question: Miss Bala's subject is loaded enough, but the frantic and muscular filmmaking puts this movie in a whole new league.

numbered reviews: 1. unyielding in its very real terror
2. It's an adventure story that could be called a contemporary picaresque if it weren't so deadly serious, and might be called fantastical if it weren't loosely based on a true story of a former Miss Hispanic America.
3. Naranjo's tense, taunt and turbulent tale shrouded in beauty has a compellingly dangerous edge.
4. [A] dizzying drug-war thriller...
5. Miss Bala is a work of impressionistic reportage, built out of artfully crammed widescreen compositions and bravura long tracking shots.
6. There's a wild, Miami Blues-like dreaminess to the movie that's addictive.
7. It is at once an exciting thriller and angry social comment.
8. Shocking in both its grim authenticity and explosive stylisation.
9. s Bala is well made, and conceived as something different from the self-conscious pastiche-homage of Rodriguez or Tarantino. It is trying pretty hard for its effects.
10. Violent, loud, frequently thrilling, it whips effectively from super-real scenes of random murder under the blue blur of strip lights to characters gazing sadly out to sea, which crashes eternally on to perfect beaches.


question: Jonas Brothers: The 3-D Concert Experience should please the brothers' adoring followers, but for non-converts, this concert film is largely flat and unenlightening.

numbered reviews: 1. Girls are crazy. I don't mean they're mildly emotional or excitable. I mean completely nuts. At least the girls flocking to see the new 3D Jonas Brothers movie are.
2. It serves its purpose.
3. I had all four posters on my bedroom closet: Davy, Mickey, Peter and Mike.
4. Love them or loathe them, it's the Jonas Brothers' moment -- you might as well enjoy it.
5. This movie spends too much time on stage, and not enough off.
6. The threat may be as illusory as the thrills in Jonas Brothers are contrived. But that won't stop Jonas junkies from enjoying their magical mystery tour.
7. Young Jonas fans will adore the Brothers' concert flick.
8. This is a concert, not in any way, shape or form, a film.
9. This current squeaky-clean vocal group is way more talented than its elders were.
10. For those of us dwelling outside the Jonas demo, the small charms in the 'candid' moments have little to do with the boys' talents as actors, and a lot to do with the revered icons whose cheeky behavior they're imitating.


question: While the rehashed story feels rather uninspired and unnecessary, the return of both Sean Connery and a more understated Bond make Never Say Never Again a watchable retread.

numbered reviews: 1. The rank pall of opportunism hangs over this sorry rogue enterprise from producer Kevin McClory, as he tries to assemble the component parts that make up a Bond movie and fails.
2. Connery
3. Bond gets worse as Sean gets older.
4. Ah, yes, James, it is good to have you back again.
5. Connery, Brandauer and Kim-sexy!
6. Aside from some minor flaws, the film is a surprisingly standard Bond film, one that could easily be integrated into the "official" franchise with very few adjustments.
7. Brandauer is a great Bond villain, and the role still fits Connery like an old tux.
8. The action's good, the photography excellent, the sets decent; but the real clincher is the fact that Bond is once more played by a man with the right stuff.
9. It's a major disappointment that, having lured back the original 007, the film makers couldn't offer him something better than this drawn-out, hackneyed story.
10. As dull as dishwater.


question: Visceral, energetic, and often very sad, Sid & Nancy is also a surprisingly touching love story, and Gary Oldman is outstanding as the late punk rock icon Sid Vicious.

numbered reviews:
1. The title characters lead pointless, useless lives that are cut mercifully short by early deaths.
2. Though dark and harrowing, explicit and unsparing, the movie proves a riveting biography of these burnt-out icons and their iconoclastic half-decade.
3. ...the movie takes us on a rocky, sometimes funny, sometimes annoying, often heartbreaking ride.
4. The only thing that is sustained in Sid and Nancy is a tone of clinical disinterest that leaves you asking why Cox would want to make a movie about them.
5. A few too many moralistic foreshadowings, but most of the time Cox's situations and characters develop on their own eloquently entropic terms.
6. Sid and Nancy is the definitive pic on the punk phenomenon.
7. Like Sid, this is flawed but fascinating.
8. Despite the downward spiral of these two lives, the film never loses its drive or passion; it never wallows in the misery.
9. The film's crowning achievement is depicting the soul-sucking toll that drugs take on the talented and the naive. Eventually, drugs replace the people they were, and they turn into mere vessels to an all-consuming craving. They become their addiction.
10. ...the ultimate punk rock movie,brilliantly crafted, cinematic magic.