At times trying and perplexing, but it also contains some of the most psychologically insightful and ecstatic filmmaking imaginable.

Epic in sweep and scale and packs in enough incident to cover two "Godfather" movies.

Mainly Blank City shows a succession of engaging, intelligent, middle-aged people showing some very bad home movies that they once hoped were something more.

A minor but sometimes touching documentary.

A letdown despite its intriguing premise.

Uneven, occasionally silly, true, but it's also an improvement over 2006's "X-Men: The Last Stand."

The film itself seems to be going nowhere slowly, but in this case, that's mostly a good thing. It allows observant writer-director Matt McCormick to take his time on the small moments and make us care more about his characters.

In a deceptively low-key manner, Danish filmmaker Michael Madsen has beautifully crafted one of the most provocative movies of the year.

Is it good bad? Nah. It's just bad. It's so bad it makes "Machete," the other movie based on a mock trailer from "Grindhouse," look like high-gloss Kubrickian satire.

A movie that's loving and wistful and often hysterically funny.

A ghastly sequel to a charming animated film.

This dark and seedy follow-up to 2009's blockbuster comedy has a quite a retro message - suggesting that civilized men carry inside them a monster, a "demon" within, that requires constant taming.

L'amour Fou engages and moves viewers in two distinct ways. It engages us by showing us something we don't know about that's interesting. It moves us by showing us something we immediately understand, that has nothing to do with being a big shot and everything to do with being just another person at the mercy of time.

For all of its brutal flashbacks and heavy-handed devices, The First Grader works best when it works quietly.

Sometimes corny, often funny and just as often touching, their act has been wowing Kiwis for decades.

This isn't absurdity. This is nonsense - and it's as boring as nonsense.

An honest, fair and quite voyeuristic look into avatars and the real-life humans who control them in Second Life.

A must-see movie that could have used a sharper edge.

The story is painfully simplistic, and it becomes quickly apparent that the narrative is a crude cement to hold together the carnage.

Nostalgia for the Light is a strange and stunning work of art: a poem disguised as a movie about astronomers in the Atacama desert of Chile.

The movie's mixture of romance and noir, its air of menace and a certain occasional playfulness suggest the filmmakers have been thinking about Polanski and Hitchcock.

Hesher is about as awful as independent films get, a mix of ugliness and unearned sentiment, with a flat story, repellent and pathetic characters and dialogue that consists of lots of stammering and cursing.

There are too many somber interludes with nothing going on but an acoustic guitar echoing over the soundtrack, the spareness of the score suggesting the emptiness of the characters' lives.

A film of great hilarity, humanity, idiosyncrasy and grade-A, eyebrow-singeing raunch.

Skillfully made and offering moments of great power, the French Canadian drama Incendies nevertheless overplays its hand, piling tragedy on tragedy until we feel browbeaten with misery.

Art history lessons don't get much better: Cave of Forgotten Dreams presents the world's oldest paintings captured by one of film's great visionaries.

A crappy 3-D conversion job mars this otherwise competent, energetic and cheerfully hambone Marvel adaptation from director Kenneth Branagh.

Bottaro finds ways to dramatize chess, and the environments are fascinating throughout.