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Wesley Morris, Boston Globe

1. All Together 2012 Minutes and minutes of cute comedy ensue. full review
2. Alps 2012 An hour and a half of darkening absurdism. full review
3. Bachelorette 2012 For women who find the film grim, I imagine that's because part of it feels true and rare in an American movie. full review
4. Bestiaire 2012 The images are meant to accumulate shame, and they do. But they also might be too much. full review
5. Bully 2012 "Bully" doesn't need research or great filmmaking or narrative focus, per se. It needs only the shaming power of its relentlessness and a young audience open to sharing in that shame. full review
6. Cheerful Weather For The Wedding 2012 What it doesn't have is drama or wisdom or comedy or heat, something to temper the banalities. full review
7. The Deep Blue Sea 2012 It feels current. That's to do with the timelessness of Davies's idea of how lush a film can feel. It's also to do with the modernity of his star. full review
8. The Devil Inside 2012 "The Devil Inside'' usefully reminds us how little it takes to make some people scream in a crowded movie theater. full review
9. The Flat 2012 There's something touching about the way Goldfinger obeys his moral compass. full review
10. For Greater Glory 2012 The scenes just plod along without much to help distinguish them. It's not an epic movie so much as an epic run-on sentence. full review
11. Friends With Kids 2012 This movie swerves from fantasy to nightmare. It doesn't feel like the story a wife and mother would volunteer to tell about herself. full review
12. Haywire 2012 The pleasure of this small, eccentric movie is the natural way Carano hurts people - by, say, walking partway up a wall and climbing onto a man's back, by sprinting toward the camera and flying into the human target standing in the foreground. full review
13. Holy Motors 2012 I don't know what Lavant is playing here because I've never seen anything like it. full review
14. How to Survive a Plague 2012 France and his crew have sculpted years of old broadcast-news stories and home videos into a narrative that is impressionistic in its scope but coherent in its feeling. full review
15. I Wish 2012 The sort of small film of real consequence that, as a kid, I remember seeing and completely losing myself in: That was my life. full review
16. The Innkeepers 2012 For too long, this movie asks us to be interested in something that rarely in the history of the service industry has been sustainably entertaining: how dull certain jobs can be. full review
17. The Loneliest Planet 2012 Loktev has written and directed with a haunting emphasis on the shortcomings of some interpersonal communication. full review
18. Losing Control 2012 Weiss's ideas about moviemaking, storytelling, and character development are indistinguishable from bargain-bin romantic comedies (so-called chick flicks) and television shows that barely last a season. full review
19. Mansome 2012 It's a movie so late in noticing a shift in American male grooming that for a documentary on the subject to work, Spurlock would either have to pitch it to our grandparents (or be a grandparent) or trace the arc of the shift and unpack it. full review
20. The Paperboy 2012 This is just the sort of movie certain people are hoping to see when they go to the movies but would never say they go to the movies for. full review
21. Side by Side 2012 You can feel the future, even if some of what you feel is worrying. full review
22. Silent House 2012 "Silent House'' is up to something. The filmmakers, Chris Kentis and Laura Lau, must have seen plenty of horror movies worth discussing in a women's studies class. full review
23. Sleepwalk With Me 2012 "Sleepwalk With Me" traps Birbiglia inside his own head. He desperately needs a movie or cable series that wakes him up and sets his material loose on the outside world. full review
24. Tyler Perry's Good Deeds 2012 Whose life, Wesley asks in the movie's narration, is he living? Judging from all the sterile office and apartment space and his mile-long face, I'd say Bruce Willis's in "The Sixth Sense.'' full review
25. Woman Thou Art Loosed: On the 7th Day 2012 This overplotted, underwritten, powerfully dumb soap-thriller has more professionalism than it deserves. full review
26. The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 2011 You watch the material here and wonder whether most of the movies made about black people are meant to pacify general audiences, to distract them from demanding more of the movies. full review
27. The Flowers of War 2011 All Zhang's splendor does is foster cognitive dissonance in an audience. full review
28. Girlfriend 2011 What begins as an absorbing exercise in glum atmosphere turns mild, meek, and desperate as the stakes rise. full review
29. Goodbye First Love 2011 This is an easy movie to spoil. It's rather plotless. But things happen in precisely the way that life happens. full review
30. Gun Hill Road 2011 Feels like it's been workshopped, from its string of coincidences to its tidy downbeat conclusion in which Green stabs at irony with a dull knife. full review
31. Hell and Back Again 2011 Dennis's film attempts something few documentaries have: to inhabit the psyche of its subject. full review
32. Judy Moody and the NOT Bummer Summer 2011 Some movies make you remember being a child. Some movies treat you like one. "Judy Moody and the Not Bummer Summer'' does both. full review
33. Justin Bieber: Never Say Never 2011 It's vaguely like the fascinating Michael Jackson performance documentary, "This Is It.'' full review
34. Keep the Lights On 2011 The movie over-blurs the line between plain and plaintive. It's not necessarily craziness you crave, it's inflection; it's need, if not from the characters then from the filmmaking. full review
35. Mysteries of Lisbon 2011 The casual way [Ruiz] practices difficult cinema is breathtaking. full review
36. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia 2011 It runs 157 minutes, and I can't say you don't feel them. You do - but in the way you would, reading a very good book in an uncomfortable chair. full review
37. Polisse 2011 All the tears I shed were hard-earned. So were all the laughing and clapping and eye-covering. full review
38. Scream 4 2011 Craven no longer appears to be directing a cast of characters. Collectively, they're a knife block. full review
39. Septien 2011 It's all a labored sort of strange, like someone forcing himself to have a bad dream. full review
40. Seven Days In Utopia 2011 If I understand "Seven Days in Utopia,'' some guys spend their entire day thinking about golf, and God thinks those guys are crazy. full review
41. Snow Flower And The Secret Fan 2011 All the two actresses do is gaze out of apartment and carriage windows, through floorboards, into each other's eyes, and, once, while wishfully wearing a man's suit. full review
42. Transformers: Dark of the Moon 2011 The more action sequences, locations, actors, historical events, machines, effects, monosyllables, weapons, and American-flag close-ups the movie shoves in its mouth and ours, the less we're able to taste. full review
43. Undefeated 2011 "Undefeated'' needs less of what we know we've seen (the football stuff) and more of the players' and coaches' lives, which even if we feel we've seen, we haven't. full review
44. The Ward 2011 How depressing to discover that John Carpenter is the man running this operation. His talent for building and sustaining suspense has now warped into flaccid attempt at fright and ogling ringers for Britney Spears and, in Heard's case, Scarlett Johansson. full review
45. Warrior 2011 All the director and co-writer Gavin O'Connor does is apply old boxing-film tricks to what is, for the movies, a new sport. Then he doubles them. full review
46. Young Adult 2011 The movie doesn't weigh that much, but it has a kind of point-blank piquancy that has gradually seeped out of American comedies, which now are mostly going for broad, topical gags that rarely venture into the relatable shadows of human behavior. full review
47. And Everything Is Going Fine 2010 You're left with as rich a sense of this man as you would in a more typical work of nonfiction. But the film's deceptive, meticulous editing also reveals that Gray's odd ambition met a cultural moment in which it could take root and thrive. full review
48. Bill Cunningham New York 2010 It's as much a portrait of a kind of artist as it is a document of a city's evolving sense of style. full review
49. Biutiful 2010 Inarritu wants to run us ragged - physically, spiritually, emotionally, it's all the same to him. And he'll empty his complete cinematic arsenal to do so. full review
50. Blue Valentine 2010 As the film, which Derek Cianfrance directed and co-wrote, makes its way to the end of its second hour, it becomes an acutely stylized, slow-motion marital accident. You either want to call AAA or roll your eyes. full review
51. Cave of Forgotten Dreams 2010 What we come to love about Herzog's documentary is Herzog's love itself. full review
52. Centurion 2010 Flaming arrows, spears, and knives have no problem finding their way to the back of a mouth. The profanity is delightful. And the general atmosphere is grim. The movie just isn't terribly inspired. full review
53. City of Life and Death 2010 Lu does more with the first 50 minutes than some directors accomplish in 10 movies. full review
54. Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer 2010 It takes Gibney almost two hours to build his own argument regarding the airing of Spitzer's laundry, and, having watched it twice, that length is inexplicable. full review
55. Countdown to Zero 2010 World destruction is no laughing matter, and yet this movie's treatment of it is sometimes amusingly desperate. full review
56. Heartbeats 2010 All the dramatic protraction gets at both a heaviness of romantic desire and emotional viscosity. full review
57. I Saw the Devil 2010 As revenge fantasy, "I Saw the Devil'' is clever. As comedy, it's sick. As moviegoing, it's tedious... full review
58. A Little Help 2010 It's not that Jenna Fischer is miscast in "A Little Help.'' It's that she's mis-everything else: misused, misdirected, misanthropic. full review
59. Marwencol 2010 An astounding movie one of those tales of all-American oddness that just keeps flowering into weirder, richer territory. full review
60. The Romantics 2010 What ensues is a couple of days of confession and mild debauchery. It's all sketchy and banal. full review
61. Senna 2010 The movie's assemblage of audio interviews poured mostly over astounding race footage is fit for a shrine. full review
62. Today's Special 2010 Shah is a bonus for the movie. This smooth, self-confident, inarguably sexy veteran actor doesn't steal the film so much as wrap it around his finger. full review
63. Waste Land 2010 "Waste Land'' is just what the film's website says it is: "stirring evidence of the transformative power of art and the alchemy of the human spirit.'' full review
64. The Proposal 2009 Why a screenwriter would think hilarity would ensue from this premise is anybody's guess. full review
65. 44 Inch Chest 2009 Is this a documentary about a porn professional? Or a gym rat? Neither. It's a stagy, half-entertaining, half-tedious acting competition between five excellent Englishmen. full review
66. Amreeka 2009 This sensitively made movie is more than dim Americans making terrorist jokes. It's one of the richer movies you're likely to see about average Arabs in America. full review
67. Blood: The Last Vampire 2009 Don't let the subtitle of Blood: The Last Vampire alarm you. The finale of this tedious piece of Asian-ish action-schlock based on a popular anime series implies an intention to make more. One was plenty for me. full review
68. Cairo Time 2009 The movie isn't sure what, politically or even romantically, it's about. full review
69. Crossing Over 2009 It's Crossing Over -- or as we call it at my desk, Crash: Special Victims Unit. full review
70. The Fourth Kind 2009 In two climactic scenes, the screen goes fuzzy. For over a minute what we're watching is basically a television on the fritz. The only place that's ever been frightening is in the privacy of your living room. full review
71. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest 2009 As superb as the Swedish actress Noomi Rapace has been up to this point, there's nothing she can do to bring craft or excitement to the act of texting. full review
72. The Good Guy 2009 It's network television drama, starring actors best known for their TV work and full of the petty gripes and mild worries of characters who really have nothing compelling to worry about. full review
73. Great Directors 2009 Rarely have clips from so many good and great movies been put to such dull use. full review
74. Soul Kitchen 2009 Soul Kitchen is a ragged -- all right, sloppy -- group comedy that taxes neither us nor its maker. full review
75. Vincere 2009 Bellocchio's priorities are electrically clear. Sensation, sensation, sensation. The effect is a rare kind of moviegoing chaos. Are we to laugh, cry, scratch our temples, or grab our dates? In the spirit of the movie, do them all at once. full review
76. American Violet 2008 American Violet feels less like life and unreasonably more like the movies. full review
77. Let the Right One In 2008 The beauty of Let the Right One In resides in the way the horror remains grounded in a tragic kind of love. full review
78. New York, I Love You 2008 How could so ethnically and artistically diverse a field of filmmakers produce a work of such lifeless uniformity? full review
79. Religulous 2008 As an exchange of ideas, this is a hopeless project, since Maher's doubt is as immovable as his interviewees' certainty. full review
80. The Square 2008 The Square calls to mind the skin-tight dread of the Coen brothers' Blood Simple. If that movie remains the more rigorous cinematic achievement, The Square is a more richly ironic pleasure. full review
81. The Tale of Despereaux 2008 A skillfully managed fairy tale about a mouse, a rat, and fairy tales in general. full review
82. Theater of War 2008 Theater of War, Walter's invigorating film, asserts the value of Brecht -- and the power of art -- for our troubled times. full review
83. Angels in the Dust 2007 One of the most staggeringly straightforward looks at death I've ever seen. The movie's grace note is its subtlety. full review
84. Beaufort 2007 full review
85. Black Snake Moan 2007 Had the old black man and the young white chick gotten it on, I think some audiences might have exploded. Perhaps sensing this, Black Snake Moan backs off, giving us a neat and clean Hallmark card ending. full review
86. Charlie Bartlett 2007 An exuberant, unexpectedly smart comedy about the fraught give-and-take between kids and grown-ups. full review
87. Chop Shop 2007 It's exciting watching Bahrani explore the possibilities of neo-realism to dramatize penury and disenfranchisement among the service-class in this country. full review
88. Day Watch 2007 Were I to tell you the summer's most awesome blockbuster action sequel involved a war over a piece of chalk, you'd laugh. But it's true. full review
89. Descent 2007 full review
90. Evening 2007 Not even a firm approach can rescue Evening from the enveloping thematic finery. It's a hopelessly classy piece of china. full review
91. Hot Rod 2007 As a director, Schaffer has a cool, punchy style, but his full-length movie dead-ends. The flavor runs out. full review
92. Lars and the Real Girl 2007 Lars and the Real Girl is poised on the line between earnestness and farce. full review
93. Munyurangabo 2007 full review
94. Never Forever 2007 It's like a Lana Turner vehicle that's too meek to be Last Tango in Chinatown. full review
95. No End in Sight 2007 A raft of documentaries have come along since the start of the war, some of them accusatory, some investigative, some empathetic, nearly all of them skeptical. None is better argued or more searing than No End in Sight. full review
96. Outsourced 2007 Jeffcoat handles the ostensible cultural differences gingerly. The movie's approach to globalism is to play everything small and keep everybody human. full review
97. Paranoid Park 2007 Paranoid Park, the new Gus Van Sant movie, is slight but fascinating. full review
98. The Signal 2007 None of the rabbit holes in The Signal go that deep. But you do leave persuaded that you've discovered some talented people. full review
99. Bloodrayne 2006 The film might be the first of its kind: something to bring Maxim subscribers, video gamers, and loyal Logo viewers together. full review
100. Copying Beethoven, (Klang der Stille) 2006 Harris saunters through this toasty little piece of biographical fiction in love with the part's fixins'. full review
101. Failure to Launch 2006 The movie is surprisingly nimble and emotionally honest. full review
102. Golden Door 2006 A movie about immigration that even Lou Dobbs can get behind. It's so hypnotically breathtaking, you don't realize you're not breathing. By the final shot, you don't realize you're crying either, but there go the tears. full review
103. Jackass: Number Two 2006 The double feat of Jackass is that it weds the obviously juvenile with the arrestingly profound. The boys of Delta Kappa Epsilon and their TAs can watch this movie in the same theater. full review
104. Last Holiday 2006 Last Holiday, in its feathery, good-hearted way, is enough to give you pause. full review
105. A Man Named Pearl 2006 This is moviemaking that honors the craftsmanship of its subject. full review
106. Severance 2006 The filmmakers want to have it both ways -- the funny and the sadistic -- but rarely do so at the same time with any success. full review
107. The Treatment 2006 The Treatment feels too much like an indulgence. full review
108. The Wind That Shakes the Barley 2006 What does come through is Loach's characteristic disdain for cheap romanticism and easy answers. full review
109. Aeon Flux 2005 Thanksgiving is over, but those gluttons still hungry for turkey should enjoy picking at the carcass of Aeon Flux. full review
110. End of the Spear 2005 Not an emotional powerhouse so much as a dutiful public service announcement. full review
111. Grizzly Man 2005 Sublime. full review
112. Land of the Dead 2005 This new movie looks and feels like someone else's better-made schlock. full review
113. The Longest Yard 2005 It's surprising how much of the movie is flat and how predictable the gags are. full review
114. Old Joy 2005 The movie explores the increasingly coarse line between nostalgia and acceptance for the way things are, without exclamatory revelation and uproarious self-pity. It's Sideways for realists. full review
115. Serenity 2005 After an hour of intense disorientation, the movie's arch sarcasm becomes oddly entertaining. full review
116. Sophie Scholl: The Final Days 2005 Rothemund gives us his sophisticated filmmaking only in the finale, which is devastating in its briskness and fury. full review
117. Sweet Land 2005 A lovely, old-fashioned farm romance quietly doubling as a comment on immigration and American identity. full review
118. This Film is Not Yet Rated 2005 Dick doesn't exactly blow the lid off the organization, but he lifts it enough to see what an outrageously flawed outfit we're dealing with. full review
119. Big Fish 2004 The picture's images linger. full review
120. The Goebbels Experiment 2004 [A] weirdly enthralling film of excerpts from Goebbels's diaries. full review
121. White Chicks 2004 The film feels long when it should be brisk, and it's bloated with stretches of hot, dead air. full review
122. Word Wars 2004 Only occasionally do the thrill of the game and the passion of its players come together. full review
123. 21 Grams 2003 A capital-M movie, and the most flagrant kind: Heavy emotion, heavy style, and lite philosophy converge and choke us with meaning. full review
124. Daddy Day Care 2003 A scentless bouquet of potty jokes, crotch kicks, and Scooter-P. full review
125. Identity 2003 It's an exasperating exercise in B-movie hokum and screenwriter's gimmickry. full review
126. Once Upon a Time in Mexico 2003 A movie with that many freaks and creeps should be a lot more exciting than this one actually is. full review
127. Radio 2003 After some student and parental resistance, a medley of obvious platitudes and great bathos washes over the place, and everybody is righteously lifted up where they belong. full review
128. Something's Gotta Give 2003 Doesn't America's 50-and-fabulous set deserve better than a movie this superficial and pandering? full review
129. The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys 2002 Built for nothing but the laziest Saturday afternoons, Altar Boys is zipless enough to seem to receive its narrative rhythms and emotional energy intravenously. full review
130. Irreversible 2002 Noe's summation is an ideological sucker-punch from a filmmaker who gets off on abusive relationships. full review
131. Star Trek - Nemesis 2002 This is the fourth film to feature the Next Generation crew, and everyone is still off-track after the ideologically unsound, sparsely entertaining Insurrection. full review
132. The Trials of Henry Kissinger 2002 A stunning and overwhelmingly cogent case for Kissinger as a calculating war criminal. full review
133. XXX 2002 The racially ambiguous Diesel cuts a fine action figure. He has the glacial swagger left over from his bouncer days and looks as if he's been bench-pressing Sylvester Stallone since he was 12. full review
134. The Safety of Objects 2001 The Safety of Objects doesn't expose nearly enough of the pre-traumatic to make before distinguishable from after. So the film leaves you dissatisfied, as though you'd just spent two hours with a menagerie of plastic white people. full review
135. As Tears Go By 1988 This sounds like a fairly standard debut. But Wong smothers the story with tremendous style. full review