It’s a fine, tough little movie, technically assured and brutally efficient, with a simple story that ventures into some profound existential territory without making a big fuss about it.

Sit through the entire credits. There’s one more shot still to come. Not that you wouldn’t be content without it.

The gristle inside this movie is one of the things that save it from being simply a series of challenges.

A terrifically exciting, deeply unsettling survivalist epic.

The setting and fatalistic musings of The Grey invite comparison to Sean Penn’s stirring 2007 ad­ven­ture “Into the Wild”; in its more metaphysical moments, told in impressionistic flashbacks, it recalls last year’s “The Tree of Life.”

Mr. Carnahan has till now been pigeonholed, and rightly, by comedy shoot-’em-ups like “Smokin’ Aces” and “The A-Team.” But here he is with The Grey – certainly an adventure film but one with a spiritual ingredient that is both surprising and fiercely resonant.

The Grey, whose clipped title, grim swagger, and lost-in-the-outback themes conjure up visions of that Alec Baldwin/Anthony Hopkins classic, “The Edge,” devolves into a predictable man-against-nature, and man-against-fellow man, affair.

You see the pattern here? Winter-release slot + travel budget + Liam Neeson = slightly preposterous, routinely violent, apparently lucrative action movie in which the Irish-born star signals inner emotional conflict with his handsomely mashed boxer’s face while settling outer physical conflict with his boxer’s fists.

It’s cheap the way The Grey wants to be both a Liam Neeson “Quit Taking My Stuff” movie and an existential thriller about survival.

The picture’s dialogue-heavy stretches and ambiguous finale could leave ticketbuyers impatient for less chatter and more chomping.

It’s quite watchable date-night cheese – the kind of movie you can simultaneously snort at and enjoy.

The Vow is agreeable enough. It may be puddin’-headed but it’s not soul-crushing.

Ready-made for Valentine’s Day, The Vow is, like the offerings at Cafe Mnemonic, a total sugar overload.

It’s pleasant enough as a date movie, but that’s all.

The Vow represents that most welcome kind of Valentine’s Day offering, focusing on the feelings that bring couples closer.

The romantic drama The Vow looks like the kind of annual Valentine’s Day staple that arrives just as calls start flooding flower shops and chocolate bonbon displays invade your local CVS.

It may appeal to the most rabid fans of tearjerk romances like “The Notebook,” but it’s a hard-to-swallow, maudlin tale.

This is a movie that leaves you wanting more. To care more, to cry more, to love more.

When they are on the screen together here, there is enough physical charm and emotional warmth to distract from the threadbare setting and the paper-thin plot. But those defects ultimately get in the way of the stars and leave you wondering: Is this a romance about neurological impairment or a neurologically impaired romance?

The Vow is a sopping hankie of a romance for women who love to suffer and the men who love them.

If the characters weren’t so well drawn, if the effects weren’t so convincing, and if the upshot weren’t so ghastly, the moral component wouldn’t carry any weight. But Trank tells his tale with an emotional and visual crispness that gives the superhero genre its best crack at naturalism so far.

If the characters weren’t so well drawn, if the effects weren’t so convincing, and if the upshot weren’t so ghastly, the moral component wouldn’t carry any weight. But Trank tells his tale with an emotional and visual crispness that gives the superhero genre its best crack at naturalism so far.

The most original and excitingly executed wow-factor-meets-handheld-video feature since “Blair Witch” itself. It’s also a movie that rebuilds the power of special effects from the ground up.

The most original and excitingly executed wow-factor-meets-handheld-video feature since “Blair Witch” itself. It’s also a movie that rebuilds the power of special effects from the ground up.

Chronicle is full of smart writing that isn’t too smart.

John Trank’s Chronicle grows into an uncommonly entertaining movie that involves elements of a superhero origin story, a science-fic­tion fantasy and a drama about a disturbed teenager.

This mind-and-fork-bending sci-fi saga comes from the freaky imaginations of director Josh Trank and screenwriter Max Landis, who’ve packed their feature debut with smartness.

This mind-and-fork-bending sci-fi saga comes from the freaky imaginations of director Josh Trank and screenwriter Max Landis, who’ve packed their feature debut with smartness.

Despite a gimmicky premise, Chronicle fuels its action with characters you can laugh with, understand and even take to heart.

Haywire comes close to achieving Soderbergh’s goal of creating “a Pam Grier movie made by Alfred Hitchcock.”

Paring down narrative and character concerns in favor of a breathtaking application of pure thriller technique, Soderbergh’s latest picture is a lean, efficient exercise tossed off with his customary sangfroid and wickedly dry sense of humor.

Where faux-empowering “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” confines sexual power play to the old rape-revenge matrix, Haywire is a real war-of-the-sexes tournament, briskly paced with a tickling sense of black humor.

There’s no deeper meaning to Steven Soderbergh’s thriller than what meets the eye, yet its lustrous surfaces offer great and guilt-free pleasure.

In terms of its title, Haywire doesn’t quite go there; it’s more “Haywire-ish.” But it’s eccentric, and the on-screen violence is sharp and exciting – brutal without being either subhumanly sadistic or superhumanly ridiculous.

Disarmingly laid back for this kind of fare, with a jazzy musical score (courtesy of David Holmes) and a sleek, straight-ahead style, Haywire may not make much sense plotwise, but it’s a rollicking 90 minutes.

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.

This is one of the director’s mainstream efforts, although his penchant for the offbeat and oddly artistic has not been completely reined in. But there’s plenty of unsparing, bone-crunching violence to dismiss the idea that Soderbergh is making an art film in disguise.

One of the reasons Haywire is such a pleasure to watch is that its director, Steven Soderbergh, doesn’t overplay the film’s hear-me-roar subversions.

A vigorous spy thriller that consistently beckons the viewer to catch up with its narrative twists and turns. Bordering on convoluted, it works best when in combat mode.

Contraband, while often grungy and far-fetched, does keep you watching. And in January, that’s recommendation enough.

It’s a genre film, not great art, though there’s a good joke about art – a pricey piece of action painting, appropriately enough – but it’s a thoroughly satisfying entertainment, and, in this season of lowered expectations, a nice surprise.

I don’t know that a lot of Contraband makes sense. But I’m not sure that it has to. The director Baltasar Kormákur carries the movie off with efficiency, brutality, and humor.

Watching it leaves you feeling less buzzed than jittery and slightly nauseated. If the “Ocean’s” movies were martinis, Contraband is a thermos full of coffee.

It put a smile on my face that never left for 117 minutes.

With their inspired, absurdist taste for weird, peculiar Americana-but a sort of neo-Americana that is entirely invented-the Coens have defined and mastered their own bizarre subgenre.

With their inspired, absurdist taste for weird, peculiar Americana-but a sort of neo-Americana that is entirely invented-the Coens have defined and mastered their own bizarre subgenre.

The movie is as visually inventive and wildly eccentric as the Coens’ earlier movies, but it lacks the emotional maturity and moral clarity of 1996′s “Fargo.”

Watching it amble along is enough of a treat, since the Coens populate this story with oddballs and bowling balls of such comic variety.

Watching it amble along is enough of a treat, since the Coens populate this story with oddballs and bowling balls of such comic variety.

The movie is as visually inventive and wildly eccentric as the Coens’ earlier movies, but it lacks the emotional maturity and moral clarity of 1996′s “Fargo.”

Some may complain The Big Lebowski rushes in all directions and never ends up anywhere. That isn’t the film’s flaw, but its style.

This is a comic amusement park ride – a wildly uneven movie that offers tremendous pleasure for the moment, even if it doesn’t stand up well to post-screening analysis and scrutiny.

This is a comic amusement park ride – a wildly uneven movie that offers tremendous pleasure for the moment, even if it doesn’t stand up well to post-screening analysis and scrutiny.

This is a great act of filmmaking and acting. I don’t believe I would be able to see it twice.

A mesmerizing companion piece to his 2008 debut, “Hunger,” this more approachable but equally uncompromising drama likewise fixes its gaze on the uses and abuses of the human body, as Michael Fassbender again strips himself down, in every way an actor can, for McQueen’s rigorous but humane interrogation.

It’s first and foremost a visual and sonic symphony, and a Dante-esque journey through a New York nightworld where words are mostly useless or worse.

Shame has a lolling pace and stunning visual clarity. Structurally, it’s close to perfect – its precision echoed in the Glenn Gould piano recordings of Bach keyboard works that Brandon listens to obsessively.

It is Mulligan and most especially Fassbender that give the film its power.

The desperation, hostility and despair he conveys through the act of sex make Shame a film that is difficult to watch but even harder to turn away from.

Fassbender’s portrayal is truly haunting, and when he sobs, dramatically unraveling, it’s clear he’s imprisoned by his physical urges.

Michael Fassbender delivers a bold and brilliantly immersive performance as a sex addict in Shame. He is so raw and riveting you won’t be able to take your eyes off him.

Fans of Fassbender’s yummy performances in this year’s “Jane Eyre” and “X-Men: First Class” should be forewarned that, although we see the handsome Irish actor in the altogether, Shame is strangely un-sexy.

Much of the film is banal or pretentious, or both – vacuous vignettes about emptiness. Occasionally, though, those vignettes burst into life and burn with consuming fire.

How can visual pleasure communicate existential misery? It is a real and interesting challenge, and if Shame falls short of meeting it, the seriousness of its effort is hard to deny.