Come for the city-flattening; stay for the political satire.

Tower is art, first and foremost, a piece about adrenaline, bravery, grief and memory that stands as one of the year’s crowning achievements in emotional, illuminative storytelling.

Ron Howard allows all manner of contrivances to pile up in David Koepp‘s screenplay, as if relying on constant reference to Dante’s Divine Comedy would make people think, “Ooh, this is clever stuff.”

Combines the barely-there characterization and irritating cutesiness of “The Smurfs” with the hideous character design and awful pop covers of “Strange Magic.”

20th Century Women mainly overcomes its flaws through the sheer imaginative sensitivity of Mills’s writing.

The film’s attempts at comedy and sentimentality are equally unsuccessful, resulting in a movie that feels more like a third-rate “Saved by the Bell” knock-off than a legitimate teen flick.

Blue Jay never seems all that interested in breaking new ground, but its success at providing small pleasures – and memorable performances – makes it worth a look.

An ugly and frequently hilarious descent into all things repellent, the debut feature from director Jim Hosking plants itself firmly in a world of filth and shock.

Newtown, even coming nearly four years after the shooting, remains devastatingly timely.

Téchiné intuitively favors movement over chatter, and he directs his young actors toward intimate, yearning performances.

It’s not groundbreaking cinema, but Do Not Resist effectively begins (and furthers) this ongoing conversation about the escalating police state, racial profiling, and beyond.

The filmmaking has a certain paint-by-numbers frankness that works in some ways, not in others.

The overall mood created by the crummy, pinched visuals and logic-strained rhythm is of something scanned and discarded, like a tabloid article or a Lifetime movie.

It’s a film that hits hard, but it also nails its targets with precision.

As with most documentaries drawn from books, it feels like you’re getting the Reader’s Digest condensed version, handy for those who have 90 minutes to spare but no substitute for the real thing.

Masterminds is kinder to its characters than most comedies about the bumbling and under-educated, and that’s Hess’s strength.

Lovely visuals are key for the success of any animated film, arguably more so even than for live-action movies. But a compelling story is also essential, and that’s where “Long Way North” trips up.

Amanda Knox delivers its own justice by covering all the complexities of its ever-fascinating true crime tale.

This adventure should have been spooky and witty and exciting, but instead it’s just dreary and dull. Peculiarity has rarely been this tedious.

The fashions are a highlight, and the story of a seething snake pit of a town is watchable and intermittently amusing, until things take a jarring turn about halfway in.

Cannan and Adam approach the outlandish crime as a puzzlement, all but wondering aloud how two celebrities could be stolen from public life and turned into a dictator’s puppets.

This documentary may indeed stir outrage and encourage victims to report such crimes. But it’s still a song we’ve heard before.

Storks continually surprises with characters who are more complicated than we might expect in a kid’s animated movie, and a refusal to hit every single pre-programmed plot beat.

The ending of this movie is monumentally, historically, even catastophically bad. Its big reveal is so mind-numbingly asinine that it nearly retroactively erases any intelligence you may have had before watching this movie. Yes, it’s that agonizing.

Though its mix of European romanticism, lustrous trappings, and nostalgic movie love can occasionally make Planetarium feel like a galaxy all its own, the effect is more illusory than enveloping.

Frantz too often belabors the obvious and ultimately blunts its own message.