Scott Foundas

Even at its most opaque, Bastards always exerts a dreamlike pull rooted in Denis’ rhythmic layerings of image, sound and music.

Most of the time Wedding Crashers is more genteel than it is outrageous (or funny), playing like an only slightly less benign spin on the tiresome fish-out-of-water farce that fueled the two Meet the Parents movies.

Almereyda has crafted an uncannily revealing portrait of a major American artist at work, all the more remarkable for the deceptive casualness with which it unfolds, as if Almereyda had just shown up.

Like a really, really high-tech version of a high school class trip to the planetarium.

Beguiling and intoxicating.

Inside Llewyn Davis is a revelatory showcase for Isaac, who sings with an angelic voice and turns a potentially unlikable character into a consistently relatable, unmistakably human presence — a reminder that humility and genius rarely make for comfortable bedfellows.

If we never do find out exactly why Wilbur is so intent on offing himself, it almost doesn't matter, given Sives' magnetic, star-making performance and the careful, elating mixture of comedy and pathos.

Stickler goes straight to the source, combining terrific archival footage with interviews of Tony Hawk, Stacy Peralta and others who knew Rogowski back in the day.

Infamous is the better Capote film, yes, but also the less easily digestible one, the more eccentric one and -- yes -- the gayer one.

The movie surely owes something to Polanski, Cronenberg, et al., in its use of an apparently placid, upper-middle-class setting as the background for perverse horrors, but De Van's fearless, high-wire performance is uniquely its own.

For those of us who prefer to judge Gibson solely in terms of his art, the movie is a virtuosic piece of action cinema -- particularly in its second half...And while there has been no shortage of recent films that decry the horrors of war and man's inhumanity to his fellow man, I know of none other quite this sickeningly powerful.

A warm, spacious road movie with a stirring sense of the wide-open landscapes of the American West.

Ellis and screenwriter Eric Bress even go all meta on us with an "Inglourious Basterds"–esque finale set inside a 3D cinema, though their set pieces never quite muster the giddy brio of "Final Destination 1" and "3" auteur James Wong at his best.

Becomes one of those wonderfully weird adventure stories beloved of children who don't mind getting a good old-fashioned case of the heebie-jeebies. It's kind of a blast for adults too.

If Johnny Depp’s mesmerizing performance — a bracing return to form for the star after a series of critical and commercial misfires — is the chief selling point of Black Mass, there is much else to recommend this sober, sprawling, deeply engrossing evocation of Bulger’s South Boston fiefdom and his complex relationship with the FBI agent John Connolly, played with equally impressive skill by Joel Edgerton.

Put simply, this second feature by the young Austrian director Hans Weingartner is a put-on -- a glib anti-capitalist rant in which the rhetoric rarely rises above the you-too-can-save-a-child-for-less-than-the-price-of-coffee level.

It has a terminal case of the cutes crossed with the labored earnestness of a disease-of-the-week melodrama.

Above all a rousing entertainment.

The movie is leaden and self-serious, with an unusually hollow performance from Norton, who's not for a moment convincing as a man of raging passion. Far better is Paul Giamatti.

Queen and Country lacks the immediacy of “Hope and Glory,” in part because there’s no single animating event here to rival the Blitz... But it remains a pleasure to spend time in the presence of these characters, and a third volume — perhaps focused on Bill’s entrance into the British film industry — would hardly be unwelcome.

Doesn't risk ruffling any feathers, and that's exactly what's wrong with it: It's less a satirical bite at the hand that feeds Guest than it is a toothless nibble, and it isn't particularly funny.

But while some may leave the theater tapping their toes and whistling the lyrics to such inimitable original ballads as "Hard for a Pimp" and "Whoop That Trick," they should hang their heads low and mourn the sorry state of the contemporary African-American movie.

At the movie's core, disguised with pitch-perfect Minnesota accent and bushy comb-over hairdo, the perpetually underrated Kurt Russell (as the late coach Herb Brooks) delivers a brilliant performance of immaculate control.

A small masterpiece of tone and form.

Love him or loathe him, Avrich proposes, Wasserman mattered -- which is a lot more than can be said for most of the multinationals and their MBA-bearing surrogates who came to run the studios in his wake.

There may not be two equal sides to every argument, but in giving such little credence to those who might oppose him, Jarecki makes us wonder what exactly it is he’s so afraid of.

Astonishingly inept alleged satire.

Richly satisfying both as subversive, music-biz primer and as gritty, true-life underdog story.

At every turn, we can sense what’s going on behind Kumiko’s doleful, downcast eyes; Kikuchi pulls us deeply into her world.

Winning performances by a number of fresh-faced newcomers are almost but not quite enough to recommend The Secret Lives of Dorks, a fitfully amusing, more often shrill and overstated teen comedy that, like its dweeby protagonist, tries too hard to impress.

The Place Beyond the Pines is a much bigger canvas, and scene by scene it can be riveting...But the disparate pieces never quite jell; the movie is all trees and no forest.

Lucas is a major figure, and Revenge of the Sith may be some kind of historic achievement -- the first movie in which it is fully impossible to tell where flesh ends and digital paint begins.

It is never less than fascinating — and sometimes dazzling — in its ambitions.

Z for Zachariah is a handsome-looking film (shot in widescreen, on remote New Zealand locations, by veteran David Gordon Green d.p. Tim Orr) and it doesn’t lack for provocative ideas, though it never digs quite deep enough into any of them.

This meticulously well-made picture is disarmingly funny at times - not least during the ballet of bloody absurdity that is the assassination itself - but also subdued and straight-faced, with one eye planted on 1979 and the other on the violent student demonstrations looming in the distance.

A dense and dazzling science-fiction mind-bender unassumingly dressed up in a tech geek’s short-sleeved oxford shirt, pocket protector and safety goggles.

Like most of Kaufman's work as a writer, Synecdoche, New York is a head trip that time and again returns to a place of real human emotion--in this case, to the idea that no matter how brilliant we may be or think we are, we're all looking for a little guidance (or, yes, direction) in life.

Came alive only in the presence of a supposed dead man -- specifically, the nefarious Lord Voldemort.

Matthew Barney delivers his masterpiece in Cremaster 3, unquestionably the 35-year-old sculptor-performance artist-filmmaker's most linear, most narratively inclined work to date.

These hunks of greased lightning tell how a gearhead SoCal teen got wind of the post-World War II hot-rodding craze, crossed paths with a pinstriper named von Dutch and ended up as the automotive visionary whom Tom Wolfe famously called “a genius of the only uniquely American art form.”

Here is a Western without irony or innovation, without any of the overt efforts toward “revisionism” we’ve come to expect even from Eastwood -- a movie that waxes elegiac about the end of the West, but remains sure that cowboys and cattle and ramshackle frontier towns will live on in perpetuity at the cinema.

Where The Gift toys with our expectations is in its refusal to align itself with any one character or to manufacture obvious heroes and villains.

It's forceful and alive and spilling over with crazy poetry.

Even at its most purplish and highfalutin (mostly in the “Her” section), “Eleanor Rigby” always aims for something sincere, and when Benson pulls back a bit — and stops trying to show us how much Freud he’s read and how many Bergman films he’s seen — the movie becomes vastly more engaging.

The result is 90 minutes in the company of some of the nicest and most boring people you can imagine ever having a movie made about them.

A stimulating scientific inquiry that may cause audiences to look at (and think about) the world around them in dramatically different terms.

[A] loosely structured, always informative, sometimes illuminating portrait docu.

Furious 7 provides both a satisfying chapter in the movies’ preeminent gearhead soap opera and a tactful, touching memorial to Walker.

Stewart’s confident, superbly acted debut feature works as both a stirring account of human endurance and a topical reminder of the risks faced by journalists in pursuit of the truth.

The result is a glorious low-tech pleasure that may be the most lyrical, phantasmagoric boys' adventure story since Joe Dante's Explorers.

The film arrives at a familiar conclusion -- that war is hell -- but the getting there is made uniquely unsettling by Dumont's relentlessly anti-psychological disposition.

Director Black is competent with the camera, but he seems to have instructed the entire cast to deliver their lines in hushed tones and pauses pregnant with hoped-for meaning -- except for Kwanten, whose overenthusiastic impersonation of a red-state rube is as grating as horseshoes on a blackboard.

The more vital subject of Mr. Holmes turns out to be our need for stories themselves and, in particular, the role of fiction as an escape from the pain and loss of everyday life.

Simply put, it represents the work of a filmmaker so exhilaratingly in command of his craft that he can, among other things, turn a single image of two people standing next to each other -- fully clothed, their bodies not quite touching -- into one of the most sublimely erotic moments we have ever beheld on the screen.

The movie is affectionate without exactly being infectious, and Browne, who begins his film with the Michael Moore–esque revelation that Americans bowl in greater numbers than they vote, disappoints by not devoting more attention to bowling in its amateur incarnations.

At its best, Behind the Mask offers some, um, cutting insights about mass-media blood lust and the cult of the serial killer, and in Baesel, who is by turns charming, manic and thoroughly scary, it has a gifted young actor who clearly relishes a role he can sink his pitchfork into.

It's "Rain Man" with ageism substituted for autism.

The new movie is a sleeker, faster, funnier piece of work — the sort of sequel (like “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan,” “Superman II” and “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” before it) that shrugs off the self-seriousness of its predecessor and fully embraces its inner Saturday-morning serial.

Marking does an admirable job of ceding centerstage to the Panthers without letting the film turn soft or letting her subjects turn themselves into latter-day Robin Hoods.

Jokes about impotence, menopause and other middle-aged maladies reside where a screenplay ought to live.

In most horror movies, it's a given that we should root for the heroes to make it out alive, but Diary of the Dead isn't nearly so certain, and so it terrifies us all the more.

While the respectable result is a more meaningful film than just about anything Mandoki worked on during his 17 years in Hollywood ("Angel Eyes," "Message in a Bottle"), pic suffers from an overindulgence of triumph-over-adversity cliches and a meandering narrative.

Dog Days is in fact a bleak but deeply felt humanism -- a yearning that we might all learn to better love our neighbors and, perhaps more importantly, ourselves.

The Bling Ring traces an intriguing feedback loop of which it is knowingly a part: a movie that affords its subjects the very immortality they so aggressively sought.

This represents at least as much of an artistic setback for Smith as "Chasing Amy" and "Dogma" were advances.

Not just the funniest but the smartest comedy around by a mile.

The movie's chief liability, though, is Rose herself, who also co-scripted with first-time director Robert Cary and who registers several notches below Nia Vardalos on the totem of unlikely double-threats.

As merry pranksters they have no match, and as they age (Knoxville is 35 now), they only grow in appeal. As they proudly hurl their tattooed (by ink and battle scars) bodies into harm's way, a devilish glint in their eyes, it's as if they've discovered the fountain of youth, and its name is Jackass.

Margot at the Wedding gives its characters (and us) something to laugh about.

Mann has done something transformative with Farrell: The Irish actor has never had this much charisma and natural authority in a role, and as he navigates that gray area between Crockett's real identity and his fabricated one, revealing subtle fissures in the character's cocksure facade, he's fascinating to watch.

The concept here holds more promise than the execution.

Rich in its love of surfing but curiously short on such footage, well-meaning directorial debut by producer Robert Mickelson is boosted by winning performances, but ultimately about as memorable as a day of 3-4 foot swells.

An enthralling, gorgeously mounted depiction of the complicated relationship between the post-Enlightenment writer and philosopher Friedrich Schiller and the sisters Charlotte von Lengefeld (who would become his wife) and Caroline von Beulwitz (his eventual biographer).

The film's power is undeniable, as a bittersweet valentine to Buzz and the many others who came to Hollywood and found a factory that produced dreams, yes, but nightmares too.

Cruise is probably the most graceful physical performer to occupy the screen since Burt Lancaster, and in this sort of action role, he's just about peerless...He may not be a great actor, but to find a greater movie star would be a nigh impossible mission.

This is a heartfelt endeavor, given weight by Shimono's extraordinary performance, in which the actor uses the subtlest flicks of his weary brow to call forth torrents of sorrow and minefields of regret.

There’s no denying, though, that Daniels knows how to push an audience’s buttons, and as crudely obvious as The Butler can be...it’s also genuinely rousing. By the end, it’s hard not to feel moved, if also more than a bit manhandled.

Far from a complete success: It takes too long to get to its central premise and, once there, too often meanders away from it. But Campbell is close to astonishing whenever she's onscreen.

Things could be worse. At the end of the day, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is nothing if not consistent -- taking care of business solidly, professionally and without a lick of the genuine wonderment or inspiration that you can find in surplus in Jon Favreau's Spielberg-influenced "Iron Man."

The quiet and intimacy of what is essentially a two-character piece are well juxtaposed by Brooks against the vast desert expanses of her home country, captured in sumptuous wide-screen cinematography by the great Ian Baker.

A sparkling and savvy comedy of political manners.

It’s a bit square, never particularly surprising, yet very rich in its sense of creative people and their spirit of self-reinvention.

There may be no other actor (Thornton)working today (or as frequently) who is this good each and every time out.

Take it or leave it, Alverson’s fourth feature is singular stuff, and it reconfirms the director as one of the truly bold voices in the all-too-homogenous U.S. indie film scene.

This is the umpteenth movie I’ve seen this year about guys in their 30s who aren't quite sure what they want to do with their lives, and it's the only one that strikes a real chord, because it's neither an exaltation nor a condemnation of slackerdom, but rather just a sweet little fable about how sometimes the life that you think could be so much better is actually pretty damn good already.

Shot quickly and cheaply in high-definition video and almost entirely on one set, the movie has almost zero visual energy, but it teems with snappy dialogue and the same carnival anarchy Lumet brought to "Dog Day Afternoon" and "Network."

McKinnon's direction is nothing if not atmospheric -- his best scenes unfold with a pungent languor that suggests the power of the backwoods to turn hours into days and days into years. If only the sum total were a movie more "In the Bedroom" than it is everything-but-the-kitchen-sink.

Scaled like an epic but possessing the narrative simplicity of a fable, The Warrior unfolds over a brisk 85 minutes of screen time, keeping dialogue to a minimum as it celebrates the power of stories told through handcrafted, CGI-free images.

Result is imperfect and overlong, but hugely ambitious and often breathtaking.

Michod’s sophomore feature isn’t exactly something we’ve never seen before, but it has a desolate beauty all its own, and a career-redefining performance by Robert Pattinson that reveals untold depths of sensitivity and feeling in the erstwhile “Twilight” star.

If Napoleon Dynamite really is, as reported, a semiautobiographical exercise, it is one of the most astoundingly self-hating such exercises in memory.

Love it or hate it, Northfork is a cinematic vision (visually and textually) unlike any with which most moviegoers, even arthouse regulars, will be familiar.

For a movie conceived and executed in the mainstream Hollywood idiom, it has uncommon depth and honesty.

Bardem, given the only fully fleshed-out character to play, is a marvel to behold...If only he had found a more soulful, less didactic movie to be plunked down into.

This genuine curio gets surprising mileage from Houellebecq’s deft, self-effacing performance at the center of a lively comic ensemble.

Beyond that surface grit, Intermission is still a fairly saccharine collage of self-redemptive gestures and happy endings that, true to its title, only fitfully compels.

While the entertainment value of Cloverfield is highly negotiable, it's clear that Abrams has consciously aligned himself with those filmmakers who have used the template of a grade-B monster/invasion movie -- Don Siegel, George Romero, Steven Spielberg -- as a stealth vessel for social commentary.

A perceptive, unsettling psychodrama marking the assured feature writing and directing debut of shorts filmmaker Kyle Henry.