Steven Rea

The film is a sharp, funny, touching tale.

A breakneck French thriller, Point Blank is so ridiculously successful at keeping its momentum going - and keeping the audience tense with suspense - that it's likely to leave you with your heart pounding, gasping for breath.

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

Exhilarating and, ultimately, filled with a sense of existential dread.

There's a difference between velocity and momentum, and while the chases, shootouts and close-quarters combat rarely flag, our interest does.

If a movie with suicide as a central theme can be deemed funny, then writer/director Craig Johnson has pulled it off, mixing heartache and humor and giving Wiig, especially, the opportunity to shine.

A merrily macabre things-we-do-for-love yarn.

Monster brings the horror stories of everyday life down to a recognizable level -- even as the actress inhabiting that story remains startlingly unrecognizable.

Rohmer pulls off a wonderful feat: celebrating the elegance, and artifice, of another era at the same time he brings this tale of social upheaval boldly into the present.

Guadagnino, who directed Swinton in the 2009 Italian gem "I Am Love," has kept the core premise - and the sensuality - of Jacques Deray's original. (Delon and Schneider go skinny-dipping, too.)

There's nothing mean-spirited, or judgmental, about the way Morris goes about his business - he must have been kicking himself with glee as one bizarre strand of the story unravels to reveal the next.

The Watermelon Woman is a thoughtful, charming movie that takes its audience along on a journey of self-discovery - without ever taking itself too seriously.

One of the finest pieces of screen acting in the career of Juliette Binoche -- the actress playing the actress in this extraordinary film.

Throw in the music -- a wall-to-wall whorl of Eastern modal dirges, thumping rock and Celtic-y skirl -- and you've got a veritable cinematic rhapsody of war.

This quiet, aching film - punctuated by dead-on music choices, a blues song, reggae, the requisite Leonard Cohen - doesn't answer those questions. It's enough to raise them.

Rize shows how clowning led to krumping, and argues that its practitioners' fierce dedication to dance has saved countless kids from drugs, crime and gangs.

For the most part, the film stays steady-on, celebrating one man's crusade - and one family's heartbreak.

Beautiful to behold but lacking in any kind of palpable dread or suspense.

As scatalogical affairs go, Flushed Away shows remarkable buoyancy.

A quiet, loopy gem, Duck Season is a goofball celebration of old friends, new beginnings, adolescent freedom, and baked goods laced with a little something extra.

Stymied by a clunking script, crammed with expository exchanges and urgent blather.

Although Mal is ostensibly the movie's hero, and River its heroine, Whedon does a good job of giving all onboard their own story arc, their tragedies and triumphs. The cast, to a man (and woman), is solid, although it's the ballet-trained Glau, who gets to mope in high angst and go Zhang Ziyi-crazy in a couple of martial-arts scenes, who steals the show.

At a certain point, Bujalski - the mumblecore meister, gleefully pushing the envelope of credulity here - jettisons the mock-doc pretense for a Christopher Guest-like glimpse into a strange subculture of the everyday.

Bold, ambitious -- and ambiguous.

Bayona's moves are deft, the atmosphere oozes with anxiety and grief, but the big payoff - like the big payoff in The Sixth Sense, another film The Orphanage has more than a bit in common with - never comes.

Offers a fascinating chronicle of the birth, glory days and waning years of a motorcycle-jacketed, bowl-haircutted quartet of middle-class geeks who unwittingly spawned the punk movement.

Delightfully creepy suspenser.

A deft, affecting drama about childhood sexual abuse and its lifelong scars.