The film looks old-fashioned, too, with cinematography and special effects so reminiscent of old-school, live-action Disney flicks such as "Something Wicked This Way Comes" that you wonder if it was an aesthetic choice or a budgetary concession. Either way, it doesn't work.

For a movie with such a brisk pace -- it clocks in at just 76 minutes -- Caesar Must Die has surprising depth, particularly when it comes to the strong performances by the actors, many of them Mafiosi serving time for drug trafficking and murder.

Shortland, whose only previous feature was 2004's coming-of-age drama "Somersault," creates a visceral, immersive environment and draws a very impressive performance from newcomer Saskia Rosendahl.

The black-and-white cinematography and silent-film feel are haunting and nostalgic, and Aurora's story encapsulates a broader, bittersweet truth about the perils of tinted memory.

By the time the satisfying conclusion rolls around, though, it proves to be much more about the ability of a world-class director to induce such willing suspension of disbelief that even the loopiest narrative developments seem like the most natural thing in the world.

The deadly dull action-comedy Identity Thief is an infuriating waste of time, on all sides of camera and screen. I did not know I could yawn angrily. This movie somehow proved it possible.

It's a forgettable series of bullet points barely strung together by charismatic performances.

It's got a big heart and high spirits on a low budget and actors who refuse to phone it in.

Fans of European cinema will recognize in Barbara the calling cards of director Christian Petzold: the icy, quiet intensity of his muse, Nina Hoss; pretty but strangely unsettling shots of the windswept east German countryside; and subtle subversions of the thriller genre wherein the suspense is drawn from decisions made in mundane settings, such as the workplace.

It's often said that actors with distinctive vocal styles could compellingly read the phone book -- in this case, it would absolutely be a more entertaining hour-and-a-half.

The movie is neatly directed by Taylor Hackford, who keeps it moving quickly without descending into a blur of cut-cut-cut edits.

While what's on screen is unsparing and clinically presented, the underlying, almost invisible humanity and artistry of the film inspire rather than depress.

Despite all this hokum, Quartet is amusing and heartwarming.

Every profile is fascinating, but certain ones stand out.

The style and subject matter recall the films of the Dardenne brothers, ("The Kid With a Bike") and while Sister never reaches the heights of their best work, it earns the comparison.

The visual design of Mama is effective, at least in small, quick doses. But those are about all the positives for this example of why a solid audition reel doesn't necessarily mean you're ready to churn out a feature.

Quality-wise, the crime drama Broken City lives in a frustrating mid-range area: It's too complex and competently crafted to dismiss as junk -- but it's also nowhere near sharp enough to work as the serious grown-up detective movie it clearly wants to be.

Audiard's craft is still arresting, and the film hums with beauty, vigor and blood.

Viewers looking for a propagandistic take will be disappointed, but even those who doubt the overall framework and existence of the so-called War on Terror should appreciate this thrilling tale of the hunt for the world's most wanted man.

Very few will remember it in a few months, which is probably just fine with the folks who made it.

The last time Jane Fonda acted in a French-language film, it was Jean-Luc Godard's radical 1972 effort "Tout Va Bien." It's fitting, then, that she fluently plays Jeanne, one of five aging leftists in this slight, but never frivolous, tale.

An extraordinarily gut-wrenching, intense story of survival against all odds.

The rhetorically stacked deck, and some unconvincing third-act plot twists, get in the way of this movie's efforts to reach the cinematic promised land of true greatness.

Django doesn't have the razor-sharp chronological complexity of "Pulp Fiction," but it's ably paced. A very funny scene involving a proto-Ku Klux Klan lynch mob and their poorly made hoods nevertheless seems a bit out of place, but there's plenty of well-timed suspense.

The cinematic technique of director Tom Hooper tries to replicate the appeal which has drawn millions to stage performances, but comes up more than a little short. This version of Les Misérables simply doesn't sing.

There are laughs to be found, as unfiltered improvisations on subjects such as Viagra, home electronics, pot cookies and the end of "Lost" come fast and furious.

Unfortunately, the movie isn't a real success, as director Roger Michell ("Notting Hill") is both too ambitious in the story he tries to tell and not ambitious enough in the way he tells it.

A decent-enough treat for fans of this particular Gallic genre.

If there's one thing missing, it's a sense of purposeful, immediate outrage. You can't help but wonder why this film wasn't made 20 years ago, when it could have saved these men some time behind bars.

There's fun to be had in the re-creation of indelible screen moments, including several with Scarlett Johansson as Janet Leigh and James D'Arcy as Anthony Perkins.

The movie's conceit grows a bit stale even with a short running time, and ultimately the whole thing feels more like an acting workshop than a full-fledged human story.

The line between fearlessness and idiocy can be a thin one, especially in this sport, and the doc never gets too far under Way's skin. But when he soars -- on a skateboard! -- above the massive structure that kept invading armies at bay for centuries, it's pretty darn cool.

It's a fine idea, but Dominik beats that drum without cease, making his passionately furious message come across anything but softly.

A satisfying holiday treat for adults and children alike.

It proves the power of a good story, both to entertain us and to allow us to process unpleasant truths.

A funny, believable film about the ability of even the damaged and imperfect to earn a little happiness.

Whatever the interpretation, Stoppard and Wright have demonstrated that Anna's saga has lost none of its power.

The movie never pauses -- at least, not to waste time on anything like developing the female characters. But there's no edge to anything, either dramatically or politically.

Convincing performances from Hemingway and the charmingly crabby Johnson and an unhurried pace ensure that Baker's film achieves its modest goals.

Unfortunately, it just doesn't come together. The animation ranges from crude approximations of Terry Gilliam's cutout style to borderline puerility, and the entire enterprise strives far too desperately for the sort of irreverence that Chapman could conjure with a cock of his pipe-clenching head.

The languid, observational style of director Julia Loktev will frustrate those expecting stuff to, like, happen more, but it has its real rewards.

Despite too stately a pace at times, and some fairly predictable plot resolutions, the film succeeds thanks to empathetic performances (from Walken and especially Hoffman) and an evident affection for the music and musicians it depicts.

Spielberg manages to give us a Lincoln for our times, inspiringly heroic but demonstrably human.

No one joyfully embraces this absurdity better than Michael Sheen. The actor finds a ridiculous-yet-perfect way to deliver every single second of his performance as head of the global vampire council -- He's all over the film's finale. It's fantastic.

There are two halves to La Rafle. The successful one involves the personal tribulations of the families and other souls who were jammed into a Paris velodrome for days under intolerable conditions.

With gadgets, girls and globe-trotting held to a minimum, Skyfall, could, for long stretches, be mistaken for just another 21st-century thriller, albeit a well-made and intelligent one.

John Hawkes has, until now, been known primarily as the skilled character actor who brought an earthy authenticity to roles on TV's "Deadwood" and the Oscar-nominated "Winter's Bone." With The Sessions, he makes his mark as a bona fide member of screen acting's elite. And he does it while barely moving a muscle.

What's even more amazing about the actor's absorbing, sometimes depraved performance is that while the film around him is generally cheesy and obvious, Washington is to-the-bone real.

If you're a gamer, another level of humor opens up, as a variety of characters make surprise appearances throughout the film.

This film could serve as a potent tool for those trying to change 40 years of public policy.

The surfing scenes are gorgeous and overwhelming. But the rest of the film...

It has laser gun fights, forbidden love, and a rollicking group breakout from a fascistic old folks' home. What more could anyone want?

As unpleasant as so many of its going-on are, Wake in Fright works both as an early instance of "Ozploitation" cinema and as a harsh critique of Australian colonialism and the absurdity of trying to bring so-called civilization to this vast arid wilderness.

War of the Buttons means well. But ultimately there's only marginally more edge to this treatment of World War II than there is to the average episode of "Hogan's Heroes."

The movie is stunningly perfunctory, soul-crushingly oblivious to its own lack of originality, and, to be blunt, just plain dumb.

The environment is one of unrelenting cruelty and misanthropy, which certainly brings out the novel's darker themes, but can be something of a slog to watch.

While Daniels' work disappoints, his film is saved from disaster by uniformly terrific performances.

The period details are spotless, kindling memories of those days of yellow ribbons and nightly news updates on the fate of the American hostages.

Consistently surprising, Seven Psychopaths ultimately plays like a combination of Quentin Tarantino's self-aware, savvy ultraviolence and Charlie Kaufman's reflexive head trips. And that potentially awkward combo goes down like a chocolate-vanilla swirl cone, only with more guns.

It's fascinating as an offbeat storytelling exercise.

The movie's excessive and logistically goofy in a way "Taken" wasn't.

Director Guillaume Canet, who previously teamed with Cluzet on the excellent thriller "Tell No One," capably handles the sprawling cast.

Frankenweenie seems like a genuine effort to pass along this love to the next generation, and if one kid who sees it goes home and demands to watch another movie featuring a giant turtle, it will have done its job.

The movie's perfectly understated, warts-and-all sense of time and place will send any suburban Gen Xer in the audience flashing right back to their less-cautious days, when mix tapes did heavy lifting as calling cards.

This ode to indie legitimacy proves to be too cartoonish to feel real and not outrageous enough to be memorable.

Even when the details of their lives feel unbelievable, these actresses compel our faith and keep us watching.

What we have is a not-very-funny college comedy for tweens, full of unappealing characters and, although the musical arrangements are fun, some truly unimaginative choreography.

The only reliable smiles come courtesy of Steve Buscemi, a frequent presence in Sandler movies, here voicing an exasperated, over-extended werewolf dad.

While the third act inevitably bogs down a bit in gunplay and chases, there are more than enough moments of visual wonder and storytelling surprise to make it worth the trip.

More convincing are the performances from Jenkins and Allison Janney, as another of Jesse's old profs. Both these pros bring more depth to their supporting characters than either of the promising, but, alas, young, leads do to theirs.

Anderson, god love him, seems determined to make the "Great American Film." The Master isn't it, but you come away from it with the sense that may be on the right path.

One of the most lifeless and predictable movies you're likely to see this year.

Olivia Thirlby adds some humanity as the empath. And as the scarred queen of a drug cartel, Lena Headey chews the scenery, and some of her costars, with relish.

The script's contrivances and the director's lax handling aren't enough to hold you.

Zobel isn't a sadist about all of this as, say, Roman Polanski or David Lynch or Todd Solondz might have been. There's a humanity here, even for the restaurant manager. But that still doesn't make Compliance easy to ingest.

More seriously, Jarecki never quite pierces the skin of this world, capturing its shiny and grimy surfaces but failing to immerse us in its flaws; too often it's like flipping through a magazine story on the lives of the rich and corrupt.

There's a touch of whimsy to his misadventures, but the malfeasance he uncovers -- often using hidden cameras and microphones -- is anything but a joke.

The word 'samsara' means 'continuous flow of life' in Tibetan, and Fricke and company surely experienced that sensation in making the film, which took them to 25 countries in a span of five years.

A nitwit story about a nitwit author who has written a nitwit novel about a nitwit author who has published a nitwit novel which, in fact, he has stolen wholecloth from another writer whose personal behavior, as fictionalized in the novel-within-the-novel-within-the-film, can charitably be described as...nitwit.

This isn't the "Right Thing" in any sense.

The slowness and stillness in the film are, actually, a slow boil, and in Lie's taciturnity there is pain and even horror.

There's a terrific balance between human comedy and just-this-side-of-science-fiction in Robot & Frank.

As the action moves from Vienna to Paris to London to Denver to Phoenix and then back again, the vignettes blur into one another.

The film's climax is a bit of a jumble, but by then Hillcoat has built his world so vibrantly that it hardly matters. And the hard-charging soundtrack -- featuring Cave, Warren Ellis, Ralph Stanley, Emmylou Harris and Willie Nelson -- is an absolute blast.

The journey on which he takes us may not satisfy in the ways we normally ask of movies, but if it did it wouldn't be a Cronenberg, would it?

Director Bart Layton's film takes us to such strange and emotionally-charged places that we cannot believe that what we're seeing is real, even though it demonstrably is.

Slight but winning.

A rather routine thriller that's got two things going for it: the ticking of a clock and the clickety-click of bicycle wheels. Both impart a sense of exhilaration to a thin and even silly story, engaging you when, really, you ought to know better.

Well-intentioned but underdeveloped and self-satisfied, it feels at times like the ultimate movie for the millennial generation, or at least its stereotype.

Spirited and saucy, Hit and Run is a small movie with big spirit, a Tarantino-ish sensibility, and a scattergun ethos that results in more hits than misses.

The overall cheekiness of the film far outweighs its preachy moments. For the most part, it's a brisk, funny and engaging movie that does genuinely exciting things with little bits of string and wire and such.

The result is a newly revived spy movie franchise -- and the best big-budget action film of the summer.

Wrapping the whole thing in a sentimental ending turns it into a fraud. The Campaign might have been truly -- and appropriately -- scabrous in other hands; those of the "South Park" guys or Mike Judge, say. But director Jay Roach and writers Shawn Harwell and Chris Henchy play it safe and down the middle. No actual political contributors or candidates need fear harm.

Hara-Kiri is low on blood and shock, emphasizing performance and atmosphere.

It takes an almost bracingly explicit attitude toward issues of sexual intimacy, to the degree that just seeing this film might count as therapy for some married couples. The PG-13 rating is justified, and should be taken literally, though I can't imagine too many parents bringing their kids to this one. Talk about an awkward car ride home. 

Watching The Queen of Versailles you don't know whether to laugh or cry.

You come away with an appreciation of the abstraction, scale and daring of Ai's art and, even more, a sense of the living man in his courage, humor and restlessness. It's an invigorating experience.

Wiseman's PG-13 remake isn't as funny, or vivid, or splatter-tastic. It contains no mutants, inflating heads, trips to Mars, or freaky little psychic dudes named "Kuato" emerging from people's stomachs. But it does a decent job setting up an unsubtle dystopia.