When this sick, ludicrous cocktail of sex, violence and mayhem was first unveiled a year ago at the Toronto International Film Festival, one wag aptly described it as "the ghost of Tennessee Williams meets the spirit of Quentin Tarantino."

As an epic of awesome achievement, it never bores.

Rønning unfurls the journey with tension and then triumph, even if some of the storytelling leans towards the formulaic.

The lugubrious pop songs by Gregg Alexander are execrable. Ms. Knightley isn’t remotely believable as a bike-riding pop singer. The saving grace is Mark Ruffalo, the only actor on the premises who shows any grit or passion for his character or for the music business.

The dreary, chug-along Australian film The Daughter offers a good but sadly wasted cast, obscured in the eye-rubbing mist of a foggy Down Under countryside and struggling to rise above the sludge of a basic soap opera with literary pretensions.

Carell delivers a performance both tender and tough.

Directed by Burton and written by Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, the fantastical comedy is a hilariously strange and charismatic voyage through Hollywood’s best creative minds and most skilled special effects magicians.

Nimble, off the beaten track and very entertaining, it’s the cinematic equivalent of a lava lamp.

There’s no way to avoid the resemblances of this film to one of Keaton’s biggest past successes, Mr. Mom, but it’s consistently more intelligent and original.

Directed by Kevin Macdonald (The Last King of Scotland), it’s basically another tough genre workout that is all too familiar, with enough tension and violence to keep an audience alert if not riveted.

A feel-good fairy tale that collapses under the weight of its own silliness, Red, White and Royal Blue is a gay rom-com that dazzles visually but defies all attempts at anything resembling plausibility.

A single idea stretched out for nearly two hours, it’s an odd but strangely compelling film, but so ponderously paced that it doesn’t always convince.

Wonderful, honest and low-key performances inform and enhance The Yellow Handkerchief, an otherwise unexceptional little drama.

Nothing much revelatory here, but what makes the movie a keeper is the energy of director Ben Younger (Boiler Room) and the charisma of Miles Teller, the sensational young actor from "Whiplash," who invests the role of a prizefighter with the same intensity he brought to the role of an obsessively driven drummer in that film.

All of it combines into not only a profoundly romantic experience, but also an exploration of a number of different kinds of love and connection.

The caterpillar crawl that passes for pacing succeeds in putting any number of viewers to sleep, including me.

Most of Ted eludes description, analysis and explanation. You just have to hold onto your own certifiable sense of humor and let Mr. MacFarlane take you where he wants to go. Then get out of the way and enjoy it.

Too bleak and wrenching to recommend unconditionally. You need a strong constitution to watch it soberly, but it is a gripping experience that left me weak in the knees.

Boring and sedentary, not to mention only occasionally coherent, this creaking-door mystery is not much of a vehicle to display young Mr. Radcliffe's range and charm.

Wakefield is a terrific movie, with a devastatingly bravura performance by Bryan Cranston that seizes and grips attention from first scene to last.

The target audience — people who waste their lives playing video games — might be amused by a movie about devices designed for the sole purpose of destroying everything in sight, but the serious audience the film industry wants to lure back to brick-and-mortar cinemas won’t find much substance here.

It's a Clint Eastwood role that only proves you can't send a boy to do a man's job.

It’s mildly entertaining with a likeable cast. And when it ends, it’s a relationship you’ll move on from quickly.

There’s always room for another first-rate action thriller, and Plane breathlessly packs its punches in spades.

It’s one of the most important and revelatory films of the year.

If you can suspend your disbelief that a cute 22 year-old had the power to succeed with civil rights where Martin Luther King and President Kennedy failed, The Help actually has a lot to offer.

Daddio is a dreary two-hander with the look, feel and sound of one hand clapping.

Eight for Silver howls the arrival of a new and exciting take on the old werewolf story, with an inventive mythology and a memorable xenomorph-inspired scene that will nest in your nightmares. Sadly, the good parts of the film are trapped within the monstrous body of an overly long and average feature film.