Tasha Robinson

It's the next best thing to being there, in that it's likely to make shuddering viewers intensely glad that they weren't.

It’s an artful, funny, endlessly surprising little acting and writing showcase that shows just how far it’s possible for writers to take tired, clichéd characters, by treating them as human beings and caring what goes on underneath the surface of the easy jokes.

As a pure cinematic experience, it's exhilaratingly, brutally beautiful.

The film is a sumptuous, handsome portrait of a woman poised fearfully on the brink of decline, yet too proud to grab at rescue.

Veers in and out of conventionality, and ultimately sinks into it at the end. But first, it deals with old types in new ways, raising issues as it raises hackles.

Hurt steals scenes with a brilliantly nuanced character, a man bitter enough to make every line delivered to his peers a challenge or an accusation, yet experienced enough to present those challenges with an ingratiating politesse that only cracks in extremis.

The trouble with Bashir's extraordinary technique is that it lacks the confrontational realism of live footage; the extreme stylization of the animation can be distancing, making it hard to relate the images to real events and people. But that's also part of Folman's point.

Campion's merciless staging forces a more intimate relationship between viewers and characters; it's hard to take a detached stance when she's smearing raw emotions all over the screen.

The connections and the meaning aren't immediately apparent, and viewers are given plenty of time to find their own patterns and invent their own associations. Then, in its final half-hour, it pulls all the threads together, and a breathtaking bigger picture finally comes into focus.

Superhero fans will likely be into Push just for the cool-factor of watching embattled heroes and villains in tense war of wits, wills, and skills. That broader audience is less likely to come along for the ride.

Machine Gun Preacher is stirring when it presents Childers as a hero, but it does its most impressive work when it addresses him as a flawed, struggling, but still determined man.

While Rise Of The Guardians boasts a great deal of visual energy and amounts to a lot of fun, it's mostly lacking in that kind of depth elsewhere.

For all the inevitable comparisons to March Of The Penguins, Arctic Tale isn't quite a nature documentary.

These stories are frightening, but they contain few shocks or flinches; they're deeper and more psychological, more about adult anxiety than pure terror.

It’s a perfectly functional, fairly scary kids’ film, with plenty of craft and creativity to keep adults occupied. But with a story as sophisticated as its visuals, it could have been much more.

However crafted their stories may have become, and however reluctantly they participate, their sacrifice will be appreciated by history, and by the next generation of voyeurs as well.

The film is good-hearted, energetic, and full of Ghibli's characteristically beautiful hand-rendered animation, but it's also lightweight and hyper, with none of Miyazaki's more resonant themes.

Géla Babluani is unmistakably a first-timer, and his debut project is raw and rough-edged. But he aces the way simple images can make the most of a simple story.

"Chasing Amy" star Joey Lauren Adams makes a competent, tender writing and directing debut with Come Early Morning, but the film is still entirely in Judd's hands.

This is the darkest, saddest, most sophisticated Harry Potter film yet.

What makes Fifty Dead Men work is the story’s sheer moral complexity, which dares viewers to sympathize with anyone onscreen for more than a few minutes at a time.

Narratively, Trance is questionable, but Boyle and Hodges whisk past all the unlikely developments with enough verve and style to keep audiences from thinking too hard until after they’ve left the theater.

Bluth's directorial debut (co-produced, co-written, and co-designed by Pomeroy and Goldman) has its clunky side, particularly in its bafflingly outré alterations to the plot of a beloved children's classic. But the animation was, as Bluth and company had promised, a spectacular return to old-school craftsmanship.

The setup is rote, almost insulting, but it's smarter than it looks: Once the pieces are in place, Kazan's script reveals a deeper game.

For all the verbal jokery, it's more tragedy than farce.

Conversations is well-calculated and well-ordered, and it manages an equilibrium that a science lab would envy.

Another crowd-pleasing comic-book film designed to bring in new fans while gratifying the old ones.

It's a smart movie for grownups, an increasingly rare commodity.