Applause may present as gritty European realism, but the struggle inside Thea is almost theological in scale, and worthy of Milton or Kierkegaard.

The heart of the movie is not in its plot but in its characters and atmosphere. Castaneda, a nonprofessional actor who runs a towing company in San Antonio, gives a towering, Robert Duvall-style performance as a granitic man in late middle age whose internal world of pain and love and knowledge occasionally flickers to the surface.

Highly entertaining and skillful documentary.

Richer and more enjoyable than the other lame-stream comedies Hollywood has churned out this summer, even though it doesn't know what kind of movie it wants to be when it grows up.

The first half of the film leisurely examines the deterioration and possible salvation of the soul in a once-glorious, rapidly disintegrating landscape. (His Alaska is full of closed factories, wandering tourists and strip mines.) The second half, with its contrived setup and its individual journeys of self-discovery (harvesting kelp and building fires), is artificial and sadly undermines all that's gone before.

Mythic, thrilling and brilliantly made motion picture.

A relentlessly gruesome, visually impressive and ultimately not very interesting movie with some pretensions to seriousness.

It's a cynical way to pass time, the cynicism that comes from being presented with something you've seen a hundred times before.

It isn't an entirely successful or satisfying film, but it's far from dismissible.

Although I personally still find the rubber-faced, pseudo-human figures produced by this technique unsettling, the work done by Spielberg and Jackson's animation teams here is exquisite.

As a ninth-generation descendant of Abigail Faulkner, a convicted Salem witch who only escaped execution because she was pregnant at the time, I call down a terrible malediction upon the people who made this entertaining but indefensible movie.

Jones, as always, knows what he’s doing. In only his second feature as a director, the laconic 68-year-old star has made a wrenching, relentless and anti-heroic western that stands among the year’s most powerful American films. Not everyone will like The Homesman, but if you see it you won’t soon forget it.

There are so many great things happening on almost every level of this movie, from Swinton's haunting, magnetic and tremendously vulnerable performance, which is absolutely free of condescension to the suburban American wife-ness of her character, to the many unsettling individual moments.

This is Lunson's debut picture and she's smart enough to keep the whole affair very simple.

It’s more that the filmmakers close out this oddly inspiring yarn of apocalypse and paranoia with a note of false reassurance. Yes, the world is fundamentally screwed and most people are apathetic or paralyzed. So start ringing doorbells!

Dancing, like being in love, sometimes means making a mess of things. Born Romantic makes glorious sense of that mess, trampled toes and all.

They've created far and away the most complex, appealing female character in a summer of soldiers, sword fighters and asteroid blasters.

An engaging entertainment that packages its thought-provoking ideas in a combination of political thriller, comic adventure and romantic triangle.

I hope viewers don’t come away from this essential documentary with the belief that Western AIDS activists in general turned their backs on poor black people just as soon as they got medicine that worked. That isn’t remotely fair. Blame for the African AIDS holocaust falls on the Big Pharma companies who put patents and profits ahead of human life, and on all of us who let them get away with it.

My personal view is that Quentin Tarantino is now permanently high on his own supply, but you could just as well say that he has succeeded in reinventing the art film. Is it worth it to put yourself through the brutal and incoherent three-hour ordeal of The Hateful Eight for its moments of brilliance and its ultimate catharsis? Jesus, don’t look at me.

So beautiful to look at that it practically feels like a drug.

Its characters and its nowheresville setting are uncannily realized... It's not a cartoon in any sense, but an honest-to-God movie with some fine, understated acting and a human heart.

Best of all may be the narration, by Sam Shepard: His voice, the kind of voice God might have if he'd ever smoked Camels, frames this gentle but potent little story with good-natured authority, making it feel modern and ageless at once.

So few filmmakers even know how to make an entertaining trifle these days, and For Your Consideration is that, at least.

In a world of movies that try far too hard to move, entertain and dazzle us, the artistry of Hustle & Flow lies in the way it waits for us to come to it. We can walk as slowly as we want, but sooner or later, it's going to get us.

Millions of people read Harr's gripping bestseller, but Steven Zaillian may be the only one who didn't understand it.

Tykwer's actors seem completely clued in to his intentions. Both Blanchett and Ribisi give performances so restrained they're almost subliminal.

Entertaining, handsome and gripping, The Bourne Identity is something of an anomaly among big-budget summer blockbusters: a thriller with some brains and feeling behind it, more attuned to story and character than to spectacle.