Barbara VanDenburgh

Relying wholly on good casting and the charisma of its actors, big and small, to elevate too-familiar material, the film’s stale humor hinges on two faulty premises: That the suburbs are inscrutable and that the people who live in them are clueless.

The film spends more time lingering on Emma's love affairs than it does in making sense of them; her declarations of passion and despair lack both.

A Hidden Life is less a story than an experience, a spiritual journey made accessible through light and sound. Malick doesn’t transcend cinema. He sanctifies it.

It is not hyperbole to say Oyelowo is a revelation. The British actor brings phenomenal humanity, grace and torment to a historical figure who once seemed to loom too large a legend to make flesh on screen.

Even more than an expose of bad reporting and social hysteria, The Witness is an intimate exercise in grief and healing

When it reaches its boiling point, Les Misérables absolutely roils.

Blue Ruin is a movie about revenge, but it reaches far past the bottom-shelf titillations of fantasy to tell a richer, character-driven story with a protagonist who's less avenging angel than ghost.

The Tribe is that rare breed of film so masterful in execution it requires watching once, yet so devastating you may never be able to stomach seeing it again.

What it lacks in thematic innovation it more than makes up for with enough memorable characters and visual splendor to make Zootopia a perennial Disney favorite.

For all its heart and beauty, The Breadwinner sputters a bit to a close. Its themes are undeniable — one walks away feeling angry and empowered. But with the story’s soft focus, one soon forgets why.

Director Terence Davies dispenses of any gaudy romantic trappings and makes something much more beautiful in A Quiet Passion, a delicate and measured drama that plumbs the depths of the poet’s strange heart and the agony of her intelligence.

Cliff Curtis is staggeringly good as Gen.

It’s an assured debut from a rising star that nails tone and pace. It would be a solid summer thriller were it not grossly undermined by its astonishingly regressive treatment of its leading lady.

There's a surface elegance that might play as depth in smaller doses, but at feature length, the stylistic flourishes seem to be covering for deficiencies rather than servicing the material.

Paddington is a mostly smart update loaded with charm, and it preserves enough of the fuzzy feelings for purists to walk away with a smile.

It’s a powerfully sensual movie, gorgeously lensed colors and textures conveying its characters emotional states while thoughtfully exploring the range of human sexuality through Adenike’s experience.

The characteristics that make Evolution an intriguing piece of cinema also make it a not entirely successful one.

Hotel Transylvania 3 is a harmless enough excuse for a couple hours of air-conditioned entertainment, which is all some people ask of a kid’s film. But there’s something bleak about its banality.

First Love might not ultimately mean much, but its wily mix of colorful elements – romance, organized crime, slapstick and ultra-violence – makes for a bracingly weird cinematic experience.

Props to Bad Milo for its fearlessly pulp approach in exploring well-worn characters and their ho-hum dilemmas, but you know you’ve got a dull story on your hands when not even a butt monster can jazz it up enough.

There’s a certain kinetic charm to the first half of the movie, a freewheeling silliness to these outsized characters that makes you curious to see just how wrong things will go. But as the weightlifters’ plot spirals out of control, so does the movie’s.

The stunning character work is accented with moments of pure cinematic poetry. Audiard uses the camera like a paintbrush, composing lyrical interludes and disorienting transitions with the power to leave you breathless. It’s all so quietly brilliant — until it isn’t.

In many ways Lady Macbeth is remarkable for what it isn’t. It isn’t a staid period drama. It isn’t romantic. It isn’t predictable. And it certainly isn’t comfortable.

Ornamented heavily with creative visual pleasures, the film is bogged down, not just by weighty thematic issues — death, divorce, bullying, unfairness — but by professions of its own grandeur.

A cunning civics lesson about religious pluralism that will have civic-minded citizens throwing up the devil horns even if they’re not quite ready to proclaim mocking allegiance to Satan.

It’s safe to say that Tickled is nothing like what its filmmakers set out to make. That's an artistic blessing.

It's a well-written rom-com with rascally charm, a modest story of an awkward Brooklyn girl making a go of life. It's irreverent and rough around the edges with an imperfect protagonist, blue language, scatological humor and rambling confessional stand-up monologues, sometimes about bodily fluids. The laughs are frequent and ribald.

It would be unbearable if it weren’t so completely self-aware.