Best of all is Favreau. Instead of mass-producing another superhero epic, he has given the overfed public a dish of right-sized comfort food.

It's an original that plays as if it were based on a novel.

A rebuke to the genteel period costume dramas that have long reigned as arthouse staples. Working from a screenplay by Alice Birch, director William Oldroyd turns the genre on its head, penetrating the pretty exteriors that conceal wild and dangerous emotions.

As the central character in “Polar Bear,” Ruffalo impressively explores the geography of a troubled mind, and makes the journey fascinating.

A terrific but uncompromising film that's definitely not for everyone.

It's not warm and fuzzy, but for kids who comprehended "Coraline" and babysitters who savored "The Corpse Bride," this stop-motion marvel from some of the same animators is like an early Halloween treat.

The storytelling is solid, propelled by characters that you come to care about.

An art film in the classic sense — ambitious, provocative and hard to shake off.

Energetic, colorful and packed with strong performances and musical numbers good enough to get by, Sparkle beams brightly.

A co-star deserving special mention is Nebraska itself, which Payne films in black-and-white to mirror the austerity of life on the de-populated prairie. These corners of the Cornhusker State are as empty as the promise of a sweepstakes prize. In this land of ghosts, one old pioneer tries to grab his stake before he becomes another windblown husk.

Although it's a guilty pleasure, The Queen of Versailles is artful enough that both the prosecution and the defense could invoke it when the peasants cry "Off with their heads!"

As usual, Ridley is immensely appealing as a born warrior with an indestructible sense of right and wrong. Her expressive face lends the fantastical goings-on an emotional resonance.

Zootopia is visually rich, with a fully realized cityscape and an action-filled train station during commuter rush that would take several viewings to fully appreciate. It’s emotionally rich, too, a film that promises to have staying power far beyond spring break.

In a first-rate cast, Titieni turns in a brilliant performance as a man who sacrifices long-held values to bow to the expediency of the moment.

Despite the obvious mismatches involved, this isn’t a simplistic smackdown. Freighted with weighty issues, Captain Phillips is a film worth debating.

Gilchrist ("United States of Tara") is immensely appealing as a kid who's just a bit too wrapped up in himself to grasp that perhaps his problems aren't insurmountable.

In one of his best roles, Hawke is galvanizing as a man who has lost his way and is desperately searching for meaning in his life. And as Mary, Seyfried turns in a poignant and beautifully nuanced performance. Provocative and mesmerizing, First Reformed is a film that demands to be seen.

An offbeat and fascinating film.

May be too sterile and stylized to elicit real tears, but it's got brains and heart to spare.

Films often fail to capture the turmoil of being a teenager — but not this one.

Fresh is a brilliant first feature by young writer-director Boaz Yakin. It works superbly on at least three levels: as a portrait of the sad toll that ghetto life takes on promising children, as a story of the tenacious moral bonds that can hold a family together, and as a down and dirty thriller. [02 Sep 1994, p.3H]

If you can take it, Unbroken will lift you like the classics of adventure cinema.

By turning a whistle-blower into a tragicomic figure, Soderbergh sustains our interest in a complicated financial scheme and rewards it with a kickback of ghastly laughs.

At once a fascinating character study and a scathing indictment of the role of the medical-pharmaceutical complex in exacerbating the AIDS crisis, the fact-based Dallas Buyers Club is one of the best films of the year.

Many of the people reading this review are doing it on a computer. And all of them are reading it in English. It’s not much of stretch to say that you could credit both of those things to a man named Alan Turing.

Imagine an opulent movie palace that was 30,000 years old, with posters preserved on the curving walls and the bones of the Stone Age patrons peacefully sleeping in the fairy dust. That's essentially what archeologists found in a French canyon in 1994 and what Werner Herzog brings back to life in the extraordinary documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams.

Benton and novelist Russo are particularly good at bringing out the grit and grace of small towns, where concern for one's neighbors and sheer nosiness are two sides of the same coin. But above all, Nobody's Fool is another triumph for one of our greatest and most enduring movie actors. [13 Jan 1995, p.3E]

Like Elizabeth Olsen in "Martha Marcy May Marlene," Oduye brilliantly slips inside the skin of a sensitive young woman who's having trouble finding her place in the world.