Wesley Morris

The images are meant to accumulate shame, and they do. But they also might be too much.

It's the hypnotic long-form music video Smoke never got to make.

A riveting and sobering way to spend a Saturday afternoon.

The grime, filth, slop, vomit, and crotch-nibbling pigs double all too easily as a recipe for this movie's failure. It hasn't been made so much as excreted.

Diablo Cody wrote Young Adult, and it's an improvement over "Juno," her first script.

Aileen is Broomfield working compassionately. Perhaps it's only because he knows he can't save Wuornos that he can offer her as she might have been: part wounded animal, part self-destructive martyr, and all tragedy.

I don't think I've seen an actor do more with deadpan expressions than Mara does in this movie. Her face doesn't move but, whether she's tasing a man or standing in front of a mirror watching a cigarette dangle from her mouth, we respond to her.

What makes Shadow Boxers special is how Bankowsky restores the woman's touch that always seems intentionally excised from coverage of the sport without comprising their participation in the sport.

Moreover, what the film lacks in temporal credibility, it amply makes up for in sheer rawness -- the rawness being literal.

This is bench-press melodrama, and it's as manipulative as anything Bette Davis or Jane Wyman ever starred in. You can't abide the shamelessness of any of it.

Birbiglia, who's from Shrewsbury, has done some wonderful things with awkwardness. I'm sad to report that Sleepwalk With Me isn't one of them.

It's one of the most beautifully unpleasant movies ever made - its reverse charge being that it is no fun at all.

Fellowes is so desperate for us to like these people that, despite how guilty everyone seems, there's scarcely any pleasure in the film for us.

The rare ecological documentary that doesn’t nag us to run out of the movie theater and change the world.

The 70-something director puts us back in luxury's lap with Roman de Gare, which looks just like the high-roller ads you get in the first 40 pages of Vogue or Vanity Fair but feels vaguely more emotional. Lelouch wants to tie a Hermès scarf around our hearts.

Angry and tragic, Carandiru is finally, in its own way, uplifting.

There's scarcely any dialogue, and the "hukkle" sound is universal enough to make subtitles unnecessary and to please an audience of any age and attention span.

When it was over I felt vaguely embarrassed. I wasn't just leaving a movie theater. I was taking a walk of shame.

Sadly, this is the sort of movie in which the white Europeans do all the talking and worrying with each other. The Africans, for the most part, are either terrified, cowering, wincing masses or corpses strewn in the dirt.

By the end, you don't entirely understand either of these people, but you come to understand why they need each other.

Stirs excitement about exploration of all kinds.

Ultimately, Bingenheimer seems underwhelmed with himself. The people who know him say, in the movie, that he's a relic. Mayor of the Sunset Strip makes heartbreakingly clear what a glorious relic Bingenheimer is.

Watching them issue hugs produces an involuntary response. You want to hug them, too.

The title is Portuguese for "send a bullet" and the clever American tag line is "the rich steal from the poor; the poor steal the rich."

A cult classic is born.

Szabo doesn't bring the film to its senses until just past the halfway point.

What the movie lacks in ambition, originality, and grit, it makes up for in pure feeling.

Shannon gives the movie its inner life. Maybe the movie will give her back her comedy career.