Wesley Morris

The immediacy and caprice of violence in The Interrupters are just as strong as in nearly every documentary I've seen about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

A collection of beautifully acted encounters, conversations, symbols, and vignettes woven into an evocative and unforgettably surreal garment.

Set in a vivid two-dimensional African village, the animated fable is jerky, odd but redolent somehow of Saturday morning and the night's sleep before.

For some, Atlas Shrugged Part II is a ridiculous movie. For others, it's scripture.

The opportunity to see what Lollobrigida could do with a crooked smile or a roll of her eyes -- let alone a simple street dress -- is well worth the price of entry.

I Stand Alone has the ghastly stink of a rotting corpse. You can smell the cess as clearly as you can see the blood vessels striking like lightning around the pupils of its malefactor's eyes.

A particularly egregious array of Kodak moments.

Short without feeling scant. That's how big its sense of grief is.

Just fascinating in an empty, trendy sort of way

It's as much a portrait of a kind of artist as it is a document of a city's evolving sense of style.

Merry, filthy, unstoppably hormonal, Serbis feels very much like the sort of movie that happens when no one is minding the store.

It’s both ridiculous and ridiculously romantic, which is an apt description of a work shaped like a heart and structured like a pretzel.

The movie is warm, observant, mildly philosophical and deeply curious about the daily and inner lives of both the people and their four-legged assistants.

Harmless enough, but "indie comedy" sounds like something better seen at Urban Outfitters than at a movie theater.

In Every Little Step, the performers bleed, sweat, cry theater - without having to tell us.

On the one hand, welcome to the music business. On the other, if A Tribe Called Quest can't stay together who can? It's a worry that eventually gets at the eccentricity of both the music and the movie.

Washington hasn't been this relaxed in years. When he feels like it he can be the most charismatic star in the movies.

The movie is like a daydream, and it's most infectious when the characters are in motion or misbehaving, which is often.

A dashing fusion of the literary and the cinematic.

It's hard to dislike a film that wants to say that the bereft have to move on with their lives, that death is part of living, and that poverty is a state of mind. But it's not impossible.

Every moment... is a cleverly constructed live-action joke on aloofness: The world is ending, and these people are too self-centered to notice.

While the words belong to the storyteller, the story in And Everything Is Going Fine appears to be telling itself.

It looks great and the dancing is the kind of stuff that would upstage the average pop star.

In its seriousness, Syriana has an absorbing, ominous roundness that plays even better with a second viewing.

Swift, brutal, lurid, often overheated, and occasionally comical, but it’s also a serious, well acted, and unromantic exploration of the rise and demise of a terrorist gang whose radicalism ultimately reached beyond the young men and women who set it in motion.

A delightful road movie.

It's taken Dreamgirls 25 years and several false starts to get to the screen, so it's a shame to see what a rush job it feels like.

Flight is a so-so movie with Denzel Washington as a commercial-airline pilot who crash-lands a plane while drunk, high, hung over, and horny. It doesn't do much that you couldn't anticipate just by seeing the trailer - the trailer is more exciting than the movie itself.

What follows is serviceable action set to music you'd find in a video game -- or a military ad.

It's scant to the point of irrelevance.

Comes on like an "After School Special'' psychodrama that's been taken off its medication.

The idea is to share with us that this show happened. But gluttons for these artists and for music festivals in general might wonder, as I have, whether there's any way the filmmakers might share more of the remaining 123 1/2 hours.

This is a party, and you're either having a good time or wondering when Akin is going to get down to business. But for an hour and a half, fun is the business.

Like most films about gay men, Undertow can't envision a normal life of couplehood. But Fuentes-Léon works in a blithe and breezy magic-realist manner that fends off attendant feelings of depression.

Piercingly co-written and directed by Susanne Bier, the movie dramatizes one man's collapse and the other's surprising maturation.

In the case of Jeremy Irons playing the aloof English billionaire who owns the bank, that's dinner theater. But it's of the highest caliber.

Enormously enjoyable.

It’s as slickly enjoyable as anything you’d see on VH1.

The movie captures a kind of tragedy of self.

This is the best thing Mortensen's ever done. His slow, paunchy, hairy Freud has a cavalier authority and a capacity for drollery. He's also seductively wise in a way that makes both Fassbender and Knightley, as very good as they are, also seem uncharacteristically callow.

The result is kitschy entertainment that wants to celebrate Lucas's chutzpah and acumen while loosely condemning what they wrought: "Scarface" with a ghost of a conscience.

The lack of sexual tension is astounding.

As films about the young and the horny go, I preferred the smarter approach director Jeffrey Blitz takes in "Rocket Science."

Rothemund gives us his sophisticated filmmaking only in the finale, which is devastating in its briskness and fury.

It's that rare movie with a sense of timeliness that is eternal, and a protagonist whose soul-crushed angst, even at its most fatal, speaks to the little boy/girl lost in everyone.

The movies rarely gives us a woman as fascinatingly complex as Lisbeth Salander, and the happiest news about the two sequels is that she’ll be back.

You could cast this movie with potato chips and still get cheers when one of the bad guys is cuffed. It doesn't matter that none of it is to be believed.

A further, captivating extension of Oshima's marriage of the oblique and the erotic.

Demonstrates an idiosyncratic human touch. Kon is unafraid of the unseemly and unsightly. People are captured as they really might be.

This isn't a case of a liberal-minded movie inflicting goodness upon a character but a man radiating goodness because, well, he is good.

The movie has a field day with thousands of airborne lanterns, a troop of Neanderthal thugs (one is a mime), some surprisingly fleet camerawork, and good editing. I can't think of a cartoon more confident about how to use jump cuts for comedy. Those senses of cleverness and innovation merely underscore how shopworn the rest of this movie is.

As wonderful as Testud is, her character doesn't make much sense.

Part Marxist social drama and part Michael Moore corporation-needling, with fed-up residents trying to outsmart the big, bad naive company to keep their lights on for free.

There's the air of sadness and worry all over this movie, and sometimes it's heavy. But it's air all the same.

The genius of Zulawski is that he's dispensed with all the buildup and explanation and logic. How many horror-movie explanations make any sense? He just made an entire movie out of the scary parts, the way a different genius concocted only the muffin top and some pop music producers give you 10 minutes of beats and chorus. Possession climaxes for two whole hours. It's as if, with "The Shining," Stanley Kubrick found 25 variations on "here's Johnny" and "red rum." [17 Nov 2012, p.G5]

It just feels like playacting.

Boy A comes frustratingly close to succeeding as tragedy.

This intimate, warmly made family portrait always feels true. The performances are particularly good.

The movie's amateurishly made. But the script is full of little surprises.

A lovely , old-fashioned farm romance quietly doubling as a comment on immigration and American identity.

What remains of the book's psychological underpinnings -- there are enough here to leave a permanent dent in the couch of any Freud-loving shrink

An alt-country paean to libidinal mothers and the little girls who clean up the mess.

Has a silly, insouciant glamour often employed to sell hair conditioners and perfume.

Fyre needs another layer. You can locate in it this national moment of brashness and effrontery.

Bridesmaids openly, comfortably turns the stress of being girlfriends into comedy. It's really about the single friend backing away from the edge of temporary insanity. This isn't the greatest such movie. That would be Nicole Holofcener's "Walking and Talking" (1996), with Catherine Keener and Anne Heche.

I've never seen a movie so perfectly balanced between unabashed nerdiness and hipness.

If anything, The Automat seeks to burnish the mystique — it won’t be hijacked by social politics even if the company’s stance in such matters appeared to be the right one. The movie opts for a starry, top-down vantage.

In an eco-horror show that politely masquerades as a documentary, the former vice president effectively warns of man-made cataclysm.

The movies are smart -- smarter than you, but not in an off-putting way. Their basic appeal, especially this new one, is that Matt Damon’s killing machine, Jason Bourne, is the cleverest man on earth. And we thrill to his sense of superiority.

For most of Lady Vengeance, Park is playing with us. But the jokey atmosphere dissipates and the fun turns inside out in the movie's last act.

Barbara Kopple and Cecilia Peck's film is a fascinating look at the intersection of commerce, celebrity, and controversy.

The sight of Adams gliding and beaming and chirping in this movie - a self-mocking cartoon that transforms into an inspired live-action musical farce - is just about the happiest time I've had watching an actor do anything all year.

An arthritic failure, genuine only when the two outcast lovers' eyes dart toward each other, then retreat.

"Angélica" feels most like the film that argues Oliveira is this close to the beyond without ever bothering to knock first at death's door.

If this is an unusually sentimental outing for Jia, it’s also characteristically tinged with woe. He’s just added a touch of sweetness to these otherwise sugarless lives.

This is the epidemic from love's point of view, a story as much about how the disease can ravage the heart as it does the body. It is also Téchiné's best film since 1998's superb "Alice et Martin," and 1994's even better "Wild Reeds."

Unlike in “Winged Migration,’’ the majestic imagery fails to tell a story or advance a message.

Gets on your nerves.

For a movie, this feels inadequate, despite its splendors and, later, its social dismay. It does, however, have the makings of a grand postcard.

What Little Children understands so well, and so poignantly, is a kind of parental existentialism that hits 30- somethings with kids: How does having children make you such a less interesting adult?

It also goes out of its way to give you a schlocky B-movie vibe by wrangling bait in the form of a bunch of Big-Gulp stupid stock characters - that's a whopping 44 oz. more stupid than you probably were bargaining for.

An army of rolled abs and their owners give the state of American race relations a beginner's workout.

The surprise here is how thrillingly bad things get.

Whitney is too funereal to be a party, too sad, strange and dismaying to cheer. Yet, in its grim, guilt-inducing way, the film works, even on the occasions when it’s working against itself.

Kline's combination of pratfalls and urbanity is funny, but it rubs against the rest of the movie's effortless rustic charm. He's like Errol Flynn on a hayride.

The movie is a perfect blend of calm execution and uninflected farce.

The finest element in de la Pena's carefully assembled account is how she doesn't simply state the obvious, but lets the meaty facts speak for themselves.

It does manage to put a somewhat complex human face on the domestic troublemakers, if not their exploits.

The filmmaker doesn't exactly let anyone off the hook.

The relief of Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami is that it seeks to square the person with the provocateuse. The documentary is a feat of portraiture and a restoration of humanity. It’s got the uncanny, the sublime, and, in many spots, a combination of both.

The characters are intended to be slightly stupid, but the writing isn’t necessarily smarter.

Rohmer's style saps the film of the drama that flows directly from the subject matter.

Like the great Iranian filmmakers, Rasoulof has no use for the artificiality of heightened drama.

Eerily tragic and chillingly hard to come to terms with.

The entire movie is pitched at a scream. But the screaming is more Janis Joplin, Axl Rose, or Mary J. Blige than Jamie Lee Curtis. All the tears I shed were hard-earned. So were all the laughing and clapping and eye-covering. In each case, it was involuntary.

You want the movie to stir your soul, push your intellect, or at the very least, break your heart. But it's such a repetitive and thinly constructed piece of filmmaking that the scope and complexity of Sampedro's case are turned to porridge.

The Others is great as a collection of acknowledgments, but a ghost story made of a bunch of ghoulish thank-yous isn't that haunting.

One of the best things about Nolan as a director is that he’s not self-conscious. His movies unfold and fold in on themselves without the strain of labor or flash. But that lack of self-consciousness is also Nolan’s downside.