Todd McCarthy

"Big Night" meets "The Sopranos" in Dinner Rush.

To be sure, the climax delivers copious amounts of blood and guts and tension and look-away temptations. But there are enough interesting surprises, in addition to the narrative promise, to provide for the presumed, and now quite desired, sequels.

The clear-eyed film dedicates itself to breaking through the debris of cliched, one-dimensional public impressions of vets, bikers, immigrant wives and kids and trailer-park lifestyles as it fashions an involving portrait of a deeply scarred man sustained by certain rituals and an unextinguished sense of empathy for others’s problems.

A tough-minded, bracingly blunt look at the sometimes debilitating cost of doing business that casts an unblinking eye on the physical, emotional and moral bottom line.

A sharply made, perfectly cast and unfailingly absorbing melodrama. But, like the director's adaptation of another publishing phenomenon, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, three years ago, it leaves you with a quietly lingering feeling of: “Is that all there is?”

Lively, sometimes funny and, inevitably, provocative.

The main performances are powerful, the visuals are bold and vivid, the final effect one of the gut having been punched and the mind stirred.

Working in his typically idiosyncratic and episodic vein, Jim Jarmusch has nonetheless pitched the film slightly more toward mainstream tastes than usual for him, using excellent thesps in the service of accessible material.

Nichols has delivered a timely drama that, unlike most films of its type, doesn’t want to clobber you with its importance. It just tells its story in a modest, even discreet way that well suits the nature of its principal characters.

Silence, more successfully than not, artfully addresses the core issue of its maker's lifelong religious struggle.

Story was originally conceived as an episode of Tales From the Crypt, and that is perhaps what it should have remained, as the thinness of the conceit shows throughout, painfully so in the first half.

Hitchcock/Truffaut is a resourceful, illuminating and very welcome documentation both of filmmaking and the making of film history.

Ambitiously tackling his biggest canvas to date, Clint Eastwood continues to defy and triumph over the customary expectations for a film career in Flags of Our Fathers.

Witty, thoughtful and illuminating.

While pic remains sympathetic and appealing, the endless dialogue and repetitive settings become wearing through the couple's one long night together, and the artifice of the premise may contribute to the difficulty the film has in coming to romantic life.

So it's a fun, if not exhilarating, ride, one sped along with the help of a wonderfully assembled cast.

The necessity of circumstances dictates everything anyone does here and you can only react with varying degrees of outrage, anger, disgust, pity, empathy and, if you're a blind optimist, hope for something better.

Part sincere and part smarmy, part amusing and part windy nonsense, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs plays like an old Western-themed vaudeville show featuring six unrelated sketches of drastically differing quality.

Ever-eclectic director Jon Favreau, who briefly pops up onscreen as a Stark minion, maintains a brisk but not frantic pace, and, in concert with lenser Matthew Libatique, production designer J. Michael Riva and the first-rate visual effects team, has made an unusually elegant looking film for the genre.

Only Lovers Left Alive is an addictive mood and tone piece, a nocturnal reverie that incidentally celebrates a marriage that has lasted untold centuries.