The chief virtues of Parkland are journalistic in the best sense.

Runner Runner is less than mediocre, but it's not repellent, which means that to watch it is to root for it - and to be disappointed.

A ludicrous, yet oddly engaging documentary.

See Gravity in theaters, because on television something will be lost. Alfonso Cuarón has made a rare film whose mood, soul and profundity is bound up with its images. To see such images diminished would be to see a lesser film, perhaps even a pointless one.

On the surface, this may seem like a bleak film, because it's so raw. But ultimately this is a movie about the mysterious ways in which we find a path toward healing, and its beautiful final moments stay with you.

A bonbon, not of a full-course meal. Foodies will smack their lips over many delectable shots of victuals prepared by the film's engaging protagonist, a provincial woman chosen to cook for the president of France. As a story, though, it's insubstantial - there's conflict here, but it feels perfunctory.

The suspenseful love story Out in the Dark isn't a political film by any stretch, but the intrigue and prejudices of the Arab-Israeli conflict certainly fuel the romance and thrills of this entertaining, taut movie.

A sturdy and sophisticated crime drama from the Philippines that takes a pretty gruesome situation and enriches its presentation with lots of human detail.

The fortunate thing about for Inequality for All is that, for all its good information and useful insight, it also has an appealing person at its center: Robert Reich, the economics expert and Berkeley professor who was also the labor secretary under Bill Clinton.

If it seems like a stupid idea, well, it is. This is one of those romantic comedies that rely on wild coincidences and misunderstandings that could be cleared up with a simple cell phone call, but then, that wouldn't help the "plot" along.

A humorous yet unfocused romp, so unwilling to settle on a single theme that hyperactivity medication should be handed out with the 3-D glasses.

Neither does it help that, despite the wit and literacy of Enough Sad, its form is straight out of a teen romance: A cool kid starts dating someone less cool, and then engages in some elaborate deception that, if found out, will threaten the progress of young love. The funny thing is, if Enough Said were converted wholesale into a high school romance, the characters' behavior might ring more true.

The ego trips and sexuality and driving are all filmed with equal intensity, to the point where the emotions and flesh and crunched metal seem to blend together. The movie's only major problem is that the tension sometimes overwhelms.

Don Jon deserves praise for wearing its message lightly and yet for daring to present such a lecture in today's Internet-drenched environment. Gordon-Levitt may be blithe in discussing pornography, but his movie nonetheless asserts that porn is addictive and destructive, that it intrudes on intimacy, and that it short-circuits the capacities for interaction and also, ultimately, for pleasure. That's a serious subject and a committed viewpoint, handled with wit and intelligence.

The film's hymn of praise quickly grows cloying, thanks partly to a relentless musical soundtrack.

There are just so many ways Carine Roitfeld can say she loves fashion in Mademoiselle C, a somewhat interesting documentary that brings us into the inner workings of a magazine, but harps a bit too much on her ideas of fashion and style.

Blue Caprice tells its story in fragments, a provocative strategy that sometimes works to chilling effect, sometimes not.

Part travelogue, part narrative and part art-history class. The class is what's best about this pretty decent movie.

How much you enjoy You Will Be My Son depends on how much you can take an unbearable, arrogant jerk as your lead character.

The characters are mostly likable, and despite some comic sallies the film takes a compassionate stance toward them. But it feels like a glossy, overly neat take on what should be an explosive topic.

A simple story told with economy, Wadjda is a notable example of old-school, humanistic filmmaking. It's also genuinely groundbreaking: the first feature shot entirely in Saudi Arabia, and the first film directed by a Saudi woman.

An enjoyable movie not because of any special gifts by the filmmakers or emotional resonance in the script. It was more like destiny. Once someone jotted down the concept on a cocktail napkin and hired B-Boys who could actually dance, the movie pretty much had to turn out OK.

Deft director Kyle Patrick Alvarez concocts a subtle brew of sexuality, religion and class that goes down easily, even as the world around Samuel sometimes leaves a bitter taste.

Salinger does what so many documentaries and biopics either fail to do or decline to attempt; it speculates convincingly on the connective tissue between the life and the work of the subject.

It's difficult to remember a recent movie that soared so high, before plummeting with a series of bad story choices. But the end result is still a strong piece of cinema, a failure only if you dwell on what might have been.

Although the filmmakers apparently wanted to focus on the Beatles, the movie's strongest moments are about Freda herself.

The joy is in the details - from the animated credits to the perky pop score to the pre-"Mad Man" hair, clothes and general sensibility.

If Insidious 2 exists solely because Insidious 1 made a ton of money, then at least credit Wan for making quality control a priority.

The result isn't a great film, but it's true to the original brutal vision.

The filmmaker makes ample use of Ungerer's drawings and existing documentary material, but sensibly lets the man tell most of his own story, which lends Far Out Isn't Far Enough a raconteur's charm rare among film studies of artists' lives.

The movie is pretty stupid in a lot of ways. But in a multiplex world of grim action thrillers with dark heroes, it isn't the worst thing to blow an hour and a half on a film where everyone - including supporting players Gary Busey, Beverly D'Angelo and Kristanna Loken - seems to be having a good time.

A smart farce that would make Hugh Grant and his fans proud.

Director Jill Soloway gets the most out of her actors, fleshing out their characters and letting us know what makes them tick. It's refreshing to hear dialogue that's natural and modern and doesn't try to pontificate. And the rewards are many.

Trying to be provocative with a capital "P," Anne Fontaine's Adore undermines itself by provoking unintended laughs.

The 3-D 1D movie is aimless, seemingly deceptive and spreads a poor message: that it's OK to act extremely immature, as long as you have millions of blind followers who think it's cute.

Anchoring the film is an outstanding performance from Iranian actress Golshifteh Farahani, who plays the timid, nameless woman who comes to believe that her jihadist spouse - rendered silent by a bullet in the neck - is a "patience stone" that can absorb all the misery confided in it.

While there's a certain staid feeling to the production, it does deliver a solid working-over to the era's gentry.

This is a special movie. For almost 20 minutes, Drinking Buddies does almost nothing to indicate where the story is going or whether there is even going to be a story. And yet everything onscreen is interesting, because of the truth of the emotion and the specificity of detail.

Any director who sees Short Term 12 will want to cast Larson in something. This movie puts her on the map.

The film is beautiful but troubled, achieving in stretches the director's signature dreamy mood but dragged down by narrative confusions.

You've probably seen this movie before, watching a child play with his toy Hot Wheels cars after eating multiple bowls of sugary breakfast cereal.

In addition to Bana and Hall, Jim Broadbent is outstanding in a couple of scenes, as a government official, watching from the sidelines and offering warnings and advice. Broadbent is somehow menacing, pathetic and persuasive all at the same time.

The pleasures are intermittent but can be located: Jennifer Coolidge, as Jane's travel companion, is funny even when the script isn't, and Feild is a nice stand-in for Colin Firth in the Austen hero department.

The chief asset of Ain't Them Bodies Saints is Rooney Mara, who gets more interesting with every movie.

More of a tribute than a hard-hitting piece of American filmmaking, which is too bad, because the subject - the imprisonment of ex-Black Panther figure Mumia Abu-Jamal - deserves a thorough, serious examination.

Sometimes indie pictures like this, with over-the-top acting and outrageous situations, are meant as a calling card for its creators - a chance to show their wares to others in the industry. So calling all producers, there is one tour-de-force performance in Scenic Route: the makeup team of Brian Kinney, Sara Robey and Maia Wagle. Admire their work, and bring earplugs.

This elegant movie never reduces or diminishes its subjects, and leaves us to ponder a remarkable truth - that Ushio and Noriko have an abiding love that four decades of frustration, resentment and rivalry have battered but not extinguished.

The result is an original picture, not entirely successful, but successful enough, and delightful in its ability to surprise viewers, and juggle tones and keep every ball in the air. The World's End has the aura - and this might only be an attractive illusion - of something imagined whole, in a burst of inspiration, rather than as something labored over.

Every moviegoer will have his own breaking point, when The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones surpasses the mundane and enters the ridiculous.

A ho-hum thriller about corporate spying in the high-tech world, comes off as a lot more preposterous than paranoid, and it takes no more than a few frames for the eye rolling to commence.

Director Cordero manages the not-bad trick of generating suspense while keeping the overall tone cool and collected.

I'll go ahead and call Drug War the best Hong Kong action movie since "Infernal Affairs" (the 2002 film that Martin Scorsese remade as "The Departed"), even though technically it's a Chinese film.

For starters, it's a movie to make you happy to see the next movie written, directed and starring Lake Bell. She has an engaging presence and has a distinct comic sensibility.

Although this leisurely tale of an aged French sculptor offers a few other small pleasures, in the end it lacks heft.

At its best, it's a good picture, and at its worst, it's almost good.

A weird mix of the refreshing and the dispiriting, Kick-Ass 2 is appealing in its brutal honesty and repellent in its honest brutality.

A nice idea for a movie, but has a mostly silly script and some of the craziest and most laughable casting imaginable. But the movie's main challenge is a simple one: It is very difficult, next to impossible, to build a movie around an inert, inactive character.

Even if a quarter of what Boreman claimed was true, she had a lot more coming to her than a sympathetic hearing and much prettier actress playing her onscreen. She practically deserved an apology from the male sex, and that, in a way, is what this movie is.

There's nothing new here about the conflict, but the film portrays the two sides fairly - both right, both wrong. Overall, The Attack is thought-provoking, even if it doesn't address how to solve the problem. We'll probably never know the answer in our lifetime.

The film provides an intelligently imagined future world.

Original, truthful and moving.

Airplane buffs are going to have a particularly good time; each of the planes seems to have an obscure real-life counterpart. And pop-culture junkies will appreciate a few sly nods as well.

Get past the comedy and there's something almost weird at the movie's core - a deep cynicism about family and a longing for family, both at the same time.

There are plenty of bad films to get riled up about in the summer. Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters isn't one of them. This is harmless tween-centric fun.

Blanchett in Blue Jasmine is beyond brilliant, beyond analysis. This is jaw-dropping work, what we go to the movies hoping to see, and we do. Every few years.

It's a complete mess, the spectacle of filmmakers blowing up their movie and everything in it, because they can't think of anything else to do.

The direction, by Ben Nott and Morgan O'Neill, is average, except for the surfing sequences, which are easily as striking as what we see in documentaries about the sport. Another positive is the soundtrack, with amusing high-energy rock tunes of the era.

There's so much torture and suffering in this movie, it starts to feel like "Zero Dark Smurfy."

It's a life worth remembering.

For the most part, Cowperthwaite keeps the preachiness in check, letting the scientists, former SeaWorld trainers and other witnesses tell it as it is. Indeed, the scary training scenes - uniformly gripping - do most of the talking.

Still Mine is uplifting and heartbreaking, a contradiction that results in the viewer exalting and being let down at the same time.

About halfway through Red 2, in the midst of all the laughs and action, suddenly Anthony Hopkins shows up, and he doesn't care one bit that nobody is going to notice his acting in a movie like this. He's going for the Oscar anyway.

A strange movie, in that it has the atmosphere of a comedy and some extreme characters set up to be comical, but there are really no funny scenes.

Ugly, gore-strewn and, ultimately, ridiculous.

There's some amusement in watching Michael Cera play an unalloyed jerk, but in the main this trifling film shuffles by with a few low-key jokes and observations, building to an abrupt moment of seriousness.

I'd be shocked if we see a better horror film in 2013.

The To Do List is a romantic comedy with no romance and little comedy, but with an ugliness of spirit that's surprising and unrelenting.

The Wolverine shows that, while originality would be nice, a little novelty and enthusiasm in the presentation of the familiar can be quite enough.

Cooke may overstuff his documentary with too many points, but if a young person had to watch just one film about the drug war, this is not a bad choice.

The development of the GoPro camera has revolutionized extreme sports photography, but even so, the 3-D images of extreme surfing in Storm Surfers 3D feel groundbreaking.

The problem is the script, which, in scene after scene, contains no surprises.

The movie is modest in its ambition and powerful in its reverberations.

The temptation arises to say something nice about Grown Ups 2 just because it doesn't cause injury. But no, it's a bad movie, too, just old-school bad, the kind that's merely lousy and not an occasion for migraines or night sweats.

If this is the best we can do in terms of movies - if something like this can speak to the soul of audiences - maybe we should just turn over the cameras and the equipment to the alien dinosaurs and see what they come up with.

What Sweetgrass lacks in context it makes up for in voyeuristic camera work that reveals a gritty beauty in the landscape, along with the human and livestock characters.

It represents 2 1/2 of the longest hours on record, a jumbled botch that is so confused in its purpose and so charmless in its effect that it must be seen to be believed, but better yet, no. Don't see it, don't believe it, not unless a case of restless leg syndrome sounds like a fun time at the movies.

Eventually, though, these scenes get repetitive, and the muddled final act neither builds nor gets scary. Writer-director Peter Strickland is much more interested in the atmospherics, so when Gilderoy plunges into the abyss (or wherever), we are left confused, and not in a satisfying, David Lynch kind of way.

There may be better examples of cinematic art in 2013, but for a good time at the movies, it's hard to imagine anything beating this action extravaganza, from director Roland Emmerich, about a very Obama-like president.

Don't believe the weak coming-attractions trailer. The inspired pairing of Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy makes for a successful action comedy.

The latest in the wonderful "Before" series does three important things: It breaks out of the courtship formula, yet retains the series' quality, and it moves the lives of Celine (Julie Delpy) and Jesse (Ethan Hawke) forward in ways that are satisfying and believable. True, a romance you once envied might now be a relationship you'd not want to be in, but as long as Celine and Jesse are still talking, there's hope.

The ending takes an unfortunate detour that stretches the running time, but this is still quality Pixar work.

Exciting, truly harrowing and smartly directed apocalyptic thriller from Marc Forster ("Monster's Ball"). It's the scariest zombie movie in many years.

This is a pretty good action movie that justifies bringing back the Superman franchise -- a dubious proposition to begin with -- by taking the plight of the superhero seriously. Henry Cavill is charismatic in the lead role, Amy Adams is an ideal Lois Lane and, as the villain, Michael Shannon does the best Michael Shannon impersonation you've ever seen.

There are flaws, but also some fun surprises. Much closer to Hitchcock than "Hostel," this is what can happen when a pile of trash falls into the hands of a talented and resourceful director (James DeMonaco).

This vaguely funny film is also the saddest and most depressing movie of 2013.

Jaden is not ready for his solo spotlight, and the film is the same action over and over. Another bad movie from Shyamalan.

Well-polished and well-intentioned, this human-among-the-fairies adventure is filled with plenty of rousing action for short attention spans. But the beautiful visuals are paired with a mediocre script. The pacing is off and scenes become repetitive. While Epic has broad appeal, it's hard to imagine this will be anyone's favorite movie in 5 or 10 or 20 years.

It's stupid but glorious -- Dominic (Vin Diesel) and his crew of high-spirited street racers are hired by an FBI agent to hunt down an international terrorist in London. Ridiculous and entertaining from start to finish.