Scott Foundas

Manna from gearhead heaven, the third and most guiltily pleasurable Furious emits the crude thrills of a 1950s drag-racing cheapie, only with souped-up Toyotas and Nissans in place of gas-guzzling hot rods, and slinky Asian temptresses substituted for poodle-skirted teenyboppers.

The Berlin File keeps narrative coherence far down on a priority list that privileges expertly choreographed hand-to-hand combat, hair-raising stunt work...and such familiar genre accoutrements as secret rooms hidden behind bookshelves, shiny metallic attaché cases, and pens concealing fast-acting vials of poison.

As in many of his films, Jaglom establishes a striking intimate rapport with his female subjects, and as the funny and bitter revelations pour forth, an activity that many men may view as something done strictly out of necessity takes on unforeseen narcotic, romantic and therapeutic dimensions.

At its core is a most affecting portrait of two people who love each other, but may no longer be able to live as one, and it is mostly a pleasure to spend two, or three, or five hours in their company.

Blessed with a witty script (by Zobel and co-writer George Smith), a talented ensemble of little-known character actors and a Meredith Willson-like feel for just-plain-folks Americans, this is a low-key but enormously charming picture.

The happiest marriage yet of the disparate propagandistic and narrative influences inherent in the subgenre of "religious" cinema.

Both “Ted” movies are, ultimately, one-joke affairs rooted in the idea of taking some emblem of childhood innocence and vulgarizing it.... That joke, though, turns out to be a resilient one, and the chemistry between Wahlberg and MacFarlane is infectiously puerile.

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.

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

Rigged toward a sentimental conclusion and overpopulated with cutesy touches (including a curtain-call finale), but there are many remarkable sights along the way.

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

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.

The movie isn't particularly tasteful or finely crafted -- but it grabs you by the jugular, and only during an overcooked climax does it finally relax its grip.

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.

MacDonald has seen enough horror movies of varying kinds to know what audiences expect, and one of the pleasures of Backcountry is how skillfully it toys with those expectations, setting us up for something like a Mumblecore “Straw Dogs” and ending up somewhere closer to a landlocked “Jaws.”

Though Lifshitz's attitude toward sex and sexuality ranks among the most progressive in contemporary movies, he doesn't belabor it; seen through his eyes, Wild Side is a love story in which love is unrestrained by matters of gender or sexual orientation or even the number of lovers.

Can a movie about global warming genuinely be called lighthearted? If so, Daniel B. Gold and Judith Helfand's Everything's Cool comes as close as one imagines possible, essaying yet more inconvenient truths about the potential future of our planet in the same buoyant, irreverent style the filmmakers brought to their last activist docu, "Blue Vinyl."

On the plus side, The Company is directed by Robert Altman, who's clearly drawn in by the rare opportunity of putting ballet on film, and who responds brilliantly...The rest of the time, the film fails to catch us up in the workaday intrigues of its characters (most of whom are played by real Joffrey dancers) the way Altman can when he's working in top 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.

This is as corny as it sounds, and yet not half as cloying and sentimental as you expect. At the end of the day, the horse may win the race, but the fate of the American heartland looms large and unresolved.

Fronted by a vibrant, deeply committed Al Pacino performance and very fine support from Greta Gerwig, this uneven but captivating film deserves to find its own audience, though doing so will surely prove to be an uphill climb.

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.

So weirdly fascinating is the tale of the Angulo clan that one wishes The Wolfpack were that much sharper, more searching and coherently organized. Still, there is much to enjoy in director Crystal Moselle’s debut documentary feature.

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.

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.”

What keeps Dheepan engaging throughout is the tremendous charisma of the performers.

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.

Pretty formulaic stuff: bland self-empowerment tinged with warm fuzzies in all the right places. But what makes this "Somebody" something is Pasquin's deft touch and understanding with the material.