A musical and a biography, and brings to both of those genres a worldly sophistication that is rare in the movies.

One of the pleasures of Beginners is the warmth and sincerity of the major characters. There is no villain. They begin by wanting to be happier and end by succeeding.

An inspired example of the story in which the adolescent hero discovers that the world sucks, people are phonies, and sex is a consolation. Because the genre is well established, what makes the movie fresh is smart writing, skewed characters, and the title performance by Kieran Culkin.

The film's title is never explained. What does Moore mean? Maybe it's that capitalism means never having to say you're sorry.

This is a family drama, all right - but not one of those neat docudramas in which every character comes attached to a fashionable problem, and all the problems are solved in the same happy ending. The family in Light of Day is more like your average, everyday, unhappy family in which the biggest problem is that some of the members quite simply hate each other.

Rarely have two actors been so effective playing the same character while taking totally different approaches.

Pure slam-bam space opera.

Submarine isn't an insipid teen sex comedy. It flaunts some stylistic devices, such as titles and sections and self-aware narration, but it doesn't try too hard to be desperately clever.

Goodnight Mommy is the kind of movie you should experience without watching the trailer or learning too much about it — and then experience again with the full knowledge of what happened, so you can admire the ways in which the puzzle was put together.

It's clear that this movie has an affection for Popeye, and so much regard for the sailor man that it even bothers to reveal the real truth about his opinion of spinach.

Here is another Western in the classical tradition.

In Thunderheart we get a real visual sense of the reservation, of the beauty of the rolling prairie and the way it is interrupted by deep gorges, but also of the omnipresent rusting automobiles and the subsistence level of some of the housing. We feel that we're really there, and that the people in the story really occupy land they stand on.

Zoë Kravitz’s “Blink Twice” is a radical blend of trippy and unnerving social satire and blood-spattered horror, with Kravitz taking a big swing in her feature directorial debut and connecting with bone-rattling impact. It is a film that takes one big leap after another and sticks the landing far more often than not.

It's strange how the earlier movies fill in the gaps left by this one, and answer the questions. It is, I suspect, not even possible to understand this film without knowing the first two, and yet, knowing them, Part III works better than it should.

This is a brave, unflinching, sometimes virtually unwatchable documentary that makes such an effective case for both pro-choice and pro-life that it is impossible to determine which side the filmmaker, Tony Kaye, stands on. All you can conclude at the end is that both sides have effective advocates, but the pro-lifers also have some alarming people on their team.

The Trip to Bountiful has a quiet, understated feel for the small towns of its time.

Although Bad Hurt traffics in tough material, it is filled with little moments of heart.

Sands' death is shown in a tableaux of increasing bleakness. It is agonizing, yet filmed with a curious painterly purity.

Rarely, but sometimes, a movie can have an actual physical effect on you. It gets under your defenses and sidesteps the "it's only a movie" reflex and creates a visceral feeling that might as well be real. Open Water had that effect on me.

The film's second half is the most touching, because it shows that our lives are not merely our own, but also belong to the events we set in motion.

Here is a film that dabbles in fantasy yet gets everything right about that fleeting summer when you’re between the end of your youth and the beginnings of adulthood.

A threat to the Bond franchise? Not a threat so much as a salute. I don't want James Bond to turn crude and muscular on me; I like the suave style. But I like Xander, too, especially since he seems to have studied Bond so very carefully.

In ways sometimes subtle and sometimes anything but, writer-director McQueen tells a story that on one level is a conventional tale of valor but is also a cutting commentary about how even as war-torn England was united in its staunch repudiation of Hitler, racism and classicism were all too commonplace in its own backyard.

It's a quality movie even if the material is unworthy of the treatment. As a result, yes, it's a druggie comedy that made me laugh.

Safety Not Guaranteed not only has dialogue that's about something, but characters who have some depth and dimension.

The first movie I’ve seen about the disease that is told from the sick person’s point of view, not that of family members. The director, Yukihiko Tsutsumi, often uses a subjective camera to show the commonplace world melting into bewildering patterns and meanings.

After that first second we quit wondering: This is magic, after all, so who wants to know where Henson is?

Director Enrico Casarosa is making his feature-length debut here, and he and the vast Pixar animation army have delivered a gorgeous and lovely coming-of-age fantasy with plenty of slapstick laughs, the obligatory heartwarming family moments and a friendship for the ages.