Four Lions is impossible to categorize. It's an exceedingly dark comedy, a wicked satire, a thriller where the thrills center on the incompetence of the villains.

More often than not, the dialogue turns into quotable speechifying and the overwrought score pounds the points home in decidedly unsubtle fashion, but thanks to the performances of an outstanding ensemble led by Colman Domingo’s electric and moving work in the title role, this is a valuable portrait of a man who hasn’t exactly been forgotten to history but is hardly a household name. (He should be.)

This is a movie about spies, but it is not a thriller in any routine sense of the word. It's just the meticulously observant record of how naiveté, inexperience, misplaced idealism and greed led to one of the most peculiar cases of treason in American history.

Nick Nolte plays a great shambling wreck of a wounded Hemingway hero in The Good Thief, a film that's like a descent into the funkiest dive on the wrong side of the wrong town.

It employs depression as a substitute for personality, and believes that if the characters are bitter and morose enough, we won't notice how dull they are.

Edmands avoids the in-your-face emotional punch that most filmmakers would employ (police, lawsuits, confrontation) and instead opts for a more delicate, observational pacing, creating a set of vignettes that give a stark glimpse into these disrupted lives.

Moon is a superior example of that threatened genre, hard science-fiction, which is often about the interface between humans and alien intelligence of one kind of or other, including digital.

This is not an easy watch, but there are also moments of deep emotion and genuine inspiration in the documentary.

Entertaining if you understand exactly what it is: if you see it as a film made by friends out of the materials presented by their lives and with the freedom to not push too hard.

What happens would not make sense in many households, but in this one, it represents a certain continuity, and confirms deep currents we sensed almost from the first.

The Night They Raided Minsky's is being promoted as some sort of laff-a-minit, slapstick extravaganza, but it isn't. It has the courage to try for more than that and just about succeeds. It avoids the phony glamour and romanticism that the movies usually use to smother burlesque (as in "Gypsy") and it really seems to understand this most-American art form.

This is a warmhearted and borderline corny story we’ve seen hundreds of times before, but the backdrop for this tale is certainly unusual, and pretty special.

Pandora remains one of the most amazing worlds we’ve ever seen on the big screen.

Lee has a wealth of material here, and the film tumbles through it with exuberance.

Bob Byington directs with an exact sense of what he wants; consider the perfect timing of his use of Harmony's mom (Margie Beegle). How she says "don't ask me" and "leave me out of it" is unreasonably funny.

Hoogendijk is a guest with more tact than curiosity about why a three-year plan went so over schedule.

The three central performances (by Walter Matthau, Ingrid Bergman and -- wow! -- Goldie Hawn) are so engaging that we find ourselves, despite ourselves, involved in their story.

A valuable and unique rewind glimpse of what it was like to be a teenage celebrity in the pre-Instagram era.

With the ensemble cast doing superb work, The Blackening is a horror comedy that packs a serious punch.

Though Light of My Life is a well-filmed and occasionally brutally effective piece of work, Affleck dilutes the power of the story with too many self-indulgent, patience-testing scenes.

While I admired it in an abstract way, I felt repelled by the material on a visceral level.

If you appreciate dark, original and chilling gothic horror stories with a supernatural twist, if you like low-low-budget indies that somehow manage to look and feel like big-time major motion pictures, you gotta check out Dig Two Graves.

Dillon has the kind of acting intelligence that allows him to play each scene for no more than that particular scene is really about; he's not trying to summarize the message in every speech. That gives him an ease, an ability to play the teenage hero as if every day were a whole summer long.

Some movies swing for the fences — and either strike out in big-budget, spectacular fashion, or hit a home run. Others, such as the smart, lovely, funny, occasionally edgy, slightly cynical and ultimately heart-tugging Other People, are the equivalent of the singles hitter in baseball — content to accumulate one small and legitimate successful moment after another.

I call the movie a thriller, even though the outcome is known, because it plays like one: We may know that the world doesn't end, but the players in this drama don't, and it is easy to identify with them.

If Cameron wants to be a pioneer instead of a retro hobbyist, he should obviously use Maxivision 48, which provides a picture of such startling clarity that it appears to be 3-D in the sense that the screen seems to open a transparent window on reality. Ghosts of the Abyss would have been incomparably more powerful in the process.

Unlike any other film I have seen about the Holocaust.

Interiors becomes serious by intently observing complex adults as they fend and cope, blame and justify. Because it illuminates some of the ways we all act, it is serious but not depressing; when it's over, we may even find ourselves quietly cheered that Allen has seen so clearly how things can be.