David Edelstein

The defense concedes that the Ruth Bader Ginsburg biopic On the Basis of Sex hits its marks with the subtlety of a legal brief. But that’s not fatal.

The best reason to see the movie is Larson, who showed how terrific she could be in "Short Term 12" and "Room" as women whose ways of fighting back were frustratingly earthbound.

Here's what's depressing: that, given the millions spent on defense by multinational conglomerates, our last best hope isn't the courts but the fickle attentions of glossy magazines and the noblesse oblige of celebrities.

Apart from having no particular reason to exist onscreen, especially at these prices, it's not half bad.

It's totally implausible, and yet it gets at something unnervingly real: the way that people can blow a budding relationship by being too honest with each other.

Some of the supporting actors register, especially Michael Mando as the unpretentious but quick-witted chief engineer. But the only surprise is Skarsgård. He has played wife-beaters, vampires, rapists, and mute would-be detectives, but who’d have thought he’d make a credible nerd?

All its themes are laid out like index cards on a screenwriter's bulletin board, and each plot turn seems so inevitable that you'll think you saw this movie in a previous life. (You did.)

It's tricky, it's surprising, and it's largely faithful to the original mini-series, but in context it's a nonevent. It's like a time bomb that's never dismantled but never explodes. The movie is good enough that the ending leaves you … not angry, exactly. Unfulfilled.

Frustratingly anemic, the filmmakers hiding behind their good taste and sensitivity. They might as well have gone for broke, since Plath and Hughes' daughter accused them of monstrous exploitation anyway.

Apart from a few choice flashbacks, the action is crawlingly linear--and opaque.

Too long, too sexist, and too--shall we say--flaccid. But it has its moments.

It’s puffed up in obvious ways but disarmingly puckish in others. As that capering pirate, De Niro is god-awful--yet his gung-ho spirit wins him Brownie points.

It’s a cracker­jack piece of filmmaking, a declaration that he’s (Eastwood) not yet ready to be classified as an Old Master, that he can out-Bigelow Kathryn Bigelow. Morally, though, he has regressed from the heights of Letters From Iwo Jima (2006). In more ways than one, the Iraq occupation is seen through the sight of a high-powered rifle. The movie is scandalously blinkered.

Given the movie’s bloody stew of greed and sadism, its unbalanced frames and ear-scraping soundscape, its moral tidiness can bring a smile to your otherwise appalled face.

I half-admire its exquisite balancing act, squeezing laughs out of its leading lady's wardrobe, vocabulary, gestures, and cretinously oblivious Beverly Hills sense of entitlement, while simultaneously demonstrating her brilliance, sturdy ethics, and unflappable egalitarianism.

The movie isn't as world-shattering as those bouts: It's a regretful-old-warrior weeper.

The King has enough in its coffers to keep you moderately engaged.

With its featherweight premise, casually amoral heroes, and exotic locales, it conjures up an era (the '60s and '70s) when twisty, romantic heist pictures were routinely ground out as tax shelters.

I wish it were as much fun as its prospectus. The truth is that The Truth About Charlie gets increasingly tiresome.

Aeon Flux is not that terrible. It's certainly more fun than a lot of films that get lovingly showcased.

If Boiler Room isn't an especially challenging movie, it's still a damn good melodrama -- a boilermaker.

It’s the smart-ass nerd’s Baywatch. The movie is okay, though, if you don’t mind manic pacing and icky dick jokes.

This is familiar terrain jazzed up by unfamiliar voices--principally Terrence Howard and his high-pitched, singsong drawl. You don't quite know what he's thinking; he might even be demented. But he keeps you watching and guessing.

Charming self-made vehicle.

Amounts to a pantheistic love-in: "A Fish Called Wanda" for vegetarians.

As I've implied, this is a great midnight movie: I enjoyed every patchily edited, ham-fisted scene. But I don't like seeing the wonderful Kate Winslet look stupid, or the wonderful Laura Linney abase herself.

It’s world away from the mystery and irrevocable tragedy that Barnes evokes in his slim novel. The climactic revelation is very sad, but it doesn’t wound you.

I'm not sure what Kontroll adds up to, but if you're looking for a rackety journey into the bowels of urban life, this is your movie.

Despite its downbeat context (a plague at its height), the movie is a crowd-­pleaser — graceful and funny enough to distract you from its gaps and elisions.

Margot at the Wedding doesn’t develop; it just skips from one squirmy scene to the next.

Devor doesn't endorse horse-on-man sex, but he does attempt--with sympathy--to account for the appeal.

Holy Rollers fuses a somber, old-world palette with a jittery urban unease--a good mix of tones. It’s also wonderfully acted.

Star Maps reveals its larger (and less interesting) social intentions with a downbeat, slap-in-the-face finale, but along the way it has some good domestic grotesquerie and a layered, ironic attitude toward sex.

A wee, breezy thing with painterly cinematography (by Jean Yves Escoffier) and with actors who are mostly fun to watch. It sails by in 103 minutes and the clunky stuff isn't painful, which makes a change from LaBute's usual grueling studies in human callousness and depravity.

Scene by scene, Jindabyne has dramatic force, but it's an awfully long slog. Carver's smartest tactic was never outstaying his welcome.

The souped-up plot is certainly indigestible (cheesecake, beefcake, bullets — choke on that), and there’s a steady stream of bad laughs, but something genuinely frightening comes through: a woman’s sense of disempowerment by men on all sides of the law. Hardwicke sticks to her guns — meaning there’s no play in the gunplay, only horror.

Too bad the movies collapses at the end when we find out what's really going on. Baghead is so much more vivid when it's indefinite.

It’s campier than its predecessor, but its gung ho union of black, white, and Asian gangs against reactionaries who’d destroy them is a virtuosic assertion of punky Parisian multiculturalism.

It’s an utterly lovely, complacent movie, too comfortable with itself to generate real dramatic tension.

It would be imprecise to say that the thrill is gone, because The Lost World recovers from its turgid opening and comes to life, or does so in spasms.

It gets the job done and then some, but it's ugly and clumsily shaped, and every scene is there to rack up sociological points.

There's too much miserable reality and not a lot of transcendent dance, and the director, Stephen Daldry, doesn't cover the action from enough angles.

I don't know what Pollock is supposed to be about, but as it stands—by default—it's the most blood-freezing Jewish-mother nightmare ever filmed. Pollock would give Woody Allen the willies.

By now we’ve seen so many good, bad, and indifferent Sherlocks that it’s almost a relief to get something different, however wrongheaded. And there’s no such thing as too much Downey.

As amusing as the movie is, I think in the end that Ascher misses the labyrinth for the trees.

Though a mess by all conventional narrative standards, Avengers: Age of Ultron is a fascinating case study in the rules of “universe” storytelling. Chief among them is that a film may not be self-contained — it must constantly allude to worlds outside its own. Marvel fans want extra characters, extra subplots, in-jokes that pander to their supposed breadth of knowledge. They don’t want closure.

Most of the time you can’t tell if you’re seeing Eichmann’s eccentricities or Kingsley doing a sort of Nazi Hannibal Lecter — the banality of ham.

A ferocious yet lyrical piece of filmmaking--an enchanted bloodbath.

A slick, not-too-thoughtful love story.

Even if you find the satire in Josie and the Pussycats self-serving, you might still love the movie, buy the soundtrack, and surrender to the hype. That's what happened to me.

Levinson must think he's on safe ground morally by keeping Bandits bloodless, as if the absence of carnage somehow makes kidnapping and armed robbery wholesome.

It doesn't entirely gel, but few directors could explore the collision of the ego and the outside world with such sympathy or purpose. It's possible that the NC-17 has never been used to such PG-13 ends.

The movie is meant to get into you like a virus, and it does.

In any case, the last twenty minutes of Breaking Dawn are so harrowing that it's possible to forget that most of the acting is soap-operatic (the guy who plays Carlisle is aging to look like Liberace) and the dialogue from hunger. The movie's that primal.

Something appalling about the way he turns to the camera with a look of sorrow: Michael Moore as a suffering Christ. It's an insult to his own movie, which at its considerable best transcends his thuggish personality.

Once the surprise of seeing something so miserable depicted with such wit and poetry wears off, you’re left with a nagging ugh, as well as the feeling that this emotional/psychological syndrome isn’t nearly as universal as Kaufman thinks it is.

You don’t go to operas for dancing or ballets for singing, and you don’t see Atomic Blonde for anything but a badass female protagonist crunching bones and pulping faces in gratifyingly long takes or remarkable simulations thereof. The auteur here is literally the stunt man.

This isn't an objectionable movie, just a mild, obvious, and rather limp one, with plenty of little jolts but no ejaculatory payoff.

Moverman is attempting something hugely ambitious with Time Out of Mind: a socially conscious, existential-displacement art movie. I think it would have worked better with a little less rigor and a little more intimacy.

The movie itself isn’t dull. It’s moderately stylish, moderately suspenseful, fun in patches. It hits its marks. But the setup lacks urgency.

Feig keeps throwing so much stuff at you — gross-out gags, chases, brutal violence, not to mention actors working their heads off — that he finally wears down your resistance. In the end, I admired him for keeping this ramshackle construction together, casting performers I adore, and proving that Melissa McCarthy can, indeed, hold a gun. A mixed victory. A definitively mixed review.

Closer is in the same arena as Labute, and I found it sour and airless, with the feel of a mathematical proof. The acting is superb, though, with one key exception. Jude Law.

I have to tip my cap to such a bold attempt to induce in the audience his heroine’s inner flux and fragmentation. The double-entendre title tells you to expect a trip, and you get one.

The First Purge is pretty good if you’re not averse to caricatures, predictable twists, and lots of familiar B-movie tropes.

Mr. 3000 is refreshing because it ends on a slightly sour, dissonant note: Stan wins, but not in the way he imagines. It's a nice change from the sports films that end with fists pumping and crowds going nuts.

One of the more enjoyably terrible movies of the year.

The decomposition of the soul is the goal of a Stasi incarceration, the promised end for an enemy of the state, and there is something about the movie’s pacing--the silences, the drone of the narration ("The name of your enemy is hope?…?")--that wears you down.

The movie isn't unwatchable. It's clumsily good-natured, the actors are appealing, and there are worse ways to spend two hours than looking at pretty young girls in shorts kicking balls. But the movie is way, way too pleased with itself.

When those talking heads metamorphose into familiar ranting heads, it becomes another mesmerizing right-wing horror show.

I like the movie, though. It forced me to rethink the way sexual desire saturates everything, along with extreme vulnerability of children.

Jolie gets the dirty/ennobling job done. If the narrative is finally unsatisfying, it’s because the last vital chapter — the way in which Zamperini was able to have a life after years of unspeakable cruelty and the dashing of his Olympic hopes — is signaled in a couple of title cards before the closing credits. Unbroken proves that Zamperini could take it and make it — but make what of it?

The movie gets funnier and less obvious as it goes along, and Zooey Deschanel is a hoot as a disdainfully bored co-worker who ritually insults the zombie chain-store shoppers -- but what is The Good Girl saying, exactly?

Ken Hixon's script contrives a lot of mutual-healing set pieces and then sadly but shrewdly aborts them: That makes the drama more Chekhovian than "quite real."

A brief, sad little piece that doesn’t quite hurdle the blood-brain barrier and rattle you to the core, but it does achieve a half-sublimity, thanks to coastal settings with white cliffs that inspire both awe and thoughts of flinging oneself off, and also thanks to poetry.

As in his pithy, tuneful songs-many written from different perspectives, in different styles-Merritt is committed to stylizing his misery instead of boring you with it.

Danny Huston is screamingly funny as the alternately finicky and savage Head Ghoul--he’s like something spewed forth from the bowels of the Politburo. The problem is structural.

An appropriately generic title for a droning, high-toned little heist picture with no dash and no raison d'être.

Bachelorette has some big gaps, and it isn't what you'd call fun - it's not "Bridesmaids 2." But lovely women doing genuinely ugly things makes for a potent combination.

The last act of Our Souls at Night is rushed and the ending truncated. But the good vibes linger. Netflix is putting the film in a few theaters but it’s online now to watch. You should. It’s a nice little movie.

It's too florid, too calculated, too too. Here's my emotional declaration: I love Richard Curtis' work. But I can't help feeling that the Bard of Embarrassment could use a touch more shame.

The film is too wan and distanced to sweep you up, but it holds you.

Extraordinary Measures has a soppy piano-and-strings score, but the primal fear of loss sharpens every scene.

Pirates is OK, in patches even better.

A feminist sitcom tricked up with garish violence and garrulous hit men.

The screenwriter, James Solomon, does the poor job only a liberal could at making the case for a Cheneyesque "dark side," and he isn't helped by Kline's wooden acting. Too bad. The Conspirator is eloquent enough to let the other side have its say.

Ozon devises tantalizing scenarios and immerses himself completely--then seems happy to tread water.

Con-artist caper comedies are almost always piffle, but there's a fierce, cruel competition at the heart of Heartbreakers that gives it some bite.

It’s an unusually warm world, full of helpful wealthy people and friendly faces. That’s the conundrum. It’s too shallow to nourish the spirit of a man like Bobby. But it’s too rich to leave.

The prolific Patrice Leconte takes a break from mythic, life-and-death scenarios with My Best Friend, a sitcom that threatens to take a rockier emotional path before swerving back into the comfy zone. It’s better when it’s threatening, but Leconte knows his audience.

There’s nothing close to the shock of seeing Blade Runner’s Tokyo-influenced futuristic dystopia — a dismal mix of high-tech and corrosion — for the first time. I thought it was okay.

Yes, I cringed at the casting, too, especially when, watching the trailer, I heard Parker deliver the narration in the same voice she used for Carrie in "Sex and the City." But Kate is funnier - less arch - than Carrie, and Parker reminds you what a dizzy, all-in, high-risk comic actress she can be when she's not too busy showing off the couture.

Although the script is based on Gauguin’s own writing, the film presents him as such a gloomy Gus that he might have swapped souls with his onetime pal Van Gogh.

The movie is well-crafted, but it doesn’t have the fullness you’d expect in a movie with so much believe-it-or-not weirdness. It feels more like a nifty anecdote.

The mournful comedy To Dust has a sicko premise, but scrupulously sicko.

The movie’s most exciting moment comes when Weldon realizes that she has been played — that in helping turn the tribes against the Dawes Act, she has won the battle and lost the war, since the U.S. would now have cause to attack. That’s the moment when Woman Walks Ahead should get really good but turns, instead, into a weeper.

For all its indirection, Meek's Cutoff is an utterly conventional film. But it's worth asking whether Reichardt's drowsy rhythms, stripped-down scenario, and female vantage add up to something illuminating. And here's where she earns at least some of those plaudits she's been getting.

Araki is trying to work from the inside out; and he captures feelings about sexual exploitation that I've never seen onscreen--not all of them negative.

A decent-enough rambunctious Southern-drive-in sort of time-waster, missing only the bare boobs that would make it the perfect socially irresponsible sexist entertainment for rednecks and uptight liberal elites who'd like to live the country-boy dream for a few hours. (Howdy, y'all!)