Some movies provide a light snack – and some provide a banquet, a feast of ideas, sensations and images that pull you into a world you never could (and never would want to) visit or inhabit.

Jacques Audiard’s “A Prophet” (an Oscar nominee as best foreign language film and the film that ought to win) is one of those films – expansive, encompassing and yet deeply personal and intimate, even as it tells a story that sprawls over six years and the entire country of France. (More…)

Emily Abt’s “Toe to Toe” is a raw look at a complex set of problems – race and class – told in stirring and straight-forward fashion.

At once a tale of teen girls jockeying over friendship, prestige, boys and their own identities, “Toe to Toe” features two exceptionally layered performances at its center, as well as ideas that don’t necessarily sort themselves out in neat and easily summarized fashion. (More…)

It’s a corollary of film criticism: The closer to opening day a film company screens the film, the less confidence they must have in the film and, hence, the worse it must be.

That’s why most multiplex-filling genre films – a la “The Crazies,” which opens Friday (2/26/10) – aren’t screened for critics until the last minute. Some studios wait until the morning of opening and then have a courtesy screening, so critics don’t actually have to, God forbid, pay for a ticket themselves.

“The Crazies” didn’t screen until yesterday and that’s the film company’s misjudgment. Not that it’s a masterwork – but this film by Breck Eisner is taut, tense and veined with just the right amount of humor. It knows what it’s about and gets to it, without a lot of fuss or frills. (More…)

“Cop Out” affects such a generic, mid-80s feel that you keep waiting for the wink.

You keep watching, expecting that, at any moment, director Kevin Smith is going to tip his hand – to spoof the genre, send it up, make fun of it. In other words, you keep waiting for him to have his characters wink at the camera as if to communicate the fact that this is all meant as a joke, not to be taken seriously.

And they do. But the joke’s on them. (More…)

A bumpy ride of tonal shifts between the tragic, the absurd and the everyday, Mitchell Lichtenstein’s “Happy Tears” repeatedly confounds expectations.

Eventually, it finds a groove and takes you to an ending that is at once undeservedly happy and surprisingly agreeable. But it’s a journey that sometimes feels like a thousand miles. (More…)

Julio DiPietro’s “The Good Guy” (opening in limited release Friday 2/19/10) is a film built on misdirection that suggests one thing while showing you something else.

Narrated by its central character, Tommy Fielding (Scott Porter), “The Good Guy” uses Wall Street as a template for male-female relationships. Getting over on a customer – selling him something he doesn’t know he wants – is a lot like selling yourself to a woman in a bar, as Tommy explains to Daniel Seaver (Bryan Greenberg), the protégé to whom he’s teaching both the art of the deal and the way with women. It’s about confidence, ingenuity, spontaneity – and a great line of bull. (More…)

It’s always feast or famine: months of movies like “Dear John,” “Valentine’s Day,” “Leap Year” – and then, in one week, new films by both Martin Scorsese and Roman Polanski.

Like Scorsese’s “Shutter Island,” Polanski’s “The Ghost Writer” is based on a popular novel – Robert Harris’ “The Ghost.” Like “Shutter Island,” “Ghost Writer” is set mainly on an island off the coast of Massachusetts. And like Scorsese, Polanski uses solid commercial fiction to make a movie that chills and provokes. (More…)

I once had the chance to introduce Martin Scorsese at a New York Film Critics Circle award dinner (he was presenting an award) – and took the opportunity to say out loud that I felt fortunate that my career as a film critic coincided with Martin Scorsese’s career as a filmmaker.

That sentiment still holds. Every film he makes is more than just food for thought – it’s a full banquet. Scorsese is one of only a handful of directors working whose passion for the medium bleeds through in every frame. He forces the critic to bring out his A game – to watch and analyze the film with the same energy and imagination as the filmmaker brought to making it. And that’s absolutely true of “Shutter Island,” his latest film. (More…)

“Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief” may have the most unfortunate movie title since “Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire.”

It’s too long, for starters. (What’s the matter? Didn’t have the guts to put a “Part 1” in the title?) And it indicates that the movie is about a character named Percy. Yikes. (More…)

On the list of crimes against cinema, the remake stands just above the sequel as an offense against the artform.

The sequel, of course, is an indicator of a dangerous loss of imagination, though there are those rare examples of sequels that do more than simply repeat the formula of the original film.

But the remake blends both a death of imagination with hubris – not just that an old product can be resold in a new package but that no matter how classic the original, the re-maker can somehow improve upon it. (More…)