The puffy high tones of medieval fantasy punctured by the flatly vulgar and colloquial - is the film's central comic vein, one McBride taps it like it's never been tapped before.

You can't help but feel that the ambition of Henry's Crime was determined by the near anonymity of its title - the movie seems to be ensconcing itself into the Witness Relocation Program.

Step over to the liquor cabinet and mix yourself a good, stiff drink - if you plan on seeing this godforsaken thing, you'll need it.

Meek's Cutoff is an ambitious feat of visual storytelling that's alive to both its landscape and the actors who people it.

Though the film concerns events contained within the roughly 50 square blocks of the East Village, it suffers from the narrative equivalent of urban sprawl.

Bier appears to have a delicate touch with actors: In a Better World is loaded - perhaps overloaded - with nuance, and her performers never overdo a thing.

One of the most chilling things about Trust is how well it lays out the grooming strategies used by expert predators.

Somewhere under all that bloat is the greatest short subject of all time.

There's nothing in it to inspire excitement or even a mild glimmer of delight; it's almost offensive in its dullness.

A concerted effort to make a scary movie without spilling a drop of blood, Insidious is earnest to the point of suffocation about scaring you silly.

Rubber could have been a modest horror novelty, a wicked, malevolent version of "The Red Balloon."

Ultimately the movie ridicules the culture that compels what Cedric the Entertainer calls grown-ass men to dress up like comic-book characters, as well as the Christian attempts to co-opt that culture.

The chief reason to see Potiche - maybe the only reason - is Deneuve.

So much of Abbas' dialogue consists of stiff platitudes (the script is by journalist Rula Jebreal, based on her novel of the same name); the character she's playing has been reduced to a dull, saintly figure, and not even Abbas can find a way out of that miniature prison.

Punch manages to cram more slow motion into its first few minutes than a season of NFL highlights, all of "Inception" and every one of those NBC promos where the casts of whatever failing police procedural walk menacingly towards the camera.

Peep World barely seems like a movie. Withered and shrunken, it feels even too small for TV.

As you might have guessed from its title, Drinkers is as full of cheap sentimentality and predictable behavior as a Hell's Kitchen bar would have been in the 1970s.

Even the gags we've all seen before are handled so deftly you almost forget how ancient they are.

Warmly observed and solicitous of its audience to the point of caress, Win Win is as comfortable an experience at the movies as you might have this year.

Fortunately, the movie is studded with performances that demonstrate the cast's skills, such as Kristen Wiig's soggy white-bread delusional Christian Ruth.

How, I'm wondering more and more often, do studios put movies like this one in front of audiences and assume they'll just buy it? The secret to making a great, or even just a good, thriller these days seems to have been lost.

Furman keeps the drama taut when it needs to be, and loosens the reins easily when it's time to kick back - he has good control over the movie's rhythms.

What Press comes up with in the end isn't just a portrait of individual eccentricity. Its larger subject is the way one man, just by being alive to what's around him, has created a vast, detailed anthropological record of how New Yorkers present, and feel, about themselves.

Aside from a few arresting visuals, Red Riding Hood is just a slog through the woods.

Sex is threatening, as Brontë knew, and Wasikowska and Fassbender make this particular dance look exceedingly dangerous.

There's an enchanting, and very Western, musicality in Certified Copy, a mash-up that charms; Mad Decent - master masher, dj and producer Diplo's label - aptly describes it. (Diplo and Buñuel would've loved each other).

It really is just sensory bombardment, and in two dimensions you have even less of a grasp of what's happening and of what you're looking at than the poor bastards on-screen.

The picture is rambunctiously affectionate; Guiterrez may go for the broad joke, but never the cheap one.