Steven Rea

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.