A consistently entertaining parody that never once makes you feel like an idiot for laughing out loud at its idiocy.

Unlike any coming-of-age movie you've seen before. Equal parts sweet and perverse, this Scottish film is unpredictable in places where it might be twee, and subversively fanciful in others where it might be punishing.

A slam-bang, sci-fi actioner, relentlessly paced and edited, with a pounding soundtrack and some ingenious aliens courtesy of Berni Wrightson and KNB Effects.

No doubt some viewers could find fault with the slack pacing, though it's hardly inappropriate for a film that's fundamentally about emerging from frustration and stasis into a state of grace.

It's not quite as relentless as Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, but Bride of Chucky is still sick and wrong in all the right ways.

It's all fab, baby, a kicky, wiggy sequel that scores on all levels, from the sexy to the sublime.

A charming surprise, the kind of neat little low-budget movie that seems more like a collaboration among friends than it does a corporate investment.

Now, with Seven Pounds, the transformation of Will Smith is complete: Gone is any trace of love-me impishness, replaced by one of the sourest pusses Hollywood has seen since Joaquin Phoenix got his Screen Actors Guild card.

Eye in the Sky maintains nerve-racking suspense throughout its running time and explicates some of the unknown nuances of drone warfare. Plus, you know, Alan Rickman is reason enough to see it.

Like Night of the Living Dead, The Crazies offers no hope, no comfort and sure as hell no happy ending.

Sisley is a former stand-up comic, although you'd never guess it here: Finding himself in the eye of a colossal shit storm of his own making, his Vincent is brusque and action oriented, his face, a picture of ulceration in progress.

It sounds high-minded, but 3-Iron is in fact simple and economical, blessedly straighforward, absorbing, and hard to forget.

As romantic comedies go, Danish helmer Susanne Bier’s follow-up to her Oscar-winning "In a Better World," percolates more than it froths – but that’s a good thing.

It's a humorous film, to be sure, but there's also a stringent vein of giddy realism to it.

Tully, along with cinematographer Wyatt Garfield and composer Michael Montes, has crafted an elegantly creepy pastiche.

This is the main movie that built the house of Troma, Lloyd Kaufman's production company devoted to low-budget camp. The Toxic Avenger tells the humorous story of a geeky weakling who is turned into a superhero when he is slimed by some toxic waste.

Its adult themes of familial separation and societal betrayal are head and shoulders above much of the director’s previous popcorn work -– more hurt, more heart, more unassailable hope.

The film, a distinctly secular take on Waugh's religiosity, is far more interested in the battle of blind faith vs. rigid unbelief and its devastating effects. Herein, everyone is complicated – by their station, their philosophy, their God – and everyone is complicit.

What makes The Innkeepers such an unnerving experience isn't the outright horror but rather the lack of it. West mines every single floorboard creek and shadowy corridor for maximum frisson; this film ventures far beyond creepy and into the rarely explored land of genuine, incremental fear.

Thompson and Kaling spark, while still leaving space for the rest of the cast to deliver blissful, blistering one-liners (I, Tonya's Hauser predictably steals the show there as the dopey gag writer Mancuso) and moments of true pathos (most especially from Lithgow as Katherine's ever-supportive husband).

A pure distillation of the great director's ongoing themes of the frailty of the human psyche and mankind's willful inability to accept the inevitable, whatever that may be.

It's a winning formula, and when done right like it is here, it transcends the clichés and moves audiences.

Mangold, Phoenix, and Witherspoon, all excellent in their roles.

It’s in the semi-improvised or captured moments, like the looks of desperation and abandonment on the faces of old men on the streets of a mining community, that Caught by the Tides is most striking.

It's childhood done just right: part cotton candy angels, part gurning adult frighteners, and all wide-eyed kidhood bravado.

The trouble comes, and not just for Fassbender, when it’s time to tackle the actual text. The toil of it is exhaustingly felt. The lines are spoken, but their weight sometimes is as vaporous as that Scottish fog.

Bardem injects a shaggy, compassionate humor throughout, aided by a wry and moving ensemble cast and co-writer/director Fernando León de Aranda's eye for the offbeat.

As atypical a summer film as they come -– no explosions, no car chases, no Arnold -– but immensely more pleasing than films with all three of those summertime staples.