Shawn Levy

If film is an art, it's because it's possible for somebody to make films like this.

Even as the film sometimes veers into unproductive sidebars, there's a masterful tension to it, Alcazar is wonderful, and the final shot is a stunner.

Pina, so exquisitely made and filled with such powerful beauty, suggests thrilling new possibilities for the marriage of movies and dance.

Kong is brilliant in many, many places. But it overwhelms its own best qualities with its sheer, punishing size. It is, literally, too much of a good thing.

Entertaining and informative.

If it can seem like there's no end of films about the Holocaust, it might be because there is no bottom to the well of crime, inhumanity and evil described by that ghastly event.

Invigorating, blistering and chilling.

It's a tiny story, told on an intimate scale, and it is rich in emotion, specificity and care.

A work of gentle, continual hilarity that feels far more ordinary than other Coen works and yet has every bit of the originality and exactness that makes the brothers' best films so wonderful.

The film is enthralling, even as the tale becomes more and more dire, with scores of millions dead and societal upheaval imminent. The circumstances depicted in Contagion are terrifying, but the power with which the film is made blends the horror, as only the best art can, with beauty.

It's a fine debut, far more grounded, plausible and engrossing than most Hollywood thrillers.

Such a powerful sincerity and goodness flows through Paper Clips.

A stylish and unnerving thriller that sucks you into surreal scenes of horror with the chilly confidence of a nightmare.

Alas, while the verbiage bubbles, the plot slogs. You feel that there's a big pile of deleted scenes waiting to appear on the DVD -- and that a good bit of what's here should have joined it. Funny is good, but it requires sharp if it's to rise to true greatness.

Richly frightening film.

It's a film for those people -- and they are legion -- who recoil in horror from the very notion of Christmas cheer. If you're in that crowd, and you know who you are, you'll love it.

Genre movies are often mere excuses for shows of gore and tricked-up suspense, and while The Grey should satisfy anyone who seeks only that there's something more profound and pure at its heart, making it a genuinely entertaining thriller that puts a chill through you in more ways than one.

Before it traps Ralston, 127 Hours gives us ample evidence of his energy, zest and boyish charm and wit.

The film is somewhat scattered in construction, but it's an eye-opener.

Leaving aside politics, it's quite an achievement in art.

There's plenty of freshness and skill here, both in front of the camera and behind it.

Something of an unforgettable experience.

The highlights of The Cooler -- the portrait of Bernie-as-schlub, the ecstatic union of two losers, the depiction of shadowy old Vegas confronted with its sanitized corporate future -- are superb. You can easily live with the rest to get to them.

There are laughs and moments of pain and many instances of embarrassing (and deeply human) behavior throughout, but there's also delicacy and grace.

The film moves with strange, creepy energy and is populated by characters who delicately walk a line between charm and grotesquerie. It's a treat.

The result is a totally absorbing and entertaining film, one of the best historical dramas from Hollywood in many years.

It doesn't break ground like "Seven" or "Fight Club"; it's not a thrill ride like "Panic Room." But it's a mature, thoughtful and full-bodied movie that compensates for the demands it makes with the rewards of craftsmanship, rigor, skill and art.

Never quite as resonant as Spielberg's earliest "Indiana Jones" films, in which, for all the clamor, it often feels like something real and vital and human is at stake. But at its best, this film is as joyful as anything in those movies, and that is something of a movie miracle.

The chief problem with Shadow Boxers is that it's too short.

Atmospheric, absorbing and completely in the control of the man who made it -- unlike, especially, “Bringing Out the Dead,” which it sometimes resembles.

Brilliantly colored and passionately acted, Moolaade teems with incidents, personalities and drama and is never less than vivid.

This impressive film feels more like a display, if an often dazzling one, than a genuine experience.

A thoroughly credible and deeply entertaining biopic about a titanically famous film personality.

Filled with personal vignettes and famous-people testimonials, the film has a few too many narrative digressions, but it's a moving portrait of all-too-human personalities and the dogged optimism that keeps them going.

As the film accrues intensity and awakes the demon lurking inside its protagonist, you can see it as something more than a retro-cool crime story. Rather, it's a parable of good and evil and the nature of man.

Wilson's account is enormously self-serving and self-aggrandizing, but the film makes his ego a virtue and a running joke.

You can't help but share the feelings, many of them subrational, that coarse through the soldiers as they live a hellish year in a hellish place.

You can find movies with better scripts, direction, acting, songs, and jokes than The Muppets -- but you won't find one that's nearly so much fun.

Anderson, god love him, seems determined to make the "Great American Film." The Master isn't it, but you come away from it with the sense that may be on the right path.

It might have poked a bit more into Clash's personal story, but as a story of man and puppet it's grand.

They've made a movie-movie of Sweeney Todd, and if you've got the stomach and ear for it, you'll be grateful.

It's a sports story, yes, because without baseball there's no Beane. But it's far more a tale of a man's triumph over himself and his doubters. And you don't need math to make sense of that.

For a picture about a stalker, Chuck and Buck is rather sweet, funny and winning.

It is well-acted and written with a rigorous effort to skirt cliche, and it has the savor of real life throughout.

It's refreshing that something once considered terribly new and modern can still feel contemporary three decades later.

Refreshing and disorienting movie.

The result is a gripping film about a subject almost too good to be true.

Ferrific fun and rousing proof that there’s still vital life in an aging master filmmaker.

The message here is vital, though, and Siegel retains the gift of making you dream of making a difference.

Discreet, delicate, and cautious, Monsieur Lazhar takes you by surprise -- and that goes for both the movie and the man.

In many ways, a smashing success. It's built not only on a casually clever script but on two expertly balanced performances.

It does a splendid job not only of introducing newcomers to a vital artist they might have missed, but of reminding rabid fans of Earle's stripe why they were infected to begin with.

Moon doesn't arrive with a train of ballyhoo, but its quiet charms easily drowns out the clatter of bigger, dumber pictures.

Johansson, fittingly, is the focus. In her face, as in the faces of Vermeer's handful of captivating subjects, the viewer intuits whole stories and worlds.

The film is a pleasure that doesn't rank with Allen's best but satisfies far more than most American comedies.

Until it goes off the rails in its final 10 or 15 minutes, Wendigo, Larry Fessenden's spooky new thriller, is a refreshingly smart and newfangled variation on several themes derived from far less sophisticated and knowing horror films.

The result is a true conundrum: You can't say for sure if a scam is in play or if a genuine genius is being smeared. And the brilliance of the film is that it doesn't let you feel secure in choosing either side.

You can learn about the grand shifts of history from Persepolis, but you learn about a handful of lives as well.

It's a goofball of a movie and a throwaway, but it's also completely free of self-import and the slightest hint of sentiment -- a perfect light entertainment that's guaranteed to launch itself as a franchise.

You come away with an appreciation of the abstraction, scale and daring of Ai's art and, even more, a sense of the living man in his courage, humor and restlessness. It's an invigorating experience.

Gets its hooks into you in ways that are hard to explain or to ignore.

If you might wish the film got deeper under the skin of the characters, you also feel grateful for the fact that you'll never get closer to them than watching it.

Moves with terrific energy, alternating riveting action sequences with intimate material in a manner that's pure Woo.

Stirring and haunting.

A kick to the heart, and Swank is a marvel. Any problems in the storytelling are more than balanced by her wholly committed work.

Icy and elegant, complex and gripping.

It's a bit insidery, yes, but isn't it a treat to be brought inside a hidden world by a movie?

The acting is superb across the board, and the film moves dreamily yet with razor-sharp precision, building to a sequence of deeply felt climaxes.

Having heard tell of its wonders for decades, I found the actual movie less transporting than I'd been led to expect. It's clearly a brilliant debut.

Sometimes a movie can defy rational logic, yet still make sense emotionally in a way that pulls you through. Bee Season is one.

Frighteningly, grippingly real.

It's no insult to the rest to say that this is one of those films that sells itself on the strength of a single performance.

One of those gratifyingly nostalgic works of art that accept the present day but remind us, as well, that the past wasn't necessarily worse.

Funny and appalling, doting and possessive, petty and selfless, raunchy and righteous, Jeannie is the pivot of the charming, garish, somewhat overwritten Australian comedy Introducing the Dwights.

Wonderful performances and the director's continual inventiveness make Junebug a particularly promising first feature.

Effortless fun: It plays like a giddy horror movie with its laughs wrapped in couture gowns.

There's much to enjoy in the lively, fun and fresh documentary Comic-con Episode IV: A Fan's Hope, but chief among them may be that its director, Morgan Spurlock, is nowhere to be seen.

Balanced precariously between a horror film and a war movie, but it's so sly and assured that you can't dismiss the allegorical, even satirical undertones that Cortés teases out of Sparling's conceit.

If you feel, like me, kinship with this essential building block of music, you owe it to yourself -- and to the Ramones -- to see this film.

Plotwise, the film seems actually designed to repel logic, almost a parody of a spy film. But it's played with such verve and dash and confident flair that you'll have a grand time.

Shot on location in New York by director Ted Tetzlaff, it's tense and fresh and, at 73 minutes, remarkably taut. [14 Sep 2012]

With its wide-open setting and taciturn, macho characters, it's a film that earns the right to use the "Once Upon a Time" title that Sergio Leone made so perversely famous.

It's sometimes uneven, but it's glorious, too, with constantly churning invention and the guarantee that you have never seen anything like it before -- unless it came from Winnipeg and Guy Maddin.

The film is a lively and absorbing document, filled with jaw-dropping materials, such as an actual audio recording of Kesey's first LSD trip in a Stanford University lab.

Funky, scrappy, dishy, screwy story of that star-studded, gilded squad.

Something in the simplicity of its vision gives The Man Without a Past a dimension of heroic grandeur -- and that effect, too, seems to tickle Kaurismaki's funny bone.

Watching skinny-armed little Will pretend to be the spawn of Sly Stallone in a series of botched feats of derring-do is a treat, as is much of this film.

A fine and sturdy picture, capable of standing alongside the many such films made when Westerns were one of our chief entertainments.

The excellent news is that Yates and company took their time adding visual depth to the film -- they shot it as 3-D -- and the result feels immediate and real and not at all slathered-on.

It's a refreshing sensation, even if it makes you feel a touch seasick at first, and the fittingly eerie conclusion to a lavish and unsettling movie.

But this is pretty honest and true filmmaking, nonetheless; try as you might, you can't detect the leer of the satirist.

The sense of inescapability, the mood of capitulation and resignation, becomes the story. What is being made clear is the thoroughgoing rot of a civilization; there is literally no place to find peace, solace or consolation.

Like the bits of home life its pioneers have brought with them to an alien landscape, the careful craft grounds the film in a reality that is as much felt as it is observed.

One of the most exciting American movies about recent political history since, ironically, Oliver Stone's "JFK."

Both deeply weird and charmingly dear.

A diverting, playful and puzzling documentary.

A gripping movie about espionage, loyalty and betrayal.

The overall effect is awe and affection -- and a strange urge to get on a board and, uh, shred, dude.