Ann Hornaday

1917 is impressive but oddly distancing; ultimately stirring but too often gimmicky.

Afghan Star goes much deeper, eloquently conveying the tensions, small victories and shattering setbacks of a fragile democracy struggling to regain a once-flourishing culture.

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.

As a portrait of a young woman testing the limits of the shame-based system that has controlled her, The Starling Girl plays like a warmer, more radiant companion piece to last year’s “Women Talking."

Without a note of music or any other extraneous narrative device, Emitai plunges the viewer deep into the lives of the Diola, to the point where the subtitles translating the Diola and French languages are almost superfluous. [02 Feb 1998]

For all its stylishness, verve and moments of visual poetry, the relentlessly punishing slapstick and overall cruel tone left me cold.

If ever a match were made in cine-literary heaven it would be Charles Dickens and Armando Iannucci, each a master of probing social criticism, slashing wit and floridly besotted love of language.

It's a smart, bold genre exercise that's enormous fun to watch, harking back to gritty urban thrillers of the 1970s with an assured sense of tone and style.

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

Like "After Tiller" a few years ago, Trapped is lucid and illuminating about the issue of abortion as a constitutional right. But in addition to being instructive, it brims with compassion, leaving viewers with haunting images of women we never even got to see in the first place.

Few will emerge from its story of intelligence tradecraft and egregious lapses in oversight without feeling seriously freaked out.

By the film's self-congratulatory final shot, Stevie has become less a portrait of a sorry young man's difficult life than the story of auteurist arrogance and self-deception run amok.

In deciding not to stray far from the first film in plot or tone, it makes for a pleasant, familiar, cheerfully unassuming fish-in-her-water tale.

That such a masterful depiction of American heroism and can-do spirit has been created by a German art film director known for considerably darker visions of obsession is an irony Herzog no doubt finds delicious.

A smart, absorbing, often exhilarating documentary.

Despite its familiar, come-from-behind contours, the story brims with redemptive optimism that it comes by honestly, thanks to its extraordinary main character and the equally remarkable actor who plays him.

With skill and sensitivity, Polley turns an on-the-nose political debate into a bracing declaration of independence.

Mississippi Grind winds up being an improbably satisfying, even heartwarming character study.

It gets under your skin and into your head, and you don't want it to leave.

Block, an experienced documentarian, does an outstanding job walking the knife-edge between personal and self-absorbed.

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.

What ensues in Corpus Christi, Jan Komasa’s absorbing and spiritually attuned drama, turns out to be a fascinating exercise in fake-it-till-you-make-it, with a hefty dose of fatalism and small-town hypocrisy thrown in for maximum provocation.

Given the current heightened tenor of religious rhetoric and paranoia, it may well wind up pushing brand-new buttons today. To quote Michael Palin quoting Jesus, "There's just no pleasing some people."

There's no doubt that Eminem has the talent and presence of a star. It's just a shame that the filmmakers didn't capture his power with mad skillz of their own.