The performances are extremely good, and the tone maintains a droll continuity throughout.

By the end, Kate admits “[her book] could be better.” Maybe this is a tongue-in-cheek acknowledgement that real life doesn’t always make for a great movie.

Clift's performance is moody, the kind of slow, psychological approach rarely witnessed in Hitchcock's films.

Ultimately, the film feels as glitzy and superficial as the fashion industry itself, a bauble in full regalia, and it’s likely your interest in the documentary will depend largely on your prior interest in the subject matter.

Feels not only like a movie from another culture but from another world.

Tonally, it all makes sense, but there’s such a thing as overmuchness. Gibney laudably launches a withering attack here on the pay-to-play relationship between lobbyists and lawmakers. But this viewer felt withered, too, by the end of his battering ram of a movie.

The film itself tends to wander as it pokes around uneasily for its tone. Yet this is also, undeniably, the source of much of the film's charm. Afterglow bathes the screen with a warm amber light.

Adapted by Katsuhiro Otomo from his sprawling, post-apocalyptic cyberpunk tale of government conspiracies, street gangs, and psychic powers that can save or destroy the world, it's still an all-time classic, and has never looked better.

Yet Porges (who pops up as an expert talking head) and co-director Chris Charles Scott III never quite hit an even tone - or rather, there's a big divide, like bouncing along on a kiddy coaster that suddenly turns into a brutal corkscrew with a massive drop at the end.

Which ultimately is what Applause is really about: applying the greasepaint of the daily mundane over the scar tissue of a damaged life, striving for a reality outside of a bottle (and off the stage) while still maintaining some semblance of what made this particular lion roar in the first place.

This quiet, contemplative gem of a film paints a painfully accurate portrait of familial love, loss, and healing-by-degrees among the migrant communities bordering San Antonio.

You couldn't have gotten a more pleasantly bizarre film if Salvador Dali himself had directed, which says a lot for Miller's rabid talents.

Thrilling, a grand cinematic adventure -- beautifully handled myth-making from Gibson, who, by the way, is just fine in the lead.

As far as nonraunchy, adult-geared rom-coms go these days, Crazy, Stupid, Love. leads the pack by several heads.

That Berg and writers Matthew Carnahan and Matthew Sand stick strictly to the day of that explosion and subsequent fire that sank the Deepwater Horizon certainly presents a narrative opportunity, but the lack of any resonance to larger issues is troubling (the end-credit coda is woefully thin).

Excellent performances and the steadying camerawork of Haskell Wexler make Limbo a supremely engaging work, but this place to which Sayles condemns his viewers is just one rung removed from Purgatory.

If you like your affected character dramas with a healthy dose of weird insanity, you may just find yourself head over hooves.

It may be a simple, old-fashioned, underdog-gets-their-day, feel-good story, but it sure as hell will leave you feeling good.

End of Watch is more than the sum of its parts, though; it ends on a downbeat note, but that's something I've come to expect from Ayer.

Apocalypto is a dazzling achievement. Not only does it showcase a civilization little seen on the silver screen, the film (which opens with a quote from Will Duant) also advances larger questions about the natural and unnatural life cycles of civilizations.

A lightweight confection, this French import slides down easily even though it never truly satisfies.

Something that falls just shy of greatness.

Well worth seeing if you have even the slightest interest in guns and sex and the interplay between the two (and who doesn't?), Burnt Money also has, you'll forgive the pun, style to burn.

Indeed, Smile, at its best, is a bit weirder and more left-field than you may expect. Following the recent release of Barbarian, it’s continuing this year’s trend of seemingly well-polished, potentially anonymous studio horrors having much more inspired, hidden ambitions than other high-profile contemporaries.

There's still too much punching down, but especially too much peddling in stereotypes and xenophobic clichés.

Amibitiously mediocre.

A cracking good adventure film well worthy of classic Saturday-afternoon matinee status. It's also, in myriad ways, a more youthful version of Spielberg's "Raiders of the Lost Ark."...What you don't have, however, is a great movie.

The seen-it-all-before elements of this supernatural thriller directed by the filmmaker who gave us "Saw," however, are more hoary than horrific. It might as well be retitled "The Amityville Exorcist."