Movie Reviews

In "The Iceman," Michael Shannon's mesmerizing portrayal of Richard Kuklinski, a notorious contract killer, has the paradoxical quality, peculiar to many great screen performances, of being unreadable and transparent.

Current films are reviewed each week to provide parents a guide to decide what may be appropriate to younger viewers.

The 38-year-old filmmaker Ramin Bahrani has emerged as one of the most exciting artists on the cinema scene in recent years, with his mesmerizing debut film "Man Push Cart" and then with "Chop Shop" and "Goodbye Solo."

'Kon-Tiki" needed to be made for the simple reason that the world needs to remember that real scientific adventure existed long before George Lucas dreamed up Indiana Jones.

"Peeples" is an African American "Meet the Parents" that slips funnyman Craig Robinson into the Ben Stiller role.

Beneath Baz Luhrmann's extravagantly hassled "The Great Gatsby" lies a great American novel filled with genuine feeling.

We unplug our phone from the charger, pop in our earbuds and go out to seize the day. We text compulsively, post on Facebook obsessively, and when it comes time to shop, date or hook up, we log on, boot up and tune out.

Current films are reviewed each week to provide parents a guide to decide what may be appropriate to younger viewers.

Title characters Ginger and Rosa are best friends.

Shane Carruth made his name in the independent film world in 2004 with his debut, "Primer," a sci-fi, time-travel thriller that he wrote, directed, produced, edited, scored and starred in for a paltry sum of $7,000.

"Iron Man 3" finds new and refreshing ways to present Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.), the billionaire industrialist, incorrigible quipper and wearer of all-flying, all-knowing Iron Man suits.

Current films are reviewed each week to provide parents a guide to decide what may be appropriate to younger viewers.

The most important thing you need to know about the action comedy "Pain & Gain" is not that it's a Mark Wahlberg movie or a Dwayne Johnson movie, or even that it's inspired by real events.

Lots of people want to escape their past. Wallace Avery wants to escape his present.

"The Company You Keep" is packaged as a political drama, but at heart it's a preachy nostalgia tour of Vietnam-era liberal doctrine.

"Marriage is like a phone call late at night," Robert De Niro says, in dulcet voiceover mode, at the outset of "The Big Wedding." "First comes the ring, and then you wake up.

Matthew McConaughey has been on an extraordinary run of late, turning an impressively versatile hat trick in "Bernie," "Magic Mike" and "Killer Joe" while proving that, rather than the tabloid punch line or rom-com sellout he seemed destined to be at one time, the boy with the bedroom eyes and bong-hit grin is a real actor, after all.

The first rule of any baseball movie is that the guys cast to star in it have to look like they can play. And in "Home Run," Scott Elrod has the build, the swagger and the sweet swing of a big leaguer. That makes him and this thin tale of 12-step redemption credible and watchable, if nothing else.

Current films are reviewed each week to provide parents a guide to decide what may be appropriate to younger viewers.

Early in the sleek sci-fi thriller "Oblivion," Tom Cruise, as a flyboy repairman living a removed existence above an invaded and deserted Earth, intones his home sickness.

'The Sapphires" is an unpolished gem of a musical, a dramedy with a familiar '60s girl-group-on-the-rise story over a backdrop of Australian racism and America's long war in Vietnam.

Current films are reviewed each week to provide parents a guide to decide what may be appropriate to younger viewers.

"The Place Beyond the Pines" announces its great ambition with its first scene. It consists of a single, unbroken shot that follows carnival motorcycle trick rider Luke (Ryan Gosling) from his trailer, through the midway, onto his motorcycle and into a wire "globe-of-death" cage where he and other riders race around the confined quarters and defy gravity.

Jackie Robinson has long been an elusive presence in contemporary American cinema, as filmmakers tried and failed to bring his life story to the screen. Brian Helgeland has finally succeeded in "42," a stirring, straightforward and ultimately soaring portrayal of Robinson's historic entry into major league baseball in 1947.

The heist picture gets a few Danny Boyle head-game twists in "Trance," a movie about memory, the mind and manipulating both to find some "lost" stolen art.

The protagonist of "Lore," a powerful and haunting drama set in Germany immediately after the country's defeat in World War II, is a teenage girl.

Depending on your generational vantage point, Jack Kerouac's 1957 novel "On the Road" was the defining literary event of its generation or, as Truman Capote famously observed, "just typing."

Sam Raimi's 1981 indie-horror classic "The Evil Dead" and its smarter, cooler followup, "Evil Dead II" from 1987, are the Rosetta Stone for the hack-and-splatter crowd.

Current films are reviewed each week to provide parents a guide to decide what may be appropriate to younger viewers.

In the future, hunger, violence and money have disappeared. Lying is unthinkable. And stealing – from the place where one acquires one's every need, a building labeled "Store" – is pointless.

A better-than-average gravity-defying ninja duel leads to an epic chase – by leaps, swings and ziplines – through the Himalayas in the big set piece sequence of "G.I. Joe: Retaliation." Masked villains in red ninja suits chase Snake Eyes and Jinx as they attempt to spirit a ninja villain out of a mountaintop lair. They scamper, by rope, across impossible slopes, swinging their swords.

Skip past the lame title and weary Stone Age premise. "The Croods" is the first pleasant surprise of spring, a gorgeous kids cartoon with heart and wit, if not exactly a firm grasp of paleontology.

Youth-gone-wild provocateur Harmony Korine pushes booze-and-bikini hedonism to the extreme in "Spring Breakers," a film that grabs attention but is about as deep as a Florida motel Jacuzzi.

Current films are reviewed each week to provide parents a guide to decide what may be appropriate to younger viewers.

For those who thought the last Bruce Willis movie was a little light on the casualty list, "Olympus Has Fallen" arrives toting the biggest body count since "Die Hard II."

Part political procedural, part seamlessly re-created time capsule, Pablo Larrain's "No" revisits Chile in 1988, when brutal dictator Augusto Pinochet – under pressure from the international community – held a plebiscite on his leadership, which he had seized in a coup in 1973.

Tina Fey visibly loses confidence as her romantic comedy "Admission" progresses. She lets Liz Lemon wackiness overwhelm more interesting instincts in playing what could have been her most substantive film character yet.

The only incredible thing about "The Incredible Burt Wonderstone" is the way it makes Steve Carell so thoroughly and irreparably unlikable. In a film about magic tricks, this is the most difficult feat of all.

The funny, warm-hearted "Wizard of Oz" prequel "Oz the Great and Powerful" veers far enough from the Yellow Brick Road paved by the original film to avoid dangerous direct comparisons.

Seven years after "An Inconvenient Truth," what has changed in the world's efforts to come to grips with global warming? The scientific consensus has firmed up, even further. Public opinion has, at last, fallen in line with the science, assisted by any number of in-your-face extreme weather events – epic droughts, record ice melts, multiple applications of the phrase "storm of the century."

"Regrets are the natural property of gray hairs," Charles Dickens opined. And while the six men in Dror Moreh's haunting and daunting documentary "The Gatekeepers" have gray hair – or no hair at all – theirs are not the simple regrets of spent youth.

Current films are reviewed each week to provide parents a guide to decide what may be appropriate to younger viewers.

Hirohito sat on the Chrysanthemum Throne through the Japanese invasion of China, the attack on Pearl Harbor and all through World War II. But at the end of the war, there were two emperors in Tokyo. Gen. Douglas MacArthur ruled Japan as a potentate, overseeing reforms that turned the country away from militarism and feudalism and setting the stage for Japan's ascent as an economic superpower.

It's a tossup which of these perfectly crafted bits of patter in the unwitting gangland noir parody "Dead Man Down" takes the cake for over-the-top irrelevance.

A big-budget, effects-laden, 3-D retelling of the Jack and the Beanstalk legend may seem like the unlikeliest pairing yet of director Bryan Singer and writer Christopher McQuarrie, but "Jack the Giant Slayer" ends up being smart, thrilling and a whole lot of fun.

On the heels of a year in which an amazing number of movies portrayed American military, intelligence and political processes without an ounce of cynicism, where can a filmmaker turn for refreshed inspiration? Russia, of course!

Current films are reviewed each week to provide parents a guide to decide what may be appropriate to younger viewers.

If you've signed a petition in the past seven days expressing outrage at the Oscar-night political incorrectness of Seth MacFarlane, stay far, far away from "21 and Over." It might be best to avoid multiplexes altogether for the next two to four weeks, on the chance that you mix up theaters after a bathroom break and walk in when our heroes trick two pledges at an all-Latina sorority into making out with each other.

"Bless Me, Ultima," the film based on Rudolfo Anaya's landmark Chicano novel, is a meticulously observed time capsule, a vivid re- creation of a self-contained world of Mexican-Americans in 1944 New Mexico.