Rob Nelson

If a dominatrix is one who takes total control of her passive partner, then R100 is the cinematic equivalent of a kinky femme fatale in black leather and stiletto heels, cracking a whip and a smile.

Payback is a rarefied conceptual documentary that will appeal to a limited but highly appreciative audience.

This disarmingly cheeky, intermittently gorgeous trifle would create the perfect bookend to a career begun almost 50 years ago.

This low-budget shocker eventually pays off, displaying just enough narrative ingenuity to compensate for a cinematically crude and logistically sketchy deployment of the requisite blood-and-guts mayhem.

First-time writer-director Stephen Chbosky adapts his young-adult bestseller with far more passion than skill, which suits familiar scenes of adolescent awkwardness aptly enough.

Overly melodramatic but fairly engrossing.

The movie is witty only on occasion. But it lingers in the mind, thanks largely to its trio of actors -- especially Alex Karpovsky.

Paramount's Footloose reboot never quite cuts loose enough to distinguish itself from the original.

Variably articulate subjects drone on and on in an 83-minute film that could easily make its TV news-style point in a half-hour or less.

We Bought a Zoo is an odd bird, warm-blooded but largely lifeless.

Waiting for Super to deliver the funny is an experience as long as the film itself.

A literary film that stands to work best for those who don't read, The Words is a slick, superficially clever compendium of stories about authors of uncertain talent and varying success.

An extraordinarily engrossing tale becomes an extremely uncinematic experience in the hands of Israeli documentarian Nadav Schirman.

Solidly acted but aloof and slow as molasses.

This documentary plays like an extended episode of “Unsolved Mysteries,” deficient as it is in stylistic zeal, investigative spirit and plain old scares.

This fawning docu goes to lengths to portray the octogenarian Playboy magazine founder as among the greatest figures of 20th-century American popular culture, while only cursorily acknowledging his status as a pioneering softcore pornographer.

The narratively jumbled film...features too many scenes that amount to mere stargazing.

Alternately gutsy and preachy, specific and scattered, the righteously angry pic risks alienating those who could be galvanized by its proof of Big Oil's corrupting omnipotence.

The helmer’s narrative dead end here registers not as a lack of nerve so much as a lack of imagination.

Oddly overstuffed with cameos by bigscreen actors playing tongue-in-cheek versions of themselves, Webber's Los Angeles-set, microbudget dramedy delivers some rare and beautiful moments of daddy day-care, but its tone shifts more wildly than a preschooler's disposition and its narrative is stillborn.

Far less chilling than versions from 1951 and 1982, Universal's latest take on The Thing at least has a strong lead thesp in Mary Elizabeth Winstead, recruited for the studio's bid to turn a tale of ice-cold macho paranoia into a beauty-vs.-beast shocker a la "Alien."

Even devotees of the Replacements' defiant perversity will be unsatisfied with this talky tribute to a noisy band.

A weaker "Elephant," Quebecois director Denis Villeneuve's school-shooting drama Polytechnique nevertheless distinguishes itself by endeavoring to comprehend the 25-year-old man who murdered more than a dozen female students at Montreal's Polytechnique School in 1989.

A costumer that's well named for being pleasant and conventional but little more.

A movie that tries and fails to channel the indelibly dreamy mood of Sofia Coppola's "The Virgin Suicides." Well-intentioned but derivative and only intermittently engaging, the suburban Michigan-set indie hits at least as many false notes as true ones.

Mistaking over-the-top dysfunctional family cruelty for comedy and drama, Another Happy Day tries and fails to channel "Rachel Getting Married" in its protracted tale of a wedding-party weekend that turns predictably from scabrous to redemptive.

Shovels enough dirt on the Tea Party guru and self-described hockey mom to satisfy her haters, but lacks sufficient humor and insight to make it a must-see for anyone outside the Brit muckraker's fan base.

Some genre fans who prefer the silly to the satiric may bite, but the anemic pic isn’t remotely weird or witty enough for cult immortality.