Yes, Boy Erased is a horror movie, but it bears pointing out that the emotion is by definition intertwined with both empathy and a certain sense of compassion. Terror elicits a shriek. Horror hits you in the heart, and the next thing you know you’re sobbing. Bring some tissues.

Fans of all that has come before (excluding Roger Corman's premature-ejaculation version of "The Fantastic Four," natch) will weep tears of giddy joy at how crowd-pleasingly cohesive – and ridiculously fun – this film is.

Casting Seigner in the coveted role of Vanda in this adaptation of David Ives’ Tony-winning play may strike some as nepotistic (she’s married to director Polanski), but her performance stands on its own. It’s deliciously self-conscious.

For once, the Coen brothers' neurotic filmmaking style works to their advantage; it's giddily appropriate for a movie about a man who's losing his mind.

What papers over any remaining cracks is the perfect casting of Hamm as the fixer turned business consultant dragged back into the morass. His raw charisma, and near-peerless ability to sweat martinis through a disheveled linen suit and still look stylish, sends the film's moral compass spinning – exactly as it should.

Its uneven comedy may leave moviegoers yearning for the confidently choreographed banter and moral sludge that marked LaBute's previous outings.

American Hardcore encapsulates a largely forgotten (by the mainstream, that is) moment in maximum rock & roll history.

Not every aspect is as exquisitely structured as Terajima's bittersweet performance. An underlying subtext about reinvention never truly develops, and the idea of Lucy as Setsuko's alter ego stutters. But her performance, especially when matched by Minami's hard-sighing world-weariness, is nothing less than transfixing.

A surprisingly large number of the laughs work, although, understandably, a good number of them also fall flat. You can bet that whenever the story slows down to advance the plot concerning its paper-thin characters, the film takes a noticeable dip.

A fun, inverted single-location thrill ride, director Halina Reijn creates one rainbow swirl of a good time.

It should be mandatory viewing for right-to-lifers and prospective parents as well as fans of creepy, crawly filmmaking.

The provocatively titled indie film Gook is both incendiary and lyrical.

There's an extraordinary immediacy to Luxor, born of director Durra's unromantic but loving view of the environment.

Not even the rich and nuanced performances of stage veterans Smith, Gambon, and Birkin can save this British period drama from languishing amid the story's unfocused longings and unrealistic musings.

A documentary whose content might possibly have further reach than the book.

In many ways, this is the thinking-person's teen movie.

I’m coming down harder than I meant to. If you’re a fan of the series – and I am – you’re still going to fan. (There’s no entry point for newcomers; it’s too in medias res.) The scenery is lush. There’s ever the pleasure in Steve and Rob’s company. I just wanted to feel by film’s end like I’d arrived somewhere new. Like the journey had been pulling me somewhere inevitable but still enlightening.

Although Moffie is competently executed, its genre-straddling will leave you vaguely unsatisfied if you decide too quickly the kind of movie it should be.

Chronicle may go over the top with its climax, but for such a giddy film, it's remarkably down to earth.

Sarah Smith pulls the various threads of this wholly original – well, as original as can be reasonably expected given the thousands of cinematic iterations Christmastime has provoked over the years – together into a very coherent, visually stunning, oftentimes laugh-out-loud hilarious holiday film.

As the ugly and bitter witch who yearns for stolen life, Streep’s performance, for the most part, is strangely joyless. Once upon a time, this actress knew how to keep it fresh when going over the top ("Death Becomes Her," anyone?), but here she’s hardly bewitching.

It's definitely quite the spectacle as directed by the modern-day king of epics, David Lean. The movie is something that should be experienced by everyone at least once in a lifetime.

A film that is equal parts a celebration of a young woman’s life and a horrible document on her death, Finding Yingying brings humanity to the often stale true-crime subgenre while also giving us a unique perspective from someone on the outside of the American justice system.

What They Had has a lived-in ring of truth that will be instantly recognizable to any caregiver, spouse, child, or other loved one who has experienced something of this sort.

To the delight of its young audience, juvenile humor abounds in Captain Underpants, but the movie is smart about the way it contextualizes this lowbrow comedy.

These scenes of debauchery and lust that make up the film's centerpiece are among some of the most powerful and disturbing ever put to film.

Fluctuating between the extraordinary and the dull, with sections of narrative explication and tangents, Chicken With Plums can be as frustrating as it is ambitious. It's more like Chicken With Plums – and the Kitchen Sink.

A gorgeous, violent, brilliant puzzle box of a movie that relishes in how convoluted it is, and pays off every second of attention.

By letting her babble on and become a somewhat risible figure, the filmmakers display a somewhat mean-spirited attitude, despite all their fuss about finally appreciating this put-upon survivor.

The dialogue is scattered with so many beautiful gems that conversations glitter.

A remarkable film. From its performances on down to director of photography Roger Deakins' sun-baked, dirty-ochre cinematography, the film is all of a piece.

Never bordering on cheesy, She Paradise is a heartfelt ode to the strength it takes to learn to stand up for yourself in a painful world.

It's a giddy blend of horror and comedy.

In transgressive cinema, there is only one real sin, and that is to be boring. Somewhere around the six-hour mark of Gaspar Noé's 96-minute drug freakout fable Climax.

The actors are all charged up, too; there’s just nowhere in this script for them to go.

Boyle, MacDonald, and Hodge honed this wonderful coupling of music, visuals, and clever words, as well as a strange affection for toy babies, in their first film.

Unlike the other great caper films of the last 10 years, like "Ocean’s 11" and "The Italian Job" – stylish affairs in which punishment is close enough to give the audience a sense of lingering danger but never so close that it gets in the way of the technological fetishism and love of tailored shirts that apparently make grand larceny such a kick – the blowback in The Bank Job is real and ugly and involves some sort of pneumatic paint-stripping machine that would freak out the Coen Brothers.

The decibel level in Little Voice ranges from a delicate whisper to seismic bellowing; aurally speaking, it traverses the spectrum of human sounds.

From James Brown to Sam Cooke, the songs set a mood that lingers for some time after.

The Birth of a Nation most definitely has its finger on the pulse of our times.

So potent it nearly succeeds even as a vacuum sits squarely at its center.

Yet it's really as a director of actors that he's a revelation. Abbott never lets the audience walk away because they have already spent so much time – if not liking him, at least understanding him. We're right there with his wife, Lydia (Newcomb, extraordinary in what could have been a cipher of a role), when her world starts to fall apart. Dumb and evil may be different, Dick Long says, but it doesn't make the damage hurt any less.

Far From Home never forgets that it's a teen comedy-drama-romance, just wrapped up in a superhero story. But oh, that wrapping.

Never makes the leap from a little fantasy about sex with a stranger to a larger story about a woman settling down for life.

The film's sense of family values will make your head hurt and the chase scenes will set your noggin spinning.

Possibly due to the story's origin as a Ruth Rendell novel, this is the most coherent, viewer-friendly narrative he's ever filmed.

To its credit, the film doesn’t linger unnecessarily over the horrors, and quickly turns into a police procedural. As the FBI takes over the investigation from the local authorities and sets up a command center, the details of this process are fascinating to observe.

For those who loved movies like "The Last Winter" or "Wendigo," Depraved is more of the same in the best possible way.

The movie buries its treasures in the crevasses of its drollery and craziness.

Despite the obvious shortcomings, Echo in the Canyon should please fans of the music, as well as newcomers to the sound who are experiencing it fresh.

Isn't Lee's most personal piece, but it may very well be his most mature.

Elgort’s performance is more mannered than Woodley’s open-faced, direct line to the heart, but it works.

Welcome to Me isn’t laughing with Alice, but at her, in what seems like a harsh reaction to mental illness.

In the end, Zentropa is above all unique in its radical take on the inherent confusion of postwar Europe, offering the viewer a glimpse like none he has had before.

Not that anyone was asking for a reboot of the series that is perhaps best remembered as the launching pad for Johnny Depp's career, but here it comes anyway. The film will probably gain several points on the likability scale for its sheer unexpectedness and modest ambitions.

It can be an incredibly entertaining romp through the picket fence yards of an America that only exists in our collective unconscious.

In the end, Redbelt prevails, just as Terry teaches his students to prevail, but getting there isn't always pretty.

Still, this is recent and public history, and Fair Game, which both fascinates and infuriates, comes across as little more than a footnote in an ever-lengthening list (thanks, Wikileaks!) of the Bush White House's sordid, potentially treasonous actions leading up to and beyond the invasion of Iraq.

Though the history and the palace intrigue are not at all difficult for Westerners to grasp, a tighter running time would probably help this epic reach more eyes in America, where it has received the biggest release ever for a Bollywood

Ultimately offers some ironic amusement but wallows too long in the sins of its father.

Tamra Davis' directorial debut is a noir-ish, adrenaline-fueled tale of a love on the border between teen angst and homicide, and it packs a mean, unrelenting punch.

Most anthologies have the framing mechanism simply service the stories they contain: Instead, Spindell weaves each tale into the bigger fabric, like bloody fat quarters making up a gruesome but surprisingly snugly quilt. When the pieces all are sewn together, the fully assembled The Mortuary Collection may well be the most wickedly fun anthology since Trick'r Treat.

As Benny, [Driver] nudges the film out of its few valleys of smarm, making Circle of Friends a heartfelt love letter to circles of friends everywhere.

Packed with an equal amount of fart gags and jokes about the modern state of superhero films, Teen Titans is a perfect bit of escapism for families suffering from superhero fatigue.

James Gandolfini’s wintery silences and bitter outbursts are enough on their own to merit seeing this otherwise frustratingly vague slice of low-end Crooklyn crime life, but just barely.

There's nothing that feels like real rage, nothing that even remotely approximates the spiritual decimation of a termination.

Equal parts tragedy and comedy, high drama and low farce.

Isn't going to make anyone's head explode with joy, but it is sweet and sporadically funny in its own loopy way.

This a deeply humane and affecting movie, surprisingly gentle in spite of its black-comic tinge, and without the slightest hint of schmaltz.

Don’t leave until the final credits finish rolling or you’ll miss what many are considering Kill Bill: Vol. 1’s best bit. Trust us on this one.

The film moves so subtly, in fact, and so seamlessly between wry humor and the emotional wreckage of life-or-death, that it was with some shock that I found myself weeping halfway through the film.

There’s something a little pious about how resistant the film is to portraying Nicky not just as an admirable character but as an interesting one, too.

Wright takes the tools of a bloodless medium, the video game, and crafts an action-comedy with a true-blue beating heart.

The story of the short-lived women's baseball league gives Marshall the opportunity to examine the roots of modern feminism and have a darn fine time doing it.

Technically, what’s on display may not be the Oscar winner’s finest go at filmmaking, but never has his message seemed more urgent and unaffected.

So even though Get Duked! is a slapstick, rap-fueled horror comedy about a bunch of Scottish inner-city kids being hunted in the glens by a pair of rich snobs disguised as the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh, you could slap a "Filmed at Ealing Studios" card at the end, and you'd know exactly what to expect.

While there’s no denying that the well-tailored Outfit starts slowly, once it finally gets going the mystery is fun to work out. But it feels like it takes a long time to get there and with a run time of 106 minutes, it really shouldn’t feel that way.

If Raiff's first film was about two neurotic characters learning to get out of their own heads, then Cha Cha Real Smooth is a tenderly bittersweet story about a couple learning to use theirs.

The movie's quirk isn't forced; it sincerely ponders the nature of love and of human need, opening with a quote by Jacques Lacan and ending with a shrug.

Kazan appears in every scene of The Exploding Girl’s perfectly paced 80 minutes, and you’d miss her if she ducked out for even a moment.

This footage is essential to this film, allowing us to view Marianne as a solo human being and not just as a muse to a great man. It is she who first noticed the figurative beauty of a nearby “bird on a wire,” not he. Yet this is also how the movie fails. Praiseworthy for finally providing some three-dimensionality to the figure of Ihlen, the film doesn’t go far enough in examining the plight of the muse.

For the most part, it's all fairly predictable material, although McAvoy and his costars invest the movie with dynamic performances that manage to keep the story's characters just this side of stereotype and mediocrity.

The numerous characters presented in the film probably dilute its overall dramatic power.

Mines the traditional Western genre and infuses it with fresh, frequently hilarious life.

Bridges is another example of Eastwood's remarkable economy of style as both a director and an actor. It is neither his best work nor his worst, though it is a fascinating exploration.

Skateboarding is not a crime, but the subject of this exhaustive documentary... is very much a criminal.

A pleasant, often beautiful, and surprisingly light-hearted film that affirms the human traits of resilience and intelligence while clearly denouncing the bellicose tendencies of nations and factions.

Feels for all the world like a Meg Ryan/Billy Crystal heist comedy transposed to the Far East.

The titular role of Monsieur Ibrahim is not a terribly taxing one, but Sharif effortlessly demonstrates that he still has the stuff that made him a star so many years ago – he exudes a charismatic appeal that is apparently timeless.

Rarely have I seen a film so willing to champion the fallibility of the human heart.

Pleasant. If you had to reduce this biographical documentary of the great violinist Itzhak Perlman to one word, it would be pleasant.

But the best way to enjoy Ong Bak is on its own gritty, low-budget level, skins, brains, and guts galore, a viscerally entertaining slice of Thai filmmaking that will leave you grinning ear to ear.

Harris' thought-provoking performance art/life isn't yet over, but by film's end he's become unplugged, both literally and metaphorically.

I bet Samuel had the time of his life making this, 'cos it shows. It’s violent. Holy crap, is it violent. It’s unrelenting. It’s bleak. It’s also entertaining as hell.

It's a small gem of a movie, disturbingly realistic and profoundly terrifying on a near-primal level.

Infamous successfully captures a sense of the loneliness of a writer's life.

Lin’s F&F films are operatically dumb, which was what makes them so much fun; maybe if Star Trek Beyond were stupider it wouldn’t feel like such a chore.

Martin is relentlessly downbeat and has a molasses pace, but is nonetheless worthwhile to watch if you're in the mood for an uncomfortable, depressing Romero-style take on the vampire legend.