question: Tom Hanks and the rest of the amiable cast make this bumpy ride worth sitting through.

numbered reviews: 1. Tom Hanks woos Catherine Zeta-Jones and Kumar Pallana spins plates...good times.
2. Hanks ... is the perfect actor for this role, balancing the absurdist humor and heartbreak of Viktor's predicament and adding his own considerable good nature.
3. Holds several small treasures and one crown jewel of a performance by Tom Hanks.
4. There are so many little details that give the movie its humor, its warmth, and its charm. It's full of unexpected surprises - every sentimental moment is perfectly placed.
5. To watch The Terminal is to be in one -- your plane delayed, your future on hold, your pass in hand and nothing to board.
6. This terminally bumpy mishmash of every bad contrivance ever made on film never takes flight.
7. Attention, Academy voters: This film needs to win for Production Design. Also, Tom Hanks is God.
8. ...a fairytale triumph about the immigrant experience in America...
9. Alex McDowell's set is so impressive, it outshines everything else in the movie, including Hanks. But as far as the lackluster story goes, it barely gets off the ground.
10. Spielberg and Hank turn this 'delay' into a delight.


question: Dynamic, tightly arranged, and deliberately provocative, Joe Berlinger's Crude is a sobering, enraging wake-up call.

numbered reviews: 1. Mr. Berlinger has both a strong narrative instinct and a keen eye for incongruous, evocative and powerful images.
2. When well-meaning Trudie Styler, founder of Rainforest Foundation (and Sting's wife), comes on, even Farjardo's convictions and Berlinger's early scenes about native culture and ancestry get swept up amidst hubristic hubbub.
3. Crude is both a tribute to human-rights tenacity and a sobering account of the multinational-Moloch greed that can keep justice in limbo.
4. Joe Berlinger's remarkable documentary, Crude, recounts an infuriating litany of South American exploitation, backroom glad-handing, and bureaucratic dead ends.
5. 'Crude,' thankfully, brings insight and urgency to an issue that has until recently been ignored
6. Crude unfolds like a pretty good legal thriller. Which, when you really think about it, is what this documentary feature is.
7. It's impossible to watch this film and not come away with a personal vow never to patronize the Chevron corporation again.
8. A stinging indictment of the huge Chevron corporation, which has been sued for despoiling the Ecuadorian Amazon to the severe detriment of the indigenous population.
9. A well-balanced documentary all the more incisive for its decision to eschew editorialising and let the evidence speak for itself.
10. The arguments are batted back and forth, and one's sympathy for the Ecuadorean side takes only a slight wobble when Trudi Styler gets behind the cause.


question: Director Andrew Dosunmu's style takes some getting used to, but Mother of George compensates with powerful acting, a thoughtful script, and gorgeous visuals.

numbered reviews: 1. Working from a script by playwright Darci Picoult, Dosunmu fashions a tale that's realistic, melodramatic and culturally specific, yet unmistakably archetypal.
2. The imagery in Mr. Dosunmu's film is consistently surprising and lush. Even the straight-ahead portraits of his characters, used as emotional caesuras, are rich in colors and textures. But he's a storyteller, too ...
3. The film forgoes the usual neo-realistic approach toward this sort of material for a painterly, meticulously composed technique. The result is transfixing.
4. Human beings are mysterious and surprising. There is something irresistible about a movie that reaches that conclusion.
5. Director Andrew Dosunmu's film is big-hearted and rich, frequently using slow motion to underscore an artful intimacy.
6. A stunningly imagined account of African immigrant life in present-day Brooklyn.
7. An unexpected gem about true love, infertility and a meddling mother-in-law.
8. Darci Picoult's script renders all of these characters, if not always sympathetically, humanly and fully.
9. Oddly, the gradual pacing, with scenes that stress the pace of chill human interaction over narrative thrust, helps make the third act more powerful: The genuine catastrophe that results is made even more intense by the shagginess that preceded it.
10. This is one of the most striking entries in the 2013 global wave of black cinema, but also admittedly one that poses hurdles to audiences with conventional expectations.


question: Bland characters, clichéd dialogue and rickety plotting ensure We Own The Night never lives up to its potential.

numbered reviews:
1. As flat-footed as writer-director James Gray's script often sounds, his cops-vs.-mob tale can be strangely mesmerizing.
2. Time will tell, but from where I'm sitting this deceptively routine cop movie runs deep. In fact, it already looks like a classic. Cagney and Tracy would be proud.
3. Gray keeps his picture interesting with a handful of inspired action scenes
4. In many ways, We Own the Night is a lite version of our favorite urban cop dramas -- or maybe it's just that writer-director James Gray is a Martin Scorsese lite.
5. The gripping, entertaining, rock-solid mob thriller feels like a throwback to a bygone era.
6. For all the competence in craft, there's no real urgency and distinctiveness to sufficiently mask that we've seen this all before--and indeed we have from Gray himself alone.
7. Everything old doesn't necessarily feel new again.
8. This one hangs on the notion of fate, and once you've figured out whose fate is the central issue, the outcome -- even with those clumsy plot twists -- is fairly predictable.
9. Bobby's decision-making throughout is operatic (with grand gestures and tears and sensational lighting), but also crude and flatfooted.
10. Writer/director James Gray uses the strengths of his top-notch actors to transform "We Own the Night" into something more than a standard-issue cop tale.