Dana Stevens

Argo isn't quite on the level of the Sidney Lumet classics to which Affleck pays stylistic homage - smart and taut as it is, it lacks the broader political vision of a film like "Dog Day Afternoon." But Lumet lite still goes down pretty smooth.

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.

Reeves’ and Pattinson’s vision of the Batman as a Hamlet-like heir unable to move past the primal shock of his parents’ murder has a certain emotional power.

At once endearing and unbearably show-offy, it seems to be the product of a sensibility formed by age-inappropriate reading.

The final scene is a piece of cunning visual wit that makes you realize how artful and sneaky Cure, has been beneath its clinical, deadpan surface.

The baby-faced Thomas Sangster nearly steals the show in the much smaller role of Paul McCartney.

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

A quiet, slow-moving tale, very much in tune with the gradual rhythms of traditional agricultural life.

The occasional obviousness of the film's themes is more than balanced by the subtlety of its methods and by the stolid, irreducible individuality of its protagonist, Hussein.

It’s a humanist crowd-pleaser with just enough historical heft to count as something more than a small family drama, and it’s also a deeply personal labor of love that, even if it never quite knocks your socks off, seems too sincere and too beautifully crafted to hate.

Thanks to Jim Sheridan's graceful, scrupulously sincere direction and the dry intelligence of his cast, In America is likely to pierce the defenses of all but the most dogmatically cynical viewers.

Fences functions as a faithful—sometimes doggedly faithful—record of a remarkable ensemble performance of one of the great works of American drama. Granted, it’s never exactly a great movie, but given the chance to see actors of this caliber tear into material this rich, you would be foolish to pass up the chance.

It lacks the fevered sincerity (and the political timeliness) of Romero's original, but it's tightly scripted, cleverly cast, consistently scary, occasionally funny--everything you could ask from a well-made and completely unnecessary remake.

A curiously thrilling and often hilarious experience.

The acting is impeccable, and the intentions are serious and noble, but the affection it elicits stops short of love, and its coziness never risks true intimacy.

Luckily Mr. Reygadas has talent to match his ambitions; or, rather, gifts that undercut them sufficiently to give his film a prickly, haunting poignancy.

It's at once a gangster movie, a buddy comedy, and a meta-fictional exploration of the limits of both genres - and if that sounds impossible to pull off, well, McDonagh doesn't, quite. But the pure sick brio of Seven Psychopaths takes it a long way.

This warm, sorrowful film plays like a downbeat variation on an old World War II picture from Hollywood.

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

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.

Because of its relentlessness, its crawling pace (the 77 minutes pass like 2 1/2 hours) and its sometimes confusing story, A Time for Drunken Horses may not be for every taste, but it's still an affecting, and in its way beautiful, movie.

It has an air of melancholy humor as its characters fumble toward normalcy.

Ms. Agrelo and Ms. Sewell deserve praise for discovering and illuminating this delightful corner of an educational system that is often portrayed in the grimmest terms, but their execution falls a bit short.

At its best when it forsakes earnest psychological exposition for magic realism, when, instead of trying to explain Kahlo's life, it conjures the moods and sensations that fed her art.

It's a question of whether or not the movie speaks to your secret, unregulated, inherently ridiculous experience of identification and desire--not who you should be, but who you are. Does the warm blood of a teenager still flow beneath your icy grown-up flesh?

Whatever your opinion of the war - and however it has changed over the years - this movie is sure to challenge your thinking and disturb your composure. It provides no reassurance, no euphemism, no closure. Given the subject and the circumstances, how could it?

The film's powerful individual scenes seem like excerpts from a missing whole, well-appointed rooms in a house whose beams and girders have been cut away.

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 "Spartacus," this movie is engaging because it's actually about something: the love of learning, the clash between science and religious faith, and the grim fact that political change often proceeds on the foundation of mob violence and genocide. Agora engages more effectively with this kind of big historical idea than it does with human drama.

You don’t go see a 2014 Godzilla reboot for the delicate character shadings and plausible story structure. You go to watch a giant radioactive lizard whale on stuff, and on that score, Godzilla does its work.

This slight but enormously likable picture seems destined to be an awards magnet.

Despite its three-hour run time and the epic scale of its widescreen IMAX image, Oppenheimer is the most intimate movie the emotionally chilly Nolan has yet made.

A happy, nasty and frequently hilarious assault on 20 years' worth of youth pictures.

It's sweet-spirited, visually delightful (if aurally cacophonous), and it will make for a pleasant enough family afternoon at the movies. But we've come to expect so much more than mere pleasantness from Pixar that Cars 2 feels almost like a betrayal.

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.

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

At times this gritty, intermittently gripping police drama feels like a follow-up to "The Messenger" - not just because of the thematic overlap (both films deal with grief, substance abuse, and self-destructive masculinity), but because Rampart's main character, the cynical, drug-abusing cop played by Woody Harrelson, might be the long-lost twin of the alcoholic Army captain Harrelson played in the earlier Moverman film.

This little movie isn't a fully accomplished farce - it veers toward sentimentality - but the fact that Peretz even gestures in the direction of farce is somehow cheering.

Disturbing, infuriating and often very funny film.

Perhaps the most satisfying Bond movie since "The Spy Who Loved Me."

And then comes that transcendent last scene, in which the man whose side we’ve barely left during this incredible ordeal is suddenly revealed as the best kind of hero, not super at all but ordinary and vulnerable and human.

If Mockingjay’s placeholder status is a little too evident in its choppy, shapeless structure, this dark third chapter does have stretches of somber beauty.

Enemy at the Gates has its deficiencies, but the first-rate cast is not among them.

A wry exercise in geriatric uplift.

Spinal Tap II’s scanty, improvisation-based script means that the story is short on suspense or forward movement; this is a gentle, nostalgic collection of sketches that riff on a four-decade-long experiment in musical and comic collaboration.

At heart, Frank & Robot is, true to its title, a buddy movie about the complicated relationship between a thief and his mechanized sidekick (a sleek, white, helmeted creature voiced with unsettling politeness by Peter Sarsgaard). But it's also a rueful and funny reflection on aging, death, parenthood, and technology.

Because it pulls off the tricky feat of combining multiple pre-existing Marvel franchises into a reasonably entertaining and tonally coherent whole, The Avengers will likely be hailed as a kind of thinking fan's superhero film, the way Whedon's recent "Cabin in the Woods" functioned as both a horror movie and a critique of same.

Often dramatically jumbled and musically muddled - but every time the film seemed ready to tip into awfulness, the sneer on my lips was trumped by the lump in my throat.

The filmmakers explore not only the banality of evil, but also the banality of goodness, and the ridiculousness, as well as the tragedy, of their collision.

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

A whomping good time, if you don’t — and who has time to think when there’s a genetically engineered megadinosaur on the loose?

Transamerica itself does not always live up to its star, but it is touching and sometimes funny, despite its overall air of indie earnestness.

Time to Leave subordinates narrative to mood. Since the end of the story is never in doubt, the only surprises lie in the particulars of Romain’s behavior and the nuances of sorrow, determination and doubt that pass over Mr. Poupaud’s face.

And yet - and yet - there's something about the solemn, gloomy, often overwhelmingly powerful experience of watching Melancholia. I'll give it this much: This is a hard movie to forget.

As luxuriant and intoxicating as a theme park ride; more remarkably, it feels like a real movie.

Dai Sijie's tender, touching adaptation of his own novel of the same title.

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

The aspect of the book Linklater has chosen to focus on, and the one he infuses with playfulness and warmth, is the complex bond between a flawed but loving mother and her devoted if perhaps too-responsible child.

Ultimately, if you are a big enough fan of the first Devil Wears Prada to have ever texted a friend (or in my case a daughter) that viral video of Bowen Yang flawlessly lip-synching the “cerulean” speech, this sparkly sequel provides a satisfying balance between nostalgic callbacks and intelligent updates to suit a more contemporary, if sadder, media landscape.

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

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

A funny, sprightly tribute to the American can-do spirit, with a bleak ending that suggests that our plucky protagonist may have just dug his own (or, in this case, his country's) grave.

Calvary gives Gleeson ample opportunity to explore his talent for anchoring a movie, making it deeper and richer than the script and direction might otherwise allow.

Though I found plenty in this film to admire, most notably a towering lead performance from Olivia Colman as the appetite-driven queen, I also confess to finding The Favourite, which runs only one minute over two hours, something of a long sit.

Young viewers seduced by the trashy flash of "The Mummy" and "The Mummy Returns" will be able to glimpse a vanished reality richer, stranger and bigger than all of the special effects in Hollywood.

Uplifting and troubling, partly because it is more honest than most sports movies about the high cost and short life span of high school football glory.

The mixture of old-fashioned themes with newfangled techniques makes The Greatest Game Ever Played a canny piece of feel-good entertainment.

As he (Allen) interweaves two versions of the Melinda story, one meant to be bathed in pathos, the other sprinkled with whimsy, it becomes apparent that his notions of comedy and tragedy do not quite correspond either to scholarly dogma or to everyday usage.

Insofar as Catching Fire does ignite, the match to the flame is Jennifer Lawrence, who gives Katniss layers she lacks even in the books’ fairly rich characterization.

The unlikely sweetness of the story carries the day. What is most astonishing is the confidence with which the filmmakers push their premise to its logical conclusion, turning an ending that could have been either laughable or appalling into something so effortlessly heartfelt as to be nearly sublime.

Given how efficiently World War Z has delivered jolts and screams over the course of its sleek 116-minute running time, it’s easy to forgive this rushed and slightly muted finale.

It's the movie's affectionate portrait of female friendship, along with Miller and Graynor's loose, playful performances, that make this whole imperfect soufflé rise as high as it does.

I was struck by how personal this movie is, and by the delicate symbiosis that develops between biographer and subject. Mr. Ponfilly's presence in the film (mostly on the soundtrack and once or twice on camera) does not overshadow Massoud so much as filter our understanding of him.

You walk out of this uneven but soulful movie with a smile on your face, maybe because that’s the default expression of Forrest Tucker, a man who practices grand theft with the stubborn passion of an aged master painter unwilling to put down his brush.

This slow, episodic film is held together by the galvanic presence of Javier Bardem.

Given the event's size and complexity, it is perhaps inevitable that this documentary feels haphazard and superficial, more tourist's photo album than analysis. Still, the glimpses it offers are never less than fascinating.

Though this is a sweet, clever, gorgeously animated movie I’d be glad to take my kid to on a Saturday afternoon, I’m not sure it’s one I’d insist all my grownup friends drop what they’re doing to see.

It might be tempting to regard Mr. Andrew and his collaborators as oddballs, but Mr. Earnhart's quizzical, charming movie allows us to see them, finally, as artists.

The movie is booby-trapped with so many loud gags that some of its sneakier humor is nearly lost in the din.

Represents the usual victory of simplistic screenwriting conventions over the rich, gamy ambiguities of the subject. But while its slide into perfunctory storytelling dilutes the raw, silly spectacle of sex and noise, the movie still has enough wit and insight to make it worth watching.

Even if you don’t harbor fond feelings for the 1986 Top Gun, a movie that upon its release was seen by many as a glamorized recruitment commercial for the Reagan-era military buildup, it’s hard not to appreciate the care that went into this lovingly tooled sequel—a far better film on the sheer level of craft than the original.

Though its conclusion is too tidily therapeutic, and though elements of its story strain credibility, Moonlight Mile has an understated, lived-in quality and a wry, unforced sense of the absurd.

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.

The icy reserve that sometimes stands in the way of Kidman's expressive gifts here becomes the foundation of her most emotionally layered performance to date.

Director Gary Ross' adaptation, co-scripted by Collins herself, isn't quite as crackingly paced as the novel, but it will more than satisfy existing fans of the trilogy and likely create many new ones.

It's an honest, unpretentious, well-made B picture with a clever, silly premise, a handful of sly, unassuming performances and enough car chases, decent jokes and swervy plot complications to make the price of the ticket seem like a decent bargain.

This new Blade Runner dazzles the audience with plenty of staggering sights but never quite matches the original’s mysterious ability to suggest something even more incredible lying just beyond our ken.

A refreshingly mean-spirited gothic real estate comedy.

Whether or not this one is really the last in the series, Final Reckoning is a noble exemplar of a dying breed: the big, dumb, fun action blockbuster with a bona fide movie star at its center, putting it all on the line—and hanging on for dear life—just to keep us at the edge of our theater seats.

A modest and thoughtful movie, and if it doesn't quite break new ground in addressing its difficult subject, it at least does not cheapen it.

Works hard to earn it and is, for the most part, intelligent and amusing, even if it never achieves the full-tilt zany desperation of Delbert Mann's "Lover Come Back," the best of the real Hudson-Day movies.

Inherent Vice’s spiraling, wordplay-happy script never quite resolves the difficulty of adapting this particularly confounding philosophical whodunit, but the film’s groovy sprawl is a fine place to hang out for 2½ hours, as long as, like Doc and his weed-toking cohort, you don’t mind spending a day in a pleasantly disoriented daze.

Like most haunted-house stories, Mama gets steadily less scary as its (for the most part, fairly predictable) secrets unfold. But even if the beats are familiar, Muschietti sustains a remarkable mood throughout: wintry, elemental and stark, like a late Sylvia Plath poem.

It could easily have become either prurient or moralistic, but Mr. Goldman's stance is that of a sympathetic observer, and his style combines ground-level realism with a touch of Almodóvarian extravagance.

Indeed, the movie sometimes has trouble living up to the richness of its subject, or keeping up with the dances' rapid spread and evolution.

If universities ever start graduate programs in rock stardom, Dig! will surely be a cornerstone of the curriculum, for it works as both an instruction manual and a cautionary tale.

But even though, most of the time, you know exactly what will happen next -- you don't much mind. Nor do the many plot holes and improbabilities -- undermine its silly, raucous spirit.

Mr. Lou lets it play on for too long. Suzhou River offers impeccable attitude and captivating atmosphere, but little emotional or intellectual impact.

Sexy and infectious in spite of itself.

The implication that beauty and meaning can be found in odd places at unlikely, idle moments resonates through this lovely film.

Naughty is an outdated word in an era of proud nastiness, but Heartbreakers has a slinky, teasing quality that recalls the dressed-up comedies of the studio era.

Mr. Toback uses his improbable, conventional story as the trelliswork for a series of wild and florid riffs about sex, ethics and the delirium of renegade moviemaking.

Interspersing shots from the original film - many of which are justly famous for their power and complexity - with interviews, Mr. Ferraz has produced a welcome piece of historical explication.

An above-average thriller.

The film’s scruffy, smartass band of brothers, along with Gunn’s light directorial touch, make for an invigorating breather after too many summer weekends of hammer-wielding superheroic solemnity.

If Giamatti's particular brand of sad-eyed misanthropy floats your boat, you'll enjoy Barney's Version, an overcrammed and galumphing movie that nonetheless provides a bracing jolt of pure, uncut Giamatti.

This is really a movie about the evil spell Jolie casts on us — it’s both a celebration and a demonstration of her formidable movie star might.

The faces of the stars glow with life, which makes you all the more grateful that this, their only film together, has come back.

Maybe part of the problem is that black comedy is a tough genre in which to create a masterpiece.

Lone Survivor’s lack of suspense never works against it. If anything, the fact that the outcome is, at least roughly, known in advance only adds to the film’s sickening tension, the atmosphere of preordained doom through which its characters seem to move.

Luckily this picture is rescued from cliché by the quality of the acting, and Mr. Kramer wisely gives the actors room to work.

Glossy, witty eye candy with some moderately chewy stuff in the middle. This lavish, exhaustingly kinetic film is smarter than you might expect, and at the same time dumber than it could be. It's an impressive product: a triumph of cloning that almost convinces you that it possesses a soul.

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

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

Challengers may not be this director’s most psychologically insightful movie—the characters can at times feel like chess-piece contrivances rather than fully rounded individuals—but it’s almost certainly his most entertaining and fastest-paced.

As played with a melancholy rakishness by the handsomer-than-ever Fiennes, M. Gustave is one of Anderson’s more memorable creations—but he’s stranded in a movie that, for all its gorgeous frills and furbelows... never seemed to me to be quite sure what it was about.

21 Jump Street isn't a wild, fresh reinvention of the movie-cliché-spoofing genre - this isn't "Airplane!" we're talking about - but it's also not a drearily overfamiliar retread of it.

The French Dispatch is a movie made with such deliberate, patient skill, and such brio, that its meandering structure and oddly low emotional temperature come off as intentional choices rather than errors of artistic judgment. Even if it’s not my favorite flavor of Wes Anderson licorice, nothing is there by accident.

This absorbing documentary, the first directed by Sydney Pollack, is a modest undertaking, offering glimpses of the architect and his work rather than a full-scale portrait or catalogue raisonné.

Bachelorette places a trio of women front and center who are so irredeemably loathsome, it's kind of refreshing. At least until a conventional third-act redemption undercuts some of the movie's sharpest insights and funniest jokes.

What is more remarkable is that he (Bacon)has found a way, without the slightest hint of vanity or ostentation, to convey the inner life of a man who is almost entirely shut down.

As unsettling as it can be, it is also intellectually exhilarating, and, like any good piece of pedagogy, whets the appetite for further study.

The evident affection that the filmmakers bear toward Smith's novel, and toward the odd, spirited people who inhabit it, gives the film a modest, hardworking appeal.

Ms. Omarova has a painter's eye for composition and a novelist's sense of character.

A trifle in both senses of the word: a feather-light, disposable thing, and a rich dessert appealingly layered with cake, jam, and cream.

An oblique, vaguely sorrowful study in domestic emotion, structured around the small eruptions of feeling -- tenderness, anger, and joy -- that punctuate the slow serenity of daily life.

There’s plenty to enjoy about Materialists, from the sparkling indie soundtrack (Cat Power! Harry Nilsson! John Prine!) to the flattering rose-hued glow of Shabier Kirchner’s cinematography, to Lucy’s enviable working-girl wardrobe.

Was The Adventures of Tintin a movie that I personally vibed with? Not really. It felt overstuffed and busy, its charm a little calculated, its outsized budget a tad too ostentatiously on display. But it's a rollicking yarn told with scads of invention and energy, not to mention a technical marvel of the first order.

Boyle's skill at wringing physical and emotional reactions from his audience is impressive; watching 127 Hours is, as intended, an experience of grueling intensity.

Mr. Singer and his collaborators grasp that comic books, for all their obligatory fights and explosions, are at bottom about their brave, troubled, impossibly muscled characters.

Going Upriver is a small, valuable contribution to the continuing project of sorting out and making sense of Vietnam, a war that, among other things, opened a fissure at the heart of American liberalism that has yet to heal.

Contrived as this may sound, Mr. Rose's updating works surprisingly well. -- the story's sympathetic, tragic sense of the fragility of individual dignity is, if anything, made even more haunting in this version.

At times this multiple-plot meander through the glorious labyrinth of the Eternal City can feel aimless, even lazy. But in the film's best moments, that willingness to wander works to its advantage.

As social criticism -- not only of Israel, but of other affluent countries as well -- James' Journey is both potent and a little didactic.

Gentle and easy to take.

While Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 will be properly debated on the basis of its factual claims and cinematic techniques, it should first of all be appreciated as a high-spirited and unruly exercise in democratic self-expression.

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.

Civil War often leaves the audience feeling trapped in an all-too-realistic waking nightmare, but when it finally lets us go, mercifully short of the two-hour mark, it sends us out of the theater talking.

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.

A breathless dash to nowhere in particular, doesn't feel bad.

Roadrunner is never less than fascinating to watch, but it is far from perfect.

One thing is for sure: The über-dream is both gorgeously animated, in Kon's shimmering, hyperreal style, and sickeningly scary.

Mr. Tarantino is an irrepressible showoff, recklessly flaunting his formal skills as a choreographer of high-concept violence, but he is also an unabashed cinephile, and the sincerity of his enthusiasm gives this messy, uneven spectacle an odd, feverish integrity.

A dumb, by-the-numbers romantic comedy. Yet I kept finding small things to enjoy in it, mainly because of the two hard-to-hate leads.

Somehow, for me, this earnest, pretty movie never came to life on screen; it remained a curio in a cabinet, to be admired through a pane of glass.

Succeeds in illuminating an almost unimaginably dark story.

Some of these revelations feel like clever reversals, others like calculated rug-pulls, but we never stop caring about what happens next.

Its most winning attribute is a kind of sloppy, unassuming friendliness, a likability aptly reflected in its characters.

At the end of Inception, I hadn't lived through the grueling emotional journey Nolan seemed to think I had, but I'd seen a bunch of cool images and admired some technically ambitious feats of filmmaking.

Miranda is played by Meryl Streep, an actress who carries nuance in her every pore, and who endows even her lighthearted comic roles with a rich implication of inner life. With her silver hair and pale skin, her whispery diction as perfect as her posture, Ms. Streep's Miranda inspires both terror and a measure of awe.

Rarely have I been so acutely aware of a movie's softness and sentimentality, and rarely have I minded less. Some of the credit surely goes to Mr. Hanks...His performance is so easy and amiable that its nuances emerge only in retrospect.

Though Logan Lucky’s funny and committed cast (also including Dwight Yoakam, an underused Katherine Waterston, and a barely there Hilary Swank) provides a steady supply of good-sized laughs, this film struck me as underachieving on several fronts.

Though it never channels the raw DIY energy of the original Evil Dead series — what big-budget version could? — this polished, clever remake remains true to the spirit of the original, which was at once viscerally terrifying and weirdly lighthearted.

Beauty Shop extends the popular "Barbershop" franchise to Atlanta and provides a sassy feminine counterpart to its cozy men's-club vibe.

At any rate, this movie’s insistent and unapologetic commitment to its own weirdness is evidence that the 79-year-old writer-director, like the ever-mutating human specimens he loves to imagine, is nowhere near done evolving.

The movie’s soulful self-seriousness, like that of its liquid-eyed hero, can occasionally slip into self-parody. But this movie confirms my "Blue Valentine"-based suspicion that the 38-year-old Cianfrance is one to watch. He’s capable of coaxing tremendous moments from actors, he knows how to move a camera, and as this over-laden but never boring movie shows, he’s willing to operate from a place of risk.

Once you can get past this movie’s reliance on the audience bringing in a prior store of knowledge about, and queasy affection for, its troubled characters, The Many Saints of Newark is a worthy companion to the series and a fascinating watch in itself.

That El Perro is so unassuming is part of what makes its humane, sympathetic story so satisfying.

The film chronicles an astonishing career...Mr. Van Peebles is that rarest of modern creatures: a free man.

By the time this movie's over, you've spent an hour and a half just working your way through the words of Howl and some related source material, and that turns out to be a surprisingly satisfying thing to do.

For me the biggest disappointment of The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent—a likeable if lightweight comedy that’s more than worth seeing for Cage’s and Pascal’s touching bromance and its Nick-confronts-Nicky fantasy sequences—was that it didn’t go even further with its central doppelgänger conceit.

This movie succeeds at the hardest task a movie musical needs to pull off: the musical numbers, with few exceptions, soar in the way an in-story song has to soar to convince us that, given this situation and these characters, “randomly bursting into song” is a perfectly sensible thing to do.

Will provide preschoolers with comfort and amusement, though not rapture or enchantment.

A searching and wide-ranging debate has unfolded about America's response to terrorism and, more broadly, about the history and future of its role in the world. Mr. Junkerman's film is best understood as a necessary, if partisan, text in that continuing argument.

The movie's warmth, and Mr. Gilliam's sober, likable performance sustain it through its ragged stretches and amateurish lapses.

Mr. Im's own aesthetic command is evident in the movie's wealth of beautiful, perfectly framed images of nature -- shots so full of passion and perception that they could almost be paintings themselves.

In the early days of Einar's transformation, Redmayne conveys the degree to which gender is, for all of us, a skill acquired through observation and imitation.

It’s a good movie for a late-summer legacy sequel, not a candidate for the all-time comedy pantheon. But every new generation of mothers and daughters, as they struggle to balance their love for each other with their quest to discover themselves, deserves a body-swap comedy of their—our—own.

Shows so much intelligence and compassion that its tendency sometimes to overreach or underdramatize can surely be forgiven.

Because I've long been captivated by Cronenberg's keen intelligence and highly personal cinematic vision, I took a strange pleasure in submitting to this movie's stilted but weirdly poetic rhythms. But I freely acknowledge that for others, enduring Cosmopolis may be less fun than a backseat prostate exam.

Leans a bit too much toward the lachrymose and has a wrong-note final image.

The fact that an indie director like Gerwig chose, for her third film, to make a lavish blockbuster tied to a major studio’s IP has unsurprisingly caused some to dismiss her as a sellout. But watching her flex her filmmaking skills on this grand a scale, and succeed at creating sparklingly original summer entertainment, has me excited to see whatever Gerwig does next, big or small.

If you sometimes go to the movies to feel unsettled, perplexed, and amused—not to mention get a peek at an often-shirtless and always-brooding Adam Driver—Annette might be the weird one you’ve been waiting for.

Indefensible, cynical, even grotesque; it is also pure -- that is to say innocent and uncorrupted -- fun.

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

The real reason to see it — as was the case with the original, and with the past two Feig/McCarthy collaborations, "Bridesmaids" and "Spy" —has to do with the universally excellent cast who establish an easy tone of camaraderie and loopy banter.

Delicate, quietly devastating.

What makes Clerks II both winning and (somewhat unexpectedly) moving is its fidelity to the original "Clerks" ethic of hanging out, talking trash and refusing all worldly ambition.

The director serves up a nice helping of blarney, but he seems to have left his schmaltz in Baltimore.

Thanks to Renner's smart, charismatic performance and a couple of elegant action sequences early on, The Bourne Legacy mostly holds its own as a late-summer thrill ride - but only if you're able to wipe your mind clean of the knowledge that it could have been something more.

A teasing, oblique curiosity of a movie.

Mr. Longley makes powerful use of the techniques of cinéma vérité. The absence of voice-over narration and talking-head interviews gives his portrait of daily life under duress a riveting immediacy.

Missteps and all, this movie’s heart remains in the right place. Its stars, who first met in the process of auditioning for Excellent Adventure, have been close friends ever since, and their shared sense of humor and love for the characters shines through even in the weaker moments.

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.

You could do worse than this fast-paced, cheerfully ridiculous, generally satisfying romp.

After Jimmy Neutron was over, I felt glassy-eyed and a little headachy. But the boy genius who accompanied me to the screening could not take his eyes off the screen. I think he's in his room right now, building a shrink ray to try out on his dad.

Black Widow is too long, too loud, preposterously overplotted, and slightly headache-inducing—all arguably features and not bugs when it comes to big tentpole blockbusters. But walking out of it I felt like summer had finally—finally!—begun

Cooper’s sophomore film far outshines the common run of contemporary biopics in its artful construction and attention to emotional nuance.

For all its punches, kicks, whacks and thumps, the movie does not have much impact, and for all its affectionate nostalgia, it produces a strange kind of amnesia. It knocks the sense right out of your head, and its own as well.

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?

I just hope Neil Patrick Harris meant what he said when he took his leave of the boys in his Radio City dressing room: "See you in the fourth one."

That over-the-top style, with its pulsating colors and generous sloshings of bright-red fake blood, is well-suited to this movie’s story, which folds crime, sex work, mental illness, and elements of the supernatural into a psychological thriller that, at its best, can be mind-bendingly intense.

Though the action is often wittily imagined and choreographed, no one could confuse Mangold’s workmanlike direction with Spielberg’s kinetic instinct for how to place and move a camera. Still, Dial of Destiny clips along nicely: Even at 2 hours and 22 minutes, the pace seldom drags.

The movie, for all its prettiness, manages to be shallow and portentous at the same time.

The Skin I Live In is a meditation on profound themes: memory, grief, violence, degradation, and survival - so why does it leave the viewer (at least this one) so curiously unmoved? Watching the parts of this multigenerational melodrama slowly fuse into a coherent (if wackily improbable) whole offers aesthetic and intellectual gratification, but little in the way of emotional punch.

Honey brings out the wholesome, affirmative side of the hip-hop aesthetic without being overly preachy, and it offers a winningly utopian view of show-business success without real costs or compromises.

Blue Moon feels like the more major entry in the director’s filmography, if only because it marks a new epoch in his ever-evolving partnership with Hawke.

This is a lovingly assembled tribute to the career of a working band that's still very much, to quote the title of its most iconic hit, "Alive."

Nouvelle Vague is an affectionate portrait of the artist as a young nutjob with absolute faith in his vision, and an invitation for creators of all kinds to believe in their own similarly implausible dreams.

Both sweet and stringent, attuned to the wonders of childhood as well as its cruelty and terror.

This might be a fun summer blockbuster if only it even remotely needed to exist.

Yes, this is the kind of movie you could imagine seeing with your grandmother at a suburban mall, but does everything have to be edgy and dark and genre-reinventing?

I've seen better movies recently, but it's been a long time since I've left one feeling the easy, full-bellied happiness this one evoked.

Coming out of Pacific Rim I felt energized rather than enervated, excited to describe certain nifty details of the film’s wacked-out imaginary world to friends, maybe even ready to … sit through certain parts again?

The humor in Me, Myself and Irene is often outrageous but rarely cruel.

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood is no biopic but a very narrowly cast reimagining of one specific relationship late in the life of a noted person.

Though well dressed and well made, ultimately falls prey to the contradiction that afflicts so many movies about writers. What makes them so fascinating, so representative, cannot really be shown on screen.

Like Gekko, the film also feels urgent and strangely necessary.

You can feel frightened and disturbed by this movie without being especially moved by it.

Ms. Giocante's intoxicating mixture of gamine innocence and womanly knowingness is almost too much for the movie - Lila is surely too much for Chimo - but her charisma, and Mr. Doueiri's insouciant, heart-on-the-sleeve style give it a mood that is at once breathlessly romantic and cannily down to earth.

Burton understands what the Beetlejuice-loving audience wants (Keaton stirring up supernatural chaos, Winona Ryder glowering in goth-girl chic, jump scares with eyeballs popping out of heads) and provides it in cheerful abundance, without subjecting us to lengthy origin stories or cumbersome expositions of franchise lore.

It's hard to resist being swept up in Blue Crush, not least because David Hennings's shimmery photography carries the breeze and spray of the island right into the theater. The movie is also the latest example of a subgenre that might be called feminexploitation.

It's a movie you're glad to inhabit for a full two hours, because it never stops surprising you - it's lopsided and spotty, but it's alive in a way that suddenly makes you remember to what degree most Hollywood movies aren't.

This middle section, in which both Carter and the audience get a crash course in the politics, history, and theology of the Red Planet, is the movie at its most imaginative and most fun.

Gets to you like a low-grade fever, a malaise with no known antidote. When it was over, I wasn't sure if I needed a drink, a shower or a lifelong vow of chastity.

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

The "American Pie" movies succeed where many other comedies aimed at the youth market falter: they manage to be both lewd and sweet, exploiting the natural prurience of young people while implicitly comforting their raging anxieties.

He plies his viewers with plenty of bread -- chewy and, to some tastes, dry and starchy scenes -- but he also scatters petals of whimsy and delight to nourish the senses.

Mr. de Broca's film is full of durable cinematic pleasures: a little sex, a lot of sword fighting and a plot that combines heady passion with complicated political intrigue.

If, on the other hand, you're not above acknowledging the trans-historical creepiness of a good dusty windup-doll shelf (Come on! It includes one of those hyper-realistic monkeys playing the cymbals!), this pokey, modestly budgeted thriller isn't without its shivery delights.

Nearly every scene builds to some kind of climactic jump scare.

Only a sourpuss could fail to be amused by this movie's sight gags and action sequences or to be charmed by its lighthearted good humor.

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.

For the two hours it lasted I wasn't asking any questions, only giggling, squirming, screaming, and swooning.

Matrix Resurrections is a movie interested in collapsing binaries: the ones between man and machine, between digital and “real” life, between past and present, and of course, between genders.

If 25th Hour does not quite work as a plausible and coherent story, it produces a wrenching, dazzling succession of moods.

Tiny Furniture feels surprisingly assured, even elegant. There are those who will accuse Tiny Furniture of wildly inconsistent tonal shifts, and it is guilty of some, but I appreciated the way this movie kept upending my expectations.

It is, as I suspected, a gargantuan hunk of over-art-directed kitsch, but it makes for a grandiose, colorful, pleasure-drenched night at the movies.

I wanted to fall under this movie’s spell as if watching one of those early 20th-century immigrant melodramas — instead, it felt like visiting a meticulously appointed but too-tidy historical museum.

Depp's performance as Bulger is as strong, and as energized, as anything he's done on screen for years.

Mr. Pettigrew's affection for Fellini and his films animates this documentary and limits its appeal.

Presents an appealing and persuasive picture of European integration, in which national differences, which once sparked military and political conflict, are preserved because they make life sexier and more interesting.

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

Devotees of the series, admirers of Ms. Sedaris and fake-news junkies who can never get enough of Mr. Colbert will find reasons to see it and to convince themselves that it is funnier and more satisfying than it really is. Count me in.

"Croupier," the director's comeback film of 2000, which also starred Mr. Owen, is a riskier, more interesting exercise in English noir than I'll Sleep When I'm Dead, but the new film, whose title comes from a Warren Zevon song, nonetheless serves as a fine stylistic showpiece.

A vigorous and engrossing genre exercise that manages the difficult trick of being both logically meticulous and genuinely surprising. Its elaborately implausible story gestures now and then toward an idea, but the movie's main concern is technique.

It is Ms. Dunst who carries the movie and unifies its disparate elements. She's a terrific comic actress.

More history lesson than dirt-digging expedition, and makes illuminating viewing for anyone curious about how the movies get made - information that is sometimes more interesting than the movies themselves.

The joys of The Boy in the Plastic Bubble aren’t all camp. The script, by Douglas Day Stewart, is surprisingly funny and sharp, especially the prickly banter between Todd and Gina (Glynis O’Connor), the girl next door who teases him at first, then gradually falls for him.

It’s such an original and idiosyncratic expression of its creator’s vision that sometimes the movie seems not to have yet made it all the way out of his head and onto the screen.

While it’s a character portrait of a morally small man, Listen Up Philip doesn’t feel like a morally small movie.

First Man doesn’t display a lot of interest in Neil’s social world. Chazelle, like his hero, sometimes seems to be just biding time until he can get back into one of those claustrophobic space modules and feel gravity slipping away.

As in "Humpday," this movie's dialogue moves with a freshness and spontaneity that sounds improvised, even as the precisely marked story beats reveal the writer/director's hand at work.

The director has produced a colorful, affecting collage of Dickensian moods and motifs, a movie that elicits an overwhelming desire to plunge into 900 pages of 19th-century prose.

Sumpter nails the first lady’s air of warm but reserved composure and the slow, careful way she enunciates her words, as if putting an extra measure of thought into choosing each phrase.

Frank, sympathetic approach to the awkward age.

Moment by moment, the film is a font of pleasures, yet there's something about it that keeps the audience at an aesthetic remove. Like Coraline in the doppelgänger world, we swoon over all the neat stuff without ever making ourselves at home.

Though Last Resort dwells on sorrowful circumstances and illuminates a grim corner of contemporary reality, it is far from depressing.

An interesting, elusive hodgepodge of comedy, melodrama and implicit allegory, lighted by occasional sparks of formal bravado.

It is fascinating without being especially illuminating, and it holds your attention for its very long running time without delivering much dramatic or emotional satisfaction in the end.

The director's seriousness and intelligence are evident, but so is her satisfaction in displaying them, and the movie has a self-indulgent, undisciplined tone that nearly obscures its provocative ideas.

It's a clever idea bogged down in sophomoric sloppiness. Sitting through it doesn't feel like eternal damnation, but it's not exactly heaven, either. It's a $9.50 tour of adolescent purgatory.

It does have its tart, fizzy moments.

Glory Road is satisfying less for its virtuosity than for its sincerity, and also because it will acquaint audiences with a remarkable episode that had ramifications far beyond the basketball court.

It is not so much a documentary as a fictional film about the making of a documentary, or perhaps a documentary about the making of a fictional film about the making of a documentary. If this sounds a bit maddening, it is, though the confusion that The Blonds induces is clearly part of its intention.

Wanderlust is about two or three script passes away from being a consistently funny, dramatically coherent romantic comedy.

Captain Marvel sometimes resembles the kind of low-budget sci-fi that might have played on kids’ TV on a Saturday afternoon in the era when this movie is set.

A most curious movie, one with nearly all the elements of a classic crime-family saga and yet somehow lacking the moral complexity and emotional heft of the films to which it pays fastidious aesthetic homage: the New York–set urban thrillers of Sidney Lumet (Serpico, Prince of the City) and Coppola’s Godfather series.