Steven Rea

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.