Shawn Levy

Inventive, droll and sharp, the film is rich in comic darkness but quite humane and genuine as well.

Moore's movies may not always be fully accurate in their details, but they almost always spur vital national conversation.

This is harsh and acid stuff, but it's exhilarating on a number of counts. For one thing, Jenkins moves with real authority between scenes of low life, tender intimacy and gripping violence; made on the cheap, her film has the iron certainty of the best art.

Lots of people have crazy stuff happen to them once or twice. Some people are magnets for crazy stuff. And then there's Joyce McKinney, who is like a factory where magnets for crazy stuff are made and warehoused.

There's a wonderful chemistry between them -- though the film wisely allows Duplass and Delmore an equally intimate connection. Choices like that enable the modest Humpday to capture the lives of its protagonists more credibly than any Hollywood-manufactured comedy of recent vintage.

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.

Polisse won a jury prize at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival, but it's only a patchwork success.

If the movie is largely familiar, its passion and craft are noteworthy.

This is the first full-length movie about his painting and his being that gets anywhere near close to comprehending both.

It's not life-changing stuff, but it's brisk and clever and funny and avoids some of the predictable pitfalls that hobble so many films of its ilk.

Warm, winning and clever.

This is a deeply felt work of art in the form of a big, brassy movie-movie.

If you think the "Star Wars" prequels are a disease, then Serenity is the cure.

For Whitaker's performance alone, Last King is a substantial piece of work. Otherwise, the film is estimable but not quite great.

With its weary introductory and concluding passages, it announces itself as the most typical of fare, a real letdown after that stirringly fresh central part.

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.

Finely etched and acted but too often limpid and punchless in its impact.

It's not deep for a second -- indeed, it repels depth deliberately as if allergic to it -- but it's as swell a swell time as grown-ups could want at the movies.

One of the most joyous, diverting and original mainstream American movies in years.

Invigorating, blistering and chilling.

Some movies uses make-believe to make you squirm or cry or rise to righteous anger. Bully does all of that with reality.

With its protracted storytelling, its fuzzy philosophizing and its less-than-compelling leading man, it's far less gripping than the subject matter deserves.

It's a film with a silly story, and it's been dubbed laughably into English. Yet it's a transporting bit of fluff, full of zest, miraculous physicality and cheeky humor.

It isn't, finally, satisfying: It's too uneven, indulgent, fey.

The film, built around McKellen's magnificent performance, is a sleek and deceptively artful work, a bio-pic that manages to encompass the whole of a man's rich life by concentrating solely on the final months of it.

One of the great achievements of In Darkness, is in creating a sense of life in the sewers.

How pleasant to report, then, that a new romantic comedy -- small, smart, funny, tender and dear -- should emerge from a pair of filmmaking brothers still in their 30s and with a distinct indie film pedigree that informs, while not dominating, their work.

Bounces along magnetically even when the storytelling goes a bit flat.