A dour-faced but sublime comedy about the kindness of strangers -- and about the strangeness of people who find themselves in oddball moments of grace.

There is a lot to like here, a few things to love. Like the fact that someone in Hollywood can still assemble a cast this large and impressive — someone who does not work for Marvel.

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.

Trueba's movie is nearly undone by its shapelessness. Because the filmmaker imposes little in the way of form (or drama) on his subject, his film is a good listen without being a particularly good watch.

Steeped in quiet despair, Lantana is a psychological thriller that emphasizes the psychology over the thrills. It's a smart, heart-twisting picture.

The rare movie that manages to convey the inner soul of an artist.

Mendes nonetheless works this screenplay like a jazz virtuoso plays with a familiar theme such as "Mary Had a Little Lamb."

Like this diabolically designed weapon of war, Tanovic's film is coil-sprung to explode on the unsuspecting.

The movie is, start to finish, candy-colored angst.

Ghosts haunt Heart of a Dog - but so, too, does love.

A funny, freaky, often profound animated adventure that is certainly the best movie ever made about a spork.

Ann Savage, the femme fatale from a slew of old Hollywood noirs, is savagely funny as Maddin's beauty-parlor proprietress mom.

Unlike "Caché" and "Code: Unknown," where Haneke's investigations into societal and spiritual despair resonated with poetic force, The White Ribbon doesn't resonate at all.

It is an exploitation picture disguised as a hipster comedy.

The Witch is a stressful movie to watch, and that's meant as the highest praise.

Late in Looper, when a highly telekinetic kid starts levitating things, it really does look like Christopher Nolan had wandered onto the set and taken over.

If you want to expose your children to a work of art with real soul, you could do a lot worse than Kubo and the Two Strings.

Insightful and involving.

What this unclassifiable story may lack in decibels, it has in emotional depth. At once a mystery, a family drama, a snapshot of children at risk, Ballast is an unusually perceptive character study more eloquent in action than in dialogue.

Funny as it is fierce, breathtaking as it is life-affirming.

Clooney has never been better, subtler, more deeply rooted in a performance than he is in The Descendants. And he's funny, too.

Swinton is delightful in a twisted turn as Wilford's enforcer, a Margaret Thatcherian dragon lady who adores watching her men torture miscreants who have defied the train's No. 1 rule: Know your place.

Stays with you like great movies tend to do. It asks you to examine the inner mechanisms of human beings, cheerful and miserable alike. It's not about looking at a glass half empty or a glass half full. It's about drinking down what's in that glass and letting it fill your soul.

The humor of the script constantly confounds expectations, and yet Shrek still manages to say all the right things to children.

Ain't nothin' but a party, y'all.

Underlines the nightmare of entrapment so vividly captured in The Day I Became a Woman.

A film full of a sense of impending danger, betrayal, seduction and destruction. Quite simply, it's great stuff.

So incrementally does Eastwood's film build toward what seems like an inevitable resolution that when it concludes, you're sucker-punched. You haven't been watching a police procedural, but a Greek tragedy. You haven't been watching a drama about the catharsis of vigilantism, but sitting vigil for a community diminished, and permanently damaged, by violence.