It’s hard to say what makes Veronica Guerin feel so distant and uninspiring. Maybe, it’s just as conventional wisdom has always said: Journalism is a dull and tedious business to put on the screen.

In an era where so many horror films are anchored in the aesthetics of Eighties American cinema, Sputnik establishes itself as an especially polished work of retro-futurism.

Where Kore-eda finds his languid but captivating pace is in the constant itch that there are no ways to quite make all of the pieces fit.

Missed opportunity and bad timing inform the romantic interlude in Of an Age in a way many of us have experienced at least once.

Embrace the simple pleasures of pen to paper.

Unfortunately, someone (screenwriter Justin Lader, perhaps?) needed to improvise some kind of satisfying denouement because the film’s third act just collapses in on itself. The One I Love is imaginative and provocative until … until it isn’t.

Pink Flamingos is, in its own unique way, the quintessential American Family Film. Not my family, certainly, and probably not yours, but a family nonetheless. So here's to family values. And shock values, too.

The result is an expansive and ambivalent testament to human ingenuity, human intransigence, and nature’s endangered yet enduring power to move.

The movie is, ultimately, a fascinating victim of its own ambitions.

It's not if Michael gets out of his rut (or when he gets to chasten Pineapple a little along the way), but how, and it's a fun ride with him until he reaches that destination.

The movie has a floppy vibe to it, teetering on lazy farce in its mixed marriage of dry humor and flashes of violence.

Just because Pavements is a prankish film about a prankish band doesn't make it any less deeply heartfelt. It’s one for the fans – and we are legion.

Employing contemporary interviews with those who were there and a wealth of raw footage from the original events, Desolation Center illuminates a short-lived but absolutely momentous time when the Mojave beckoned, free of charge and front-loaded with anarchic artistic overload.

Not so much horrific as it is just skeletons-in-the-basement creepy, this is a shuddery fun surprise for horror fans, who by the way should stick around until the closing credits are done for a special (if inevitable) trick or treat.

Offers a very interesting snapshot of some decidedly modern pathologies.

It's interesting to see this more quotidian aspect of Israel displayed on film, but the parable of James' Journey to Jerusalem has the sophistication of a Sunday School lesson.

Spacey makes interesting work out of an otherwise overdone situation.

The film offers elliptical hints as to what evil may or may not be lurking in the house, a four-story set designer’s dream.

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.

Although flawed in many respects -- it's not as smooth and silky a movie as it could have been -- Don Juan DeMarco nevertheless evokes a romantic mood that tickles and caresses.

Fans of the considerably more pedestrian "Julie & Julia" will likely have to attach drool buckets to their chins in order to avoid hours of tedious mopping up, so lusciously bizarre are the comestibles on display here.

Theater Camp may not qualify as a 24-carat enterprise, but when it occasionally shines, it glimmers with a love for the transformative magic of the stage.

The leads’ prolonged, puffed-feathers sparring is entertaining while it lasts, but the sensation of something sizable is only fleeting.

In the mold of their previous films "Ice Age" and "Robots": a nice blend of rudimentary and inventive touches.

Isn't a comedy, but it's not entirely a tragedy, either, and it straddles this razor's edge with a deeply nuanced aplomb.

White couldn't stay away, and neither can the band's legions of fans, who bop up and down in sold-out arenas at the reunion tour that provides the film's hopeful coda.

The casting is solid, with an even more pumped-up Jordan once again anchoring the movie as the conflicted young boxer in the title. But it’s the underdeveloped villains of the piece who ultimately prove more intriguing, despite their one-dimensionality.

Winter can't resist the cheering idea that, for all its sins, YouTube has created a new, disseminated knowledge base. However, that core concern about its dangers is what really drives The YouTube Effect, and re-enforces its central finding that it has had an undeniably corrosive effect on our lives, even as we've fallen for its steady stream of pablum and bootlegged shows.