The Imitation Game is vibrant and lively, engaging you on three levels: The fascinating way the Nazis managed to outwit the rest of the world until Turing came along, how his giant contraption (essentially the world’s first computer) will work, and what will happen to him and everyone he knows when the truth about him is finally revealed.

Taken is nonsense, but it's terrifically entertaining nonsense.

If you don't have a dog waiting for you at home after seeing A Letter to True, you'll want one.

I can't imagine anyone seeing Once and not instantly falling in love with it.

There is some exhilarating wordplay in 8 Mile, and you don't have to be a fan of rap to appreciate its quicksilver energy and mischievous wit. For all its grit, 8 Mile ends up radiating a joyful, hopeful vibe. It's an old-school charmer.

Bridges brings his 50 years of acting experience to this one captivating, surprisingly moving performance.

It's an earnest, contemporary drama about adults -- OK, women -- that has no use for irony or cynicism, no room for cutting-edge, clever hipness.

Superbad never forgets the lesson one learns when looking back on one's awkward youth: Cool isn't just where society dictates; it is also where you find it.

Most contemporary sci-fi movies come on with all CGI-guns blazing, trying to blow the roof off the theater. Moon settles for trying to blow your mind instead.

Whenever the film starts getting overly sticky, Perez swoops in to even things out. If there isn't a fat smile plastered on your face as It Could Happen to You comes to its whimsical, crowd-pleasing finale, consider yourself a cynic. [29 July 1994, p.G6]

Luminous, melancholy and ultimately heartbreaking.

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 grows stronger and more engrossing as it unfolds.

The movie has a profound understanding of the back-and-forth nature of the bond between boys, and it ends on a silent note of forgiving looks and instant reconciliation that is the privilege of the young, whose lives aren’t yet complicated enough to put resentment before friendship

Impossible to watch passively. It may be a work of pure fiction, with the requisite preposterous plot turns, but it still has the air of a ''what if?'' scenario, and it is perfectly, thoroughly chilling.

If I were 8, I would want to see it 800 times.

As formidable as Kingsley is, Elegy wouldn't work if his object of obsession wasn't worthy of him.

The best parts of It Might Get Loud, though, occur when Guggenheim visits with the musicians one on one.

The Secret of Kells manages to feel simultaneously old-fashioned and mesmerizingly modern,and the slight story at its center has the emotional weight of a classic fable: A boy's wild, fantastical adventure, simply told.

Suggests that professional wrestling is more than a multibillion-dollar industry: It's also a way of life.

What really makes Hidden so involving is Haneke's sometimes maddening insistence on keeping things vague.

It's almost impossible not to respond emotionally to this fascinating, sobering and all-too-brief exploration of the politicized religious right and its hopes, dreams and power.

All the film's energy, and most of its appeal, lie in the scenes in which Williams is talking to his audience, the most singular captive audience in Top 40 history. These moments do ring true, and they have a fine humanity to them. [15 Jan 1988, p.C1]

This engaging documentary is briskly funny.

In Redbelt, David Mamet enters the realm of sports drama and Rocky-underdog clichés and discovers it's a surprisingly good fit.

It's a gritty, realistic police procedural about the Internal Affairs Division of the Los Angeles force (the cops who watch the cops). It's also a taut, eerie thriller in which the conflict and tension are hidden -- but still effective. [13 Jan 1990, p.E1]

It's all about making everybody happy. If that's not grounds for a good relationship, then I don't know what is.

In Spanish, the title of the film, El abrazo partido, translates into ''a broken embrace,'' a more fitting description of Ariel's feelings for his father.

As summer fare goes, Fluke is a shaggy surprise -- the most winning dog-meets-girl love story yet. [02 Jun 1995, p.4G]