It's a great metaphor - but not a great movie. Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris direct in a drably naturalistic style, and the script is thin.

Palestine 36 offers an interesting and valuable perspective on a relatively unknown period in history, though I wish it wasn’t so thinly spread out. Jacir wants to show a cross section of people’s responses to these events, but the result often feels like scattershot scenes from a longer miniseries, flitting from one character to another with little narrative thrust or cohesion.

With its martini-swilling leads and swingy French pop soundtrack, A Simple Favor seems to yearn for a bygone era of nail-biter, but rather than wallow in pastiche, it comes up with something truly contemporary feeling.

As with all Ozon's work, Time to Leave resounds with grace notes. The wide-screen cinematography by Jeanne Lapoirie offsets (or maybe disguises) the movie's narrow scope, and there's something private--withholding--in Poupaud's beauty that gives his misanthropy a touch of mystery.

The final twist is both baffling and repulsive, but as an evocation of the triumph of evil, it's peerless.

Unfortunately, Kravitz has neither the vision nor the range to deftly skewer the heinous foibles of wealthy men, let alone disrupt Tatum’s onscreen reputation.

Two Girls and a Guy isn’t a satisfying movie, but Downey is alarmingly brilliant in it -- a man locked in torment who can’t find the way out.

In the new Speak No Evil, the ineffectual nature of the characters becomes not a shortcoming so much as a teased-out joke — a Straw Dogs moment that never arrives, leaving us instead to wince at these bumbling fools as they strive, however poorly, to save themselves.

A true story of courage and survival, yes. But viewing the destruction of the World Trade Center--in a film called World Trade Center--through this kind of prism represents a distinctly Hollywood brand of tunnel vision.

Wonder has an overflowing humanism that extends to less-sympathetic characters.

With Jimi: All Is By My Side, writer-director John Ridley tries to do for the rock biopic what Jimi Hendrix did for rock 'n' roll itself in the 1960s — explode it, redefine it, and help it find its best self.

The kind of documentary that’s smart enough to step back and let its charming subject take over. It won’t break new ground, but it’s not lazy or generic.

The depressing subtext is that even with detailed proof of ongoing genocide, it takes movie stars to get to the movers and shakers, and to get worthy movies like this one into theaters.

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.

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.

Working in a mini-genre whose bones would appear to have been picked clean by the likes of Kevin Williamson and Wes Craven, Glosserman and Stieve find a few pints of fresh blood.

Cop Car does enough things so well for so long that to quibble with its finale feels churlish. This is a film very much worth seeing.

The mournful comedy To Dust has a sicko premise, but scrupulously sicko.

I don’t mind the movie’s retro-ness, but I wish Mostow didn't take pulp so seriously.

Julie & Julia is full of holes, but you don't even care when Streep is onscreen.

Though a mess by all conventional narrative standards, Avengers: Age of Ultron is a fascinating case study in the rules of “universe” storytelling. Chief among them is that a film may not be self-contained — it must constantly allude to worlds outside its own. Marvel fans want extra characters, extra subplots, in-jokes that pander to their supposed breadth of knowledge. They don’t want closure.

Until the computer-generated effects bog it down and mess up its rhythms, Captain America: The First Avenger, has a measured, classical pace and a lot of good, old-fashioned craftsmanship.

Even in a piffle like Something’s Gotta Give, Keaton reminds us of her uncanny ability to inhabit her characters' knockabout emotions.

Most of the dialogue is listless, and no matter how much Soderbergh snips and stitches, the movie is a corpse with twitching limbs.

It understands the exchange of aggression and guilt, and it’s witty about the awkward way that whites who have been taught to respect Blacks will speak and act when confronted with an actual Black man.

Compared with other first-person motion-sickness horror pictures like "The Blair Witch Project" and "Cloverfield," George A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead is weak tea, yet there’s enough social commentary (and innovative splatter) to acidulate the brew--to remind you that Romero, even behind the curve, makes other genre filmmakers look like fraidy-cats.

The first time I saw Peterloo, it sent me out of the screening room onto Park Avenue with my blood boiling. Despite the oratory and the funny hats, Leigh’s ability to incite felt utterly contemporary and urgent.

Alan Partridge awkwardly tries to wed the episodic spirit of the character with the feature-length demands of a theatrical experience. The result is a mess, but it’s got some choice bits. Even if you forget the film itself, you might find yourself quoting parts of it for years.