If you’re not enraptured with the work of Hayao Miyazaki, Isao Takahata and the rest of the artists at Ghibli, it may not be precisely what you’re looking for, but Sanada captures something poetic about art and creativity that could speak to anyone, animation fan or otherwise.

It is nonetheless a very well-mounted film, with outstanding contributions in Alvarado’s cinematography and Eric Andrew Kuhn’s subtly expressive score.

The finest and most genuinely provocative horror movie to emerge in this still very-new century.

The Imitation Game is most on its game when it primarily sticks to being a John le Carre-lite espionage version of “Revenge of the Nerds.”

The pacing is so zany, the jokes are so rapid-fire and the sight gags are so inspired that it’s impossible not to get caught up in the infectious energy of it all.

Morris & Anders, who also directed, literally repeat many of the same set-ups and punchlines from the original “Bosses,” only more crassly this time and with more discussion of bodily fluids. And nothing is quite as cinematically desperate as someone telling you a joke you’ve already heard only louder.

So, while the film doesn’t delve into the doctrines of Tibetan Buddhism, it does provide a sense of its outward life in the images of the people and rituals of the monastery to which Nicky Vreeland has devoted so much love and care.

Damici gives his memorable protagonist enough life to hold it together more often that it would have otherwise. He’s great here. The movie around him, not so much.

Haupt’s film moves along agreeably enough for a while, and the intercutting between the film’s real-life subjects, now at an advanced age, and their dramatized adventures almost 60 years ago, convincingly creates a rooting interest.

Once you’ve sunk into the entirely warped groove of Reach Me you’re almost eager to experience the next offense against aesthetics and/or common sense it is poised to commit. And make no mistake: this is a movie that keeps on delivering, and for 95 solid minutes.

There was little reason to expect such a horrendous drop in quality as there is to “Viral,” a film that contains some of the sloppiest, most ineffective filmmaking I’ve seen all year.

Extraterrestrial never settles into a groove, and therefore never becomes more than a collection of effectively icky scenes.

A digitally restored version arrives in spectacular fashion with its mixture of bold imagery and biting wit.

Along with Jarmusch, A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night is steeped in other influences: Spaghetti Westerns, 1950s juvenile delinquent movies, gearhead movies, teenage rom-coms, the Iranian new wave.

The problem is, for all its surface intelligence, "Mockingjay, Part 1" has little depth, and that sometimes makes it much more frustrating than a more knowingly shallow and silly movie might have been.

Populated with totally naturalistic performances, and a stunningly observed relationship between mother and son (their scenes together are phenomenal), Bad Hair works by keeping its focus on the small details of everyday life and its rhythms.

Cocker's magnetic persona is a huge part of Pulp's identity, but it's not the band's greatest legacy. So don't be surprised when Cocker's gas-leak hiss of a voice is drowned out by smoke machine cannons, and fails to swell until it bursts at the end of "Common People."

It's slightly frustrating that the movie doesn't venture a point-of-view on any of these larger issues, which are less clear cut than the matters of sexual abuse and its immediate enablers.

Wolves is consequently too violent to be a "Twilight" knockoff, and too cuddly to be an effectively freaky tale of a boy who, to paraphrase "Werewolf Bar Mitzvah," becomes a man while also becoming a wolf.

The earnestness brings the movie from mildly irritating pastiche status to actively awful, and that is all she wrote.

Every holiday season sees a new influx of Christmas movies desperate to become the next big seasonal perennial destined to provide laughter, tears, humanity and healthy residuals for years to come.

As gory as it is corrosively cynical, a supernatural mood piece that's equally influenced by the arthouse horror movies of David Lynch and Roman Polanski, and the grindhouse-ready Satanic Panic films of the '70s, like "To the Devil a Daughter," and "The Devil Rides out."

It’s a confident, engaging film, undone by some narrative sag in the middle but worth seeing for its opening and closing acts.

My one real gripe with Stewart’s script is that it doesn’t make clear that Bahari (according to his own account), though admitting to “media espionage,” did not name names, i.e. implicate reformist leaders, fellow journalists or others, as his captors wanted him to.

The Homesman doesn't play things safe, and that's a welcome change.

Beyond the Lights makes unapologetically damning statements about the music industry’s treatment of women, yet it never feels preachy. It strikes a risky, though successful balancing act between being immensely entertaining as a musical feature and making dramatic, important statements about depression, self-worth and female empowerment.

Still, I laughed — enough to feel mortified at myself.

In the end Foxcatcher proves impossible to embrace because of fundamental miscalculations in performance, direction and makeup, along with a certain clumsiness in the way that it tries to use its profoundly sad story to make some kind of grand statement about American values, or the lack thereof.