Marshall Fine

Lucas is under no illusion that Hide Away is a mainstream film. But he enjoyed taking the risks inherent in making an independent film with a very personal point of view.

For a movie based on a fairy tale, Snow White and the Huntsman is kind of grim -- or is that Grimm?

The temptation to make lots of marijuana-derived jokes would be a lot stronger if High School, an alleged stoner comedy, were actually funny.

I will admit: I tend to have a bias against movies with the number "3" in the title. If there's ever a dead giveaway that all imagination has been sap...

Based on a true story, The Intouchables is a movie that already has been tarred with the condescending brush of American critics who mischaracterize it as patronizing to the character of Driss.

Oh, let's just get it out there: This is a movie about the invention of the vibrator and women seizing the reins of their own pleasure.

Maiwenn Le Besco's Polisse is tough and compelling, a police drama with no real plot but, rather, a snapshot slice-of-life of a group of Paris cops coping with what may be the most demanding assignment on the force.

A Bag of Hammers isn't out to change the world. But it does capture the sense of what happens when our world does change, in ways that bigger, more expensive films too seldom achieve.

When Tim Burton and Johnny Depp decided, "Oh, wouldn't it be fun to make a movie out of the campy '60s TV show Dark Shadows," the correct response should have been the following three words: Wild Wild West.

The Avengers is veined with wit, even as it offers exactly the kind of action that fanboys and normal movie-goers alike want out of something like this.

Don't trust the trailers for Anne Renton's The Perfect Family. They make it look like an irreverent, iconoclastic satire, one that attacks hypocrisy among the pious -- like something from the Farrelly brothers or, perhaps, John Waters.

Bernie, based on a true-crime story from a small Texas town, is a film Linklater knew he wanted to make when he first read the Texas Monthly story about the case in 1998.

I personally don't care one way or the other about how young Lena Dunham is, how nondiverse the show's cast is or any of the other gripes. I think the show is smart and funny.

The Five-Year Engagement wrings a slightly different change on the old boy-meets-girl formula -- and finds enough big laughs to make the whole thing enjoyable, even if it's never particularly fresh.

It's a gorgeous spring day in Manhattan, which seems to have both actor Kevin Kline and writer-director Lawrence Kasdan restless.

Marley is a welcome documentary, one that celebrates Bob Marley's spirit, his genius and his influence. If it errs on the side of hagiography, well, at least it gives us glimpses of previously unseen Marley performances.

It says something about the state of romantic comedies today that the ideas in a movie like Think Like a Man -- or in books like Steve Harvey's Act Li...

To the Arctic, like the cable series Frozen Planet, provides a precious historical record. At some point in the future, films like this will provide the only visual record of polar bears, caribou and other Arctic fauna that will eventually disappear.

Stranded in outer space, stranded in Serbia -- how much different can it be? Not much, says actor Guy Pearce, whose newest film, Lockout, opened Friday.

I'm sure there are those who will be shocked that I not only enjoyed a lot of The Lucky One, but that I think Zac Efron's performance is a break-out moment -- the announcement that a teen dream has made the transition to adult dramatic actor.

Thanks to a marvelously full-bodied performance by Michelle Yeoh and a complementary one by David Thewlis, The Lady overcomes its own obstacles -- principally ones of pacing -- to present a moving portrait of courage, resilience and conviction.

In Lockout, we have a prison-escape film that features an actor in search of literal escape -- from this film.

I'm declaring a moratorium on the "found footage" mock documentary. And, while we're at it, how about the same thing for movies shot to look like they're hand-held documentaries, even when they're just fiction films?

Like Paul Greengrass' United 93, this film focuses on urgent action in tightly enclosed spaces, which also leads to an occasional lack of clarity when we're not sure what we're seeing.

Thoughtful but funny in a low-key way, Nanni Moretti's We Have a Pope examines the idea of papal succession through a fictional story that reminds us ...