Tells the story of a love affair and a new family, and reminds us that even billionaires are not omnipotent.

Trumbo is a terrific picture, a blend of interviews and archival footage and readings of Trumbo's letters and speeches.

It isn't going anywhere, but the journey is highly entertaining.

A flinty, almost hardhearted work about characters who have lost almost everything in pursuit of some undefinable abstraction, like honor or their country or doing the right thing. It's an impressive film, but don't expect any warm fuzzies.

Humor is notoriously subjective, of course, but I didn't find Young Adult especially funny. It's an intermittently engaging fable of American homecoming that's both intentionally and unintentionally awkward, and flavored from bitter to sour all the way through.

Bronson owes a little or a lot to Kubrick's "Clockwork Orange," but if that's a crime I wish more people would commit it.

This is an immersive and powerful thriller, driven by terrific leading performances. It's mostly really good and then it wears out its welcome.

O'Connor chucks away everything that was interesting or dark or subtle in Warrior and replaces it with a pseudo-individualist, sub-Freudian, Tea Party-friendly fantasy.

A glossy, enjoyable thriller that isn't quite as tricky or Hitchcockian as it wants to be, Roman de Gare gets by on high style and nice central performances by rubber-faced Dominique Pinon.

What emerges is an astonishing debut, unlike anything else you'll see this year.

An academic exercise driven by adolescent ideas that never shape themselves into a narrative: in short, a movie that can never dislodge the art fatally wedged up its butt.

Features an astonishing pair of lead performances and one of this year's most impressive directing debuts. If this movie isn't quite the contempo-Greek tragedy it wants to be, it's still a powerful, unforgettable meditation on fate, cultural collision and the morality of renovating a house that isn't really yours.

Zbanic is such an acute observer of women's lives in their intimate details, and constructs such fine scenes, that I think this might be the best film to emerge from the aftermath of the Balkan conflict.

It's a messy, colorful big-screen entertainment that veers from sober period piece to outrageous melodrama, which is to say it's a Verhoeven movie.

I really don't understand why anybody thinks the wispy, bittersweet tale of long-distance love in Like Crazy is any big deal. Seriously, I liked this movie better last year, when it had Drew Barrymore in it and was called "Going the Distance."

Gorgeous and terrifying.

While the women's battle with the cave creatures has fine jump-from-your-seat moments, it gradually becomes the same chase flick horror fans have seen dozens of times. OK, it's a darn good one in most respects.

Laranas does cultivate a mood of distinctive menace and mystery, not to mention a convoluted and ambitious chronology.

A stunning technical accomplishment that virtually bursts with noise, ideas and references, but it's fundamentally a gracefully crafted movie that's about human beings and not images.

Ewing and Grady could have done a better job filling in each boy's back story, as well as explaining exactly how Baraka started and what its agenda is. But the film is clearly a labor of love, portraying the lives of its subjects with tremendous intimacy and passion.

It's a classic gal-pal movie, perfect for daughters, sisters, moms and the guys whose asses they kick.

There were half a dozen occasions, maybe more, when I roared out loud with laughter. This just may be a filmmaker with great things in him; this one's pretty damn good.

Year of the Dog is an enjoyable, patchy, rambling affair, a series of bittersweet comic sketches strung together with thin wire.

It isn't surprising that the film was originally based on actors' improvisations, since it creates a universe of tremendously enjoyable characters and allows them plenty of room to roam, but has only the most predictable notion of plot and nothing whatever to say beyond be-yourself pieties.

It's also possible, I suppose, that a movie as deranged and grotesque and spectacular as Álex de la Iglesia's near-masterpiece The Last Circus, an overcooked allegory that's been dialed to 11 in all directions, simply doesn't appeal to you. But if you like your baroque sex and violence with a side dish of heavy-duty symbolism, and if the idea of an unholy collaboration between, say, Guillermo del Toro, Federico Fellini and William Castle appeals to you, then put The Last Circus on your must-see list right now.

While this does not strike me as the most urgent element of Standard Operating Procedure, Morris makes a persuasive case that many of the Abu Ghraib photos don't show us what we think they do, and that some of the episodes depicted were staged specifically to be photographed (and might not otherwise have occurred).

A charming comedy with a philosophical undercurrent that provides a fascinating glimpse of Jerusalem's ultra-Orthodox Jews, who live in a realm almost literally sealed off from outsiders. But the most remarkable thing about the film is that it exists at all.

Thankfully, this information arrives via a graceful and frequently humorous film that captures the idiosyncrasies of its characters and never hectors.

It's literally difficult to believe that the person who made this picturesque, clueless, oddly misanthropic picture also made "Annie Hall" and "Crimes and Misdemeanors."

An explosive wide-screen vision of the street life of Soweto, bursting with music, danger and vitality, and the extraordinary story of a ruthless young criminal known only as Tsotsi.

A terrifying and highly effective documentary.

This warm, graceful and fundamentally optimistic movie snuck up on me, in the best possible way.

One of the great things about Scott Thurman's film - a low-budget but thoroughly watchable documentary, largely funded on Kickstarter – is that it helped me see the world from McLeroy's point of view, which I might previously have considered impossible.

It's an impressive film, beautifully photographed and marvelously acted. But is it more than a set of undeniably gorgeous affectations?

This yarn about an innocent-looking but desperately horny teenage girl might not have that much commercial upside, but its bittersweet, faintly depressed brand of Nordic humor is definitely enjoyable.

Sleep Tight, first of all, is a nifty new Euro-horror film, with several wicked-cold Hitchcockian twists, that shows off the range and craft of terrific Spanish director Jaume Balagueró, co-founder of the "[Rec]" franchise (still the gold standard in found-footage horror).

It's a profoundly moving story of -- yes! -- the human spirit rising above horrible circumstances, and simultaneously a work of nostalgia for the gentlemen's war that marked the end, or the beginning of the end, of Christian Europe's world domination.

A nerve-jangling work of visual poetry and ironic juxtaposition, and a powerful human story of a group of brave young Americans.

It's as stylish and kinky as you could want, but compared to his recent female-centric melodramas ("Broken Embraces," "Volver," "All About My Mother"), this is a chilly genre exercise that casts his obsession with gender and sexuality in a harsh new light.

Another remarkable chapter in the career of Asia's most important living filmmaker. After "Pan's Labyrinth," this is the movie to see this season.

Tense, hilarious and totally serendipitous.

A loving tribute to one of the strangest and most enjoyable figures to emerge from American pop culture in its entire history.

No one who sees it will confuse it with anything else. Fans of Gondry's DIY low-tech aesthetic, which he blends, as always, with exceptionally sophisticated animation techniques, will adore it.

You could describe Love Songs, as a blend of François Truffaut's wistful Parisian sentimentalism and Pedro Almodóvar's acrid polysexual comedy, which were never far apart to begin with (given the difference in climate and native temperament between France and Spain).

An extraordinary social comedy.

Lynn Hershman hasn't reached much of an audience, which makes the modest national rollout of her fascinating Strange Culture a noteworthy event.

By the end of Who Killed the Electric Car? you'll be worked into a lather one way or another. Paine crams in more theories, ideas and arguments than the movie can easily hold, but that's OK with me.

Simply too bright and pleasant to become a huge hit, but it's a confident little genre film with near-classic charm.

This may test your patience, it's not for everyone, it's a stretch to call this "entertainment" and so on. As far as Heathcliff being black – well, deal with it. Arnold's simply right about that one, and it's Laurence Olivier and Ralph Fiennes and all those costume-drama versions of the story that are wrong.

A movie that is never elegant but is often hysterically funny, and maintains a rabbit-on-speed pace that Hollywood comedy long ago abandoned.

Uprooted from their home soil, González Iñárritu and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga can't quite manage to make this gloomy, improbable stew of romance, film noir and pseudo-metaphysical speculation hang together.

It's a reassuring and delicious film, but in no sense an adventurous one.

The best film in the alien attack, conspiracy theory, "Silence of the Lambs" rip-off, disgraced-cop drama, deranged circus wirewalker, anti-capitalist parable genre I've seen this year.

This movie's too small and too dark to have gotten Harrelson into the overcrowded best-actor race, but it's without question one of the year's great performances.

A bit pedantic, but thorough and interesting throughout, a must for history buffs.

A chilly, fascinating thriller at odds with itself.

One of the finest cops-and-robbers thrillers of recent years.

Often hilarious, although I found it so amped-up and overly broad that I was exhausted before the movie was over.

The summer season's most surprising and thought-provoking documentary.

Director Mark Romanek captures the slightly seedy and rundown reality of '70s and '80s British life in astonishing and even tragic detail; this is more like a period piece than a science-fiction movie.

I hate to criticize anybody for artistic ambition, but the problem with Babel isn't that it's a bad movie. It's a good movie, or, more accurately, it's several pieces of good movie, chopped up in service of a pretentious, portentous and slightly silly artistic vision.

If a movie can be both exciting and boring at the same time, that movie would be Unstoppable an adrenaline-infused runaway-train flick that perfectly distills director Tony Scott's talents and limitations.

Moms and girls everywhere deserve this movie, absolutely, and I hope they have a great time. But they also deserve much more, and much better.

Black Gold is more an Al Gore-style message of hope than a total downer.

You could call Just Another Love Story nothing more than an exercise in style, but A) Bornedal's got style to burn and B) that's not quite fair. Beneath all the dazzling cinematography, propulsive score and overcommitted acting, I found this movie an affecting, mordant comedy about male midlife crisis in its most extreme form.

Ang Lee's dark and sober fable might be the most interesting and least dogmatic view of the Civil War to wend its way into the multiplexes.

What I see in The Avengers, unfortunately, is a diminished film despite its huge scale, and kind of a bore.

Some of American Hardcore is amusing -- many of the aging punks Rachman and Blush track down have turned into highly ordinary middle-aged Americans -- and some is profoundly disturbing.

Only viewers with some appreciation for the odd, bloodless character of moneyed family life in New York will really understand how hilarious and deadly accurate this movie is. But then again, New York parents are the last people who will want to see it.

The hectic, sprawling Fanfan la Tulipe eventually feels like too much -- too many goofy asides, too much Comédie Française hambone acting, too much gallantry and villainy, too much forced good cheer.

Absolute Wilson changed my views of Wilson as a person tremendously, and at least gave me some useful context for his art.

Gruesome and terrifying things happen in The Last Winter, but there's no gratuitous gore or torture, and the film's real power comes from its building sense that something really, really bad is ABOUT to happen.

Nathalie becomes a complicated three-handed game, far more concerned with the narcissistic, pornographic and mutually manipulative relationship between Catherine and Nathalie than with the latter's purported affair with Bernard. If you live in New York, run, don't walk to see this on the big screen, because it won't be there long.

Almost utterly defeated by its subject's sardonic stonewalling.

There have been dozens of Holocaust documentaries, and one could well argue that the world doesn't need another. But Michèle Ohayon's Steal a Pencil for Me offers a simple human story of dignity, levity and romance.

Mamet's trademark artificial, mutual-incomprehension dialogue and con-game plotting are ineptly matched to the action genre (and feel stale in any case), while the jiu-jitsu scenes are so incoherently shot and edited you can't tell if the fight choreography is any good or not.

It's a strange and murky movie, at times a frustrating one, but I also found it profoundly moving in a way no regular thriller ever is.

What makes Boynton's film stand out amid the current crop of political documentaries is its rigorous reportorial fairness, and its refusal to simplify material in order to score facile ideological points.

A lot of this is compelling, after its didactic and heavily thematic fashion, but if you strip most of it away, along with Roger Deakins' handsome cinematography, you're left with the conflict between Jack and Bobby and something like "Shop Class as Soulcraft: The Movie."

In its best moments, and they are considerable, Chicago 10 makes you see 1968, that near-apocalyptic year, with fresh eyes, as an extraordinary turning point in history now at least partly set free from boomer nostalgia and regret.

Highly entertaining, from minute to minute, and its semi-mythical portrayal of Torontonian life is entirely charming. If you can stand massive doses of cute and clever, it's a fine use for your summer-movie dollar (whether or not that dollar has a funny old lady on it).

Formally, Klores film is a standard-issue documentary, combining period footage with talking-head interviews. But his talking heads are a hoot -- leathery, leisure-suited, foul-mouthed, larger-than-life characters, straight out of the Bronx by way of Palm Beach -- and their story is a Gothic yarn of obsession, crime and forgiveness.

No single film or book can dispel the cloud of enigma surrounding Kurt Cobain, but simply sitting in the dark and hearing him talk to you for 90 minutes, while the dreary gray-green beauty of his home state moves through your eyeballs and into your brain, goes a pretty long way.

Primo Levi's Journey is a profound meditation on the unevenness of history, reminding us -- as Faulkner once remarked -- that the past not only isn't dead, it isn't really past at all.

The problem with Seitzman's script is how predictable almost all of it feels.

Lake and Epstein are not in fact trying to stigmatize other women's choices about how and where to give birth. Instead, they're trying to introduce an entire universe of history and information that should inform those choices, and that the medical establishment has virtually erased from American memory.

The tremendous power of Aronofsky's filmmaking -- its omnivorous omnipotence, if that makes any sense -- has the curious effect of diluting its emotional impact.

A pitch-perfect blend of darkness and sweetness, built around a masterful performance by a great actor.

Applause may present as gritty European realism, but the struggle inside Thea is almost theological in scale, and worthy of Milton or Kierkegaard.

The heart of the movie is not in its plot but in its characters and atmosphere. Castaneda, a nonprofessional actor who runs a towing company in San Antonio, gives a towering, Robert Duvall-style performance as a granitic man in late middle age whose internal world of pain and love and knowledge occasionally flickers to the surface.

Highly entertaining and skillful documentary.

Richer and more enjoyable than the other lame-stream comedies Hollywood has churned out this summer, even though it doesn't know what kind of movie it wants to be when it grows up.

Mythic, thrilling and brilliantly made motion picture.

A relentlessly gruesome, visually impressive and ultimately not very interesting movie with some pretensions to seriousness.

Although I personally still find the rubber-faced, pseudo-human figures produced by this technique unsettling, the work done by Spielberg and Jackson's animation teams here is exquisite.

There are so many great things happening on almost every level of this movie, from Swinton's haunting, magnetic and tremendously vulnerable performance, which is absolutely free of condescension to the suburban American wife-ness of her character, to the many unsettling individual moments.

An engaging entertainment that packages its thought-provoking ideas in a combination of political thriller, comic adventure and romantic triangle.

Take This Waltz is frank, erotic, often very funny and sometimes startling, with an underlying tragic sensibility.