Walking with the Enemy may not be another “Schindler’s List” (Ben Kingsley has a small but important role as Hungary’s deposed regent) but it’s handsomely photographed (A-list vet Dean Cundey) in Romania and a compelling addition to the Shoah canon.

The movie is at its best when Gekko gets back into the game, with his impish smile and his perfect hair.

The film fails to represent how singular and influential the late Giger is in popular culture.

It's an odd mixture of an unsentimental, darkly humorous take on mental illness with the usual Hollywood loony-bin cliches.

As the plot loses steam, director Mark Pellington (whose paranoid thriller "Arlington Road" was one of the worst movies of 1999) tends to rely on cheap tricks to maintain suspense, although the final catastrophe is very nicely done.

Along with co-writer Emmanuele Bernhein, Ozon...has crafted a contemplative blend of fantasy and reality that illuminates the mysteries of the creative process.

The filmmakers have an pleasurably accurate sense of the embarrassments that darken early adolescence and of the amazing cruelty of teenage girls.

Those who can hang on through the mumblecore-ish narrative languor of the nicely photographed The Exploding Girl will savor a very talented actress' sensitive portrait of youthful awkwardness.

Doesn't have nearly enough Hugh Grant and is a little short on laughs, but it gets by on Renée Zellweger's charms.

Niccol’s film may not be perfect, but it shines a light on a subject many viewers will know vaguely by name — and not much more.

The performances are so solid - and newcomer Jon Dichter's direction (he also wrote the script) is so utterly assured - that the rather contrived ending barely seems to detract from the film's entertainment value.

A refreshingly naturalistic depiction of the dynamic of traveling companionship — at any age.

Only the French could or would make a movie like this. You'll enjoy it if you turn off your brain and concentrate on the eye candy.

It's not surprising that This Thing of Ours -- the title refers to the literal translation of La Cosa Nostra -- rings with authenticity and solid acting.

Its characters are likable enough to settle in with for a pleasant hour and a half.

The only character who makes much of an impression is a crazed, cannibalistic cockatoo voiced by Jemaine Clement ("Flight of the Conchords"), who gets the best of the handful of musical numbers.

Butler’s pretty bad — not horrible — but the movie itself is quite watchable, if a lot bleaker than your average disaster flick.

The love story is nice, but Ember and Wade’s relationship also goes from zero to 60 awfully fast. There have been many a romance told inside of two hours, but these guys’ instant gushiness is awkward and doesn’t ring true — even for CGI blobs.

Posey is a delight throughout, and Zoe Cassavetes is clearly a filmmaker to watch.

On a technical level Buried is impressive, at times blisteringly suspenseful.

Its abundant laughs are heavily reliant on the chemistry of stars Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson - who show once again that they're as fine a comic team as Hollywood has ever produced.

The movie is a visual feast, with Oscar-caliber sets and costumes that for many will justify the trip to the Paris Theatre.

An Italian romantic comedy that's irresistibly set in Mole Antonelliana, the cavernous Museum of Cinema in Turin.

Slight but entertaining and occasionally touching.

What’s different from the previous entry is that humor here, despite a formulaic plot, is balanced with surprising dramatic heft.

If you enjoy foulmouth dialogue mixed with sex, violence, bikes, badass bikers, boobs, babes, booze, brawling, broken noses and broken promises - then the Quentin Tarantino-produced Hell Ride should make you one happy guy.

There can only ever be one Bad Lieutenant: Harvey Keitel. In Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, Nicolas Cage, pretend tough guy (Malibu accent, long floppy coiffure, nervous smile), is more like the Bad Used-Car Salesman.

If you're starved for on-screen nudity and sex garnished with art-film trappings -- The price you'll pay is putting up with the director's relentless Euro-pretension, manifested in a tediously contrived plot crammed with absurd coincidences, clunky symbolism and soap-operatic melodrama.

The film has a nice sense of female friendships’ emotional depth. But as a woman, Duris (while amusing) is not much more convincing than Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon in “Some Like It Hot.”

The result is mystifying - intentionally so - and frustrating. But it's worth a look.

By far the best single performance in the film - and it is really, really terrific, utterly believable and moving - is by Emma Thompson. To the extent that there is genuine feeling in the movie that doesn't feel slickly manipulative, it's in the scenes involving her character.

Makes a powerful case against the wisdom of budget cuts at universities everywhere.

He may be saddled with an overly ironic title role, but Bystrov is terrific. His cowboy squint and dogged intelligence are enough to give you hope for Russia, although the movie certainly won’t.

If you go, be sure to stick around through the closing credits. By far the funniest part of the movie is a blackly humorous fantasy sequence starring Merchant.

It's basically left to the viewer to figure out the historical significance of this drug-fueled odyssey.

France's friendship dramedy Little White Lies is such a blatant rip-off of a far better American movie that it could have been called "Le Big Chill."

The gorgeous heartache of songs by the group Belle and Sebastian gives God Help the Girl its dreamy appeal, but thanks to a poky story line it essentially amounts to a series of music videos.

The atmosphere is convincing - there is an "Eight Mile" desperation to Raya's plight - but nothing makes sense.

The story is nothing if not uplifting, but it unfolds in a conventional, uninspired documentary style better suited to the small screen, where it soon will reside. Wait.

Doesn't always deliver on its twists. But it works well enough that an American remake is in the works.

The drawbacks to this often rhapsodically beautiful film lie not in the journey itself, but in the preachy detours taken along the way.

The chatty killer and the nervy atmosphere are both so depraved that the film, though it contains hardly any explicit violence, is like stepping into a blood Jacuzzi, and there is a biblical severity to the ending.

The low-low budget ($50,000) coming-of-age drama, shot on high-def video, is nothing if not daring and innovative.

You need a scorecard to keep track of who's bedding whom in Happily Ever After, a tres French take on sex and love, in that order.

That is not an original idea, for sure. But the ensemble cast -- especially Tatou as a 24-year-old store clerk named Irene -- is personable and the Parisian ambiance is catching.

Gandhi did save India from the British, but he didn't save India from the Indians, and the horrific subjugation of widows continues there even today. It was only 10 years ago that Mehta encountered the Hindu widow who inspired her film.

There are affecting scenes, and not all of Cacoyannis' additions to the Chekhov text detract from the effect of its moving brilliance.

Enough SpongeBob-meets-Monty-Python silliness to give adults a kick as well.

It's fascinating and moving all the same, both in its depiction of Iranian daily life and in its powerful portrait of female oppression.

A sitcom with enough big laughs and emotional truth to get audiences past awkward pacing and some slow spots.

About 30 minutes too long and somewhat clumsily executed, this zombie's-eye-view story still manages to evoke the comic and splattery spirit of the best '80s cult horror flicks (and features a car-horn shout-out to "The Lost Boys," to boot).

This is a slickly entertaining package, beautifully photographed on well-chosen locations with an unerring sense of pace by Gregory Hoblit.

It’s a swift, vivid movie, but 10 years past the scandal, not much is new.

Give Boyce and Boyle credit for daring to be strange, but this enchilada is so overstuffed, it's falling apart.

Director Francisco de Lombardi fills his sensual film with plenty of gorgeous shots of the lush landscape and its equally exotic, miniskirted "fauna."

I’d have been curious to see more about Reddy’s interactions with the women’s movement, but the film mostly has room for this one woman. Thanks to Cobham-Hervey’s performance, it’s an engaging, if fairly familiar, story.

Despite the high quality of the acting, Spring Forward is for the most part sleepy, long-winded stuff.

Never much more than hagiography that lets the context of its hero's death remain confused.

A surprisingly edgy comedy.

It's like your appendix - you'll never even miss it.

It's high-spirited, innocent fun.

Poetic but tedious and all but plotless.

How the feds inadvertently resurrected the performing career of stoner comic Tommy Chong by busting him is the ironic subtext of Josh Gilbert's one-sided documentary a/k/a Tommy Chong.

A serviceable animated movie about a soft-hearted Dracula.

Visually, this toon is all over the place. Rapunzel's glowing hair can look alarmingly like fiber-optic cable, but some backgrounds are the computer-generated equivalents of Disney's golden-age work.

This Disney film is all pretty simple, with messages about bigotry and ignorance, friendship and growing up. But at least they don't hit you over the head with them.

The documentary tries to pin Africa's suffering on capitalism, but dances around the real problem. Africa starves because corrupt governments own the natural resources and export them to buy weapons to keep their people at bay.

A well-written and -acted drama that's also unrelentingly grim.

This one-sided documentary, told entirely by supporters, paints Swartz as a hero pursued by malign forces.

Gritty visuals and a strong central performance elevate the routine crime story at the heart of Sweden's Easy Money, a sort of mash-up of "Goodfellas" and "The Great Gatsby."

The ironically titled A Perfect Day isn’t entirely successful, but Del Toro is wonderful and there are many well-judged moments, some involving a 9-year-old (Eldar Residovic) whose return to his home underlines the tragedies of this particular conflict.

Diva du jour Beyoncé Knowles may be the draw, but the real star of The Fighting Temptations is the sensational gospel soundtrack.

Makes an earnest stab at illustrating the hardships and sacrifices humanitarian workers contend with - but in the end, all the suffering merely forms an amorphous backdrop for a Harlequin romance.

Uniformly excellent performances keep this destabilizing tale ticking, yet one can't help wishing Hollywood had combined this cast and these timely themes with a little bit of imagination to come up with something fresh.

Michael Berry’s Frontera offers an unsparing look at the plight of illegal immigrants, even if the ending seems too patly convenient.

It all gets repetitive, and after about the halfway point, you get the feeling that Myers and Co. don't know where to go next, and are making it up as they go along.

Fanning has little to do beyond grasping her prosthetic stomach, but James is a decent foil for Gere, who gives form to the highly topical subject of how pain meds destroy lives.

Sappy and corny, but there are a few lovely moments.

The story is something of a trap: Both irresistibly poignant and an invitation to wallow.

Possibly the least sexy vampire flick ever to crawl out of the crypt (it never occurs to anyone that biting someone's neck is kinda intimate; the act is strictly utilitarian), but it's unusually detailed in its imagining.

For short stretches, the movie has a touch of surreal "Office Space" brilliance, but it's broadly acted, its characters are thin, and the production values are ragged. Still, it's hard to resist its goofy hostility: "You're like the drummer from REO Speedwagon. Nobody knows who you are."

As familiar as the costumes and decoration are, the conflicts are unsettlingly vivid and strange.

When The Last Gladiators treats brawls like greatest-hits clips for more than half the movie, then suggests fighting is behind Nilan's decline, it feels like trying to have it both ways.

A raunchy, often hilarious satire from the Judd Apatow stable that lacks any real bite.

Though a bit stiff in the joints and acted by an undistinguished cast amid TV-movie trappings, this low-budget adaptation of Ayn Rand's novel nevertheless contains a fire and a fury that makes it more compelling than the average mass-produced studio item.

Worth seeing for McTeer's touching, funny and richly detailed performance, which should put her on the map in Hollywood.

Beautifully photographed and acted, with a somberly affecting tone, the film, by Derek Cianfrance, is nevertheless marred by severely contrived elements.

The script, narrated by Queen Latifah, is so embarrassingly dorky (it was co-written by Kristin Gore) that it's like Fred Rogers gone hip-hop.

Surely, if Fey herself had written Baby Mama, this mild cross between "Baby Boom" and "The Odd Couple" would not be so crushingly predictable.

The story meanders from competition to competition (up the ramps, down the ramps) and seems like it could end at any point. The characters are similarly underdeveloped.

Jeremy Allen White (“Shameless”) and Maika Monroe (“It Follows”) shine in this dramedy.

An entertaining if nonsensical variation on Hill's greatest hit from that bygone era, "48 Hrs.''

With ravishing landscapes, violent political allegory and a glacial narrative that takes an abrupt left turn in the third act: Lisandro Alonso’s Jauja resolutely checks every 2015 art-film box.

It isn't a really good movie, but there's real talent in it.

Though deeply well-intentioned, director Kasi Lemmons’ film never really breaks free of conventional biopic mode.

Apart from the slightly sanitized look of Reagan-era Harlem, this raw ghetto drama rings true, from the smooth dialogue to the unaffected performances of the central actors.

Reflective but only mildly engaging dramedy.

The best sequence comes when the gang meet a saucy French lady mouse who works for the Resistance and at moments of high drama sings "Je Ne Regrette Rien" ("Ah!" your children will say. "At last, an Edith Piaf joke!")