This sort of stuff is magnificently silly, and Lee, to give him credit, never tried to rise above it. If a movie like this were directed seriously, it would be a disaster.

Unfortunately, not even Gordon-Levitt’s stellar work can sustain a well-made but ultimately underwhelming docudrama from first-time German writer-director Patrick Vollrath.

Benny and Joon is a film that approaches its subjects so gingerly it almost seems afraid to touch them. The story wants to be about love, but is also about madness, and somehow it weaves the two together with a charm that would probably not be quite so easy in real life.

The movie wants to be a laffaminit extravaganza like the Zucker & Abrahams productions, but with slyer humor, more inside jokes, throwaway references and just plain goofiness, as when the characters occasionally break into their own language.

The key to the film is in the character of David. One can imagine a scenario in which an overbearing father drives the son to rebellion, but what happens here is more complex and sinister.

It's an incredible lapse in a movie of this size and ambition - but they've failed to make Judge Roy Bean interesting. He's one-dimensional, predictable, propped up by Paul Newman's acting style, with no personality of his own.

A fresh and lovable comedy about a dysfunctional Jewish family planning their son's bar mitzvah.

The movie’s funniest touches are quiet flashes of character, expertly timed and nimbly played by a deft ensemble. It’s a Disaster is consistently funny, but you wince more often than you laugh out loud. It’s like a Christopher Guest improvisational farce with the volume turned down to 5.

This intriguing premise, alas, ends as so many movies do these days, with fierce fights and bloodshed.

As a melodrama, Trishna builds a hypnotic force.

I’m going to tread lightly so as not to spoil too many of the twists and turns, but I will say it’s not often you experience a film that at times plays like a rom-com from the 1990s spliced with something from the John Carpenter playbook.

It’s ugly but not scary. It’s creepy but not chilling. It’s one of the least successful adaptations of a Stephen King story since …The last Pet Sematary.

This movie is one of the most relentlessly nonstop action pictures ever made, with a virtuoso series of climactic sequences that must last an hour and never stop for a second. It's a roller-coaster ride, a visual extravaganza, a technical triumph, and a whole lot of fun.

Appealing performances and a not always predictable storyline help elevate Pulling Strings above the run-of-the-mill rom-com.

Here's a movie that teeters on the edge of being really pretty good and loses its way.

Going All the Way is a deeper, cleverer film than it first seems.

A smaller picture like this, shot out of the mainstream, has a better chance of being quirky and original. And quirky it is, even if not successful.

Likely to entertain kids, who seem to like jokes about anatomical plumbing. For adults, there is the exuberance of the animation and the energy of the whole movie, which is just plain clever.

The kind of dread dark horror film where you better hope nobody in the audience snickers, because the film teeters right on the edge of the ridiculous.

Kurosawa was a great artist and so even his lesser work is interesting -- just as we would love to find one last lost play, however minor, by his hero Shakespeare.

It circles the possibility of mental and spiritual infidelity like a cat wondering if a mouse might still be alive. Watching it, I felt it would be fascinating to see a movie that was really, truthfully, fearlessly about this subject.

The main story keeps stalling out in favor of these drive-by interludes that take center stage for a few minutes and then fade into the background, usually never to be heard from again.

With Surrounded, Mandler solidifies his standing as a talented and versatile filmmaker, with Letitia Wright and Jamie Bell burning up the screen as two wounded and fiercely independent adversaries who both realize they’re in this thing together, and the outcome is most likely going to be a bloody mess.

The Laughing Policeman is an awfully good police movie: taut, off-key, filled with laconic performances. It provides the special delight we get from gradually unraveling a complicated case.

The Thing is basically just a geek show, a gross-out movie in which teenagers can dare one another to watch the screen. There's nothing wrong with that; I like being scared and I was scared by many scenes in The Thing. But it seems clear that Carpenter made his choice early on to concentrate on the special effects and the technology and to allow the story and people to become secondary.

In less skilled hands, this could have come across as cynical and manipulative material, but Pollono is such a skilled wordsmith and the cast is so universally excellent, Small Engine Repair becomes a viewing experience you won’t easily shake off, not today and not for a long time.

Tom has enlisted our identification and sympathy, but he seems hopelessly isolated within his own bubble of despair. How much that happens is in his mind?

A splendid comic thriller, exciting and graceful, endlessly inventive.