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.