A.A. Dowd

Speaking of style and confidence, Morris From America constitutes a huge leap forward in both for writer-director Chad Hartigan, whose last feature, "This Is Martin Bonner," was about as minimal as American cinema gets.

The movie exists mainly as an act of social advocacy, showing how one portion of the population lives and offering a sobering rebuke to pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps rhetoric.

That Civil War doesn’t collapse under the weight of its various moving parts, that it manages to be the most serious entry yet in this franchise of franchises without sacrificing much in the way of valuable comic relief, is a testament to the creative mojo of directors Joe and Anthony Russo and screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely.

Did the super dark times need to arrive at all? If the scenes of shit-kicking naturalism feel authentic, the thriller that replaces them — a kind of junior "A Simple Plan" — relies too heavily on unconvincing psychology.

The cheesiest thing about it is the punny English-language title with which it’s been saddled. Otherwise, Land Of Mine is tough and admirably grim, turning a harrowing history lesson into a study in how the battles of wartime don’t always cease with the ceasefire.

Thoroughbreds...has been made with diabolical craft and intelligence, the kind that marks Finley as a major new American talent. But it’s no empty exercise, no mere calling card. The style all comes in service of the central relationship and the superb performances that bring it to bewitching life.

There’s an emotional dimension to Kate Plays Christine—an empathy linking an actor to the human headline she’s dressing up as—that’s nearly abstracted into oblivion by the film’s neurotic self-examination.

The M:I films remain blessedly, unfashionably self-contained: They’re stand-alone popcorn entertainments that can be watched in any order, with only the thinnest of connecting continuity between them.

It’s refreshing to discover that True History has an actual perspective on the events of Ned’s formative years.

What saves the movie is its actors: Exploiting audience’s memories of their previous collaborations, Hader and Wiig really do seem related. And both actors handle the balance between drama and comedy with aplomb.

Directed by Alexandre Moors, who made the D.C. sniper movie Blue Caprice, The Yellow Birds might have used its nonlinear structure to confront us with how war reshapes these young men, putting who they were and who they become into conversation. But the performances don’t capture that psychological change.

The film picks up when it gets down to shot-by-shot analysis, allowing editors and other interviewees to break down one of the most famous sequences in movie history.

The first feature from writer-director Richard Tanne is sweetly speculative historical fiction — a date movie with some very recognizable lovebirds.

The structural gamesmanship is just a smokescreen, a way to obfuscate the pulp nature of what is, ultimately, little more than a glorified, low-aiming potboiler.

The film ends on a strangely moving theatrical exercise, as the various performers gather together on a soundstage recreation of the Ramsey home to dramatize all the major theories in tandem, creating an overlapping spectacle of speculative horror.

For the most part, though, this hour-long curiosity feels like a fans-only doodle, riffing on motifs Joe has done better elsewhere. Even for a filmmaker who takes pride in scaling the fantastic down to everyday proportions, there’s such a thing as going too slight.

What stands out most are the performances, delivered by two actresses capable of generating a little emotion, even in a film that insists on keeping the volume “realistically“ low. The reality between the two of them is the one that really counts.

Trier’s first foray into the fantastic—his college Carrie—gets stuck in an odd middle ground: It’s at once too metaphorically muddled and too dramatically straightforward.

Lowery, it can’t be denied, has Malick’s moves down pat. It’s the Malick touch that eludes him.

Identity is the film’s true subject: As much as he pokes fun at the foibles of a privileged white America, Simien is more interested in the ways his protagonists conform, or refuse to conform, to society’s idea of them.

The footage, edited by Actress director Robert Greene, coheres into what feels like one long, chaotic school day. You can practically feel the pulse of grown-up veins, the fraying of last nerves.

A good cast and Collet-Serra’s energetic staging elevate the kind of straight-down-the-middle entertainment Hollywood has mostly, sadly stopped bankrolling. It’s not quite Die Hard, but close enough.

It’s dazzling, but also excessive; by the end, even those consistently wowed by the directorial showmanship may find themselves feeling that less would have been more.

The Calming ultimately might have benefitted from an animating tension—from something beyond its sustained mood of lovely but unvaried serenity.

This psychodrama didn’t go exactly where I expected it would. It didn’t go anywhere particularly interesting either.

For two hours or so, he becomes a magnetic actor again, the same vibrant presence who wowed audiences with his work in "Leaving Las Vegas" and "Adaptation." He is, in these rare instances, just plain good.

Thor: Ragnarok, with its jabs of reportedly improvised banter, isn’t really an action movie. It’s a round-robin buddy comedy, mismatching Hemsworth’s amiable lug to characters old and new.

Some Kind Of Heaven contrasts the dissatisfaction of its subjects with the sunniness of their surroundings, the better to stress the wide gap separating how they feel and how they’re expected to feel in a community one talking head refers to, un-ironically, as “nirvana.”