Chris Nashawaty

The film itself feels a bit padded and clunky.

Interviews with Boenish’s wife, Jean, give his life story perspective and heart.

One of the great surprises of Matt Tyrnauer’s giddy glitterbomb of a documentary about New York’s infamously Caligulan Me Decade hot spot is discovering how much of our culture (the drugs, the music, the sexual liberation) is wrapped up in one nightclub that existed for a mere 33 months.

This is where the brilliant second act of Lewis' career begins.

The whole thing feels a bit like an Arabic riff on "Chinatown" or "L.A. Confidential" — a neonoir with a tawdry edge where our imperfect hero will eventually be doomed. It’s not a question of if, only when he will lose.

The kind of deliriously trashy psychosexual thriller that only the French seem to be able to pull off with a straight face. It’s like "Dead Ringers" meets "Body Double" with a kinky, winking full-frontal Gallic twist.

While Byrne is solid (as always) and Eisenberg is restrained (a relief after his manic Lex Luthor), it’s newcomer Druid whose scenes pack the most power and force.

None of it would work without the two leads: As the author on the run, Ayako Fujitani conjures a rare mix of demureness and daring. And as the sleuthing lawman, Pepe Serna uses his cement-mixer voice and boxer’s mug to convey a real bloodhound determination.

It is essentially two movies. The better by far (and it’s very good) is the one that feels like a darker Stand by Me — a nostalgic coming-of-age story about seven likable outcasts riding around on their bikes and facing their fears together... Less successful are the sections that trot out Pennywise. The more we see of him, the less scary he becomes.

What starts off as a promising indie about a couple (Jake Johnson and Rosemarie DeWitt) trying to balance their own needs versus their partner’s quickly goes south in director Joe Swanberg’s latest meditation on aging-hipster malaise.

Sure, showing that girls can be as horny and impulsive and raunchy as guys isn’t exactly the most radical statement. But when it’s done this well, it certainly is a welcome change-up.

Boy Erased is the kind of topical, well-intentioned movie that makes you wish it was slightly better than it is.

Mitchum looks like a doomed slab of granite and gives a dynamite performance. The tough-guy dialogue and working-class Boston locations are so realistic it almost feels like you’re watching a documentary.

The first two-thirds of the film, which are like the Brothers Grimm's Greatest Hits on laughing gas, have a fizzy, fairy-dust energy. But as soon as the baker couple's scavenger hunt is over and a rampaging giant appears, Woods loses its magic and momentum and sags like an airless balloon.

While it’s loaded with excellent ensemble performances and flashes of real poignancy, it can’t seem to help itself from occasionally jack-knifing into heavy-handed wrong turns that can play as clichéd or phony. It’s half of a great movie.

Is it possible to be an enfant terrible when you’re 55? Unrepentant French provocateur Gaspar Noé pushes that question (and your buttons) to the breaking point with his latest transgressive import, Climax.

A stranger-than-fiction gem.

I couldn't help wondering what kind of spiky unpredictability a "Say Anything" - era John Cusack would have brought to the character — with or without the requisite Peter Gabriel song.

Taken together, the film is kaleidoscopic, sober, and also a bit glib. 22 July is exceptionally choreographed and tough to sit through, but it also leaves an uneasy, bitter aftertaste knowing that the movie is probably exactly the kind of continued attention a deranged narcissist like Breivik would have wanted.

Beyond is more fun than deep. It’s lightweight, zero-gravity Trek that is, for the most part, devoid of the sort of Big Ideas and knotty existential questions that creator Gene Roddenberry specialized in.

Still, there are enough glimpses of the old master peeking through that it’s hard not to have a bit of a good time. It turns out that even second-rate (okay, third-rate) Woo has its moments.

With her sad, haunted eyes and ''plain as a tin pail'' looks, Swank is by far the best thing in the movie. More than most actresses, she seems unburdened by vanity.

What comedy there is comes from Tom Hiddleston’s Lord Nooth — a miser with a head like a soft-boiled egg. But the laughs are mild at best. At least there’s director Nick Park’s playful Silly Putty visual imagination to take your mind off just how thin the story is.

Cooper, the director of Crazy Heart and the underrated Out of the Furnace, has made a tight and tense gangster film with Black Mass. But it’s a pretty straight-ahead entry in the genre, albeit one peppered with spicy performances.

It's so deliciously twisted, it will make you walk out of the theater feeling like you just endured a grueling, giddy workout.

The Hateful Eight doesn’t have enough ideas. Set almost entirely in a snowed-in saloon, the story’s so spare it doesn’t warrant either its three-hour running time (including an overture and intermission) or his use of 70mm projection. It’s narratively and visually claustrophobic.

Going on 20 years now, Moore is someone who's been so reliably good for so long that we've probably taken her for granted. But her subtle, heartbreaking decline as Alice—from her initial diagnosis to her daily struggle to hold on to her identity and dignity to her eventual disappearance in plain sight—is among her most devastating performances.

Tonally, the movie can’t decide whether it’s a comedy, a romance, or a wistful wartime madeleine. What it’s missing is the sense of joy and wonder of its predecessor.

If there’s one nit to pick with Everybody Knows, it’s that Farhadi’s films, as excellent as they are, are starting to feel a bit same-y. He’s plying the same family-in-crisis formula he’s worked before. That formula still works like gangbusters, but it’s becoming a formula nonetheless: Happiness and community curdle into paranoia and suspicion.

What saves Infinity War from being just another bloated supergroup tour – and what will end up being the thing that blows fans’ minds to dust – is the film’s final stretch.

John Wick, is not only a return to badass form for the actor, it's also one of the most excitingly visceral action flicks I've seen in ages.

Is Kumiko simply naive, or is she mentally ill? The film’s perfect ending doesn’t try to solve that riddle, but it will make you feel as if you’ve just seen something hypnotically original.

Pretty light on scares and only hangs together with the thinnest (and hokiest) of narrative threads.

The fact is, Dock Ellis was...complicated. Probably a lot more so than No No makes him out to be.

Even though there’s not a lot to Jim Strouse’s new relationship comedy, it has a real warmth and charm thanks to the undeniable appeal of comedian Jemaine Clement.

Speaking in her native Aussie twang, Byrne shows that she's a deadpan comic ace. And thanks to her chemistry with Rogen, Neighbors proves that just because you grow up doesn't mean you have to be a grown-up.

Noah is a movie about big ideas (environmentalism, heavenly obedience versus earthly love) and even bigger directorial ambitions (how to tell a personal story on the grandest of grand scales). But, in the end, it's also a disappointment. Maybe not one of Biblical proportions, but a disappointment nonetheless.

If this soap opera wasn’t real, you’d never believe it.

Somehow, almost miraculously, Shannon makes her character become stronger as she gets weaker. It’s a wonderful performance.

Corbet doesn’t seem as interested in the answers to the provocatively glib questions he raises as he is in creating a cynical riddle cloaked in style. No doubt some will find all of this to be a deep meditation on the pop-industrial complex, but from where I was sitting, it just felt like empty camp.

The result is a slight, handcrafted indie that’s sweet, skewed, and feels a bit like a skit stretched out to feature length.

The good news is that the film’s four lead actors all slip seamlessly back into their onscreen alter egos as if they’ve been keeping tabs on them all these years.

Like Welles' butchered cut of "The Magnificent Ambersons," it's fascinating but leaves you hungry for more.

It's a fascinating film that points the finger at a charismatic master of deception — as well as our willingness to buy his deceit.

Wonder Woman is smart, slick, and satisfying in all of the ways superhero films ought to be. How deliciously ironic that in a genre where the boys seem to have all the fun, a female hero and a female director are the ones to show the fellas how it’s done.

More than anything, the film feels a bit like a trial balloon for the relative star power of Jacobs, who’s been promoted from best friend to headliner here.

Not that there’s a ton of competition, but Long Shot may be the most deliriously raunchy comedy with a pivotal semen gag since "There’s Something About Mary."

No one forks over 10 bucks to see one of these flicks for its logic. We go for the bananas demolition-derby mayhem. Furious 7 delivers that with the direct visceral rush of an EpiPen.

He’s not just a name-dropper, but a master storyteller. Whether you believe every spicy morsel that drops from his lips is entirely up to you.

It’s festooned with so many triumph-of-the-underdog clichés (including a climax you can see driving down the Garden State Parkway from a mile away), it’s like déja-vu with a breakbeat. The most remarkable thing about the film is how little you’ll actually mind by the end.

It’s smarter than most films, but not as smart as the first one. It’s funnier than most films, but not as funny as the first one. And it still probably belongs in the upper tier of Marvel movies but nowhere near as high up as the first one.

Zoolander No. 2 is embarrassing, lazy, and aggressively unfunny. The only good news is that at the pace the franchise is moving, we won’t get Zoolander 3 until 2030.

It’s a film for people who thought they never needed to sit through another zombie flick.

The fizzy cocktail combination of Blanchett’s cartoonish hauteur and Branagh’s visual razzle-dazzle and confectionary sets (courtesy of the legendary Dante Ferretti) manages to take a tale as wheezy as Cinderella and make it feel almost magical again.

The film's lack of such signature Hendrix tunes as ''Purple Haze'' may put off some — the filmmakers couldn't get the rights — but I'd argue that this obstacle forced Ridley to zig where most biopics zag. Which, when you think about it, is fitting for the story of a lefty who played his guitar upside down.

How many times can you watch two middle-aged men impersonate Michael Caine? Your answer to that question will determine whether you should tag along with Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon on their third and latest fictionalized (and largely improvised) eating tour of Europe.

The moments that work the best are the ones where Tammi lets the pace and pulse slow down, lets the ominous wind whistle and groan, and it isn’t trying to turn The Wind into Meek’s Cutoff as interpreted by the director of Insidious.

Cop Car feels like a great short stretched into a mediocre feature.

Still, my real beef with these movies — and this one in particular — is how same-y they’ve started to feel. Each time out, everything is at stake and nothing is at stake.

Like so many reunions, this one starts off all smiles and quickly grows tiresome.

Creed II slavishly follows the sentimental-palooka Rocky template as if it were a sacred text. Still, it doesn’t make those old rope-a-dope tropes any less effective.

In Wiener-Dog, Solondz just keeps telling the same dark joke over and over again—and it just keeps getting less and less funny. It’s a dog.

As an introduction to a first-class director who shouldn’t require any introduction at all, By Sidney Lumet is a thoughtful and thought-provoking treat.

There are some stretches of the film that are frankly a bit boring and wouldn’t be missed if they were cut.

Megan Leavey is one of those strong-arm soaps, and it certainly doesn’t hurt that it has a certain secret weapon in the forced-waterworks department—an adorable bomb-sniffing German shepherd. All together now: Awwwwww.

Crimson Peak is a cobwebs-and-candelabras chamber piece that’s so preoccupied with being visually stunning it forgets to be scary.

Parents looking for a 21st-century E.T. to share with their kids are bound to be a bit disappointed even as their eyes are dazzled.

It feels like a movie that’s been lovingly crafted and put under glass in a museum. And I kept waiting for it to move me more than it did.

For a movie about the importance of objectivity, Truth feels like a biased and sanctimonious op-ed column.

While the story attempts the moves that a Pixar film typically makes—nonverbal storytelling, death, a bittersweet ending—most of The Good Dinosaur’s punches land soft, made worse by the disconnect that exists between the overly cartoonish style of the characters and the photorealistic landscapes.

Now, in Johanna Hamilton’s fiery truth-to-power documentary, those gray-haired agitators finally step out of the shadows to explain what they did and why they did it (with the help of some slightly hokey dramatic reenactments). Their message—namely, Who will watch the watchmen? — remains as important today as it was 44 years ago.

Charlie McDowell's romantic brainteaser is disarmingly clever — too clever to spoil. But it's also repetitive and a bit too Spike Jonze lite.

A violent, grungy, Peckinpah-lite action thriller that’s worth checking out just to be reminded how powerful an actor Mel Gibson continues to be even—if the parts aren’t coming like they once were.

Fantastic Beasts is two-plus hours of meandering eye candy that feels numbingly inconsequential.

It doesn’t have the most adrenalized action sequences or the deepest origin story. What it has is the balls to mess with the formula and have some naughty, hard-R fun. It’s a superhero film for the wiseasses shooting spitballs in the back of the school bus.

In the end, Non-Fiction is a warm, humane story that ends on a hopeful note reminiscent of "Hannah and Her Sisters." Life can be a messy business, but every so often it reveals moments of unexpected joy with perfect clarity.

Richard Fleischer’s dystopian thriller set in an overpopulated, famine-stricken 2022 New York is a wonderfully silly slice of future schlock, featuring some of Heston’s zestiest overacting.

The premise would make for a great Funny or Die video, but stretched out to feature length, it runs out of ideas pretty quickly. Still, Plaza is terrific. She commits so fully to her rabid, Romero-esque alter ego, she chews the movie up.

Rogue One would have been a very good stand-alone sci-fi movie if it came out under a different name. But what makes it especially exciting is how it perfectly snaps right into the Star Wars timeline and connects events we already know by heart with ones that we never even considered.

Gazzara struts like a polyester peacock, playing a doomed nightclub owner in debt to the wrong people.

It's a deeply touching story about survival, perseverance, and hope.

The movie spins like a top for two hours. With his pearly shark’s grin, always-underestimated comic timing, and macho daredevil streak, Cruise rips into the role and summons a side of himself that he rarely lets his guard down enough to reveal.

There are some solid scares (Wan is too gifted in the dark art of gotcha manipulation to not make you leap a few times), but there’s nothing on par with the first film’s brilliant hide-and-clap scene with Lili Taylor. If there’s going to be a Conjuring 3—and this movie is just decent enough to suggest there will be—our heroes should be a little choosier about which case they dust off next.

The achievement of Edward Zwick’s new Fischer biopic, Pawn Sacrifice, is that it does just that. It manages to turn thinking into action.

Saving Mr. Banks is a wholesomely square film about a wholesomely square film. But damned if its sugar doesn't go down like honey.

It’s fine and funny and sweet and lush and some of the songs are infectious, but I still don’t completely understand why it exists — and why they couldn’t do more with it.

As entertaining as The Lego Movie 2 ends up being — and let’s be clear, it’s still better than 99 percent of its competition — there’s something missing: that white-hot spark of insane creativity and out-of-the-box novelty that made the first Lego Movie such an unexpected, revolutionary surprise. Everything is still awesome. Just a little bit less so.

There are certain movies that you really want to like based on their ambition, or their weirdness, or their ambitious weirdness, and ultimately you just can’t. Ben Wheatley’s High-Rise is one of those movies.

Westerns can be a tough nut to crack, but Hostiles may be the finest example of the genre since "Unforgiven."

The Autopsy of Jane Doe is essentially a 90-minute episode of Jack Klugman’s late-’70s TV show "Quincy, M.E." with more graphic gore, goo, and guts.

Despite its Irish setting, Black ’47 feels more than anything like an American Western, what with its shades-of-grey morality and almost Biblical quest for payback. Like Clint Eastwood’s Bill Munny in "Unforgiven" or John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards in "The Searchers," Martin is a silent avenger pushed to do things he doesn’t want to do but also can’t ignore.

A major disappointment. Bleak, brutal, and ultimately pointless.

It’s a shame that, despite some excellent performances, this urgent, well-intentioned film feels so conventional and stolid.

A lightweight teen rom-com that isn’t likely to clear up anyone’s grasp of what the studio stands for, but it is breezy and charming enough to merit a watch contingent on reasonable expectations.

Like "Downton Abbey" but with corsets, culottes, and tricorn hats, Belle subtly skewers the absurd rules and hypocrisies of class. But the real takeaway is Mbatha-Raw. She makes a case for why she ought to be a star.

It’s likely to be enjoyed more by audiences unfamiliar with the original.

A hot, strange mess that never quite comes together the way it should.

As it is, Youth is hit-and-miss, beautiful and frustrating.