The Armor of Light is a fascinating little piece of storytelling.

It's the usual undisciplined, overextended Spike symphony: more fun than it is any good.

This is a rare kind of pulp; it's boisterously destructive, funny and, at the same time, almost serene.

A wise, warm, funny and touching romantic drama.

As she demonstrated in “The Skeleton Twins,” the former “Saturday Night Live” comedian has grown so adept at rendering troubled characters without offering sideline commentary that you can’t help but fall in love with her, even as laughter gives way to uncomfortable silence.

It's an obscure experience, partly alienating, partly enthralling; it weaves a spell that is frightening, irritating and invigorating all at once.

Like Marilyn Monroe and Judy Holliday before him, Tatum is sublime at playing dumb (as a dim pretty boy, he seems to be channeling Brad Pitt in "Burn After Reading"), just as Hill shrewdly deploys his body mass for maximum physical comedy (even slimmed down, with an Oscar nomination under that tightened belt, he carries himself with a fat man's comically elephantine grace).

What is memorable is the film's portrait of a man of honor in a sleazy world, possibly a metaphor for the struggle of the artist to stay honorable in a world of backbiting, betrayal and hunger for easy money.

A thematically bleak yet subtly comic film.

With its clean staging and coolly mannered style, Selah and the Spades reaches back to Wes Anderson, Whit Stillman and even Stanley Kubrick; this is a film in which nearly every image looks worked over and carefully polished, with no detail left unconsidered.

The kind of taut, serious adult drama Hollywood rarely produces anymore. Quality-starved audiences should flock to it, if only to ensure that more of them get made.

May not be for everyone, but filmgoers tuned in to its particular, perverse frequency will find much to value in its bent sense of humor and compassion.

You’re astonished to see how fully actualized Candy was as a performer in his short time, but you’re also left with the heartbreak of all that was left unrealized by his untimely passing.

If “Oak” brushes up against the fuzzy calculus of melodrama, Mari and Turner always wrestle it back to earth.

Davis's sensibility is much more fully developed, more authentic and much less self-consciously referential than the Coens' was at the same stage. She's not just playing around with film noir, or paying homage to it -- she's using it for a new kind of edgy, grunge realism; using it to look at sex and love and murder; using it for real.

As Benny (short for Bernadette), a big-boned, headstrong lass who strains winningly against the restrictions of family, religion and just plain growing up, [Driver's] a comedic breath of fresh air, easily the best thing about the movie.

It’s a credit to Lehane’s screenplay, director Michael R. Roskam’s restraint and a superb cast led by the masterful Tom Hardy that “The Drop” earns every sad-eyed glance and heart-tugging whimper.

Morgen plunges viewers completely into the anarchic, exhilarating, finally ambiguous world of 1968 America; his final stroke of genius is his choice of music, which includes a breathtaking use of Eminem's "Mosh."

Pleasant enough and its ecological, pro-wildlife sentiments are certainly welcome.

Based on a true story, the movie takes us through some harrowing times.

Reconfirms Tarantino's status as the master of pop cinema and puts a sense of excitement into the year. He has matched, if not eclipsed, the power and scope of 1994's "Pulp Fiction," though not its human charm.

Provides some wry chuckles, but much of it is as dark as a Glasgow winter.

MOST Americans are probably having a hard enough time trying to distinguish the good guys from the bad guys in Central America, and Oliver Stone's "Salvador" is careful not to help us take sides. Much to its credit, that's mainly what makes this political thriller so terrifying...It's not that there aren't any villains in this film -- based on the real-life account of photo-journalist Richard Boyle who co-wrote the screenplay with Stone -- but that there are so few good guys to turn to. [4 Apr 1986, p.29]

A dog-frequency movie: enjoyable only to those tuned in to its particular register.

Filled as it is with unforced errors, A League of Their Own isn't a perfect picture, but it is irresistibly ebullient with not one, but nine Babes on base.

Hope may be a commodity that’s in short supply by the time that Fahrenheit 11/9 has finished painting its unsettling portrait of an America in crisis.

Set in 1956, it’s a cleverly twisty crime story constructed of many invisible folds and threads, yet it fits Rylance like custom-made clothing.

Writer, director and actor Cooper Raiff delivers an ingratiating turn as a cheerful lost soul in Cha Cha Real Smooth, a post-college coming-of-age story of intergenerational lust and the rocky road to adulthood.