It's the human struggle that makes this a sci-fi masterpiece.

Notes on a Scandal is a wobbly film that never settles on its tone or, perhaps more precisely, its voice. It can't figure out what kind of movie it wants to be: a high-camp melodrama, a realistic psychological portrait of a troubled female friendship, or a vampire-lesbian horror film.

Law gives a doozy of a performance: He's fond of bulging his eyes, curling his head like a gargoyle, and displaying a set of rotten yellow teeth. This is some of the most flamboyantly bad acting since Brad Pitt in "Twelve Monkeys" (1995). An Oscar nomination would appear inevitable.

Straight Outta Compton is, undoubtedly, a nostalgia trip, but, this being NWA, it’s one you take in a ’64 Impala with height-adjustable suspension. It’s a loud, stylish ride.

It's often funny and smart, but seldom deeply involving, and practically never scary.

Especially during its third-act descent into the surreal netherworld of its protagonist’s mind, Friendship plays out as if it were a 97-minute-long I Think You Should Leave sketch.

This is a dazzling movie, yet some people (not kids, but maybe their parents) will be put off by its Grand Guignol ghoulishness.

Quinceañera is a rare bird of an indie, a sharp-eyed analysis of class conflict that still manages to leave you as choked up as a proud auntie on her niece's 15th birthday.

Something appalling about the way he turns to the camera with a look of sorrow: Michael Moore as a suffering Christ. It's an insult to his own movie, which at its considerable best transcends his thuggish personality.

Pure misery.

The world didn't need a remake of The Thomas Crown Affair. We didn't need it, but we got it anyway -- and it's pretty terrific.

Smoothly narrated and is packed with some wonderful quirks. Nonetheless, it could have taken more to heart the lovely paradox it reserves for Jessica: that we most become ourselves in our capacity to surprise ourselves.

The best thing about Seabiscuit is that it will make a lot of people hungry to read the book. They've seen the pretty pictures; now they'll want to enter the world.

Above all, Mickey 17 is remarkable for the savagery of its satire of 21st-century capitalism.

This isn’t the churning of ambiguities; it’s a muddle, a mess.

It’s a meditation on life and a touching ensemble picture, smuggled in by Streep’s star power and Soderbergh’s constant quest for innovation.

The moment when things clicked into place for me was when Herzog, in his trademark Bavarian deadpan, read a quotation from Alexander Yakovlev, one of Gorbachev’s key advisers during perestroika: “It was as if we were blind men trying to trade a mirror to deaf people in exchange for a balalaika”—a Herzogian image if there ever was one.

The film's most striking repeated effect, in which the caped hero dangles dejectedly in space as the Earth turns below him, emphasizes the passivity and loneliness of the character: This Superman's version of flight seems almost indistinguishable from a helpless freefall. Fair enough, but what's he got to be so existentially glum about?

The smartest, funniest, and best-looking sci-fi comedy since the movies learned to morph.

This is very much a first feature, with all the hyperbolic, sometimes indiscriminate cinematic energy of a student film. But it's also sensational, a febrile meditation on the mathematics of existence.

The result is a pop documentary in the Morgan Spurlock mode, cheeky and smart without being too serious.

The movie, directed by Kyle Balda and adapted by Craig Mazin from Leonie Swann’s novel Three Bags Full, is endlessly charming and pleasingly clever, as well as surprisingly moving in spots. And, oh yes, it’s about death.

Fascinating for the issues--ethical, aesthetic, psychoanalytic--it raises. But it doesn't fully come together.

Guillermo del Toro is in a class with Peter Jackson as a fan-boy who gets it--a brilliant filmmaker who has a kind of metabolic connection to horror and sci-fi that helps him transform secondhand genre material into something deep and nourishing. Del Toro reaches into himself and finds the Wagnerian grandeur in schlock.

If the Coen brothers’ dramas are cautionary tales, their comedies are veritable how-to guides for people who can’t help but enjoy a mirthless chuckle at the humility of human existence. Yeah, the joke is on us, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t funny.

Igby Goes Down got a reaction from me: I think it's the movie of the year. I squirmed, I laughed a lot.

I was onboard with the gentle charm of Safety Not Guaranteed until these last few scenes, when the genuine trauma suffered by these characters - especially Kenneth, whose paranoia and isolationism seem like symptoms of real mental illness - gets glossed over in an unconvincingly Spielbergian happy ending.

He’s (Abrams) caught some of the spark of the first Star Trek without either mimicking or desecrating the original.