Shawn Levy

The combination of ideas and wit, lively characterizations, believable human dilemmas and a climax that both melts and braces you makes for a fine blend. A movie about ideas may sound like a drag, but this one packages them in well-earned emotions.

There's a terrific balance between human comedy and just-this-side-of-science-fiction in Robot & Frank.

Is it a great movie? Maybe not. But it is a great step forward in moviemaking. Shrug it off if that makes you feel better, but starting today you live in a post-Avatar movie world.

Such a treat for the eyes, ears and funny bone that you feel cheated that it clocks in at less than an hour-and-a-quarter.

The slowness and stillness in the film are, actually, a slow boil, and in Lie's taciturnity there is pain and even horror.

It's a crowd-pleasing, artful and convincing movie that just misses being great but nevertheless gratifies.

The most striking thing about it is what it's not...a richly atmospheric film that races surefootedly through complexities of data and emotion like a spy movie and not at all like a sentimental sob story.

Boyle, one of the premier stylists in the world fills "Slumdog" with ebullient energy and ceaseless invention.

At the end, you're refreshed, like Pauline after she swallows an entire soft drink in one gulp, and it feels terrific.

It's a sharp and vivid film, filled with moments of tremendous ingenuity and characterized by a persistent avoidance of the expected tropes. It's far scarier than the big-budget remakes of "Godzilla" and "King Kong," more engaging than "I Am Legend," more human than a sackful of slasher films.

Quick and charming and irresistible.

It's a splendid ensemble, equal in almost every way to the fine, probing script.

Until State of Play slips into its small cascade of improbabilities near its end, it proves a thoroughly engaging and professional enterprise.

You'll gasp appalled and laugh outraged and possibly, watching the spectacle of a promising young lad treading desperately in a nasty sea, shed an errant tear.

A frequently transporting depiction of the early and middle life of Ray Charles, the film soars on remarkable performances, a convincing sense of time and place, and, of course, the glorious music for which Charles was rightly billed as The Genius.

If there's a calmer, more self-collected star out there, then he or she has hidden the fact pretty well.

It's spirited and funny and deeply entertaining, a summer movie for kids who think like adults and adults who feel like kids.

The word 'samsara' means 'continuous flow of life' in Tibetan, and Fricke and company surely experienced that sensation in making the film, which took them to 25 countries in a span of five years.

I give the slight edge to the first movie because I prefer Boyle's craft to Fresnadillo's, but the action is more intense here, and I greeted the thought of a third film -- virtually assured in the closing shots -- with a little yip of "Yes!" Likely you will, too.

For the record, it's truly puzzling that this film has been rated PG-13; it's much stronger than that. The monsters of "Beowulf" have haunted human imagination for more than a millennium; the ones in this film will easily provoke a few nightmares.

Mournful and moody, crepuscular and poetic, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford turns one of cinema's most rehearsed tales into a dreamy inquiry into the nature of sadism, hero-worship and betrayal.

The Road walks a tremendously daring and delicate line between inspiration and horror, and it does so not only in the events it depicts but in its very air and atmosphere. It was unforgettable on the page, and it impresses equally, or at least it does so remarkably often, on screen.

The longer it goes on, the less your mind settles. You may not believe in a hell in which a lake of fire rages, but we live in a nation and at a time when many people have little lakes of fire in their heads and hearts. Kaye is determined that we never forget that truth or its price.

If you thought "Boogie Nights" blew it in its final third, you ain't seen nothing yet.

Baghead has a nearly documentary quality that infuses it with a sense of heightened stakes and real peril. In a characteristically offhanded way, it's cunningly skillful.

The film does leave you with the lingering regret that you missed a hell of a good party. It is, as the kids used to say, a trip.

Lacks the poetic and romantic resonance of "Crouching Tiger," but it's got kicks aplenty -- of both the physical and the sensational kind -- and it lands them again and again.

Sometimes the best way to relate history is to tinker with it and make it feel like a living thing.