2012 Best Reviewed Movies (Page #7)

In his autobiographically inspired, fictional feature debut Sleepwalk with Me, comedian-turned-playwright-turned-filmmaker Mike Birbiglia wears his incisive wit on his sleeve while portraying a cinematic surrogate. We are thrust into the tale of a burgeoning stand-up comedian struggling with the stress of a stalled career, a stale relationship threatening to race out of his control, and the wild spurts of severe sleepwalking he is desperate to ignore.

Based on a true story involving Australian serial killer John Bunting, the film follows a 16-year-old who begins a friendship with a charismatic older man. As the relationship grows, the teen finds his world threatened by both his loyalty for, and fear of, his newfound father-figure.

An Albanian family caught up in a blood feud. Nik (Tristan Halilaj) is a carefree teenager in a small town with a crush on the school beauty and ambitions to start his own small internet business. His world is suddenly up-ended when his father becomes entangled in a dispute that leaves a fellow villager murdered. According to a centuries-old code of law known as the Kanun, Nik's family owes a life in return. Nik finds himself the prime target and becomes confined to home while his younger sister Rudina (Sindi Lacej) is forced to leave school and take over their father's business.

In The Salt of Life, Gianni Di Gianni plays a middle-aged retiree who has become invisible to all distaff Romans, regardless of age or relation. He contends with an aristocratic, spendthrift mother (played by Valeria de Franciscis); a wife who is more patronizing friend than romantic partner; a daughter (played by Di Gregorio's daughter Teresa) with a slacker boyfriend whom Gianni unwillingly befriends; and a wild young neighbor who sees him merely as her dog walker. Watching his "codger" friends snare beautiful younger women on the sun-kissed cobblestones of Trastevere, Gianni tries his polite, utterly gracious best to generate some kind of extracurricular love life--with both hilarious and poignant results.

Story follows a screenwriter (Colin Farrell) struggling for inspiration for his script, Seven Psychopaths, who gets drawn into the dog kidnapping schemes of his oddball friends (Sam Rockwell and Christopher Walken). Things take a turn for the worse when a gangster's (Mickey Rourke) mutt goes missing.

A year after his brother Tom's death, Jack (Duplass) is still struggling emotionally. When he makes ascene at a memorial party, Tom's best friend Iris (Blunt) offers up her family cabin on an island in the Pacific Northwest so Jack can seek catharsis in solitude. Once there, however, he runs into Iris' sister Hannah (Dewitt) who is reeling from the abrupt end of a seven-year relationship and finds solace in Tom's unexpected presence. A blurry evening of drinking concludes with an awkward sexual incident, made worse by Iris' sudden presence at the cabin the next morning.

Dino is a pet cat that leads a double life. By day he lives with Zoe, a little mute girl whose mother, Jeanne, is a detective in the Parisian police force. But at night he sneaks out the window to work with Nico--a slinky cat burglar with a big heart, whose fluid movements are poetry in motion--as he evades captors and slips and swishes from rooftop to rooftop across the Paris skyline. The cat's two worlds collide when young Zoe decides to follow Dino on his nocturnal adventur ...

Fifteen-year-old Camille (Lola Creton) is a serious girl who has fallen in love with the cheerful Sullivan (Sebastian Urzendowsky), an older boy who returns her feelings, mostly, but wants to be free to explore the world. When he leaves her to travel, she is devastated, but develops over the following years, into a more fully formed woman, with new interests and a new love - and the possibility that she'll be less defenseless when Sullivan enters her life again.

When Kelli returns home from war, she expected to slowly but surely settle back into her life with her husband and kids in the small town she grew up in. But she gradually realizes that the life she left behind is no longer there waiting for her.

The story centers on a career criminal who gets caught by Mexican authorities and is sent to a drug- and crime-filled prison, where he learns how to survive with the help of a 9-year-old boy.

Maria (Naomi Watts), Henry (Ewan McGregor) and their three sons begin their winter vacation in Thailand, looking forward to a few days in tropical paradise. But on the morning of December 26th, as the family relaxes around the pool after their Christmas festivities the night before, a terrifying roar rises up from the center of the earth. As Maria freezes in fear, a huge wall of black water races across the hotel grounds toward her.

Beca (Anna Kendrick) is that girl who'd rather listen to what's coming out of her headphones than what's coming out of you. Arriving at her new college, she finds herself not right for any clique but somehow is muscled into one that she never would have picked on her own: alongside mean girls, sweet girls and weird girls whose only thing in common is how good they sound when they sing together, in the new out-loud comedy "Pitch Perfect." When Beca takes this acoustic singing group out of their world of traditional arrangements and perfect harmonies into all-new mash-ups, they fight to climb their way to the top of the cutthroat world of college a cappella. This could wind up either the coolest thing they'll ever do or the most insane, and it will probably be a little of both.

The story centers on Doug Glatt, a bouncer (Seann William Scott) who has been touched by the fist of God. Upon discovering both his right hook and skates, he joins a downtrodden hockey team and inspires them into new heights. Jay Baruchel is Glatt's best friend. Alison Pill plays the female lead role of while Marc-Andre Grondin plays a French-Canadian star hockey player.

Susan and her sons Dane and Lucas Thompson move from Brooklyn to Bensonville, in the countryside. Dane is upset with the constant changes of address and the family has lived in many cities. Lucas and Dane befriend their next door neighbor, the gorgeous Julie and the brothers find a bottomless hole in the basement of their house locked with several padlocks. They take the locks off and sooner they are haunted by their darkest fears. Further, they believe that the hole might be a gateway to hell.

Beecham House is abuzz. The rumor circling the halls is that the home for retired musicians is soon to play host to a new resident. Word is, it's a star. For Reginald Paget (Tom Courtenay), Wilfred Bond (Billy Connolly) and Cecily Robson (Pauline Collins) this sort of talk is par for the course at the gossipy home. But they're in for a special shock when the new arrival turns out to be none other than their former singing partner, Jean Horton (Maggie Smith). Her subsequent career as a star soloist, and the ego that accompanied it, split up their long friendship and ended her marriage to Reggie, who takes the news of her arrival particularly hard. Can the passage of time heal old wounds? And will the famous quartet be able to patch up their differences in time for Beecham House's gala concert?