Don’t be fooled by its awful title. The Spy Who Dumped Me is the rare secret-agent spoof that doesn’t double-O-suck.

Lino Ventura is grand as a solemn resistance leader. He's backed by a knockout cast that includes Simone Signoret.

An original head trip definitely not recommended for kiddies.

The political intrigue behind the documentary would make for a great movie of its own.

In addition to the magnificent music, the movie takes its rumpled charm from Fry's unfeigned fanboy manner.

Endearingly offbeat romantic comedy with a great meet-cute gimmick.

Doesn't shy from the ugly side, though it's far from the no-holds-barred exposé being touted in the ads.

What we’ve got is a highly entertaining nautical version of “The Towering Inferno’’ (still my favorite guilty pleasure of all time).

The acting is first-rate, and remarkably there's no sense that the sometimes tough material (which barely skirts an R rating) has been watered down to make it more palatable for a wider audience. I just wish Chbosky had changed that terrible title for the movie.

The Drama, for all its heat, is not perfect. I wasn’t won over by its climactic series of calamities that fall in rapid succession like dominoes at the end. However, most movies are completely forgotten by the time the credits roll. This one, like it or not, lingers for days. It’ll likely wind up one of the most controversial movies of the year.

A scary, inventive, exciting and breathless adventure that combines the best elements of “Children of Men," “Escape from New York" and “The Road Warrior," but leaves out the worst stuff - such as the story-clogging despair and political allegory in “Children," a movie that made apocalypse look like kind of a downer.

Jean-Pierre Jeunet, the French di rector of "Amelie," is back to more lighthearted whimsy with the delightful Micmacs.

A remarkable 179-minute meditation on the nature of revolution.

Ten percent of Ghana's 20 million people are disabled, yet the film makes little attempt to explain why.

The movie is strangely demure in its attempts to be wild.

The two male actors are very good, but Juuso is particularly amusing and touching as the earthy heroine.

As we learn in director Jonathan Berman's fun documentary Commune, the ranch was financed by people such as musician Frank Zappa and actor James Coburn.

The filmmakers are clearly fans, and any of Vreeland's personal shortcomings - child-rearing, for instance - are only hinted at.

Thanks to the extraordinary performance of Cotillard, who expertly lip- syncs to Piaf recordings and disappears into the part, few will regret seeing La Vie En Rose, named after a famous Piaf tune. Just brace yourself for a film of unvarying intensity that seems longer than its 140-minute running time.

Konchalovsky, best known here for "Runaway Train" (1985), takes on a difficult subject with a light mix of dark humor and pathos.

This contemplative drama manages to dodge mawkish potholes to emerge as a strangely life-affirming work.

The best actress currently on New York screens is Esther Gorintin, a 90-year-old Pole who provides the emotional center for Julie Bertucelli's delicate, bittersweet comedy-drama, Since Otar Left, which is set in Paris and Tbilisi.

Well worth seeing for its acting and its tempting cinematography. Don't be surprised if you find yourself wanting to book a vacation in Cobh.

An insightful time capsule.

Love Is All You Need is entirely predictable, and that’s OK in a film as lovingly made, well acted and enjoyable as this.

At its best, Love, Gilda intertwines the comic’s own narration — drawn from audiotapes, interviews and journals — with reflections from her current-day admirers.

Vincent Lindon, one of France's leading actors, is super as Marc, a man on a downward spiral into insanity. And Emmanuelle Devos is comforting as Marc's loving wife.

The first half of Scotland, PA is by far the funniest, with witty dialogue, hilariously ugly period fashions and hairstyles.

German director Werner Herzog's fascinating, fond and often bitchy documentary recalling the late star of his most celebrated movies.

There isn’t a lot here about her films, or great performances, but this is two hours of Ingrid Bergman, much of it rarely seen before. I’m not about to complain.

Ultimately, Sleep Tight makes a sounder case for nocturnal Webcams than the "Paranormal Activity" franchise ever could.

This film is so funny it may be beside the point to complain that, as in many Apatow productions, the writing and direction are still in something of a state of arrested development.

He turns to the furry creatures as a metaphor for life in post-Communist countries. Just as the rabbits were discombobulated by their newfound freedom, so, too, were people, who found it difficult to adapt to life without Big Brother.

The result is as impressive as one would expect.

Sergei Puskepalis (Sergei) and Grigory Dobrygin (Pavel) give powerful performances, but the real star is Mother Nature.

It’s a pleasant watch with some solid jokes.

The movie is passionately retro, but Barta shows his methods can create a world every bit as engrossing as the latest CGI.

We know Lee can channel anger into art. Now, in the maiden feature for Amazon Studios, he adds poetry, beginning with the spoken-word verse that fills the movie.

A mouse and a bear defy social convention to forge a friendship in this lovely, charming and Oscar-nominated French animated feature (now available dubbed into English with the voices of Forest Whitaker and other notables).

It’s only a matter of time before someone turns Louise Osmond’s crowd-pleasing documentary, about people in a working-class Welsh mining village invading the snobbish “sport of kings,” gets turned into “The Full Monty” on four hooves.

Hamilton the film is just OK.

The film is as tender and endearing as a lamb, a lamb at rest in a fragrant atmosphere. It’s a film that has a determined, unironic respect for things past. It’s as if millennial hipsterism, with its feigned fascination for all things retro, took a surprising further step: actual respect for learning, for experience, for wisdom.

Lee hasn't given an interview in 45 years, and even her 99-year-old sister (still practicing as a lawyer) only hazards a guess in Mary Murphy's old-school documentary: Her younger sister had nothing to prove, and nowhere to go but down after her astonishing debut novel.

Part sitcom, part comedy of manners - but it lacks the courage to deal honestly with class and ethnicity.

A little humor would have helped leaven a movie that is frankly often very difficult to watch.

The film is both elegiac and amazingly retro, like the nature specials that baby boomers were weaned on - although it's not for animal lovers, unless you have a specific grudge against sables. "Happy People" is the title, but it's virtually all men.

Documents the life of Rodney Bingenheimer, a teenage outcast who parlayed a youthful stint as double for Davy Jones of the Monkees into a 40-year run as a real-life Forrest Gump.

It’s all a delightful mess, executed with a deft touch by Jacobs.

Contains impeccable performances, especially by the frightening Ifans.

Director Susanne Bier is helped by a well-chosen cast, especially the glowing Nielsen, a Danish-born actress best known for American films like "Gladiator."

The frothy, feel-good Notting Hill is about as enchanting as movies get these days.

You'll want to catch this clever movie before Hollywood ruins everything with a dumb remake.

A satirical blast at America's gun culture. But it's so entertaining that even a die-hard NRA member might be impressed.

This entertaining and handsome-looking version of The Magnificent Seven is very much tailored to his star, right down to Washington’s real-life history as a preacher’s son.

Long before Occupy Wall Street, there was Bob Fass, the legendary overnight host on WBAI whose 50-year career is lovingly saluted in the documentary Radio Unnameable.

Lately, the Shakespeare plays on film tend to be either too self-consciously irreverent on the one hand or too stodgy on the other; Kurzel’s Macbeth takes a point of view without betraying the Bard.

A big, dark film that should satisfy the many fans of the Orson Scott Card novel and engage newcomers, too.

Cohen, so good in 2015’s “Brooklyn,” is chilling as the shark-eyed Varg (who has been linked to hate crimes in France in recent years), and Culkin brings just the right amount of eye-twitch to Aarseth, who seemingly enjoyed making grandiose proclamations of “evil” and donning corpse makeup rather than actual criminal activity — yet did little to stop out-of-control followers.

The remarkable performances from the central trio are what carries the film.

Puts a face on the clerical sex scandals rocking the Roman Catholic Church.

Forty-three years later, “Tron: Ares” is groundbreaking for being the first “Tron” film with a discernible plot.

Tackling serious issues with humor and understanding, the film portrays Mona's woes as a microcosm of the entire mess in the Middle East.

The self-possessed Hall is well-suited to this proto-feminist role, smoking and rolling her eyes as the pasty old men around her exclaim, for what is clearly the millionth time, "An educated woman!" as if she were a zoo animal.

I'm not, finally, sure what Leigh is saying - but she is a filmmaker with a voice.

Be warned: Some of the afflictions are so disturbing, you might have to turn your eyes from the children. Susan Tom doesn't have that option. And 11 children are all the better for it.

Miller never really fleshes out all of these colorful characters in her emotionally facile script, leaving the heavy lifting to the actors. Fortunately for The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, Wright is more than up to the challenge.

Writer-director Jon S. Baird has devilish fun with the hilarious black-comic elements of Irvine Welsh’s novel, but the incessant bad behavior does get a wee bit monotonous, and the twist ending is disappointingly pat.

A very fine follow-up to the most successful horror film ever.

This film is no fairy tale for children. Not only does it contain nudity and sex, both straight and lesbian, but it also presents childhood as a time of terror.

The Astronaut Farmer stalls narratively in the third act, but rest assured it finally achieves liftoff. See it before it disappears into the ether.

In the poignant, symmetrical end, Touré leaves the idea that the real yearning of these people is for a fair shake in their own home.

Needless to say, In My Skin isn't for everybody. It's recommended to viewers who, like Esther, want to feel something, no matter how distasteful.

An extraordinary documentary about an extraordinary man that brings to urgent life potentially dry questions of American foreign policy in the 1960s.

There’s little dialogue in this gem of a movie, but little is needed. Aman’s anguished face – which recalls Maria Falconetti in “The Passion of Joan of Arc” -- conveys all the information we need.

A true fan's nirvana.

A very rare contemporary romantic comedy that doesn't succumb to terminal stupidity.

Crowe makes the most of his own quiet presence, and this ode to the world’s never-recovered soldiers and their families is a fitting meditation on the insanity of war.

It turns into something that is much smarter, and in a gentle, low-key way, tougher and funnier than you expect.

Madsen interviews experts galore, but few seem to know what's going to happen with this project in the next decade -- let alone 100,000 years.

Directors Matthew Pond and Kirk Marcolina wisely keep this unrepentant charmer, in her 80s during filming, on-camera, save for when they’re interviewing fascinated writers and fed-up prosecutors.

Has its share of clichés and contrivances. Fortunately, compensation is provided by strong performances by veteran actor Vincent Lindon as the coach and newcomer Firat Ayverdi as the refugee.

A first-rate documentary on this subgenre of punk rock, which flourished roughly between 1982 and 1986 as an anarchistic response to Ronald Reagan and the disco era.

So why does the Democratic Party hate him so much? The answer, as this valuable (if blatantly pro-Nader) documentary makes clear, is hypocrisy.

Like with any great singer, it's often the telling pauses of the man born Anthony Benedetto that say the most in The Zen of Bennett.

It’s much more lively than “On the Road,” last year’s snoozy adaptation of the Kerouac novel that presented fictionalized versions of some of the same characters.

By terms moving and funny, the story reaches its apex when Half Moon, a beautiful young woman played by Golshifteh Farahani, makes her appearance from out of nowhere. Is she real, or perhaps an angel? You'll have fun trying to come up with an answer.

The editing (by Kitano) and lensing are stylish and guaranteed to keep viewers hooked through the final rubout.

Seagulls is easy to take, insightful and darkly funny. The story sometimes seems forced and the characters stereotypical, but the engaging cast and surreal shots of the rugged landscape compensate.

Alcoholics Anonymous founder William G. Wilson, known mostly as Bill W. before his death in 1971, was played by James Woods in a fine 1989 made-for-TV biopic. But the drama didn't have room for some of the darker corners of Wilson's life, fascinatingly explored in Kevin Hanlon and Dan Carracino's documentary.

A beautiful nature film, with gorgeous, multicolored shots of bees and flowers. It also is a well-made documentary about the troubles of the honeybee.

The three-part anthology opens with its best shot, Hong Kong fruitcake Fruit Chan's "Dumplings," photographed by the great Christopher Doyle.

You care for these warriors, no matter which uniform they're wearing. I don't know Taub's intentions, but The Fallen makes a potent antiwar statement.

Sweetly appealing fable.

It’s an impressive first effort from Kravitz that, like the island and the women, immediately has us in its grip.

War was both cruel and magnificent, as Churchill once put it. To Gibson, it still is.

Dazzling fun. Jerry is master of a new domain.

Guy Maddin's films are always delightful, but his latest, My Winnipeg, has an added treat for film buffs: It features Ann Savage!

The recent trend in political documentaries is for filmmakers to heap ridicule and sarcasm on people they don't agree with, a la Michael Moore. Waiting for Armageddon (which has nothing to do with the 1998 Michael Bay movie) demonstrates that sometimes it's far more devastating to simply point the camera at your subjects and let them talk.