It's a truly prodigious piece of work, resembling a career summation far more than a maiden voyage.

Rarely has there been so obscenely precise a depiction of ravaged innocence. This young girl has nothing to live for--and an entire life ahead of her in which to live it.

Abrams and his writers (Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman) have come up with a way to make you dig the souped-up new scenery while pining for the familiar--a good thing.

Bahrani’s concentration is close to supernatural as he tracks the young, prepubescent Ale (Alejandro Polanco) from job to soul-numbing job, some legal, some extralegal, to the point where you’re forced to suspend altogether your moral judgments and watch with a mixture of pain and awe.

A comedy in the best sense--it draws its life from the pitch-perfect authenticity of its characters.

Ineffably sad - yet there's almost no loitering. The film is crisp, evenly paced, its colors bright, as sharp as the winter cold.

You get a bad feeling early in Project Nim, the brilliant, traumatizing documentary by James Marsh (Man on Wire).

The set pieces, such as an unmasked Spider-Man trying to stop a runaway subway car, are furiously scary, and compensate for all the icky mooning and moping that Peter does whenever he's questioning his gift, which is most of the time.

Paranoid Park is a supernaturally perfect fusion of Van Sant’s current conceptual-art-project head-trip aesthetic and Blake Nelson’s finely tuned first-person “young adult” novel.

Early on, writer-director David Michôd serves up "Trainspotting"-like tricks and narration that is beguiling, if rarely apropos. But the actors are something.

For all the wizardry on display, Hugo often feels like a film about magic instead of a magical film.

A kind of psychological whodunit, but without the thrills. The clue-making is rather desultory, as if Cronenberg were indulging a narrative strategy he didn’t really care for.

Very entertaining (and doesn’t overstay its welcome) but it’s a little depressing to contemplate.

Truly, this is manna from hell.

This is more social anthropology than psychology. 56 Up isn't concerned so much with opening up individual lives as it is with showing us how the journey of an ordinary life - or over a dozen ordinary lives - can offer insights into our own, and into society. The effect is often profoundly moving, but you can't help but feel at times like there are other stories here you're missing.

Up in the Air is poised to be a smash, and Clooney--slim, dark, perfectly tailored--glamorizes insincerity in a way that makes you want to go out and lie.

The best movie ever made about a man of God -- which is to say, the most honest and morally the most ambiguous.

I don't mean to unduly target Kill Bill Vol. 2 --it's certainly no worse than most of the blam-blam fare out there. But what I crave now are movies that speak to me in a different way about violence, that acknowledge the fact that real people are harmed.

One of the letdowns of Vera Drake is that once Vera is arrested, we lose her voice.

Lake of Fire centers on abortion, but Kaye understands that while dead fetuses are the hook, the agenda covers the whole life cycle.

When it comes time for some of the girls to flee, the result is one of the most emotionally satisfying of all prison breaks.

No filmmaker I know has gotten as close to a professional athlete as James Toback gets to Mike Tyson in his new documentary.

You can't make this stuff up. You can, however, capture it on film for all time. Trouble the Water is ineradicably moving.

Burton, bless him, constricts the space and concentrates the melodrama; he finds the perfect balance between the funereal and the ferocious. Above all, he treasures these ghouls: He digs both their bloodlust and their melancholy.

Venus is worth seeing for the scenes between O’Toole and Vanessa Redgrave as the woman he abandoned--the mother of his children.

The movie doesn't quite jell, but you'll feel its sting for hours.

The Deep Blue Sea is not a showy or pronounced movie. Open yourself up to it, however, and it might destroy you.

The most blessedly traditional sort of documentary. It follows the twisty, complicated rise and fall of Enron in steady, chronological order, from the mid-eighties to the present.