Stewart did direct Rosewater, and even with its limitations, the film works. Stewart has serious, dramatically astute talent behind the camera, as well as (big shock) a sense of humor.

The best of Laggies, both in the writing and the playing, comes in the square-offs between Knightley and Rockwell.

A tough-minded, empathetic portrait of dreamers on the edge.

Without making a big deal out of it, Big Hero 6 features a shrewdly balanced and engaging group of male and female characters of various ethnic backgrounds. It'd be nice to live in a world where this wasn't worth a mention, but it is. And yet the movie belongs to the big guy.

A knockout one minute, a punch-drunk crazy film the next, Interstellar is a highly stimulating mess. Emotionally it's also a mess, and that's what makes it worth its 165 minutes — minutes made possible by co-writer and director Christopher Nolan's prior global success with his brooding, increasingly nasty "Batman" films, and with the commercially viable head-trip that was "Inception."

A lot of the rougher stuff, depicting Ig's late-inning vengeance, is sadistically misjudged. It's hard to jerk tears a beat or two after gleeful rounds of brutality, even if it happens to, or because of, dear wee Daniel Radcliffe.

The film works, whatever your ethical stance on Snowden, because it's more procedural than polemic.

Despite the familiarity of its themes — the bottom-feeding news media; the pathology born of extreme isolation and a little too much online time; the American can-do spirit, perverted into something poisonous — Gilroy's clever, skeezy little noir is worth a prowl.

Birdman proves that a movie — the grabbiest, most kinetic film ever made about putting on a play — can soar on the wings of its own technical prowess, even as the banality of its ideas threatens to drag it back down to earth.

Like Martin Scorsese's "Shutter Island," Stonehearst Asylum starts with the hysteria knob set at 11 and goes up from there.

Writer-director Perry has made a bracing and very Roth-y study of ambition and itchy literary yearning. In another time and another world, Robert Altman captured the essence of William Faulkner's landscape by filming a non-Faulkner crime story, "Thieves Like Us." This is comparable to what Perry has done here.

Dear White People isn't perfect. And yet the flaws really don't matter. This is the best film about college life in a long time, satiric or straight, comedy or drama.

A handful of revisions, tweaks and adjustments, along with a musical score less bombastically grandiose, might've made this a film to remember.

For all the boozed and abusive amusement provided by the great Bill Murray in the good-enough St. Vincent, the moment I liked best was Naomi Watts as a pregnant Russian stripper, manhandling a vacuum across the Murray character's ancient carpet. In movies as in life, it's the little things.

Whiplash is true to its title. It throws you around with impunity, yet Chazelle exerts tight, exacting control over his increasingly feverish and often weirdly comic melodrama.

Of the 141 minutes in The Judge, roughly 70 work well, hold the screen and allow a ripe ensemble cast the chance to do its thing, i.e., act. The other 71 are dominated by narrative machinery going ka-THUNKITA-thunkita-thunkita.

Parts of Pride are shamelessly escapist, as when party-mad Jonathan (Dominic West) busts loose with a disco routine, surely the most outre thing ever to hit Onllwyn. But nearly all of it's engaging.

The film itself, fond and intriguing, is by no means a hard-charging confrontation. Rather, Lewins' film is an affectionate series of memories, as recalled by Ali's family and associates.

All of it is plausible, if one were to break the narrative into its component parts; together, though, those parts resemble "Babel" or "Crash" or other determinedly topical mosaics that end up falsifying their own concerns.

We need films such as Kennedy's as a corrective.

Cage is going for manly, if conflicted, family-guy confidence in this role, but somehow it comes off as nuttier than the events surrounding him.

Each time a character gets tossed in the air by some manifestation or another, the effect is cheesy. Still, I've seen worse. For the record, the violence in Annabelle is far less copious and sadistic than the stuff in the Denzel Washington movie everybody's going to.

David Fincher's film version of the Gillian Flynn bestseller Gone Girl is a stealthy, snake-like achievement. It's everything the book was and more — more, certainly, in its sinister, brackish atmosphere dominated by mustard-yellow fluorescence, designed to make you squint, recoil and then lean in a little closer.

The Boxtrolls remains relentlessly busy up through its final credits, and it's clever in a nattering way. But it's virtually charmless.

Wasikowska is wonderful here, unaffected and affecting, but then she has long been a young actress conveying a rich and shadowy interior life on screen. She humanized the Tim Burton "Alice in Wonderland," so clearly she can do nearly anything.

For an hour or so The Equalizer glides along and works; in the second hour, plus change, it turns into a shameless slaughter contrivance with a flabby sense of pace. I did like one line: "When you pay for rain, you gotta deal with the mud too." Washington's the rain; by the end, the movie is the mud.

For me Chastain's unerring honesty is the only element keeping The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby above the realm of pure affectation.

The chief argument regarding his (Smith) "Human Centipede" riff is pretty basic: good trash or stupid trash? I'd say roughly half and half.