Alfonso Cuaron’s space station disaster saga “Gravity” is an intellectually-soft video game, a SuperMario of space debris and a disappointment as a space-survival story.

A great deal of praise is being heaped on the 3-D outer space experience, labeled as immersive and hypnotic. Comparisons are being drawn to the upside-down, gravity-free experience

“There is no way not to tell this right,” a cheerful Mason says to his co-workers Grace and Nate as he relates a story while on break outside the drab foster care residence where they work. The same could be said of "Short Term 12," a thoughtfully executed film that examines a range of emotions, from love and hope to despair and the pain of betrayal in an astonishingly moving ninety-six minutes.

Should we accept the common virtue of safety? Or, sometimes in the future when cars become self-regulated, will we--too stubborn to lose the thrill--reject the disappearance of the human element?

Pushing toward that thrill is at the axis of "Rush," Ron Howard’s superb film about Formula 1 racing of the seventies. At the end of the push, Peter Morgan’s

“Prisoners” is the most maddening kind of failure: an abrasively portentous thriller that, in spite of its copious flaws, manages to startle the audience a handful of times. Because director Denis Villeneuve regards screenwriter Aaron Guzikowski’s cut-and-dry kidnapping story as an ultra-serious treatise on torture, and because the superb cast (Hugh Jackman, Jake Gyllenhaal, Paul Dano, Terrence Howard, Maria

“Enough Said” will be fondly remembered as the late James Gandolfini’s final film, not to mention the one that most accurately depicted his real-life gentle giant nature. But it also marks the first starring/dramatic film role for TV comedy queen Julia Louis-Dreyfus (The New Adventures of Old Christine, HBO's Veep), who (a few too many face-crinkling tics aside) proves herself capable of carrying a film. And it’s a

The Persian story goes, when your heart is filled with sorrow, find a patience stone or syngué sabour that will listen as you talk to it until it can take no more and bursts into pieces, lifting that weight from your shoulders and leaving you free. This well-known legend has been written up any number of times, including by Iranian novelist Sadegh Chubak, and filmed at least once, in 1968. It is also the basis of the novel by Atiq Rahimi, Syngué sabour, that in 2008

Jem Cohen’s “Museum Hours” is a contemplative, leisurely look at the world of art as a parallel to ours. A loose narrative pulls together the director’s musings on the correspondence between the two. The story, such as it is, introduces us to a Canadian woman (singer Mary Margaret O'Hara) who travels to Vienna to visit a cousin she hasn’t seen in years and who has fallen in a deep coma with little chance of recovery. For someone