I was happy watching these actors, happy going behind the scenes of a sober classical music ensemble instead of another druggy rock group, happy hearing Beethoven for a couple of hours. The movie is haut-bourgeois to the bone, but so am I: Let's hear some chamber music and have a little laugh and a cry!

With its clever construction and comic timing, it’s a mean romp with an escalating death count and some nice quips.

The childlike, free-associative playfulness is now underscored by a palpable hunger to be the cleverest and coolest kids’ movie on the block, a hunger that weighs down Lord and Miller’s plenty-smart silliness.

As Solène, Hathaway gives a particularly lovely and vulnerable performance. She’s radiant as a woman reconnecting with big, swooping emotions, and reminding herself that those feelings are not the exclusive territory of the young.

A loose-limbed documentary about the hip-hop D.J. scene that, for know-nothings like me, is highly informative without being in the least academic.

Van Warmerdam has a way with images that are both playful and horrific, and you may find yourself chuckling at Borgman as much as you recoil at it. It’s destined for cult status.

It’s overbaked art-pulp. You’re always thinking, What fresh horror is around the next bend?

In this otherwise rather schematic swatch of social catharsis, Brazil's Fernanda Montenegro gives the best performance by an actress I've seen all year.

Rust and Bone doesn't come together, but it's a triumph of non-actorish acting.

If Amy Pascal loses her job over this, it will be an outrage. The only thing about which we disagree is The Interview. She hated it; I think it’s a blast.

It’s a good idea done well until the last 20 minutes, when the leap from a realistic addiction drama to a hair’s-breadth Hollywood rescue movie is too jarring to ignore.

It’s not just vérité--it’s battlefield vérité; it triggers your fight-or-flight instincts.

As much of her (Steen) as there is, you'll want more.

The Pale Blue Eye shows us everything we need to figure it all out and still manages to pull the rug out from under us. Even so, what ultimately resonates are the picture’s surprisingly moving central relationship and its vivid setting.

At its best, the film gives us a sincere look at the creative process and reveals it to be a sad, scary, at times uncontrollable and destructive thing. Just for that alone, it’s worth seeing.

Wahlberg grows into the part. He may not be right as a precocious, self-loathing intellectual, but he's very much at home playing a dickhead who's gotten in too deep. And as The Gambler becomes less about its protagonist’s dashed intellectualism and more about the gathering danger of his predicament, the film gains power.

Haneke’s integration of the ways we communicate and conduct our lives via phone and laptop feels uniquely effective.

The first half is handsome but coy, the second is messier but stronger and fiercer too.

The film has weight in ways that you don't quite expect. Or maybe it's just Scott's subdued, slow-burn performance, which may have intended to convey stupidity but actually helps create an overall mood of convincing despair.

As a mogul, Besson doesn’t worry about pleasing his corporate masters. He and his visual effects supervisor, Scott Stokdyk, can expend all their energy on topping themselves and making each other laugh. The movie is like a wave that makes you want to yell, “Cowabunga!”

It has vivid characters, a strong sense of place, and a free-floating hopelessness that never precludes the possibility of meaningful action.

It isn’t much of a movie (unless your aesthetic was formed in high-school science class), but it will be hugely informative to aliens who land on this planet in a thousand years and wonder why there’s no welcoming committee.

The Incredible Jessica James is a little odd duck of a film, an old-fashioned romantic comedy that’s decidedly modern in its frame of reference, a character-driven piece that never lets us too deep into its protagonist, a movie as pleasant as it is fleeting.

There are no bad guys, and no real violence. Horror fiends looking for cheap thrills may be disappointed. But those with a flair for the offbeat might find themselves unnerved and riveted.

What it is, really, is a showbiz satire about media ownership and our nostalgia fixation, though it muddles its message before the tone gets too scathing. It is, after all, still a Disney movie, even if it takes a perverse pleasure in playing around with Disney’s vast catalogue of characters.

10 Cloverfield Lane does what it needs to do: make you sit and squirm and want very badly to know. It has the appeal of suspense radio plays from the '30s and '40s and even a touch of Orson Welles’s most infamous Mercury Theater broadcast.

The movie's evolution from somber spiritual torment to icky body horror to fetishistic sex to wild lyricism (vampires pogoing off buildings) to Grand Guignol splatter is exhilarating.

The stage is set for a wonderful movie, and yet The Luzhin Defence, based on the Vladimir Nabokov novel The Defense, never courts greatness.

It's a pure (guilty) pleasure trip. That's pleasure, De Palma–style -- twisted, dirty, voyeuristic, a vast glissando of amorality.

He's [Pitt] not particularly inventive - with his appraising eyes and a toothpick in his mouth, he's like Redford without the edge - but he uses his stardom cannily, to kill with softness.

Taken--in the hands of director Pierre Morel (District B13), with Neeson in nearly every shot--works like gangbusters. The Frenchies have made the filet mignon of meathead vigilante movies.

Bigelow and Boal don’t bring much moral complexity to Detroit. They don’t illuminate the psyches of the cops or suggest the fundamental feeling of weakness that drives people to violence. They don’t shed much light on Dismukes’s inaction or subsequent thoughts about what he didn’t do. What Bigelow does — incomparably — is put us in that room with those people at that moment.

Rufus Norris’s debut film, Broken, is a fractured, tonally scrambled British coming-of-age movie with flashes of greatness and an intensely felt performance by a young actress named Eloise Laurence.

Sleeping With Other People is a rare American non-homogenized rom-com, and it’s delightful even when you’re not sure what you’re watching.

Pacino in low doses can be fulsome, and this is 10,000 cc’s of super-concentrated Al and his patented air of electrified stuporousness — which means it’s always on the border between thrilling and insufferable.

What made the first two so successful — Beverly Hills Cop III is not canon in my world — is that they also functioned as delivery systems for Murphy’s charms as a total ham willing to freak out or speak in a parade of goofy voices for the sake of getting a laugh. Axel F does that too, but more than anything, it’s a reminder of how fun it can be to watch a Beverly Hills Cop movie.

Niceness also takes the edge off Patrick Creadon's otherwise revitalizing documentary.

Great on atmosphere and less good on everything else. That’s not entirely a knock.

Bad Trip might be a dumb, gross candid-camera comedy, but don’t be surprised if it makes you feel a little better about your world.

Yoga Hosers is the best film Kevin Smith has made in a long time, which admittedly isn’t saying much. But this new cult comedy-thriller may well represent a turning point for the writer-director.

A glancing, disjointed little movie that captures as well as any film I've seen the mind-expanding mojo of rock and roll at the dawn of the counterculture - particularly rhythm-and-blues-oriented rock, particularly the Rolling Stones, the group that synthesized R&B and made it commercial.

Captain Jean-Luc Picard would be enough for one lifetime, but given that Sir Patrick is now living out an exuberant second adolescence as a Brooklyn hipster and throwing himself into parts like these, it’s time to proclaim him another reason to love New York.

The best thing in the movie is Stewart. She was the leggy hobo-camp teen in love with Emile Hirsch in "Into the Wild," and she's better at conveying physical longing than any of the actors playing vampires.

M. Night Shyamalan has come up with an unoriginal faux-doc horror picture that actually works like a demonic charm.

For these kids to sing and dance with all their hearts, they need to go to a place in themselves that should be closed down forever. The glories of War/Dance are torturously won, and all the more glorious for it.

Neither movie (Capote/Infamous) gives you the whole picture, but it's fun to see them both and rearrange the pieces in your head.

Honoré has proven you can make a movie musical in which style doesn’t upstage content--a movie musical that blossoms from the inside out.

Despite the simplicity of the brothers' technique, The Kid With a Bike has deep religious underpinnings, a relentless drive toward the mythos of death and resurrection. The film is not just in the tradition of Pinocchio and A.I.: It is a worthy successor.

It’s amazing how skilled he (Allen) is in making his old ideas seem fresh, lively, even urgent. His new drama Blue ­Jasmine comes this close to being a wheeze. But he sells it beautifully.

As befits its settings, The Trip to Italy aims higher than its predecessor — maybe too high — and isn’t as fresh. I enjoyed it, though.

It’s engrossing, and Mueller-Stahl’s mix of Old World chivalry and murderousness is scarier than Jason and Freddy combined.

It’s ironic that Stop-Loss loses its momentum when the characters go on the road. Yet Rasuk--the star of "Raising Victor Vargas"--gives a stunning performance.

There’s a lopsided quality to Lean on Pete that will particularly destabilize viewers (like myself) who are unfamiliar with Vlautin’s book. It has three distinct acts, and the last one feels like a very different movie indeed — its turn of events aren’t implausible, it just feels like they keep going well past the logical finish line.

Public Enemies has incidental pleasures (its hi-def video palette is fascinatingly weird), but it’s only Depp’s sense of fun that keeps it from being a period gangster museum piece.

Talk to Me doesn’t quite have something pointed to say about it, or anything else, but that’s okay — it’s just here to show you a good time and then usher itself out before overstaying its welcome.

Page is softer than in "Hard Candy" and "Juno." Without Diablo Cody comebacks, she’s even more marvelous.

Million Dollar Arm is cute, cloying, simplistic, borderline offensive … and thoroughly effective.

The final scenes are potent enough to save the movie.

Penn is terrific in his low-key doggedness.

The Room Next Door is an alternately rapturous and ponderous meditation on mortality, though in a very Almodóvarian fashion, that exploration comes by way of a fantasy of set directing one’s own death, down to the moment, location, and outfit worn.

Heineman’s film is, in many ways, the movie so many people say they want: a portrait of a deeply complex, flawed, but brilliant and forceful woman. But as tempting as it is to think of Pike’s Colvin, with her eyepatch and sailor’s mouth, as a “badass,” there’s not much that’s aspirational about the film.

Profoundly different from the others. On the cusp of their half-century mark, Apted's British subjects have accommodated themselves to what they were, what they are, and what they will be.

A scabrous, amusing, and thoroughly predictable exercise in exposing the animalistic underbellies of grown-ups pretending to be civilized liberals.

If it feels somewhat hazy and unsatisfying as a story, that is perhaps by design. Its fragmented, elliptical style has the quality of a dark, fragile memory.

I found myself often enraptured by this sad little story. Its weird narrative of faith healing serves as an intriguing diversion from the real matter at hand — the notion that grace lies in the search for help, rather than the finding of it.

The villains in this movie aren’t merely cruel and sadistic; they’re also profoundly stupid and incompetent, which actually feels closer to the way things tend to be in the real world.

Evans, in effect, is the real producer here, and the film, which mostly consists of artfully blended archival footage, comes across like a last will and testament.

Sensationally directed by Peter Berg, it’s a combination forensics detective movie (car bomb blows up secure American compound in Saudi Arabia--who dunnit and how can we stop him from doing it again?) and red-meat waste-the-terrorists action picture.

Luckily, Crazy Rich Asians is, at its heart, a fish-out-of-water story, and it has a lot more going for it than its literal money shots.

Raw is certainly nasty, but its gore is strategic and sparse. It is, however, a very stressful film to watch from beginning to end, even before the real feasting gets underway.

The movie is wonderful, nonsensical fun.

On balance, I admire the hell out of Collaizo for choosing to tell a more emotionally convoluted story, even if it sometimes kills the momentum.

The third and least original of the Pegg-Frost features, but it's still a lot funnier than most films of its ilk.

While The Ballad of Judas Priest may not always feel complete, by centering the music, it excites our curiosity long after the credits roll.

The film, Rescue Dawn, is so good it makes you wish that Herzog had gone Hollywood earlier in his career. His pet theme is here: man tested against nature, his sanity more precarious than his body.

The film builds to an anarchic set piece, in which a school full of rambunctious children defend the world from evil while the adults literally disappear off the face of the earth. It’s the closest thing Cornish comes to a real-life prescription for what ails us, and it goes down pretty well.

The movie is unfailingly likable and finally impressive. Goldin doesn’t settle for easy answers, and he makes you think that no one should.

The movie belongs to Gordon-­Levitt and Anna Kendrick as his painfully green therapist.

In its broad strokes, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent is a fairly by-the-numbers action comedy, one that sometimes wears Cage’s presence like a talisman against the bad juju of slipshod storytelling. But the talisman works because the film never loses sight of its touchingly nutty premise and because Cage remains a compelling actor.

The first half of Quid Pro Quo is among the most jaw-dropping things I"ve ever seen: Who knew there was a closeted subculture of people pretending to be paraplegics?

The jokes might not be the funniest, the bits might not be the wittiest, but it’s all done with such verve and velocity that we might not notice.

Taut and straightforward and a little grungy, which is how these movies ought to be.

Just as the “French Extreme” film Martyrs set a new standard for garish sadism, Hereditary raises the bar on emotional agony. If you want to see things you can never un-see and feel pain you can never un-feel, here’s the ultimate test.

It’s a wobbly, uneven, ultimately wonderful film — its unevenness befitting its title character, who we come to love despite her loopy lack of awareness of her own deficiencies.

I much prefer the whacked-out, Dr. Strangelove-ish brand of political-apocalypse film to all this straitlaced you-are-there dramaturgy, which seems a throwback to the early sixties not only in time but in spirit. But what Thirteen Days sets out to do it does admirably.

While "The Invisible Man" was built around its clever set pieces rather than its characters, Swallow is led by its protagonist’s mental and emotional state. It takes place in a landscape that’s largely internal — but that’s territory that can be just as filled with darkness and dread as a forbidding mansion.

The movie gives off a stranger vibe. Beavan is both a hero and a figure of fun, a man whose ideals are in constant collision with the habits of modern life.

At heart, it’s about as naughty as an old Disney movie with Dean Jones, Suzanne Pleshette, and an unruly Great Dane. I liked its gung-ho slapstick spirit, though. No one’s slacking off.

Kitano has conjured a universe of such incredible and casual nastiness that we yearn for some nobility and loyalty, or even some modicum of decency.

Insidious: Chapter 2 may be somewhat uneven, but at a certain point near the end, I realized I hadn’t taken any notes during the second half. For all its weirdness, the film had utterly transported me. Bring on Chapter 3.

More Eurocentric but quite enjoyable, even for those of us who don’t follow British “football.”

Beneath the expensive, computer-generated busyness of this second Captain America installment is a bracing, old-style conspiracy thriller made extra-scary by new technology and the increasingly ugly trade-offs of a post-9/11 world.

The Trip to Spain plays like it’s no big deal — a throwaway — but it’s consistently funny, its bitterness nudging the sweetness into complexity, its sweetness tempering the soupçon of despair. If that also sounds like a food review, well, someone has to write one.

Ryan Murphy’s jaunty screen version of Running With Scissors proves that nothing consecrates one's depiction of a narcissistic mother like having her embodied by Annette Bening. Bening's specialties are (a) insane people and (b) actresses.

The emotional resolutions aren't pat, exactly. But they're not messy either, and for material this inherently volatile, that seems like a cheat.

One of the strangest films I’ve seen this year, Clara’s Ghost is a twisted, slippery little whisper of a thing that refuses to let itself be easily defined.

Get Smart the sitcom was a one-joke affair and got tedious fast, whereas Carell’s starry-eyed dweeb has room for nuance, for growth, for inspiration.

Even when a guy is getting stabbed in the ear with a chopstick, Outrage is so controlled you're liable to go mad watching it. Somehow both stifling and beautiful, it's the Salo of Yakuza pictures.