Apatow's film comes across as overstuffed and understructured, a collection of elements that hasn't really been assembled into a story and could do with the backbone.

Mohan's film may not manage anything out of the ordinary, but it does present a convincingly contemporary depiction of relationships and dating when the goalposts have been moved, or when we're at least trying to pretend they have.

For all that it is, as promised, about love, it's also a subtly punishing affair that grinds you into the ground as you watch an elderly couple deal with one member's slow deterioration of health and sanity.

The latter half of The Impossible is so disappointingly movie-ish, tying a bow on the events after portraying them too vividly to allow them to be wrapped so neatly. It wrings out tears with an industrious efficiency that leaves you feeling manhandled after the exhilarating, terrifying footage that's unfolded before.

Zero Dark Thirty makes you feel every step of Maya's journey, but it's her impressive achievement and that of the film itself that we're left contemplating, not her humanity - a stunningly well-realized whole with few soft spots to latch onto.

If gangsterism is just capitalism in a more raw form, then Jackie is the creature best suited for this world. He knows the rules and enforces them without prejudice, because it's just business and this is just a job. Killing Them Softly doesn't give that idea its intended sting.

Scripted by playwright Tom Stoppard, the film labors to fit Tolstoy's sprawling story into its two hour and ten minute runtime by drawing its characters with minimal lines.

The glorious mess that is Pat's family and community is the warmest, funniest aspect of Silver Linings Playbook.

This is Day-Lewis' movie, and he does with the meditative inner stillness of his character a wonderful thing - he finds a type of heroism that runs counter to all of the usual showy movie signifiers of such a quality.

Working with the great cinematographer Roger Deakins, Mendes also presents some stunning sequences of beauty in a film where you might not expect such a thing.

Turns out to be a disappointingly standard addiction story in its second half also serves as a reminder that Hollywood tends to be more invested in these types of self-serious movies than most actual audiences.

As is often the peril with movies of giant ambition, Cloud Atlas walks a crooked line between the glorious and the ridiculous.

One of the finest of the year, The Loneliest Planet is based on a short story by Tom Bissell that's itself inspired by a famous Hemingway work, "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber."

The film is heavily reliant on jump scares, but its best moments are the ones before them, when the tension builds without the benefit of escalating music to queue you in to the approaching shock.

The primary weakness of Affleck's film is the actor himself, who can't seem to find much in "exfiltration" specialist Tony aside from a dedication to his work and sorrow over the potential breakup of his family.

Set to a score by Carter Burwell that takes breaks for tunes like P.P. Arnold's "The First Cut Is The Deepest" and Linda Ronstadt's "Different Drum," existing in a start contrast from what's unfolding on screen, Seven Psychopaths is a ball.

It's probably too early to peg Frankenweenie as Burton's comeback vehicle, but it's certainly the director's best movie in twenty years.

Looper may not have the bell-ringing resonance of Chris Marker's "La Jetée," one of its touchstones, but it's a jaunty match-up of genre and character drama that's far smarter and more finely wrought than almost anything else in the multiplexes.

The two cops are cocky and funny and young, and it still takes a good half hour to accept that they may be as forthright and dedicated to their jobs as they appear to be.

What makes The Master such a singular experience, as dense as a mille-feuille, is that it is not Lancaster's story but Freddie's, and told as such, in layers that are sensorially rich but that do not always lead easily from one to another.

Physically it is a kick in the teeth, a depiction of poverty, sex and violence which crosses most known codes of acceptability.

This variation on the demon child subgenre has enough of the familiar and the new to be a decently good time at the movies.

As rollicking and rough as a drive down a dirt road with no suspension, Lawless is a tale of three-bootlegging brothers from Prohibition-era Franklin County, Virginia, who are, in the words of one character, some "hard-ass crackers."

Premium Rush is a half-entertaining, half-exasperating movie.

Pattinson does a quietly marvelous thing in finding vulnerability in Eric without making it seem like softness.

Like much of the movie, Norton's presence has a patient, diligent quality to it, as if what's on screen is just a slog to get through before some promised fun in the next installment.

Celeste and Jesse Forever creates a handful of likable and very human characters, so much so that halfway through you want the film to stop putting them through the emotional wringer so that you can just spend time with them.

Sugar Man is most interesting when it touches on the conditions that combined to draw a cult hero out of some decent music and a generously enabled, imagination-firing mystique.