Dana Stevens

Narrative coherence is perhaps not among the film's virtues, but its loopy, cluttered story is part of the fun. And a clearer, simpler plot might have required the sacrifice of some delightful grace notes and visual marvels, like the elastic-necked geisha or the one-eyed ambulatory umbrella.

It's a meal you may feel you've eaten before, but you nonetheless walk away stuffed and happy.

This film is a curiously paradoxical achievement: a visual and aural marvel that is also a crashing bore.

With so much going for it, how could the movie be such a dud?

A gorgeous, heartbreaking and utterly convincing work of art.

Like an uncommonly artful and well-acted after-school special. I don't mean this as a put-down: its combination of realism and fretful moral inquiry is best suited to the tastes and sensibilities of young teenagers who devour young-adult fiction.

Like its humor, the film's sentiment sneaks up on you, and so does the dramatic reversal that makes it something more than a collection of wry anecdotes.

Mining the incest prohibition for laughs in what's essentially a light romantic comedy is a bold move, and for the first two-thirds of the movie, it works surprisingly well. But as long as the Duplasses are willing to go there, I can't help but wish they'd gone a little further.

Walks the delicate boundary between politically inflected realism and costumed sentimentality.

Sully can feel like a dutiful, hagiographic slog, even though its actual running time barely tops 90 minutes and both Hanks and Eckhart give warm, understated, funny performances in the only two roles developed enough to qualify as real characters.

A movie I snickered at more than once but never stopped staring at in wonder. This isn’t Nolan’s best film by any stretch, but it abounds in the qualities that are among his strengths.

Happy People's images of the Taiga, while often breathtaking, come from the standard visual language of nature documentary: in between interviews with villagers, cutaways to icicles hanging from branches or dawn breaking over an expanse of snow. It's Herzog's inventive use of voice-over that elevates the film above an extremely well-researched episode of "Nature."

Sophie, in both her incarnations, joins an impressive sisterhood of Miyazaki heroines, whose version of girl power presents a potent alternative to the mini-machismo that dominates American juvenile entertainment. Not that children are the only viewers likely to be haunted and beguiled by Howl's Moving Castle - all that is needed are open eyes and an open heart.

Anchors its melodramatic formula in tough, heartfelt realism.

The nearly flawless execution of a deeply flawed premise.

What better to do with such a quiet, majestic landscape than to liven it up with the noise and vulgarity of lowest-common-denominator American pop culture?

Especially when Baymax is onscreen doing his adorable-puffy-robot thing, Big Hero 6 qualifies as a better-than-average kids’ movie with enough cross-generational appeal to make it a fine choice for a family weekend matinee. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that this film was designed to function as a starter kit for future Marvel aficionados.

In short, Elizabeth Gilbert is the Julia Roberts of writers, which means that the film adaptation by Ryan Murphy (the creator of Nip/Tuck and Glee) got at least one thing right.

Highest 2 Lowest moves with a swagger and self-confidence that perhaps oversells what the script actually has to offer, but it’s hard to resist the draw of seeing Lee and Washington collaborate for the first time since Inside Man in 2006.

Mr. Akin pursues his happy, silly love story without embarrassment, and In July is ultimately more endearing than irritating.

An almost unbearably powerful documentary.

The main problem with Such a Long Journey is its storytelling. There is simply too much happening.

You realize you are witnessing a psychodrama of novelistic intricacy and epic scope.

Succeeds in illuminating an almost unimaginably dark story.

Ultimately too thin for its length and too dependent on easy assumptions about its characters. But it does demonstrate that Ms. Collette is more than able to carry a movie, and it leaves you hoping she will soon have another chance to do it.

Mr. Boyle has hardly lost his sly, provocative perversity or his ear for the rhythms of unchecked violence, but he does seem to be maturing. It's as if, in contemplating the annihilation of the human race, he has discovered his inner humanist.

The blend of grim violence with romantic whimsy tilts toward sentimentality. Mr. Salles has the confidence of a storyteller too entranced by his tale to worry about the resistance of his audience, which he thus effortlessly overcomes.

Like a good novel, Les Destinées is many things: a family chronicle, a series of psychological portraits, a sumptuous re-creation of the past. But the film is also a pointed tribute to the French tradition of quality and distinction, a tradition in which it clearly includes itself.

The Iron Lady is, to put it kindly, a shambles.

Madagascar arouses no sense of wonder, except insofar as you wonder, as you watch it, how so much talent, technical skill and money could add up to so little.

Somehow, in spite of the stunning vistas and some witty and affecting moments, the story seems to unfold at a distance; the human drama is diminished by the setting rather than amplified by it.

A brilliant satire of emotional politics.

The Coens have used the noir idiom to fashion a haunting, beautifully made movie that refers to nothing outside itself and that disperses like a vapor as soon as it's over.

Despite the movie’s arguably excessive run time, it takes seriously its mandate to keep the audience not just entertained but dazzled.

Offers the rare pleasure of watching a major director return to his own material and rework it 30 years later. This story of a pitiful jewel heist gone so profoundly wrong that it approaches the scope of Greek tragedy isn't quite a remake of "Dog Day Afternoon."

You come away from his film overwhelmed, hopeful and, perhaps paradoxically, illuminated.

Its warm, occasionally off-putting individuality is more like what you look for in a friend than in a movie, and like a friend it invites you to see the unique beauty that lies under its superficial flaws.

Spider-Man, while hardly immune to these vices, is, like Mr. Maguire, disarmingly likable, and touching in unexpected ways.

Even when Prince-Bythewood (Love and Basketball) tries to pack too much around the edges (including critiques of record-industry sexism and the mechanisms of black political fundraising), the romance at the movie’s center remains credible and vibrant.

Mr. Stuhr, an actor who worked frequently with Kieslowski and who plays the main character in this film, honors his old friend's memory, producing a minor but nonetheless charming footnote to his oeuvre.

Goes down easy and takes a while to digest, but its message is certainly worth the loss of your appetite.

The result is a mountain of honest, nourishing corn, a lavish evocation of simplicity that, for all its showy sophistication, has an appealing emotional directness. For all its sweep and scope and movie-star magic, Cold Mountain is studded with fine small moments and deft supporting performances.

I call it wondrous because, in spite of lapses and imperfections, a few of them serious, Mr. Burton's movie succeeds in doing what far too few films aimed primarily at children even know how to attempt anymore, which is to feed - even to glut - the youthful appetite for aesthetic surprise.

American Sniper is by no stretch a critique of the U.S. involvement in Iraq; Eastwood leaves larger questions of politics and policy entirely outside the frame of his story, an approach not uncommon in modern war films of any political stripe.

At its best, L.I.E. offers a rich, dark, bitter slice of contemporary life. But the film's arty embellishments undermine its bleak vision, making it, in the end, a little too easy to take.

The Corporation is a dense, complicated and thought-provoking film, but it simplifies its title character.

One of the best entertainments this season has yet offered.

Is it OK if, as a critic who has at times found the director’s work to be astringent to the point of sourness, I enjoyed without unreservedly loving this foray into warmer, more humanistic territory?

Eastwood's furthest venture yet into the comic possibilities of his flintier-than-thou persona.

The feel-good movie of the year.

Battle of the Sexes breaks little new ground as either a sports film or a lesbian romance, but it’s lively, funny, and, if you’re unlucky enough to be a feminist in 2017, vicariously wish-fulfilling.

While not a great movie, is a very good movie about greatness, in which celebrating the achievement of one major artist becomes the occasion for the emergence of another.

The New World takes a shopworn American myth--and runs it through the Malick-izer, making it feel rich, strange, and new. In so doing, the film takes wild liberties with historical accuracy.

Its fidelity to its characters’ view of the world -- although they are presumably college graduates, they seem never to have read a book or expressed an opinion -- is more a liability than a virtue. The Puffy Chair is as modest as their ambitions and as narrow as their curiosity about the world beyond themselves.

An astute and surprisingly gripping drama not only about the ethics of magazine writing, but also, more generally, about the subtle political and psychological dynamics of modern office culture.

Has a quiet, cumulative magic, whose source is hard to identify. Its simple, meticulously composed frames are full of mystery and feeling; it's an action movie that stands perfectly still.

Acting is not really the point of this movie, which seems to arise above all from Mr. Spielberg's desire to reaffirm that he is, along with everything else, a master of pure action filmmaking.

A cautionary essay on the risks to democracy posed by the fight against terrorism.

Boyhood reimagines the coming-of-age film as family album, longitudinal character study, and collaborative artistic experiment — a mad risk that paid off in a movie that’s as transcendent as it is ordinary, just like life.

Chandler's script has, by my count, exactly one sort-of-funny line and not a single scene whose comic possibilities are successfully exploited.

It's often funny and smart, but seldom deeply involving, and practically never scary.

Especially during its third-act descent into the surreal netherworld of its protagonist’s mind, Friendship plays out as if it were a 97-minute-long I Think You Should Leave sketch.

Whether unintentionally or by design, the movie never really makes a case either for or against the troubled figure at its center.

All the drinking, arguing and brooding, which in lesser hands might have produced oppressive and unvarying dreariness, somehow adds up to a tableau of extraordinary vividness and variety.

Disturbing, infuriating and often very funny film.

An appealing blend of counter-cultural idealism and hedonistic creativity.

What the movie lacks in polish, though, it makes up for in pluck, enthusiasm and slapstick shamelessness.

Somehow we are never quite swept into the boisterous, democratic world of which Seabiscuit, in Ms. Hillenbrand's account, was the plucky, galloping embodiment.

Above all, Mickey 17 is remarkable for the savagery of its satire of 21st-century capitalism.

A teasing, self-conscious and curiously heartfelt demonstration of his (Mr. Kim) mischievous formal ingenuity.

Outfoxed will inevitably be discussed in the same breath (or with the same hyperventilating rage) as Michael Moore's ''Fahrenheit 9/11,'' but it lacks both the showmanship and the scope of that incendiary film.

Heist is a pleasure to watch, and the greatest pleasure is to watch Mr. Lindo and Mr. Hackman steal it.

I was onboard with the gentle charm of Safety Not Guaranteed until these last few scenes, when the genuine trauma suffered by these characters - especially Kenneth, whose paranoia and isolationism seem like symptoms of real mental illness - gets glossed over in an unconvincingly Spielbergian happy ending.

A modest film, less interested in advocacy or analysis than in sympathy.

He’s (Abrams) caught some of the spark of the first Star Trek without either mimicking or desecrating the original.

Thanks to a witty, fast-moving script (also by Famuyiwa) and a sensitive performance from the newcomer Moore, Dope helps us see how a young black man coming of age in America faces complications unforeseen by the smugly entitled high schooler played by Tom Cruise all those years ago in "Risky Business."

Like Ari Aster’s Eddington earlier this year, Bugonia invites us inside the internet-poisoned imagination of a lonely male protagonist who has “done his own research”—and, as with Eddington, the result is an allegory about contemporary life that’s as nauseatingly gory as it is thuddingly obvious.

Being Julia may not make much psychological or dramatic sense, but Ms. Bening, pretending to be Julia (who is always pretending to be herself), is sensational.

Scene by scene, 50/50 can be both amusing and moving, with the tightly wound Gordon-Levitt and the boundaryless Rogen forming an oddly complementary pair. But as a whole the movie never quite coheres, seeming to skitter away at the last minute from both full-body laughter and full-body sobs.

Super 8 is at its best when it dwells in this secret childhood empire, and at its worst when it juices up its essentially simple story with increasingly senseless action set pieces.

It works on the mind as well as the funny bone and the gag reflex.

It's an anti- romantic comedy that resolves on a minor chord of grief.

A freshness and intensity that recall the television series "My So-Called Life."

The first hour of Candyman does a bang-up job of mixing such audience-teasing popcorn thrills with trenchant, if sometimes too flatly stated, social critique. But by the last half-hour, there are so many themes, plotlines, and flashbacks in play that the movie’s message becomes muddled, and the forward momentum slows.