McQueen and his stellar cast take us on a difficult journey, an odyssey that will make you want to avert your eyes. It is to their great credit that we don’t.

Using archival footage, inventive animated recreations of incidents and chilling aerial smart-bomb views of air strikes as they happen, Moreh creates a simple yet elegantly damning film.

The dialogue is hard-bitten and Mamet-sharp.

Young Onata Aprile makes Maisie a passive wonder, a sweetly poker-faced, nonjudgmental and hopeful child, even as she’s being ditched at bars, forgotten at school or passed back and forth like a prize, or a bad penny.

As with her best films, Coppola is utterly at ease in this milieu and it shows.

Doueiri has brilliantly and simply put a compassionate human face on a part of the world where ethnicity still trumps education, class and achievement, where even the successful face, at best, second-class citizenship in their own country.

The funniest kids’ cartoon of the summer.

It’s a pretty conventional “Lifetime Original Movie” sort of story. But co-writer/director Thomas Vinterberg (“Dear Wendy”) makes it work by building a sense of frustrating unease into it all.

This is as thorough a take-down of a business and its practices as you’re likely to ever see.

Michael B. Jordan (“Red Tails”) is never less than riveting as Oscar, and he has to be.

Witty, warm and wistful and in just the right proportions, Spectacular is the best-acted film of the summer.

A fine and fun film tribute to the milieu, the men, women and machines in a sport that was never deadlier or more glamorous than its Disco Decade incarnation.

Bullock and Clooney make their peril our peril in this absolutely gorgeous, moving and sometimes exultant reminder that the real terrors of space are scary enough, without invented bug-eyed monsters thrown in.

To fans who know the tunes by heart, hearing their history is never less than thrilling. And if you’ve heard that line about “Swampers” and never new who they were, you should. They have been known to pick a song or two.

The performances and Greengrass’s way with action immerse us and make Captain Phillips a tight, taut,edge of your seat thriller even if you remember the ending.

This solo ordeal won’t be to every taste, but All Is Lost is a grand vehicle for the actor and for that viewer ready to consider his or her own mortality, the problems, conflicts, strengths and shortcomings you’re sure you leave behind when you just sail away.

It's a celebration of great old actors set in a world of once-great singers, and Hoffman's affection for them and the material shows in every frame.

Horror is all about that short-circuit the screen's technical manipulations cause in our brain, so this isn't high art. But Mama is easily the most moving, most chilling ghost story since "Insidious," an emotional tale efficiently and affectingly told.

Take that sign at the entrance to his Tulbagh, South Africa compound seriously – "Beware of Mr. Baker."

Gangster Squad is a gang war drama built on Western conventions, a rootin' tootin', Camel-smokin', whiskey swillin' shoot'em up.

It's a fine summation of this complicated story, one that focuses heavily on Echols and his sweeping declarations about the state of justice in Arkansas and America.

A Royal Affair...is a lovely history lesson, but a film without the spark of invention that makes this modern parable feel modern.

Steven Soderbergh, rightly considered one of Hollywood’s smartest movie makers, is at his cleverest in Side Effects, a canny, cunning big idea thriller in a minor key, an engrossing zeitgeist whodunit about Wall Street, Big Pharma, prescription drugs and the power we give psychiatry and psychologists.

There’s something so delicious when Brits such as Thompson and Irons sink their fangs – sorry – into Deep South dialect. Thompson devours scenery, supporting players and dialogue with every “Bless your heart, shooo-gah” in the script, and Irons curls his non-existent mustache with every syrupy zinger.

Roberta Grossman’s cute documentary gives weight to the tune, tracing its lineage to a town – Sadagora, in the Ukraine – and the 19th century. It bubbled to life as a “Nigun,” a wordless hymn or prayer, more hummed than sung.

A down-and-dirty genre picture that manages a couple of decent plot twists, a couple of passable car chases and two epic shoot-outs.

The Hollywood debut of Korean filmmaker Chan-Wook Park (“Oldboy”) is a vivid, short exercise in tone, a movie lacking shocks and huge surprises, but one that makes up for that by creeping us out, from start to finish.

It’s a beautifully shot and reasonably balanced film, but one that struggles to find a hopeful note to end on.