Chris Willman

It’s about as sweet to see friendship survive success as it is to see Lin-Manuel Miranda as the world’s most adorkable Beastie Boy.

If this is the final chapter, as Apted suggests it could be, it’s a worthy cap to one of the boldest experiments in world cinema.

Even filmgoers with little taste for these arcane sounds may enjoy the doc, if only for the chance to spend an hour and a half in the company of so many prodigies who’ve put down their phones in the service of taking up catgut.

I’d say that Mountaintop provides a valuable service in capturing what it’s like to be in a recording studio at length, with all the bickering and tiny experiments and small eureka moments that entails, better than any other music doc ever has.

The problem for “As It Was” is that this modest turnaround in lifestyle and attitude comes a third of the way into the movie, leaving an hour still to come that will be devoted almost strictly to how well the comeback is going.

The film picks up more general interest once it moves past the early nobility of the outfit as a band of brothers into the things that cripple the least greatest of groups ... Robertson [is] an articulate and ingratiating tour guide through all this glorious and eventually tortured history.

Paz’s story is obviously a feel-good one, which somewhat hamstrings a writer-director who you can feel chafing against the constraints of fidelity to sheer uplift.

If only Carey Mulligan had been inspired to protest for the right to a better script for Suffragette, an overly schematic look at the struggle for women’s voting rights in 1910s Britain that almost gets by on the strength of a great slow burn of a lead performance.

Films about this particular divide don’t get any kinder or gentler, but there’s a knowing sweetness to Dancing Arabs that doesn’t come off as particularly naïve or divorced from reality, at least taking some of the false hopes of the period into account.

Wisely, Broomfield doesn’t harp on alleged police incompetence, beyond letting a handful of activists and locals repeatedly raise it as an issue; Tales is far from overbearing as far as agitprop goes, letting the outrage quietly seep in.

Whatever fascination the film holds belongs solely to Del Toro and his vanity-free impression of Escobar as a titan whose potbelly and gym shorts do not put the slightest dent in a charisma that hypnotizes a nation.

For better or worse, torture-themed films don’t get too much easier to take than this one.

Johannson turns out to be perfectly cast, being able to shift from blank alien mode to kittenish seduction without ever letting you see the switch being turned on or off.

[Fiennes] has rarely been better than he is as the 19th century’s most celebrated novelist, with his chops on screen just about matched by what he’s done behind.