Silent House: Reality-horror gets a questionable upgrade

Wanderlust: Jennifer Aniston and Paul Rudd go searching for a lifestyle that fits

In The Vow, Rachel McAdams gets the sense knocked out of her

This Means War: Good premise, but it panders to the audience

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: Bald eagles will weep

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows: Robert Downey Jr. gets a Bond makeover as everyone’s favorite Victorian detective

The movies are full of bed-hopping men — think of Humphrey Bogart’s serial flirtations in The Big Sleep (1946) and Richard Roundtree laying his way uptown and down in Shaft (1971). But in Steve McQueen’s Shame, womanizing is not just an outgrowth of the plot — it is the plot…

Immortals: Mickey Rourke returns in one of the most extravagantly violent movies

Tower Heist: Brett Ratner’s latest is fleet and funny

Senna: The need for speed, for the love of God

David Bowie as ET in 1976’s The Man Who Fell to Earth

MMA flick Warrior holds the audience in an emotional arm bar

Truffaut and Godard rise in Two in the Wave

The Double Hour: Promising material softened to mush

Blank City, which opens this weekend at Miami Beach Cinematheque, is a self-defeating user-friendly primer on a group of films whose aura was enhanced by the fact that one had to brave scenester gatekeepers to find them. A loose history of underground movies from the hybridized gallery-art/loft-rock/filmmaking scene that coalesced…

Blank City: A self-defeating user-friendly primer on the “no wave” science

Road to Nowhere is the first feature by Monte Hellman the Great since 1989’s Silent Night, Deadly Night 3, an ignoble last chapter, that, for an artist who at his peak (Two-Lane Blacktop, Cockfighter) superbly combined an absurdist worldview and snapshot-authentic Middle America. But rather than rehashing the old hits,…

In Submarine, which opens this weekend, Oliver Tate (Craig Roberts), a rampant 15-year-old only child, has two presiding preoccupations, detailed in rapid voiceover: a broody classmate, Jordana (Yasmin Paige), and the flatlined sex life of his parents (show-stealers Noah Taylor and Sally Hawkins), brought to crisis by the arrival of…

The Tree of Life: Better than a masterpiece

Cameraman: The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff at O Cinema June 11 and 12

“He gave me half my performance with the lighting,” says actress Kathleen Byron of cinematographer Jack Cardiff, who shot her in 1947’s Black Narcissus. A rebuke to style-versus-substance segregationists, these words pay tribute to the star of Craig McCall’s documentary, a soapbox for the wizened eminence to explain the innovative…

Something Borrowed: Sloppy seconds