The result is more fancy than funky, but the directors' aim is true and occasionally hits its mark.

Scene by scene The Hunter, adapted from a novel by Julia Leigh, holds your attention like a pair of big, inquisitive eyes, or perhaps the point-blank scope of an automatic rifle.

Even at a generous running time that matches this season's other giant award candidates, Les Misérables seems like it's in a hurry, skittering from one number to the next without interlude. After Hathaway's early high point, it starts to feel numbing, an unending barrage of musical emoting carrying us through Valjean's adopting of Cosette, the latter's first encounter with Marius, the battle at the barricade and a last hour that can feel like it's a non-stop series of death arias.

If nothing else, Rio is unabashedly jubilant.

Tries too hard and ultimately achieves less. It's undone by its own inferiority complex.

The result is the double shrift of a thinly sketched background and a story that has trouble standing up on its own.

In its own way and to its own detriment, William Friedkin's splattery, southern gothic return to the screen seeks to amuse as well as shake and stir.

It's startlingly funny in an uncomfortable, envelope-pushing way that's all the more effective for how it sneaks up on you.

Watching True Legend, a wuxia film crossed with classic vaudeville, it's hard to figure out who's borrowing from whom anymore.

The result is a shaggy rise-and-fall story that is deceptively well-wrought, playing at times like an extremely hip, deep-access concert film.

One of the tricks of Ted -- perhaps its smartest one -- is that everyone, not just John, knows the bear can talk.

Ultimately, the effort, however rough in patches, is to be admired. We need our best minds on this subject, in all arenas, and Beautiful Boy is another jagged, early piece in a puzzle whose borders haven't formed yet.

The pleasures of the period ghost story The Woman in Black are something like the creepy shiver of delight you get from Edward Gorey's illustrated poem "The Gashlycrumb Tinies."

The Five-Year Engagement is, for a movie in which a guy fakes an orgasm and (in a separate incident) stuffs a dead deer in his car's sunroof, very grown-up.

Nearly everyone, and everything, in Micmacs is at one point or another guilty of trying too hard.

If you're like me, and you find yourself retreating to a safe place in your mind whenever human beings are being graphically decapitated on screen, you'll spend the majority of Centurion, horror maestro (The Descent) Neil Marshall's Roman bloodbath, on psychological lockdown.

The "black maid" may be a cliché. But when was the last time we saw a story told from her point of view?

The film is, underneath its surface of warm fuzzies, a precision instrument aimed directly at the heart of its intended, underserved older audience.

Anton Corbijn's The American looks and feels like a movie made by a filmmaker who hasn't been to the movies since the '70s - and I mean that as the highest compliment.

Mostly, though, African Cats is extremely tactful about the truly harsh stuff that goes down in the world of nature.

The casting of Jespersen, with his sub-Wookie intonations and granite stare, is key: If this pillar of masculinity says there be trolls, I don't have to be bitten by one to believe it.

But there's so much going on in Big Miracle that the biggest miracle of all – the whales at the center of the story, get lost amid all the criss-crossing love stories, political wheeler-dealing and well-intentioned but inadequate rescue missions.

It's not a film that's easy to love, but like a song you at first can't stand but then end up humming all day, it works its way past your defenses and curls in close.

The story is so bounteous that Goldwyn can't quite get a grip on it.

So it's too bad 10 Years isn't, you know, funny.

Timoner attempts - with talking heads, travelogues, and a little alarmist flair of her own - to articulate Lomborg's central idea that not doing enough good might be the same as doing harm.

Sleeping Beauty is best experienced as a piece of fragmented poetry rather than a strict ideological tract.

It's an extravaganza of bad taste that in the end just tastes bad.