Raised in Mumbai, classically trained actor-turned-writer-director Khanna addresses the volatile issue of women's rights within Islamic households, and if his sensationalistic debut feature makes its point with a heavy hand, it's also starkly effective.

Harrowing, psychologically astute drama.

It's swiftly paced and never dull, but the heavy-handed symbolism comes fast and thick.

Beautifully shot in rich colors by Franz Lustig, it's possibly Wenders' most accessible film to date, and among his most emotionally satisfying.

Basilio narrates his tale with such wit and wisdom that one comes away from the film wondering how much youthful potential is slowly being choked to death deep within the bowels of the earth.

You just know that any film that opens with Nietzsche's aphorism about hope being an evil that only prolongs the torments of man isn't going to a comedy.

The film's tone - a mix of childlike directness, twee whimsy and arty sentimentality - is a matter of taste.

Stovall's film could have been a little shorter and a lot tighter.

While touching on subjects as serious and diverse as capital punishment, the devaluation of women in Iran and the true Islamic concept of forgiveness, this powerful melodrama from the Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi is anything but a message movie.

That there's precious little chemistry between buffed-and-tanned stars Parker and McConaughey is only the first of this slight, overly busy film's problems.

French up-and-comer Alexandre Aja's full-bore do-over is a shockingly successful update of a seminal 1970s shocker.

Crafting this crude, noisy remake of Disney's first live-action comedy required the labor of no fewer than five screenwriters.

Occasionally overrated as a writer but consistently underrated as a director, Towne does a marvelous job resurrecting all the seedy jumble of the long-gone Bunker Hill neighborhood.

Slow but charming film.

Given Argento's willingness to attempt the controversial book at all, she pulls a surprising number of punches. What at first appears to go too far in reality doesn't go far enough: Argento doesn't even broach the subject of child prostitution.

This didactic drama is set safely in the past and says nothing about the culture of conformity at all costs that hasn't been said before.

Though Keaton is convincing as a smarmy narcissist who secretly thinks he deserves to fail because writing plays isn't REAL work, he's also thoroughly unlikable -- a problematic trait in a protagonist.

Shakespeare himself couldn't have written better or more complex characters, and far from strange, by the end of this extraordinary film you couldn't imagine Shakespeare performed anywhere else.

Though impressively ambitious and making the most of a small budget and talented cast, director Ari Taub's feature concentrates so intently on the day-to-day minutiae of infantry life on World War II's European front that the bigger picture gets lost.

A throwback to an age when action movies had room between shoot-outs and car chases for dialogue - real dialogue, not rim-shot-ready one-liners - and character development.

Aside from an inspired bit involving a pair of sycophantic starfish, it's amazing how unimaginative a movie about a mermaid can be, and it's sad how thoroughly its girl-power stylings devolve into a muddle of mixed messages.

The film's highlights are far and away the musical performances.

An all-but-incoherent mess whose main components are palpably fake-looking CGI effects, video-game-style action sequences and Milla Jovovich's admirably taut abdomen, Kurt Wimmer's film epitomizes just about everything wrong with post-MATRIX, comic book-/video-game-inspired, Hong Kong-action-style sci-fi thrillers.

Forget haunted houses and the mountains of the moon: There's no better environment to show off the wonder of the immersive IMAX 3-D experience than the deep blue sea.

A down–under fable with a sweet country-music twang.

The bad news is that Seitz's protagonists are almost all insufferable: Smug, self-important, opinionated and relentlessly convinced that they're far more sensitive, intelligent and interesting than they are.

The film's heart is Magdiel and the modest dreams that get him through the day but may also be the death of him.

What's suspenseful - and so troubling - is seeing exactly how far the "progressives" of GCS are willing to go to put a decidedly unpopular candidate back into office, regardless of what it will mean for the future of the country and for Bolivian democracy itself.