Block Party is largely a giant love-fest, which is fitting given the staggering amount of simpatico musical and comic talent on display, though some conflict surfaces nevertheless.

Altman and Keillor's A Prairie Home Companion is fittingly both a celebration and a winning example of the joys of collaboration.

Like the best independent films, The Motel realizes that life is made up of minor pleasures and tiny epiphanies, not sweeping character arcs or big dramatic moments.

In choosing cheap gags over incisive cultural commentary, Borat scores more as scatology than satire, but it's easy to overlook its ramshackle nature in light of the explosive laughter.

A beautifully observed coming-of-age story.

Begins by living up to its fans' rabid expectations, and ends by justifying skeptics' doubts. In between lie roughly equivalent levels of tedium and hilarity.

Though the filmmaking is pedestrian, The Camden 28's timeless truths come through with resounding power.

Though it never regains the inspiration or comic density of its brilliant first 20 minutes, The Simpsons Movie keeps the laughs coming from start to finish, a feat as rare and wonderful in film as it has been through 18 years of television.

In a heartbreaking, scene-stealing performance, Wilkinson plays his bipolar character's manic delirium as a heightened form of awareness, a life-affirming source of moral clarity in a cloudy and corrupt world.

It's a relentlessly downbeat, well-acted melodrama that's easy to admire, but intentionally impossible to enjoy.

Like few of his filmmaking peers, McCarthy understands and respects the power of quiet, and how a whisper can be as explosive as a shout.

Ron Perlman returns as the film's loveable title character, a demon gone good who's tough on the outside but tender underneath, with a soft spot for kittens, candy, and babies.

Funny excuses an awful lot, and at its best, Hamlet 2 is nothing short of hilarious.

Audience reaction to Outrage will depend heavily on how people feel about outing. Dick’s film probably won’t persuade anyone who finds the practice to be a loathsome and intrusive invasion of privacy, but after a relatively dry beginning, the film builds in passion and intensity until attaining a stirring cumulative power.

O’Horten feels like a waking dream. It's a film of subtle, insinuating charm, a character study about an eminently sane, reasonable man unsteadily navigating an increasingly insane, unreasonable world.

James Brown, B.B. King, and a dazzling array of top African, Afro-Cuban, and African-American talent finally gets its own solo spotlight in Soul Power.

Is it possible to talk about the fascinating and complex universe of black hair without dealing with race and identity? That’s the question posed by Good Hair.

Workingman's Death's primary pleasures are aesthetic. Glawogger is an extraordinarily elegant filmmaker with a photographer's eye for striking compositions.

Lottery Ticket gets far on the strength of its star's charisma and a likeable tone.

Superman argues convincingly that everyone should have the right to a good education, not just folks lucky enough to score winning numbers: It should be a birthright, not a matter of chance.

From an emotional standpoint, it's enormously satisfying, even cathartic to watch Ferguson "nail" some of the rogues behind the economic crisis with the unseemly zeal of Stephen Colbert on The Colbert Report.

Chris Morris' corrosive black comedy Four Lions explores the lighter side of jihad. It's a ballsy romp through one of the least lighthearted subjects imaginable.

The film tells such a compelling, expansive story that its unwillingness to plumb its subject's psychological depths feels forgivable, though regrettable.

Arthur Christmas gets a little sappy toward the end - it is a Christmas movie, after all - but it otherwise strikes just the right combination of naughty and nice, reverent and irrelevant, holiday-sweet and Aardman dry.

The filmmakers throw everything at the audience, literally and metaphorically, and the results are exhilarating rather than exhausting.

The film emerges as a powerful, even shattering look as music's power to unite where it once divided.

Everything here is pitched relentlessly toward uplift, but at least that uplift is genuine, the product of one visionary's indomitable will and a musical universe he brought into existence through vision, dedication, and plenty of stubborn hard work.

A lovely, sweet, funny, romantic, and supremely worthwhile endeavor that unfortunately takes longer to wrap up than it should.