The Dutch thriller Borgman gets credit for being original, but not for being original in a compelling way.

Most interesting, to me, is what happened at New York City's Cooper Union, which has charged no tuition since its founding in 1859. Due in part to mismanagement of funds, the school has announced it will start charging tuition, prompting the students to form their own Occupy Movement. This alone deserves a 90-minute documentary.

Writer-director Michael Tully simultaneously pays tribute to his own 1980s childhood and the cliched movies he grew up watching, and the result is one of the most honestly dishonest movies you'll ever watch.

You're in that world, sucked in by the music and the performances. Appreciate the big things, but while watching, also pay attention to the little grace notes that make up a quality production.

We encounter a man of great talent and usefulness, and yet someone most of us can be glad never to have met.

The pregnancy monologue isn't funny at all, despite cuts to audience members laughing it up. It's a small false note in a movie that's otherwise as honest as they come.

The Signal starts off as an alien version of "Blair Witch Project" and then drifts off into cold plotlessness. But for a while, a little while, it seems like it just might be interesting.

For a while, you can feel like a part of the golden circle.

It is by far the sharpest-looking DreamWorks Animation film to date.

22 Jump Street is exactly what comedy is today. It's coarse, free-flowing and playful.

Despite the increase in seriousness, the film's mood is buoyant, as it's impossible not to root for these appealing if flawed youngsters.

Night Moves, which shows her at her best and worst, also shows two roads, right and wrong, that Reichardt can choose to pursue. As someone who likes this filmmaker even when I don't like her movies, I hope she takes the harder road.

Edge of Tomorrow covers familiar ground with unexpected wit and economy, and the result is a thoroughly entertaining sci-fi fantasy.

It's nothing you'd ever want to put yourself through twice, and yet it's effective in the moment. Shrewdly prefabricated and yet lovingly assembled, it is, in short, the most beautifully made cynical thing I've ever seen.

Then there's the acting, particularly that of Sam Shepard, as an old ex-con without much in the way of limits.

The Dance of Reality may not succeed, but it may hold some interest to cinephiles as a relic of a kind of extravagant, overheated personal cinema that doesn't exist anymore.

The Grand Seduction slowly brings its story into focus and then sneaks up and becomes quite funny.

Maleficent imparts a feeling of enchantment. Here is a world that's strange and beautiful.

An inventive and caustic comedy that really does look like the thing it's mocking.

Ida is a rarity, a film both intensely grounded in painful historical reality and genuinely otherworldly.

It's hard to argue with the movie's basic point. Dr. Robert Lustig of UCSF sums it up in three words: "Sugar is poison."

Will serve mainly to reassure his countless admirers that Ai has recovered his defiance and ingenuity: a heartening message, but one that may be lost on those still unacquainted with his true case against the Chinese state.

An astonishingly beautiful, irresistibly grim movie.

For those willing to overlook its few slips into heavy-handedness, Corpo Celeste tells a compelling story of a 12-year-old girl thrust into a strange new world.

Klapisch still gets these characters to sneak up and make us care about them - though it might help if you remember them from when they were young.

Audiences will walk away thinking, "What was that?" But they will walk away thinking.

Badly made and poorly written, Blended is a rehash of Adam Sandler's 2011 comedy "Just Go With It," only without Jennifer Aniston and without laughs. It not only gets the big things wrong. It gets the small, easy things wrong.

Most important, there is an emotional undercurrent in this installment that the earlier films only aspired to. When for a brief moment, the younger Charles Xavier meets the older, there is the sense of time's mystery - and also of the long, magnificent slog of a purpose-driven life.

Many of the individual scenes are compelling, with a gritty tension that recalls "The Wire" and other good television. But too many of the attempts at "The Sopranos"-style comic drama fail.

Chef is the best thing he (Favreau) has ever done, as writer or director or actor. It's the sort of thing of beauty that filmmakers are ultimately remembered for.

Nothing in the story feels specific to that California city, or emblematic of it.

Miserly on food porn but not on prefab characters, it's well short of a cinematic feast.

How could a little story like this get stretched to 124 minutes? It's at least 30 minutes too long.

What's particularly weird about Godzilla is that for long stretches, all it shows is destruction.

Offers some memorable stories, but it simply tries too hard.

As a documentary, it is very much what it set out to be - a celebration bordering on propaganda. Yet enough slips through to keep it interesting.

Taken as a whole, the movie is far-fetched and even faintly ridiculous; and yet, in the moment to moment, it's compelling and truthful.

Belle isn't a perfect movie; in some ways it's obvious. But even if it's not true to history, it's true to that painting and worthy of its inspiration.

Neighbors is funny for all 96 of its minutes, not counting the credits, and it contains the single best sight gag of the year so far. (We're talking laugh-out-loud funny and then laugh again later, just thinking about it.)

All the brains, heart and courage in the world can't save a movie that doesn't have a third act.

The filmmaker works with economy and has a knack for creating a sense of foreboding, which is good because the plot is simply a working out of the old saw that violence begets violence.

The movie is a fantasy, and the choice is either share the fantasy or don't participate.

Cinema is not about special effects, but about human emotion and a face in close-up. For those in doubt, Locke is the proof.

It has action sequences that will appeal to people looking for the usual pyrotechnics, but the core of the movie - and the source of the audience's interest - is emotion.

A particular strength of Alan Partridge is that the writers (Coogan among them) don't trade entirely on the audience's familiarity with the character, but rather come up with a flashy, eventful story in which Alan can be showcased in a variety of contexts.

A smart and unsettling atmospheric thriller.

The resulting film is a rich mix of movements and cultural phenomena that occurred not only in the United States, but several European countries.

Some of that emotion inevitably makes its way into our perception of the film, which elevates it somewhat, but only to the level of mediocrity.

Faced with a story that doesn't make much sense, the filmmakers switch gears and try for a sociological statement - something about the marginalized and the neglected. This makes for a funny last five minutes, but sad, too, because Walker was better than this, even if his movies sometimes weren't.

Audiences looking for a nonstop laugh riot may be disappointed, but the big laughs are there, and they benefit from the movie's underlying sincerity.

For such a torment-filled story, the ending is surprisingly satisfying, with an important message that a lesser filmmaker might have telegraphed too much.

The documentary Watermark is close to the cinematic equivalent of a coffee-table book. It relies heavily on visuals and offers minimal context. The project has a pro-environment feeling, which comes across implicitly, not through browbeating or preaching.

Only Lovers Left Alive is simply dead, an exercise in style, bland humor and vague gesture that yet seems to have been made in the naive expectation of a conventional response - that is, of an audience's actually caring.

The new Disneynature film lacks the fortuitous plot turns found in previous Disney documentaries, resulting in some awkward (and possibly deceptive) editing. But the movie has a strong protagonist and impressive footage, and the educational core is unsullied.

Transcendence looks and sounds like a Christopher Nolan film that got attacked by malware.

The images of heaven somehow diminish the impact of the boy's experience, perhaps because heaven is just too profound for anyone to film.

Dom Hemingway isn't about story. It's about Jude Law as a force of nature, and that turns out to be a very entertaining diversion.

As Wade, Gary Poulter is the most authentic-looking old drunk you'll ever see onscreen - something I thought before I knew the story of his casting: Poulter was a homeless man who was recruited by a casting director. He'd never acted before, and yet he's remarkable in this.

An engaging documentary attempt to probe her mystery, and it offers some answers - she was secretive and stubborn, a hoarder of epic proportions who seems to have had fits of instability. She also wasn't always nice to her young charges.

A Rubik's Cube of a movie, an intriguing, layered puzzle that isn't easily solved.

A pleasant diversion starring the always amiable Nick Frost, with Chris O'Dowd relishing his role as a slimeball.

Entertaining and suspenseful, the movie shows the politicking and strategies that go into this annual ritual, and Costner is at his beleaguered best.

There's nothing like a good story, and The Galapagos Affair: Satan Comes to Eden has a great one that grabs viewers from the first minute and holds on for two solid hours.

Under the Skin can be confused for a movie that hides its meanings, when it's really a movie that hides its meaninglessness.

It's a bright and fun movie, but also repetitive and overloaded with plot. A nice enough diversion, but not a necessary one.

To extend the boxing analogy, it's as if Morris, after getting pummeled for 12 rounds, just taps Rumsfeld with his finger - and scores a knockout.

Evans pays careful attention to atmosphere, while giving wide berth to cinematographers Dimas Imam Subhono and Matt Flannery, who find beauty among the mayhem. Everything on screen is crystal clear and vibrant, like a city street right after the rain.

Although Jones and Pearce are interesting when onscreen alone, their chemistry is slightly off.

Some sections are better than others, but all of them benefit from the various ways the character and the actress illuminate each other.

The film is partly a comedy, because no movie with protagonists this stupid could be a straight drama. And yet the film contains a lot of truth about its place and time.

There are phony movies made every week, but this is in a different category - a phony movie that seems a distortion of something real, a phony movie offered in place of the real movie von Trier could have made, but it would have cost him something. Some blood, some truth, some soul. What we're left with instead is an empty gesture.

Has the usual overlong running time, the half-hearted feints in the direction of human feeling and the obligatory action sequences that are big without being either exciting or particularly legible.

Ernest & Celestine builds a delicate and charming animated world, but you wouldn't want to live there.

Enemy is what might happen if someone let Terrence Malick make a "Twilight Zone" episode, with a quick rewrite by David Cronenberg.

The film is always a little bit at a distance, almost involving, always good enough to make us root for it, but rarely better than average.

Noah is no silly action blockbuster with a Biblical pretext. Rather, it's the product of writer-director Darren Aronofsky's vigorous engagement with the Biblical story and what it might mean in our time.

Sabotage cannot be called a good movie, not with a straight face. But as an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, it has something.

This society makes no sense except as a metaphor. The social layout of Divergent was supposedly devised so as to maintain peace, but putting people into airtight factions guarantees conflict.

Children in the audience may not be thrilled at the highbrow humor and lack of pointless action, but tough luck. Life is more than "Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked" and "The Smurfs" sequels.

This film doesn't feel obliged to pick a winner or lob easy answers; it aims to observe, with humor and humanity, with penetration and without oversimplifying.

Consists of long stretches of boredom, banal dialogue and contorted metaphors, interrupted by flashes of ugliness. See it if you want to be put off of sex for a month - longer if you're older, and perhaps for years if you're very young.

Director Nancy Buirski not only is able to give rare insights into the dance world but a compelling tale of love, friendship and perseverance.

Though overlong and formulaic, two things keep this street-racing movie of interest all the way to the finish line. The first is Aaron Paul ("Breaking Bad"), a sensitive actor in his first major movie showcase. The second: some extraordinary racing sequences.

A gripping documentary about the most exacting and expensive scientific experiment ever conducted, and one that may be among the most significant.

All this is interesting, or interesting enough, depending on how you feel about Elaine Stritch. If you're a particular fan, this documentary is a must-see. But for everyone else, a little of Elaine's personality goes a long way.

It tries too hard, but at least it's trying.

John Lennon once said that because he was an artist, if you gave him a tuba, he could get something out of it. The Face of Love presents us with Annette Bening and Ed Harris playing the tuba. They get something out of it - they get everything there is to get and more - but it's not enough.

Although most of the actors beyond Bell aren't big film stars, Jamie Lee Curtis gets a few minutes of screen time, and James Franco makes a spectacularly self-deprecating cameo. Whatever they contributed to the Kickstarter campaign, it was worth every cent.

That perception of Fiennes and Gustave is central to the whole enterprise. Without it, the movie just breaks off and flies away. But with it, The Grand Budapest Hotel becomes something wonderful.

You may experience Visitors as more of a sedative than a punch in the guts.

The Lunchbox is better as an experience than as a memory. When you're watching it, you can still believe it might actually be heading somewhere.

"300" was an innovative and imaginative action film, but the follow-up, 300: Rise of an Empire, is nothing but a disappointment.

You might need the assistance of a time machine to find a child who is clamoring for a Mr. Peabody & Sherman feature film remake.

An entertaining film, but also an uncompromising one. It is harsh and not particularly hopeful, and it presents a situation so tangled and contorted, with so many interests in collision, that a lasting peace between the Israelis and Palestinians seems a distant prospect.

The film does thoroughly succeed in one important regard: offering a coherent, viewer-friendly account of the life of Jesus Christ.

Director Patrick Creadon, who in 2006 made the entertaining "Wordplay," about crossword fanatics, probably errs on the side of advocacy here. But give him credit for acknowledging that idealistic endeavors don't always pay off.

The movie has lots of ironic humor, especially in the earlier segments, and laughter doesn't disappear entirely when the thriller element kicks in.

After a devastating opening, the movie gets sluggish here and there, but it remains interesting throughout, not just culturally, but as a piece of drama.