As in Richard Linklater’s lovely "Before Sunrise," the film’s principal pleasure comes from watching two people connect as they get to know each other over the course of several hours.

With a running time of only 84 minutes, Rize frequently feels padded. However, there’s no denying the fascination of watching these bodies in motion, and perhaps the ascendency of a new, American-born art form.

I could say Bottoms shines because it nods to nostalgia but feels totally of our time, or expertly inhabits the buddy comedy genre formula while providing its own absurdist twist – but most importantly, it is simply, joyfully, ridonkulous.

Wild lands some hard punches, but it can’t sustain the impact. Some of that lies in its inherited arc: Strayed found some peace – the whole point of the trek – but arriving-at-peace is less provocative than the struggle, at least in a movie.

Throughout, Horan tactfully pulls from archival interviews and footage of the singer to mark her meteoric rise as a teenager in the 1970s; her tumultuous, tabloid-fodder, 1980s career; and her effective blackballing from the industry when she became too rock & roll and irreverent for country sensibilities.

Foulkrod's film instead airs some of the hard-won truths learned by American soldiers from experience.

For a film that is so fresh, thrilling and overdue in its very existence, just by having three Asian-American women leads, the narrative seems hidebound: for a story that break so far from the traditions of the Disney fairytale, it's still deeply predictable.

As for that central question: Yep, it’s art, all right. One only wishes they’d gotten down to the business of it sooner.

Wasted! is sure to be mind-expanding for anyone who’s never contemplated what happens when excess food is scraped off one’s plate. But the film’s real novelty lies in the demonstration of actual solutions that have already been put into practice.

Director Maggie Betts never lets herself be saddled by historical events in crafting a narrative filled with empathy, humor and life.

Understandably, a filmmaker tackling the retelling of a national hero must do so with great delicacy, but The Sea Inside presents not so much a hero as a saint in Sampredo.

The cast is uniformly excellent and delivers enthusiastic performances, even the ones played by puppets, and the pacing is lively and not at all boring.

A spare, discomfiting score and uniformly excellent performances, and you have a quiet little masterpiece of dark and chilling beauty.

Flushed Away has a wicked, smart, and subtle sense of humor.

Visually, this is a charming addition to Japanese interpretation of pastoral England, with the overall vision of manor houses and rural idylls feeling perfectly bucolic. There are moments when some elements of culture or set dressing ring a little false. It's in little details.

Many have already heralded Poirier as the cutting edge of the new French cinema, and while that may be overstating things a bit, it's worth noting that this is a road movie unlike any other you've yet seen.

Writer/director Megan Park follows up her debut feature, the South by Southwest award winning high school shooting drama The Fallout, with another look into the lives of teenagers. But whereas her first film took a suffocating dive into the emotional extremes of their inner lives, coming-of-age comedy My Old Ass is sweeter without being cloying.

For a movie about happiness, Thirteen Conversations is terribly joyless. Thirteen Conversations tries hard and its ambitions are provocative, but its conversations often fall like that Zen tree in the forest.

Barcelona does have brief flashes of brilliance.... For the most part, however, Barcelona offers nothing much interesting beyond some beautiful scenery and generally annoying characters.

The Hunchback of Notre Dame ultimately misses its target, as it's more likely to find acceptance with an older-than-average Disney crowd.

I don’t say this lightly, but I think jackass forever is exactly what we need right now.

Not in recent memory has a movie so short – 90 minutes on the nose – been so stagnant and stubbornly slow to build. And that's exactly the point.

Nolan’s end-act pacing has always felt ponderous – but it’s not enough to ruin what is surely the most intellectually and viscerally engaging action film in years. The soul doesn’t stir, no, but everything else is wildly somersaulting.

Serenity evinces the kind of swashbuckling bonhomie that made so many of us fall in love with the original "Star Wars" films, a love that was mightily tested by George Lucas' humorless prequels.

It’s a query with no answers, a period piece about the present. It’s idiosyncratic, actively noncommercial, and doesn’t follow the rules – like playing a game of chess on a board with no squares.

This veteran actor is always great, and it's just a little bit sad that he has to play a big, scary demon for us to sit up and finally take notice.

There's also a little something smarmy about the interactions between the lawyers and their clients, all of whom are poor.

A handsomely constructed and executed movie, the kind of effort that deserves appreciation, on its own terms, for what it both dares and accomplishes.