This is, by some distance, the best movie of the three, and it showcases the impeccable symmetry of his compositions, while retaining his compulsion to wag a finger in your face.

It’s a lark, if you can tolerate the hammy redneck accents, and confirms that Soderbergh is as agile as ever at knitting together all the moving parts of a complex heist.

Skarsgård’s the ace though. Without going overboard, and never being anything less than terrifying, he fleshes out Orlok into a richer character than bat-like Schreck was able to. His tragic, albeit disturbing, final scene almost puts a stake right through our hearts.

A powerful account of how the American dream became a nightmare for one Laotian family.

2046 is a bit overlong and not for all tastes, but fans of "In the Mood for Love" will relish this second helping, which is more emotionally substantial than the first.

[Refn] mixes jittery hand-held camerawork, improvised dialogue and available light to create a nightmarish world of sex, drugs and horrific brutality that will turn off many viewers while delighting others.

Gut-Bustingly funny moves are pretty rare, so hustle over to Kung Fu Hustle, actor-director Ste phen Chow's exhilaratingly hilarious and affectionate send-up of Hong Kong action flicks.

The entire cast is wickedly good, and their overblown characters are what keep the Dickens spirit alive.

Clemency is remarkable for the understanding it affords to all involved with its wrenching subject matter.

Archival footage is combined with somewhat affected-looking re-enactments, but the film achieves its purpose: to remind us that we still have thousands of bombs, and neither they — nor we — have gotten that much smarter.

Boasts some genuinely intelligent and funny sequences and some nicely painful scenes of domestic tension - as well as surprisingly strong performances from actors like Neve Campbell and Donald Sutherland.

The movie equivalent of a lavish coffee-table book, a love letter to the Golden Age of Hollywood from one of its foremost students.

Has its moments, but overall the effect is uneven.

Moves along its tranquil way until about five minutes before the closing credits, when it turns into a terrorist thriller.

One of the most original and stylish films to come along this year.

In Abuse of Weakness, Breillat, notorious for her sexually explicit films, casts the excellent Isabelle Huppert as her avatar, Maud, to tell the tale.

Scary and sad, Trapped is for anyone who cares about the precarious future of reproductive health for American women.

At the end the film turns into an infomercial for President Obama’s Iran deal, but Gibney delivers plenty to think about — and fear.

The movie is a bit long, and the culmination overstays its welcome. That is the only section of the movie where the viewer is a step ahead — and therefore it doesn’t sizzle like what came before. Yet the visual splendor of the sequence also proves the director has a flair for the epic we didn’t know about before. And that makes me all the more excited for the next “Untitled Jordan Peele Project.

If there has ever been a better voice performance in an animated film than Ellen DeGeneres’ in Pixar’s wonderful sequel Finding Dory, I sure can’t think of it. Her tour de force even surpasses Robin Williams in “Aladdin.”

What a sweet collision is Rescue Dawn: the American psycho meets the German kook.

Happy Feet is not only the year's best animated movie, it's one of the year's best movies, period. Go.

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

Filmmakers Sam Green and Bill Siegel tend to shy from tough questions, allowing their subjects to wax nostalgic about bomb-throwing as yet another youthful folly of the '70s. That's tougher to swallow than some boomers' claims they didn't inhale.

Chang doesn't pull his punches in this continuing look at a changing, out-of-control China.

The real star of the movie is the delectable sushi itself. Viewers will be tempted to hop the next flight to Tokyo, but probably will have to settle for a Japanese eatery closer to home.

What’s so unsettling about his Longlegs is, as big and cartoonish as he is, the weirdo is just believable enough. You could run into him late at night at a highway rest stop or, God forbid, on an empty subway platform. Cage makes a meal out of the murderer...During this so-so summer at the movies, something’s finally got legs.

The long-term effects of bullying are at the heart of The Gift, a dark and ultimately quite nasty psychological thriller from actor/writer/debut director Joel Edgerton, who manages to yank the carpet out from under his audience a couple of times.

For a long stretch this movie plays well. Quiet moments, such as when Victoria plays a piano waltz and reveals herself to have a concert-level talent, have a feel for urban yearning. Costa is appealing; it’s a pleasure to watch her brush her teeth in real time.

How English is this movie? As English as a cold, rainy day at the beach. As English as the politeness that masks hostility, as English as a pie that contains meat, as English as secretly wishing you lived in some other country.

This low-budget indie has a unique ambiance and surprising depth, both in the performances of its two leads and the writing/directing team of Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck (“Half Nelson”).

It's hard to remember a film that mixes disparate, delicate ingredients with the subtlety and virtuosity of Sofia Coppola's brilliant The Virgin Suicides.

Darci Picoult’s script renders all of these characters, if not always sympathetically, humanly and fully.

Take note, Lars von Trier: This is how you do a truly funny, subversive movie about a woman’s obsession with the human body and sex.

A languid but refreshingly real depiction of female adolescence.

Masterful acting.

The plot of the gorgeous Mexican film Alamar -- a father-son vacation -- isn't what Hollywood calls "high concept." But thanks to director-cinematographer-editor Pedro Gonzalez-Rubio, the film might be called "high enjoyment."

Offers well-chosen selections from Aleichem's darkly humorous work.

The movie reveals some of the most stunning landscape cinematography imaginable, while everyone on the isolated ship waxes philosophical — as who would not?

The film is nominated for this year’s Best Foreign Film Oscar, and it doesn’t deserve to snatch the prize from the towering likes of “Ida,” “Timbuktu” or “Leviathan.” Yet in its gaudy, predictable way, Wild Tales is enormous fun, and the consistent wit of the quiet stretches shows there’s more to Szifrón than shock tactics.

The director (whose “The Assistant” was solid, but this is far better) has built a gripping thriller around the sort of off-hand remarks, boozy outbursts and inappropriate behavior that most bartenders and reasonable patrons encounter all the time. Everywhere.

Best of Enemies illustrates how even literary swashbucklers can be reduced to schoolboy behavior.

Direction of all three films is no more than workmanlike, which isn't surprising since they were originally made for British television. The acting, on the other hand, is sometimes superb.

Personal Shopper doesn’t have much of a plot, but if you can tune into its languid frequency, it will get under your skin.

Less Spartan than some films shot under the Dogma "vow of chastity" (there's actually a little music), but it's raw enough to complement the very real emotions on display.

What makes 8 Mile transcend the formulaic nature of its plot is the way it makes these rap competitions compelling even for those unfamiliar with rap music, and its scrupulous, loving rendition of a grim, wintry Detroit circa 1995.

More popular today than during his lifetime (his music even made it into a Volkswagen commercial), Drake once complained, "Everybody tells me I'm great, but I'm broke. Why?"

The film leisurely unfolds as a series of vignettes about class distinctions and crime, with an unexpected ending. It is beautifully filmed in CinemaScope and strongly acted (especially by Solha), and makes for mesmerizing viewing.

Although the movie is reasonably suspenseful for a while and has a few witty moments (of a first draft, the ghost says, "All the words are there. They're just in the wrong order"), it rings false.

Probably no studio mulls its “brands” as obsessively as Disney does, and The Jungle Book is very much a careful, calculated brand extension, not a reinvention. But that’s just fine: What better lesson to teach kids than respect for what came before you?

A few university officials talk on camera, but not many do, and it will be fascinating to watch the fallout from this scathing indictment of a system that, the movie claims, has all but encouraged sexual predators to do their worst.

Noah Baumbach’s While We’re Young amounts to the most hilarious Woody Allen movie in forever.

Porumboiu, who also produced and wrote, elicits remarkably deadpan performances from Teo Corban (as the show's host), Ion Sapdaru (the professor) and - especially - Mircea Andreescu, as the old man. Even the subtitles cracked me up.

Sharper and far more entertaining than most political documentaries.

A tad too long, "Tea" is nevertheless touching and funny, with charming performances. You might say it's as calming as a hot cup of green tea.

It’s a remarkable story, vividly and urgently told by French-Canadian director Vallée (“The Young Victoria”) from a pointed, schmaltz-free script by Craig Borten and Melissa Wallack.

It's a long way from the carefree days of "Breathless" and "Band of Outsiders," but then the world has changed since Godard made those movies 40 years ago.

Indulgent, tedious documentary.

Despite a bunch of fourth-wall-breaking re-enactments, the look is consistent with most TV true-crime stories. But the way Layton parcels out information makes this story as strange and fascinating as anyone could desire.

Agreeable this film certainly is, but the shagginess never seems to take shape.

Truth be told, Firth's transcendent performance in A Single Man renders that stylistic gimmick utterly unnecessary -- Firth provides all the emotional color this movie needs, and then some.

The similar Kevin Bacon HBO movie "Taking Chance" got there first. Worse news: The earlier movie was sober, meticulous and quietly convincing, not a shouty, shoddy bore like this piece of flummery.

Clever, wise and witty.

Jim Carrey mostly plays it straight as the narrator. The 3-D effects are uncanny; much of the audience ducked when sea snakes lunged at it. You can't get that on your TV set. Yet.

You don't have to be a fan of Daniel Johnston, an underground artist and singer-songwriter whose manic-depression has kept him from realizing his full potential, to appreciate director Jeff Feuerzeig's documentary.

Forget those weepie liberal clichés. This starless and vividly authentic romantic thriller set in Central America really rocks, and is one of the most exciting directorial debuts in years.

In a way, this marvelous movie does show that the Mekons have declined, because they’ve become the one thing punk rockers never ever want to be: lovable.

The stunning adventure Mountain Patrol: Kekexili is like a John Ford western set, not in the master's beloved Monument Valley, but in remotest China.

As subtle and careful and slyly disturbing as Child’s Pose is though, it and many others of its genus suffer from an airlessness, pacing like the growth of algae, a dishwater color palate and a dirge-like monotone.

Tomlin and Elliot relive their characters’ pain and anger so deeply that they could very well both end up with Oscar nominations.

Presence is a brisk 85 minutes, which is nice if you have dinner plans, but it also exposes limited storytelling ambitions. It’s a mid-season episode of TV. We don’t get to know much about the characters, and don’t care either way about their fate.

Profane, darkly funny, violent and tragic.

So daring and unsparing in its depiction of the psyche and experience of adolescent girls that it's hard to imagine an audience that wouldn't find it deeply provocative despite a slow pace.

Maddeningly pretentious and often slow to the point of tedium, Humanite is also hauntingly original and truly strange.

To get to the best part first, Tarantino's adrenaline-pumping "Death Proof" is actually a good movie that - unlike Rodriguez's "Planet Terror," - rethinks its genre in ways that say something to contemporary audiences. And it's got some of Tarantino's best dialogue since "Pulp Fiction."

Such is literature’s power that the cast is more at ease portraying ancient Romans than speaking as versions of themselves.

A charming and enjoyable movie.

We get to know three of these courageous, funny, smart and perhaps permanently damaged men in a film that largely avoids telling us what to think and makes an effort to get near the truth of the soldiers' experience.

Nothing Cooper does is organic or authentic, and his show-off performance is always stilted. He arduously thinks through every single choice — it’s time to scream into a pillow; cue the laugh; ready, set, cry. Nobody goes to a movie to watch actors ponder their next beat. We want to feel, and his overwrought turn does not allow us to.

A devastating indictment of unbridled greed and materalism, made all the more relevant by the Enron and WorldCom scandals.

During a moment in which movies tend to be either cynically corporate or bleaker than a black hole, “Project Hail Mary” dares to be about that once-great driver of drama: friendship.

Director Marc Silver expertly interweaves the courtroom drama and its larger social and human connotations.

Those with the stomach to sit through Decline will be rewarded with a lively, masterful documentary.

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.

Any plot greasing is quickly forgivable because of how damn delightful it is to be riding in the back of Squibb’s scooter. That this is the actress’ first leading role in a decades-long career is the greatest crime of all.

The entertaining movie from director Rose Glass, whose first feature was “Saint Maud,” is unsparing in its graphic depictions of violence, abuse and extreme aspects of the body. Many will find all of that stuff gratuitous, but it fleshes out this unsavory world and ratchets up the plot’s tension.

Issues millions of people face everyday are addressed cleverly and poignantly, and never without a hint of humor. Wilde isn’t really interested in sentimentality, either, and her movie hits harder for it.

Twice I have left a Calvary screening feeling dazed and moved.

Wladyka keeps the film lively with a sparkler aesthetic and a flair for musical storytelling.

The evidence Jarecki amasses against the drug wars in The House I Live In is more than strong enough to withstand any excess rhetorical zeal.

Why was this pointless movie made? Because quality actors like Blanchett and Weaving like to play drug addicts. They can't stop themselves. They need help.

Terry’s talent is so magical that you may wish there were longer snippets of his playing. Still, this is a wonderful portrait of two artists strengthened by friendship.

Thomas Vinterberg (“The Celebration”) directs with restraint that makes the story all the more affecting.

Lets viewers uniquely into Springsteen’s creative process: Choosing a set list, adjusting tempos, collaborating with background singers. In short: Getting the band back together.

A Touch of Sin is by no means subtle, but it is composed with a passion and sinuous grace that makes it far more effective than many other sincere message movies.

It’s a quiet, slow burn but one that stays with you.

It’s Schoenaerts, one of this generation’s finest actors, who makes The Mustang a moving look at human potential for redemption and rehabilitation.

The most enjoyable western comedy since "Blazing Saddles."