Dana Stevens

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.

The story, touching though it is, does not quite have enough emotional resonance or variety of incident to sustain a feature, and even at 85 minutes it feels a bit long. The premise, too, is a little thin.

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.

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

The particular kind of “fun” to be found in a slick and shallow spy fantasy like Atomic Blonde feels peculiarly arid in a moment as desperate for substance and meaning as our own.

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.

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.

We're all familiar with the experience of seeing movies that cram ideas and themes down our throats. Les Misérables may represent the first movie to do so while also cramming us down the throats of its actors.

An unadorned, unsparing chronicle of a young man's descent into a nightmare of delusion, paranoia and self-destructive behavior.

The problem lies in the calculating pretentiousness of using human misery to make shallow entertainment seem serious. It's worth comparing Spy Game with "The Tailor of Panama," John Boorman's far superior exercise in post-cold-war spycraft.

More amusing than annoying. It is not as maniacally uninhibited as "Old School" or as dementedly lovable as "Elf," but its cheerful dumbness is hard to resist.

By the end, instead of feeling stirred to a high pitch of anxiety and excitement, you may feel battered and worn down. But not, in the end, too terribly disappointed.

The skills on display in Freestyle are too varied and idiosyncratic for one movie to contain, but this one at least offers a heady, rousing education in an art form that is too often misunderstood.

Any irregularity in tone becomes a part of the movie’s intentionally rough, imperfect surface — a formal strategy I might find interesting if I could make head or tail of what the movie that’s using it is trying to say.

A modest, restrained picture, as small and satisfying as one of Woody Allen's better recent efforts.

A wise, gentle and sad new comedy by Zhang Yimou.

The sharks are scary, and the ocean is vast and indifferent, but the most effective parts of Open Water, which is ultimately too modest to be very memorable, evoke a deeper terror, one that can chill even those viewers who would never dream of putting on a wet suit and jumping off a boat.

Like a documentary version of "Fight Club," shorn of social insight, intellectual pretension and cinematic interest. It also offers a supremely literal-minded version of slapstick.

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.

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.

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.

A seriously flawed movie wrapped around two nearly perfect performances.

The Dreamers, which is disarmingly sweet and completely enchanting, fuses sexual discovery with political tumult by means of a heady, heedless romanticism that nearly obscures the film's patient, skeptical intelligence.

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.

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.

Reflects the sensibility of the generation it holds up to critical scrutiny, and it's a cunningly ambiguous act of self-portraiture.

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

Unfortunately, that sharp-eyed domestic comedy is dwarfed by the far less well-written supervillain crime plot that surrounds it.

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.

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.

The pleasure of watching McConaughey strut, preen, and menace his way through this Southern-fried black comedy (at least I think it's a comedy) isn't quite enough to save Killer Joe. The whole movie has something tonally off about it, not to mention a theatricality that works against it in a way Bug's didn't.

That they're English and elderly apparently makes their antics screamingly funny to people who would turn up their noses at similar humor in a film like "Scary Movie."

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.

The picture is saved from mediocrity by Mr. Raimi's smooth competence, and by the unusually high quality of the acting.

None of it is quite believable -- the film is too studied, too forward in its conceits to be entirely satisfying -- but Mr. Eckhart and Ms. Bonham Carter approach their roles with intelligence and conviction.

Land of Plenty, is like a clumsy, well-meaning intervention in a family quarrel. Mr. Wenders may not have the power to heal the rifts his movie acknowledges - and his account of them may not always be persuasive - but there is nonetheless something touching about his heartfelt concern.

Instead of prying into his soul, the filmmakers investigate his working conditions and offer a sort of backstage ethnographic study of the professional stand-up culture.

Every shot seems measured for maximum effect, and when the pace suddenly quickens in a late action sequence on a deserted subway train, it results in a moment of pure Hitchcockian panic that reverberates like thunder in the fretful, melancholy air.

Since her character wears no historical costumes and suffers from no debilitating ailment, it is likely that Ms. Curtis will be overlooked when Oscar season rolls around. This is a shame, since it is unlikely that any other actress this year will match the loose, energetic wit she brings to this delightful movie.

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.

It has a bright young cast and a clever, eclectic soundtrack, but the tone veers unsteadily from mockery to preachiness, and the story loses its breath, hopping from one clumsily paced scene to the next.

Hathaway transcends her usual complacency in this role and resists the temptation of using Kym's (and her own) wounded-bird appeal to let the character off the hook.

Told in the usual sequence, the story of Gilles and Marion would be a banal bell curve of infatuation, bliss, boredom, regret and recrimination. As it is, 5x2 does not quite make the case that Gilles and Marion are entirely worth our interest, let alone our sympathy, but the reversal of narrative order gives their ordinary moments together a faint aura of mystery, as Mr. Ozon teases us with the conceit that it will all make sense in the end - or rather, the beginning.

Where "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" frolicked on the beach, this amiable but underachieving comedy just sort of blobs on the couch.

I Want You Back is a sometimes underwhelming vehicle for Day and Slate’s considerable comic talents, but it’s a pleasure to spend two hours in their company.

The Help is a high-functioning tearjerker, but the catharsis it offers feels glib and insufficient, a Barbie Band-Aid on the still-raw wound of race relations in America.

Until its unbearably hokey ending, acquits itself reasonably well.

Lan Yu is like a less dizzily gorgeous companion to Mr. Wong's "In the Mood for Love" -- very much a Hong Kong movie despite its mainland setting.

The actor's (Murray) quiet, downcast presence modulates the antic busyness that encircles him, and his performance is a triumph of comic minimalism.

Conventionally described as a political thriller, but The Interpreter is as apolitical as it is unthrilling.

An entertainment choice I wouldn’t recommend, but one you might not regret if you dial your expectations down (or your drug intake up).

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.

If you're willing to let go of your Hollywood-bred expectations for a movie of this type-spectacular action set pieces, constant pulse-pounding music, a killing every 15 minutes-The American is a great pleasure to watch, an astringent antidote to the loud, frantic action movies that have been clogging our veins all summer.

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

It is an enormous improvement over the brainless, patronizing teenage romances that have slouched into (and quickly out of) theaters in recent years. But it could, if the filmmakers had trusted themselves and the actors a bit more, have lived up to its title.

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.

A slow-burning suspense thriller about a trio of eco-terrorists conspiring to blow up a dam, it’s directed by Reichardt with the concision and elegance of a chess master.

What ultimately brings down The Boxtrolls isn’t the film’s willingness to wade into grimmer, more gruesome waters than your average kids’ animated adventure. It’s the failure to anchor its often misanthropic story in a character or relationship strong enough to offer a glimpse of redemption—a place of respite in an ugly, cheese-obsessed world.

The Wackness may not have much that's new to say about being 17--it's a fairly standard coming-of-age drama with a couple of noteworthy performances--but it's a definitive compendium of trivia about 1994 (by Levine's lights, the best year ever).

Block intended this movie as a loving portrait of his relationship with his daughter. Instead, it's a reflection, and not always a kind one, of the man behind the camera.

The film's resolute indifference to fashion makes it, perhaps paradoxically, a refreshing piece of old-style entertainment, accompanied by a whooshing, trembling score by Edward Shearmur.

Epic in size but claustrophobically narrow in scope, The Wolf of Wall Street maintains a near-exclusive focus on the greed and self-indulgence of its proudly rapacious hero.

Babylon is a defecating elephant of a movie: gigantic, often repulsive, but hard to look away from.

Both entertaining and empty: an emotional shell game that leaves you feeling cheated even though, on the surface at least, everyone is a winner.

This thin, floppy comedy never quite became the high-spirited summer sex romp it clearly set out to be. I haven’t quite figured out yet why The To Do List doesn’t work, when so many elements within it seem to.

With Quitting, he (Zhang) has removed sentimentality from the theme and presented it with unflinching honesty, a quality he shares with his fearless cast.

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.

I spent much of Vice trying to work out why the same narrative strategies that worked so well in the raucously entertaining "The Big Short" suddenly felt smug and even propagandistic.

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."

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

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.

At once somber and mysterious, comical and sad. It shows just how lonely a crowded city can be.

Secretariat is a by-the-numbers sports-hero picture with an inexpressive hero (horses look great in motion, but they can't carry a close-up) and a preordained outcome.

There’s something sour and strained about this movie that’s at odds with the usual Muppet ethos of game, let’s-put-on-a-show cheer. Maybe that’s because of the inordinate amount of screen time spent on the rivalry between two villains who are as uninteresting as they are unpleasant.

In general, and in spite of its deft use of archival video clips and interviews, Giuliani Time offers a superficial reading of recent New York history, zeroing in on the headlines while often missing the context.

Like Lou Ye's "Suzhou River," a Hitchcock homage similarly set in Shanghai's demimonde, So Close to Paradise offers an intriguing and sometimes self-canceling mixture of emotion and style.

It doles out information so arbitrarily that you are robbed of the twin pleasures of figuring out clues and figuring out you've been fooled.

Wargnier's sumptuous, moving new film, captures both the hope of the returning Russians and their brutal betrayal.

Works best when it sticks with the gentle humor and pathos of its literary source.

Stiff, talky, and airless, a textbook example of that not-always-true cliché about the unfilmability of theater.

The movie turns out to be a predictable and somewhat sentimental lower-depths love triangle, but Ms. Braga almost makes it work.

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.

Blomkamp proceeds to spend the last two-thirds of his film crashing spaceships into lawns, or staging high-tech fistfights between Elysium’s stolid hero and his even duller arch-nemesis. It’s a waste of a perfectly good dystopia.

If I had a child near Dre's age, I'd drag him or her out of "Marmaduke" and into The Karate Kid--but not before requiring an at-home screening of the still unsurpassed original.

Some of the scenes are like mislaid puzzle pieces, and they snap into place only when all three movies have been seen and absorbed. This makes watching any one of the episodes both more interesting and more frustrating than it might otherwise be, since a portion of dramatic satisfaction is always withheld.

Cianfrance’s gift for allowing his actors to create relationships — with one another, with the camera, and with the stark landscape that surrounds them — makes The Light Between Oceans an unusually captivating romantic drama, at least until that last-act slide into self-sabotaging bathos.

The story, to the extent that it is comprehensible, is pretentious and banal, closer to "Vanilla Sky" than "Notorious." But Mr. De Palma proves that, in the absence of insight or ideas, some amazing things are possible. It is possible, for instance, to be entranced by a movie without believing it for a second.

The inhospitability of the land emphasizes the spare precision of the narratives and helps to give them an atavistic power, as if they were tales that had been handed down since the beginning of time.

It's a bit like "The Sixth Sense," but without the melodramatic comfort of the supernatural.

Unquestionably minor, perhaps deliberately so, but it is nonetheless intermittently delightful.

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.

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.

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.

It’s a crowd-pleaser, funny and sexy and raucous, while also being startlingly wise and tender.

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.

Any movie that makes you root against the underdog, though, is cause for suspicion, and Mr. Smith and Mr. Montana, perhaps aware of this, try belatedly to restore Mr. Duffy's status as a victim.

With its likable blue-collar characters and its unpretentious exuberance, Everybody's Famous is reminiscent of recent British comedies like "Brassed Off" and "The Full Monty."

Mr. Boe keeps a safe distance from his characters' inner lives, he does succeed in conjuring an atmosphere of elegant melancholy and metaphysical anxiety.

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.

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.

Polished and bouncy without being overly mawkish or unduly obnoxious. Above all, it is short.

What emerges from the chaos may be uneven and at times ridiculous, but it's never boring.

There’s a rueful irony to the fact that it’s this supposedly human inspiration for the beloved toy who feels more like a plastic action figure.

Fraser’s all-in commitment to playing Charlie—300-pound fatsuit and all—put me in mind of Joaquin Phoenix’s performance in Joker, an act of faith so complete it managed to be the only transcendent element of a thuddingly bad movie. But Fraser’s beautifully judged performance isn’t enough to save this abject wallow through a mire of maudlin clichés about trauma and redemption.

Though it's about a pair of lovers whose passion is strong enough to break down the barriers between life and death, this mildly amusing, sort-of-sweet comedy is strangely sexless and passion-free-these bodies, whether human or zombie, feel room-temperature at best.

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

Tomorrowland is a highly original, occasionally even visionary piece of sci-fi filmmaking, but that doesn't necessarily make it a good movie.

For the most part, Three Thousand Years of Longing reads not as an unintended allegory of contemporary race relations but as a thoughtful, melancholy, and sometimes mordantly funny celebration of the time-and-space-collapsing power of storytelling.

Red simultaneously tries too hard and not hard enough.

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'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 rough-edged parody feels both distinctive and handmade, and for those reasons alone it’s a hard movie to hate, even when it temporarily loses its comic footing. Anyway, as romantic comedies down the ages have taught us, hatred is just a latent form of love.

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.

The delicate magic of, for instance, Hayao Miyazaki's "Spirited Away," which Disney released earlier this fall, is absent from this brainless, mechanical picture.

In a late scene in House of Gucci, one character labels another “a triumph of mediocrity.” That paradox and others like it might be applied to the movie itself: It is a glamorous slog, a fabulous bore, a pointlessly bespoke bit of silliness.

It is filmed, perhaps fittingly for the subject matter, like a TV show. But on the heels of a Sorkin movie, The Trial of the Chicago 7, whose women were essentially hippie-styled set dressing, it’s a pleasure to see him putting some of his signature quips in the mouths of female characters, especially one as spiky, complicated, and powerful as Lucille Ball.

The dad minds behind Bad Moms don’t seem to understand, or be terribly curious about, the minds of mothers.

Mamma Mia! is in essence celebrity karaoke night.

The revelation of Hateship Loveship is the casting of Kristen Wiig, who effortlessly makes the shift from comedian to straight dramatic actress in a role full of potential ego traps that she never falls into.

The film's warm, sweet sentiments are genial and unchallenging, and its jokes are low-key and gentle.

In parceling his story into discrete scenes, Mr. Cunningham has turned a delicate novel into a bland and clumsy film. A Home at the End of the World, is so thoroughly decent in its intentions and so tactful in its methods that people are likely to persuade themselves that it's better than it is, which is not very good.

The combined efforts of this fine ensemble cast make Tower Heist go down easier than it otherwise might, but the film's potential as a buddy comedy is sadly wasted.

It is a beautifully made film - decorously composed, meticulously acted, cleanly photographed. But all of these qualities make it seem complacent and hypocritical when it wants to be honest and brave, and sentimental rather than emotionally daring.

Perhaps it's all a bit too much, and perhaps it doesn't add up, but the loose ends give the picture a jaunty, improvised feeling that, while it leads to some confusion, is ultimately part of its whimsical charm.

An easygoing exercise, impossible to dislike but not especially memorable, engaging but finally derivative:

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.

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

Mr. Mantegna, who as an actor is one of the leading interpreters of Mr. Mamet's work, gives generous room to the movie's first-rate ensemble.

A teasing, oblique curiosity of a movie.

The latest movie from Spain to use the conventions of the thriller to explore knotty and fascinating philosophical questions.

Mr. Shyamalan never gives us anything to believe in, other than his own power to solve problems of his own posing, and his command of a narrative logic is as circular -- and as empty -- as those bare patches out in the cornfield.

Still, the movie’s mores can feel cluelessly retro as the ever-dithering Bridget lurches between one man and another.

The character as written is incoherent, but Ms. Witherspoon has the reflexes to make Elle both appealing and ridiculous. It's funny -- in that slightly queasy, un-P.C. Doris Day kind of way.

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.

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.

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."

If Confidence was made by people who have seen too many movies, it seems to be aimed at people who have seen too few. It offers up stale lessons in vocabulary and technique, all of them easily gleaned on a trip to the video store, as if they were choice bits of inside knowledge.

As for The Drama, it runs out of big ideas—and, seemingly, compassion for its characters—before the audience has had a chance to develop our own rooting interest in, well, the drama.

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

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.

Unfortunately, these actors are subject to Mr. LaBute's usual dramatic method, which is to cobble together a preposterous moral outrage and then wave it in front of our faces, asking us to believe that it is a window, or even a mirror.

Lacks both the intellectual rigor and the soulful sublimity of "A.I.," but it nonetheless allows some genuine ideas and emotions to pop up amid the noise and clutter.

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

Joker is a bad movie, yes: It’s predictable, clichéd, deeply derivative of other, better movies, and overwritten to the point of self-parody. (If a feature-length sendup of Joker was made, it’s hard to imagine in what details it would differ from Joker itself.) The experience of sitting through it is highly unpleasant, but that unpleasantness has less to do with graphic violence — there are only one or two scenes that go hard, gore-wise — than with claustrophobia and boredom.

Follows a formula, but the formula, when applied with skill and intelligence, as it is here, is pretty much foolproof.

At its worst, This Is 40 feels like being condemned to watch two hours of someone else's home movies - overly long, self-indulgent, and bone-crushingly banal.

Aiming for lighthearted, bittersweet charm, But Forever in My Mind slips into predictability and condescension.

In the end, though, The Ant Bully is adequate rather than enchanting. Unsure of its ability to charm, it compensates with noise, sentiment and low humor, the usual synthetic stew served to children,

For a series so steeped in supernatural mumbo-jumbo, Pirates of the Caribbean displays remarkably little sense of wonder.

Triumph of Love, Marivaux's 270-year-old romantic comedy, is a beguiling trifle, a gauzy, teasing inquiry into the fungibility of emotions.

A movie like this can survive an absurd premise but not incompetent execution. And Mr. LaBute, never much of an artist with the camera, proves almost comically inept as a horror-movie technician...It's neither haunting nor amusing; just boring.

I didn’t like the movie at all — found it boring, unintentionally comical, at times even (a word I seldom use) pretentious — but I admire the rest of your work so much that I nonetheless feel the need to defend To the Wonder.

An average romantic comedy put together with enough professionalism to keep your cynicism momentarily at bay, featuring good-looking actors who also, in this case, seem like pretty nice people.

August: Osage County is a mess, an overcooked movie-star stew that never quite coheres into a movie.

Mr. Swofford's book has earned a place alongside the classics of military literature, but Mr. Mendes's film is more like a footnote - a minor movie about a minor war, and a film that feels, at the moment, remarkably irrelevant.

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.

The movie is so small and emotionally constricted that it gives Hoffman too little room to explore his range.

This forced march through a chamber of personal and sociological horrors is difficult to endure but easy to forget.

The conventional meet-cute love story at the center of The Dictator feels like a bizarre concession to some nonexistent demographic that prefers its sick black comedy with a side of humanist sentiment.

Quantum of Solace, the first bona fide sequel in the Bond series, has the poky pace and expository padding of the middle chapter of a trilogy.

(Director Bigelow) piles up one nerve-racking crisis after another, interspersed with moments of ethereal, almost otherworldly beauty.

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.

The painfully literal ending struck me as a somewhat risible disappointment, and though I admired the movie’s imagination and ambition, I can’t say I ever entered wholeheartedly into its story.

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?

It unfolds with the verve and clarity of a piece of music, carefully composed and passionately played.

With the help of an ensemble that is nearly flawless, she (Troche) assembles the damaged human elements of Ms. Homes's world with patience and precision, and more often than not chooses dry understatement over easy satire or obvious sentiment.

Mr. Miike is best known in the United States for horror films like "Audition" and "Ichi the Killer." Gozu, for all its extremity, is a more relaxed, less disturbing picture. Its dreamy disconnection is reminiscent of David Lynch's "Mulholland Drive," but it is, if anything, even more hermetic and dissociated.

The most curious thing about this magical-realist fable...is how thin and soft it is, how unpersuasive and ultimately forgettable even its most strenuous inventions turn out to be.

A slight, amusing documentary.

All of this makes the movie pleasant, but not very memorable - a pale mirror image of "Shopgirl," which touches on some similar themes.

Scene by scene, there’s nothing not to enjoy about this lushly animated ode to exploration, teamwork, and pluck, especially if you’re a parent of small kids on the hunt for a fun family outing. But for all its verve and polish, Moana 2 seems more like a consumer product, in some subtle but unmistakable way, than the first film did.

Might have been richer and more observant if it were less densely plotted. The characters would resonate more if there were fewer of them, and if they were not pushed through so many contrived dramatic incidents.

The movie keeps you at a distance; it is visually sweeping, and the history is fascinating, but the drama is rarely stirring.

More time in Middle Earth is exactly what The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey provides - so much more that the movie starts to feel like some Buddhist exercise in deliberately inflicted tedium.

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

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

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.

Taken on its own, without comparison with its literary source, the movie, Mr. Schreiber's first as writer and director, is thin and soft, whimsical when it should be darkly funny and poignant when it should be devastating.

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 resolution of these characters’ arcs, and of For Good’s several other subplots, feels unsatisfying, rushed through and at the same time too fussed over. But any sense of disappointment that Wicked: For Good doesn’t quite live up to the first movie pops like a big pink bubble the moment Erivo and Grande unite one last time to sing the showstopping duet “For Good.”

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.

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.

It boasts (nearly) all the elements of a perfectly fine, even very good, movie, without ever quite becoming a movie at all.

The brusque realism of Kragh-Jacobsen's style -- his careful suppression of style -- allows a surprising sweetness to emerge.

All the rest of Thor's 113 minutes felt so synthetic and overfamiliar that those brief flashes of spontaneity stood out like Morse code messages from another, better movie.

The 19-year-old actress Summer Bishil captures the terrifying combination of lubricity and innocence that is being 13. Her performance is the truest thing in a movie that, for all its good intentions, feels thoroughly phony and mildly embarrassing.

Albert Nobbs is the rare double drag king bill you could plausibly take your grandmother to. It's genteel, well-crafted, mostly sexless and frequently dull - a movie that, like its title character, never quite dares to let itself discover what it really wants to be.

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

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.

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.

If this particular franchise’s material feels at times a bit thin to be spun out even to two hours, it may be simply that three solo movies per Avenger is more than enough. But this weekend, if the lure of an air-conditioned summer blockbuster summons you like a sacred Asgardian hammer, you could do worse than this Easter egg–colored, classic rock–scored frolic.

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.

Ms. Polley is a naturally subtle actress, and part of her appeal lies in an unusual ability to seem at once forthright and enigmatic, but this time she comes off as a bit smug.

In the end Amen is neither as moving nor as illuminating as it should be. It suffers especially when compared -- as is inevitable, given the closeness of their release dates -- with "The Pianist," Roman Polanski's movie about a Polish Jew during the Nazi occupation.

The movie's atmosphere is, in many ways, more interesting than its story. Mr. Robbins and Ms. Morton are not the warmest actors. He can be mannered and smug, and she often seems to beam her performances from a strange, private mental universe.

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.

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.

Snow White and the Huntsman, the first feature from British commercial director Rupert Sanders, has its work cut out for it if it wants to be a truly dull piece of junk - but it manages.

This may be the coach's story, but to the extent that Coach Carter is interesting rather than merely inspirational, it's because of the team.

This Brighton Rock doesn't live up to the greatness of the novel (or even, really, the very-goodness of the 1947 movie), but it doesn't betray Greene's book either, which may be all a reasonable reader and filmgoer could ask.

It is hard to feel much warmth toward people whose most salient feature is their disconnection from reality.

There's a little more sex than you'll see on WB, but mostly there's an atmosphere of brooding psychodrama and erotic cruelty that falls somewhere between "Cries and Whispers" and "Say Anything."

By the end, after an hour and a half of wondering -- sometimes amusedly, sometimes impatiently -- just what this strenuously unconventional movie is supposed to be, you discover that the answer is as conventional as can be.

It reminds us that Italy is beautiful, that Fascism was a dreadful nuisance and that Sean Penn is a great actor, deserving of better vehicles than this vintage lemon.

Horrible Bosses doesn't quite qualify as a black comedy. Without the conviction to follow through on its own macabre premise, this underachieving little movie washes out to a muddy grayish-brown.

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.

Unfortunately, the rest of the movie does not live up to Mr. Russell's performance.

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.

The format and the purposeful blandness of the script make Jordan seem remote, more icon than human being.

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.

On its own, apart from whatever beliefs a viewer might bring to it, The Passion of the Christ never provides a clear sense of what all of this bloodshed was for, an inconclusiveness that is Mr. Gibson's most serious artistic failure.

In any case, what is on screen is a delightful respite from awards-season seriousness - a feather film, you might say, that actually tickles.

Sloppy when it should be incisive, indulgent when it should be astringent, and ultimately unsure of what it is mocking and in what spirit.

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

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

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

Watching Jackass 3-D was like being plunged into a Hieronymous Bosch painting of hell, yet this very reaction attests to the franchise's primal, diabolical power.

Should have been more polished, and less tame.

I object to A Dirty Shame not because it is offensive - to do so would be another way of congratulating Mr. Waters for his bogus daring - but because it is boring. Beyond offering a catalog of interesting practices and lampooning their dedicated practitioners, the movie has very little to say about sex.

The movie seems to love its main character without bothering to understand her.

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 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.

"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.

From start to finish, is pretty much a blast.

The only thing missing is a coherent story -- or even, for that matter, an interesting idea for one.

Christine Jeffs's film is an emotionally rich biography of the poet Sylvia Plath, who is played with radiant conviction by Gwyneth Paltrow.

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

Though I found Hereafter meandering and occasionally sentimental, I couldn't help but admire Clint Eastwood's ambition in taking on-headfirst-the greatest fact of human existence.

For what it is -- a big, expensive, occasionally campy action movie full of well-known actors speaking in well-rounded accents -- Troy is not bad. It has the blocky, earnest integrity of a classic comic book, and it labors to respect the strangeness and grandeur of its classical sources.

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.

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

Like Christopher Walken or Marlon Brando, Mr. Pacino frequently uses his gifts to make mediocre movies more interesting. Everything else in The Recruit may be tiresomely predictable, but he, at least, is not.

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

The storytelling is choppy and abrupt, and the filmmakers rely heavily on voice-over narration to announce themes that are never brought to dramatic life on screen. Mr. Ledger, his heartthrob charisma camouflaged behind a heavy beard, gives a stiff, hesitant performance.

Joy the movie never cohered, for me, into a story with forward motion. The minute the film begins to find its footing in one tonal register, it switches to another.

Not only is it excruciatingly boring -- but its central premises are so banal and dubious as to border on offensiveness.

As a life lesson for teenage girls, Twilight (excuse the pun) sucks. As a parable for the dark side of female desire, it's weirdly powerful.

The general talent and dedication of the ensemble mitigate the script's occasional lapses into sentimentality and noisy confrontation.

Nevertheless, I’m So Excited (in Spanish, the title is Los amantes pasajeros, meaning both “the fleeting lovers” and “the passenger lovers”) looks fabulous, talks dirty, and sometimes makes you laugh, which is really all you can ask of a fleeting lover.

Whether or not The River is, as some critics have claimed, Mr. Tsai's masterpiece, it is an excellent introduction to his oblique narrative style, his favored themes and his careful, lyrical visual sensibility.

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

In spite of my general distaste for Friends With Kids, let me cast my vote on the side of those who liked the ending. I wish more of the film had had that scene's fresh mixture of casual banter and breathless intimacy, instead of sounding like half-remembered dialogue from a movie we've all seen too many times before.

If this version of Superman is to have a future — as Warner Brothers seems convinced he will, having already green-lit the sequel — I hope Snyder will dial back both the casualty count and the Krypton mythmaking and instead focus on establishing a fictional Earth that’s rich enough to be worth saving.

Yes is not just a movie, in other words, it's a poem. A bad poem. There is no denying Ms. Potter's skill at versifying - or for that matter, at composing clear, striking visual images - but her intricate, measured lines amount to doggerel, not art.

For better or worse, it’s a Brontë adaptation for the era of Instagram and TikTok, second screens and viral memes.

Holds together in spite of its flaws.

Crude, unpolished, yet curiously dreamy.

Where the book is sinuous and oblique, their film is galumphing and heavy-handed, its rare flights of lyricism stranded between long stretches of outright risibility. And yet there's something commendable about the directors' commitment to their grandiose act of folly.

I wouldn't recommend Hitchcock to cinephiles seeking a bold new take on the master's life or work, but if all you want is to while away the afternoon in the company of some excellent actors in plummy period costume, Gervasi's film is not without its pleasures.

I watched it not as a critic preparing to summarize its merits or flaws to an audience of readers curious whether it was worth their time to see it, but as a sickened and disappointed fan, saying an unsentimental but still sad goodbye to one of her cultural crushes. Under those circumstances, I Love You, Daddy seemed less like a movie than like a series of symptoms presented, with shocking directness, for the viewer’s clinical consideration.

Hyde Park on Hudson has little more on its mind than hot dogs and hand jobs - which, come to think of it, would have made for a much catchier alliterative title.

It's Depp as Barnabas that holds the movie together. The story may be less than coherent and some of the minor characters washouts, but when he's on-screen, there's energy and humor and that foppish sex appeal that (as in the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie) reminds you why you once liked Johnny Depp.

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.

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

The end titles and the ones that introduce Veronica Guerin...are the most informative parts of the film, and also the most powerful. What comes between them is a flat-footed, overwrought crusader-against-evil melodrama, in which Ms. Blanchett's formidable gifts as an actress are reduced to a haircut and an accent.

A patchwork of contrived naughtiness and forced pathos...The loose ends are neatly tied up, as they are when you seal a bag of garbage -- or if you prefer, rubbish.

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.

Careening from bathos to bromance to naked sexytime, the movie is like a mashup of three or four different movies, at least two of them fairly unpleasant. And yet Love and Other Drugs is so sincere and unjaded about its mystifying purpose that it keeps our gaze fixed on the screen for the full two hours.

Less a movie than an extended re-enactment from a History Channel documentary, the movie is stagey, preachy, and long on exposition.

Uncanny singing animals aside, a secondary effect of the film’s commitment to zoological verisimilitude is to place the voice actors in a relatively powerless position. It’s a strange choice to assemble an all-star cast from various walks of celebrity—actors, pop singers, rappers, comedians—and then make their only contribution a verbal one.

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

Unabashed, and often quite diverting, technological overkill.

Jody's story is told with so much heart -- and his character is acted with such a winning combination of playfulness, vulnerability and sexual dynamism by Mr. Gibson -- that you can forgive the occasionally incoherent storytelling, the overwrought moments and the haphazard, unconvincing excursions into dream and fantasy.

Beneath the rough vérité exterior beats the same slick, corny heart.

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 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.

The movie is bulky and inarticulate, leaving behind a trail of wreckage and incoherence.

For all the contemporary relevance of the issues it explores, there’s something morally and aesthetically muffled about The Reluctant Fundamentalist: Nair is so busy making sure we never lose sympathy for her handsome and charming protagonist that the film ultimately founders in a tangle of humanist platitudes.

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.

Though the director's jet-set fantasy world of rugged jewel thieves and sailboat races, triste cabaret singers and sybaritic pleasures may feel dated and more than a little decadent, it is a nice enough place to visit.

It is not really much of a movie at all, if by movie you mean a work of visual storytelling about the dramatic actions of a group of interesting characters.

Neither the neighborhood intimacy of "Mean Streets" nor the grandeur of the "Godfather" movies is imaginable without Visconti's example. Its richness, though, is inexhaustible, and well served by the spotless new 35-millimeter print being shown at Film Forum.

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

In spite of some acute observations and a few interesting performances (most notably from John Malkovich as Jerome's drawing teacher and the ever-reliable Jim Broadbent as Strathmore's least illustrious alumnus), Art School Confidential is a dull and dyspeptic exercise in self-pity and hostility.

The screenplay doesn't lack for memorable zingers, and thanks to Cody's script and Streep's performance, Ricki emerges as a complex, self-contradictory person (even if most of the supporting characters don't).

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.

The violent scenes veer vertiginously between slapstick, soft-core pornography and raw documentary, leaving you repelled and confused, as well as fascinated.

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.

The main thing this "Assault" lacks is a point. Mr. Carpenter's film still resonates with the political paranoia and social unease of the era. Mr. Carpenter's cynical refusal to distinguish clearly between good guys and bad guys feels freshly unsettling, while Mr. Richet's "modernization" looks like something we've seen a hundred times before.

Speaking for myself, I’m fine with the concept of terminating The Terminator — and there’s no need to blue-orb back any more augmented hitmen or - women to do it.

This movie feels phony and slick, as if it were cooked up by Darrin's cynical ad agency, rather than at his aunt's stove down in Montecarlo.

Even knowing what's likely to come-the doors opening on their own, the skeptical characters scoffing at metaphysical explanations, the unheeded warnings from paranormally gifted guests-doesn't make it any less nailbiting to watch.

The Promise occupies a curious landscape somewhere between opera and cartoon.

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.

Front-loaded with inspired gags, and the first half-hour is both sneakily and explosively funny, raising expectations that are never quite met.

Moves nimbly from behind-the-scenes comedy to melodrama, with occasional stumbles into pop psychology and film-noir violence.

An adequate piece of children's entertainment, though it seems better suited for home viewing...than for the big screen.

A gleefully crummy buddy comedy that uses horror-movie conventions as catapults to hurl the audience down one "whoa, dude!" narrative wormhole after another.

The human landscape of Palindromes is a vista of grotesqueness, dishonesty and creepiness. These are qualities Mr. Solondz has explored before, but this time he fails to make them interesting, partly because he lets himself and the audience off the hook.

The project as a whole conveys a drab sense of bureaucratic necessity, a "let's get this over with" wheeziness.

As Passionada ambles toward a formulaic fairy-tale ending, it exudes such giddy self-assurance that you wish you could believe in it.

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