Ali has done such a masterful job laying out his tableau that we’re not only enamored with the characters, we want to know where they end up.

It's a highly entertaining, big-budget, kick-butt kung fu movie, the best of its kind since Jet Li's "Fearless" in 2006.

Sure, not everything is great. Here and there, the movie goes out of its way to be sentimental. But The Lovebirds is a pleasing comedy, funny from beginning to end. That should be enough for anybody.

Thought-provoking, insightful and entertaining.

Contrived and overly schematic, but De Niro and Hoffman are such good actors that it never slips into pat sentiment.

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.

In Mimic, director Guillermo Del Toro has created a dark, grotesque world that's hard to look at, and impossible to stop looking at.

Charming and witty, it's also somewhat clumsy.

What The Thomas Crown Affair has to sell audiences is a fantasy of the life of the super-rich who jet off to Martinique on the spur of the moment, and the super-smart who operate outside the rules.

It's so wonderfully silly, coarse and down-to-Earth that its radiance sneaks up only over time.

Berlin is still a subject very much worth exploring on film, and his observations as an aged man are even more fascinating than the statements he made as an artist in his prime.

Men will watch Crazy, Stupid, Love thinking they're finding out things about women, but if anything, this movie works the other way. Women will get a glimpse into the male mind.

This is one of those rare films nowadays that might have been helped with a few extra minutes. Yet at the same time, that’s a clear sign that Hill has created a world and a set of characters that have kept us engaged throughout.

In almost any other filmmaker’s oeuvre, this film would be considered a highlight. But for the director who made “Hannah and Her Sisters,” “Match Point” and “Blue Jasmine”? It’s right up there with “Melinda and Melinda” and “Scoop.” Good, not great.

Tom O’Connor’s script hits all the right notes, and Dominic Cooke’s direction brings out unspoken subtleties of the characters and their interactions.

The obvious thing to expect here is that writer-director Christian Petzold is using the Undine”myth as a metaphor. But no, he’s doing the actual myth.

There have been many adultery movies over the years, but Leaving has some aspects that make it different and interesting.

Darkman is big, stupid and wonderful -- an absurd, grand-scale adventure and a vicious comedy rolled into one nasty, unpleasant, hard-to-resist mess. [24 Aug. 1990, p.E1]

The sum is difficult to watch. But this isn't a film against Islam or religion in general: A clear distinction is made between Allah's more vicious followers and the mercy of Allah himself.

For a thoroughly fascinating, true glimpse into the horrors that vanity and self-delusion can wreak, take some time to see The Baader Meinhof Complex.

Old is, at times, clumsy and obvious, but it’s different and weird, and it taps into something essential. It might be a distant second to The Sixth Sense, but it’s the second-best movie Shyamalan has made.

Shepard always keeps things on track, and his well-paced, beautifully scored film makes us see San Francisco in an atypical light as welcoming and beautiful, yes, but also bewildering, lonely and intimidating. Indeed, though all the refugees make varying degrees of progress, we can’t help but feel that a rocky road still lies ahead for them.

Things get quite Gothic in the film’s final stretch, with genre add-ons that “Garden” purists may also find distasteful. The extra melodrama can feel unnecessary. However, it leads to moments of life-restoring beauty (core theme here again) and love.

This isn’t just a good horror film. It’s a good film, which just happens to fall in the horror genre.

To the extent that this difficult but ultimately rewarding film has a message, it's that you can't run away from who you are.

Funnier, sunnier and even more violent than its predecessor, “Nobody 2” ups the ante in the cinematic action department as well.

Efficient action thriller.

Quietly unsettling.