Steven Rea

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

Something about the way the film has been assembled doesn't feel altogether organic.

Takes startling - and startlingly unpleasant - turns. This is not a film with anything approximating a conventional ending.

Sure, there are holes in The Manchurian Candidate, and tenuous coincidences and too-convenient plot devices. But Washington, Schreiber, Streep and company - and Demme - have managed to make all the malevolent machinations seem relevant again.

Greenberg, with Stiller's sad and self-mocking portrait at its core, is well worth getting to know.

Rife with nightmarishly violent and horrific behavior. It's intense, graphic, frightening.

The menagerie of mythological beasties in Narnia don't seem quite genuinely, three-dimensionally real.

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

This is a sad, passionate, beautifully wrought story, and Bardem's portrait of Arenas is at once daring and deeply moving.

Ripe with homoeroticism, but also with what the director — who made the film after recovering from a stroke a few years back — calls "the scent of murder."

Although Mistress America is very much a New York movie, full of references to couture, pop culture, boutique hotels (to Antigone and Faulkner, too), its comic centerpiece is a brazen assault on a country compound.

A delightful, oddball surprise.

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.

There's no adroitness, no grace in the handling of the pitching emotions - funny, sad, icky - that such a story presents.

Amelie is utterly charming. And so, too, is the film.

In the end, what the movie is about: time and life, and what we do with them, and what we regret that we didn't do.

Suffers from several goofily tacky animated reenactments and a music score that unnecessarily underlines the significance of key events, but for those who lived through the turmoil of Vietnam, and for the generations that have come since, the film is an important document in its own right.

Moves from its protagonist's dream state to her memories to her waking present in imperceptible shifts - the effect is disorienting, at first, but ingenious.

Watts, who is one of the film's executive producers, brings a taut intelligence to the proceedings, but her character, like Roth's, is more archetype than actual person.

The Trip to Italy doesn't feel entirely new, but there's comfort in familiarity, too. And as Brydon and Coogan note in one discourse, it's the rare sequel (The Godfather: Part II) that's better than its forebear.

Lord knows how Holofcener got the performance she did out of Goodwin, but the child actor's Annie, rude and unmanageable, is an extraordinarily rich and complicated figure.

The performances are uniformly strong - nuanced, realistic, lacking any wild, flailing emoting.

A really satisfying suspenser, but also really, really fun.

Opens the window on a pivotal time in 1960s (and early 1970s) pop culture.

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.

Whatever one makes of its subject's moral code and mind-set, one has to give Terror's Advocate its due: the stories are riveting, the man is real.

The same kind of keen, empathetic observations that made "The Station Agent" and "The Visitor" so illuminating are at play here, too.

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.