At 93 minutes, Lady could stand to be longer. The conversations between the women could go further. Nwosu is digging around in fertile ground, but there’s always a sense that things could go deeper. As it is, the film excels at depicting the complexity of female friendship within a devastating and isolating economic landscape.

In this film about war, told by those who survived it, it’s war’s futility that rings loud and clear.

There isn’t a predictable or hackneyed exchange in the drama, which understands not just the immense challenges its characters face but also the throwaway humor that can be essential to a family’s connective tissue.

Understanding the life and work of Luis Valdez is a way to broaden one’s understanding of what it means to be American, perhaps now more than ever. Watching this enlightening and entertaining documentary is a good way to start.

Alternately disturbing and brutally funny, and ending with the sort of capper that perfectly encapsulates its provocative ethos, this marks an auspicious directorial debut for Oscar Boyson.

A sci-fi-action-comedy-thriller loaded with zippy style, upbeat humor and sneaky heart.

The heart of this action-comedy that’s really a high-concept girlfriend movie is Ginger Minj and Jujubee, their characterizations in perfect sync, their rapport endearing and their triumph-of-the-underdog arc something worth rooting for.

If at times the dramatic balance feels off, or the passion exasperating in particularly Gallic ways (l’amour!), Desplechin and his superb cast convincingly bring the angsty emotions to a place of unexpected brightness and clarity.

Like a photograph developing in a bath of chemicals, Kreutzer’s strategies and themes slowly become clearer, and the scene isn’t pretty.

A Woman’s Life is, in its own way, something almost as gratifying: an elegant, enjoyable sophomore outing that proves the breakout was no fluke.

It’s such a seamless, harmoniously composed work, effortlessly edited and elegantly shot, that it’s almost too easy to just drift along with it, like floating down a river on a canoe, letting its currents take control. This isn’t a grabby, attention seeker of a film, but a quiet, watchful sort of movie that whispers its secrets sotto voce.

Club Kid isn’t really a whitewashed vanity project. It’s a confident, exciting directorial debut, stylish in an unobtrusive way and agreeably paced.

More powerful than an argument or a treatise, The Last Interview is an immersive experience. It will be a reminder for some and an eye-opener for others of why John Lennon mattered to people, and why his murder was so shattering.

Everything is connected in a movie that never ditches its razor-sharp view of class exploitation.

There’s nothing simple or reductive about the emotional throughlines the documentary traces. It embraces the complexities of a man who turned artifice into a kind of superpower, whether he was dreaming up scenarios for fashion spreads or confronting an America as far removed from haute couture Manhattan as you could get.

It's a pleasure to experience Scorsese as a circus master. One just hopes he doesn't continue in this vein.

So has "Percy Jackson" successfully cracked the "Potter" code? In terms of overall quality, not even close. Still, the film's carefully calibrated mixture of CGI-enhanced spectacle, diverting (and blood-free) action sequences and adolescent angst could make it a modest hit with the eight to 12-year-old set.

Crazy Heart lacks that spark of originality. So what Fox Searchlight has salvaged essentially is a highly watchable performance by Bridges, one of many he has furnished throughout a long career.

The collision of adolescent hormones and parental folly, hardly new cinematic territory, gets a bracing absurdist slant in Youth in Revolt.

Bullock is an irrepressible hoot in writer-director John Lee Hancock's otherwise thoroughly conventional take on Michael Lewis' fact-based book "The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game."

Director John Hillcoat has performed an admirable job of bringing Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel to the screen as an intact and haunting tale, even at the cost of sacrificing color, big scenes and standard Hollywood imagery of post-apocalyptic America.

There is a lot of very black humor; and it develops, somewhat surprisingly, into something suggesting a kind of cheerful pessimism.

What Meyers doesn't do is take chances. She sticks to formula and predictability. In "Complicated," this is as much a matter of casting as writing.

This is a pretty minor film from the filmmaker. It feels like more of an exercise in plotting and movie nostalgia than a story about real people.

Eye-popping special effects ensure that this movie will be a smash hit, and while it's entertaining for most of its excessive running time, the cheesy script fails to live up to the grandeur of the physical production.

Emily Blunt, one of the best and most glamorous actresses to come out of England in recent years, makes an unusual but highly successful choice for the young Victoria.

Even if The Men Who Stare at Goats is not worth comparing to "Dr. Strangelove," it should satisfy audiences with its great cast and patent absurdities, coated in quaint nostalgia for the happy hippie days of yore.

Andre Techine's many admirers will not be disappointed by his latest offering, The Girl on the Train, but they might be hard-pressed to define it.