Scott Bowles

Unapologetically brutal and unencumbered by much plot, Raid is the year's most turbo-charged film.

A slow-cooked film that's one of the most heartwarming of the young year.

Menacing and meditative, Hallows is arguably the best installment of the planned eight-film franchise, though audiences who haven't kept up with previous chapters will be hopelessly lost.

Sprinkled with riffs, concert footage and home videos, the family-authorized documentary does what the artist usually did: When in doubt, return to the beat.

Let Me In is going to lure and please fans of the original; like the first, the remake is graphically violent but as tense as good horror gets.

Inspired and inspiring, this documentary about 7- and 8-year-olds competing for the U.S. Kids Golf World Championship is too fawning to be consistently gifted, but it manages to be occasionally, perhaps accidentally, profound.

Black is clearly suited for the role of a modern-day Inspector Clouseau, a hero clown who can't help but save the day.

As he did in "Stranger Than Fiction," Ferrell displays surprising range when he ratchets down the volume.

The film is surprisingly deft and entertains at both the adult and juvenile levels. If something in Guardians catches your eye, trust your gizzard.

An historical opus that is equal parts ballet and biography, though the second component pales in comparison with the first.

It's no "Taxi Driver" or even "Open Water," but Route has enough attractions to warrant the trip.

Rude, wrong and laugh-till-you-snort funny, Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa not only stands as the best installment (by bounds) of Johnny Knoxville's hidden-camera franchise; it's one of the sharpest comedies of the year.

Sarandon is worth leaving home for, even if Jeff won't.

Despite an abrupt ending and the worst title of the year, Arbitrage manages to leverage real tension from its veteran stars in one of Hollywood's first pedigreed films of the fall.

Visually stunning and narratively stunted, this IMAX documentary is the family version of 2006's "An Inconvenient Truth," Al Gore's Oscar-winning documentary on global warming.

The side story about Muslim extremists is a little ham-handed for a film that otherwise exercises such restraint.

July is solid throwback storytelling, a crime yarn that may not blow you away but can cut to the bone.

The action is brisk, the acting is solid, and barring an unlikely failure at the box office, a franchise is born. Let the games begin.

While not as revelatory as Al Gore's 2006 Oscar-winning documentary, Inequality makes a resounding case that the middle class is facing its own planetary crisis: becoming an endangered species.

Crisply shot and voiced by a legion of Brits, the animated Arthur seems aimed at the Scrooge and caroler in all of us.

Survivor is a pummeling, frenzied ride, one of fall's most charged action films. The gunfights and rocket-propelled grenades are palpable, and Berg manages to make the chaos followable.

It's over-the-top stuff, to be sure. But Bosses never crosses that line into the macabre.

Even by today's standards, some scenes are jaw-dropping in their bloodshed. To that end, Lurie accomplishes some of what Peckinpah evoked 40 years ago.

Pooh succeeds by embracing much of what modern films (including Potter's) have largely forgotten: old-fashioned movie pleasures.

It is in many respects the best installment of the franchise as its stars go from sullen kids to sullen young adults, where their expressions look more natural.

Sarah's Key is, for the most part, an exercise in reserve. We never see Hitler, never enter battle. Paquet-Brenner (Pretty Things, Walled In), rightly tells his Holocaust story as it now lives: through survivors and descendants.

It's simple stuff, but the movie's heart is in the right place.

Fright is way too quick on its feet to be slowed by clichés. David Tennant seizes McDowall's role as Peter Vincent, now a Criss Angel-style clown vampire slayer. Christopher Mintz-Plasse was born to play a high school nerd.