Steve Davis

While the tone of Rafiki is simple and direct, director Kahiu demonstrates a delicate touch when she enhances Kena and Ziki’s early euphoric attraction to one another through a subtle shift in the otherwise vibrant cinematography by Christopher Wessels.

In video segments scarier than any couch-jumping antics on a talk show, actor Tom Cruise salutes the organization’s Napoleonic chairman David Miscavige like a soldier in an army of darkness, and rambles on about a world free of suppressive persons like he’s auditioning for the loony bin. One thing is clear in Going Clear: The man has taken one super-big gulp of the Kool-Aid.

Graduation may not occupy a place at the top of the class of contemporary Eastern European cinema like some of Mungiu’s other films, but it definitely sits above the curve.

Although flawed in many respects -- it's not as smooth and silky a movie as it could have been -- Don Juan DeMarco nevertheless evokes a romantic mood that tickles and caresses.

The premise is ripe for potent melodrama, but director Jacquot (who gets co-screenwriting credit) ultimately doesn’t finesse the situation.

If Tuff Turf had used a little more of Downey's relaxed intelligence and amiability, and a little less teenage angst and sense of violence as retribution, it might have been tough stuff. As it is, it's a lightweight in a genre populated with featherweights.

It’s a movie from which you can’t look away, no matter how hard you may try.

There's much to enjoy here as long as your expectations aren't too high.

From its opening tracking shot of four furry legs sauntering through a bed of colorful pansies as cars and trucks whoosh nearby, Stray is a documentary of unhurried pleasures.

When it rolls, Barbershop: The Final Cut lets its hair down like few others do.

As Dawn, Matarazzo isn't afraid to evoke the horrors of puberty with a straightforward charmlessness: She's gawky, unhappy, and confused, while her tingling of sexual desire downright gives you the shivers.

The film is one big advertisement for the multicolored building blocks from which it’s made. The Lego Movie may be the shrewdest marketing ploy you’ve ever seen.

At first, you may question whether this is all some elaborate head game, but gradually the creatively unorthodox approach to pay tribute to a man who gravitated toward unconventional artistry enlightens more often than it disorients.

Even the documentary crew, composed of seasoned climbers and longtime friends, can barely watch their buddy painstakingly move up the peak.

This fresh adaptation shakes the dust off Jane Austen's early 19th-century novel of manners and gives it a good airing out. The result is a witty and lovesick skirmish of the sexes that exceeds all expectations.

It’s a familiar template for domestic drama, particularly in its observations about traditional masculinity, but rarely – at least, in recent memory – has this type of story felt so potent or dangerous.

Taking the concept of the dysfunctional family to a degree that might even boggle Leo Tolstoy's mind, Flirting With Disaster is every son or daughter's nightmare… multiplied.

Unrelenting and inconsolable, with a smattering of compassionate moments, the superb Vortex brings to mind an observation attributed to actress Bette Davis, no less: Getting old ain’t for sissies.

The Iranian production There is No Evil (Persian title: Satan Doesn’t Exist) may not revive the portmanteau film to its former glory (the comic 1963 Italian Oscar-winning trilogy Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow being a stellar example), but it’s a comparatively solid quartet of short films that critically examine the country’s dehumanizing system of capital punishment, putting a human face on the citizen-executioner asked to carry out the all-too-frequently enacted death penalty.

As much a movie about class, race, and sexual orientation as anything you've ever seen.

When the gut-wrenching conclusion of A Hijacking comes in the form of a single, random act, it’s only then you realize how far you’ve been pulled into its emotional core. It’s a staggering moment, one for which you may not be fully prepared. It’s a moment that differentiates the merely good from the very good.

Like Spencer Tracy, Gene Hackman, and others who have made acting on the big screen seem so easy while taking us on a journey that is far from simple, Clooney is the real thing.

The movie’s wit and energy hold your interest, but they don’t spark the pleasure of the unexpected, the thrill you felt in "Laura," "The Last of Sheila," "Chinatown," "The Sixth Sense," or the 1974 adaptation of Christie’s "Murder on the Orient Express" (not Kenneth Branagh’s inept remake), movies whose big reveals surprise you in their elegant simplicity.

Director Lane and screenwriter Thom Stylinski take a lighthearted, folksy approach to telling Brinkley’s life story, using fairly unsophisticated animation and twangy vocalizations in the spirit of the man’s carefully created image.

There isn’t one false move in Tomàs Aragay and Cesc Gay’s beautifully modulated screenplay. Es perfecto.

For the most part, Spielberg appears content to allow the story (admittedly, a tad bit long) to do the talking, though he goes badly off-track in the sappy ending reminiscent of a Fifties sitcom’s notions of hierarchy within the American family. Given the Spielberg film canon, it was inevitable. The guy just can’t help himself.

There’s something refreshing about the old-fashioned way in which it entertains, a mix of silly slapstick and sight gags combined with a gentle heart.

Whatever the case, Foxcatcher provides little insight. Art can shape the truth in ways that resonate beyond the obvious. Regrettably, the truth-shaping here grapples for significance, without any apparent aim. Catch as catch can.