Gayby isn't groundbreaking, but it's a fun romp whose characters grow on you after spending some time with them.

It's worth saying that the final moments of Smiley are a grade above the by-the-numbers film that unfolded prior, but it's too little too late.

With just a little bit more prodding and elaboration, the movie could have been rich and evocative. Even if you don't believe what he preaches, the movie (at least) could have bordered on a transcendent experience. As it stands, it's pretty good, but not exactly heavenly.

Unfortunately, there are few screens small enough to properly convey how inessential another deadpan suburbs satire is in 2012.

With both Garner and Shahedi providing voice-over, the small-town stakes and the big thematic ideas, Butter feels like someone trying to create the lemonade tang and quenching zest of, say, Alexander Payne's "Election."

It's not a surprise that he most resembles an older Charles Bronson in Taken 2, as both found the enthusiasm to soldier on in the action genre well into their old age. Bronson had a bit more patience with these films: after this, it's doubtful Neeson will.

Ultimately, while 'Escape Fire' proposes numerous options for changing the system-- getting Medicare to cover healthy lifestyle counseling programs, incentivizing doctors to spend time with patients, and patients to empower their own health-- the one that is most poignant is that people should spend the time to take care of each other.

We strongly insist that any pain you experience while watching this movie will never be useful, anytime or anyplace.

Special notice should be given to Billy Campbell, who takes a stock character and gives him a new spin.

While it's messily put together, with a sprawling and at times unfocused narrative that often gets in the way of itself, it doesn't deny the power of the facts Jarecki brings to bear on a misguided program that hasn't stopped the demand for drugs, that has disenfranchised the poor and minorities, and created an expensive prison industry.

Wuthering Heights is a model of how to bring a classic novel kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century.

Sister is as bleak and as beautiful as its snowy, mountainous setting.

Ponsoldt, Paul and Winstead make a remarkably effective team for this film's points and purposes, and Smashed burns long after it goes down smoothly.

A lurid, florid, humid, flaccid and insipid waste of time and money for the audience and for everyone who made it.

V/H/S delivers the thrills and chills craftily and with a better batting average than usual.

It's easy to take most films' war-torn elsewheres for granted, and taken on its own merits, Red Dawn is a victory of small battles and heavy artillery, sentimental but rarely too hackneyed, energetic without becoming too silly.

Deeply resonant and soulful, Life Of Pi, is a harrowing journey of survival, self-discovery and connection that both inspires and awes in equal measure.

The script finishes up exactly where you think it will, but along the way, there are enough surprises and perfectly delivered lines to make it a blast.

Moving, rousing, funny and at times even haunting.

It's not everyone cup of bloody tea, but an unapologetic genre treat for those willing to dive in.

Hotel Transylvania is very different from its contemporaries. You just wish that, with so much emphasis on chaos, they could have spent a little more time on character.

17 Girls is mostly fueled by grrl-power, from it's nineties-era femme-centric alt-rock, to it's marginalization of boys as sperm-deposit devices, unfair but a natural corrective to years of women onscreen as purely sexual objects.

It's a deeply humane and moving look at a complex issue that at the very least demands that a conversation begins not about short term fixes, but long term solutions.

It says something, then, that Burton's best, most enjoyable, and most emotionally resonate film in years is actually an adaptation of one of his very first projects: Frankenweenie.

We assure you, it's not worth taking a trip to down to the House at the End of the Street. Something horrible might have happened there, but it can't be worse than this movie.

One of the best documentaries, and best films, of the year, it is required viewing for anyone with a desire for making their own world a better place, inspiring you to act up and fight back.

Hachmesiters's Three Stars is a treat, largely because it eschews the standard arc of documentaries.

I'm Carolyn Parker isn't so much a movie title, as a "Spartacus"-like shout that, if we all embraced, would make us a better people and country.