Norman is the "freak" bullied and ostracized and otherwise degraded by the alive-and-well crowd. Such is the outcast fate of most heroes in the best children's tales. And ParaNorman, a ghoulishly delightful exercise in stop-motion animation, is a very good children's tale indeed.

More entertaining than a dozen Major League Baseball games stacked on top of one another.

In truth, there is not much this film does not cover; every minute of Luce is saturated with the organicism of its sharp lines of inquiry and its actors here are at their best in their handling of their given materials.

Although no single documentary could give a comprehensive account of the Roma’s culture and history, Yeger’s doc offers a sobering, often harrowing understanding of a people and the workings of genocide.

Inevitably, all this seems just too diffuse, and a set of uniformly adept performances (even Harrelson puts a leash on his usual histrionics) tends to be wasted in an only intermittently engaging movie.

Delivers a touching, morally outraged portrait that, in memory of Swartz, may inspire people to ask hard questions about how the new world is being shaped away from view, behind closed doors.

It's a movie intent on telling us the hotshots were heroes, without sufficiently dramatizing either their professional decisions or their private lives.

The humour doesn’t go nearly as deep as the science of “looking eternity in the eye,” resulting in a neat-enough educational experience, if not a fulfilling work of documentary cinema.

It's a treat because, making no apologies for the source material, director Guillermo del Toro lets his picture gorge on power bars of pop energy, sugared with sprinkles of playful humour, and, at least twice, laced with a visual style so piercingly keen that horror morphs into beauty. Not bad for a pulpy outing.

Consequently, Ephron is forced to shape and integrate the twin halves of the picture, and she does a splendid job - the intercutting is always fluid and never mechanical. Better yet, the script keeps surprising us, setting up stock situations and then pulling away from a stock treatment.

In short, there are an awful lot of subplots and comic characters but none of the actors in this star-studded cast is allowed to build his laughs and the Coens just abandon several of these vivid personalities along the way.

“SEE THE MOVIE THAT NO AUDIENCE CAN OUTLAST!” – after actually taking in The Painted Bird, I can confirm that the horror more or less matches the headlines.

Laurent is determined in mapping the depiction of the patriarchal violence endured under both the supposition of scientific method as well as the social order of the world outside of the institution; however, the film struggles to keep a similar pace and substance within its story world.

The Color Purple arrives as a confused byproduct of the industry’s best intentions and worst habits.

The result is hallucinatory and puzzling, but never anything less than captivating.

Teenmeister John Hughes, begatter of Pretty in Pink and Ferris Bueller's Day Off, has permitted Planes, Trains and Automobiles to be promoted as his first "adult" feature, but it's actually a re-run of a movie he wrote in 1983, National Lampoon's Vacation, another primitive cartoon for the kinds of adults who find Neil Simon too sophisticated. [27 Nov 1987]

This film and Salinger's novel differ greatly in the details of narrative and character. Yet, there's no mistaking the similarity in tone and sensibility and, particularly, in the capacity to split an audience into warring camps fighting on shared ground.

Call me biased, but I'm quick to put out the welcome mat for any movie – good, bad or indifferent – that resists easy categorizing. That's certainly the charm of Safety NotGuaranteed, which flirts with two very different genres yet never goes steady with either.

Hall creates a fierce, uncompromising portrait of a woman who was prescient enough to see the dark places her culture was headed – the logical end game of our “if it bleeds, it leads” obsessions – but also damaged enough to succumb to them.

For those who enjoyed J.J. Abrams’s frisky relaunch of Star Trek back in 2009, the good news is that the new Star Trek Into Darkness is more of the same. The bad news is that Star Trek Into Darkness is, well, a bit too familiar.

It is a remarkably beautiful portrait of agony, anchored by Craig’s remarkably understated performance. But it’s also a film at odds with itself.

The Great Invisible is a dense, disturbing look at the effects (personal, political, economic, ecological, macro, micro) of the disaster.

The story of the colony’s exile and return feels like a dull sermon, but the animals themselves, with their expressive faces and Moe Howard hairdos, can switch from slapstick to pathos faster than Charlie Chaplin.

Whereas Jang’s original film was driven by a funky visual inventiveness that embraced wacky comedy over repellent and snide creepiness, Lanthimos’s version merely doubles down on the filmmakers’ most annoying tendencies: obvious observations about power dynamics, ostensibly outrageous acts of violence that underline a juvenile affinity for shock humour, and an overall contemptuous view of humanity that is played for easy, repetitive yuks.

Brought to life with a smooth and almost restrained kind of animation – all rounded edges and frames designed to breathe, rather than hyperactively cram in as much action as possible – and paced with a confident speed, Orion and the Dark will charm and entrance.

The film's dramatic and thematic ends could have been served just as well, if not better, by skipping the invention and sticking to the no less gripping figures and the no less wrenching dilemmas that history actually provided. [21 Oct 1983]

But like Tasya, Possessor succeeds in getting under your skin. If this is just a taste of what Brandon Cronenberg has in store for cinema, then long live the new flesh.

Glodell never lets his creation spin out of control. Bellflower revs the engine of an exciting new maverick.