Lawless offers a compelling, gruesome and instructive time-travel exercise.

A cupcake of a movie, a sweet and lightweight little thing that's all but served up in a ruffled paper cup.

It's perhaps most remarkable as a sweet, mysterious portrait of pre-flood New Orleans, which Almereyda not incorrectly portrays as a land of wandering, uncertain souls.

A rousing old-fashioned yarn with numerous exciting set-pieces and an uncomplicated hero you root for all the way through. It’s entertaining throughout and made with a high level of technical skill. If made 40 years ago, it would have been a leading Oscar contender and a huge hit, whereas today it’s a bit “meh” in both categories

An unsettling but ultimately joyous little picture, a movie that's as self-conscious as anything Baumbach has ever made, and yet far more open: It reaches out to the world instead of insisting on hugging its own pain, tight.

There's a commitment to half-improvised, ground-level realism that lends the picture news value and an obvious urgency.

A strange piece of work, perhaps closer to an imaginative portrait or an experimental fiction that borrows elements from real life than a traditional documentary.

Black Gold is more an Al Gore-style message of hope than a total downer.

I'm delighted to tell you that the new Thing was made by people who understand what the horror audience wants and don't treat it like a bunch of brain-dead children. Mirabile freakin' dictu.

Smith deserves a better romantic comedy than Hitch, but at least he somehow manages to improve the material around him.

Gripping: Even when it wobbles off-track, it has some juice to it.

Southern Gothic lite -- with a bite.

Overall, the picture is accomplished, intelligent and, in places, a little dull. Mangold isn't an economical filmmaker, and parts of 3:10 to Yuma suffer from needless bloat. The new version doesn't use the same kind of blunt, visually arresting shorthand as Daves' original...And yet somehow, maybe just barely, Mangold -- succeeds on his own terms, largely because the actors he's working with here.

This movie is a sun-dappled documentary about skateboarding, about the thrill of speed, the joy of reckless youth. Turning it into an academic example of the problems of history -- of who tells it and how it gets told -- is a lot less fun.

A very gentle-spirited picture, but it's not a self-consciously precious one.

The Kingdom is distasteful in several obvious and irrefutable ways: For one thing, the idea of setting an action-thriller against terrorist activity that's all too close to real-life events is simply opportunistic and creepy.

Director Ian Allen (a longtime playwright and stage director) has lovingly re-created the look and indeed narrative style of silent film -- and he's from Salt Lake City, so if he says Mormons are vampires with hypnotic powers, who am I to argue? I suppose this is a one-note joke, more in the style of '70s avant-garde camp than anything else. But, hey, at least it's a funny joke.

Craig never overreaches, and yet he accomplishes the unthinkable. He's not the Bond we ever asked for or hoped for, yet he's reimagined the character in ways we never could have foreseen. He's Bond with soul.

A finely balanced piece of comedic machinery.

Winterbottom's adaptation of the novel is spellbinding cinema, with all the atmosphere, technical excellence and expert pacing the British director is known for.

Moore, who may be the most unpredictably talented actress in movies right now, plays Amber with an inseparable mixture of maternal feeling and lust that's flabbergasting.

It's tough not to respond to the visual cleverness of Pleasantville.

Implausible in countless ways and wooden for long stretches, Gattaca at least never collapses into a special-effects barrage or erupts in long, choreographed explosions; it sticks carefully to its pristine vision.

Chow depends way too much on jokey computer graphics that make the whole thing feel like a superhero comic, instead of athleticism or charisma or good storytelling, and that Kung Fu Hustle wears itself out long before it's over.

It’s a lovely film that requires a little patience and a friendly disposition, and may be too low-impact to thrive amid a summer of grotesquely overengineered sequels.

This is definitely a formula movie, lovingly and even obsessively so, made by someone who obviously enjoyed “American Pie” and numerous other raunchy-sweet teen sex comedies of the ’90s, and wished they existed for girls.

Stephen King reportedly loathed the liberties Kubrick and co-writer Diane Johnson took with his story, but King's ur-villain, the emasculated husband from hell, has never been more clearly presented on-screen.

Nothing is surprising, that is, except the fact that the film has a big heart, a core of sweetness and tremendous cinematic ambition.

It takes discipline in this age of bloat to bring your movie in under 80 minutes, closing credits included, and still make the audience feel we’ve been taken on a genuine journey with these people, a few big laughs and jagged left turns included.

A flinty and deeply enjoyable little comedy. There's genius in its absurdity.

Willis' John McClane, with that sly, sideways smile, is like an old acquaintance you don't mind running into. He may be older and balder, but he's none the worse for the wear. And he can still take a punch.

Tyson does succeed in humanizing a deeply troubled individual who has been depicted as an almost animalistic stereotype of African-American manhood.

A prickly, twisted, mean-spirited, borderline crazy and highly seductive picture.

Fleming's movie is, at the very least, a tribute to Nancy Drew's longevity -- and a valentine to all of us who, even as we strive to live in the present, just like old things.

It must be hard to misread the tone of a book as single-minded as Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley, but Anthony Minghella manages somehow.

Ocean's Thirteen has a pleasingly casual, raffish quality -- it's enjoyable to watch, particularly if you've got nothing better to do.

A fantastical sex farce, and a highly amusing one at that, without being the least bit momentous or memorable.

Clerks II has its problems: It rambles into sentimentality, and it doesn't need to -- the movie is more affecting when the characters are just cracking jokes. But Smith, an inherent optimist, has made a movie full of crude humor that also manages to explore the enduring qualities of friendship.

I found it gorgeous, opaque and disturbing in roughly equal portions, but it was a riveting experience all the way through.

Undeniably clever.

It's a universe invented for our delight and pleasure and nothing else, a world made up of colors not found in nature but in a little girl's sock drawer. In Powerpuff Girls, shapes, images and colors make up the most crucial part of the message. It's a hot-pink little movie.

Fast and funny and brings back some of the wonder to the series.

Coach Carter, its flaws aside, is as interesting for what it doesn't do as for what it does.

Pusher III is also, far more clearly than the earlier films, a chronicle of life in the rapidly changing ethnic mix of western Europe.

Parillaud's performance is sharp on its surface and soft at its core. And if Jeanne truly is Breillat's alter ego, she is a pitiless self-portrait.

Much of Devil's Rejects is absolutely hilarious, especially the brief appearance by a Gene Shalit-like film critic who explicates all the Groucho Marx references. Zombie's eye for the faux-'70s detail is perfect.

It may be slight, but it's also buoyant and pleasurable, partly because the leads make the whole thing feel like a spontaneous duet. Lawrence trusts them to carry the picture, without feeling the need to throw in a lot of extraneous fluff.

The astonishing thing, however, is how pleasantly hypnotic the film is -- despite the fact that its subject is confined to peculiarly gruesome sex.

Offers the most intense visual experience I've had at the movies all year.

Ridley Scott's A Good Year is a bonbon made by a mechanic, a well-intentioned diversion put together by someone who clumsily adds the right ingredients in the wrong proportions at the wrong time. But sometimes, if you get the sugar level close to right, you can do OK, and A Good Year offers some pretty basic pleasures that movies often fail to give us these days.

While this does not strike me as the most urgent element of Standard Operating Procedure, Morris makes a persuasive case that many of the Abu Ghraib photos don't show us what we think they do, and that some of the episodes depicted were staged specifically to be photographed (and might not otherwise have occurred).

Unsurprisingly, the camerawork in Lila Says is spectacular.

An exhaustive, exciting and ultimately exhausting history of how that white powder, and the Colombian crime lords who imported it by the hundreds of kilos, transformed the culture and economy of Miami, for good and for ill.

It's a fine example of the excellence of French genre film right now: A dark tale of revenge with an inscrutable heart, ice in its veins and an electric undercurrent of eroticism, it also might be the best-photographed picture I've seen so far this year.

Carell's performance as Barry, is nothing short of magnificent.

For everything wrong with it, A.I. is not a dismissible film. It's too richly imagined, too accomplished. Even as he botches the emotions and the issues he raises, Spielberg goes headlong into them, wrestles with the picture's conflicting impulses. It's the kind of screw-up you get only from a master filmmaker.

Morally ambiguous, subtly crafted, resolutely free of cliché and made with almost no money, The Great World of Sound is under-the-radar independent filmmaking in the Jarmusch-Cassavetes mode, both noble and ruthless in spirit.

Lone Survivor has no politics in the sense that it presents a more or less factual story about Luttrell and his comrades trying to fight their way out against overwhelming odds, and tells the truth that most of them didn’t make it. But the visual symbolism and the iconography of this movie are not apolitical or ideologically neutral at all.

Fortunately, Curtis isn't completely tone-deaf, and he does manage to capture the mood, and certainly the sound, of the era. The best parts of Pirate Radio take place in the movie's margins, in the vignettes and asides that don't necessarily have much to do with the plot.

Although I have mixed feelings about The Eye, there's no question the Pangs have a natural talent for cinema. They create bright, unfussy images and work terrifically with actors.

It has the heart and spirit of a true romantic comedy, and a lightness of touch that you rarely see in a debut picture.

This is a conventional political documentary with a conventional view of what happened in the Buckeye State and why, but it's no less fascinating for all that.

You'll either find The Extra Man utterly charming or thoroughly mystifying, but either way Kevin Kline, playing a community-theater version of himself, with all the foppishness and Shakespearean pretension but half the talent and none of the luck, inhabits its peculiar soul.

It's an exceptionally intelligent and controlled piece of direction, and for once Polanski didn't hide his emotions in a death's-head grin. The movie is raw and passionate and unresolved in a way that's unique among his work.

It's an openhearted picture, an unintentional goodbye that feels more like a beginning than an ending.

Seeing these four actors launching Reza's zingers at each other at high speed is pretty much worth the price of admission all by itself, and one thing you always know about Polanski is that he won't waste your time.

Cronenberg, who both wrote and directed, is out to fool you -- to give you just enough information to let you figure out what's going on, and then bluff you out of using it. The movie, in other words, is a game itself.

Sheds some unexpected light on the uneven and still undigested career of one of the most paradoxical artists pop culture has yet produced.

There's a curiously ho-hum quality to the murders, despite the fact that the two victims are bludgeoned, sliced, chopped and jabbed, and also (the movie suggests) get their eyeballs gouged out.

Any thriller from first-time directors that starts out with a couple of teenagers in a Texas diner talking about legendary pulp novelist Jim Thompson has a super-steep hill to climb. Here’s what I can say for Bad Turn Worse... It may not make it all the way up that steep slope, but the effort is pretty doggone entertaining.

It’s an enormous relief to have a lightweight but non-insulting date movie to recommend in this arid season. This isn’t a movie that requires your full attention at every second – although when Dyrholm and Brosnan are on-screen, you won’t be able to look away – but it’s a nifty entertainment that’s always easy on the eyes and gains just a bit of dramatic weight as it moves forward.

I'm not sure Mean Machine is any worse than "The Longest Yard," but it lacks the nihilistic '70s background that lent the latter's combination of humor and brutality an air of (arguably bogus) social commentary.

Moody and a little slow, with muted colors and a half-empty, alien-feeling suburban setting, Danish director Ole Bornedal's The Possession is a nifty end-of-summer gift for horror buffs.

What Stone Reader offers that's new is its portrayal of reading not as a supremely civilized and soulful activity but as a lonely, thwarting and sometimes painfully embarrassing one.

Whatever the reason, Oscar and Lucinda winds up feeling like a collection of bits in search of vision and an emotional surge.

Can I tell you exactly what happens in Memphis, or what it’s “about”? Absolutely not. But it worked its magic on me, and its meaning is something I take on faith.

Maybe Joan Rivers is a high-powered engine of self-debasement who will go lower than anyone else for a laugh and a dollar, and maybe she's a skilled actress who has spent her whole life playing one. Either way, yes, she's quite something. And I'd rather appreciate her from a distance.

In its better, non-jizz-related moments, Ted 2 is a loosey-goosey stoner road trip with an irrelevant, appealing blend of innocence and sweetness: John and Sam doing a “Walk Like an Egyptian” dance number in the law library, for no particular reason, or the “Law & Order” theme-song lyrics, a bit of brilliant standup material stuck in the middle of a movie.

Whatever its flaws, Maleficent is a family-friendly Disney adventure that offers a relaunched and thoroughly delightful Angelina Jolie.

The material has crackle, but its vibrancy feels far off and muted, like a fireworks display going off in a neighboring town.

Operation Homecoming at first seems like a modest enterprise, a document of a few guys' paths to personal catharsis. But the sense of damaged intensity found in all these men's writing -- and found in war lit since the classical age -- builds to a powerful crescendo, and the haunting poem that ends the film, in which the ghosts of American and Iraqi dead confront each other on the banks of the Tigris, is a showstopper.

Gandhi’s direction brings out superior performances in the film’s cast, particularly in Terrell, whose imitation of Obama’s singular ways of speaking and mannerisms is nearly flawless.

There’s so much delusion and so much delight in Noah that I have trouble distinguishing one from the other, or determining whether its most outlandish flourishes qualify as mistakes or as strokes of genius.

Tells the story of a love affair and a new family, and reminds us that even billionaires are not omnipotent.

It's an intriguingly murky B-movie that should satisfy genre buffs.

So, yeah - even if In Time descends from its gripping and thought-provoking premise into a mediocre chase thriller before it's over, it's still pretty damn satisfying to watch in the current climate.

As crafty and compelling as Aaron Aites and Audrey Ewell's Until the Light Takes Us is, it may go too far in its understandable desire to correct the bias and prejudice of mainstream journalism.

What filmgoers get is a satisfactory mainstream entertainment, with a handful of major actors in juicy minor roles tossed in for good measure.

It’s shot through with sadness and beauty, with dry humor, with the certainty that even things meant to last forever actually don’t.

Lake and Epstein are not in fact trying to stigmatize other women's choices about how and where to give birth. Instead, they're trying to introduce an entire universe of history and information that should inform those choices, and that the medical establishment has virtually erased from American memory.

Honestly, one can only wish that Hollywood made movies for non-teenagers and non-comics fans with this much care and reverence. Are superhero movies dying? Well sure, but you and I and the planet may die first.

Tracking down Rebney proved to be no easy task. But Steinbauer found him, living on a mountain in California, and spends much of the film trying to get Rebney to reckon with his unsought celebrity, which Rebney had only recently become aware of.

Along with Sheryl Lee, Morton is probably the best actress to have emerged in this decade.

Lazer Team is a pastiche based on a beloved pattern; it understands its own limitations but seeks to maximize its potential. All the characters are presented with immense affection and offered the chance to grow and develop, by which I mean to be gifted with inexplicable superpowers, to be repeatedly struck in the groin area by projectiles and to be mocked by others for their moments of vulnerability.

Jane Horrocks saves the annoyingly noisy Little Voice.

A breezy, uncomplicated, unapologetically broad comedy.

A lot of this is compelling, after its didactic and heavily thematic fashion, but if you strip most of it away, along with Roger Deakins' handsome cinematography, you're left with the conflict between Jack and Bobby and something like "Shop Class as Soulcraft: The Movie."

The Sessions should be taken for what it is, a sweet but minor fictional parable about the strange possibilities of love. You may find it significant, moving and even profound, but it has a limited connection to the real world and the real life of Mark O'Brien.