Animation for adults, not solely because of a sex scene or two but because of the total tapestry of lost souls and losers around an apartment building in Sydney, one of whose residents sends away for a book, at the titular price, that promises to disclose to his uncritical eye …

A comedy of male menopause. The hero, a Hollywood songwriter with personalized license plates that read "ASCAP," is explicitly a product of an earlier, more romantic era, and is quite nakedly a stand-in for writer-director Blake Edwards. Edwards's conscientious efforts to adopt liberal, open-minded, up-to-date attitudes lead him onto some …

The drawing is a little meager compared to the finest work of the Disney animators; also is afflicted with a bad case of the cutes. But the storyline picks up conspicuously when it moves beyond a couple of frightfully bourgeois dalmatians and introduces several different breeds of dog, as well …

Think The Seven Samurai with a revisionist twist. Yes, there’s a villain with murderous henchmen terrorizing the countryside. Yes, a master samurai must gather a team to confront the bad guys. But this time, the villain is royalty, the kind of guy the samurai usually live to serve. And this …

Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Downfall launched a thousand YouTube Hitler memes. Any number of them are more insightful and engaging than this fact-based saga of a German worker who in November of 1939 miscalculated by that much an otherwise foolproof scheme to blow up the Fuhrer. Johann Georg Elser’s (Christian Friedel) botched …

Beware of Jews bearing perfume. August 9, 1945 is the day America bombed Nagasaki; in another part of the world, the magistrate of a small Hungarian village (Péter Rudolf) is about to have his son’s nuptials torpedoed by a pair of unexpected guests. His missus is a druggy, his wimpy …

A pair of lifelong (albeit hair-triggered) pals, Hannah (Jenna Ushkowitz), famous for a stint on a Jersey Shore-style reality TV show and Brooklyn (Laura Ashley Samuels), a would-be Instagram influencer, make for enjoyable travelling companions in this raunchier variation on Romy and Michelle. Rather than a high school reunion, our …

Roland Emmerich's widest view of disaster to date: the sky-high eruption of Yellowstone (Old Faithful gone Vesuvius), the toppling of the Washington Monument and St. Peter's Basilica (the Statue of Liberty and the Eiffel Tower would be so old-hat), the block-by-block collapse of Los Angeles (a rented limo outrunning the …

Score one for mass culture: the animating forces behind The Simpsons aren't about to teach you anything new about the possibilities inherent in illustrated storytelling, but "Maggie Simpson in 'The Longest Daycare'" dominates this year's field through old-school craft and wit, and offers a politically topical Ayn Rand hook to …

For once, Pixar is out of the picture — The Blue Umbrella was almost (but not quite) as dire as the feature that followed it (Monsters University). That clears the field for...Disney? Sigh. Look, if you've seen Frozen (and by this point, what parent hasn't?), then you know all about …

A solid collection of five films that make the most of the short form and the simplicity it permits. Boogaloo and Graham tells the story of a pair of Belfast boys and their pet chickens (and also their Mum and Dad). The Phone Call lets us watch a woman working …

After the concentrated perfection of "The Hand" -- Wong Kar-wai's fraction of the anthology film, Eros -- the defects of this one are apt to appear the more glaring. Ostensibly it's a sequel to his close-to-perfection In the Mood for Love. Or anyhow the action picks up shortly after it …

Knowing that it doesn’t take a man to raise a man, single mom Annette Bening duly deputizes surrogate “daughters” Greta Gerwig and Elle Fanning, assigning them the role of dual consigliere to look after her 15-year-old son (Lucas Jade Zumann). Once the fastidiously worded dual voice-over narration commences, the characters …

The first English-language feature from Mexican filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu brings together disparate characters by the same matchmaking method of his Amores Perros: by car accident. Benicio Del Toro, a born-again ex-con, runs over the husband and two daughters of Naomi Watts, and the husband's heart is transplanted anonymously into …

A shared load of working-mother stress and pressure, not everyone's notion of moviegoing fun. Director Nancy Savoca (True Love, Dogfight, Household Saints) makes little personal movies about small-as-life people, mainly women, in small-as-life predicaments, almost as if she were operating in the field of the serious novel rather than the …