The pair are scrappy and smart and riff off each other like a no-budget, indie version of Tracy and Hepburn. It's impossible not to like them, and there's absolutely no reason not to.

Alvarez triumphs because he made one crucial decision: Avoid digital animation and use only practical in-camera special effects. He uses every trick from classic Hollywood and invents a few of his own.

Based on reports of a real 2005 incident, it is a film that asks its viewer to consider the nature of good and evil, love and trust - and trust that turns into something like blind faith.

A sloppy, sentimental story line and pivotal plot turns that are only sketchily realized undermine the life-on-the-road misadventures.

An atmospheric Argentine thriller starring Viggo Mortensen in twin roles (literally), Everybody Has a Plan is in the vein of, if not on the same plane as, Michelangelo Antonioni's "The Passenger."

A silly, if fun, futuristic sci-fi romance.

It's a fun ride for the most part, with a bumping soundtrack and genuine moments of warmth and heartbreak. But one can't help but wish Gondry had simply let the camera roll, and let the kids speak for themselves.

On the Road is an honorable homage to the bennies-and-booze-and-bebop-driven hegiras undertaken by the fiercely dedicated anti-establishment duo. But in Salles, screenwriter Jose Rivera and company's effort to get the details right, they only get so far. And it's not quite far enough.

Any semblance of seriousness and verisimilitude suggested by the marketing campaign is quickly forgotten once director Antoine Fuqua's enjoyably tacky Die Hard-on-the-Potomac gets under way.

The movie is well-edited and lean, a fast-paced, action-filled bit of froth that manages to be diverting and surprisingly fun.

Admission works in stops and starts.

Am I crazy, or are Spring Breakers and "Oz the Great and Powerful" essentially the same movie? James Franco stars in both - a tattooed, gun-totin' gangsta in one, a charlatan magician in the other (you figure out which is which), and, in both, he's encircled by a bevy of Hollywood babes determined either to get witchy on him, or get that other witchy-rhyming word on him.

A political drama, a personal drama, a sharp-eyed study of how the media manipulate us from all sides, No reels and ricochets with emotional force.

A beautifully twisted, slow-burning psychothriller that may or may not all be taking place inside India's head.

By the end of their arduous journey, Lore and her siblings are changed. But it's the kind of change that will take years, perhaps generations, to understand, to heal.

With an attention to the telling detail that one finds in a great short story, Kiarostami guides Takanashi and Okuno - and then Kase - through the mischievous and melancholy tale. It is quiet. It is lovely. And it will stay with you for a long time.

The film is at once shamelessly transparent, manipulative, and far-fetched, and impossibly suspenseful. You'll want to take a shower afterward - that's how icky you'll feel.

The film has been directed in a murky, rhythmless fashion by Niels Arden Oplev.

If vigilance and preemption, recompense and retaliation is not enough, the film asks, then what is?

Peter Jackson devotees may not like to hear this, but Jack the Giant Slayer is far more accomplished, visually speaking, than The Hobbit: An Unexpected Snooze, I mean, Journey.

Directed by veteran stuntman Ric Roman Waugh, Snitch is shot with a mix of nervous close-ups and weirdly vertiginous angles.

Beautiful Creatures tries terribly hard to establish its own mythology of magic and witchcraft and Southern-fried adolescent angst. This isn't Hogwarts, though, and it's not even Forks High from Twilight, but boy, you know Warner Bros., the studio behind Beautiful Creatures, wants it to be!

Not one of Sparks' best flicks (The Notebook is quite good) Safe Haven is marred by film cliches. It has an alarming number of throwaway montage sequences.

For all its mayhem, for all the smashing windows and kabooming fireballs, the grenade launchers and giant helicopters, A Good Day to Die Hard not only fails to top its predecessors, it also forgets the basic Die Hard rules.

John Dies at the End isn't deep. But it is deeply amusing, in the sickest possible way.

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.

In some ways, Identity Thief is a raunchier variation on another recent odd-couple road pic: Barbra Streisand and Seth Rogen as overbearing mom and nebbish son in "The Guilt Trip."

Elegiac and corny and not really convincing on any level (especially when it comes to its treatment of women - be they hookers, or waitresses, or girls on the town), Stand Up Guys nonetheless holds some fascination just for the off-the-charts affectedness of Pacino's performance.