After seeing Life of Pi and The Hobbit, whose 48-frame-per-second 3D is game-changing, according to some observers, it feels like the right time for m...

But despite a cast that includes Rebecca Hall, Bruce Willis, Vince Vaughn and Catherine Zeta-Jones -- and a director like Stephen Frears -- Lay the Favorite just kind of, well, lays there.

Lewy had the idea for a Brit living in the U.S., even as he was researching America's immigration bureaucracy. His discussions with immigration lawyers sparked the idea for the film.

In a season that's packed with big-budget headline-grabbers, it's hard for a quiet but compelling film such as California Solo to get a little attention. Make the effort to find it; you won't be sorry.

The new Red Dawn isn't that much better than the original and doesn't make much more sense. About the only thing it doesn't do is make the imposing of Sharia law part of its package of horrors.

The visual trickery will catch your attention -- but it's the performance behind it that will hold you and move you in Jacques Audiard's Rust and Bone, opening Friday in limited release.

Sacha Gervasi's film, from a script by John J. McLaughlin (and based on a book by Stephen Rebello), is fun in all the ways that The Girl was not.

Steven Spielberg's Lincoln opens in wide release today, after a limited release last Friday -- and with luck, Barack Obama will not only see it but take it as a template for the current lame-duck session of Congress and for his impending second term.

With Keira Knightley as the muse, Joe Wright and screenwriter Tom Stoppard transform Tolstoy's classic into a film that is emotionally wrenching, even as it turns the world it depicts inside out.

Starlet, opening Friday in limited release, may be one of the year's most surprising little movies, a tough-minded, low-budget tale that never quite leads you where it seems to be going.

Robert Zemeckis' Flight is a character study disguised as a thriller. The near-crash is just the beginning of the story -- and the story is not what you think.

It was supposed to be a documentary about the dead zones in the Chesapeake Bay. But the material he was reading about the pollution of the bay was too scary. So director Barry Levinson made a horror movie instead: The Bay.

Imagine investing the price of a movie ticket in as many fun-size candy bars as that sum will buy -- and then eating them all in one sitting. Imagine how you would feel -- and it would still be better than how you feel after sitting through Fun Size.

There are a lot of ways Lorraine Levy could have gone with the premise of The Other Son, opening in limited release Friday. Thankfully, she took the least-expected one.

Alan Cumming knows a little bit about feeling like a second-class citizen. After all, aside from being a gay man in a straight-dominated world, he's also a Scot who's lived in London.

What is Cloud Atlas about? In various ways, it examines the nature of tyranny and the human instinct toward freedom. It is about the search for truth and the many obstacles that stand in the way of that search.

The dividing lines have already been drawn -- and continue to be drawn -- about what should or shouldn't be among the year-end awards contenders. And the biggest line, of course, has to do with The Master.

The best films about recovery from addiction are not about reaching rock bottom and making that choice to stop. Rather, like Smashed, they're about the very real and difficult task of going on, in an emotionally unshielded and intensely vulnerable way.

It's a little early to be proclaiming Ben Affleck's Argo the best movie of the year -- but one of the best? No question.

How much bad luck can one family have? Enough for a hit movie -- Taken -- and what I assume the makers hope is a hit sequel: Taken 2.

I'm not one who worships at the altar of Tim Burton, probably disliking his films as often as I am moved by them. But I fell hard for Frankenweenie, an extrapolation of a short film Burton made almost 30 years ago.

Would Butter be a funnier movie if Michele Bachmann were still at the center of the American political conversation?

Lee Daniels' touch is all over this movie, which is as sensational as it is nonsensical, with its overheated blend of sex, race and murder.

It's one thing when documentaries like Davis Guggenheim's Waiting for 'Superman and Madeleine Sackler's much better The Lottery look at problems in public education and offer some solutions (such as charter schools).

Stephen Chbosky's The Perks of Being a Wallflower, which he adapted from his young-adult novel, gets it right in too many ways to ignore.