Rob Nelson

Escape From Tomorrow is a sneakily subversive exercise in low-budget surrealism and anti-corporate satire.

An aptly infuriating expose of sexual abuse within the U.S. military, Kirby Dick's documentary The Invisible War calls high-ranking officials to account for turning a blind eye to a violent epidemic.

The docu’s accomplished summary of tension-filled events as they transpired from minute to minute comes at the expense of wide-angle historical context.

More compelling as an intellectual exercise than an emotional one, Certified Copy finds deep-thinking writer-director Abbas Kiarostami asserting there's nothing new under the Tuscan sun, particularly not his own conventional romantic drama set in rural Italy.

The brisk, brief feature appears more atmospheric than terrifying, but its bare-bones tale gets under the skin.

Under African Skies is appreciably smarter than most celebrity musician documentaries.

Splashy colors, oddball framing, super-cool threads and cranked-up retro music supply the picture's bizarre love triangle with a dance-club atmosphere that'll seduce young audiences of most any orientation.

A possession thriller less terrifying than fun.

It takes pains to make the political personal, forging the viewer’s identification with Scahill by making persistent use of his voiceover narration and keeping him oncamera throughout.

Rossato-Bennett’s over-the-top narration often sounds cloying and banal... But the filmmaker succeeds in providing context, medical and historical, in between awakenings.

Despite amply funded f/x, including some spectacular muscle-car stunts, the movie motors to the grindhouse with squealing tires and guitars, gratuitous nudity and gore, and a scantily clad greasy-spoon waitress endearingly played by Amber Heard.

The picture scores big points by drawing a sharp distinction between corporate vidgame programmers and indies.

Distinguished by splashy cinematography, engaging performances from Dennis Quaid and Helen Hunt as the girl's go-get-'em parents.

Audaciously giving itself license to do whatever it wants, Leos Carax's narratively unhinged, beautifully shot and frequently hilarious Holy Motors coheres -- arguably, anyway -- into a vivid jaunt through the auteur's cinematic obsessions.

This merciless work of anti-entertainment is arguably admirable for being as disturbingly disgusting as it wants to be.

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.