Byrne and Kroll are the reasons to see Adult Beginners. The story itself feels truncated, like there are bits missing that we should see, ambling along.

A riveting sci-fi investigation into humankind's experiments with A.I. (with pages from Spike Jonze's Her and Stanley Kubrick's 2001), Ex Machina marks the extremely able directing debut of British writer Alex Garland, of the novels "The Beach" and "The Tesseract," and of the screenplays for Danny Boyle's "28 Days Later" . . . and "Sunshine."

Tcheng finds Simons in moments of haughty self-confidence and tremulous self-doubt.

A small, dreamy romance.

After toiling for the likes of Ridley Scott, Ron Howard, and Peter Weir all these years, Crowe takes command of his own camera crews and castmates, mounting an ambitious and sentimental period drama.

Sadly, director Lee Toland Krieger's offering, a weak wanna-be Jean Cocteau-esque fable with magical realist pretensions, does great disservice to Lively and her remarkably accomplished costars.

Hugely affecting - and reflective and witty.

Never mind the facts. True Story, slick and shaky, doesn't know where the truth lies.

A horror pic with a new gimmick that likely will spawn an entire subgenre of more substandard rubbish.

But there's not much here: The characters are paper-thin, and the action is slow, at times agonizingly so.

Unrelentingly grim, plodding, and close-to-incoherent adaptation of Tom Rob Smith's best-selling mystery.

A somber piece of film poetry about men so invested in a rigid notion of honor and revenge they become trapped in an endless loop of violence.

Baumbach, whose films include the searingly funny, autobiographical "The Squid and the Whale" and the brilliantly uncomfortable "Margot at the Wedding," writes wry, sharp, poignant stuff.

It leaves behind a nagging feeling, a suggestion there's more to the story than its story.

Not a great film. Or particularly good. In fact, it's fairly bad as B-movies go.

The Salt of the Earth, has the power to draw you into its world, transfix, and perhaps eventually transform you.

White God offers a dark - very dark - take on the way humans exert authority, and superiority, over our fellow creatures.

The transformation of Reynold's lawyer from a bumbler and stumbler to a victorious litigator, sticking it to an entire nation, is the stuff of a Frank Capra/Jimmy Stewart pic.

Effie Gray is peculiarly compelling, even if the issue of sexual repression, all the Victorian manners, seem light-years gone and close to unfathomable.

It's refreshing to see a film set amid the daily life of an impoverished, rural immigrant community. It's a shame the only aspect of the social world that is explored is the sexual exploits of a few teens.

That one sentiment repeats throughout: No matter how horrible the assaults, the schools' treatment of the women afterward was worse.

Comedy, pathos, and some schmaltzy couplets about the changing seasons follow forthwith.

If Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter takes its time, it's time worth taking. The cinematography is lovely: great swirls of midnight snow, frosted trees in glinting sun, the bustling modernity of Tokyo, a big library, subway stations exquisite in their orderliness.

It's all dumb, but it's wonderfully, comfortably dumb in just the right way.

Merchants of Doubt shouldn't be a hard sell. The fact that it is should make you very mad.

A masterfully creepy and beautifully turned variation on the teen horror formula.

An ambitious, if wildly uneven, character study that relies on a taut script, snappy dialogue, and a few well-placed plot twists, The Barber boasts a fine turn by Scott Glenn as an aging serial killer.

You'll need a strong stomach for some of the scenes in A Girl Like Her, one of the most moving and intelligent of the recent glut of films and TV specials about teenage bullying.