Wrenching, poignant, and quietly healing.

It lacks momentum, and thus the propulsion required to rocket it into the movie mythosphere.

A devastatingly funny portrait of a wildly dysfunctional clan, Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums is a movie about how people never really mature in ways that matter.

Mud is steeped in a sense of place, and the people inhabiting it. Southern. Superstitious. Suspenseful. Sublime.

Yet, despite a mesmerizing performance by Gyllenhaal - he's as transfixing as a cobra in a snake charmer's dance - and a terrific turn by Riz Ahmed as an unskilled homeless kid Louis hires as his assistant, Nightcrawler doesn't quite have the satirical smarts that made "Network" a classic.

Catching Fire is bigger, better and broodier than the first film.

The film's humor comes in part from the gap between what Oliver says and what the audience sees.

Giannoli's riotously funny and heartbreaking film follows Marguerite's attempt to stage a solo recital in a grand theater in Paris.

Intermittently hilarious if also interminable.

Takes startling - and startlingly unpleasant - turns. This is not a film with anything approximating a conventional ending.

Sure, there are holes in The Manchurian Candidate, and tenuous coincidences and too-convenient plot devices. But Washington, Schreiber, Streep and company - and Demme - have managed to make all the malevolent machinations seem relevant again.

Greenberg, with Stiller's sad and self-mocking portrait at its core, is well worth getting to know.

Rife with nightmarishly violent and horrific behavior. It's intense, graphic, frightening.

The menagerie of mythological beasties in Narnia don't seem quite genuinely, three-dimensionally real.

Kids for Cash is no-nonsense, no-stone-unturned filmmaking.

Scrupulously made and deeply affectionate.

Ripe with homoeroticism, but also with what the director — who made the film after recovering from a stroke a few years back — calls "the scent of murder."

His (Mamet) direction is unobtrusive, unflashy, and always willing to allow the hilarious cast all the room it needs.

Although Mistress America is very much a New York movie, full of references to couture, pop culture, boutique hotels (to Antigone and Faulkner, too), its comic centerpiece is a brazen assault on a country compound.

Vibrant and vivacious documentary.

Rango is best enjoyed by those over 10 who have an idea of what "existential" means and can appreciate a surreal mashup of "Chinatown," "Gladiator," "High Noon," and "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly."

A delightful, oddball surprise.

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.

As a movie, Steal is as finely wrought as the decorative ironworks that hang on the walls of the Barnes between Picassos and Seurats. Yet as a narrative of the facts, it is as one-sided as a plaintiff's brief.

Amelie is utterly charming. And so, too, is the film.

In the end, what the movie is about: time and life, and what we do with them, and what we regret that we didn't do.

Suffers from several goofily tacky animated reenactments and a music score that unnecessarily underlines the significance of key events, but for those who lived through the turmoil of Vietnam, and for the generations that have come since, the film is an important document in its own right.

Moves from its protagonist's dream state to her memories to her waking present in imperceptible shifts - the effect is disorienting, at first, but ingenious.