Wesley Morris

It's a funny, fearless, suspenseful sex comedy that, in drawing on science and philosophy and art and death, risks accusations of pretentiousness. But, even in its romantic idealism, the movie proceeds according to recognizable rhythms of how some people live.

Who knows what movie Lonergan was searching for in all that footage? But what emerges from the tinkering and legal skirmishes is an occasional marvel, a kind of everyday highbrow social X-ray, Paul Mazursky by way of Krzysztof Kieslowski.

They're not looking to say anything grand. What they do say - and what we see - is smart and true.

The movie is corny enough to remind you that boxing rings are square.

This is a ridiculous movie - a thriller so indifferent to suspense, so above mystery that one character literally stabs another in the front.

It's an imperfect but ambitious film willing to confront an enormous, complex period in this country.

If Bunraku were serious about subverting or reinventing the genres it's cobbled together, Moore would play the gunslinger or the samurai or the crime boss. But no. All she gets are a couple of scenes that demonstrate that she still looks great soaking wet.

It's that awkward, tedious monster mash of "chick flick'' and romantic comedy.

The movie attempts to both explain everything away and pat itself (and Norway) on the back once we see Noa watching President Obama deliver his Nobel Prize speech.

The film isn't about the actor's intelligence. It's about his emotional radiance.

Killer Elite is based on a true story and about a half-dozen Jason Statham movies.

This is the first movie to make me equate coming home from prison with coming home from war.

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.

It's a crude, queasy, ugly remake of a crude, queasy, ugly, yet artistically superior 40-year-old Sam Peckinpah movie.

The movie has you from its nearly wordless opening sequence.

There's too much narration and too many drug-movie cliches.

As a filmmaker Soderbergh requires nothing more of us than a willingness to enjoy ourselves. He had fun. Why shouldn't we? With Contagion, the fun begins with a cough.

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.

Heartlessness, stupidity, cynicism, and greed are a demoralizing combination for movie-going. We pay to see a movie that doesn't respect us for being there at all.

It has a sense of small-town America that feels special even without great specificity. Some of the music on the soundtrack places it in 2007 or 2008, but, really, the film occurs outside of time, virtually outside of place (it's suburban Detroit), and in a void of cultural chic.

The movie is terrible partly because it's badly written, directed, and conceived and partly because it lacks the necessarily thematic coherence to accomplish proselytism of any kind.

It's basically a blaxploitation movie stretched to meaninglessly international proportions that leans on tired Colombian stereotypes. But if Saldana's aiming to be some kind of new Pam Grier, she needs to save more than herself.

Wetzel's challenge is to film the experiments so that the process itself is legible. We're made to marvel at slow-cooked, freeze-dried, unappetizingly bagged food, the way some mushrooms, when delicately sliced, evoke fruit and some crustaceans resemble side-sleeping snooze-bar slappers.

Mysteries of Lisbon brings us far inside oil-on-canvas in a way that isn't imitative. It's simply, magically a moving picture, what a movie in the 1800s would look like.

Chasing Madoff is mostly that sort of movie, the kind you make when all you've seen is other movies and television shows about crime, when you want someone to know what you can do with a juicy story that takes some effort to ruin.

It's all emotionally counterfeit, and that bogusness infects the comedy.

The remake isn't openly nostalgic. In a sense, this is another sexy vampire movie. But Farrell does something special with the sexuality: It's simultaneously omnivorous, dangerous, and a hoot.

Octubre is a quick, quiet movie that distills Lima, Peru, to a downtrodden version of its more dynamic current self.