A.A. Dowd

Moss attacks the role with a fearless lack of vanity, daring to make this nosediving rock star not just unlikable but downright irritating — as hard to endure as chipped nails dragging slowly down a chalkboard.

Better, then, to think of this handsome, inoffensive Little Prince less as an adaptation than as a tribute — one that makes the relationship between the book and those who love it a central focus.

A film about taking chances takes its own big chance, risking ridicule with a third act that’s at once sweet, amusing, lackadaisical, and more than a little preposterous.

A gripping dramatization, The Stanford Prison Experiment puts its audience in the same position as the head researcher, Dr. Philip Zimbardo: We watch with equal fascination and dread as a group of fresh-faced undergraduates adapt with scary speed to the roles they’re assigned.

The best Marvel film since "The Avengers."

It’s an ode to the way that even impermanent relationships can be profoundly meaningful.

If Hold The Dark lacks the sheer razor-wire tension of Saulnier’s earlier crime-horror corkers, it still knows how to make the carnage count—to force us to experience, on a gut level, every casualty.

It’s the cathartic, even meditative qualities of metal that are explored in A Spell To Ward Off The Darkness, a new documentary whatsit that frequently resembles nothing so much as an adaptation of some imaginary black-metal record.

Part of the movie’s brilliance is in how it questions the very concept of a good deed.

Knife + Heart sometimes feels as rough around the edges and inelegantly plotted as its pornos-within-the-movie, but maybe that’s just conceptual consistency.

This grim, acclaimed Chilean Western will dazzle your eyes, even as it crushes your spirit with its true story of genocide.

The film is as campy and nearly as regressive as the E.L. James adaptations it consistently out-kinks, except that it’s been made with a slumming Hitchcockian verve that enhances, rather than apologizes for, the proud disreputability of the material.

By its nature, the film is uneven—Estrada shares screenwriting duty with a whopping 25 poets, and as with any poetry slam, some performances are better than others, both in terms of the words themselves and in the highly variable acting abilities of these mostly first-time stars.

What’s really been withheld, in this dreary drag of a movie, is a reason to care.

You won’t learn much from Gunda. It’s an arty pastoral mood piece, not an educational tool. Which is not to imply it lacks a philosophy.

A new Wes Anderson movie is always an event, but the writer-director’s latest whirligig comedy, The Phoenician Scheme, might be his slightest in a couple decades.

These stylistic tricks open windows into the hearts and minds of the characters. They also make a movie about people grappling privately with their emotions feel energetic, even thrilling, in its own melancholic way.

The artificiality is funny but also thematically resonant: This is a film about fake feelings, the invented romance for which two strangers forfeited their futures. And to Hausner, such a colossal waste of potential deserves not a melodramatic tribute, but the cinematic equivalent of an eye-roll.

Cooper keeps both the camera and his dramatic focus tightly locked on the characters, and on Lady Gaga’s face, expressing the full ecstasy and agony of what this timeless tale throws at her. Like Jackson, he can recognize a natural, brilliant talent when he sees one. And he knows, too, when to get out of the way and cede the spotlight.

Anachronism, as it turns out, is the guiding force of this frequently funny, agreeably bawdy farce, which imagines what a convent of the grubby, violent, disease-infested Middle Ages might look and sound like if it were populated by characters straight out of a modern NBC sitcom.

No wonder Green Book, which is like an inverted "Driving Miss Daisy" by way of "Rain Man’s" mismatched-buddy road trip, is already earning ovations: Intentionally or not, it flatters the delusion that racism, in its ugliest form, is more of a past-tense problem.

Polanski isn’t a miracle worker. Venus In Fur works where the facile "Carnage" largely didn’t because the play itself is something of a delight — a straightforward but sharply comic twofer about roleplaying and control-based relationships (be they artistic, romantic, or otherwise). The casting, too, is impeccable.

It’s nice to look at, easy to watch, and impossible to remember for the length of a car-ride home.

he performances are strong, and the situation itself presumably carries a harrowing veracity, but an ordeal is about all the movie offers. Shaking your head over and over again is the only suitable reaction.

At least everyone seems self-aware about how much they’re repeating themselves yet again.

What Leto understands is that the lives of these Russian rock pioneers never approached the excess and flashbulb excitement their American and British counterparts enjoyed. Steadicamming through modest concert venues and studio spaces, the film replaces the melodrama of the typical rock biopic with lots of downtime, spent recording and talking about music.

Drenched in the evening glow of its urban and suburban backdrops, Darker comes alive in the dark, when its characters are drowning their sorrows in song, the sauce, or conversation.

Predestination, a superficially cerebral new thriller, plays almost exclusively to the diagram-drawing crowd.