Sara Maria Vizcarrondo

A clearly personal effort, Somewhere demonstrates Coppola's featherweight touch with big subjects like identity and human connection.

He's either daring you not to laugh or daring you not to care, but either way, you'll laugh, care and worry about the consequences in Dark Horse.

Premium Rush has a rewarding relentlessness and a payoff that suggests that whirring city that surrounds us in is full of supporters who see past the system.

It's a wonderfully moving meditation on the capacity of animals to inspire our imaginations and something applicable to educational markets as well as regular documentary audiences.

A dating fantasy for girls and an action bromance for guys, This Means War wins the Valentine date crowd in swoops and strokes, but does it lead to swoons? Not really.

Still, the fans are lovable no matter how mixed the Comic-Con bag is, and Morgan Spurlock is precisely the doc maker to tell us about it.

Katz, however, is great with gentle moments (his most dear and haunting is the final scene), and he handles the balance of mystery and family drama quite adeptly.

The film is a twisty and playful primer that suggests the best thing to do when beset with ugly forces is to publicly laugh them off. What happens in private is your business.

Contrary to all of my bitter nudging, I found both sweet and charming. It's just me: I hate precocious children.

It's scary fun and packed with comic bits that skate between sad and absurd like the best of reality TV.

A chick flick for do-gooders, The Help suffers from a malady common to the discrimination drama: its treatment of inequality is more condescending than the prejudice it aims to remedy.

Italian audiences are bound to like it and the broadness of plot and appeal suggests casual fans of foreign film should, too.

It's a trenchant modern western and fans of the genre should embrace it for more reasons than just the presence of the epic Sam Shepard who, by the way, owns this Butch Cassidy.

OKA!, like the mysterious horn the characters hunt, is a real find.

A traditional southern gothic, Septien delivers oddities from the perverse to the parochial with a straight face, and in the process restores the oddball genre to what might be called authenticity.

A family drama that looks for answers in coincidence (is it really ever coincidence?), this endearing and breezy comic fable watches Jeff's coming of age and promises nothing after his moment of truth.

What it provides (instead of the thematically clever dialogue of typically subtle French comedy) is biting wit, poignancy and, forsaking some structural nuisances, the summer's best bromance.

Repression is one thing, but discontent generally breeds self-knowledge and rich interior lives, two things that are eerily absent here. Regardless, the film features some really intriguing conflicts and solid performances throughout.

Formally, everything's in order-it's an attractive film with some ingenious action sequences-but the problems overwhelm the pleasures, leading to the conclusion that this film's trouble is under the hood.

Upbeat, bitter, sweet and always gripping, Shut Up! Little Man gives remix culture the ucky origin story it likely won't heed, but could sorely use nonetheless.

The laughs are proportionate to the stakes, which are middle-of-the-road.

You'll laugh and be offended, but if you watch it and don't want to be part of the solution, you'll know which side of the line you're on. Activism takes some unique forms.

In sum, the film is not without its sweetness. Carell's Barry retells the story of his life in dioramas populated completely with costumed, stuffed mice.

This foreign view of the subject is anthropologically useful, however the film's photo animation technique transforms family photos (used extensively to fill in historical plot holes) into something that resembles zombie-resurrection.

Sure it's fun - and painful - but it's not thin.

The shadow of Whitney Houston's stardom and crushing recent death hang heavy over this midrange movie that promises its female audience at least three good cries during its somewhat overlong run time.

A film about how outwardly alienating our circles are (much to the detriment of our careers) and how caustic our supposedly nurturing intimacies can be at the same time.

Though the film is a fairly plastic British period piece with all the intimacy of a Hitachi Wand, the script captures some delicate and intelligent facets of a tensely conflicted era.