The falsely euphoric close is a big misstep - Pulitzers, it would seem, are the ultimate Band-Aid. What was that old adage about printing the legend?

The major change is that the domestic, Eun-yi (the great Jeon, star of "Secret Sunshine"), is now more of a victim than an aggressor.

Losier has made a quietly revolutionary work that treats a pair of people on the fringes with the decency all humans deserve.

Terrific performances and superb cinematography (by Claire Denis’s right hand, Agnès Godard) lift cowriter-director Ursula Meier’s feature debut above its thuddingly metaphorical premise.

What matters more is recognizing Post Tenebras Lux’s kinship with a strain of impressionistic autobiographical cinema practiced by filmmakers such as Andrei Tarkovsky (The Mirror) and Terrence Malick (The Tree of Life) in which every sound and image seems to spring straight from the psyche.

The film's commitment to representing the harsh truths of an unfortunate historical moment is admirable, but it tends to grate rather than illuminate.

There's shockingly little thrill in watching Carano bounce off walls and pummel antagonists.

The four leads more often than not transcend the material's calculated moroseness; Ivanir is especially good as a man whose perfectionist facade masks a soul in perpetual turmoil.

For an animation studio that too often specializes in the frivolous and glib (begone, Shrek series!), the move to the dark side is refreshing.

The jarring juxtapositions only heighten the enigmatic air of the film's subject; even when he's right in front of us, he seems to be plotting his next wily act.

Visual Acoustics goes out of its way to remain as kindly and pleasing as Shulman himself.

Once the rote plot takes over - the tension brought on by the film's you-are-there verisimilitude quickly devolves into soapily overwrought theatrics.

There's not much beyond all the fawning, but the effusively talented Channing more than deserves the gush.

Too many movies come to us as preordained cult objects - this is the real deal.

All the retroactively enlightened symbolism gets monotonous, and reaches an absurd apex with the introduction of a party-line newspaperman played by that scowling emblem of Teutonic depravity, Ulrich Tukur.

The perfectly sculpted, entirely sure-of-himself Tom ultimately seems more of a construct than a character, his carefree nature shaped almost entirely by the very wish-fulfillment clichés that the movie otherwise sidesteps.

Walken is particularly alive in a way he's rarely been since "Catch Me if You Can," adding untold shades to Hans's mystery-shrouded past - wait until you see what's under his cravat - while still giving his singularly eccentric line readings.

Director-cinematographer Steven Soderbergh’s indifference to the material is palpable and of a piece with his deathly dull output of late.

Jendreyko elegantly sketches in the details of his subject's life and the historical events surrounding her coming-of-age-out of which emerges a fascinating subtext about the malleable powers of language.

It’s a neurotic treatise that simply adds to our cultural dementia instead of illuminating it.

The story's half-baked environmental themes become more prevalent as Letters from the Big Man progresses to its back-to-nature finale, which unfortunately distracts from Munch's consistently sure hand with his actors.

At least Mark Ping Bing Lee’s luscious cinematography distracts from the shallow storytelling. There are worse things than luxuriating in a two-hour Côte d’Azur travel ad.

After the story takes a cloyingly sentimental turn, this lean-and-mean thriller becomes bathetically bloated. Just a few spokes short of a wheel, guys.

If you’ve seen "Species," you know where this don’t-mess-with-Mother-Nature horror show is going, though director-cowriter Vincenzo Natali has a few interesting twists up his sleeve.

Carice van Houten (Black Book) is superb as the emotionally unstable Jonker - all manically beaming highs and depressively gloomy lows, a tempestuous force of nature in a movie that too often plays it blandly polite.

The film has the look of unflinching truth, yet it too often feels like a calculated ploy to stoke viewers' liberal-guilty consciences.

I'll respect the studio's wishes to abbreviate all plot description. God knows, they're marketing it like the second coming of "The Crying Game," though the revelations that await Nev are only shocking if you believe P.T. Barnum was really in possession of a genuine Fiji mermaid.

Less deadpan spoof than loving act of possession, Black Dynamite near-fully channels the look and feel of its blaxploitation ancestors, warts and all.