“Barbara” is a terrific film, as smart, thoughtful and emotionally involving as just about anything out there.
“From Up on Poppy Hill” is stunning, as beautiful a hand-drawn animated feature as you likely will see.
“Star Trek Into Darkness” is ridiculously exciting. It’s got hairsbreadth escapes beyond counting, much pell-mell running, hyperspace jumping and phaser-fire dueling. But along with the propulsive action, the picture has a brain and a conscience, which are on display as, in the manner of “Trek” creator Gene Roddenberry, it addresses important social issues of the day.
“To boldly go where no one has gone before” is instantly recognizable as the guiding mantra of the crew of the starship Enterprise. But with actors Simon Pegg, John Cho and Alice Eve, that famous catchphrase could use a little tweaking. That’s because Pegg, Cho and Eve have all gone boldly, yet at the same time carefully, where other very well-known actors have gone before.
Jazzy, fizzy and often quite fun, Baz Luhrmann’s “Pretty Good Gatsby” takes F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Great American Novel out for a sometimes dazzling, always irreverent spin.
“Peeples” is an African-American “Meet the Parents” that slips funnyman Craig Robinson into the Ben Stiller role. Casting the musically minded Robinson in this formula comedy about screwing up your first encounter with your potential in-laws is like replacing Stiller’s Greg Focker with Jack Black.
A barrel of whiskey would usually spell doom for the working-class blokes who find their way into Ken Loach films. But it is redemption the director and his longtime creative collaborator, writer Paul Laverty, have in mind in the unexpectedly warm, hopeful and humorous brew of “The Angels’ Share.”
The past is a puzzle that resurfaces in bits and pieces for Robert Redford in “The Company You Keep.”
You’ll be surprised.
“The Sapphires” is an unpolished gem of a musical, a dramedy with a familiar ’60s girl-group-on-the-rise story pasted over a backdrop of Australian racism and America’s long war in Vietnam.
America’s twin ills — the swollen ranks of hungry people in the country and the national “obesity epidemic” — are explained, in blunt and poignant terms, in “A Place at the Table,” a documentary about “food politics” and the forces that let hunger in America make a comeback.
“Starbuck” is a big, fat French-Canadian hug of a movie, a sperm-donations-gone-wrong farce that manages the occasional belly laugh, but also offers moving takes on parenthood, family and what it means to grow up.
“Pain & Gain” is the darkest of comedies set in bright Miami about gruesome crimes committed by the dimmest of bulbs.
The cinema’s leading purveyor of Southern Gothic, Jeff Nichols, hands Matthew McConaughey his latest tour de force turn in “Mud,” a down-and-dirty, if entirely-too-long, mythic melodrama in the “Tobacco Road” tradition.
“Marriage is like a phone call late at night,” Robert De Niro says in a dulcet voice-over at the outset of “The Big Wedding.” “First comes the ring, and then you wake up.”
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