Dan Kois

I don’t know how long the boys can keep tapping the well of their surreal imaginations before they become exhausting. But I do know that The Treasure of Foggy Mountain made me laugh so hard I missed a number of jokes.

It’s all captured vérité-style by the filmmakers, who, like everyone else in this utterly sweet production, display great affection for the totally foolish theater kids (of all ages) who inhabit this world.

The problem with Elemental is that it is, in every way, the epitome of a Pixar film, except that it isn’t any good.

Like every Pixar movie, it’s entertaining, sharp, and visually inventive. But it lacks the thunderbolts of creativity that make the company’s best philosophical inquiries so electrifying. It never quite finds its spark.

The result is a movie that’s sad, but not at all unbearable — in fact, that’s oddly inspiring.

The movie is surprisingly moving in its focus on the character who’s often felt like the show’s biggest drag.

Wendy recognizably reflects Zeitlin’s vision; it’s less a follow-up to "Beasts" than a kind of echo of it. The mistakes the movie makes, and the ways it fails to fulfill its predecessor’s promise, make me want to say something critics rarely express: I wish that the studio had meddled a little bit more.

In its portrayal of black athletes and their families navigating a system that both depends on them and abases them, High Flying Bird is a low-key act of subversion that just happens also to be a sleek, entertaining drama.

Congratulations to Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald for being the first flat-out terrible product of the Harry Potter expanded universe. The first two movies were not good movies, but no matter how sludgy and overlong Chris Columbus made them, they were salvaged by the truly magical origin stories they told.

That a princess movie filled with brown faces and absent a love interest will be a slumber-party staple for decades may be its most important legacy.

While it’s a decent table-setter and a welcome return to a magical world that many of us love dearly, it’s no Force Awakens, bogged down as it is by exposition, dull characters, and sludgy pacing.

It’s offbeat and refreshing nonetheless.

Pete's Dragon is a gentle, understated family adventure, one that feels notably unlike the simplistically sentimental product the Disney imprimatur might lead you to expect.

Like Clueless or Breakfast at Tiffany’s, it’s a great American comedy, and like Boyhood and Dazed and Confused, another easygoing masterpiece from our reigning auteur of hidden depths.

The silliness is more than made up for with moments of stillness and quiet connection between characters learning to need each other in lovely ways. And most of all, there’s the glorious landscape.

I can’t say that this austere, beautiful movie satisfied my impatient desire for answers. (It seems, in fact, to be a rebuttal to that desire.) But I’ll be thinking about Kumiko’s journey for a long time.

Paddington is a wonder: warm, gentle, well-acted, funny without being stupid.

It’s a welcome sight, seeing him carry a movie again. He’s austere and fascinating in The Rover, and his seriousness of purpose undercuts any possible campiness in the film’s world-gone-wrong setting: Each scene may be more dire than the last, but we care about Pearce, so we care about the movie.

Actors aren’t Navy SEALs, I know, but Johansson was, in fact, brave to take on this role: brave in that it’s a sharp left turn from what audiences expect or even like; brave in that she embraced an artistically bold method of building a movie when most other movie stars would have said no thanks to the idea of chatting up random Scotsmen in a van.

The movie itself is not unsatisfying, though it’s less fun than previous Jackass films, and has a worse title.

Sarah spends her downtime drawing her friends and family in her sketchbook - the art is by Brown - and the figures she makes are not stylized or caricatured but just well-observed, scruffier versions of real life. It's fitting that those same drawings adorn the opening and closing credits of this sweet and sympathetic movie.

The realities that Crowe creates all seem like pleasant enough places to be, but you'd never mistake them for real life. The fuzzy, squishy world of We Bought a Zoo may be the Cameron Crowe-iest of them all.

Should you see Mission: Impossible-Ghost Protocol? By all means, and in the big, big, biggest theater you can find.

Young Adult doesn't fully work, but it's still one of the year's most memorable movies.

Spalding Gray himself has the last word on his life, something this exacting storyteller would surely have demanded.

If Richard J. Lewis's film can't re-create the novel's complex stew of grievances, dirty jokes and misremembered anecdotes, it's still a warm tribute.

The Way Back diligently catalogs the outrages through which extreme cold, hunger and thirst put the body, and Weir's camera finds the terrible beauty in his actors' chapped lips, windburned cheeks and tenderized feet.

Kato's often the best part of the movie. Britt calls him a "human Swiss army knife," and he's right; Kato is not a sidekick, but a fully formed hero who's full of surprises.