The problem with The Third Miracle is that it is thematically ambiguous and never lays out its position on whether it thinks saints are or are not real.

The results are striking: an emotional and aesthetic whirlpool of horror, fascination, beauty (it's hard not to feel a bit guilty – even morbid - enjoying such beauty), and resignation that would probably drown lesser movies but that gives The Bridge an eerie power.

It's a slow build to collapse, escaping the traditional trap of such supernatural suspense films in that both of them have secrets, and it's not the acts themselves but the deceits that have led them to this place.

There are echoes of Greta Gerwig and Dunham, and Barr’s voice never fully comes through in her homage. Instead, Sophie Jones feels like bites from these auteurs Barr so clearly admires, with brief blips that feel genuinely her own.

Haunting and extremely atmospheric, Mama is a horror film imbued with an unsettling and affecting power.

It's all deliberately grotesque, but comic readers will be pleasantly surprised at the degree of compassion for and comprehension of the culture Kline portrays.

A Quiet Passion’s manneredness overwhelmed me at times, but it is very effective – chilling, even – in its charting of one woman’s disappointed journey to the rhetorical coda of her own life: “Why has the world become so ugly?”

What's more, they toss a few original twists into a familiar generic set-up and thereby create a thoroughly entertaining and stylish thriller.

A good movie but not a great one, Stranger Than Fiction is reminiscent of the films of Charlie Kaufman (Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) but lacks that writer's conceptual rigor and imaginative power.

Predicated as it is on Huppert's pensive, provocative blankness, the action moves a bit slowly, although, as is often the case with Jacquot, events make more sense after the movie is over. Dares to provoke rather than titillate in its delineation of love's strange ways. As the French might say, “L'amour, l'amour, toujours l'amour.”

It may not sound like much of a storyline, but there’s a subtle beauty in the ability of human compassion to cure one’s shortcomings.

Cadillac Records bobs and weaves, strides and duckwalks, samples and smiles on the sounds that made urban Chicago such a blues melting pot.

In the end, however, Poitras’ portrait of Assange in exile exudes a less acute sense of history unfolding before our eyes than does "Citizenfour."

What we get is more of the same from Ferrell – funny faces, goofy accents, pratfalls aplenty – and that ain't bad. It just could have been a lot better.

Star Trek: Generations is a successful entry in the series, and a darn good film on its own.

Its head may be in the sand, but Outsourced is a good-spirited idyll, an escape from reality, naive to a fault, and all but unconcerned with the troubles of the world but almost -- almost -- convincing in its innocence.

When embraced on its own terms, the film will provide an ironic bridge for those who want to share a greater closeness with Smith.

It's not perfect King, but it is jarringly close, which these days remains pretty much all one could hope for.

World War Z comes across as a smart and ambitious horror movie, a bio-disaster film along the lines of "Contagion" or "28 Days Later." It’s nail-bitingly tense at times, although these well-executed moments mix with others that are too much of a murky jumble to follow with any precision.

The middle of a movie is often where filmmakers lose their way, but Friends With Benefits nails this stretch, in which nothing very remarkable happens as two people talk, in bed and out of bed. There's a fine line between fun-dirty and ick-dirty – sometimes you can't identify the line until it's been crossed – and this film keeps its toes on the right side of raunch.

While there is undoubted visual spectacle to All You Need Is Kill, Kido’s rewriting of Rita and Kaiji as just ordinary people stuck in extraordinary circumstances is grounded in their mundanity.

It's a dirty, ugly, joyless world these fathers and sons live in, and for all the passion involved, of retribution and a father's fierce love, Perdition is as emotionally distant as Sullivan. The feelings are all there, just submerged.

It’s one of the more interesting aspects of Fernando Meirelles’ new film The Two Popes, these peeks into overly regimented and often extravagant ceremonies of the Vatican City being a fascinating glimpse behind the curtain.

Amateur offers the inimitable Hartley style with a harder edge than his earlier films, and while the thriller elements of Amateur prove entertaining on a bigger scale, this entertainment may not endure for viewers not completely committed to Amateur's characters and Hartley's slow-motion storytelling.

Gran Turismo is perhaps a more basic film for Blomkamp, but a welcome reminder that his breakthrough first feature District 9 wasn’t a fluke. He manages to give a film that is more or less an ad for a video game a little bit of heart.

It remains head and shoulders above what little competition there is by virtue of its stellar casting, editing, and above all, Frankenheimer's fluid, explosive direction.

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

Needful Things is hardly a cinema milestone -- it's a bit too episodic in chronicling the downfall of the town, and some of King's best bits are glossed over in favor of some of King's worst bits, but all things considered, it's still a hell of a good ride.