When starlet Anne Baxter preyed on aging stage legend Bette Davis in “All About Eve,” did anyone figure that paradigm would eventually shift to middle school? Every two years we chop down the last teen star so that a new one can rise in the sunlight. You know Stewart and Lindsay and Fanning and Fanning, Knightley and Woodley and Ronan and Breslin. But do you recall, the greatest teen-actress of all? Would it be Chloe Grace Moretz

What can you do when you know that death is approaching? Joaquim Pinto contracted HIV and hepatitis C twenty years ago. In this film-diary which he directed he reveals his innermost thoughts as he lines up one difficult day with another, powerless to do anything about his debilitating afflictions. And yet, his documentary is less about the philosophical implications of life and death as it is, more simply, about how to live with

As a critic it’s important to remember that there have always been bad movies. While Godard was at his peak and Arthur Penn and Warren Beatty were making "Bonnie and Clyde," Hollywood was unrolling horrible Cold War spoofs and beach blanket movies. The bad fade. The good last. It gets really hard sometimes. I tried to keep that in mind while suffering through "Guardians of the Galaxy," the latest Marvel Comic books adaptation.

In "An Unwanted Man" Philip Seymour Hoffman is Gunther Bachmann, the leader of a secret team working for the German government fighting the war against terror from Hamburg. The film follows a plan to bring down a doctor (Homayoun Ershadi, who was seen notably in Abbas Kiarostami's "Taste of Cherry" in 1987) suspected of financing terrorism and Al-Qaeda. Bachmann works with a tight-knit posse of spies, the group's

This is the surreal and poetic story of a young idealistic and inventive man, Colin, who meets Chloe, a young woman who could be the incarnation of a blues piece by Duke Ellington. Their idyllic marriage turns to bitterness when Chloe falls ill due to a water lily that's growing in her lung. To pay for his care in a fantasyland Paris, Colin must work under increasingly absurd conditions while all around them their apartment deteriorates

Watching Pawel Pawlikowski’s drama “Ida,” is to immerse yourself in a film of great silences. Set in the grim landscape of postwar-Poland “Ida” follows Anna, a young Catholic nun (newcomer Agata Trzebuchowska) as she prepares to profess her vows in the convent she's lived in since childhood. Before she can take this important step, the convent’s Mother Superior insists that she pay a visit to her only living relative, her aunt Wanda (Agata Kulesza). Obeying reluctantly, Anna’s appearance in Wanda’s life unmoors not only the older woman but Anna herself, who learns that her real name is Ida, and that her Jewish parents were murdered during World War II.

Bravo, Clint Eastwood! With “Jersey Boys,” the director moves away from his sometimes schlocky and often manipulative movies such as “Invictus,” “Gran Torino,” or “Hereafter,” and gives us a biopic as moving as it is entertaining. Like the Broadway musical, it’s a story of greed, success, fall and redemption, none of it unpleasant as the protagonists are young, gifted, and for the most part naïve.