Our Little Sister zooms in close, observing everyday rituals, the commonplace that suddenly turns significant.

Feig, who wrote the Spy screenplay, encouraging his actors to improvise along the way, has his own stealth mission. For all the over-the-top comedy, zigzagging chases, and choreographed fight scenes, Spy is very much a tale of female empowerment.

Simple, sweet family fare, and a picture that extols the virtues of comradeship and community in a spunky, spirited fashion.

What's less clear, and more maddening, is how several generations of Ecuadorans have been left to live on toxic land, their health and livelihoods compromised, while lawyers file motions and counter-motions and blame is passed around.

Has two or three booming and intense action sequences that may leave the littlest audience members more quaking than charmed. But the notion of having a pet dragon - just like a pet whale, or a pet lion - is a scenario that should appeal to children of all ages.

Side Effects, chilly and noirish, and boasting a wily performance from Catherine Zeta-Jones as a therapist who worked with Emily earlier in her adulthood, is, Soderbergh says, his swan song.

The music is symphonic, the cinematography spectacular, the narration — ay, there's the rub. In Oceans, the latest Disney nature documentary, the voice-over almost manages to turn the majestic into the mundane. Almost.

If the heart of the film is Hartford, who late in his struggle with cancer conveys the luminous colors of a man at his twilight, its soul is Welch.

A steady, soulful film experience. It's got poetry to it - the poetry of humanity.

During its two hours-plus running time, Field's movie veers from dark comedy to melodrama, not always gracefully. But tonal inconsistencies don't blunt the keenness of its satire, so sharp that I walked out with emotional razor burn.

It's a joyride until you think about the film's biggest contradiction. How come this movie celebrating the superiority of human feelings over machine precision is most alive when thrilling in the mechanical perfection of the Terminator and T-1000? Inside Terminator 2 beats a human heart. But its soul is that of a killer machine.

Their film would be even more compelling if it followed up with further reports, perhaps a few years apart, charting the three boys' fates.

Isn't as strong a film as it could have been: Only teasing slices of these people's lives are offered.

With every new installment of the comic book franchise, the scale gets bigger, relationships get trickier, new forces enter the fray.

DuVernay, a low-key director sparing in her use of emotion and music, has made an existential drama that is European in its feel.

The film is a small and polished gem that proves that with a friend like Harry, nobody needs an enemy.

This small story that tells the much bigger story of the New Economy's bubble and burst is less a documentary than it is breaking news.

As pleasant and rosy and optimistic as it is, Liberty Heights doesn't really soar, emotionally or otherwise.

Sly, sophisticated and surprising.

Robert Evans has been variously described as the Hugh Hefner of Hollywood, a Tinseltown Gatsby, the Lancelot of the backlot.

It's hilarious - in a Scandinavian Sartre-esque sort of way.

Beauty in Trouble offers a meditation on the legacies of communism and the lure of capitalism, but also on the human need for love, connection and family.

It's a devilishly twisted affair.

In the end (and it's a happy end, to be sure), Catch Me if You Can is as crisp and trim as a new suit. Well, a new old suit - say, circa the 1960s.

Ambitious, even audacious, the movie's mix of action and for-devotees-only intrigue can overwhelm, but there are moments of sheer virtuosity, too.

I'm not sure that the endearing charms of the assorted fogeys and whelps add up to a movie. But I always enjoy how Altman weaves the warp of professional life with the weft of the personal.

A pleasant taste of Roman life.

House is one of the most exciting genre discoveries in years. [17 Jun 2010, p.14]