The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is predicatable and sentimental, but the acting makes it a pleasant enough stay. more ›

After six films worth of buildup, The Avengers contains something to entertain the comic book collector as well as the contemporary Hollywood fan boy. more ›

In Monsieur Lazhar, the characters, adult and child alike, navigate treacherous cultural and emotional minefields, and the resulting dramatic tension and resolution is genuinely moving without being maudlin. more ›

Kenneth Longeran's long-shelved Margaret is so contrived and ham-handed that its successes are mostly drowned in its failures. more ›

This biopic of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi tries to capture turmoil. But its blandness does not end with its title. more ›

A compelling if ultimately uncritical life of the reggae legend. more ›

Joss Whedon's meta-horror movie will satisfy the gore hungry. But it's not just another formula slasher. more ›

Bully is probably preaching to the choir paying to see it, but if that choir becomes a little more aware of what their children are up to, the movie will have done its job. more ›

"The Long Day Closes" has stunning production values, but its impressionistic collage of memory adds up to little more than a glorified scrapbook." more ›

"The Hunter: charts no new territory, but Willem Dafoe, the Tasmanian wilderness, and an elusive tiger keep your interest. more ›

Fairy tales are not just about living happily ever after. They play upon our most acute childhood fears: abandonment, incompetence, powerlessness. Mirror Mirror adds two contemporary fears to this list in the form of Julia Roberts and Nathan Lane. more ›

Like a good fairy tale, The Kid with a Bike traffics in childhood fears. Like a good movie, it tugs at the heart strings without falling into maudlin sentiment. more ›

As brutal and frenetic as The Raid: Redemption is, it’s brilliantly staged. It's not for everyone, but if you think it is, you'll love it. more ›

Move over, Harry, Bella, et al. The big-screen adaptation of Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games opens today, starring Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss Everdeen, the heroine in the middle of a teenage deathmatch. more ›

At the end of the cinematic hardship that pervades The Turin Horse, you may happy to know that it's Béla Tarr last film. more ›

Will Ferrell in a telenovela? It sounds like a great idea, but Casa de mi Padre strays a little far from what makes Spanish-language soap operas so fun to watch. more ›

The Pruitt-Igoe Myth attempts to figure out the complicated history of a public-housing project in St. Louis. more ›

Text messages, billionaire sheikhs and oddly placed definite articles bog down Lasse Hallström's romantic comedy Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, starring Ewan McGregor and Emily Blunt. more ›

We Need to Talk about Kevin tells a fragmented tale about the fractured psyche. It poses difficult questions, and perhaps has too easy answers. But it’s a grueling and fascinating interview process. more ›

If Oscar-winning documentary Undefeated inspires you, it will not be because of what happens on the field, but because of the character of these young men and their coach. more ›

Pina, Wim Wenders' gorgeous 3D document of the Tanztheatre Wuppertal, might not leave you in tears, but it may well convert the uninitiated: fans of Wenders who know nothing of the late choreographer; devotees of Bausch unfamiliar with the German’ director’s arthouse favorites Wings of Desire and Buena Vista Social Club; and finally, film skeptics who feel 3D adds nothing but a gimmick to the moviegoing experience. more ›

Can a graphic novel successfully make the transition to a live action feature film? more ›

50/50 has a well-meaning script that gets a lot of the details right. But it's so wrapped up in Hollywood convention that not even Seth Rogen can make this more than Lifetime for Hipsters. more ›

Whether you find it funny or infuriating, Shut Up Little Man! An Audio Misadventure is an intriguing study of how information spreads, and a sober meditation on human relationships. more ›

Part documentary, part street-opera, John Turturro’s homage to the music of Naples will have you humming. more ›

Director Denis Villeneuve wastes no time setting the hook at the start of his engrossing mystery, Incendies. In the first scene, a brother and sister, college-aged twins, sit in the office of their mother Nawal's boss, and executor of her will, not long after her death. Their mother's will has some odd requests: she's to be buried naked, face down, in a grave without a marker, and the twins cannot place a headstone at her resting place until they've completed a task: deliver two sealed letters to their father and brother in Iran, the country where their mother was born (they have been raised in Quebec). The problem is, they've never met their father, don't know his name, and didn't even know that they had a brother. more ›

For his debut exercise in stunt-documentary filmmaking, Super-Size Me, Morgan Spurlock spent thirty days putting a whole lot of beasts in his belly. This time around, he heads into the belly of the beast. more ›

Credit director Joe Wright with trying to avoid pigeonholing himself. His first two films, the period dramas Pride & Prejudice and Atonement, garnered much critical love and comparisons to a previous British master of sumptuous, graceful period pieces, David Lean. Not content to play just to the Masterpiece Theatre set, he set his sights on more modern material -- with mixed results -- in The Soloist. And now, radically shifting genres yet again, Wright delivers a thoroughly breathtaking, heart-racing international espionage thriller with fairy-tale overtones and a thumping electronic soundtrack from The Chemical Brothers -- a band he used to work with in his pre-cinema days directing and crewing rave-inspired music videos that probably inform this work a great deal more than anything he's done in feature films. more ›

The art of Matthew Barney tends to be divisive within the art world, so when he began making forays into cinema, it was bound to rouse arguments with an entirely new audience. His series of Cremaster films is a unique collection of movies, in that they seem at home in both art galleries and movie theaters. These are high-minded art pieces, yet they use recognizable building blocks of narrative filmmaking that make them more accessible than the abstract works that usually come to mind when one thinks of experimental film. Despite his high-art pedigree, Barney's films owe as much, if not more, to commercial filmmakers like Kubrick, Lynch, and Cronenberg than to avant-garde figures like Brakhage or Deren. more ›

Do you have the next Small Press Expo marked on your calendar? Do you have Joss Whedon's Astonishing X-Men volumes, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and the collected works of Douglas Coupland all placed on your top bookshelf, filed under "A" for "Awesome"? Do you have an original, operational Nintendo Entertainment System currently hooked up to your TV? Have you watched Edgar Wright's Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and the entire run of Spaced within the past year? more ›