The imperfect yet affecting new film Beautiful Boy, based on memoirs by the real-life Nic and David, examines addiction and its effects on one family. But it’s also a meditation on memory and the difficulty of reconciling the happiness of the past with a present that’s become too sad to bear.

Zoe is lively and an astonishing athlete, but it's Jeannie who gives this film resonance.

It's true, of course, that Trier still hasn't set foot on U.S. soil, but it may be that he sees us, in all our virtue and victimhood, that much more clearly for it.

Johnson pulls us into his world and keeps things oddly plausible, despite the intense stylization

The Cave of the Yellow Dog has an abundance of gentle humor, much of it provided by an adorably scruffy toddler, but there's also impressive strength and wisdom in the family's uncomplaining, shoulder-to-the-wheel approach to the world.

Even if Signs suffers a little from uneven pacing and mismatched tones of reverent homage (to "The Birds" and "War of the Worlds"), soul-searching and silly comedy, the jokes are clever, the tension continual and expertly calibrated, and the performances -- are both deep and moving.

The old hands still seem to be having a good time, so why the hell shouldnít we?

But by film's end, no one is looking good. If Wranovics is somewhat too noncommittal in his presentation, he still shows a great eye for detail.

Unlike the zippy American medical dramas it apes, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu is paid out with the deliberate slowness of a dray horse straining up a mountain path. With every painstaking turn of the screw that seals Lazarescu's sorry fate, Puiu flirts with tedium, but tedium is the point of this hyperrealist tale, paced in what feels like real time.

There's great charm, and also discomfort, in watching these highly motivated, excited women learn the tricks of a trade practiced very differently from their own, and casually swap horror stories of life under the Taliban.

I'm thankful No Greater Love is around to make people realize how much war heroes need our love, help and support once they come back home. Just telling them "thank you for your service" ain't gonna cut it.

This is a heartfelt endeavor, given weight by Shimono's extraordinary performance, in which the actor uses the subtlest flicks of his weary brow to call forth torrents of sorrow and minefields of regret.

Even more than the invasive procedures of her day job, or the casual humiliation by the raging misogynists drawn to this business, there's a virulent self-hatred on display that is palpably painful to watch.

The most pleasant surprise here isn't just watching these masters perform their craft - though it is quite a treat - but rather how eloquent and thoughtful they are when discussing it: each and every one of them emphasizes the importance of simple hard work and lack of any catch-all technique or "secret" to what they do.

It weaves its familiar story with some fresh textures and even manages to invest the conflict on the field with a resonance that transcends the tick-tock turnover of the numerals on the scoreboard.

Places Greenberg in historical context -- as a pioneering Jew and as an all-American sports hero.

Writer Sam Catlin and director Danny Leiner have fashioned an alert, shrewdly observed portrait of a moment in time.

Although what ensues is generally unsurprising and as pro forma down-and-dirty as the genre dictates, it's also on occasion rather affecting.

Cherot (who also co-wrote the script with Charles E. Drew Jr.) has made that rare hip-hop movie that doesn't fetishize lurid ghetto clichés.

A lovely wallow in the sweaty pains and joys of mostly gay adolescent love.

There's nothing profound going on here, and this pristine example of cinéma de qualité must later have driven ardent French New Wavers round the bend. But as a breezy populist comedy, more farce than satire, it remains infectious, and the case made for love and sex over tyranny and death takes us back to an age when romantic leads were less self-serious and more willing to double up as buffoons.

Far and away the strongest performance in Shattered Glass is Peter Sarsgaard’s.

The Terminal perfectly captures Spielberg's ambivalent worship of capitalism. His big boy's love of gadgetry is everywhere apparent in the security cameras, blinking computer screens and one-way glass walls.

Shallow Hal is "Shrek" for grown-ups, a fairy tale right down to its reverse-Cinderella plot.

It's the brilliance of The X-Files to have turned Mulder's paranoid style into a function of cool. Mulder and Scully aren't just beautiful, smart, well-armed and seemingly impervious to the banalities of everyday life, such as cheap haircuts and ruinous love affairs--they're cool.

There's something magical about seeing a packed house of 300 Taveuni locals laugh equally uproariously, and, without a nanosecond’s worth of culture shock, at Queen Latifah in "Bringing Down the House" and Buster Keaton in "Steamboat Bill, Jr."

This is one of the few treatments of the macabre in animation that is authentically unnerving, rather than merely gross or campy.

There's no denying that Fry's movie is all the livelier for its gay embellishment.