Steven Rea

22 Jump Street's scattershot approach to comedy is rooted in the belief that for every anatomical, scatalogical, sexual, or pop-cultural reference and pun gone awry, another will stick to the wall like, um, bodily fluid.

A kind of Tracy/Hepburn rom-com with a "Dead Poets Society" backdrop and dollops of human failing for added drama, Words and Pictures stars Clive Owen and Juliette Binoche - a matchup that makes you want to like Fred Schepisi's film, even when it becomes impossible to do so.

Maybe it's generational: In a movie about teens, it's the teens who should rule. And they do. With certainty. With laughter. And with tears - buckets and buckets.

At its best, Edge of Tomorrow plays like a tripwire time-travel thriller. As it progresses, though, the built-in repetition can, and does, grow tedious.

A road trip at once tragic, hopeful, and unforgettable.

They're not exactly Richard Linklater's "Before" trilogy, but French filmmaker Cédric Klapisch's "Spanish Apartment" movies - 2002's "L'Auberge Espagnole," 2005's "Russian Dolls," and now, Chinese Puzzle - have their devotees, too.

Jolie's Maleficent is magnificent.

This movie feels like it has a million jokes, and every single one arrives with a lethal thud.

Kafka-esque, Terry Gilliam-esque (Brazil), Charlie Kaufman-esque (remember Floor 71/2 in Being John Malkovich?), and David Lynch-ian, too, The Double plays like a nightmare that will leave you spooked, jittery, and confused. Well, that's how it plays for Simon, anyway. For everyone else, it should leave us simply amused.

Marion Cotillard has made her share of unremarkable, if not remarkably bad, films. But when the French star, who won the Academy Award for her unearthly reincarnation of Edith Piaf in "La Vie en Rose", gets it right, the result is magic.

Ambitious, even audacious, the movie's mix of action and for-devotees-only intrigue can overwhelm, but there are moments of sheer virtuosity, too.

Belle, with its country manors and its city slums, its snooty nobles and its fiery idealists, its ballroom dances and barroom conspiracies, brings these themes to a dramatic head: romance and race, privilege and justice.

That is the sum of writer/director Steven Knight's movie: a man, a car, a hands-free mobile device. And it is extraordinary.

The lack of any readily identifiable star - no Cage, no McConaughey - makes Blue Ruin feel even more authentic, more rooted in this frightening world.

Lacks the origin-story freshness of its predecessor (even if the inaugural Garfield Spider-Man came only five years after the final installment of the Sam Raimi-directed Tobey Maguire Spider-Man trilogy). It lacks a charismatic central character, too.

Thank goodness for Leslie Mann. If not for the nutball charm of this tight-wound whirlwind, the dispiriting Hollywood sex comedy The Other Woman would be close to unbearable.

This story of two very old souls who suck on O negative Popsicles is, in many ways, more about the life-sustaining force of music than any hankering for blood.

A deeply creepy and mysterious noir.

Echoing the lessons learned from "HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey," the message of Transcendence is that computers should not be allowed to become sentient.

This world feels studied in its "authenticity": the rusted GMC pickup, the tumbledown shack, the boozy brothel, and angry Joe Ransom guttin' deer and tending to his own gunshot wounds with a grimace and a bottle of alcohol.

With his sleepy, So-Cal inflections, Costner is an actor who summons urgency and drama with, well, I'm not sure exactly how he does what he does. He's the least dynamic of stars, but still, he is one.

In his own profound and ingenious way, Panh has brought the pictures and the thoughts together again.

The problem with Captain America: The Winter Soldier is that there's too much going on: the Marvel Universe stuff, the WikiLeaks-ish paranoia stuff, the video game-ish CG visual effects stuff, the epic John Woo-ish everybody-pointing-a-weapon-at-everybody-else face-off stuff.

Darren Aronofsky's Noah is the Old Testament on acid. It's the movie equivalent of Christian death metal. It's an antediluvian Lord of the Rings, fist-pumping, ferocious, apocalyptic, and wet - very wet.

Sustaining illusion with marvelous grace is, in a nutshell, exactly what Anderson is all about.

It's the cars, and the mega-horsepowered action, that matter most. With its driver-POV spinouts, wrong-way chases, and multilane median jumps, the movie is a roaring revel of an automotive fantasy.

Has a cool, midcentury-modern look (dog and boy live in a populuxe Manhattan penthouse) and a voice cast that may not be A-list but fits the bill nicely.

Non-Stop gets increasingly far-fetched as the jet makes its way across the Atlantic. Certainly, there are more red herrings on the plane than there are in the sea below. And Neeson has to stare down every last one of them.

Kids for Cash is no-nonsense, no-stone-unturned filmmaking.

Bakri, a newcomer to acting, has presence and power. His intensity and determination become Omar's.

Like Liam Neeson's "Taken" series, Costner's 3 Days to Kill finds its absentee-dad action hero facing off against hordes of goons and gorillas - not to rescue his loved ones, but to prove himself to them, and maybe get a little extra quality time, too.

RoboCop is a solid near-future action pic that poses moral questions about artificial intelligence and remote-control combat systems without getting too preachy or ponderous about it.

Director Rob Meltzer, who made the kind-of-amusing meta short "I Am Stamos," directs things in shameless, let's-get-this-thing-over-with style, throwing in some gratuitous topless (female) nudity and allowing the usually amusing Kristen Schaal to let loose with a barrage of potty-mouthisms.

Alas, it's a throwback that's thrown its back out - limping along, trailed by battalions of stereotypes and ammo rounds of cliche.

Gloria, spare and keenly observed, plays like a short story - there is no sweeping narrative arc, no momentous triumph or calamity. But there is a bit of justice meted out, and the act of its meting brings a slow, small smile to Gloria's face.

It is a yarn. But it's so full of passion, poetry, and humor that it becomes, for the time, quite real.

Jones (Like Crazy) gives Nelly's tragic plight a palpable anguish. There is no doubt that Dickens - who was mad about theater, about acting, about inhabiting other lives onstage and in the pages of his books - was in love with Nelly.

Too much of the action in Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit takes place on laptops, thumb drives, and video monitors.

The middle 40 minutes of Lone Survivor have to be some of the toughest battle scenes in Hollywood history - an epic, close-range firefight that finds the SEALs throwing themselves down rock faces like superheroes. Only they aren't superheroes - they bleed, they break.

August: Osage County is the movie equivalent of Denny's Lumberjack Slam breakfast. If eggs, bacon, and toast aren't enough, throw in some ham, some sausage, pancakes, and hash browns. And then throw in more ham.

Sad, funny, and quietly alarming romance.

The momentum Stiller has built up - his character's globe-trotting derring-do, the care and consideration on display in his directing - carries the movie a long way. Falling short of fantastic, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is still a fantasy to enjoy.

A conventional biopic made anything but conventional by the magnitude of its subject's life and accomplishments, and by Idris Elba's imposing performance in the title role.

Been there, done that. As thrilling a filmmaker as Martin Scorsese continues to be, and as wild a performance as Leonardo DiCaprio dishes up as its morally bankrupt master of the universe, The Wolf of Wall Street seems almost entirely unnecessary.

Big hair. Big mouths. Big scams. Everything about American Hustle, David O. Russell's wild and woolly take on the late-'70s FBI sting operation code-named Abscam, is big. And the biggest thing of all is the love story that beats at the heart of this rollicking disco-era ensemble piece.

Saving Mr. Banks, set in 1961, is smart, delightful.

Inside Llewyn Davis plays like some beautiful, foreboding, darkly funny dream.

No manner of bizarre distraction can keep Anchorman's hapless hero from his mission: "I'm going to do what God put Ron Burgundy on this earth to do," he declares. "Have salon-quality hair and read the news!"

Not only eight minutes shorter than its forebear, it's at least eight minutes better - less twee, less chatty, more action, more Elvish.

Cooper, who steered Jeff Bridges through his Oscar-winning turn in Crazy Heart, gets fiercely committed performances from just about everyone in Out of the Furnace.

The Catholic Church does not come off well in Philomena, but then, what else is new? And the film isn't so much an indictment of institutional unkindness as it is a story of resilience, resolution - and human kindness.

Black Nativity offers a whopping serving of Yuletide emotion. And it's a musical - with plenty of wailing and rapping on the side.

Luckily, Statham is up to the task. Which is a surprise, because he's never, ever done anything like this before.

Nebraska is not a breakneck, screwball farce - although it has its moments, like the comical heist of an air compressor from a farmer's barn. Payne's film is loping. It's deadpan, poignant, absurd.

Delivery Man, with its democratic band of half-siblings and its feel-good view of humankind, is what it is: a reproductive remake that will make you laugh. More than once or twice.

Catching Fire is bigger, better and broodier than the first film.

McConaughey's performance isn't just about the weight loss. It's about gaining compassion, even wisdom, and it's awesome.

Then Death feels the need to intrude again. And again. If his accent weren't so charming, his voice so resonant, it would be depressing, all this meddling and mortality.

Rare, too, is the way The Broken Circle Breakdown incorporates music into its narrative. The songs - traditional bluegrass and country, and a clutch of new ones rooted in same - are as integral to the characters and their relationships as the dialogue.

Wood, for her part, can appear sad, or seductive, or mysterious, or happy, or lovestruck, or deeply troubled. Gabi is also very good with a gun, so look out.

Kill Your Darlings is a tale of inspiration, then, but also a tale of jealousy, obsession, homophobia, and homicide. It's a whirlwind. Even if it doesn't all hang together, it's worth the ride.

How I Live Now takes some frightening, gruesome turns. In tone and terror, it comes close to matching the jumpy dread of Danny Boyle's British Isles virus thriller "28 Days Later."

One of the problems with The Dark World is that its monsters and angry armies and visual effects are interchangeable with Peter Jackson's Tolkien pics, with Clash of the Titans, with The Avengers, with Man of Steel, and on and on. These superhero movies. These Middle Earth movies. These mythic god movies. It's getting hard to tell them apart.

Let the Fire Burn does not glorify MOVE. What it does do is force us to consider why and how this surreal event - a city bombing its own citizens, leaving innocent children dead - occurred. And ask, could something like it ever happen again?

There's lots of zero-g action in Ender's Game - even old Han Solo takes a whirl.

Blue Is the Warmest Color explores a life with a depth and force that would be scary - if it weren't so scarily good.

In truth, the only hazardous material to be found in Diana - the title role assumed bravely, if mistakenly, by Naomi Watts - is the screenplay.

McCarthy's screenplay, a tangle of doublecrosses and dead men, has just been published. Those who really want to know what's going on would be advised to buy a copy.

Marwencol is about Hogancamp and his miniature alter-ego, about his photographs and his creative process. But it is also, on a deeper level, about how we process our experiences - good and bad, violent and mysterious - and how we try to build safe places in our lives.

It speaks to the courage and resilience of one man, the savagery of many, and the potential, for both good and for ill, in us all.

If you're going to take another stab at this tale of a taunted, traumatized teen who exacts fiery revenge on, well, everyone, then Kimberly Peirce is the director to do it.

There is incredible tension in this ordeal, this effort to survive, to find rescue, and Redford - an icon of the American film experience for more than half a century now - makes that tension deeply palpable.

There is a lot of finger-pointing. Assertions are made, theories offered, but not much in the way of certainty.

This Romeo and Juliet is hard to take seriously - and simply hard to take.

Captain Phillips is harrowing, inspiring, a must-see piece of moviemaking.

An epicurean dream where the dishes conjured up by the characters are as essential to the experience as the characters themselves.

Wadjda is a movie about freedom - and nothing represents freedom with the metaphoric simplicity and symmetry of a bicycle.

The sort of generic crime thriller - stick-figure characters, pointless muddle of plot, people entering and exiting SUVs and Lear jets with a sense of urgency - that feels like it could drag on forever, and drag us down into a purgatory of stupefaction with it.

A wildly suspenseful zero-g tale of survival 350 miles beyond the ozone layer, Alfonso Cuarón's space saga is emotionally jolting - and physically jolting, too.

The first date that James Gandolfini and Julia Louis-Dreyfus embark on in Enough Said - has to be one of the great getting-to-know-you encounters in movie history.

Rush, which marks a return to form (and more so) for Howard after plodding through adultery buddy movie comedies (The Dilemma) and Dan Brown sequeldom (Angels & Demons), is almost primal.

Don Jon is about a man's unwitting search for intimacy, for real connection in a world where everyone is connected - by social media, by the Internet, by TV and computer and smartphone screens. That's not exactly an original idea. But Gordon-Levitt goes at it with gusto, and style. Give the guy some props.

It is by turns illuminating, exasperating, sloppy, redundant, a head-spinner, and a headache.

Populaire plays like a musical - you expect anyone, at any time, to break into song.

Ultimately, it's the romance that feels forced and phony, not the group meetings, the confessions, the anguished moments alone.

Director John Crowley trots his crew around London, working up a suitable amount of suspense. And paranoia.

Smart, funny, and gross (often at the same time).

The Spectacular Now feels genuine in almost every respect, from the unflashy cinematography and the sparingly deployed music cues to the natural, unhurried performances of its two stars. They will get to you, truly.

Jobs is a just-the-facts - and fiddling-with-the-facts - dramatization, forgoing any kind of deeper psychological exploration of the man and his motivations, his demons and dreams.

Hemsworth, who is Gale Hawthorne in "The Hunger Games" and the brother of the Hemsworth who stars as "Thor", has maybe one arrow in his acting quiver - he can look engaged.

For all its faults - and there are many, from shameless compression of events to milk the drama for all it's worth, to the gimmicky miscasting of several commanders-in-chief (Robin Williams as Eisenhower is especially egregious) - The Butler is an inspiring and important summation of the black struggle.

In the annals of sequeldom, Kick-Ass 2 has to be one of the lamest follow-ups ever.

The scene when she's (Blanchette) babysitting Ginger's boys and takes them to a diner - and confides about her electric shock treatments ("Edison's medicine"), her breakdowns, about the side effects of Prozac and Lithium . . .. it's genius.

Among the slew of recent futuristic hell-in-a-handbasket spectacles, Elysium takes the cake.

An innocuously smutty road comedy.

Still Mine resonates in all the right ways.

With border crossings and familiar buddy-cop movie tropes (think Lethal Weapon, think 48 HRS, think The Heat), the Wahlberg-Washington express hits lots of comfortably familiar notes. And more than a few viciously uncomfortable ones, too.

The Hunt offers a powerful, provocative study of mob mentality and the fabric of trust.