Nevins's portrait of how a nihilistic movement fostered such nurturing family men resonates beyond its rebels-with-a-cause novelty.

The artsy silhouette ballet is plain dull and hardly suitable for a kids' audience, but at least it shows the cutesy Disney house style stretching out a little.

Marvin is consistently brilliant, but the film is patchy.

What makes the film is essentially the character of Coffy as played by Pam Grier with increasing alienation: a nurse out to get the men who are responsible for her little sister's addiction, she makes a conscious decision to manipulate the sexual situations which the men around her force her to engage in. It is a performance that defies and subverts the genre.

Although Binoche is the film’s star, her presence is smartly muted, allowing us time and space to discover the world as she does, and providing room for complexity in considering the ethics of his character’s work and of Carrère’s film itself.

Predictably, the documentary got a rousing reception at hipster-laden SXSW; real people might find it a touch easy.

Here, though, everyone involved seems above the rom-com conventions they’re satirizing, so anxious to get to each punch line that they let the connective tissue languish. You howl often but quickly forget why.

These kinds of disease-fueled dramas already tend to be soap-operatic, but Kohlberg isn't taking any chances; by the time father and son end up at a Dead show in matching tie-dyed outfits, the director has aggressively, insistently overplayed audience heartstrings like Jerry Garcia in a long-winded solo.

Gibson simply turns his signature righteous rage into a crushing inward sorrow-Sad Max?-and Foster boldly plays everything straight, rendering her actor's unnerving turn to mania (and a pitch-black third act) with zero tongue-in-cheek.

There’s a ruthlessly effective movie to be made from this material, and you couldn’t hope for a better performer than Shannon, who can turn on a dime between quiet malevolence and volcanic rage, to inhabit the sociopathic central figure. Unfortunately, this overproduced biopic constantly counteracts the actor’s committed efforts with its pale-imitation slickness.

Gardening has never been so creepy.

Schwimmer is so committed to telling grim truths about modern living (whither goes humanity in the age of Twitter and sexting?!?) that he abandons the film's tantalizing slide into B-movie exploitation.

The ambition of Under the Silver Lake is worth cherishing. It will either evaporate into nothingness or cohere into something you’ll want to hug for being so wonderfully weird.

Between epic bouts of bickering, Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham save the world in an offshoot that gets the job done.

Madagscar 3 is less interested in plucking the last bit of meat off the series's bones than with simply picking the lowest-hanging fruit.

The best moments in filmmaker Rebecca Thomas’s debut feature manage flashes of wide-eyed grace — that is, when the overly precious, half-formed story isn’t undermining her understated direction and the work of a fine cast.

Despite typically hip disclaimers, WW2 is in many respects a standard sequel, careful to rerun not only the (very sketchy) form of the original, but often the content as well. Odd, then, that this should be much funnier than the first film.

The question at the movie’s heart is: What is best for Mary? The answer Gifted chooses is predictable, but that doesn’t stop the movie from messing with your tear ducts.

Berg may be adhering to the basic facts, but his movie’s childish machismo is a disgrace to all involved.

[Ridley Scott's] second film in as many months, after The Last Duel, is uneven, overlong and completely over the top, and has characters and plot turns that Marvel and Pixar would reject as ‘a bit much’. The good news is that it is undeniably a proper drama and, for the most part, wildly entertaining.

This highly fictionalized look at the Wild West early days of Internet porn is off-putting in almost every way, with sledgehammer stylistic flourishes (incessant shaky-cam; a Rolling Stones musical cue as ironic comment) and dialogue that sounds like it was written in a testosterone-fueled haze.

This one belongs to the women: As a gold-digging mistress, Isla Fisher does half-smart expertly, while Jennifer Aniston demonstrates her underrated timing as a wealthy kidnapping victim turned confidante.

When a movie is this predicated on aping the Coen brothers (effectively, it should be added, in fits and starts), surprise won't be its strong suit.

This metaphor-movie is both touching and tasteful. It allows Foster to play scared and alone, traumatised and neurotic, and, most importantly, free and inspirational.

Must all films for kids be so shoddy, though? The music is appalling.

Jones writes herself a couple of powerful scenes and plays them well, but she and director Lee Toland Krieger don't find many memorable uses for Samberg as her blandly schlubby hubby.

The filmmaker’s irreverent directness with his subjects makes for a savagely funny and bluntly insightful portrait of those who live with disfigurement.

Tigers is a vivid, chastening look inside the ruthless promised land that is top-level sport.