Dana Stevens

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.

The animating humanism of Scott’s film is irreducible. It’s a wry tribute to the qualities that got our species into space in the first place: our resourcefulness, our curiosity and our outsized, ridiculous, beautiful brains.

Wake Up Dead Man marks not just a return to form but an expansion of the series’ potential.

The Ram is sometimes--often, even--a manipulative, self-pitying man, but Rourke and Aronofsky paint his portrait with a rigorous dignity.

Café Lumière stands in relation to "Tokyo Story" as a faint, diminished echo. It is nonetheless a fascinating curiosity, a chance to witness one major filmmaker paying tribute to another in the form of a rigorously minor film.

Marcel the Shell with Shoes On struck me as an animated film like no other I can recall. It’s a story about the difficulty and necessity of making yourself vulnerable that is itself the product of an unusually intimate artistic collaboration, literally a couple’s shared in-joke that took on a life of its—or his—own.

An old-fashioned movie-movie, the kind that's substantial enough to go out to dinner after and discuss all the way through dessert.

Having already admired Pattinson’s post-vampire work in David Cronenberg’s "Cosmopolis" and elsewhere, I wasn’t surprised to see him kill it in this role as a shambling antihero in the "Dog Day Afternoon" mode. With this movie, both Pattinson and the Safdie brothers have broken new ground in their careers.

The visual intensity and the relentless degradation visited on the characters begins to feel prurient and dishonest.

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

Martin Campbell (who also directed Pierce Brosnan's first outing as Bond in "Goldeneye"), has chosen to give us a Bond who's both metaphorically and literally stripped bare. Let me take this opportunity to thank him for both.

For the bulk of its two-hour-and-two-minute running time, I watched in a state of hypnotized delight.

Very much a writer's film: Mr. Schickel's elegant, occasionally knotty prose, read by Sidney Pollack, offers a clear, nuanced interpretation of the artist's work in relation to his life.

The performances, whether from novices like the sensational Lane or professionals like LaBeouf, Keough, and Patton, are at once naturalistic and emotionally precise.

The main character of this movie expends enormous effort seeking affirmation that the words she spends her days trying to get down on paper matter. The movie’s writer-director, one of the most idiosyncratic and indispensable voices currently working in film comedy, needn’t worry about a thing.

The first hour and half or so of True Grit is as good as anything the Coens have ever done-a sweeping Western that, like John Ford's best films, exposes the cracks in American myths of frontier justice and self-reliance.

Like their Star Wars forebears, Boyega’s Finn and Ridley’s Rey are brave, funny, and admirable but also imperfect, uncertain, and sometimes afraid. That is to say, they’re genuine, multisided characters with believable motivations—no small victory in a movie designed with the express purpose of breaking world box-office records.

Enough drama, humor and unfiltered nail-biting suspense to put all the thrill-mongering screenwriters in Hollywood to shame.

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.

Essential viewing for anyone who desires a sense of the finer human grain of a war that now commands the attention of the world as never before.

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.