Scott Tobias

Though some of the heated exchanges in Forgiving Dr. Mengele seem awkward and staged, they put Kor at the center of a riveting debate over how best to come to terms with past horrors, and the potential (and limits) of putting them to rest.

The scenes between Gelber and Blair are the strongest in Dark Horse, because they form a bond not out of shared interests or passion, but a weary kind of compromise.

Patrick Wilson rounds out the cast as McAdams' love interest, but his presence seems necessary only to classify Morning Glory as a romantic comedy. The heart of the movie is really McAdams' wonderfully contentious relationship with Ford.

The cast, anchored by sweetly goofy Ed Helms, redeems the film at every turn, adding humor and dimension to characters who might have otherwise drowned in tacky grotesquerie.

Valhalla Rising has the misfortune of starting with its best chapter and steadily growing more ponderous from there, dragged down by a religious theme that's as thin as the filmmaking is relentlessly spare. Yet it's a beautiful head trip, too.

Romantic comedies - and this is one, in spite of its phony irreverence - turn largely on star power, and theirs is transcendent, whether they're casually trading one-liners on the streets or doing running commentary on their sexual escapades. They'd have been better off staying in bed.

The weaknesses in Sayles' story and his occasional bouts with didacticism are far outweighed by the film's exceptional intimacy and humanity.

These images and reports have stirred consciences without quite stirring decisive action, and an earnest indie doc like this one seems like another cry in the wilderness.

Epstein and Friedman's doc-like approach also results in a certain dramatic stasis; Howl is a film aimed more for the head than the gut.

Not since Lecter has a role been this well suited to Hopkins, whose intelligence and pristine formality as an actor often make him seem alien--or worse, an incorrigible ham.

It's the product of a great dreamer and aesthete, rather than an authentic emotional experience--a gorgeous, crystalline bauble that really catches the light.

Builds to a key point about the consequences of democracies fighting terrorism by erasing its central tenets, but in doing so, it doesn't underplay the horrors wrought by Guzmán's organization.

There's a reason the underdog sports formula is followed over and over: When it's executed as skillfully as it is here, the damned thing works every time.

Working from Chantal Thomas' novel, Jacquot doesn't entirely scrape the gloss off this love triangle, which plays neither as a florid bodice-ripper nor as emotionally complex as it might have been. It stays on the surface, but at least that surface is gorgeous.

Argo's earthy features and self-effacing style make him a memorable foil to the flashier Walken. Without him, King Of New York might be written off as exploitative gangsta fare, all sleaze and decadence for its own sake. With him, it has the ballast of common decency.

Cross may not earn the broad recognition he deserves for his performance in It's a Disaster, a droll apocalypse comedy of exceedingly modest scale and even more modest commercial appeal. But it's still a master class in how to play the straight man right.

Singer's reverence for the 1978 version edges perilously close to mimicry, as if he has no new ideas to bring to the table, but he succeeds in drawing out the Superman myth with simple power and a refreshing absence of irony.

Whatever the case, We Own The Night plays like a masterpiece because it skillfully appropriates actual masterpieces, not because it earns the label on its own merits.

It's a struggle at times, mostly because the action-movie clichés haven't been weeded out of the script, but the film is cheerfully, irresistibly destructive - an old-fashioned, "Rio Bravo" shoot-'em-up with the hicktown spirit of "Tremors," though it isn't as good as either.

Had Pumpkinhead been made in the silent era, it might now be treated with the reverence granted Nosferatu.

There certainly are labored stretches and groan-inducing gags, but between the suggestive names (Melvin Jerkovski, Bootsie Goodhead, Principal Stuckoff), the deliberately broad characterizations (the Richie Rich type carries his tennis racket everywhere he goes), and the air of unbridled permissiveness, the film feels about as wholesome as a T&A-fest could possibly be. It makes a strong case for being the definitive work of a disreputable subgenre.

All of this free association falls under the wide umbrella of "experimental" cinema, meaning that the often flagging pace and incoherent stretches are balanced by sublime moments of inspiration.

Lourdes starts from the unexpected position of believing miracles are possible, but it doesn’t paper over the religious and practical problems they raise--for the blessed and bereft alike.

A hypnotic 80-minute drift through nocturnal New Orleans that seeks more to pick up on bits of culture and atmosphere than to tell any stories. They blow up the conventions of documentary realism to capture the city's soul, a much more abstract, elusive undertaking.

The film gets its distinction from the performances by Cheung and Nolte, whose scenes together are suffused with loss and unexpected mutual compassion.

After being strapped down by a run of elegant, high-class literary adaptations--"The English Patient," "The Talented Mr. Ripley," and "Cold Mountain"--writer-director Anthony Minghella liberates himself in Breaking And Entering, his first wholly original screenplay since his piercing, minor-key debut feature "Truly, Madly, Deeply."

Hits the sweet spot between stunning ineptitude, hilariously dated period touchstones, and a touching naïveté that gives it an odd distinction. As with the other so-bad-it's-good sensations that have toured the midnight circuit over the last few years - "The Room," "Birdemic," "Troll 2" - its awkwardness comes partly from a foreign-born auteur making an American film, and the culture clash plays out for all to see.

Love stories don’t come much squirmier than this one, and Alvarez plays it with honesty, insight, and the awkwardness inherent in this blindest of blind dates.

Davis and Heilbroner lean a bit too hard on the most outrageous forms of abuse in the pre-Stonewall era, as opposed to the everyday traumas of living in the closet, but Stonewall Uprising picks up momentum once it starts detailing the event itself, drawing on the vivid memories of the people who lived it.

The dramatic stakes are high in Fightville, and Epperlein and Tucker shine a little light on the margins of this marginalized sport.

Gosling and Stone, too, have wonderful chemistry; their all-night "seduction" sequence is the film's highlight, witty and effortlessly sexy.

Chabrol develops the inevitable confrontation between the two men like a car wreck in slow motion, and getting there takes a little more work than it should; the film takes the form of a thriller, but it doesn't have the pace of one.

They never come up with a sufficient reason for crossing into Afghanistan. Their motives for heading straight into a war zone sound like something out of a stoner comedy: They went in search of "really big naan."

In easily her best performance - and sadly, one few will see, given the film's modest release strategy - Jessica Biel stars as a single mother in Cold Rock, Washington.

A sampler of novella-length films set in three different time periods and starring the same two actors, Hou Hsiao-hsien's Three Times resembles one of those delicate trios served at fine restaurants, each a fresh interpretation of a common ingredient.

A sort of distracted, freewheeling form of inquiry and observation drives Encounters At The End Of The World, a loosely constructed documentary that seems to have been made on a whim.

Ideally cast as Reiser's stand-in, Joseph Gordon-Levitt digs into a character role that also gives him a chance to show off the comedic chops he developed during his years on "3rd Rock From The Sun."

It's also, in its sick, sick way, a real crowd-pleaser.

Those schooled in Eastern European history may have better luck deciphering it, but what keeps it compelling throughout is Loznitsa's direction, which favors sophisticated long takes and particularly suspenseful use of foreground and background action. His next film should be a doozy.

Only about half of 1929's The Cocoanuts, an early sound-era comedy, was entrusted to the Marx brothers' vaudevillian antics; the rest was left to drippy Irving Berlin songs, kick-lines of bathing beauties, and a half-baked subplot about a stolen necklace. Yet the good scenes establish the Marx dynamic to hilarious effect.

Markevicius tells this incredible yarn through the significantly less exciting format of an ESPN-style documentary, which gets the job done with minimal flourish. Still, he employs former Lithuanian greats like Arvydas Sabonis and Sarunas Marciulionis to serve as guides to the country's past and present, and the basketball culture that's thrived there under the best and worst of times.

Special recalls a minor-key "Donnie Darko," but its vision is much more limited, and it sinks into Indiewood cliché whenever it reaches for profundity.

For most of the way, right up until a hastily contrived and deeply unsatisfying ending, the film perceptively sketches a fractured identity, a man who enters a new life carrying painful remnants of the old.

It's a fittingly loose, shambling little nothing of a comedy that's occasionally inspired, but at least a draft or two short of its potential. Still, it's a pleasure to watch Faris--a gifted, likeable comedian who tends to be the best element of many terrible movies.

It’s a crude, clunky piece of writing, hampered by variable performances and a leading man whose looks of silent resolve are more compelling than his line-readings. Yet the film has the elemental power of a classic immigrant story, revealing a young man’s single-minded, arduous journey to America through black-and-white images that evoke the country’s promise to the huddled masses.

Quite apart from its environmental agenda, the film is a reminder that there's no space for substance in political discourse: A 30-second soundbite on global warming could easily be brushed off as tree-hugging rhetoric, but after 100 minutes of level-headed elaboration, it's chillingly undeniable.

She was simultaneously a pariah and a marked woman, and Amenta respectfully honors her quixotic, deeply lonely quest for justice.

Rossi never gets around to exploring his opening question: What would the world be without The New York Times? Perhaps, as with a lot of his subjects here, the answer is just too painful to consider, no matter the economic realities.

Though its heroine's mysterious seizures and blackouts are terrifying in the way they undermine her quest for self-determination, Requiem isn't a horror movie so much as a thwarted coming-of-age story, like "Carrie" without the bloody reckoning.

Once the action shifts to the dead-eyed denizens of Santa Mira, the remote town that Silver Shamrock calls home, the film becomes a sly and creepy indictment of corporate engineering. It’s not what Halloween fans wanted—and Wallace rubs it in by showing a couple of clips from the original film on TV—but take the Halloween part away and Season Of The Witch is a standalone oddity worth considering on its own terms.

There's nothing particularly distinctive or engaging about Wetzel's fly-on-the-wall style, which feels like second-hand Frederick Wiseman. But for hardcore foodies, El Bulli offers a clear, unvarnished look at the master at work.

The mix of blunt sexual politics and dime-store-paperback luridness has the bracing quality of tub-brewed rotgut. It eats away at the stomach lining - that is, if it can be stomached at all.

When victims and their families talk about having their lives wrecked by a sexually abusive priest in the forceful documentary Deliver Us From Evil, that destruction is as much spiritual as psychological.

Save The Date's achievements are modest - it could be funnier and more affecting, and it ends with a shrug - but the film is wise about sibling relationships, the uncertainty of youth, and smaller matters, like the way people relate to each other after a break-up.

Its hero may be on a mission from above, but in a refreshing twist, the fate of mankind rests with the literate.

The big payoff, of course, is Neil Patrick Harris reprising his role as "Neil Patrick Harris."

It's an enormous scoop for a Western filmmaker, but a potentially compromising one, too. How much can a filmmaker challenge the dubious elements of Dresnok's story? At what point can the film be considered an unwitting propaganda tool for an oppressive, totalitarian system?

Pleasing mainly just as a message-in-a-bottle from a restless, persecuted artist-that is, until the amazing closing shot, which brings the volatility of post-Green Revolution Iran home with unforgettable force.

Going The Distance could stand to color outside the lines a bit more, but it's perceptive about the problems of young people torn between pursuing love or their nascent career ambitions, and the witty script, by first-timer Geoff LaTulippe, is spiked with refreshing profanity.

Segel has always played more a serial monogamist than a horndog, and his earnest, self-deprecating screen persona graces the film's crudest moments with a kind of innocence.

The problem with Sicko--one endemic to Moore documentaries in general--is that it never confronts any challenges to its position, which can make it seem like the crudest sort of agitprop.

Madsen casts doubt on the notion that this Pandora's box will never be opened, either by some cataclysmic event, like another Ice Age, or drilling by future generations who may not be aware of Onkalo, or even able to decipher warnings of its contents. Something terrible seems likely to happen-just not today.

Modest, personal, and nicely proportioned, Red Flag resembles one of Hong Sang-soo’s self-reflexive doodles about relationships and filmmaking — "Oki’s Movie," in particular — and it wisely doesn’t take too big a bite.

The primary challenge for all blockbuster franchises is to be big yet fleet. Iron Man is as good as model as any, thanks largely to Robert Downey Jr.’s flamboyantly narcissistic Tony Stark and filmmakers that valued pacing and character as much as superhero hardware.

A Molière this good deserves a more substantive portrait, but this one will do for now.

Random silliness rules the day, but the gags are frequently surprising.

He's (Corbijn) a patient, fastidious filmmaker with a great eye-ideal for his subject here-but his austerity doesn't entirely erase the suspicion that he doesn't have much on his mind. His film is a triumph, but it may be a triumph of style over substance.

The entertaining new documentary The Heart Of The Game at least acknowledges many of the same conflicts that arose in Hoop Dreams, even though it's really more about two outsized personalities and their infectious passion for the sport.

Rocket Science doesn't go too far into Todd Solondz-style mockery, either; though painful to witness at times, Thompson's determination to face his fears--not just of speaking, but of girls, too--is heartbreakingly noble and courageous.

It also, in its best moments, makes horror out of the 21st-century obsession with self-documentation.

It's common for coaches to take roles as father figures on a high-school and college level, but Undefeated gets into how that dynamic works on both ends, as Courtney seeks to salve the pain of his family history.

Though it's a ramshackle piece of filmmaking, Best Worst Movie is an honest one, too, staying open to awkward, humbling moments while still making a solid case for the film's immortal badness.

The Lie's payoff strikes an unexpected, refreshingly open note that makes this slight little indie more resonant than its scale suggests. The line this couple is about to cross is significant, and the film takes it seriously.

Many of its fiercest detractors may be surprised to find that it's a far more sobering piece of speculative fiction than they might have imagined.

The best moments of Maïwenn's Polisse, about the dedicated members of a Child Protection Unit in northern Paris, have the same quality, a fly-on-the-wall docu-realism that feels eerily like the real thing.

Tamahori’s workmanlike production doesn’t match the elemental power of Mamet’s script, and it fails to evoke the harsh physical conditions that turn ordinary, civilized men into resourceful survivalists and predators.

Director Burr Steers (Igby Goes Down) doesn't always have a firm handle on what is and isn't appropriate; the film makes a few sharp detours into misogyny, and the level of smuttiness is surprisingly high, which may be a function of Efron wanting to grow away from his core audience too fast.

It's a chilling film about the routine business of unspeakable acts.

Hill, dialing back on the pissy vulgarity of his supporting roles in "Knocked Up" and "Funny People," makes the perfect foil, as passive and impressionable as Brand is reckless and impulsive.

Radio Unnameable is at its best when it tries to find some visual analog to Fass' vibe, courtesy of cinematographer John Pirozzi, who takes beautiful snapshots of a sleepless city. It also, in the Fass way, does a little meandering.

With its obligatory plot points, character arcs, and forced resolution, the narrative's demands tax Cross and Odenkirk's sensibility by limiting their freedom of movement. Yet even in its current bastardized form, the film still flickers with moments of great inspiration and vitality, providing isolated hints at the groundbreaking comedy that might have been.

The film belongs to Linney, whose caustic putdowns and status-seeking veneer barely hides her genuine hurt over her husband's philandering and her distant relationship to her own child. No doubt her diaries would be more compelling than the nanny's.

Coming after the inspired trifecta of "Dracula: Pages From A Virgin's Diary," "Cowards Bend The Knee," and "The Saddest Music In The World," Brand feels a little like boilerplate Maddin rather than a fresh burst of inspiration.

Flight was commissioned by producers overseas, and it feels similarly, impeccably slight.

The Abandoned is a rare horror film that moves from the real world into a kind of psychic space, and slowly suffocates its characters inside their own heads.

If the role brings her more recognition and work, all the better, but Leo certainly isn't lobbying for it. She doesn't show off. She just does what she's always done: Reveals a character for who she is, nothing more, nothing less.

Put simply, the film excels most at not being awful.

It’s a sturdy bridge between two markedly different filmmaking cultures.

Benson and Moorhead have made a horror film for jaded aficionados, deconstructing and reconstructing tired elements into a gnarled, distinctive Frankenstein's monster. This monster might ransack a village, but it would have to think about it first.

The writing is clumsy, with information packed crudely into the dialogue, and his attention to the performances is inversely proportional to his attention to style. Yet his “New York” has an eerie, deserted, otherworldly quality—much as Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut would later—and some of the individual setpieces are spectacularly vibrant.

Watching the Australian coming-of-age film Somersault is a little like watching a fluffy white bunny hop through a minefield, one tiny spring away from becoming tonight's rabbit stew.

Paranormal Activity 3 has one new technical wrinkle, and it's brilliant: In addition to the cameras in the bedroom, Smith mounts a third to the base of a rotating electric fan, so it pans back and forth from the dining room to the kitchen and back again.

Steinbauer's eagerness to draw information--and, let's face it, exclusive new clips--out of his recalcitrant subject borders on exploitation at times, but the smart, cagey Rebney has an agenda of his own that Steinbauer can't entirely control or define. The documentary gives him a forum to be his funny, irreducible self, which is a luxury the accidentally famous are rarely afforded.

The Last Rites Of Joe May succeeds in some of the smaller details and the soulful performances.

Reserving the only trace of editorializing for the end credits, which list some sobering numbers on the occupation and this so-called successful election, Poitras mainly allows her subjects and the circumstances to speak for themselves.

On one level, it's a down-market Star Wars-inspired shoot-'em-up for kiddies; on another, it's a radical alien invasion story where the HUMANS are the aliens.

Europa has been described as a Kafka-esque fever dream, and while that isn't inaccurate, it's also a cover for the film's confounding narrative, which wends through murky noir plotting, a polyglot of accents and performance styles, and surreal interludes. The best approach is not to puzzle too much over the details, and to marvel at von Trier's technical wizardry, which re-imagines the period through a patchwork of vivid impressions.

It's no surprise that Bridemaids sputters, coughs, and lurches, but it's a winning shambles, buoyed by a sharp, balanced comedic ensemble and some truthful observations about how close friends adapt when their lives fall out of step.

When the goal is simply to be as faithful as possible to the material - as if a movie were a marriage, and a rights contract the vow - the best result is a skillful abridgment, one that hits all the important marks without losing anything egregious. And as abridgments go, they don't get much more skillful than this one.

Writer-director Charles Sturridge doesn't mess with the Lassie formula--he provides plenty of dog-porn shots of the collie bounding through scenery in slow motion--but the overqualified cast puts the film over the top.

The film rescues the story from tabloid hell, and asks for a saner assessment of a deeply flawed man.

You, Me And Dupree isn't terribly democratic about spreading the laughs around; whenever Wilson disappears from the screen, the comedy evaporates in kind.

Iron Crows isn't the miserablist wallow you might expect. While director Park Bong-Nam observes the hazards of ship-breaking with a thoroughness that borders on fetishization, he also catches the humor and camaraderie of men in the trenches.

A damning example of justice bending toward those who can most afford to buy it.

If nothing else, Margin Call serves as a rebuke to "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps" emphatic style - which ultimately glamorizes the profession it means to shame - and brings this dangerous numbers game back to the trading-floor desktops and mahogany-covered conference tables where it belongs. It isn't sexy, but the stakes feel much higher.

The entries aren't equally strong, of course, but each comes from a sharp outsider's perspective, approaching Tokyo as a strange, mysterious organism that infects the populace.

Shot with such grit that the lenses seem coated with grease, Fratricide offers a myopic impression of an unnamed German city, and that's probably the point, since so much of its territory and opportunities are sealed off from these immigrant characters.

The documentary dashes any lingering hope that Pixies would ever record a new album, even though it makes no definitive statement to that effect.

Intimate, moving documentary.

Mostly, Nothing But The Truth operates a lot like Billy Ray's "Shattered Glass" and "Breach," offering up the sort of no-nonsense, meat-and-potatoes docudrama that's in short supply these days.

American Swing could use the flair of similar portraits of disco-era debauchery like "Boogie Nights" or "Inside Deep Throat," but it’s even-handed in capturing the operation’s ambition and hubris. Just don’t bring an appetite.

In an unfortunate case of star casting, Cruise strains credibility as a hard-edged Jersey dockworker.

Lacking a more specific sense of time and place, Cinderella Man leans heavily on the technically proficient Crowe to slip into Braddock's skin, but he can only do so much with a character who's ready to be mounted in bronze over Central Park.

Adapted from a long-running stage play, The Dinner Game has been refined to peak comic efficiency, with every misunderstanding and hare-brained scheme neatly cascading into bigger and bigger catastrophes.

Cutie And The Boxer chronicles a marriage that’s extraordinary in many ways, and ordinary in one—it’s a constant work in progress.

Ballard makes a simple, deeply affecting emotional associations between Amy, her father, the geese, and the absent mothers and cinematographer Caleb Deschanel bathes the action in an appropriately magisterial beauty.

The film seems content with the more modest ambitions of a romantic comedy, albeit one with unusually potent wit and intricate construction. The old Ealing could never have afforded Parker's deluxe treatment of the material; the new Ealing seems to have forgotten the benefits of economy.

Through Brody's remarkably controlled, self-effacing performance, Polanski succeeds in making his hero an invisible man, but the sights he conjures are surprisingly artless and ordinary, familiar from a dozen other Holocaust dramas. Among the casualties in The Pianist is a great director's imagination.

Hopkins' increasing disconnection with his fellow actors and the material nearly sabotages Proof, an otherwise-respectable adaptation of David Auburn's Pulitzer Prize-winning play.

Matti’s primary order of business is regularly serving up tense, stylish action sequences, and he proves more adept choreographing those than sorting out the convolutions of his parallel plotlines.

Willow Creek does everything a little bit better than others of its kind. It’s a little wittier, a little more insightful, a little more imaginative, a little scarier.

Much like his overrated 2000 opus "Platform," Unknown Pleasures spends more energy fussing over the backdrop than on the poor souls languishing in the fore, who have little to do but wander aimlessly and symbolically as life passes them by.

Once these players strap on their skates and take to the ice, it's hard to suppress that lump in the throat.

A powerful documentary about a squad of Army grunts patrolling the Iraqi city of Fallujah in late 2004.

Freaky Friday mines a lot of laughs from common misapprehensions adults have about adolescent life, with fun bits of observation about schoolwork, dating, and other practices where kids have to bend the rules in order to survive.

Though it's still too reliant on a sloppy, gag-a-second style, Stuck On You gets through the arid stretches by leaning on some winning performances, most notably from a hilarious Seymour Cassel.

More than the first Magic Mike, XXL is a loose, shambling party bus—or party organic fro-yo food truck, to be more exact—and everyone’s having a great time. These are entertainment professionals, after all, and the audience is in good hands.

Broken Wings doesn't stray far from the common melodrama in its setup and resolutions, but Bergman's uncommon sensitivity makes the film feel specific, intimate, and utterly plausible at every turn.

The Long Walk has an impressively sober understanding of what rebellion looks like in a nation that’s fully smothered by an oppressive regime.

The scenes between Cage and Caine are by far the film's most affecting. The two men don't seem to share the same gene pool, which only helps their dynamic.

Knuckleball! looks and feels like a standard ESPN documentary, slickly packaged and a little bloodless, and Stern and Sundberg lean a little heavily on music to goose up the excitement.

For all its pervasive irritations and lack of discipline, succeeds in using below-the-belt tactics to get its message across, especially for those unschooled in the rarified world of oenophilia.

Poking fun at uptight British civility has long been a monocle-shattering comedic staple, and Mrs. Henderson Presents gets by for a while on its genial naughtiness.

Mostly it's just a good yarn, with attractive picture-postcard vistas and an agreeable strain of light humor.

It’s easier to tell the story of a smashing success or an utter failure, because there’s drama inherent to either scenario, but what Hansen-Løve accomplishes with Eden is trickier, a feeling of being adrift in a scene where people are already invited to lose themselves to dance.

While Lenny Cooke’s considerable social and emotional resonance still doesn’t measure up to Hoop Dreams’, the Safdies beautifully evoke the other side of the professional game, the many basketball casualties who don’t get movies made about them.

My Friend Victoria has a specific vibrancy as delicate and understated as Lessing's social critique. It's an accumulation of small moments: telling gazes, sour notes in the dialogue, the persistent impression of a woman who's in a room but never fully present.

Wyatt is a supremely confident filmmaker. His style is multitudes sleeker than Reisz’s original, but his eclectic taste, particularly in the soundtrack, reveals a true connection to the earlier era.

A little of this stuff goes a long way with Cattet and Forzani, who have always seemed more immersed in image-making than in the tedious business of telling a story with a mind toward pace and characterization. To experience their films is to toggle between exhilaration and enervation, and hope the balance tips the right way in the end, which it ultimately does with Reflection in a Dead Diamond.

Serves as a fascinating window into an era of radical dissent that now seems centuries past.

When Porn Theatre stays in the darkness, its minute observations about grindhouse culture are hypnotic in their accumulating detail.

Fiennes is the perfect John Le Carré hero: reserved and sophisticated, possessing the driest of wits, yet deceptively passionate in a way that people never really anticipate from him.

If the independent film world were littered with alleged disasters like The Brown Bunny, the scene would be far richer for it.

Though never unpleasant, thanks largely to Cámara and Peña's warmly convincing performances, Torremolinos 73 only really takes off when it deals with the filmmaking process.

If constructing a thriller could be likened to building a house, then Wes Craven's Red Eye is a perfect piece of architecture: It's clean-lined and soundly structured, without a foot of wasted space or any materials left unused.

Locking into the film’s rhythms requires patience and an abandonment of preconceptions, but it’s nonetheless Alonso’s most accessible work to date, buoyed by spare but lush photography and Viggo Mortensen’s magnetic presence in the lead role. It takes a special kind of charisma to bring viewers along on a journey to nowhere.

While In America doesn't convince as an immigrants-in-the-U.S. story, it resonates powerfully as a portrait of grief and reconciliation.

In the end, it feels like a life aestheticized, not examined.

A dense, challenging work by any measure, Japón snakes toward a justly celebrated final shot that's technically astonishing and immensely powerful, cementing the arrival of a promising new talent.

To its enormous credit, doesn't cast the conflict as cut-and-dried exploitation. It presents something altogether more complex--too complex, unfortunately, for an 85-minute documentary to elucidate perfectly.

The film satisfies in much the same way Allen's movie-a-year comedies used to satisfy.

Some of the strongest scenes are candid front-stoop sessions in which the kids swap gossip and float some hilariously pre-sexual theories on romance.

The always-interesting Jane, a volatile and unpredictable character actor, fits the bill.

For most of the way, the film is perceptive about the hot-and-cold volatility of wounded relationships, when couples are struggling to communicate yet familiar enough to exploit each other's weaknesses.

There are strong ideas at play in Noé's undeniably audacious and technically stunning second feature, which goes as far as any film can in revealing the breakdown of order and the deterioration of the rational mind.

McCarthy’s voice comes through strongly enough to excuse the film’s excesses and cast its more generic plot elements in a new light.

Brilliant in flashes, thinned out as a whole, the film seems ideal for the DVD revolution, where the greatest hits can be compiled at the touch of a remote.

The question of whether Maier, a recluse, would have ever wanted someone like Maloof to bring her into the light is troubling, and perhaps impossible to resolve, but Maloof’s passion for her work and his boundless curiosity about her history certainly make for a riveting documentary.

Provides enough happy endings to make the audience forget that romance and Christmas miracles don't always work out.

As director Dominique Benicheti invites the audience to contemplate this way of life—and that’s all the film seeks to accomplish, which is plenty—he reveals the virtues of simplicity, routine, and quietly communing with the natural world.

Cobbled together from borrowed parts, Jean-Claude Brisseau's Secret Things makes a fearsome Frankenstein monster out of other movies, yet the influences are so thoroughly digested that they come out seeming wholly original.

Caetano's blunt, deterministic ending underlines the point too neatly, but in dignifying an outcast whose life is treated as anonymous and disposable, he puts a human face on a national tragedy.

The Rwandan genocide was one of the most shameful marks on Bill Clinton's presidency, but for all the film's powerful images, George stops short of the forceful political statement that Rusesabagina's story demands.

Every part of Wojtowicz’s story is touched by madness, though The Dog doesn’t miss the depression and tragedy that lingers around it.

For the soldiers, it's about living to see the next day and living with the things they see, and Gunner Palace honors their perspective like no other Iraq documentary has to date.

Even in its rougher patches, The Spectacular Now has a disarming earnestness that keeps it on the level, helped along by two superb lead performances that add up to more than their sum.

Kutcher and Peet are a low-wattage pair, with little of the verbal riffing that counts as seduction in most romantic comedies, but they have real chemistry together, and A Lot Like Love happily indulges their silly, juvenile one-upmanship.

Ozon tosses an abundance of twisted psychology into the stew, but he leaves the audience to sort it out for themselves. Young & Beautiful has the detached air of other Ozon productions, and Vacth gives so little away as Isabelle that she’s eternally an unsolved problem.

Seidl could not be clearer in his associations between religion and sex, but in Paradise: Faith, he’s slightly less successful in mining them for greater insights.

It's only human to feel gripped, enraged, and even moved by the events depicted in Innocent Voices, a true account of one boy's experience in the crossfire of El Salvador's long, bloody civil war.

The vibrant rap drama Hustle & Flow wraps the authentic around the inauthentic, telling an underdog story that sticks to formula, yet resonates with an undeniably real energy and texture.

Shows an unusual degree of generosity toward all its characters, and its tenderness yields some affecting moments, even if they don't ring entirely true.

The constant in The Imitation Game is Benedict Cumberbatch’s terrific performance as Turing, which has much in common with his delightfully mercurial Sherlock Holmes, but with an underpinning of repressed emotion and quiet despair.

It’s odd to see a romance that commences with rough trade in an alleyway end up feeling like a spiritual descendent of Bend It Like Beckham.

Whether Edwards intended it or not—and his inclusion of hippies in the third act points to yes—The Party seems keyed into the spirit of ’68, with the house representing the upending of old money and hidebound tradition.

Funny and endearing.

Layton is a confident storyteller and the various subplots in Winslow’s pulpy scenario converge elegantly, even if they’re a bit secondhand.

Comparisons to "Taxi Driver" are unavoidable and mostly unflattering to Mueller's film, but Assassination engages more directly with the political fissures of the time, which deeply divided the nation.

The mimicry is so pronounced that it’s hard to locate a distinct, original sensibility beyond the film’s apparent influences. But talented young directors often need time to develop into singular ones, and there’s value in Coppola’s sensual, always-sympathetic feel for lost adolescents.

When its many secrets spill out in the finale, “The Housemaid” has to cheat a little to pull off a humdinger of a twist, but it’s enormously satisfying anyway, if only for bringing the core historical conflict back to the fore.

May be Assayas' airiest work to date, an intriguing trifle that leaves its considerable pleasures to lounge around on the surface.

Turning Manchester’s story into more of a drama than a comedy feels counterintuitive, and Roofman can feel a little slow and gloppy for missing the laughs. Yet Tatum and Dunst are deeply invested in their roles, and Cianfrance loads up on ace character actors.

Die My Love is ultimately a more insightful film about motherhood than marriage, but the sheer force of Ramsay and Lawrence’s collaboration turn Grace into an essential woman under the influence.

LaGravenese lets real-life messiness keep it off a straight track, coming up with an unexpected and touching portrait of platonic friendship.

The film lacks the discipline to stay on point all the time, but Fey and director Mark S. Waters (Freaky Friday) have fun with offbeat throwaway touches.

While Creep has the limited scope of DIY filmmaking at its most rudimentary, that contributes to a tone that’s unusually playful and entertaining without coming off as a lark.

The cheetah is the star in Duma, and no one directs animals more convincingly than Ballard, who knows better than anyone how to integrate patchwork nature shots into narrative action. Too bad the two-legged talking animals aren't as compelling this time out.

Leitman gets some wonderful tall tales from her subjects, who open up like they've been waiting for years for someone to come along and ask, and she complements it with punishing footage of their exploits.

Only half a great movie, because the other half follows a separate but related thread that isn't nearly as compelling.

With no greater ambition than reworking the Police Academy movies, Broken Lizard comes up with a winning formula: one part laughs to two parts goodwill.

It’s a sick piece of work—I felt like a heel for watching it, yet I couldn’t look away, either.

Though it has the dramatic apparatus of fiction, the film unfolds with a documentary-like openness to the world around it.

Based on true events, À Tout De Suite reveals the seductions of criminal life to be something like Stockholm Syndrome for Le Besco.

The Sure Thing is queasily old-fashioned, a raunchy road trip without the raunch that nonetheless trades on sex-comedy stereotypes: party animals in Hawaiian shirts, tea-sipping no-fun-niks in neutral-colored sweaters, and a compliant blonde sex doll that is, in fact, a sure thing. The film takes baby steps to something better.

Ends with horrific revelations that are made all the more powerful by the lightness that precedes them. Simultaneously sad and hopeful, Ghobadi suggests the resiliency of a culture in which war is part of the fabric of everyday life.

The grace notes in Dujardin’s performance are an important booster for The Connection, which conspicuously lacks the grit and flavor of William Friedkin’s tangentially related The French Connection, and at worst unfolds like Scorsese-lite.

The film might have been more powerful, not to mention fair, if the nuns believed they were doing right; only on movie night, when McEwan sees herself in Ingrid Bergman in "The Bells Of St. Mary's," does Mullan grant her so much as the delusion of rectitude.

It can be a bit of a slog, frankly, but Schilinski’s command over the look and feel of the film, from the evocative Academy-format images to the unnerving rumble of the soundtrack, sinks into your bones. The more it shimmers with uncanny horror, the better.

At once predatory and vulnerable, Jung has a primitive intensity that speaks louder than words, carrying an enigmatic and often maddeningly elusive film that's short on dialogue, rational behavior, and narrative logic.

Though it doesn't rise above the cut-and-paste aesthetic of other making-of documentaries, The Siberian Mammoth assembles many members of the disparate Cuban cast and crew, and unearths some rare production photos and footage.

It's not often that good movies have a hole in the center, but Nina's Tragedies labors admirably to develop the strong feelings of longing and heartbreak that unite its damaged souls, however briefly.

Smartly conceived and meticulously executed, if too slight and gimmicky to have much resonance.

Though the results are a matter of record, the uplift is nevertheless intoxicating, even enough to compensate for a film that routinely substitutes corny iconography for real imagination and vision.

Until its pat, implausible conclusion, the film has the edgy nerve of a classic amour fou, charting a complex relationship with the sort of bumpy, unpredictable spirit that would do Cassavetes proud.

The kids are great, but when they graduate from Rock School, will the valedictorian be the next Jimmy Page, or the technically proficient lead guitarist of a Led Zeppelin cover band?

Even with shaggy, semi-improvised projects like Crystal Fairy, there’s a need for some kind of conclusion, and Silva devises one that’s simultaneously terribly contrived and by far the most powerful scene in the movie.

As a domestic melodrama, the film sometimes plays like The Honeymooners without the laughs, but the push and pull between the flashbacks and the interrogation scenes gain steadily in strength as the case gets harder to pin down. There’s more to these characters—and this movie—than initially meets the eye.

Dekker knows who she is, what she wants to do, and how to get it done, and Maidentrip wisely sails off the tailwinds of her confidence and boundless curiosity.

Plays like a 90-minute wake, albeit a warm and humorous one.

May represents something rare and unfashionable-–a smart, twisted little slasher comedy that doesn't skimp on the gore.

Though frequently dazzling, Kings And Queen proves that a bunch of punchy singles don't necessarily make an album.

When it steers away from campaign-ad testimonials and considers Kerry's moral awakening in Vietnam and beyond, Going Upriver features some tremendously powerful scenes.

Like a lot of scenes in Funny Ha Ha, the commonplace somehow seems invigoratingly original.

A beautiful, mysterious, beguiling cinematic doodle, and an absolute master class in mise-en-scène, unfolding in odd, fragmented frames and precisely choreographed movement within those frames.

For a big-budget Hollywood feature, the film places an unusually high amount of stock in the audience's imagination; not since "The Others" or "The Blair Witch Project" have so many shocks been indirect or kept teasingly out of view.

Calls on De Niro to drum up the sort of emotional intensity that's been allowed to atrophy of late. City By The Sea isn't always worthy of him, but it makes enough demands to bring out his best.

Calling it a mess would be both accurate and pointless, because a tidier comedy would squeeze the life out of this vital, generous blob of a film.

Abouna starkly defines the masculine and feminine influence in raising children, and what happens when they're not so complementary.

Trobisch has made a drama of tragic accommodation — limited not to one woman’s sexual assault, but to the everyday interactions that all women must navigate carefully.

Shattered Glass simply sinks its teeth into a juicy story, never better than when Sarsgaard methodically paints the sniveling Christensen into a corner.

As a buddy-cop movie, The Heat seems almost deliberately generic, with boilerplate plotting carried across with zero panache. It wagers that McCarthy and Bullock’s comic energy will make all the difference—a smart bet, as it happens.

To her credit, Hamilton lays out their story cleanly and with no small amount of tension, all while drawing strong connections to Watergate, the Pentagon Papers, and the Edward Snowden case.

Mordantly funny deadpan comedy.

Daniel Dencik’s unusual documentary Expedition To The End Of The World sounds like a grand seafaring adventure, as expeditions to untraversed Arctic territory tend to be, but its tone is much more philosophical.

There's something pure about the crude pleasures of Hobo with a Shotgun, a pre-fab cult film that aspires to nothing more (or less) than the red-meat feeding of a feral midnight-movie audience.

Screenwriter William Broyles, Jr., a former Vietnam pilot and "Newsweek" editor, connects reasonably well with the material, but "American Beauty" director Sam Mendes has a tendency to smooth out the rough edges, and the film goes flat as month-old soda.

Until filmmakers get a little distance, maybe they'd be better off ignoring such projects.

Through it all, Gheorghiu finds the perfect pitch between a mother’s love for her child and a kind of pathology.

Photographed in muted interiors and under perpetually cloudy skies, Félix And Meira has the somber tone of a romance couched in painful sacrifice, but there’s also sweetness and joy in Meira slowly emerging from her shell.

The film's modest charms are ingratiating and sweet, thanks to Colm Meaney's hilariously salty lead performance and a soundtrack that channels the warm spirit of traditional Ceili music.

Sumptuously photographed in bright primary colors, with equally immaculate period clothing and design, Untold Scandal lacks some of the emotional and thematic depth of previous adaptations, but it has the refreshing candor and explicitness that marks the current wave of Korean cinema.

At a time when the once-dominant romantic comedy is an endangered species, What If proves the formulas can still work, under the right circumstances, and without really needing to tweak the recipe much.

Matt Wolf’s innovative documentary is a bracing reminder that the notion of adolescence as distinct from childhood and adulthood is a relatively modern phenomenon.

None of it would work without Hathaway, whose self-possession and lack of irony represents a throwback to old-fashioned Hollywood wholesomeness and glamour.

Sweet-natured and likable to a fault, the film studiously avoids confronting the darker themes of death and religion that bubble up from its story, no matter how central they are to the characters' lives.

For the fascinating character study Imelda, Ramona S. Diaz was given a month's access to the former first lady, who supplies so many bizarre equivocations that it's hard to tell whether her actions were malicious or merely delusional.

For a film about man who spent half his life defying staid convention, Kinsey remains as timid as a choirboy.

Few directors are as "extreme" as Miike, but ironically, his entry in Three... Extremes is the least explicit; its suggestive tale of envy and guilt resembles Edgar Allen Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" more than Miike's usual six-per-year gorefests.

The best scenes play like "Frankenstein" revisited, with a comically bedraggled Pacino cast as the mad scientist trying to protect his runaway creation from a rabid public.

With shades of Carrie, Harry's magical powers and adolescent angst make a combustible fusion, taking on frightening, vengeful implications that Cuarón honors by refusing to airbrush the shadowy regions of fantasy.

The Village may have finally emptied his usual bag of tricks, but considered on its own merits, its skillful fusion of Grimm fairy-tale horror and pointed social parable find Shyamalan in peak form.

Its whimsical touches, along with a reverence for creative young minds, gives the film a warmth that counterbalances its shocks.

Sonnenfeld's best movies function like elaborate Rube Goldberg contraptions, with visual gags popping out on a precise calibration of gears and springs, and Cohen's script, however derivative, is a stable apparatus.

Though it always feels like Emma and Charlie (and the movie) are one productive conversation away from putting the entire matter to bed, The Drama doesn’t let anyone off the line until the last possible moment. It’s a productively excruciating experience.

Through Bingenheimer, the film not only gets the last word on the peculiar allure of celebrity, but also captures a fascinating shadow history of West Coast rock, which owes no small part of its livelihood to Bingenheimer's influence as a tastemaker.

A movie so nice she made it twice, Susanne Bier's Dogme-certified feature "Open Hearts" gets a slight makeover in her follow-up Brothers, another raw melodrama about three lives recalibrated by sudden tragedy.

Park’s pristine framing and yen for extreme violence give Sympathy For Mr. Vengeance the pop of a graphic novel, but there are times when his point about the poisonous nature of revenge is eclipsed by stylized torture and sadism for its own sake.

Within its limited scope, the film celebrates Conti's peculiar dreams and earnest intensity without dipping into condescension.

Jones directs with all the grit that's associated with his onscreen persona, but Peckinpah would never allow this degree of sentimentality to slip into one of his Westerns. A better comparison might be to Clint Eastwood, another tough-guy actor whose work as a director is often a little soft at the center.

Perhaps because the trial hits so many delays and roadblocks, Twist Of Faith doesn't gather much dramatic momentum, though there's something to be said for the emotional grind of running in place.

With the exception of Hilary Swank, whose earnestness spoils the fun, a stellar cast seems in on the joke.

The true puzzle here is grief, that nebulous process where there’s no clear answer or road map, just behaviors and rituals that feel distinctly removed from the flow of everyday life. Petzold and his cast spend time in that stream, and it’s an alluring feeling to drift along with them.

There’s a scolding tone to Nightcrawler that runs counter to its pulp energy, as if Gilroy is telling the audience to be alarmed by the things that turn them on. But much as Gilroy tries to be his own killjoy, Gyllenhaal’s wickedness prevails.

Can't help but be deeply engrossing, as it taps into a highly charged atmosphere that one parent dubs "a different form of child abuse."

It's rare for a comedy to be as fully worked-out and exquisitely timed as An Amazing Couple; just don't expect to warm to it.

As much as the jurors at this year's Cannes Film Festival insisted that the Palme D'Or was awarded to the best film in competition, it was a sign of the times that they chose to honor Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, marking a clear and decisive victory for ideology over aesthetics.

In its strongest moments, Tully has the quality of a good short story, in the way it details the underlying affection and resentment that creeps into the lives of its four main characters, played with great sensitivity by a cast of mostly unknowns.

Intoxicates and overwhelms at the same time, giving off so much pleasure in a small space that the effect can be suffocating.

ts small achievement is in trying to understand the life-and-death choices of two people who aren’t as certain about what they’re doing as they initially appear.

Little beyond Servillo’s presence gives the film any ballast, which is both asset and liability, freeing Sorrentino to pepper the screen with wild setpieces and fits of inspiration while encouraging a certain shapelessness.

Though it gets far too cute, The Cuckoo settles into the snappy rhythms of a promising sitcom pilot, at least until Rogozhkin decides to get serious.

Epperlein offers Karl Marx City as her own act of painful transparency, an essential warning about what happens to societies when ordinary citizens are being watched.

22 Jump Street squeezes every last drop of comic inspiration it can get from Tatum and Hill, as well as the very notion of a sequel to such a superfluous enterprise.

This is grave business, and After Tiller registers the weight of it.