Todd McCarthy

Genuinely funny, randy and moving by turns, breezily enjoyable throughout.

As intensely personal and deeply felt as it is, however, Davies' attempt to breathe new life into Rattigan's 1952 play is a rather bloodless, suffocating thing, lent tragic passion more by its use of Samuel Barber's Violin Concerto than by anything achieved by his star Rachel Weisz and her leading man.

The fact that a genre entry of this nature, with no intrinsic need of being philosophically nuanced, goes out of its way to endow even its ostensible villains with comprehensible motives rates as a notable achievement.

Succeeds in capturing the book's essential themes and concerns, albeit in a hectic style that could not be more antithetical to that of the literary master of international intrigue.

Lack of depth, complexity or strangeness make this a relatively routine entry for the director.

Sympathetic, genial and exceedingly wholesome, it's a film that, once seen, will permanently and favorably influence the way viewers regard the characters' real-life counterparts.

Manages the difficult feat of being an intimate, even delicate tale played with an appealingly light touch against an epic backdrop.

If it were a normal holiday animated film, The Nightmare Before Christmas would be an entertaining, amusing, darker-than-usual offering indicating that Disney was willing to deviate slightly from its tried-and-true family-fare formula. But the dazzling techniques employed here create a striking look that’s never been seen in such sustained form, making this a unique curio that will appeal to kids and film enthusiasts alike.

Blasting onto the screen at warp speed and remaining there for two hours, the new and improved Star Trek will transport fans to sci-fi nirvana.

On its own terms, the plotting of "Devil" is absorbing, and the pieces actually fit together pretty decently. On the other hand, when scenes directly call to mind similar ones in "Chinatown," this effort's stepchild relationship to the classic is forcibly demonstrated.

The director mixes moods with a playfulness that is both brazen and carefree and yet precisely modulated, yielding results that amplify the specific content of the screenplay. This makes for a film that, however cheap it was to make, is incredibly rich to watch.

Ordinary in some ways and extraordinary in others, The Spectacular Now benefits from an exceptional feel for its main characters on the parts of the director and lead actors.

A provocative premise, virtuoso direction and two dazzling lead performances go a long way toward offsetting a lack of dramatic structure and a sense of when to quit in Face/Off.

Hakonarson observes all this with the practiced eye of a good documentarian but, in the compositions, the rigorous timing of the editing and the performances of the two leads, he lifts the material beyond the observational to a modestly accomplished work that not only neatly observes an obscure lifestyle but brings to life a most peculiar sibling relationship.

Reheating the ingredients can't disguise how stale they are, as setpiece after setpiece strains to whip up excitement, only to fall flat while reminding of previous sequences that did such things ever so much better.

Racing in high gear from start to finish, Danny Boyle’s electric direction tempermentally complements Sorkin’s highly theatrical three-act study.

Uses first-person on-camera accounts of the adventure by Simpson and fellow climber Simon Yates to backdrop newly shot you-are-there footage that brings home the awesome and harrowing aspects of their feat.

All the dramatic components have not only been well thought out by Talbot and co-writer Rob Richert, but they’re adorned, for the most part, by a sense of reality that keeps pretentiousness at bay. To be sure, this is a highly calculated and worked-out story, but the humor and lively playing of the entire cast keeps the film aloft across its two hours.

A classic piece of Americana, a down-home documentary that not only produces gales of laughter but also manages, by the end, to come together as a highly unlikely metaphor for the rigors of human existence.

The film rips right along and never relinquishes its grip.

An impudently comic, stylistically aggressive and, finally, very thoughtful manner.

Unusual for this sort of thing, Snitch is a film after which you remember the characters and actors more than the big action moments.

Upstream Colors certainly is something to see if you’re into brilliant technique, expressive editing, oblique storytelling, obscuritanist speculative fiction or discovering a significant new actress.

The violence of the inter-American drug trade has served as the backdrop for any number of films for more than three decades, but few have been as powerful and superbly made as Sicario.

As a contrast to Gosling's deliberately deadened, emotionally zoned-out turn, Ford almost single-handedly amps up a film otherwise intentionally drained of character vitality.

Exploding Raymond Carver's spare stories and minimally drawn characters onto the screen with startling imagination, Robert Altman has made his most complex and full-bodied human comedy since "Nashville."

To say 13th is stimulating and thought-provoking is the understatement of the year.

An ultra-smart-mouthed comedy about a planned adoption that goes weirdly awry.