It's a mistake to confuse Zero Dark Thirty for "truth" – that would be a disservice to the high level of craftsmanship, from first-billed actors to below-the-line production crew, at work in this movie fiction – but there is admirably little fat on its bones.

The tension is enough to make you slightly sick, and the overall mood of the thing is deeply dispiriting, but then, nobody ever said that war isn't hell.

I laughed more (sincerely, full-throatedly) at Toy Story 3’s smart comedy than at any other film of the still-young summer movie slate.

A triumph in anguish.

It isn't about where you get, but how you get there -- and the getting there is a chewy delight.

A lovely, quietly thrilling thing.

I don't know if the many plot swerves withstand a second viewing, but I suspect the meat of the matter – the swooning visuals, the expert choreography, the teasing love story – does.

Bahrani's small marvel of a film.

The fault does not lie with Hoffman (who doesn't so much act out Capote's distinctive mannerisms and high-pitched lisp as channel them); his performance is undeniably great. Everything else – solid, satisfying though it may be – falls short of that greatness.

Part 2 is something else altogether. Such digital effects as the marauding giants that squash baby wizards like bugs or the inky terror that is the Death Eaters – acolytes to the mad, bad wizard Voldemort (Fiennes) – are magnificent and experienced in one long, clutched breath. But what's missing is what has been the chief pleasure of the series: the chemistry between its young leads.

His (Spielberg) is an old-fashioned style of moviemaking that can produce soaring entertainment or, alternately, a fussed-over theatricality. Minute to minute, Lincoln moves between these extremes.

100 minutes spent watching children struggle and delight in learning is, at least in my book, 100 minutes happily spent.

The actors, as a powerful and convincing ensemble, are equally understated and just as devastating.

Moments of almost unbearable beauty.

The balloon will resurface throughout, but far more interesting, and substantial, is the slow reveal of Simon's domestic situation.

It's huge and bewildering and it hurts to watch, but it hurts so good it's gorgeous.

Writer/director Lonergan succeeds at capturing eloquently the disappointments of growing up and growing old. But he isn't always successful at reining in the schmaltz.

The scoped camerawork is a shrewd tactic; only occasionally does its flat, proscenium effect make the action feel overly staged.

One wishes for a chewier whodunit – there just aren't enough clues for the viewer to work with – and the reveal of the mole is perversely anticlimactic. But maybe that's just stickling. We always knew Smiley'd get his man.

It’s not quite as brutalizing as McEwan’s brilliant source novel – it bears too much of a Great Art buff – but it ravishes nonetheless in its grand exploration of the sins of the daughter and a lifetime spent making reparations.

This revisionist Western – intellectually, aesthetically, and narratively absorbing – rattles to the bone, but never quite rends the heart.

An absorbing human drama.

The Vuillards, however fractured, know one another's rhythms and rituals, and Desplechin knows just how to convey them in the subtlest of ways.

I suspect that, like the Coen brothers, David Lynch, and Wes Anderson -– our American masters of idiosyncrasy -– Kaurismäki has a limited appeal. Those who get him, really get him.

Anderson and his co-writer Roman Coppola have crafted an elegant and emphatic metaphor for adolescence, that tumultuous province of firsts and lasts.

When the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River began construction in the early Nineties, an estimated 2 million people's lives were impacted. That's a staggering number to contemplate, but Up the Yangtze effectively personalizes that near-meaningless number by putting a face on at least a few of those 2 million.

The deeply heartfelt Milk is more of a surface skim: a fairly standard biopic – if a very fine one, indeed – but never the transcendent work one would have hoped from the filmmaker or his subject.

Looper makes a full-meal entertainment out of piecemealing genres: It boasts the kicky mental gymnastics that come with time-travel terrain, the relentless rapid heart rate of a crackerjack thriller, and the bursts of extreme violence, buttressed with black humor, of a modern actioner.