This paean to youthful irresponsibility applies the right crude and rude 'tude to its bulging sack of gags to have the desired effect on its target audience.

Ordinary in some ways and extraordinary in others, The Spectacular Now benefits from an exceptional feel for its main characters on the parts of the director and lead actors.

Despite the world-changing ramifications inherent to the plot, the results are more tedious than thrilling.

There's little facetious comedy a la the "Pirates of the Caribbean" series. It's all traditional stuff, done well but without an original spark.

There's more than enough going on here to compensate for the script's occasional tendency towards on-the-nose exposition of feelings, and evasive contrivances.

Despite the familiarity of this setup, Way Back is a charmer, putting refreshingly little emphasis on Duncan's romantic needs and allowing family melodrama to erupt and simmer down without pat resolution.

Jeff Nichols’ much-anticipated follow-up to his breakthrough second feature Take Shelter feels less adventurous and unsettling but remains a well carpentered piece of work marked by some fine performances and resilient thematic fiber.

Approaching the first half of the film fairly conventionally, Stewart then misses the opportunity to capitalize on shifting to more full-on genre mode.

The film’s small scale is more than compensated for by its insights into adolescent awareness, the passions stoked by global causes and the moral hypocrisy of the ideologically righteous.

Webber’s key influence appears to be ultra-naturalistic contemporary European cinema, most specifically French, and The End of Love hits that mark often enough to make it affecting.

Managing to be neither sentimental nor sensationalistic, the film tells its story from the heart, and from the simple, straightforward viewpoint of young heroine Komona, warmly played by the talented Rachel Mwanza in her screen debut.

A highly original film of uncompromising, other-worldly beauty. Leviathan demands to be seen, even if it means you never eat seafood again.

Paying slavish homage to culty genre predecessors from the sixties, seventies and eighties, this steamy tale of a hunky screenwriter, his ethereal blood-sucking paramour and her bad-girl sister can't quite decide whether to be seductively stylish or knowingly cheesy.

Beyond the Hills is less fun than any film about lesbian nuns and their psychotic ex-lovers ought to be. But it is an engrossingly serious work, and confirms Mungiu as a maturing talent with more universal stories to tell than those defined by Romania’s recent political past.

This material would never have attracted a major studio, so Christy Walton — heir to the Wal-Mart fortune — financed the picture herself, not because of any desire to become a movie mogul but simply because of her passion for the novel. She allowed the filmmakers to work without major stars or obvious commercial hooks added to the story. Although the film doesn’t always sustain dramatic impact, its fidelity to the spirit of the novel is impressive.

The opportunity to see the stunning footage on the big screen is not to be missed, and the narration by Daniel Craig, delivered with James Bond-style drollness, makes it as much fun to listen to as to watch.

The director mixes moods with a playfulness that is both brazen and carefree and yet precisely modulated, yielding results that amplify the specific content of the screenplay. This makes for a film that, however cheap it was to make, is incredibly rich to watch.

It has hypnotic visual style and a dense, driving soundscape. But it’s also too monotonous and thematically empty to be seriously provocative.

Sanders and DeMicco’s script doesn’t have the robust plotting, consistent wit or flavorful character development of the best family animation. And some of the voice actors have too little to work with.

A character-driven take on true-crime fare, Alex Karpovsky's Rubberneck marks a solid dramatic turn for a filmmaker best known for playing comedic parts in indie films like "Tiny Furniture."

Unusual for this sort of thing, Snitch is a film after which you remember the characters and actors more than the big action moments.

The picture has enough entertainment value to tickle its target audience and even offers a few chuckles for accompanying adults. A strong cast and bright -- if uninspired — animation help to offset a thin story.

A curiosity telling the President's story through the eyes of longtime friend Ward Hill Lamon, it's of interest only to serious history-hounds and techies curious about its unusual green-screen production.

A thriller element that has not been present in earlier Sparks movies is designed to draw reluctant male viewers to see the picture, but they won’t respond with the same enthusiasm as his core audience of woozy romantics.

Unfortunately, John Moore has directed these sequences in a way that makes the incidents look so far-fetched and essentially unsurvivable that you can only laugh.

Nicely cast and made with as much conviction as can be brought to something so intrinsically formulaic.

This lushly and pretentiously made drama about a young American whose worst instincts are unleashed during a stay in Paris endeavors to entice with details of the seedy underworld of La Pigalle but is a turn-off in almost every respect.

Nutty, arcane and jaw-dropping in equal measure, this is a head-first plunge down the rabbit hole of Kubrickiana from which, for some, there is evidently no return.