Scott Tobias

Arriving on the heels of "13 Assassins," Miike's gloriously irreverent take on the samurai action genre, Hara-Kiri seems conventional by his standards, especially in a long middle section that occasionally dips into sentimentality.

Though Barrie's stories are about a rite of passage into adulthood, Disney's Peter Pan treats the issue superficially, retreating from the dark places of movies like Pinocchio in favor of amped-up tomfoolery.

One of the big reasons Flight is so satisfying is that it moves with the no-frills, meat-and-potatoes conventions of a first-rate procedural while being awash in ambiguity.

While The Marine proves a poor showcase for the charisma-impaired Cena, it's a terrific vehicle for world-class heavy Patrick, who is clearly enjoying himself as the kind of deranged lunatic who interrupts a long string of felonies to confirm the details of his new cable package.

Shine A Light pays tribute to the band's essential agelessness.

The film looks to do for reflective surfaces what "Amityville 4" did for killer lamps.

The scattered insights in This So-Called Disaster aren't worth the sifting it takes to find them.

For all of Audrey Tautou's considerable charm in the title role, Jeunet's need for a well-ordered universe proved as suffocating and exhausting as being trapped on an amusement-park ride.

Though Cartel Land isn’t interested in making fact-filled statements about the drug war, Heineman’s ingenious conceit gets at the difficulty ordinary people have in doing something about it.

Soul Kitchen plays everything big and loud-and sometimes too doggedly conventional-but it's the rare example of a crowd-pleaser made without cynicism or calculation.

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

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.

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.

The Secret Agent has a warm affinity for communities like the one that adopts Armando—Dona’s apartment building echoes the lo-fi resistance of Baktan Cross in One Battle After Another—but it doesn’t sugarcoat the immense loss that history can deliver.

Wingard’s direction is a robust throwback to the VHS gorefests of yore, but with a distinctly more modern slickness and snap, and he knows how to play around with the audience.

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.

Listen Up Philip doesn’t care to be liked. And in that, it deserves to be loved.

It goes down smoothly, thanks in large part to Joseph Gordon-Levitt's grounded lead performance and Marc Webb's slick direction, but it seems like every other scene coughs up a dispiriting cliché.

With Scott playing the perfect foil to Leary's exasperated sage, the fantasy sequences are hilariously caustic, but as they accumulate more rapidly, the distinction between real and imagined situations becomes disturbingly vague.

As a piece of filmmaking, Safe is brilliant for the way Haynes, in concert with cinematographer Alex Nepomniaschy and composer Ed Tomney, blankets the mundane in the eerie tone of science fiction and horror, especially in the first half.

What should be a momentous occasion instead gets anonymously processed through the Doc-U-Matic, with exhilarating live material cut into a sloppy assemblage of interviews, archival footage, and awkward reenactments.

His outrageous, self-destructive journey lands him in a place just as ironic as Rupert Pupkin’s in "The King Of Comedy," but it’s haunting and mysterious, too, reflecting the dream that consumes his life.

The film feels as beautifully calibrated as a great piece of short fiction, only with visual accents and emphases filling in for the prose. It's a relationship movie where the most important exchanges remain unspoken.

The movie and the movie-within-a-movie share a chemistry even more awkward than that of their flat-footed leads.

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.

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.

Cheryl is a thoroughly realized, warts-and-all character, and the flashbacks contribute to that. But like their heroine, the filmmakers do some fumbling to get to their destination.

Though studio interference and his own personal demons hampered his later work, Straw Dogs shows a master in control of his effects, which made an artist of Peckinpah's sensibility an especially dangerous man.