Killing Them Softly does a wonderful job of creating a realistic, lived-in world in the post-Katrina wreckage of New Orleans, without a lot of frills or even much music. While it is no fast-paced bulletfest, when the violence comes, it's scary, gory, and brutal, as it should be.

Life of Pi is more about the nuts and bolts of a teenager surviving at sea and bonding with a tiger than a spiritual quest that asks hard questions about the wisdom, will, and existence of God.

A few weeks ago, I told a friend that I'd bet most North Korean soldiers would probably surrender for a few Big Macs and an iPhone 3GS. That's why the 2012 reboot of the 1984 cult classic Red Dawn strikes me as being so dumb.

The film follows five students, showing the impact chess and being on the team has on their lives, and how those gains may be erased when the economic meltdown forces budget cuts that may hamper the team's ability to compete at the highest levels.

Lincoln may be what America needs right now to remind us what politics, for all its messy, dispiriting ugliness, can and should be about -- doing the right, moral thing to better us all.

Maybe you're like me and know next to nothing about classical music, string quartets, and the men and women who perform it. But none of those things kept me from enjoying A Late Quartet, an impressive indie film.

Would the Wachowskis redeem themselves with another reality-twisting mindbender? Or would Cloud Atlas prove that The Matrix was truly a fluke?

It's impossible to watch Brooklyn Castle and think that a program like this and the kids who benefit from it should be sacrificed so multi-millionaires can get a tax cut, so hopefully this scrappy, inspiring doc and its chess wizards get all the attention they deserve.

With an impressive 91 percent fresh score on Rotten Tomatoes, Argo has been receiving some Oscar buzz, with some critics claiming it's one of the year's best films.

Oscar-winner Andrea Arnold has pulled off something very special with her adaptation of Emily Brontë's literary classic Wuthering Heights -- she's made a story that's over 150 years old feel modern without modernizing it.

The film's palpable sense of honesty and authenticity is surely due to the fact that Chbosky not only wrote the film's screenplay, but also directed Perks in his hometown of Pittsburgh.

A lot has been said about whether the Cause is code for Scientology. Anderson drew a lot of inspiration from L. Ron Hubbard and the origins of Scientology, but to say that The Master is about Scientology misses the point.

The movie Robot & Frank tells the story of an unlikely friendship between Frank, an aging former cat burglar, and a nameless eldercare robot. But Robot & Frank is no hypothetical sci-fi flight of fancy.

Sleepwalk With Me is a really wonderful, poignant, funny, and very original film from a unique and honest voice that shows its main character not as a hero, victim, or saint, but as a real person who makes mistakes, and sometimes big, hurtful, avoidable ones.

The Campaign exceeded my expectations by ignoring partisan politics and instead poking fun at the realities of modern campaigning, the role of wealthy donors, our gaffe-obsessed media, and, in the end, on voters themselves.

The studio tried to figure out how to make a Bourne movie without Bourne, but could it feel like anything other than a cynical attempt to squeeze more dollars from a finished franchise?

The Watch is obviously fiction, but sadly, when unstable people can buy such powerful weapons, we need to do more than just hope that they'll only be aimed at bad guys and aliens.

The Dark Knight Rises is very impressive and definitely worth seeing, but without a once-in-a-lifetime performance like Ledger's Joker to provide the pulse, we'll have to be content with a final chapter that certainly delivers, but in a trilogy that peaked in the middle.

Why would Sony, which owns the rights to the Spider-Man character, feel that it was a good time to reboot the series with The Amazing Spider-Man? As you probably guessed, it has something to do with money.

There were some things in Rock of Ages I really liked, but there were also things that were annoying or just plain weird. But what's weirdest is that what I liked and what I didn't like were often the same things.