Werner Herzog, better known as one of the finest living directors, plays a bad guy with Teutonic relish. If he doesn't watch it, he'll have a whole other career for himself playing dead-eyed villains.

Because of its subject matter, and because of the actors, it's impossible to watch this film without being moved. But a martinet is running the show.

The jokes mostly fall flat and the dramatic scenes fall even flatter.

The performers are so likable that you stay with them even when, as is often the case, the material is hit-or-miss.

My first thought in watching The Hobbit was: Do we really need this movie? It was my last thought, too.

By showing scenes of torture without taking any kind of moral (as opposed to tactical) stand on what we are seeing, Bigelow has made an amoral movie – which is, I would argue, an unconscionable approach to this material.

Rust and Bone is made by filmmakers and actors who are capable of much more – and they know it. The result is a true oddity: an orgy of hokum dressed up as an art film.

It's never altogether clear why this visually blah and dramatically bland movie needed to be made at all (or why it wasn't made for television instead). The only answer I can come up with is that Murray wanted to show off with a cigarette-holder.

What we do see, among much else that is damning, are archival NYPD videotapes of the boys being interrogated by detectives who press them to implicate one another in exchange for a leniency that never materialized.

The dialogue is sharp and so are the performances. Andrew Dominik directed this neo-noir in a low-key comic style that's alternately gritty and fancy. The gritty stuff is best.

Hopkins has been fitted out prosthetically to resemble Hitchcock and he does a reasonably good job of impersonating him, but it's a foredoomed effort.

Too much of this movie, directed by Peter Ramsey, is more clamorous than inspired, and little kids might find parts of it too scarily intense.

Lee may, in the end, be too balanced a filmmaker to give Life of Pi the extra spin of lyric delirium it sorely needs. It's a sane movie about an essentially deranged situation.

This is the kind of it-can-mean-whatever-you-want-it-to-mean art film that I usually run from, but Carax is such a prodigiously gifted mesmerist that, if you give way, you're likely to be enfolded in the film's phantasmagoria.

It's slick stuff, but Lawrence, in her most high-low, sad-comic turn yet, is remarkable.

One of the many, many things wrong with Joe Wright's Anna Karenina, starring Keira Knightley as literature's most famous adulteress – take that, Emma Bovary! – is that one never feels the love. It's a conceit in search of a movie. It could just as easily have been titled "Décor."

Whenever Jones is on screen, the film's energy level kicks up several notches, an indication, I think, that Spielberg otherwise overdoses on directorial decorum.

He's 9Mendes) discovered his stride here, a blend of thrills and sabotage and deep-dish emotionalism. The powerful performances by Craig and Dench surely owe a great deal to his indulgences.

Sean Penn is one of those actors, like Nicolas Cage, who is best (sometimes worst) when he's over-the-top. Unlike Cage, Penn doesn't pour himself into dreadful commercial vehicles. No, his dreadful movies are usually not destined for the multiplex. Case in point: This Must Be the Place.

Zilberman's conceit is that these players, who mesh so beautifully in their music-making, are discordant in their personal lives. Those lives are constructed for maximum messiness, turning what might have been resonant drama into high-class soap opera.

The people who made Flight have done a courageous thing. With all the potential revenue to be had from in-flight movie sales, they have made a movie that is guaranteed to never be shown on an airplane.

The Loneliest Planet is not a perfect work of art, but it gets at something powerful: the way that life can turn us around in a flash, without warning.

Goldfinger happened upon a story far larger than he must have anticipated. The Flat is about the persistence of denial, and of hope.

The result is maddening, exasperating, occasionally exhilarating – and mostly boring.

Although stylistically and conceptually it never lifts itself entirely out of the realm of a made-for-television drama – don't expect "My Left Foot" – The Sessions is bracing. It's also one of the few movies to recognize that people with severe physical disabilities have sexual lives, too.

As inspirational academic stories go, it doesn't get much better than this.

Photographic Memory is about the permanence and impermanence of what we choose to preserve: on film and in our heads (which is often the same thing). I would like to think that one day Adrian might look at this documentary and see it as a supreme act of paternal love.

The movie has some powerful moments, but it's mostly superficial.