoroughly chilling.

An exuberant, disarming entertainment.

The best science fiction leaves you with questions and ideas to ponder. Arrival is the sort of superficially profound movie that initially seems deep and weighty but stops making sense the moment you put down the bong.

Juno comes on all wisecracking and aren't-we-clever, but don't be surprised if you find yourself getting choked up -- with happy tears -- by the end.

There isn't a moment in the entire film that doesn't feel genuine.

What makes Master and Commander so bracing and transporting -- what makes the movie feel unlike any adventure film you've seen before -- is the precise detail and care with which Weir places us aboard the HMS Surprise.

The Secret of Kells manages to feel simultaneously old-fashioned and mesmerizingly modern,and the slight story at its center has the emotional weight of a classic fable: A boy's wild, fantastical adventure, simply told.

The first half of the movie, which alternates between hilariously vulgar, gross gags and some electric improvs and riffs by Rock and his cast of all-stars, has the crackle and pop of a live performance — it energizes you.

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?

Overflowing with melancholy and tragedy, Road to Perdition is one of the most somber gangster pictures ever made.

This is more of a poignant, haunting study of well-intentioned but doomed folly, embodied by a heroine whose bravery renders her blind to the world that is crumbling around her.

Foxcatcher is too cold of a movie to love, but that chilliness is intentional and transfixing, a parable about the darkest corners of the minds of men that dares to whisper instead of shout.

It's all amiably hackneyed, but it sucks you in anyway.

This iconoclastic filmmaker seduces you with ridiculous laughs, then sends you home contemplating your mortality and your place in the world.

No is an exploration of the power of the media to manipulate hearts and minds. The moral of the story: Always go positive.

Django Unchained is the most brutal film Quentin Tarantino has ever made. Unlike "Kill Bill" or "Inglourious Basterds," where the violence was thrilling and carried a visceral kick, the carnage here is often ugly and difficult to watch.

It’s the cinematic equivalent of a kid playing with his toys and smashing action figures together, except del Toro does it with more grace and imagination than most. There are long sequences in this movie that merit that most overused of terms, “awesome.”

But there is so much information to process in The Big Short that only hedge fund managers and stock brokers will be able to track every nuance and shading of this complicated story.