Ann Hornaday

It’s possible to see why McDonagh’s fans love his quirks and clever structural feints (the war of wills in “Banshees” often plays out like variations on a theme), as well as his characters’ willingness not to be liked. But what they find at the end of the filmmaker’s rainbow is less likely to be a pot of philosophical gold than prosaic self-satisfaction.

Scrappy and unsubtle where "We Were Here" is elegant and nuanced, How to Survive a Plague isn't nearly as formally beautiful as its predecessor.

Maybe the best way to describe Beasts of the Southern Wild is faux-k art. Even Hushpuppy's name suggests an author more interested in the folk- and foodways of a culture-with-a-capital-C than the people who comprise it. Too often, she and her peers are presented as curios to be exhibited rather than as fully realized -- if resolutely un-mythic -- human beings.

The mopey, midwinter atmosphere of Nancy becomes increasingly and oppressively bleak, leavened only by Smith-Cameron’s spot-on portrayal of her character’s trembling, painfully fragile optimism.

As beautiful and compelling as Ramsay’s filmmaking and Phoenix’s central performance are, the degree to which viewers will buy You Were Never Really Here depends on the degree to which they accept yet another display of febrile vigilante brutality motivated by sexual violence perpetrated against young girls. One person’s trope, after all, is another’s shopworn cliche.

The gently perfumed air of impending doom suffuses 3 Hearts, a tasteful, mildly intriguing romantic drama from writer-director Benoît Jacquot.

Never quite breaks out of its talky inertia.

For all his creepy tendencies, Hitchcock is portrayed mostly sympathetically in Hitchcock, in which Sir Anthony Hopkins plays the corpulent British auteur with a combination of hauteur and playfulness.

It's a depressing little kingdom, even when Gordon tries desperately to goose the drama with the requisite "Eye of the Tiger" riffs and some junior high-level palace intrigue.

Put delicately, this is one long sit, made all the more so by a turgid story, a dour visual palette and uninspiring action.

Consistently absorbing -- thanks in large part to strong performances from the actors -- but not particularly rewarding.

From its very first scene, Untraceable isn't the sophisticated, brainy thriller it so nearly could have been, but just another movie about a serial murderer.

Upon leaving The Big Short, audiences are likely to feel less enlightened than bludgeoned with a blunt instrument, albeit one wrapped in layers of eye-catching silks and spangles: You may be too old to cry, but it hurts too much to laugh.

In this case, director David Michôd — working from a script he co-wrote with actor Joel Edgerton — doesn’t make the material distinctive or provocative enough to merit a second, far more dramatically inert go-round.

A vivid but vaporous portrait of collective unease that feels uncannily of this moment.

What starts out as an invigorating odyssey winds up becoming an enervating series of postures.

Gone Girl may get the job done as a dutiful, deliberately paced procedural, but it never quite makes the splash it could have as a thoughtful, timely and thoroughly bracing plunge.

It succeeds only fitfully. Toggling between Stark's impish goatee and Iron Man's full-metal body condom, and amid so many generic fireballs, kill shots and earsplitting thumps, bumps and crunches, the film finally collapses under its own weight.

Never lets viewers fully inside Erik and Paul's world, a reticence that isn't helped by the actors' fey, restrained-to-a-fault performances. That and a frustratingly episodic structure make what might have been a raw and inspiring portrait of commitment and boundaries a surprisingly uninvolving, arms-length enterprise. Keep the Lights On lets go just when it should be holding you tighter.

At the movie's thoroughly expected conclusion, a visual joke has a bedraggled cat licking at the icing on a wedding cake, but it's really Melanie who gets to have it and eat it, too.

For all its feminist pretense as a parable of empowerment, Priscilla’s still caught in a trap, even when the heroine can — and does — walk out.

After Yang again demonstrates Kogonada’s mastery of form, framing and composition. But audiences will be forgiven for wanting to reach through the screen to mess it up a little, if only to inject some recognizable warmth and spontaneity.

Does it make it as a movie? Only in fits and starts.

As lighthearted, late-summer escapism goes, Logan Lucky is an amusing if convoluted and undisciplined bagatelle. As a hotly anticipated comeback, it feels like a slightly dippy, ultimately disposable warm-up of a director whose brains, chops and judicious taste we need more than ever.

The film is ultimately too self-regarding, too smug to be transcendent itself.

Graciously accompanied by Washington (who can even make eating mac-and-cheese compelling), Zendaya emerges as the star of this show, delivering a performance that calls on sudden, turn-on-a-dime reversals — emotional figure-eights that she executes with impressive, unstudied finesse.

Equity isn’t perfect — far from it — but it’s an intriguing attempt at rebalancing a system that’s been dreadfully out of whack for far too long.

Make no mistake: The War Tapes is not an overtly political film. It appears to grind no partisan ax nor score either red or blue points. Whether viewers support the war or not -- or find themselves somewhere in the mushy middle -- this documentary won't fit comfortably into the pigeonholes of their preconceptions.

Let's get it out, loud and clear: Jerry Maguire is not a sports movie. It's a stealth chick movie, wrapped in a swaddling of jock stuff so that it gets through guy radar without setting off the missile defenses.

As pungent as McDonagh’s writing is, it may be his too-easy pessimism that makes Calvary engrossing and thought-provoking, but not great.

Even Lawrence’s magnetic powers can’t keep Mother! from going off the rails, which at first occurs cumulatively, then in a mad rush during the film’s outlandish climax.

A yawn and most unforgivably features some appalling arrangements of the Beatles' best-loved songs.

For all the energy and personality of its subjects, Planet B-Boy tends to drag, especially toward the competition finals.

Even with Hudson's triumphant arrival and an overall fizzy mood of singing, dancing, pop nostalgia and camp, Dreamgirls is an uneven crowd pleaser.

Nightwatch is passable stuff for undiscriminating fans of the ickier-the-better genre; for the rest of us, it offers nothing new. [17 Apr 1998]

For all its beauty and poignancy, The Hand of God suffers from a strange paradox: It goes on too long but somehow doesn’t go far enough.

Despite the literal and figurative pains it takes to persuade viewers of its own importance, The Revenant can’t escape the clutches of crippling self-regard.

Hello, My Name Is Doris is a weirdly off-plumb little movie, one that manages to be condescending and compassionate, knowing and blinkered, reassuring and unsettling all at the same time

As skillful an artist as Range clearly is, he has gone to an awful lot of trouble to make a painfully obvious point about threats to civil liberties in a post-9/11 world.

Will probably appeal most to hard-core fans of Japanese animation and its wide-eyed style, both visual and philosophical.

A wild, inventive ride through the unconscious, by way of Art History 101 and An Introduction to Film Tropes. The story of a famous psychoanalyst struggling with his Oedipal demons with the help of some hardened burglars isn’t a story at all, really, but a decidedly rickety scaffold on which Krstic can hang his images, an array of ecstatic references to the painters and directors who have inspired him.

What elevates Heaven Knows What above other run-of-the-mill wallows in aimlessness and self-destructive compulsion is Arielle Holmes.

A bit hard on the posterior, it is definitely easy on the eyes.

The best we can do, Goodbye to Language suggests, is to be as attuned, instinctive and spontaneous as beasts in a state of nature. Or maybe that’s not what the movie is saying at all. Godard leaves his enterprise adamantly open-ended, the better for viewers to supply their own metaphors, meanings and moral implications.

There’s attentive scrutiny here, and a surfeit of playful style, but precious little genuine curiosity or interest.

Like a gel cap in a sip of orange juice, the psycho-pharmacological thriller Side Effects goes down easily, even if its long-term impact turns out to be barely dis­cern­ible.

Jagged, unrelenting, claustrophobically intimate.

Interstellar tries so hard to be so many things that it winds up shrinking into itself, much like one of the collapsed stars Coop hurtles past on his way to new worlds. For a movie about transcending all manner of dimensions, “Interstellar” ultimately falls surprisingly flat.

It resides in that cinematic middle ground of not-bad, not-great, just okay.

If anything, it's worth watching as yet another example of Lynch's extraordinary collaboration with Dern. It may be overstating things to call her performance heroic, but it's nothing if not brave, as she dares to embody Lynch's most brutal impressions of Hollywood -- not as a dream factory, but as the place where dreams come to die.

Can a performance be too good? Meryl Streep disappears so uncannily into former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady that her performance overpowers the movie it's in - a perfectly executed triple axel that renders everything else just featureless ice.

Bolstered by good supporting performances from Kyra Sedgwick, Janeane Garofalo and Ritchie Coster, Submission is a handsome-looking film that aims to fulfill the most meek, well-behaved implications of its title.

The dour, downbeat story eventually spirals into grisly Grand Guignol and contrivance. Still, Gordon-Levitt is superb, and Jeff Daniels delivers a wry and wily performance as Pratt's blind roommate.

The Square may be one of the most timely films of this season, but it squanders its own relevancy by shooting fish in the world’s most shallow, painfully obvious barrel.

Surprisingly formulaic. So many scenes seem lifted from a 1950s melodrama, from Blake and Francis' repentent mother (Leslie Ann Warren) to the film's tearjerker of a final scene.

In a textbook example of the have-it-both-ways ethos of self-loathing narcissism, Carell has succeeded in creating a character of old-fashioned decency in a movie that otherwise flouts it at every turn.

Rather than a movie that breaks the mold, it looks like Anning has inspired one we've seen before.

Will probably appeal only to the most committed of Leigh fans.

Unfolds as a series of meticulous tableaux vivants, but like those parlor pastimes, it lacks physical verve and a compelling emotional charge.

Paints an often grave but sometimes hilarious picture of a hugely powerful network.

Unfortunately, Provoked possesses the tiny production values and schmaltzy music of a prime-time special, despite its ensemble of terrific actors.

Pirouettes along a beguiling but treacherous line between horror and whimsy.

Unfortunately, for all its good music and admirable vocal impersonations, Walk the Line slides -- very, very slowly -- downhill.

Celeste and Jesse Forever engages in Bridget Jones-like comedy of mortification, sending its heroine down a path of self-discovery that ultimately seems more cruel than revelatory.

Although the plot is painfully familiar — and not particularly edifying, compared with similar narratives that have gone before — the novelty here is Silverman, who doesn’t exactly erase her comic persona so much as bring to the surface an inherent darkness that has always lurked in the shadows.

Whether the entire production comes off as classy or cloying depends entirely on the viewer's mood.

It’s a fascinating story and well worth revisiting. But in the hands of director Lee Daniels, working from a script by the playwright Suzan Lori Parks, what should be a sensitive and densely layered drama instead becomes a perfunctory collection of scenes that feel overwrought and under-considered simultaneously.

There're some low New York laughs in Swingers and some nice clothes if you like bad taste, but on the whole, I'd rather be in Philadelphia. At least they know how to make a sandwich in that town!

Fellowes has brought intelligence and control to the eternally vexing question of whether the right thing is always the good thing.

Fails to go into the one realm that would make it worthwhile, which is Ed Wood's brain.

Try as it might to entertain serious notions of manhood, evil and original sin, Prisoners works most effectively as Hollywood hypocrisy at its most sleek, efficient and meretricious. It’s stylish, high-minded hokum.

A good as the performances are, and as dutiful as Nolan has been in preserving the Kane legacy in Batman Begins, there's something joyless about the enterprise.

Most revelatory here is Malli, who defies the stereotype of submission and subservience and emerges as a woman of self-possession and substance. (The earthily beautiful Bat-Sheva Rand infuses the character with a generous dollop of her own zaftig sensuality.)

Often astonishingly beautiful, but in a way that's the problem: You wonder what visionaries such as Tim Burton or Michel Gondry might have done with the material. As it is, "Benjamin Button" is little more than "Gump" by way of "Dorian Gray." It plays too safe when it should be letting its freak flag fly.

Siegel's depiction of the film's supporting characters too often borders on caricature. By the movie's strained, overheated climax, it's clear that Siegel, in his directing debut, is less interested in his protagonist as a character capable of transformation than as a human petri dish of futility and pathology.

The first two-thirds of Joyeux Noel are strangely inert, but the film ends with a moving and surprisingly sophisticated meditation on the definition of moral duty.

There are times when Our Idiot Brother possesses a loping, genial sweetness. But it lacks conviction, and it doesn't hold a beeswax candle to such similarly themed films as "You Can Count on Me" and "Momma's Man."

Like Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton before him, Helms plays a lamb trotting hopefully through the abattoir, blessedly unaware of the blades hanging just above his head.

Isn't about history or war, or people and their problems, or anything of substance or meaning. It's a movie about other movies. For all its visual bravura and occasional bursts of antic inspiration, it feels trivial, the work of a kid who can't stop grabbing his favorite shiny plaything.

The result is that Revolutionary Road is a hard movie to love. Plenty of people will appreciate the hopelessness, but they might wish for a little less emptiness.

The Little Hours seldom rises above a clever but lightweight one-liner.

Compliance is an extraordinarily assured, well-made drama, signaling a promising career for Zobel, an adroit filmmaker with a talent for taut pacing and staging. But it also fails its first test, which is that the audience believe every word of it.

With its contrived setups, preposterous coincidences and calculated sentimentalism, Crazy, Stupid, Love seems beamed from the same alternate reality as "Larry Crowne." We might enjoy the ride while we're on it, but it will seem like a visit to another planet once we're home.

It's one of those movies whose appeal depends on the viewer's tolerance for watching French people suffer, smoke and sigh prettily.

The net effect is one of frustration and will surely send Cohen compleatists back to their record collections for relief.

Even filmmakers and actors as fine as these haven’t managed to solve one of cinema’s most enduring challenges — making criminals interesting without exalting them.

Rather than taking viewers on a twisty, provocative journey through a mazelike meditation on appearance and reality, The Illusionist finally just sits there, looking like a very well-produced pilot for PBS's "Mystery!" series. It's a sophisticated snooze.

Things take a nasty turn in the film's bilious third act, suggesting that Guest's deepest gift -- his expansive humanism -- stops at the studio gates.

The film's unforgettable stars are the beauty academy's students, women who have survived tribal warfare, Soviet invasion, Muslim tyranny, American bombs, patriarchal families and even Western good intentions with extraordinary grace and fortitude.

As touching as Hayek’s performance is, Beatriz at Dinner too often forsakes nuance for caricature.

“No No” performs the valuable service of elevating Ellis’s legacy beyond one game, reminding viewers of a career during which he was almost always, as one observer notes, “a chapter ahead.”

A shaggy, baggy collegiate comedy that is less a coherent movie than a loosely assembled series of lewd jokes and punishing slapstick routines.

Well, it's better than "The Phantom Menace."

The action in “The Way of Water” is ultimately overwhelming, betraying an uncomfortable truth about Cameron: He might preach environmentalism and balance, calling on Indigenous peoples for their gentle worldviews and material culture. But at heart, he’s just as aggressive and all-commanding as the bad guys he portrays with such oorah swagger.

Rogen and his friends may have set out to celebrate virtue at its uneasiest, but they’re clearly still most at home with earthly delights.

This is a carefully conceived, thoughtfully orchestrated effort in taste and restraint that ultimately is too restrained and tasteful.

Some dazzling in-camera special effects, especially the ingenious idea of filming the story's ghost at a slow speed, six frames per second, giving the being a strange, otherworldly way of moving.

Closed Circuit is intriguing, even mildly diverting. That might have been fine for another film at another time, but in light of the here and now, this one should have been more.