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.

Director David Mackenzie's quietly accomplished film straddles the arthouse world and cult movies with a unique poetic vision.

Kill List is a major breakthrough for writer/director Ben Wheatley, whose assured and painstaking handling of this difficult material makes for an unforgettable viewing experience.

So Watching TV is less a story loosely bound by cause and effect than a kind of scrapbook of memories, all of which convey the concerns of being super smart and mostly confused in a culturally mixed Manhattan, circa 1980. The affection is sweet and precise, if even the terms we use to define them aren't.

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

One for the Money is as static and ugly as romantic-comedies get, the distractingly fragmented coverage of simple dialogue scenes suggesting a general ineptitude that's rare at the studio level.

Repression is one thing, but discontent generally breeds self-knowledge and rich interior lives, two things that are eerily absent here. Regardless, the film features some really intriguing conflicts and solid performances throughout.

Clichés and thin thrillers are what we can expect from January releases and while Man on a Ledge has predictability to spare, it also has something that makes your time spent worthwhile: legitimate suspense.

Kate Beckinsale can still fill out a skin-tight leather bodysuit, but with Awakening, the vampires-vs-werewolves Underworld franchise has finally decayed beyond the point of repair.

Such a story is made to be colored in jumbo crayon, and at first you might long for a more nuanced approach, but this film was produced in the 1940's serial style that's made Lucas Films enormous.

Gerardo Naranjo's fourth feature Miss Bala is one long slow burn with no final bang.

This is admirably ambitious, but Carnahan's not nearly good enough a writer or director to pull it off: the results are portentous, muddled and not nearly as entertaining as Neeson's usual face-punching antics.

Streamlined, beautifully shot and casually thrilling, Haywire's superior action fun should hopefully draw audiences eager for R-rated, no-frills fare.

A well-meaning production that consistently fails to deliver on even the most basic of cinematic expectations, all while covering up stunning ineptitude with bloated song-and-dance numbers.

This Americanized version of the 2008 Nordic thriller "Reykjavik Rotterdam" transfers the original's gritty, violent action into an entertaining and intense starring role for Mark Wahlberg.

The mother/daughter drama should have played a bigger part in this film as the 87-minute runtime passes quickly and leaves us feeling utterly short-changed.

Ultimately an inspiring, stirring and unforgettable human drama in the face of a horrifying war. It is highly recommended.

The Darkest Hour isn't just a dark horse contender for the year's biggest joke, it's the darkest.

A thing of endless contrivances. Jolie's phony plotting and graphic depictions of sexual assault and murder are transparent attempts to bluntly convey the war's atrocities.

Where the actress succeeds, all but disappearing into the role of Thatcher, the rest of the film is a bizarre amalgamation of archival footage, half-baked montages, hallucinations that push the bounds of poetic license straight into the gray area of bad taste, and plain old tedium.

It's an emotional powerhouse of a film, an unforgettable and rewarding motion picture experience.

Director Steven Spielberg doesn't have a steady grip on War Horse's careening tone, but he'll be damned if there's not 15 minutes in there for everyone.

Chipwrecked is the sort of Sunday afternoon trifle that will mollify children and mortify their parents, an eyesore that auto-tunes its strong cast into anonymity and undercuts its convincingly rendered CG leads by confining them to hideously cheap environments.

Director Guy Ritchie is like a Heismann-winning football player cast in a ballet stage-perfectly talented, but wrong for the circumstance.

You'll be happier with the film if you don't expect fidelity to source material, but that doesn't mean you'll hate it if you loved Niels Arden Oplev's movie.

The messy uplift audiences can expect from this butterfly awakening they'll get in spades.

Uncomfortably tense but worth savoring, particularly because of Tilda Swinton's devastating lead performance.

Even with a big name cast that includes three Oscar winners - Halle Berry, Robert De Niro and Hilary Swank - New Year's Eve is at best a pleasant diversion.