Erased starts out strong...but for the rest of the running time, we are watching Ben catch up with us, and that makes for uninteresting cinema no matter how kinetic the action.

It's exactly the oddball and crooked tale you'd want and expect from a Cronenberg with all the gratuitous blood, pus, bone and multiple closeups of needles piercing skin you could ask for. Dad would be proud.

No matter how it shakes out, 'Mad Man' will never be more than an interesting curio that provides a basic overview of why Stern matters. But for the rest of us, the images themselves will be the greatest evidence on their own of Stern's innovation in photography, fashion and advertising.

On both a political and a personal level, the film is pessimistic, yes, but it feels truthful, and never lapses into easy cynicism.

Confidently constructed, and aided by an assured focus, Free Angela & All Political Prisoners is a solid tribute a woman who was one of many vital pieces of the civil rights movement, and an insightful study of a time when the American identity -- both politically and socially -- was being drastically reshaped.

Down The Shore at least deserves credit for its strong performances.

It's a very competent black comedy, one that should please audiences looking for something with some bite.

There is no doubt that Greetings From Tim Buckley is respectful, and thanks to Badgley and Rosenfield, does justice to both singers. But the film never quite connects father and son as each sharing the common bond of extraordinary talent or even similar personal woes.

There is little more to Kon-Tiki than a fun, handsomely-mounted, old-style adventure story. And as impressive a feat as that is to achieve, especially outside of Hollywood, which kind of specialises in this sort of thing, those looking for something with more depth from this category may come away a little disappointed.

Regardless of whether this is a film you can handle, it’s a perfect example of the kind of bold new vision that cinephiles should be championing.

Barrett and Wingard are clever filmmakers, but unlike many modern day horror directors, their cleverness never gets in the way. There's an earnestness to the entertainment in You're Next that is truly admirable, and at the end of the day it's a super enjoyable way to spend an hour and a half.

You don’t need to know the resume of Maribel Verdú to know that the “Y Tu Mama Tambien” star is this film’s meal ticket. With an equal division of screentime with her co-star, Verdú’s ferocious sexuality projects that she was meant to become the fairest of them all by sheer force of will.

The more dramatic moments feel unanchored to the more farcical, and the humor ranges erratically from scatological to tender/heartwarming and back to cheap shots at slightly uncomfortable stereotypes. "Uneven" would be the kind way of putting it, but "messy" is probably nearer to the truth.

Retaliation is no masterpiece, but it’s a movie whose fun doesn’t feel like a four-letter word -- popcorn entertainment that not only rivals what you see during summer, but surpasses what you see from Sommers.

Tedious effort.

Eden may be unpleasant, but it's not as grim as you'd imagine, and always compulsively watchable. If only all issue movies were this entertaining.

The film's not merely content with being a twisty psycho-thriller. Boyle and Hodge expertly tweak and tinker with your sympathies, and the characters you initially peg as heroes and villains may not be in the same place by the time things wrap up.

While it hardly reinvents the genre, it’s smart, sharp entertainment that meets expectations dead on, and provides a nifty little story told with just enough spark to make the familiar feel fresh.

The movie is so apolitical; there could have been a nice slant to the movie, about how both sides of the aisle could get together to kick out these Korean terrorists. Instead, it remains totally void.

As every sub plot, reveal and character… err, caricature that is, gets stacked on top of each other, the more inevitable it is that the whole thing will come tumbling down. And while Love is All You Need is by no means a disaster, it simply can’t support all that weight.

It’s as if Weitz knows he’s got a corpse of a film on his hands -- never trust a movie when it feels as though you can see the director clasping the defibrillator.

Pablo Trapero’s White Elephant is a smartly acted, beautifully scored, often bracingly directed film of good intentions and big ambition. Yet it can only be called a modest success, and, in light of how strong some of its individual elements are, even a slight disappointment.

The film isn’t a white knuckle ride, and the pacing can be slow at times, but this is one of those cases where that’s sort of the point, and you certainly don’t begrudge it. A Hijacking is an absorbing, highly moving film.

Presenting a terrifying view of a hidden holocaust and a moral apocalypse in which the most basic humanities have become twisted beyond recognition, The Act of Killing is a towering achievement in filmmaking, documentary or otherwise.

Though it's impressive in many technical and surface ways, The Croods lets us down on the essentials of character and story, and no amount of late-stage father/daughter bonding or vertiginous 3D cliffside tumbling can make up for that.

Gimme The Loot involves drug-dealing, constant foul language and vandalism, but Hickson and Washington, both attractive and charismatic enough to be stars, carry the film with an air of lightweight pleasure, keeping it light and bouncy.

The results are a disturbing mixture of paranormal ghost story and psychological unease.

While it's great to look at, Reality is an empty shell. A feature length examination on the artifice of reality programming, Garrone's film itself is superficial and lacking the same depth of artistry and ideas he finds absent on TV.

There’s so much to like about the film, and it’s a mark of Assayas’ skill that it's a hugely engaging watch despite the blankness of the characters.

It'll get your blood pumping, before it starts spilling down your forehead.

Sturgess and Dunst are two actors who have the potential to excel; “Heartless” and “Melancholia” both hold notable performances from them that serve the story and its themes well. Here though, Solanas does the pair no favors.

If Kiss of the Damned has one thing, it's an identifiable groove, one that is sustained and very, very infectious.

Even with so many talented actors involved, there’s nothing really galvanizing or particularly provocative about Redford’s latest.

For most of the run-time, Welcome To The Punch is thrillingly cinematic, beautifully made, smarter and funnier than you'd expect, and a phenomenal showcase for Creevy and his team.

While the premise of the film is outlandish, the feelings are all real...Director Vogt-Roberts and screenwriter Chris Galletta are in perfect unison on this film, harmonizing to create what feels like a fresh comic voice.

Featuring truly shocking levels of violence but none of the wit or fun of the original, the new Evil Dead is mostly a dud.

It's a comedy so out of touch that jokes disappear before they're even delivered, as if by magic.

As emblematic of the film’s general indifference as anything is Driver’s central, perfectly fine performance.

Its off-the-cuff nature makes for a film that is not flawless – the music is a bit daft, and some of the acting a little too “large” for the intimate setting – but is, from beginning to end, delightful.

Fans of Polley’s work to date will be delighted by a documentary that serves simultaneously as a gripping mystery, a moving record of a family and a fascinating investigation into the nature of truth, memory, and the documentary form itself.

Oplev composes shots with grace and an understanding of where everything is geographically and how scenes relate to each other in the multi-threaded plot. Like everything else in Dead Man Down, his direction is beautiful and brutal at the same time. Whoever thought that this movie would be as entertaining as it is existential is either lying or psychic.

Lowery is the real deal and understands filmmaking, and this is abundantly clear in this searing, romantic crime drama and love story.

The end result provides a range of quality, from the inspired and creative to the lazy and insipid, but one that horror fans will certainly devour.

The movie is never without forward momentum, it's just too bad when just when it's ready to go to interesting places, we jump back to Bonner and Aya's pedestrian romance.

Muddled, muffled and mixing empty comedy with empty dramatics, The We and the I is an abject failure.

It’s not like “The Artist” was gritty, but Populaire is so cotton-candy breezy it makes the Best Picture-winner look like “The Panic in Needle Park.”

Up until the very very end (which uncorks a CLASSIC cop cliché that seemed long dead by now), The Sweeney is straight dumb procedural, no chaser.

Powerful, engaging and, by the finale, moving. And in the end, At Any Price is certainly one of the most impressive reactions to the recent economic crisis (because that’s exactly what it is) that cinema has produced so far.

A brilliant, towering picture, The Place Beyond The Pines is a cinematic accomplishment of extraordinary grace and insight.

It's enjoyable and toe-tapping for what it is, but it's also extremely lightweight stuff.

A beautiful, hearfelt and raw piece of work.

Some good laughs and a passable air of bonhomie do nothing to cover up the fact that The Angels’ Share is totally lightweight and distractingly underdone.

While far from perfect, Welcome To Pine Hill works more often than it doesn’t and is an intimate and existential character study of a man out of place with his past, himself, and his surroundings, and the push and pull of former and future worlds beckoning him.

With the help of a talented cast, The Brass Teapot is able to coast on charm for the first hour, but then the fairytale idea that powers the film runs out of juice, and the last forty-five minutes hurtle toward a wrap-up that feels both awkward and overwrought, needlessly portentous and arriving much too late.

For a movie that tries to create and sustain a sensation of wild unpredictability, it's a huge failure. It's not shocking if we've all seen it a thousand times before. With 21 and Over, it's all been there, drank that.

A valiant attempt to build on the magic of “The Wizard Of Oz,” and while it certainly doesn’t diminish the standing of that movie, Sam Raimi’s film provides proof that the more we know about the mysteries of our favorite stories, the less interesting they become.

The experience of Leviathan is wholly singular, without context, enveloping and immersive. In some ways, it might very well be the most terrifying picture of the year.

It’s the kind of garbage that does a disservice to the fearless possibilities of the horror genre and its knack for sly social commentary.

Blending a surrealist perspective of battle-tinged faith with the harrowing tale of one girl's resilience, the film is a laser-focused fable threatened occasionally by its drifts into character shorthand, but equaled by a wrenching lead performance by Rachel Mwanza that results in one of the finest of the year.

The Spectacular Now is wise beyond its years, charismatic, measured and authentic in its depiction of the pains, confusions and insecurities of the teenage experience, and while its deliberate rhythm may prove to be a harder sell among the teen crowd, it’s a valuable and honest film that’s worth the investment.

Ultimately, it’s hard and a bit pointless to nitpick Jack The Giant Slayer because it never sets out to be or presents itself as anything more than a slightly beefed up fairy tale.

Comedy is hard all on its own, but comedy that resonates is a rare thing indeed. So it’s admirable that Rash and Faxon are continuing to head down that path they started with “The Descendants,” even if this film isn’t quite as refined.

Mud is as unmoving as it is because it doesn’t aspire to be anything other than a competent anti-fairy tale in which the paint-by-number morals are enforced by equally obvious main protagonists.

The End of Love is hardly a work of revelation. At the same time, it's surprisingly well-executed, nicely performed and manages to combine a warm and gentle sense of the rhythms of life with a cold and bright-eyed look at the world and its lead's flaws and character.

Beautiful, yet dark and moving, unsparing, but told with a sympathetic eye, Ginger & Rosa is sometimes relentless in its examination of emotional pain.

Rubberneck is a thriller too drab and self-obsessed to ever be truly thrilling.

Alien abductions are a truly terrifying idea, and building an alien abduction movie on the template of "Poltergeist" is a great idea. But "Poltergeist" had one thing Dark Skies is sorely in need of: follow-through.

Deceivingly complex, with an emotional center that peels away like an onion the longer it unfolds, this is a powerful effort from Mungiu in which love and faith are both different kinds of poison.

Snitch is just a big, dumb, ugly-looking waste of time, one that turns one of cinema's most charismatic heroes into a restless drone. As they say in the joint: snitches get stitches. But Snitch deserves to be put down for good.

It’s a fun, laugh-out-loud dark comedy, and proves that Alex Karpovsky and crew have made their mark.

Loose, limber and driven by a fierce energy and staccato/pause rhythm we haven't seen previously from this filmmaker, Noah Baumbach's sublime Frances Ha is a fresh and vivacious near-reinvention of the director/writer's comedic milieu.

Midnight movie programmers of the future will undoubtedly give it a long life years after it’s gone from first-run theaters.

Quite frankly, The Jeffrey Dahmer Files would have been better if it had a little more meat on its bones.

At its worst, the film is a panoply of ersatz camera placement and terrible scene blocking, actors having no clue how to interact with their surroundings as they rifle through dialogue that stands as a series of historical checkpoints rather than a cohesive story.

A Good Day To Die Hard isn’t dead on arrival because that would suggest it has a pulse.

Writer/director Richard LaGravenese tries his damnedest to deftly navigate the clunky plot, and while it's not exactly a home run, it's still an incredibly stylish, evocative, edgy (was that an incest reference?) and frequently funny (there's even a Nancy Reagan joke) Southern Gothic romance.

A noir-tinged, noose-tightening ordeal [that] confirms Antonio Campos, if not the entire Borderline Films outfit, as a filmmaker/team to be reckoned with.

Unique and at times profound, it's a reminder of how much Kubrick left for us to appreciate in his work, and how the greatest films always leave something more to be discovered with each viewing.

All of Wong's undeniable visual flair can't conceal the haphazard nature of the story.

Richard Linklater's Before Midnight isn't the most digestible picture, but its challenging, funny, painful, very present and alive depiction of relationships at 40 is so honest and real that we wouldn't have it any other way.

The film is undeniably moving at times, and there are moments of metatextual elegance that feel as though they tremble on the brink of genuine insight.

Unfortunately, Would You Rather is content with being a risible borderline torture porn horror film.

There is a fine line between meeting an audience halfway and witholding enough without falling into self-indulgence, but Kiarostami can't make that balance here. Enigmatic and dull to a maddening degree, Like Someone In Love finds Kiarostami spinning his wheels.

Perhaps hardcore Jet Li fans will be able to get some joy out of it, but we'd suspect that even they will struggle with this one.

While a film of great craft, strongly performed by the cast across the board, and particulary by the lead, newcomer Saskia Rosendahl, Lore never lets the audience in close enough for it to be a truly embraceable picture.

With long stretches (we're talking 20-30 minutes) without a single guffaw, Identity Thief is aggressively dull, and will joylessly steal two hours of your life that you will never get back.

A film of surface pleasures, even joys, but those joys seem to be longing for a central idea around which to coalesce.

You may not be able to figure it out, but that's part of the point of this sensually-directed, sensory-laden experiential (and experimental) piece of art that washes over you like a sonorous bath of beguiling visuals, ambient sounds and corporeal textures.

The risible Stoker is a brutally empty, deeply unfortunate movie, and Park Chan-wook's jackhammer of a tool he calls a brush is, on this evidence, something that should be locked away.

The picture's conspiratorial late-night tone and fleshy after hours luridness was practically built for watching at night, when our parents think we've gone off to bed (think '80s films directed by folks like Adrian Lyne).

Each scene is a brisk vignette of deadpan reversal, often involving a running theme of miscommunication.

This film feels like one you discover late at night and watch for ten minutes before remembering you've already seen it, and yet we still kinda loved it.

A vibrant and vital tribute to a piece of recording and rock history that could have been lost to the ether, and Grohl packages the story of this little studio with a detailed celebration of the craft and skill necessary to this kind of recording, all with a killer soundtrack (which should go without saying).

It's like stocking a team with proven performers and hoping that everything else will work itself out at the end, including a rickety script, indifferent direction, and a plot that pretends its final act is anything other than a cliché-hugging inevitability.

Playing with genre is fine, but if you're going to create new rules, you have to play by them too, but unfortunately Warm Bodies continually subverts its own internal logic and basic, believable character motivation to keep pushing the movie along.

This newest film is an undercooked potboiler, one so tastelessly bland and visually indistinguishable that you wonder if anyone associated with the project realized what makes cheapo crime fiction so fun to consume.

Not only is not even a single character more than one-dimensional, but every line falls flatter than a witch dispatched with a Gatling gun.

There is a lived-in quality to Supporting Characters that comes from either a strong cast or days of rehearsal – unclear as to whether they had the latter, though they definitely have the former.