Calum Marsh

The humor is over-the-top and often exaggeratedly juvenile, but like many nominally “dumb” comedies, it’s the product of a keen and deliberate intelligence.

The action in The Wrecking Crew is so good, its fights so brisk and its car chases so lively, that it makes you wish its muscular leads, Jason Momoa and Dave Bautista, had starred in more decent action movies.

Lynch is a difficult influence to wield responsibly, yet Erkman keeps it largely under control: A Desert, if at times too ambitious, certainly feels distinct.

Jaeden Martell, Julian Dennison and Rachel Zegler, as the teens tasked with thwarting the apocalypse, make charming heroes — but it’s Mooney himself, as the loquacious stoner Garret, who is the film’s dopey MVP.

The animals act like real animals, not like cartoons or humans, and that restraint gives their adventure an authenticity that, in moments of both delight and peril, makes the emotion that much more powerful. With the caveat that I’m a cat lover, I was deeply moved.

If the movie’s portrayal of rivalrous (and homoerotic) hypermasculinity doesn’t always seem original, it is nevertheless realized with seriousness and vigor.

With its rambling momentum and quick-witted, almost musical dialogue, it feels less like “Superbad” than a Robert Altman movie, sort of like a pint-size “California Split.”

This is pretty routine material, but it’s been realized with charm and enthusiasm: The director, Simon Cellan Jones, maintains a good handle on the comic-thriller tone and shoots the action with wit and creativity.

While sometimes grating, the film is always appealing, with pleasing details, down to its Art Deco end titles.

Yoo was granted exceptional access to San Quentin, and when she depicts the mundane qualities of life there — inmates working odd jobs, writing letters, passing the time alone in their cells — the movie gains some of the penetrating clarity of one of Frederick Wiseman’s films.

Office Race, a ribald comedy from Jared Lapidus about an inveterate deadbeat reluctantly training for a marathon, understands one of the great unspoken truths about running: that it is a miserable, arduous, soul-destroying pastime, and also deeply, profoundly rewarding.

With compelling verve, “Hall of Shame,” from the director Bryan Storkel, tells the story of Conte’s ignominious rise and fall.

The director having fun is the presiding feeling here — which may account for why the movie is so frequently amusing, and occasionally delightful.

The flashbacks are well-written and add off-the-court dramatic interest, but it’s the basketball action that is the movie’s claim to excellence. Expertly staged and beautifully rendered using a combination of computer-generated imagery and traditional hand-drawn animation, it’s often so spectacular that I am eager to watch again.

The documentary “Glitch” is slyer and smarter than some of its paint-by-numbers dramatized contemporaries, and the story it prefers to tell is more interesting and complex than the battle of two domineering egoists who came up with a novelty app.

A funny and thoughtful high school comedy.

It’s a winning setup, and the director, Daryl Wein, escalates the action shrewdly, with clever rom-com engineering.

That winsome charm and gusto is infectious, as in a Central Park-set dance number with some of the Technicolor verve of an old Hollywood musical, and it manages to sustain this unflagging exuberance across its fleet 72-minute running time.

Like Pez, the film is charming and colorful — and perhaps too sweet.

The infectious brio at the heart of “Bojangles” is a testament to the performances of the ensemble cast, but especially Duris and Efira, whose chemistry is magnetic.

The “Dragon Ball” formula is repetitive and predictable. But it’s difficult to overstate how exquisitely gratifying that formula can be.

It’s not simply a movie about how Giannis became one of the most dominant players in the league. It’s about why Giannis is so lovable.

A wry take on the material that combines animation and live-action comedy, the movie has some of the hip flair and anarchic meta-humor of “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” as well as an irreverent, self-referential attitude that’s rather appealing.

Sprouse plays it a touch broad, veering sometimes from endearing to goofy. But Condor is note-perfect, and Winterbauer directs with a light, playful touch, giving the movie an energy that’s nimble and vibrantly sexy.

The ensemble of children has a natural, authentic-seeming rapport, and Braff and Union, as the beleaguered but loving parents, have an easy, irresistible chemistry, buzzing with big-hearted charisma every time they share the screen.

They/Them/Us finds sharp humor in more relatable friction: namely between Charlie and Lisa (Amy Hargreaves) as they attempt to reconcile their domestic responsibilities with their voracious sexual appetites.

I suppose it doesn’t cohere into anything more than the sum of its parts. But this is the first time I’ve felt the anthology horror format really worked, and gosh, the parts are really good.

Tender and exuberant, it includes set pieces modeled on “Footloose” and “Grease,” and feels closer to those films in spirit than to the Disney Channel. This is the kind of movie that vibrates with the energy of the people who made it, whose enthusiasm radiates from the screen.

This is a film about the devastation of Inner Mongolia and the systematic annihilation of its migrant workers, but it is no mere coup d'œil of righteous advocacy. It is a work of film art.

This is portraiture for the Zhangke-acquainted. Admirers will find much of interest here, as Salles, scrupulously self-effacing, affords Jia the latitude to think and talk at his leisure — to speak at length, and candidly, about his work and what informs it.

This is a masterpiece not because it culminates in some redemptive catharsis or clinching argument for social change, but because, by disavowing such facile ends, it meets the mess of life on its own clear and true terms.

The stories have an almost dreamlike sweep and imaginative energy, and the film never exhausts that exuberance. More extraordinary still is its emotional depth.

However you enjoy its nearly four hundred minutes, I expect you'll be held rapt till the last second by a film of abundant wit and generous heart.

Diliberto has managed to make a political comedy that seems at once tremendously funny and intensely serious — a provocative, and perhaps even important, combination.

The faults and merits of the free-school movement are elucidated with a steely, journalistic rigor. More surprising is that this candid glimpse plays as exhilarating drama.

Martin and Peranson, a savvy pair, appreciate their outsider status here, and they remain uncommonly sensitive to even the subtlest ways that ignorance and entitlement may manifest themselves — both in art and in our relationship to it.

Reichert and Zaman level a perceptive, justly withering eye at the state of healthcare in the United States, careful to remind, if only implicitly, of the tragedy that necessitates these commendable acts of charity.

Story of My Death is a singular work, and its originality is apparent in every frame.

Greene seems fascinated by the contradictory identities — each a kind of real-life performance — that Burre endeavors to reconcile, and he is profoundly sensitive to the emotional truth these performances describe.

An exemplary mystery, a paranoid thriller rooted in contemporary technology but not crafted to denounce it.

Force Majeure represents what is perhaps Östlund's most sophisticated thought experiment yet, at once provocative and wise. It is a penetrating study of that most ludicrous of social pretenses — masculinity, toxic and ubiquitous.

The film mounts a compelling case on behalf of what was, perhaps, a sort of genius — a rare gift for identifying talent in others and nurturing it, even amplifying it.

What ultimately holds the film back, I believe, is its tendency to err too far on the side of that sweetness — it indulges too often in the hallmarks of the mediocre indie, the stuff a press release might call quirk, to level its more substantial points with real seriousness.

Norte tells a big story on a grand scale, but its emphasis, moment by moment, is on the quotidian. It's simplicity that resonates most deeply of all.

Tobia approaches comedy in the same way that John Cassavetes did, which is to say that he embraces the absurdity of human behavior at the same time that he recoils from it.

Surprising, challenging, and never less than thrilling.

It is amazing, given the modesty of its scope and means, how much Manakamana is able to achieve.

At its best, the film does the job of the albums lost to the floods: It captures a town's history.

The Double taps into a deep reservoir of psychic turmoil even as it navigates the script’s abundant jokes, and the nightmare of the heart of the film is doubtless universal.

This is a film for which the landscape, both social and material, is paramount.

White Reindeer concedes that much about Christmas is funny — its notions quaint, its fixtures cliched. But it proposes that beneath this sometimes lurid veneer lay something to cherish all the same.

The result is a pleasure, perhaps as much for audiences as for Polanski; it's a chance to luxuriate in the atmosphere of world-class Formula One, here a lavish free-love party interrupted now and again by a few laps on the track.

Part of what’s so invigorating about A Touch of Sin is its refusal to betray the depth of its intellectual ambition, deferring when needed to generic convention and relishing the entertainment which follows.

The film is starved for the kind of nuance Kore-eda wields effortlessly elsewhere. What’s left without it is something merely schematic.

Silver locates the ordinary madness bubbling just beneath the surface of his own life, and flickers of lunacy abound.

The world the film describes is so vividly realized that it seems to spill over the edges of the frame, as if the lives of its characters will continue after the credits roll.

The film, a kind of hybrid between understated drama and essayistic tourism, approaches its subjects with uncommon patience and curiosity, lingering over objects and faces as if to savor their aesthetic qualities, eager to convey truths without authorial imposition.

The film expresses, with much style and sophistication (if, at nearly three hours, perhaps an overabundance of both), the personal tragedy of love torn apart, of watching helplessly as your life crashes hard into another's but fails to stick.

Perhaps the richest of Resnais's recent efforts.

One of its most refreshing aspects is its acceptance of both western and action-film conventions on their own terms, refusing to regard itself as operating outside of or superior to the genre.