What is so surprising – even exhilarating – about The Names of Love is that it shucks off the desultory roadblocks that engine the modern romantic comedy – all that razzmatazz of missed connections and dunderheaded misunderstandings.

So much here is equally befuddling and beguiling; I caught myself leaning in toward the screen repeatedly, trying to somehow get closer to the gorgeous impenetrability of the story, of the boy.

Undeniably gripping stuff.

Screenwriters Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman, and fanboys’ favorite whipping boy, Damon Lindelof, keep the film moving at a quippy clip; there’s really no fat here until the film feints a climax only to lurch the coaster-car back up the hill again.

When Les Misérables is good, it is very, very good, and when it is bad, it's usually because Russell Crowe has opened his mouth.

With "50/50," his last stint in the director's chair, Levine upended convention to make a feel-good cancer movie. He's still defying expectations: In animating the inner workings of the undead, he's made a movie that is both clever and heartfelt.

Cooper mostly tamps down that Sexiest Man Alive demeanor that follows him from film to film, and Lawrence – a continually startling young talent – counterpoises her Bardot beauty with a blistering snarl. They both play hurt people clawing their way toward wellness, but it's Lawrence who makes you feel the hurt in your heart – and the hope that it'll get better soon.

What a weird, winning little movie is Robot & Frank, which explores what happens to the essential self as the memory goes. Oh, and it's a heist picture. With robot butlers. I'm not sure I've ever seen anything quite like it.

Sisley is a former stand-up comic, although you'd never guess it here: Finding himself in the eye of a colossal shit storm of his own making, his Vincent is brusque and action oriented, his face, a picture of ulceration in progress.

With a saga this sprawling and byzantine, it makes sense that the emphasis is not on Schiele, but rather on what the sorely wronged Bondi never stopped calling "my Schiele."

Berger’s low-key, likable ensemble film flares with brilliance in its framing concept.

This documentary does boast some bowl-you-over reveals best experienced blind.

First, to dispel the two talking points attending The Impossible, Juan Antonio Bayona's dramatization of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami: No, it's not racist, and no, you don't have to be a parent to feel the film in your bones.

Keep the Lights On feels like a first-rate, late-Seventies experimental student film, or early Scorsese. But then the cycle of addiction takes over the film, and the plot about stagnancy ends up stagnating the film itself.

The film is studded with stirring moments of surprise.

Blancanieves never lags, per se, it’s just awfully in love with itself: with its gorgeous black and white chiaroscuros and whirling-dervish first-person camera perspectives, the Spanish-guitar-scored dance sequences (that include the undeniable dance of the matador in action), and battering winds of emotional extremes. By the end of this sumptuous and sincerely felt melodrama, I was rather in love with it, too.

It’s a little bit silly – as is Dafoe’s Kentucky-fried cowboy mechanic named Elvis – but silly is fun. In fact, one wishes it were sillier still.

It’s an enjoyable enough exercise in teen angst triumphing.

It’s not an altogether convincing portrait, but it is an entertaining, even moving one, and the forcefulness of Bullock's presence goes a long way in pulling the film back from the brink of cuddliness.

There is Clooney’s deceptively layered performance, some startling bits of laugh-out-loud absurdity, and the not-at-all-negligible pleasure to be had in a cockeyed point of view.

If anything, The Invention of Lying is too soft for the satirical promise of its premise.

Funny People – sensitive, shaggy, a little bit draggy – is as much about the maturation of Ira as a performer and George as a man as it is about Apatow’s maturation as an artist.

Giamatti is masterful.

What a glorious weepie The Notebook might have been if they’d just found a way to get rid of the damned notebook.

Never achieves the satisfaction of a real crackerjack con movie.

Shannon is monstrously good – unpredictable where the other actors are clipped and careful – and he steals the whole picture in two short, shattering scenes. When Shannon exits the film, the air gets sucked out again, and you realize the pretty artifice extends to more than just the Wheelers.

It’s always a pleasure to be in the company of Potter, and when looking back at the just-competent first outings – well, baby, you’ve come a long way – but still: Where’s the magic, huh?

It neither embarrasses the original, nor is superior to it in any way.