Comedy
Rod Lott
Why Stop Now is a comedy that tries too hard to be a comedy. C’mon, you know the kind: Although grounded in reality, the film presents characters so quirky, they may as well come with signs around their neck to signal their stock roles, i.e. “Precocious Sibling” and “Black Sidekick.” Incidentally, this one fronts both of those examples.

Thriller
Rod Lott
At least All Superheroes Must Die isn't like every other comic book-inspired cinematic vision that currently serve as the buttered bread to Hollywood's rumbling stomach. That alone is not enough to make for a good movie, but it's a head start.

Thriller
Rod Lott
Here's how I knew the Icelandic crime thriller Black’s Game was going to be great:

Action
Rod Lott
Who in the hell hires Jackie Chan and then tells him not to kick a lot? The Exterminator director James Glickenhaus, that’s who.

Drama
Rod Lott
Vanguard director Takashi Miike is not one to repeat himself, and in Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai, he hasn't — not really. Yes, the film is the Japanese filmmaker's follow-up to 2010's 13 Assassins; yes, both are remakes and focused on samurais. But they approach the genre from such varying ways that other than excellence, the similarities end there.

Drama
Phil Bacharach
John Hughes, for all the love people heap on his ’80s teen movies, was far too easy on high school. Maybe your high school experience was different than mine — and, if so, congrats. For many of us, however, those years were a marathon of self-pity, heartache, passion and anything else you’d find on an album by The Smiths.

Drama
Phil Bacharach
Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke isn't the obvious choice for a movie about love at its weightiest and most profound. In previous works like Funny Games, The Piano Teacher, The White Ribbon and Caché, he has crafted cinematic nipple twists that tweak audiences while examining humankind at its cruelest.

Drama
Rod Lott
Life can change in the blink of an eye, according to the opening minute of the turgid romance The Lucky One. It's the kind of empty observation that has become such a cliché, it no longer holds weight. But somehow, against God and every force of nature, grotesquely arrogant novelist Nicholas Sparks has built a lucrative career stringing such things together.

Thriller
Phil Bacharach
Generating suspense from a story that is a matter of historical record is no easy thing. That was the primary challenge facing Ben Affleck and Chris Terrio, the director-star and writer, respectively, of Argo, a thriller inspired by a real-life covert operation that helped rescue six U.S. embassy workers out of Iran during the 1979 hostage crisis.

Drama
Rod Lott
Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master is my least favorite of the director’s half-dozen films. That said, he has yet to make a bad one.