The film manages to make the ordinary extraordinary. It takes visual risks, tells its story subjectively through images and moves confidently to a stunning, imaginative climax.

This restrained drama of lifelong friends drifting in separate directions is a quietly rich and resonant portrait of disconnection.

Annoyingly shallow, filled with one-note characters, and not half as daring as it seems to think it is.

The movie around Stallone is fairly dreadful, so overly stylized and poorly written that it's always a struggle to stay oriented.

In the face of intolerance, Two Family House lovingly celebrates the triumph of love and acceptance over prejudice.

It's a magical film -- an exquisitely made and exceedingly wise family drama that communicates a touching sense of the universality of the human condition, and leaves us with the rich emotional satisfaction we just don't seem to get often at the movies anymore.

It's hard to figure exactly what the point of this movie is -- except maybe to expose the myth of samurai machismo.

It's an unpleasant experience, and a long one, that gets more morose and melodramatic as it goes along.

Stiller is enjoyably long-suffering, and De Niro convinces us that Attila the Hun would make a preferable father-in-law.

To be fair, Aronofsky has a knack for stylistic overkill, and his hammering onslaught is undeniably riveting, at first anyway.

A genre-twisting surprise.

There's a real joy to this film, a love of the music and an appreciation of the band's eccentric humor.

It really does communicate an optimistic sense that race is irrelevant and we can all live happily ever after together.

In the end, dark comedy drives the film, but it's overwhelmed by a desire to be liked, really liked.

No one does this genre better than actor-writer-director Christopher Guest.

No style, no irony and no smarts, just a vicious streak that lasts 90 minutes.

As a goofy little fantasy, however, this film has loads of charm.

Fairly incompetent as a musical and rather silly as a drama.

An extraordinarily absorbing neo-realistic tragedy.

It assumes considerable knowledge of his life and times. But, with even a little of the familiarity it demands, the movie is something special.

Not faithful enough to be an adaptation, too misguided to be considered an interpretation, and not funny enough to be a parody, this film would do well not to advertise its inspiration.

A perfectly competent, if undistinguished, action film that smoothes over all the most interesting bumps in the drama.

At its best when exploring grieving and loss and anger, but Shear turns it into spiritual shock treatment.

The big downside of the film is that it always feels slightly contrived.

It's not only the most gentle and effortlessly funny movie so far this year, it's a film with a style and sensibility that wonderfully harkens back to Hollywood's golden age of sophisticated comedy, and in particular to the masterpieces of Crowe's filmmaking idol, Billy Wilder.

Edgy, hard-boiled crime drama that is very much in this Tarantino-esque tradition.

It's compelling, poetic, rebellious, funny and one of the few movies that feels like it's been culled from another time and place yet broodingly bends modern societal taboos.

He (LaBute) pulls the farce and the violence and the fantasies together with a deft touch and a sweetness rare in American films -- especially his.