Fiennes thrives under his own direction, but such is his sense of balance that everyone else thrives, too.

Don't expect an in-depth study or exposé in Carol Channing: Larger Than Life. But director Dori Berinstein does capture the essence of Carol as one of those creatures of the theater that when you see her onstage, you know you've seen something special.

Writer-director Patric Chiha directs the proceedings with incredible restraint, which works both for and against him. Yes, it allows the actors to shine with some subtle, quiet moments, and prevents things from going over the top, but somehow Aunt Nadine and restraint don't belong in the same sentence.

Unabashedly weepy, lyrical in tone, and yet it cuts through the melodrama and stands as an honest depiction of young people who don't know all the answers but have the intellectual capacity to figure them out.

If, in the end, the movie fails to generate much beyond several crackling jump scares and a nicely gothic mise-en-scene, it has enough mood, and enough Radcliffe, to carry us through the mist.

Though the movie drips and aches with good intentions, I do wonder how lesbians may feel about seeing lesbianism presented as a mere traumatized distortion of female heterosexuality.

Bala, by the way, means "bullet." Laura Zúñiga, the real-life beauty queen on whom the film is loosely based, was called "Miss Narco" in the Mexican press.

What a treat to find a movie so bright-eyed and true - without a trace of bathos - in its depiction of such a harrowing subject.

Man on a Ledge doesn't aim high, but what it aims to do, it does. It grabs the audience's attention, engages its anxieties, stokes its resentments and, at the finish, sends people out saying, "That was good."

A handsome but gabby take on the standard survivalist thriller that's more concerned with lofty metaphysics than which poor blockhead is about to bite it next.

With excellent animation, gobs of action, mystical mayhem and more twists and turns than you can count, Fullmetal Alchemist: The Sacred Star of Milos - the latest installment of the anime sensation from Japan - is not likely to disappoint its fans. Or the uninitiated.

The film's subject, a whistle-blowing research scientist who played a key role in the fight to regulate tobacco, deserves to be celebrated.

Moaadi is the standout here, subtly evoking filial worry and fatherly pride in one scene, popping off with rage in another: He's believably decent, believably flawed. A Separation touches on religious strictures and the role of women in Iran, but it does so with a light hand and not a twitch of condemnation.

What's missing is any hint of realism. There's no grit to it anywhere.

It's a far better thing to remember Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close than to watch it. Looking back, much of what is irritating, precious and tiresome about the movie recedes and drops away, while all the movie's virtues, which are considerable, rise to consciousness. There are good things here - just be prepared to blast for them.

Beautiful in a girl-from-the-neighborhood sort of way, Carano inhabits Soderbergh's elaborate frame with wit, physicality and just a hint of ironic distance, the suggestion of someone who's not overawed by the opportunity or taking herself too seriously.

The first Russian musical in more than 50 years, Hipsters is appreciated best as a curiosity.

The film isn't half as deep as intended, but parts of it are very funny - someone actually barfs onto a stack of art books - and the parts that aren't may as well be.

Like most ruckuses, it is frequently loud and not always intelligible.

Let's start by admitting three things: that Contraband is a ridiculous movie, that it wasn't meant to be a ridiculous movie, and that it's an enjoyable movie. One of the things that makes it enjoyable is that it's so ridiculous.

Imagine a biopic about Ronald Reagan that leaves out Gorbachev but instead dramatizes his years with Alzheimer's, and you'll get an idea of this film's misplaced focus.

Unless you're a fan of Fishbone, Everyday Sunshine is probably just a documentary about a band you've never heard of, whose music you probably will not like. But there's a bigger and more interesting subject at work in this film. It's a movie about what it's like to almost make it in the music business, but not really, not quite. It's about coming close and watching it slip away.

The film is a vehement drama and a fitfully amusing snark fest set to Nicola Piovani's jaunty circus music. It winds up only half-succeeding at both.

A mix of the powerful and the ridiculous, and eventually the ridiculous wins. The movie deals with a big subject that has received scant treatment in movies - the genocide in Bosnia in the 1990s - giving voice and testimony to what happened there. But the ill-conceived fictional elements take the picture right off the rails.

The film benefits most of all from Rees' careful screenplay, which dances that shifting line between fear and emergent hope. One of Alike's poems says it best: "Even breaking is opening. And I am broken. I am open."

A mystical masterpiece about a lonely man who helps a widower perform last rites for his wife, is an astonishing, haunting, sensual, lyrical, bleak and ultimately beautiful road-trip movie.

Affecting at times, but finally feels overblown and heavy-handed.

The film is sweet. Its observations of life in the aftermath of death ring true, especially for anyone who's traveled the contours of mourning. And although it doesn't rank among Crowe's greatest films, it's a better, tighter, more disarming piece of grief work than his baggy and zigzaggy "Elizabethtown."