Rust and Bone is a movie about letting go of shame and making way for the advent of pleasure. Let that be your guide to watching it as well.

Management remains for the most part as endearing as its leads. Steve Zahn is a wonderful actor who's spent too long in the "hey, it's that guy" best-friend role.

It's sweet-spirited, visually delightful (if aurally cacophonous), and it will make for a pleasant enough family afternoon at the movies. But we've come to expect so much more than mere pleasantness from Pixar that Cars 2 feels almost like a betrayal.

The film, smoothly directed by David Dobkin, has a neat farcical structure but is too in love with its overly tight-lipped protagonist and deadpan pacing.

Noise is never quite as smart as it tries to be. But as summer and its mouth-breathing blockbusters loom large on the horizon, there's something touching about a movie that even tries.

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

Laugh for laugh, Pineapple Express is way funnier than "Superbad." It may be the funniest mainstream comedy released so far this year (not that that means much when you've got "The Love Guru" pulling down your average).

Role Models may not set its sights very high, but it comes by its emotional payoff honestly. And why isn't Paul Rudd in greater demand as a romantic comedy lead?

At times this gritty, intermittently gripping police drama feels like a follow-up to "The Messenger" - not just because of the thematic overlap (both films deal with grief, substance abuse, and self-destructive masculinity), but because Rampart's main character, the cynical, drug-abusing cop played by Woody Harrelson, might be the long-lost twin of the alcoholic Army captain Harrelson played in the earlier Moverman film.

It's nice to see Scorsese back in the saddle and a treat to find a cops-and-robbers thriller with some energy and wit. But even so, it's a stylish head rush of a movie that flies by, even at two-and-a-half hours, and keeps turning the knife (and your stomach) up to the final scene.

It’s a welcome sight, seeing him carry a movie again. He’s austere and fascinating in The Rover, and his seriousness of purpose undercuts any possible campiness in the film’s world-gone-wrong setting: Each scene may be more dire than the last, but we care about Pearce, so we care about the movie.

Haynes sets out to demonstrate the power of popular music to change people's lives--to tell them it's OK to fashion themselves into anything they please.

This little movie isn't a fully accomplished farce - it veers toward sentimentality - but the fact that Peretz even gestures in the direction of farce is somehow cheering.

Nearly every line of dialogue in this adaptation of A Christmas Carol comes directly from the story. What interpolations there are have to do with juicing up the transitions between scenes with unnecessary, but not obnoxiously intrusive, action.

The Last King of Scotland never rises to the standard set by Forest Whitaker's fearless (and fearsome) performance as Idi Amin.

And then comes that transcendent last scene, in which the man whose side we’ve barely left during this incredible ordeal is suddenly revealed as the best kind of hero, not super at all but ordinary and vulnerable and human.

If Mockingjay’s placeholder status is a little too evident in its choppy, shapeless structure, this dark third chapter does have stretches of somber beauty.

Spinal Tap II’s scanty, improvisation-based script means that the story is short on suspense or forward movement; this is a gentle, nostalgic collection of sketches that riff on a four-decade-long experiment in musical and comic collaboration.

At heart, Frank & Robot is, true to its title, a buddy movie about the complicated relationship between a thief and his mechanized sidekick (a sleek, white, helmeted creature voiced with unsettling politeness by Peter Sarsgaard). But it's also a rueful and funny reflection on aging, death, parenthood, and technology.

In Mother, Brooks has essentially made the missing psychiatrist scene of Modern Romance into a feature. There’s no doctor, mind you, and the character’s string of failed marriages is barely dramatized. But the thrust of the film is frankly therapeutic.

Because it pulls off the tricky feat of combining multiple pre-existing Marvel franchises into a reasonably entertaining and tonally coherent whole, The Avengers will likely be hailed as a kind of thinking fan's superhero film, the way Whedon's recent "Cabin in the Woods" functioned as both a horror movie and a critique of same.

He thrilled me, then betrayed me in the end.

All along we've known that the contest was a metaphor for getting your act together BEFORE taking it on the road.

This is ultimately a conversion melodrama, and a clumsy one. But until it goes to hell, it's thrillingly good, a fervid answer to the spate of cop movies that glorify brutality and sanction ends over means.

Beautifully made and unsurpassingly creepy, it's the rare remake with something contemporary to add.

The plot of the Downton Abbey movie is brilliant, not so much because it is surprising, but because it allows every member of the cast to do what we expect of them.

It's fun both to watch and to talk about afterward, and it possesses the elusive rom-com sine qua non: two equally appealing leads who bounce wonderfully off each other.

A whomping good time, if you don’t — and who has time to think when there’s a genetically engineered megadinosaur on the loose?