For the most part, it works brilliantly.

The documentary mostly steers clear of Vreeland's home life. Little attention is paid to her husband or her children, and that may be partly because Vreeland didn't seem to have much time for them, according to interviews with her two sons.

The empathy-generating performances by the charismatic young actors -- particularly the uber-confident Miller and a simultaneously punk-rock cynical and girlishly fragile Mae Whitman -- compensate for any missteps.

Thanks to the assured hold Johnson exerts over this ingeniously structured game of cat-and-cat, we'll go anyplace he has in mind.

Most of the comedy, however, is unintentional. House At The End of the Street may not draw much of an audience during its initial run, but the movie's preposterousness certifies it for future midnight screenings, where the story will get the jeering it deserves.

Trouble With the Curve presents viewers with a frustrating change-up: What promised to be a modest, refreshingly unforced little comedy turns out to be low energy to a fault.

Never lets viewers fully inside Erik and Paul's world, a reticence that isn't helped by the actors' fey, restrained-to-a-fault performances. That and a frustratingly episodic structure make what might have been a raw and inspiring portrait of commitment and boundaries a surprisingly uninvolving, arms-length enterprise. Keep the Lights On lets go just when it should be holding you tighter.

Hello I Must Be Going isn't heavy lifting, to be sure. But it's still worthy of a little end zone dance.

It's the story of changing chefs and changing seasons. It looks at food as not just something that nourishes our bodies, but as something that enriches our lives and our relationships.

That Detropia won't be just another well-reported urban obituary is clear from the film's arresting opening moments.

10 Years doesn't completely avoid the road-not-taken theme. It does, however, neatly navigate around many of the potholes, finding a novel and nuanced approach to addressing the ways that our mistakes make us better, wiser and more human.

It's powerful stuff, but I almost felt like I needed an intermission.

This, finally, is the Dredd movie comic book readers have been anticipating.

By bringing so much thought, verve and visual poetry to bear on two neurotics acting out -- rather than on the larger cultural story they anticipate and embody -- The Master turns out to be more of a self-defeating whimper than the big, important bang it could have been.

Refreshingly free of hot air.

A solid and subtly moving portrait of the people of Burma.

A workmanlike, if treacly and overblown, piece of propaganda. Its effectiveness depends entirely on the degree to which you already believe its talking points.

A whimsical, sad, diverting and altogether delightful exploration of how cinema can benefit, not only from glancing back at its own past, but by staying open to parallel forms of presentation and play.

There are few cinematic pleasures as satisfying to behold as an actor in a role that fits him like a Savile Row suit. Richard Gere offers just such gratification in Arbitrage, a silky, sophisticated Wall Street thriller that finds the actor utterly in his prime, wearing his age and accumulated emotional wisdom with warmth, charisma and nonstop appeal.

The question isn't whether Toys in the Attic is any good. The question is: good for whom?

A well-acted but narratively limp indie that's undermined by a failure to connect emotionally with its audience.

"Bridesmaids" may have been crude, but it also said something about female friendships that felt true. Bachelorette feels like it's about four women who, not even all that deep down, can't stand one another.

By the time it glides -- not lumbers -- to the closing credits, it's also amazingly moving.

Even if a good phone-sex movie does exist, For a Good Time, Call . . . is woefully, definitively not it.

Anyone who actually believes in dybbuks and other ghoulies will find The Possession terrifying. For the rest of us, the movie is a cleverly constructed, well-paced piece of hokum.

With warmth, unsparing self-awareness and that ineffable Everyman appeal sometimes called "relatability," Birbiglia proves to be as engaging a presence on the screen as he has been all these years onstage and over the radio waves.

Compliance is an extraordinarily assured, well-made drama, signaling a promising career for Zobel, an adroit filmmaker with a talent for taut pacing and staging. But it also fails its first test, which is that the audience believe every word of it.

It feels like each and every moment bursts forth with urgent dialogue, and yet what does anyone actually say?