Rob Nelson

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.

Not clever enough to be truly pretentious.

Debuting writer-director Anusha Rizvi manages to wrest a lively feature out of a gravely serious issue, capturing the desperation of India's village farmers, as well as the nation's shift from agriculture to industrialization, without losing sight of the entertainment principle.

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.

Director Scott Hamilton Kennedy (“The Garden”) favors formulaic uplift over investigation, failing to offer a p.o.v. on whether young creative people should be driven as mercilessly as these. Lackluster videography further dulls the pic, which culminates in frustratingly fleeting glimpses of the students’ year-end performances.

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

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.

Focusing on the absurdly ultraviolent tit-for-tat tussles among a trio of Tokyo crime families, the film is a beautifully staged marvel that confidently reasserts Kitano's considerable cinematic gifts.

Repugnant content, grislier than the ugliest torture porn, ought to have made the film unwatchable, but it doesn't, simply because Kim's picture is so beautifully filmed, carefully structured and viscerally engaging.

The ups and downs of a decades-long friendship are charted with warmth and sensitivity in Shepard and Dark.

First-time writer-director Aurora Guerrero beautifully captures the fluctuating dynamics of friendship between 15-year-old girls in Mosquita y Mari.

A dynamic and immersive piece of you-are-there verite.

In purely cinematic terms, Buried, set in late 2006, is an ingenious exercise in sustained tension that would make Alfred Hitchcock turn over in his grave.

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.

A highly satisfying Western-cum-noir in the old tradition, Deadfall is alive in ways that are all too rare among American movies.

A digressive, daringly experimental study of a flailing musician, magnetically played by accomplished bluesman and poet Willis Earl Beal.

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 bona fide high-wire act, Cirque du Soleil: Worlds Away delivers towering thrills through its candy-colored 3D ode to the titular outfit's astounding acrobatics.

Director Jesse James Miller’s bio of ‘80s-era World Boxing Council lightweight champ Ray “Boom Boom” Mancini connects on emotional levels in the telling of an up-from-nothing brawler whose colorful career climaxed in tragedy.

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

Finding a pulse only in the band's late-reel performance of "Alive," a lusty passage that would've begun a pic intent on making a case for the group's greatness, "Twenty" simply counts the years from 1991 via sludgy backstage and onstage footage whose rarity can't forgive its inclusion. Crowe's critic mentor, the late Lester Bangs, would cringe.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.