Steven Rea

Beloved spans 45 years, shifting from Paris to Prague to London to Montreal, and it boasts an especially strong performance by Paul Schneider.

A Cat in Paris is thrilling, and a thrilling example of traditional ink and paint cartooning.

A story of entrepreneurship, of family, of fighting for one's rights - the right to make white lightning, and money. It's as American as apple pie.

Obama, it is implied, is deliberately making America more vulnerable to attack from Muslim extremists. No mention is made of the fact that it was under Obama's watch that Osama bin Laden was killed.

It's an Alzheimer's allegory, full of humanity, heart, and humor.

Unfortunately, David Koepp - the A-list Hollywood screenwriter (Jurassic Park, War of the Worlds) and decidedly less-successful director (Ghost Town, Secret Window) - can't find the right Looney Tunes-ish tone for his immersion into bike-messenger culture.

Ridiculously funny, ridiculously charming.

Killer Joe is twisted pulp, and the actors chew on it bravely, boldly, and with varying degrees of success.

It's smart, it's exhilarating, and Gilroy's depiction of a high-tech world where our every move is captured by surveillance cams and Big Brother-types deploying the latest spyware feels authentic, and troubling.

Relying on improv-y riffing and watch-them-coming-from-down-the-block-and-around-the-corner sight gags, The Campaign is intermittently amusing, but more often just interminable.

Seydoux, no doubt best known for her kickboxing catfight with Paula Patton in "Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol," gives a quiet, watchful performance, suggesting fealty for her lady but also a strong independent streak.

It's a good thing not to know where a film is going - we need surprises, we need to be spun around a few times - and Ruby Sparks, which is about a writer and his muse, but then becomes more about the muse and her writer, is happily just such a film.

Strip away the video-game visual effects, the endless chases and zero gravity shootouts, and Total Recall comes down to this: What is reality?

The Queen of Versailles combines the voyeuristic thrills of reality TV with the soul-revealing artistry of great portraiture and the head-shaking revelations of solid investigative reporting.

Reality aside, The Watch is harmless enough - and even occasionally humorous, in a riffy, sketch-comedy kind of way.

An English-language remake is in the works, but why wait for the Hollywood knockoff? Easy Money is the real thing: a great gangster pic.

If you just give yourself over to Nolan's sweeping, symphonic Cowled Crusader saga, The Dark Knight Rises is, well, a blast.

Beasts of the Southern Wild transports us to places that are peculiar and dangerous and magical, and makes us feel weirdly at home.

Michelle Williams is a beautiful moper.

Oh so slight and forgettable.

Who knows if it was Del Toro's idea, or Stone's, but at a particularly crucial - and criminal - moment, as a very bad thing is about to occur, the actor twirls his mustache menacingly, like a Mexican Snidely Whiplash. Yes, Savages is that kind of story.

Don't come to The Amazing-Spider-Man looking for originality.

An odd and entertaining mix of backstage melodrama, indie verite, and "Showgirls" kitsch, the usual gender stereotypes are upturned.

Ted is really a rather sweet examination of loyalty, friendship, and love. Wahlberg and Kunis are charming together (though not exactly in a Cary Grant / Audrey Hepburn kind of way), and both manage to play this thing - at least the challenges-of-a-serious-relationship part of this thing - straight.

Satisfying and spirited and laced with humor.

It's about time: Aubrey Plaza gets her own movie!

A jukebox musical that's astonishingly cornball one minute, winkingly sardonic the next.

Laughably bad adaptation of a Guy de Maupassant novel.

The usual complaints and caveats about Anderson - he's precious, his characters have no grounding in the real world - can be made about Moonrise Kingdom, but so what? This is his seventh feature, he has been working with a gang of collaborators in front of the camera and behind, and his worldview gets richer, and more revealing, even as the view from his lens gets smaller, closer, almost two-dimensional in its oddball tableaux.

It is Rapace, the Swedish actress who gained worldwide recognition as Lisbeth Salander in the original adaptation of "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo," who ends up the true heroine of Prometheus.

Casting herself (as the proprietor of the local cafe) along with a mix of professional and nonprofessional actors, Labaki tries to get across her give-peace-a-chance message with humor, with song, with melodrama.

It's the classic odd-couple buddy movie setup, only it'll pull at your heartstrings, whether you want it too or not. And you won't want it to, because it's sap.

Hysteria is a romantic comedy, not an erotic one.

A surprisingly fine, fantastic movie it is.

Kore-eda, deploying a Western pop score by the Japanese indie-rock band Quruli, just lets these kids be kids.

Weirdly funny, inspiring film.

Mixes its high and low comedy with surprising success.

It's fun to watch Keaton and Kline together, bickering and (of course) bonding all over again.

Pinpointing the era - lovingly - is very much what Dark Shadows' has on its mind. While there's a tangle of romance and vengeance and all sorts of family matters to deal with, Burton's film is really about hippies in bell-bottoms, stoned out in their VW micro-buses.

It's more of a character study, insightful and nuanced, about a man grappling with a profound sense of inadequacy, questioning himself. In many ways, We Have a Pope recalls last year's Oscar winner, "The King's Speech": Someone who doesn't feel up to the job fate has handed him, and then struggling to come to terms with it.

An economical thriller, both narratively and budgetarily, Sound of My Voice serves up moments of extreme dread and discomfort, but works a winning undercurrent of playful absurdity into the material as well.

As far as director Nicole Kassell and writer Gren Wells are concerned, the C in Big C must stand for cute. The film reaches into the pits of moviegoing hell when it finds Marley on a celestial white couch, ringed in billowing white curtains, communing with God. And God is embodied by Whoopi Goldberg.

The chaos and carnage here is just a pumped-up take on a tradition that harks back to Godzilla, and harks back, of course, to the Marvel comics from which all these heros originally sprang.

It's not impossible to address grown-up issues of commitment, of responsibility, of love, and have some fun, and some profanity, while you're at it.

Marley celebrates the fact that its subject is still among us in the way that perhaps matters most: His music not only survives, it thrives.

Efron, who wears an "All glory is fleeting" tattoo on his back and a soulful look on his face, gets to be more of a grown-up in The Lucky One than in most of what he's done before.

The beautiful misery of The Deep Blue Sea - Terence Davies' crushing adaptation of Terence Rattigan's 1952 play - is almost too much.

Lockout is genre all the way. The film wears its colors proudly, but it also, alas, wears out its welcome.

In some ways, American Reunion is the Charlize Theron indie "Young Adult" all over again: In both, a small-town high school reunion is the setting for a lot of nostalgia and narcissism and nasty behavior.

Boy begins with an epigram from E.T.: "You could be happy here . . . . We could grow up together." That's what the film is about - finding happiness, growing up, feeling like a stranger in a strange world.

David Gelb's thoughtful and wonderful documentary, Jiro Dreams of Sushi, explores the dedication of this humble, bespectacled man, and the Zen-like focus he has for his work - or, as many would claim, for his art.

Tautou, who looks even smaller and more fragile alongside her towering leading man, conveys the hurt and hesitancy that are pulling at her character's heart - and does so with seeming effortlessness. It's as though she knows this woman, deep down.

It also smells very much like a movie with money on its mind - not altogether successfully balancing its loftier ideas with a sense of superficial whimsy and Vegas-meets-Wizard of Oz production design.

Nothing in this quiet, quirky comedy from the brothers Duplass comes close to Jeff's inspired, bong-fueled deconstruction of "Signs," but it gives us a good idea of where this guy is coming from.

Casa de Mi Padre is at its best (a relative term, mind you) when it's at its silliest and most surreal.

Fragmented, dreamlike, a whir of memories and misery, We Need to Talk About Kevin is unsettling, but also somehow unnecessary.

While The Forgiveness of Blood lacks the narrative momentum of director Joshua Marston's previous film, "Maria Full of Grace" - it is nonetheless fascinating.

If all this sounds like too much whimsy to bear, be forwarned. There is whimsy everywhere.

That's kind of the aesthetic that Stanton is going for: over-the-top pulp. But there's something generic about the digitally rendered Martians, and there's a corniness to the dialogue that keeps the audience from any kind of emotional attachment to the Tharks and Zodangans and their ilk.

It's the powerful emotional punch their films deliver - and this one is no exception - that elevate the game, that make them so satisfying, so worthwhile. The Kid With a Bike grabs at the heart.

The filmmaker, whose career took off with a very different sort of Holocaust film, 1990's Oscar-nominated "Europa Europa," understands that most of these stories arrive at a point of unspeakable, incomprehensible horror.

Undefeated is undeniably inspirational stuff.

A lazy assemblage of sketch-comedy raunch, mock-schlock TV ads, and ideas that even the writers of "Mall Cop" and "Observe and Report" would have tossed.

Brian Cox is especially good, and slippery, as Menenius, a Roman senator.

Writing with her sister, Karen, Jill Sprecher rigs up an elaborate cause-and-effect comedy of errors, with Kinnear's predatory protagonist as both perp and victim. I won't say more than that, but Thin Ice is deeper than it first appears.

By detailing the allegiance between Tutsi Muslims and Christian Hutus, and the fatwa issued by a Muslim leader forbidding his followers to participate in the massacres, the film is hopeful rather than horrific, even as it describes events of impossible savagery and hate.

The greatest lacrosse movie of the 21st century - and, unless I'm mistaken, the only lacrosse movie of the 21st century.

Chronicle is full of smart writing that isn't too smart.

Safe House rockets along, taking a familiar formula and making it work - hard.