An elegantly observed, sleekly packaged look at an artist whose career-long balance of enigma and self-exposure culminated in a 2010 retrospective at New York City's Museum of Modern Art.

It's a mark of Shelton's ability to create living characters from seemingly minor shared moments -- the ones that wind up meaning everything.

The writing is relaxed in the right places and heightened to a largely effective degree when it counts.

The climax errs on the side of the overwrought and overdetermined, like an earnest adolescent's first attempt at a short story. And yet Papoulia's extraordinary performance lingers, as does the film's provocative existential fog.

Hill cuts a hilariously adversarial figure.

Ultimately -- and perhaps fittingly -- Cropsey is most effective as a study of Staten Island and its inhabitants, specifically the half-life of grief as it is manifested in a self-contained community.

The roots of romantic feeling, as explored in Wild Grass, Alain Resnais's jazzy ode to cinema and the love impulse in later life, are equally, spectacularly random.

Dark to a specific point of dullness or even opacity, Solondz requires patience, as always, but indulgence as well. He relies on your remembrance of his other films and characters but also on your willingness to overlook his redeployment of tactics that range from puerile to mildly -- and somehow always self-skeptically -- profound.

Because Animal Kingdom is so richly suffused with atmosphere and style, you could almost float right past the deficiencies in its story in an admiring trance.

Minor but still quite enjoyable. And like other minor Woody Allen pictures it becomes more interesting when placed in their larger context.

Waiting For Superman may rub a little raw here and there, but if it stirs that memory in enough voting and tax-paying Americans, it has at least begun to do its job.

Although this is a film about the influential women in Lennon's life, it succeeds equally in its evocation of the family Lennon built among his boyhood mates.

The result is like a sugar rush after a visit to the vintage candy store.

The result is a shaggy rise-and-fall story that is deceptively well-wrought, playing at times like an extremely hip, deep-access concert film.

The result is way out there - so far that you won't quite recognize the terrain, and still feel strangely at home. The look has the impossible feel of a CGI soundstage: Not cheap, not even necessarily fake, just… weird.

Physically Watts is of course a decent match for the even more aggressively glamorous Plame; in spirit, it would seem, they are even closer. In the field Plame was first and foremost an actress, a pretender whose belief in her pretending was often of mortal consequence.

As Gibney and Spitzer are at pains to point out, it's a story as old as Icarus: Man rises to power; man makes enemies; man gets greedy and is undone.

Veering between the windswept and the simply windy, The Tempest, I suspect, will provoke purists and only intermittently win the attention of less interested parties.

There are a couple of scenes of pure, sentimental genius, as well as appealingly boggled turns by Rudd and Wilson.

It's all sweet and very, very silly. I was surprised by the subtleties - both comedic and thematic.

Country Strong rides pretty high in the saddle, confident in the remarkably realized world Feste has created for her characters.

Burns handles the more dramatic moments - divorce, accidental death, betrayal - with invention, using abrupt cuts and impressionistic editing to keep the film from settling into a rut.

Scenic, inventively playful, and successfully serious when it wants to be.

The casting of Jespersen, with his sub-Wookie intonations and granite stare, is key: If this pillar of masculinity says there be trolls, I don't have to be bitten by one to believe it.

In catsuits, swimsuits, and skimpy underthings, Saldana is as potently elusive as a shadow can be.

By the time he's putting the entire metro area on notice -- having thrashed his father and all the local bullies -- Andrew has no camera and the metaphor has run away with the story entirely. The crazy thing is it almost works.

It's a matinee treat for the very little ones, after all.

Manages to surprise with a charm and wit all its own.