I often note how difficult it is to create a comedy that's not only smart and funny but also charming and surprising. But first-time director Craig Zi...

Having broken through as a filmmaker with the intriguing and moving The Freebie, actress Katie Aselton suffers the sophomore slump with her second film as a director, Black Rock.

Never a filmmaker for whom story seemed particularly important, Baumbach collaborated here with his star, Greta Gerwig, for what feels like an amorphous and fragmentary story of a delusional young woman who doesn't seem to want to grow up.

Aftershock is competently made and effective at making you squirm. That's as much praise as I'm willing to dish out.

If you ever imagine gruesome deaths befalling people who annoy you in the course of your day -- people you may not even know but who instantly rub you the wrong way -- well, this is the movie for you.

Don't believe the hate. The Great Gatsby is not a terrible film; indeed, it's a surprisingly affecting one.

Fashion entered my life in junior high school, when it suddenly became imperative that I own a Gant dress shirt, the kind with a loop on the back. The...

So is the third film the decider in a series? Two out of three good enough for immortality? In the case of Iron Man Three (as the closing credits have it), I'd say it's probably too close to call.

Love Is All You Need is an unexpectedly upbeat film from the chronically downbeat Susanne Bier -- if you can use upbeat to describe a romance between ...

It seems startling to me that so few people recognize the name of actor Michael Shannon when they hear it. Perhaps The Iceman will make the difference.

Adapted and extrapolated from Henry James' novel of the same name, What Maisie Knew is a film that puts the audience right in the title character's world -- and forces it to experience it the way she does.

Though a bit literal for a film that traffics in magical realism, Deepa Mehta's Midnight's Children is both dreamy and dramatic, a fascinating view of Indian history seen through the prism of a personal -- and occasionally twinned -- story.

There is something both engaging and unique about Jeff Nichols' plain-spoken tale of youngsters learning hard lessons about the nature of love and the darker side of the adult world.

Initially seeming like a comedy about the vicarious voyeurism of a literature teacher at a Paris high school, it casually transforms itself into something else: a psychological thriller of sorts, in which what is real is never quite clear and never particularly important.

Jacob Hatley's documentary about the late Levon Helm (who died in 2012) is a flinty valedictory to a rough-hewn but cagey and soulful musician.

In telling Robinson's story, Helgeland doesn't dwell on the endless barrage of racist bile that Robinson (and his wife) endured, but he doesn't shy from it either. As a result, Robinson's achievement takes on more meaning and more power.

If Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life was too much the dialogue-driven, story-heavy film for your liking, you'll probably be more in the mood for his latest, To the Wonder, which features Ben Affleck, Rachel McAdams and Olga Kurylenko in its cast.

Disconnect is upsetting, exhilarating and frightening in equal measures. It's got the ability to pierce your complacency with its cautionary tale.

While The Company You Keep can't sustain itself as the kind of thriller it's being pitched as, it's still a thoughtful, provocative story about the continuing battle between idealism and cynicism.

This is a film that challenges the audience to plug into the story and stick with it. But if you do, it pays off with a portrait of a manipulative, dark character, one who continually surprises the viewer with his choices.

If the first G.I. Joe movie was an F, Joe 2 is, at best, a C-. More likely a D+. Barely passing.

Andrew Niccol's film of The Host starts so well that, when it suddenly slows to a crawl 20 minutes later, your impulse is to give it some slack -- to let it find its feet and get back on track. Unfortunately, it never does.

Derek Cianfrance's The Place Beyond the Pines is a sure-handed effort from a director who proved himself capable of dramatizing difficult human emotions in Blue Valentine.

Ostensibly a documentary, it's meant as an eye-opening deconstruction of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. Director Rodney Ascher lets a group of obsessives spout off about their theories of what Kubrick really meant. The only thing they don't suggest is that Kubrick is talking to them over the radio.

A second-rate Die Hard knock-off with Gerard Butler playing the Bruce Willis role, Olympus Has Fallen is preposterously overblown, an action movie that seems to prove the old saying: If brains were gunpowder, this movie wouldn't have enough to blow its own nose.