The absolute ending of Some Velvet Morning is a stunner, one that is sure to irk and awe viewers in equal measure (I’m in the latter camp). LaBute may not be saying anything novel about constricting gender roles and the cynical ways in which we sell ourselves out, but he is saying it in his signature, provocative style.

An intoxicating kiddie cocktail for young-at-heart adults, inspired by a Disney fairy tale based on fact: the making of "Mary Poppins."

David O. Russell out-Scorseses Martin Scorsese with American Hustle, a '70s crime romp that's ridiculously entertaining in all the best ways.

The thematic elements are in place, the emotional tension is highly strung, and the action unfolds in a wave like the fire erupting from the dragon's mouth, overtaking all in its path.

This is quite a good sports documentary, moving and unafraid of making you work for its pleasures.

Through the playing of the game, the real life characters' true personalities emerge, and we can see that this is a pretty heartless bunch.

Yes, it's all as clunky and tasteless as the description suggests, and the awkward casting doesn't improve this overlong drama.

Expecting is a fairly laidback movie that isn't serious and isn't funny and isn't much of anything.

It really isn't even a bad movie, or a bad movie of its sort. It's just not good enough to really distinguish itself.

Khumba is disastrously uninspired. Not even a galaxy of stars, united in their willingness to take a check, can save Khumba from being the boringest plucky outsider of all.

Crave, a creepy and deliberately paced thriller that is effective in its unpleasantness.

Probably a lot of people who see this film will get fed up with Gili's passivity, but some people in life are passive in a way that feels like a defiantly inactive reaction to ill treatment. These boys don't view her as a person with feelings, but Gurfinkel's film does.

The most satisfyingly diabolical cinematic structure that the Coens have ever contrived, and that's just one reason that I suspect it may be their best movie yet.

Unfortunately this film has none of their urgency or sense of control; for long stretches it just doesn't seem to have any idea what, exactly, it wants to say, or be.

This American version of Park Chan-Wook's Korean thriller is Lee's most exciting movie since "Inside Man" — not a masterpiece by any stretch, but a lively commercial genre picture with a hypnotic, obsessive quality, and an utter indifference to being liked, much less approved of.

Sylvester Stallone can write entertaining formula action scripts like a demon, but he often hands them over to hack directors who don't know how to extract the pulp and the juice from them. On that score, Homefront is better than average.

Little girls will absolutely love it, though. That much is undeniable.

A visually opulent, proudly melodramatic entertainer with some great songs and star performances.

Just over the Mexico/U.S. border from Juarez is El Paso, Texas, ranked the safest large city in America three years in a row now. The question that that fact begs is in part why this film is a quietly subversive masterpiece.

The trouble here is a lack of texture and urgency.

She is an engaging guide, humorous and honest, cynical and wise, with that same sense of innocent joy in her own fame that translated into in photos.

Most of its pleasures come from the way it confounds expectations.

With each on-screen chapter, the poor girl from District 12 continues to fulfill her destiny as an inspiration and a rebel fighter. She is but one female, but she's the perfect antidote to the surplus of male superheroes out there.

You may think it unfair that I make comparisons between "Starbuck" and Delivery Man. Truth be told, my rating is higher because I'd seen "Starbuck." Had I not, Delivery Man would have been intolerable.

It wants to put you smack-dab in the middle of a particular place during a particular time, and let you marinate in that place and time through quiet montages and long—sometimes very long—scenes.

Without being explicit, without being overtly angry, Kabakov's installations are a critique of the entire system, a critique leavened with irony, wit, and fantasy. It's powerful stuff. You go into Kabakov's labyrinths of associations and you don't come out.

If Sunlight Jr. does anything, it is to shine a light on the fact that the American dream is a dormant notion for far too many.

Every now and then, one comes across an indie film that's so showily awful, so drenched in bathos and cliché, and yet features such a uniformly sharp cast that you have to wonder: "What is it with actors?" Or, if one already knows what it is with actors, "Did this material actually look good on paper?" The heavy-sigh-inducing Charlie Countryman is just such a motion picture.