While most of the talking heads, including the funny and articulate Barbara Ehrenreich (herself a breast cancer survivor), are not likely to join runs and walks for the cure, Pool shows how such events create community and sisterhood.

It's as exhilarating and moving a film opening as you're likely to experience. Sadly, the rest of Follow Me doesn't live up to this overture.

This gang of highly skilled dancers (with the guidance of debut director Scott Speer) delivers a sequence of spectacular group numbers that truly pop in 3-D.

The Queen of Versailles combines the voyeuristic thrills of reality TV with the soul-revealing artistry of great portraiture and the head-shaking revelations of solid investigative reporting.

Reality aside, The Watch is harmless enough - and even occasionally humorous, in a riffy, sketch-comedy kind of way.

An English-language remake is in the works, but why wait for the Hollywood knockoff? Easy Money is the real thing: a great gangster pic.

If you just give yourself over to Nolan's sweeping, symphonic Cowled Crusader saga, The Dark Knight Rises is, well, a blast.

Beasts of the Southern Wild transports us to places that are peculiar and dangerous and magical, and makes us feel weirdly at home.

Michelle Williams is a beautiful moper.

Oh so slight and forgettable.

Who knows if it was Del Toro's idea, or Stone's, but at a particularly crucial - and criminal - moment, as a very bad thing is about to occur, the actor twirls his mustache menacingly, like a Mexican Snidely Whiplash. Yes, Savages is that kind of story.

Part of Me is Perry's visually spectacular testimonial to her own indomitable determination to follow her dreams. The fact that the film lends itself to some really colorful Pinterest pages is merely a bonus.

Don't come to The Amazing-Spider-Man looking for originality.

An odd and entertaining mix of backstage melodrama, indie verite, and "Showgirls" kitsch, the usual gender stereotypes are upturned.

Ted is really a rather sweet examination of loyalty, friendship, and love. Wahlberg and Kunis are charming together (though not exactly in a Cary Grant / Audrey Hepburn kind of way), and both manage to play this thing - at least the challenges-of-a-serious-relationship part of this thing - straight.

Shelton and her cast are so skillful that before long it seems we are not moviegoers watching a screen but flies on a wall witnessing real encounters and the beauty of the Pacific Northwest.

Scafaria's movie never catches fire. The bad news: The end of the world comes with a whimper. Worse: And two wimps.

Satisfying and spirited and laced with humor.

It's about time: Aubrey Plaza gets her own movie!

At 24 minutes, Lola Versus might be a middling episode of a sitcom like "New Girl." At 87 minutes, it is a gracefully aimed arrow shot in the air. Where it lands, Wein and Lister Jones know not where.

A jukebox musical that's astonishingly cornball one minute, winkingly sardonic the next.

A touchy daughter and her feely mom form the emotional axis of Peace, Love, & Misunderstanding, a touching, feeling, touchy-feely series of emotional encounters that generate much warmth in Bruce Beresford's balloon-light family comedy. If it were any lighter, it would float away.

Laughably bad adaptation of a Guy de Maupassant novel.

The usual complaints and caveats about Anderson - he's precious, his characters have no grounding in the real world - can be made about Moonrise Kingdom, but so what? This is his seventh feature, he has been working with a gang of collaborators in front of the camera and behind, and his worldview gets richer, and more revealing, even as the view from his lens gets smaller, closer, almost two-dimensional in its oddball tableaux.

It is Rapace, the Swedish actress who gained worldwide recognition as Lisbeth Salander in the original adaptation of "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo," who ends up the true heroine of Prometheus.

Casting herself (as the proprietor of the local cafe) along with a mix of professional and nonprofessional actors, Labaki tries to get across her give-peace-a-chance message with humor, with song, with melodrama.

It's the classic odd-couple buddy movie setup, only it'll pull at your heartstrings, whether you want it too or not. And you won't want it to, because it's sap.

Hysteria is a romantic comedy, not an erotic one.

A surprisingly fine, fantastic movie it is.

The mosaic of cases and caseworkers is like a season of "The Wire" distilled into two hours.

Kore-eda, deploying a Western pop score by the Japanese indie-rock band Quruli, just lets these kids be kids.

So although this multicharacter stew has a tasty morsel or two, in the aggregate it makes one long for the comparative complexity and subtlety of "Valentine's Day."

Weirdly funny, inspiring film.

Mixes its high and low comedy with surprising success.

First Position shows the dancers' emotions, but it is weaker in building the suspense of the competition.

It's fun to watch Keaton and Kline together, bickering and (of course) bonding all over again.

Pinpointing the era - lovingly - is very much what Dark Shadows' has on its mind. While there's a tangle of romance and vengeance and all sorts of family matters to deal with, Burton's film is really about hippies in bell-bottoms, stoned out in their VW micro-buses.

It's more of a character study, insightful and nuanced, about a man grappling with a profound sense of inadequacy, questioning himself. In many ways, We Have a Pope recalls last year's Oscar winner, "The King's Speech": Someone who doesn't feel up to the job fate has handed him, and then struggling to come to terms with it.

An economical thriller, both narratively and budgetarily, Sound of My Voice serves up moments of extreme dread and discomfort, but works a winning undercurrent of playful absurdity into the material as well.

As far as director Nicole Kassell and writer Gren Wells are concerned, the C in Big C must stand for cute. The film reaches into the pits of moviegoing hell when it finds Marley on a celestial white couch, ringed in billowing white curtains, communing with God. And God is embodied by Whoopi Goldberg.

The chaos and carnage here is just a pumped-up take on a tradition that harks back to Godzilla, and harks back, of course, to the Marvel comics from which all these heros originally sprang.

Throughout, Bergsholm's poker-faced performance creates the effect that we are watching the misadventures of an actual teenager. It may be a slight comedy but Turn Me On, Dammit! is enormously entertaining.

It's not impossible to address grown-up issues of commitment, of responsibility, of love, and have some fun, and some profanity, while you're at it.

Marley celebrates the fact that its subject is still among us in the way that perhaps matters most: His music not only survives, it thrives.

Story and collaborators succeed in making a courtship comedy that will entertain women and amuse men.

Efron, who wears an "All glory is fleeting" tattoo on his back and a soulful look on his face, gets to be more of a grown-up in The Lucky One than in most of what he's done before.

The beautiful misery of The Deep Blue Sea - Terence Davies' crushing adaptation of Terence Rattigan's 1952 play - is almost too much.

Lockout is genre all the way. The film wears its colors proudly, but it also, alas, wears out its welcome.

In some ways, American Reunion is the Charlize Theron indie "Young Adult" all over again: In both, a small-town high school reunion is the setting for a lot of nostalgia and narcissism and nasty behavior.

Boy begins with an epigram from E.T.: "You could be happy here . . . . We could grow up together." That's what the film is about - finding happiness, growing up, feeling like a stranger in a strange world.

Rarely has a film so equally balanced macho and nacho, but Wrath does leave us with a few valuable lessons: a.) fratricide is a nasty business, best left to the Greeks and b) fighting fire with fire may sound good, but it turns out to be a really stupid idea.

It's an involving journey, remarkably free of sentimentality, deepened by the performances.

David Gelb's thoughtful and wonderful documentary, Jiro Dreams of Sushi, explores the dedication of this humble, bespectacled man, and the Zen-like focus he has for his work - or, as many would claim, for his art.

Tautou, who looks even smaller and more fragile alongside her towering leading man, conveys the hurt and hesitancy that are pulling at her character's heart - and does so with seeming effortlessness. It's as though she knows this woman, deep down.

It also smells very much like a movie with money on its mind - not altogether successfully balancing its loftier ideas with a sense of superficial whimsy and Vegas-meets-Wizard of Oz production design.

Whatever you call 21 Jump Street, this potty-mouthed and drug-laced reimagining of the 1980s TV show has one of the highest laughs-per-minute ratios since the "Naked Gun" films.

Nothing in this quiet, quirky comedy from the brothers Duplass comes close to Jeff's inspired, bong-fueled deconstruction of "Signs," but it gives us a good idea of where this guy is coming from.

Casa de Mi Padre is at its best (a relative term, mind you) when it's at its silliest and most surreal.

Fragmented, dreamlike, a whir of memories and misery, We Need to Talk About Kevin is unsettling, but also somehow unnecessary.

While The Forgiveness of Blood lacks the narrative momentum of director Joshua Marston's previous film, "Maria Full of Grace" - it is nonetheless fascinating.

If all this sounds like too much whimsy to bear, be forwarned. There is whimsy everywhere.

That's kind of the aesthetic that Stanton is going for: over-the-top pulp. But there's something generic about the digitally rendered Martians, and there's a corniness to the dialogue that keeps the audience from any kind of emotional attachment to the Tharks and Zodangans and their ilk.

It's the powerful emotional punch their films deliver - and this one is no exception - that elevate the game, that make them so satisfying, so worthwhile. The Kid With a Bike grabs at the heart.

The filmmaker, whose career took off with a very different sort of Holocaust film, 1990's Oscar-nominated "Europa Europa," understands that most of these stories arrive at a point of unspeakable, incomprehensible horror.

Undefeated is undeniably inspirational stuff.

A lazy assemblage of sketch-comedy raunch, mock-schlock TV ads, and ideas that even the writers of "Mall Cop" and "Observe and Report" would have tossed.

The problem is that these stoic warriors infect Act of Valor with more wooden acting than you'd see at a ventriloquism school.

David Wain's riotous, raunchy, and more than a little raggedy showcase for Rudd's improv genius and Aniston's airy groundedness. He is gut-busting funny, she gently ticklish - ideal comic rapport.

The film's focus on the contest between the two agents does throw the film off-balance.

Brian Cox is especially good, and slippery, as Menenius, a Roman senator.

Writing with her sister, Karen, Jill Sprecher rigs up an elaborate cause-and-effect comedy of errors, with Kinnear's predatory protagonist as both perp and victim. I won't say more than that, but Thin Ice is deeper than it first appears.

As lovingly written as it is beautifully rendered.

A superb, violent, jarring and daring documentary.

By detailing the allegiance between Tutsi Muslims and Christian Hutus, and the fatwa issued by a Muslim leader forbidding his followers to participate in the massacres, the film is hopeful rather than horrific, even as it describes events of impossible savagery and hate.

The greatest lacrosse movie of the 21st century - and, unless I'm mistaken, the only lacrosse movie of the 21st century.

Chronicle is full of smart writing that isn't too smart.

Madonna the director deserves a script better than the one Madonna the screenwriter handed off to her. The movie is full of incidents that don't quite cohere into a story - kind of like a Power Point presentation without a throughline.

Safe House rockets along, taking a familiar formula and making it work - hard.

Ready-made for Valentine's Day, The Vow is, like the offerings at Cafe Mnemonic, a total sugar overload.

Valérie Donzelli's Declaration of War deals with issues that may scare audiences away. Don't let it.

The humor and chops are there, but the story isn't quite.

The Woman in Black has lovely period atmosphere. Unfortunately, it doesn't have much else besides atmosphere.

Perfect Sense is a very conventional love story wrapped into a slightly more quirky, apocalyptic yarn and lightly dusted with a touch of true originality.

There are no good guys in Miss Bala, just bad guys of different stripes.

Albert Nobbs is a quiet, minor-key work. The period finery is Masterpiece Classics-y, the parade of upper-crust and lower-tier eccentrics predictable. But Close's performance as this poor, wounded fellow resonates with depth and poignancy.

The real 3-D experience of the season is Pina, Wim Wenders' shockingly beautiful and moving tribute to the late German choreographer Pina Bausch.

It's small. It's real. And it's deeply moving.

The Grey, whose clipped title, grim swagger, and lost-in-the-outback themes conjure up visions of that Alec Baldwin/Anthony Hopkins classic, "The Edge," devolves into a predictable man-against-nature, and man-against-fellow man, affair.

There's not much to this movie beyond a slick procession of dark, gleaming violence. But Selene lovers would pay good 3D money to see her fight a parking ticket.

At once a deeply personal film and an important historical document, The Man Nobody Knew leaves us with an incomplete portrait of a man. Did Colby have a moral core? Did he know what was truth, and what was a lie? Did he sanction assassination plots? Did he love his family? Was he even capable of love?

There isn't a real, flesh-and-blood figure in the bunch. Everything about Red Tails - the breaking down of racial barriers, the military achievements, the courage and sacrifice - is diminished in the process.

In supporting roles, Bullock and Hanks deliver performances that are low-key and perfectly scaled. Viola Davis and Jeffrey Wright are, likewise, excellent as a couple Oskar meets on his reconnaissance expedition.

Disarmingly laid back for this kind of fare, with a jazzy musical score (courtesy of David Holmes) and a sleek, straight-ahead style, Haywire may not make much sense plotwise, but it's a rollicking 90 minutes.

Rees tells Alike's story in vignettes that are sometimes slapstick, sometimes heartbreaking, always tender.

Yea or nay, love or hate, the portrait that Streep delivers in Phyllida Lloyd's impressionistic biopic is astonishing.

There's an icy chill, a detachment, to A Dangerous Method, too. Of course, there are no talking cockroaches (Naked Lunch), no naked steambath knife fights (Eastern Promises), and that may have something to do with why this all feels so un-Cronenbergian.

Think "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?," but then think fun.

Though one wishes Graff's eye were as developed as his keen ear, he elicits rafter-raising musical performances from Latifah, Palmer, and Jordan that are irresistible fun.