Dana Stevens

There are some scenes that display impressive technical cunning, and others that show an astute regard for the emotional capacities of his able cast, but On the Run amounts to a sullen display of skill in a dubious cause.

It’s well worth seeing, both for its merciless anatomization of the country’s post-Ceausescu social order and for Gheorghiu’s stupendous central performance as a mother so monstrous she makes Medea look like a pushover.

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?

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

Like the space mission named in its title, Project Hail Mary pulls off a seemingly impossible task, combining big-budget Hollywood spectacle with small-scale craft. The story it tells, of two lonely but intrepid problem-solvers bridging the huge cultural distance between them to collaborate on addressing a shared cosmic threat, is unabashedly humanistic and hopeful, not to mention timely.

Wherever these two love-crazed lesbians’ poorly-thought-out plans take them, we’re along for the dizzying ride.

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.

From an aesthetic and technical perspective, her achievement is laudable, but there’s something underfurnished about this movie, a lack of historical, intellectual, and thematic richness. For all its elaborate design and carefully calibrated mood, it comes down to the tale of a randy fox in an impeccably preserved Greek Revival henhouse.

Alan, who Mr. Sachs has said was based on his own father, is a great character - passionate, complicated, bursting with life. Those words also describe Mr. Torn's performance.

A refreshing movie that's so good natured, so confident of its ability to provoke not queasy awe or numb exhaustion but pure delight.

The real protagonist is the family itself -- a fragile, complex organism undermined by internal conflict and menaced by the cruelty and indifference of the society around them.

May be the most necessary film you'll see this year. But if you go to the movies in search of emotion rather than edification, don't let that word necessary deter you, because this is also one of the most engaging films you'll see this year, full of vibrant, complex real-life characters whose troubles and joys will stay with you long after the movie's done.

The Holy Girl may occasionally frustrate your desire for clarity and order, but in the end it will reward your patience, and you leave the theater in a state of quiet awe.

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.

This is the kind of movie that often racks up more than a few walkouts but also makes for passionate postscreening conversations.

There may be deeper, more intangible fears buried beneath this rowdy, raucous thriller’s grody surface—luckily, you won’t have time to stop and ponder them while you’re being chased by a supersized zombie wielding a severed head.

The relentless upbeatness of Life or Something Like It wrecks the possibility of either real laughter or genuine pathos.

A day and half after walking out with a sensation, primarily, of physical relief—at two hours and nine minutes, Pain & Gain makes for a long, loud, relentlessly assaultive sit—I find that my thumb is wavering at half-mast. I’m still not sure whether to mildly like or mildly hate this movie.

What limits The Guys -- what makes it an exercise in art therapy rather than a work of art -- is its decorous refusal to probe deeply into its characters, or to exploit any of the dramatic potential their accidental relationship might contain.

It's amazing to see a film so brazenly experimental, so committed to reflecting on the circumstances and techniques of its making, that is at the same time so intent upon delivering old-fashioned cinematic pleasures like humor and pathos, character and plot.

The case could be made that The Disaster Artist is a little too sunny for a movie about a clearly damaged man whose lifelong drive to create something beautiful only led to his becoming a symbol of grand-scale failure. But in addition to making me laugh, hard, at a time when cathartic laughter is all but a medical necessity, this portrait of the artist as a not-so-young weirdo struck me as peculiarly moving.

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.

For all its tasteful spareness and eerie, diaphanous mood, Blue Caprice feels, in the end, insubstantial. It’s a true-crime story that illustrates little about the crime in question and a character study whose characters, even when haunting, remain stubbornly opaque.

Like Someone in Love is a movie that never quite lets you through to the other side of the glass, but it’s dazzling to watch whatever drifts by on the surface.

From start to finish, is pretty much a blast.

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.

In its own modest, genial terms, the picture succeeds: it never wants to be more than charming and sweet, and it invites us to imagine London as a cozy, happy small town where coincidental encounters are everyday occurrences.

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.