An endlessly fascinating movie. If only it were a good one.

Seesawing between despair and soul-affirming inspiration, God Grew Tired of Us is a documentary to make you proud of what America offers to the rest of the world and worried that it can't keep its promises.

In the end, Seabiscuit gets right the things that matter.

A structural mess that turns contrived just when it should be hitting home.

Dreamlike and the slightest bit precious, the film is a beautiful, over-cultivated hothouse flower.

A generally thrilling entertainment that's not quite the grand slam you want it to be.

ParaNorman is supposedly for kids, but it's really aimed at their snarky older brothers, and it illustrates the limits of the new family creepshows.

In more ways than one, Mark Wexler gets the release he's seeking.

So forget about taking anyone under 12. But if you want to see what a benign demon looks like when he's eating nachos and unwinding to Al Green, this is the movie for you.

Immense, mystical, and deranged beyond immediate comprehension, Ilya Khrzhanovsky's 4 is an apocalyptic allegory of Mother Russia and its current state of squalid exhaustion.

Across the board, the performances testify, often hilariously, to the pain these characters feel and inflict but are incapable of expressing.

The final scenes deliver a payoff worthy of the film's scrappy optimism, but that may not be the reason you walk out of the theater on a cloud. It's the sight of a character coming rapturously into her own at the same time as the actress playing her.

All Abrams wants to do is give us a great ride while holding firm to our longstanding emotional investment in these characters.

It's a merry deconstructive delight and easily the best party in town.

Hardly a consistent piece of work, but even when it falls apart toward the end in a mess of bad acting and amazingly youthful pretentiousness, you may find it hard to look away. Handmade and helpless, it's nevertheless the real deal, an artful blurt of sensitivity and rage.

Kendrick gives a truly bad performance here - she's a self-conscious actress playing a self-conscious person and getting her signals all mixed up - and it's unclear whether she has been hung out to dry by her director or if it's just that the character makes no sense whatsoever.

There's a thin line, though, between honoring what came before you and replicating it, and Super 8 occasionally wobbles over that line into predictability.

War Horse is the best film of the year. The year, unfortunately, is 1942.

The Aristocrats -- the movie, not the joke -- is a working demonstration of the pleasures of the profane.

Until it spins manically out of control in the last act, Easy A is a charmer: a high school satire with a lethally sharp script and a big, smart, adorable star performance from Emma Stone.

In reality, it's messy in the way that life is, and with a rare and welcome obstreperousness.

The hidden message of The Oath is so inescapable as to be Shakespearean: Character will out.

Priceless is a bauble - an art-house diamond made of paste that somehow still gives you good glimmer for the money.

It's pure plastic product from plot line to the pro forma 3-D to the tidy moral lessons - ersatz family entertainment as disposable as it is diverting. It made me want to go read a book.

Because its subjects are so driven and so talented, First Position, which is about ballet, is more gripping than the norm.

This charming, bittersweet 90-minute monologue consists of the actor telling tales of his childhood and early years, when he was an ugly duckling from an uglier family. The anecdotes are bruisingly funny and delivered with clarity and light mockery.

A charming, damning portrait that has been stinging audiences in the Czech Republic since its 2006 release. In any language, what the movie says about surviving fascism by rolling with it speaks loud and clear.

Scorsese and his team of Grade A talents are working on an operatic scale here, and like many operas, this is long, overwrought, sprawling, and more than frequently brilliant. It also hits just enough discordant notes to keep it from greatness.