Skincare is the perfect vehicle for Banks’s style, the cinematic equivalent of a Barbie-mobile with 60s Cadillac fins. The audience gets to ride shotgun as she speeds through the flashy, splashy visuals to get to the long tunnels of persecution.

I enjoyed Subservience for what it is: a Megan Fox vehicle with a dash of sci-fi. Casablanca it is not, but that’s okay.

Overall, I found myself not hating the film. There's just one thing that troubles me about the way Nancy Drew is depicted. She is determined, a perfectionist, uber-organized, and efficient. Those qualities can be associated to geekdom, but they’re also symptoms of someone with a propensity for disordered eating or obsessive-compulsive disorder. Hmmm.

What Cuarón and friends have done is made a cute genre film. What's the harm in that? I’m sure Bernal will be back to his edgy roots soon enough.

No one portrays and skewers really intelligent morons the way Albert Brooks does. Oddly enough Lost in America has a lot of similarities to everybody’s favorite TV show Green Acres. They are both about men who have dropped out of society and their inability to convince all the insane people in their world about the usefulness of common sense and rationality in an insane world.

The direction keeps things moving along nicely, while the cinematography makes the whole production look bigger and slicker than it would come across otherwise. Couple that with a decent script and two strong lead performances, and one gets a fine entry into the survival-thriller genre.

Overall, The Cherry Bushido is a fun time, and I found it to be a very different sort of samurai film. It’s loud, brash, and seeks to propagandize the Japanese to embrace their warrior nature. I quite enjoyed that. If you’re into unsubtle tales of demons and samurai, this is the film for you.

Bruce Thierry Cheung adapted this story from a novel by Dean Bakopoulos, brilliantly changing the setting from Michigan to the California desert. The film is light on dialog and heavy on brutally beautiful cinematography painting the mood.

A fun movie. It accomplishes exactly what it sets out to do. It’s a great first date movie.

My biggest frustration with Summerland is three major plotlines mixed like a tossed salad. Each plot is interesting to watch as well as engaging, but transitions from one to the next can clash with the good feelings generated by the previous.

Raw, irreverent and uncompromising, Cho transforms her life into a form of performance art like no other.

I love zombie movies. I love George Romero even more. It is easy to say that every movie he comes out with is an event for me, so it brings me great sadness to say that I felt let down by his latest effort, Diary of the Dead.

Gaia uses its atmosphere to great effect.

In Bale, Herzog has found a talent who transcends the challenges of a brutal shoot. "Rescue" reveals new capabilities for an actor who's already proven himself in other intense and ever-focused performances.

Luz does have trouble giving depth to its characters. Rather than a deep dive character study, the film is very plot-centered. That is not inherently a bad thing, but unfortunately, when moving the plot gets in the way of developing characters, it can be a shortcoming.

Perhaps most compellingly, it’s a reminder to open our eyes, to notice the bigger world around us for what it is, to see who we really are. Toussi never preaches, gently luring you into an utterly tranquil state, wherein you may just find yourself booking a ticket to Colombia.

Hate crimes, racial tensions, economic strife, illegal immigration, and the preservation of white neighborhoods are familiar issues in this nation, but the crux of the documentary Farmingville is where these issues play out.

Freakier Friday is perfect for the mother/daughter set and offers a lot that we haven’t seen from Disney in a while: solid cast, strange plot, and a heartfelt message about family.

Any minor flaws Off the Map has are easily forgiven by great acting and beautifully shot landscapes. Campbell Scott does a great job of adapting a stage play (by screenwriter Joan Ackerman) to film as well.

In 30 years’ time it might seem as incisive a document of its time as, say, “Don’t Look Back” or “Gimme Shelter.” As a study of how the current corporate idiocy impacts one man’s art, it’s priceless.

The Hole In the Ground surprised me, took me on a fun ride, and returned me, almost unshaken. This was a brilliantly satisfying monster movie.

Ultimately Impossible Monsters is a perfectly adequate film with good production values and quite a few engaging twists and turns. If you are interested in the psychology of dreams and nightmares, or the thrill of a murder mystery, then this film is worth a watch.

I think what sets Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go for It apart from other end-of-life docs is that this one is just so honest, so forthcoming, and so remarkably detailed. Mariem Pérez Riera has perfectly captured an American icon at the moment we need her the most.

The White Crow demonstrates that, if perhaps not having yet mastered all of the nuances of directing an artful biopic, Fiennes possesses a keen eye for detail – and the man just can’t help but exude sophistication.

Despite being overall quite enjoyable, it feels very rushed in places, especially towards the end, and it fails to cap off Midway’s epic rise and fall as it deserves.

New territory for the Vermont director, and he shows every sign of feeling right at home in it.

The guy (Grace) simply steals the show here. He's at once goofy and hammy, yet so lost, sad and sensitive you buy into his performance from the get go.