Blend of sardonic humor and bitter poetry.

Graceful cinematography captures the loneliness and isolation of these kids with understatement, even when the director succumbs to twinkling piano that pulls a tad too hard on the heartstrings.

Don't count on special effects: it has been lovingly and traditionally animated to pay homage to E.H. Shepard's original drawings.

Higher Ground is a weird film with some very nice moments, but its odd and offbeat combination of comic touches, serious spiritual subject matter and occasional surrealist interludes never quiet gels.

Educational rather than entertaining.

If "Heat" and "The Departed" had a baby, the result might come close to The Town, a riveting and explosive crime thriller and one of the year's best pictures.

In Darkness takes its place among the many great European films to tackle the subject. Plenty of quality-seeking adult moviegoers will be lured to the arthouse and thoroughly moved.

Those unfamiliar with the Duplass' previous movies won't realize what's missing; they'll just enjoy the earthy angst, edgy laughs and off-kilter casting of Jonah Hill.

Fans of the 66-year-old guitar god (which is to say the only people who'll see this homespun gem) will revel in Young's winsome cruise down Memory Lane.

A Hitchcockian thriller with a bit of "Unstoppable" and a little "Unknown," Source Code is a pulse-pounding flick.

This is one of the super rare docs that packs an unbelievable punch despite its misguided aesthetics. It's a strange triumph of content over form, which is the province of journalists to report.

What Audiard has created here is nothing less than the rare combination of high art and beautiful filmmaking with visceral power and gut-level emotional reality - it's like a symphony of fists, or a brutal assault by angels.

Filmmakers Luc Côté and Patricio Henriquez don't use flashy tricks to tug heartstrings-instead they put faith in the story they're telling. And what a story it is.

See What I’m Saying is at once heartbreaking and irritating, enlightening and boring, but frankly not aesthetically well made in any particular way.

Breillat directs with her characteristic flair for getting under the skin of her protagonists while taking a particular pleasure examining sisterly bonds and feminist concerns within the context of a fairy tale.

The key point is made, if seemingly lost in the overly cheery finale.

An orgiastic barrage of violence, The Raid: Redemption is, at least in its finest moments, one of the most breathless, blistering action movies in recent memory.

The key selling point is Bayona's ten-minute reenactment of the tidal wave and its carnage, which is brutal, visceral and without peer. His visual mastery is almost enough to make up for The Impossible's conventional final hour and the empty feeling of trying to find the point of this whole exercise.

The Pirates! Band of Misfits is one of the funniest animated films in years, or to put it in terms you scallywags can understand: it's a treasure trove of laughs.

Instead of venturing into mournful "Terms of Endearment" territory, the film - and the filmmakers - commit to a relentless determination to live.

Like Carrie without the telekinesis, this horror movie replaces the supernatural with blunt brutality and dark humor to terrific effect.

Mission: Impossible 4 is so well-made and smooth you may need to see it more than once to truly appreciate its brains and nerves and blood.

The Dish and The Spoon boasts the efficiency and tidiness of early American indies like Rob Nilsson's "Heat and Sunlight," while it relocates its foreign film-like emotional landscapes to more native climes.

By way of remarkable sleight-of-hand, Steven Soderbergh's Magic Mike both is and is not the freewheeling, fun-loving, male stripper extravaganza its trailers peddle.

The first half-hour is as evocative as (and more specific than) Claire Denis' "White Material," a similarly broad treatment of post-colonial chaos. The rest, sadly, falls apart, but Haroun's formal skill confirms his continual promise.

A gripping new documentary that's essential viewing for anybody who believes that the impact of global warming is tomorrow's problem.

Drew Goddard's giddily brilliant The Cabin in the Woods has a lot on its twisted mind.

The film, despite its promise to excavate an inner life, wilts into banality whenever Gould's thorny paranoia and control issues come up.