Truth is a strange interpretation of events, in which the visuals and the music sometime seem to be nudging us in one direction, even as the screenplay and the performances are telling us something quite different.

Because it speaks to a terror that lurks deep within our memories, Parents has the potential to be a great horror film. But it never knows quite what to do with its inspiration. Is it a satire, a black comedy, or just plain horror? The right note is never found, and so the movie's scenes coexist uneasily with one another.

By the time it's over, Penelope Cruz has slipped away with it, and transformed Kingsley's character in the process. It's nicely done.

There is clear definition between closer and further elements. I've seen a lot of 3-D recently, and in terms of technical quality, this is the best.

This is the face of dysfunction. Apparently alcohol and drugs are not involved, except perhaps with some of the missing men. The drug here is despair. They seem to treat it with cigarettes.

A great visionary achievement, a film so original and exciting, it stirred my imagination like "Metropolis" and "2001: A Space Odyssey."

Landline is a very funny film about people dealing with very serious situations.

It's a film you enjoy in pieces, but the jigsaw never gets solved.

This movie is a little treasure, a funny, sexy, appealing story of a Valley Girl's heartbreaking decision: Should she stick with her boring jock boyfriend, or take a chance on a punk from Hollywood?

Louis Malle's Pretty Baby is a pleasant surprise: After all the controversy and scandal surrounding its production, it turns out to be a good-hearted, good-looking, quietly elegiac movie.

The problem may be that Bill Melendez, who directed, and Charles M. Schultz, who wrote the movie based on his own comic characters, couldn't decide whether to aim for kids or their parents.

This is a bold and unique slice of storytelling that serves up some genuine scares and bone-chilling fright moments while pointing a finger at a culture that alternately glorifies, worships and sexualizes young women and revels in stereotyping them and tearing them down.

The actors are better than the material.

With a richly layered and resonant screenplay by Kata Wéber, surehanded direction from Mundruczó and a stunningly authentic performance by Vanessa Kirby (“The Crown”) sure to garner an Oscar nomination, Pieces of a Woman is a stark and unforgettable character study about love and loss, and what loss does to love, and how some tragedies are so devastating, so huge, the survivors will never be the same.

This is the first movie about virtual reality to deal in a challenging way with the implications of the technology. It's fascinating the way Bigelow is able to suggest so much of VR's impact (and dangers) within a movie - a form of VR that's a century old.

American Teen isn't as penetrating or obviously realistic as her "On the Ropes," but Burstein has achieved an engrossing film.

The acting here, by Sean Penn, is a virtuoso tour de force - one of those performances that takes on a life of its own.

It takes a while, but the old-fashioned pleasure of watching a well-told story unfold eventually becomes the chief satisfaction in Byzantium, though there are other things to enjoy as well.

The Edge is like a wilderness adventure movie written by David Mamet, which is not surprising, since it was written by Mamet. It's subtly funny in the way it toys with the cliches of the genre.

Talk Radio is based on a play Bogosian wrote and starred in, and it was the right decision to star him in the movie, too, instead of some famous film actor. He feels this material from the inside out, and makes the character convincing. That’s especially true during a virtuoso, unsettling closing monologue, in which we think the camera is circling Bogosian - until we realize the camera and the actor are still, and the backgrounds are circling.

Oddly enough, Crimson Tide develops into an actors' picture, not just an action movie. There are a lot of special effects, high-tech gadgets and violent standoffs, yes, but the movie is really a battle between two wills.

So it goes with the family in this movie. All of its members are engaged in a mutual process of shooting one another down. Watching Margot at the Wedding is like slowing for a gaper's block.

[A] slightly diverting documentary.

Writer-director Baumbach (“The Squid and the Whale,” “Marriage Story”) delivers an effectively unsettling, carefully crafted, at times brilliant but uneven adaptation of Don DeLillo’s postmodern dystopian classic from 1985, with Baumbach regulars Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig leading an outstanding cast in a three-pronged social satire.

One of the more completely entertaining movies I've seen in a while--a well-crafted character study that, like a Hollywood movie with a skillful script, manipulates us but makes us like it.

What did I think about this movie? As a film critic, I liked it. I liked the in-jokes and the self-aware characters. At the same time, I was aware of the incredible level of gore in this film. It is really violent.

Thanks to the brilliant, nuanced work by the great Mahershala Ali, our heart goes out to both Camerons.

Will I seem hopelessly square if I find Kick-Ass morally reprehensible and will I appear to have missed the point? Let’s say you’re a big fan of the original comic book, and you think the move does it justice. You know what? You inhabit a world I am so very not interested in.