Shawn Levy

Anderson, god love him, seems determined to make the "Great American Film." The Master isn't it, but you come away from it with the sense that may be on the right path.

The script's contrivances and the director's lax handling aren't enough to hold you.

Zobel isn't a sadist about all of this as, say, Roman Polanski or David Lynch or Todd Solondz might have been. There's a humanity here, even for the restaurant manager. But that still doesn't make Compliance easy to ingest.

More seriously, Jarecki never quite pierces the skin of this world, capturing its shiny and grimy surfaces but failing to immerse us in its flaws; too often it's like flipping through a magazine story on the lives of the rich and corrupt.

There's a touch of whimsy to his misadventures, but the malfeasance he uncovers -- often using hidden cameras and microphones -- is anything but a joke.

The word 'samsara' means 'continuous flow of life' in Tibetan, and Fricke and company surely experienced that sensation in making the film, which took them to 25 countries in a span of five years.

A nitwit story about a nitwit author who has written a nitwit novel about a nitwit author who has published a nitwit novel which, in fact, he has stolen wholecloth from another writer whose personal behavior, as fictionalized in the novel-within-the-novel-within-the-film, can charitably be described as...nitwit.

This isn't the "Right Thing" in any sense.

The slowness and stillness in the film are, actually, a slow boil, and in Lie's taciturnity there is pain and even horror.

There's a terrific balance between human comedy and just-this-side-of-science-fiction in Robot & Frank.

The journey on which he takes us may not satisfy in the ways we normally ask of movies, but if it did it wouldn't be a Cronenberg, would it?

Director Bart Layton's film takes us to such strange and emotionally-charged places that we cannot believe that what we're seeing is real, even though it demonstrably is.

Slight but winning.

A rather routine thriller that's got two things going for it: the ticking of a clock and the clickety-click of bicycle wheels. Both impart a sense of exhilaration to a thin and even silly story, engaging you when, really, you ought to know better.

Spirited and saucy, Hit and Run is a small movie with big spirit, a Tarantino-ish sensibility, and a scattergun ethos that results in more hits than misses.

The overall cheekiness of the film far outweighs its preachy moments. For the most part, it's a brisk, funny and engaging movie that does genuinely exciting things with little bits of string and wire and such.

The result is a newly revived spy movie franchise -- and the best big-budget action film of the summer.

Wrapping the whole thing in a sentimental ending turns it into a fraud. The Campaign might have been truly -- and appropriately -- scabrous in other hands; those of the "South Park" guys or Mike Judge, say. But director Jay Roach and writers Shawn Harwell and Chris Henchy play it safe and down the middle. No actual political contributors or candidates need fear harm.

Hara-Kiri is low on blood and shock, emphasizing performance and atmosphere.

Watching The Queen of Versailles you don't know whether to laugh or cry.

You come away with an appreciation of the abstraction, scale and daring of Ai's art and, even more, a sense of the living man in his courage, humor and restlessness. It's an invigorating experience.

By the time the film reaches its convoluted, bombastic and preposterous climax, any sense of real magic that it once conveyed has utterly vanished.

It isn't art, it's will-o-the-wisp thin, but it might well make you squirt your soda through your nose. And as there seem to be a number of people willing to pay good money for that sensation, there's glory for you!

If Ruby Sparks doesn't warm you much or form a seamless whole, it's nevertheless got pieces that you can genuinely admire.

Neil Young Journeys is the third documentary/concert film focusing on the great Canadian songwriter that director Jonathan Demme has made since 2006, and it's the weakest of the three, even as it sporadically charms.

The Dark Knight Rises is reasonably accomplished as a gigantic superhero movie; as a meditation on capital and its personal and social discontents, it's strictly from the funny pages.

"Waltz" requires you to be on board with it from the start and doesn't often enough rouse itself to magnetize you if you're not.

Brings you into a world you didn't know existed with a closeness that the movies almost never achieve. If that constitutes exploitation, then it's a crime which all works of art should aspire to commit.