What makes this film special and memorable is the character of Danny Green, who is not the usual neighborhood hoodlum you see in movies.

Koolhoven is able to strip away both visually and mentally our idealized cinematic notions of how the resistance fighters lived. It's a lonely existence. It's stark and it's scary. And it makes for a compelling movie.

Though Zack Snyder is known as an action director, he is a genuine artist and one of the most exciting and promising filmmakers to emerge in the past 10 years. His new movie, Sucker Punch - let's just say it - is a failure, but there's so much talent on that screen that the movie can't be dismissed as a waste of time.

There are odd comic moments, but this is a bleak, nighttime, nightmare world, where the couple seem to have about the same chance at a happy outcome as the accident victims.

Rodrick Rules has a brighter comic edge than its predecessor - and a bit more spunk.

This latest adaptation of the Charlotte Brontë novel is careful, respectful and even enjoyable, and yet dry, singularly humorless and played without the lavishness of spirit that makes sense of Gothic melodrama.

Later, as the picture becomes a Petrie dish in which James' theories are put to the ultimate test, Certified Copy loses some of its magic, but it retains interest as an appealing and one-of-a-kind experience.

The songs and a couple of strong performances are only good enough to make the film watchable, not exceptional.

It serves up a broad humanistic lesson with absurdism and black comedy more sad than barbed.

Right now, his (Dolan) work is fun to watch. Before long, it may very well be mandatory for anyone who values great filmmaking.

Not only is a good look at a man who carved a small but important niche into the folk world but a good record of the turbulent 1960s and what motivated its protesters.

The story gets away from itself as it barrels forward. The tiny bit of sense it makes at the beginning is quickly sacrificed in a conclusion so facile, illogical and cheap that it could use a dose of NZT itself.

A smart, juicy entertainment, but it's the kind of straight-up legal drama that hinges entirely on crafty storytelling and across-the-board solid performances.

This is a well-made, well-plotted and sensitive movie.

Mars Needs Moms floats about 45 minutes' worth of story in an 88-minute ocean.

It's an observant and heartfelt film, with turns of dialogue that show that writer-director Josh Radnor really can write.

An artfully depraved piece of South Korean torture porn directed by Kim Ji-woon, is a skillful serial-killer thriller in keeping with the likes of "Saw."

Carbon Nation serves us a full portion of scary statistics, but overall tries to accentuate the positive.

The film is never dull. And director Yony Leyser has come up with an ending that will take your breath away. Burroughs would probably be proud.

The battle in Battle: Los Angeles is grab-the-armrest tense until the last seconds.

Catherine Hardwicke's prettified movie is a strange adaptation because it supplants the woodsy horror of the original fairy tale with two new elements: a romantic triangle and a witch hunt.

Does an admirable job of telling the stories of the obsessive Savitsky and other important Soviet artists, such as Alexander Volkov, Aleksei Rybnikov and Mikhail Kurzin.

I liked this movie, maybe more than I should have, and would be happy to see anything this director wants to do next.

It is, all in all, off its rocker. But it's gorgeous.

This is a beautiful film, full of gray-and white-haired men who grow in stature before our eyes.

Every last joke in the movie - verbal gags, visual gags, musical cues, camera moves - is crushingly literal.

For some, this sort of thinking is a much-needed revolution in human consciousness. For others, it's little more than New Age platitudes and questionable science.

A doleful melodrama. There are some intense, moving sequences, but too much emotional badgering and a general shortage of finesse.