David Edelstein

Soderbergh tends to get one big idea - a thesis idea - per film and stick with it even when a touch more flexibility would help. Here it's that non-kinetic camera, which he's so wedded to that parts of the film seem underenergized, like a cheap seventies or early eighties picture you'd catch at two in the morning on Cinemax's tenth most popular channel.

I was happy watching these actors, happy going behind the scenes of a sober classical music ensemble instead of another druggy rock group, happy hearing Beethoven for a couple of hours. The movie is haut-bourgeois to the bone, but so am I: Let's hear some chamber music and have a little laugh and a cry!

I like my SpongeBob a little less lumbering, a little more free-associational, without that big, heavy anchor of a story structure to weigh him down.

It's tempting to praise The Ides of March as a realistic depiction of how low we've sunk. But that would mean accepting the second-rate writing and third-rate melodrama and incredible shrinking characters.

The laborious title of an even more laborious Cockney action movie that some people think is the cat's pajamas crossbred with the bee's knees.

That's the feeling Stephen Chbosky captures in The Perks of Being a Wallflower, his exquisite adaptation of his best-selling YA novel about a Pittsburgh high-school freshman who doesn't fit in and then all of a sudden does, for a spell.

Gregory and Demme have turned A Master Builder into (pardon my invoking the name of a Strindberg work) a dream play, and have made it once more madly, bitingly, chillingly alive.

Say this for actors: Too self-centered to be embarrassed, they can be existential heroes of a (moronic) sort.

The only grace note in the generally clunky Wonder Woman is its star, the five-foot-ten-inch Israeli actress and model Gal Gadot, who is somehow the perfect blend of superbabe-in-the-woods innocence and mouthiness.

I generally like Rogen a lot but this performance is bad — worse than it even seems because of the drain it is on the movie.

Furious 7 kicks the biggest and hardest, but it’s far from the best. Lin has handed the keys to James Wan, the cunning horror director of "Saw" and "The Conjuring," and though the thrill isn’t gone, the finesse is.

You don’t have to be a moralist to see the tragedy of Scotty Bowers’s life. You only have to have an eye for things that don’t fit comfortably. Tyrnauer has that, as well as the compassion not to probe too deeply. What’s onscreen is enough to make you conclude that you can’t make people truly happy without fixing the world.

Private Parts is so riotous that you almost don't remember how unfunny Stern can be on his radio show.

It’s a real crowd-pleaser, and I hope a lot of people will be inspired by its mixture of grittiness and uplift. But it also demonstrates that showbiz go-for-it stories are more alike than unalike, even when they have a vivid countercultural vibe and feature actors who don’t conform to (Hollywood white male) studio ideals.

It goes soft, but even a gelded traditional farce is more potent than most of our slob comedies.

It’s not the weighty emotions that drag Vol. 2 down. It’s the plot that chases its own tail and the cluttered visual palette.

What makes Phoenix’s performance especially exciting is that you’re watching not just a character go from chaos to self-possession but an actor, too.

Think "In the Mood for Love" with hookahs instead of chopsticks.

Stillman's comeback comedy Damsels in Distress is wobbly and borderline twee, but it deepens as it goes along and becomes rich.

Might be the most provocative teen sex comedy ever made; it is certainly one of the most convulsively funny.

A Joyful Noise overcomes. The big numbers are a gospel-pop-funk fusion that made me think, Hmmm, this seems very processed - before I noticed my feet were tapping of their own accord. How can you resist that wah-wah funk guitar?

How bad is Zoolander 2? It’s "Batman and Robin" bad. It’s so bad that it makes you feel sorry for the scores (literally) of celebrities who show up in cameos, even the ones (Anna Wintour, Tommy Hilfiger, Susan Sarandon, Ariana Grande, Kimye ...) who actively resist your sympathy, whom you maybe want to see taken down a peg.

Hit and miss, but its tone of lyric melancholy is remarkably sustained.

It has a gritty feel and a tight, methodical, one-thing-after-another tempo.

Rich, finely judged, gorgeously acted movie.

I suppose it's too much to expect Pirandellian stature from the madness of Chuck Barris -- but that's about the only thing that would have made this mixed-up ego trip work.

Essentially a solemn, splintered meditation on lost love: a movie about personal space, in space.

Nancy is a grim piece of work, but Choe’s empathy for her protagonist gives the film its distinctive texture — woebegone, with flickers of both hope and dread.

The movie is barely an hour and a half but feels dense, and exhausting, as Barker skips among three protagonists who are up against a ticking clock.

This is a mood piece, shapeless but often lyric.

Garbus brings off something extraordinary in a film that sets out to leave us sad, enraged, and profoundly unsatisfied. Lost Girls makes us want to rethink our need for a certain kind of closure in a world that has so little of it.

This could be the premise of a zany comedy, but the mood of The Future is, from the outset, defeatist - annoyingly defeatist, to be frank.

It's a great metaphor - but not a great movie. Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris direct in a drably naturalistic style, and the script is thin.

hilarious, sometimes rueful, and strangely hip documentary.

The final twist is both baffling and repulsive, but as an evocation of the triumph of evil, it's peerless.

The movie becomes more and more lugubrious, finally ending on a note of high-tragic operatic bathos.

Wonder has an overflowing humanism that extends to less-sympathetic characters.

Hot-dog Hong Kong action stylist Johnnie To has never achieved the cult status of John Woo in this country, but his explosively entertaining — and startlingly splattery — Drug War should win him new fans.

The depressing subtext is that even with detailed proof of ongoing genocide, it takes movie stars to get to the movers and shakers, and to get worthy movies like this one into theaters.

The Trip to Spain plays like it’s no big deal — a throwaway — but it’s consistently funny, its bitterness nudging the sweetness into complexity, its sweetness tempering the soupçon of despair. If that also sounds like a food review, well, someone has to write one.

Working in a mini-genre whose bones would appear to have been picked clean by the likes of Kevin Williamson and Wes Craven, Glosserman and Stieve find a few pints of fresh blood.

It manages to be funny and charming while capturing a lot of disturbing things about the way we live now.

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

The villain comes back more times than Wile E. Coyote. I found it tiresome and witless and numbingly repetitive, but action mavens won't feel cheated.

Julie & Julia is full of holes, but you don't even care when Streep is onscreen.

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.

Until the computer-generated effects bog it down and mess up its rhythms, Captain America: The First Avenger, has a measured, classical pace and a lot of good, old-fashioned craftsmanship.

I love Nicholson here because he lets Keaton take the movie--and his relative reticence is very attractive.

Most of the dialogue is listless, and no matter how much Soderbergh snips and stitches, the movie is a corpse with twitching limbs.

Fey's comic gifts mesh with Wiseman's first-hand research, and the wit becomes dazzling.

Compared with other first-person motion-sickness horror pictures like "The Blair Witch Project" and "Cloverfield," George A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead is weak tea, yet there’s enough social commentary (and innovative splatter) to acidulate the brew--to remind you that Romero, even behind the curve, makes other genre filmmakers look like fraidy-cats.

Schrader is like a reformed addict who isn't even honest enough to show what once gave him pleasure. He's the most dangerous kind of crusader. In Auto Focus, he makes you hate sex and movies equally.

You could never call Solondz a humanist, but he achieves something I've never seen elsewhere: compassionate revulsion.

It’s a good idea done well until the last 20 minutes, when the leap from a realistic addiction drama to a hair’s-breadth Hollywood rescue movie is too jarring to ignore.

I loved it, but you might not. Despite its often prostrating bleakness and an ending likely to inspire howls of outrage (Solondz’s world is not kind to children or pets), it might be the closest he’ll ever come to making an inspirational work.

Michael Keaton is sensational as Kroc.

The Angels’ Share is a rare upbeat Ken Loach comedy — and a wee dram of bliss. Set in Scotland, it has a blessedly funny overture.

Occasionally dissonant, but it's remarkably cleareyed.

Sam Rockwell kills as the hero's loony tunes best friend, deliciously abetted by Christopher Walken as an aging, sad-sack dognapper.

Only the generic title disappoints. Leo Rockas, who turned Lady Susan’s epistles into an Austen-esque novel, suggests Flirtation and Forbearance or Coquetry and Caution. But by any title this is a treat.

Apart from scenes with Leslie Mann as a mother who propagates the wisdom of The Secret (she’d be too heavy-handed for a Disney Channel sitcom), The Bling Ring is enjoyable. And it’s always easy on the eyes.

It’s a dry, arm’s-length movie that seeps into your blood as it seeps into Jones’s.

Most of all, I enjoyed the picture's subtext, which is that Smith has become so sensitized to Internet abuse -- that the cathartic climax consists of tracking down bellicose posters (all of whom turn out to be adolescent dweebs) and pummeling the crap out of them.

This is yet another of Soderbergh’s “exercises in style,” which means he has one big idea and sticks to it. He makes the space shallow and ugly (faces are bathed in orange) and adds groovy sixties titles and Marvin Hamlisch music.

Rock of Ages withholds nothing and makes miracles seem cheap.

A labor of love that sometimes wears its love too laboriously, but a surfeit of rapture isn’t the worst thing in a movie.

It might even have been a landmark film about race relations had its aura of blunt realism not been dispelled by a toxic cloud of dramaturgical pixie dust.

What Hooper can’t manage is to put us inside his characters’ heads — where we should be in a story that makes every surface suspect.

The movie is a broad ethnic comedy, but there’s nothing broad about the wicked-smart way it’s executed.

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.

The tit-for-tat scenario ought to be wildly entertaining, but the magic is crude, the characters flyweight, and the story protracted and unpleasant.

It's surprising that The Greatest Movie Ever Sold plays so entertainingly, given that Spurlock's quest is essentially beside the point.

The most engrossing part of Truth is the gradual, grueling retreat from the story, first by its participants and then by the network that broadcast it.

A spare, melancholy film that is so far in spirit from its source, Philip Roth's "The Dying Animal."

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.

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

There isn’t a single false scare. There isn’t, come to think of it, a scare that doesn’t set up another scare.

This is not a movie to see if you're contemplating tying the knot; it's a hard slog for those of us already entwined.

The movie does get under your skin (the tremulous misfit girl, Hannah, might be a breakout role model), but the way it has been put together reminds me of those animal shows where the crew nudges the gazelles in the direction of the lions with multiple cameras standing by.

The movie is gorgeous, mesmerizing, poetic; the lyricism actually heightened by harsh jets of gore.

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

Kick-Ass is a compendium of all sleazy things, and it sings like a siren to our inner Tarantinos.

Farce born of sadly irreconcilable impulses: Bravo!

I fear that the cozy domestic ending will leave audiences disappointed, convinced that they've seen something smaller and less momentous than they have.

Ends up leaving you starved for a single moment of unhyped emotion. You can barely see the characters for Luhrmann screaming.

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.

It's a sensational trip -- gorgeous, gaga.

She lip-syncs convincingly to Piaf's songs. Even when she overacts like mad, she makes you think she’s Piaf overacting like mad--the little sparrow with the foghorn pipes.

I've saved the best for last: The love interest played by that throaty redheaded (here blonde) darling Emma Stone, whose blue eyes radiate so much intelligence that any actor on whom she trains them in adoration becomes an instant movie star.

Premium Rush is that rare bird: a chase picture that's just a chase picture - and a dandy one.

Tukel takes a big risk in Catfight: using farcical means to weave together personal and political tragedies, so that each dimension feeds the other. The rough edges and occasional clunks are a small price to pay.

With an actor as great as Gene Hackman in the lead, a lot of scenes even breathe.

Quite likable -- even sometimes, with the squeezable Zellweger its principal object, lovable.

It’s Moss who takes the film to a higher, scarier level. After years of playing Peggy Olson on "Mad Men", she knows how to smile and nod and say one thing while obviously meaning the exact opposite, and when at last she unleashes the truth, it’s with demonic intensity. She turns subtext into horror-poetry.

The movie might pass muster for kids weaned on the Harry Potter films — I shudder to think of the movies that pleased me when I was 7 or 8 — and uncritical critics. But you’d have to be desperate for another Potter fix to think this is magical entertainment. It’s thoroughly No-Maj.

Deadpool is a send-up of Marvel movies but in no way a takedown of them. It’s not subversive — it’s meant to elasticize and enhance the superhero genre, to flatter the audience for being hip enough to get all of those in-jokes.

One of those half-straight, half-spoof comic-book extravaganzas that don't ever work, and what's neat is that this one does--beautifully.

We’ve reached superhero saturation point, and Deadpool 2 is less a satire of that condition than a symptom of it. It has zero suspense — it’s too hip, too meta, for suspense.

She has the perfect nervy, nerdy, needy alter ego in Anna Kendrick.

Mary Poppins Returns is a work of painstaking re-creation, and it’s full of nice touches. But it’s a bit of a dud.

The movie gives off a stranger vibe. Beavan is both a hero and a figure of fun, a man whose ideals are in constant collision with the habits of modern life.

Streep and Jones make themselves small: She's chirpy; he's crusty. Incessant pop standards on the soundtrack supply the emotion the director can't. All that's missing are commercials for estrogen cream and erectile-dysfunction meds.

Although Catfish is opportunistic, even borderline exploitive, it gets at-by indirection, through the back door-the magic-carpet aspect of this scary new medium. Real people are so complicated and irreducible, you know?

The first two thirds and change of I Am Legend is terrific mindless fun: crackerjack action with gnashing vampires barely glimpsed (and scarier for that) and how’d-they-do-that New York locations that retroactively justify the traffic jams.

Despite glimmers of wit and a hipper-than-thou cast, it's painstakingly smug, and smaller than the sum of its parts.

Life After Beth is a reasonably fun, medium-gory horror comedy that’s better before the innards hit the fan.

The movie didn’t rekindle the thrill of seeing, say, The Empire Strikes Back, but Rogue One will loom pretty large in the Star Wars galaxy — if only because there’s so little competition.

In Married Life, Ira Sachs aims a bit lower than Green but obliterates his target: The funny, the scary, the campy, the sad--they’re all splendidly of a piece.

Crudely ­powerful. You can object to the thuggish direction and the script that’s a series of signposts, but not the central idea, which is genuinely illuminating.

As a movie, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone has no inner life -- no pulse -- of its own: It's secondhand.

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.

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.

As a narrative, it’s clunky. As a whodunit, it’s third-rate. As the drama of a closed-off man’s awakening, it’s predictable. But Haggis has got hold of a fiercely urgent subject: the moral devastation of American soldiers serving in (and coming home from) Iraq. At its heart are deeper mysteries--and a tragedy that reaches far beyond anything onscreen.

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.

A glancing, disjointed little movie that captures as well as any film I've seen the mind-expanding mojo of rock and roll at the dawn of the counterculture - particularly rhythm-and-blues-oriented rock, particularly the Rolling Stones, the group that synthesized R&B and made it commercial.

Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool isn’t visually drab, only conceptually. As a critic who often complains about biopics diverging too radically from the facts, I’m chagrined to find myself wishing the filmmakers had taken more liberties with Turner’s brief memoir.

A religious conspiracy disguised as a romance.

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

It’s in the uncertainties and dissonances of Last Flag Flying that Linklater’s humanism really expresses itself. Three men of vastly different values and temperaments come alive in the shared understanding that their losses were for nothing. And that shared understanding is something.

Haynes sets out to demonstrate the power of popular music to change people's lives--to tell them it's OK to fashion themselves into anything they please.

The best thing about the film The Front Runner is that it gives Gary Hart, the Colorado senator and 1984 and ’88 presidential candidate, a measure of dignity, and today’s audiences a historical context in which to view his missteps.

It's deftly calibrated and acted with relish: Kasdan is really good!

What's a shock is the crudeness with which Spielberg fills the scenario in -- how he neuters his protagonist and short-circuits the inner workings of his human characters.

In patches it's agreeably lurid, but it's otherwise ho-hum.

This is another moderately interesting but shallow biopic with an actor going for broke — to win, not to draw.

Sutton finds the lyrical tension in torpor; he shows how Willis’s artistic vacuum isn’t a passive thing, how it eats into him, how it even permeates the natural world.

No mainstream filmmaker since Orson Welles can touch Steven Spielberg when it comes to camera movement and composition--or, more precisely, to composition that gets more vivid as the camera moves...It's the work of a man with film storytelling in his blood. What a bummer when the story he has to tell is a cosmic nothing.

Battle for Haditha has some of the raw energy of Sam Fuller's war pictures, which weren't subtle but left you energized by their ambivalence (there was no good or evil). It's a hell of a picture.

A senseless blast.

The final film adaptation of Suzanne Collins’s dystopian Hunger Games YA novels, Mockingjay — Part 2, is a potent antiwar saga: bleak, savage, and very modern in the depiction of an unholy union between political manipulation and showbiz.

Pecker is a breezy, agreeable picture--a charmer, thumbs-up, three stars--but there's something disappointing about a John Waters film that's so evenhanded and all-embracing, even if its sunniness is "ironic."

That lawn with its scraps of a ruined life is a setting both satirical and poignant, and Will Ferrell gives a performance of Chekhovian depth.

Michael Apted's Amazing Grace is a beautifully chiseled blunt instrument. No, it's not subtle, but how subtle was slavery?

A fair number of people have responded with tears and laughs to Saving Mr. Banks, but I found it interminable.

It's hard to do justice to Hawkins's acting, because you never actually see it: Her Rita simply is.

A fascinatingly strange and chaotic ballet set to familiar noir motifs.

The dialogue of Alien: Covenant is often clunky and its plot repetitious. (As usual these days, there are too many climaxes.) But it’s scary and splatterful, which is all it really needs to be. It holds you.

Annie Silverstein’s Bull doesn’t jerk you around. It doesn’t Go for It. It’s quieter and more pensive than a glib summation (or a trailer) would suggest, but it never goes soft.

Serves up some of the most gruesomely misogynistic imagery in years, then ends with a bid for understanding. Are its makers so deluded that they think they're making the world a more compassionate place?

James Scurlock's documentary Maxed Out, tells the bone-chilling, bloodcurdling, hair-raising story of a country (guess which one?) that's up to its eyeballs in credit-card debt.

Sally Hawkins doesn’t rise above the film’s conception, but she makes it work.

Panic Room is fluidly made, and it keeps the audience quiet and unpleasantly gripped. But the only surprise is the absence of surprise; that trap is in too-plain view.

Wholly unnecessary but highly enjoyable.

Entertainment wears its contempt too arrogantly, fulsome in its emptiness.

The only surprise is the level of violence — not just beyond "The Karate Kid" but beyond "Fight Club." The problem with that strategy is that unless you’re knocked out, you’re just grossed out and eager to go. You practice the art of self-defense against the movie.

What makes Alice Wu's debut so pleasurable is its easy rhythms, its sly juxtapositions, and its relaxed but funny performances.

The ensemble is stupendous--howlingly great--and the music goes deep.

A more down-to-earth actor would sentimentalize Breakfast on Pluto and make for an awkward fit with its peculiar mix of tones. Murphy's strangeness--his chill estrangement--makes his campy "Kitten" persona more poignant.

Ultimately, it has less in common with "Blair Witch" than with such quivering lumps of sentiment as "Ghost" and Field of Dreams."

Surprisingly intimate and nuanced.

Thanks to chillingly spare storytelling, Kruger’s momentous performance, and a score by Josh Homme (the front man of Queens of the Stone Age) that features a sort of screechy clang that gave me shivers, In the Fade is gripping. But it’s hard to know what to take away from it.

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

The most effective counterweight to Polanski's fatalism is young Barney Clark, whose Oliver--although given to few words--is unshakably alive and responsive, even as he's being buffeted violently by forces beyond his control.

Every Dardennes movie is worth seeing, and The Unknown Girl has all kinds of gripping undercurrents.

The actors manage to show crack comic timing while looking as if they’re groping along blindly — a high compliment for psychodrama.

Yes, this farrago of fairy tale and sci-fi conspiracy flick is, on one level, howlingly obvious. But there are howls of derision and howls of amazement, and mine were of the latter kind, mostly.

Pacific Rim made me marvel at the technology of movies, but never the magic of them.

It's square, stiff, and in places cheesy; it's also authentically harrowing -- and blood-showered, blood-drowned.

I hope that in Part 2, Yates and screenwriter Steve Kloves give Fiennes a better send-off than Dame J.K. did in her less-than-wizardly climactic wandathon. Having made us sit through two and a half hours with no payoff, they'd better not go all Muggle on us. Next time, we want magic, people.

Bier dramatizes our ambivalence so earnestly that it's tempting to give her awards rather than admit that the movie is a crushing bore.

The gut-whomping, high-concept romantic thriller This Means War is not a distinguished addition to director McG's oeuvre.

It’s overbaked art-pulp. You’re always thinking, What fresh horror is around the next bend?

This is one of the most immediate, personal costume dramas ever made, and so it's not unseemly to consider how the writer-director and her heroine overlap.

A giddy ballet in which the women whirl around a still, clueless man.

Napoleon Dynamite is too low-wattage to be a true nerd anthem, but it's charming in retrospect.

I’ve sat through so many claustrophobic examples of the genre I forgot how exhilarating, how pure a great one could be. Interview is a great one--electric as theater and cinema.

They’ve taken "2001" and Tarkovsky’s "Solaris" and "Silent Running," mixed in stuff from save-the-earth pictures like "The Core" and "Deep Impact," and thrown in a cheesy climax out of "Alien."

Everything we love about biblical-movie kitsch is here, only concentrated and heightened.

Uneven, ludicrous, but--oh man!--fun to watch.

What’s extraordinary about Tangerine is that it’s everything an entertaining, old-fashioned, mainstream Hollywood comedy should be but no longer is. That nowadays you have to get this kind of stuff via Sundance from directors using iPhones is a drag — the wrong kind.

Mother and Child is suffused with grief and loss. It’s also suffused with compassion and insight.

The movie is phenomenally well made and the three actors who fall apart on our watch suffer magnificently.

You have to give credit to Frailty for jiggering up the formula a bit, so that what starts as an ominously low-key study of a boy coming of age with a mad father escalates into a combination of "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" and "Breaking the Waves" -- Grand Guignol religiosity.

Sleeping With Other People is a rare American non-homogenized rom-com, and it’s delightful even when you’re not sure what you’re watching.

It takes about an hour after it's over for the heart to slow, the brain to recalibrate, and the nonsensicalness of the thing to sink in.

At one point, Van Damme delivers a long, tortured soliloquy about his alienating stardom to the camera in a single take. It's the most amazing piece of acting I've ever seen by a martial artist. But the film itself doesn't rise above the level of a good try.

It's formulaic, but it sticks to a classic Western formula instead of a cartoonish blockbuster one.

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.

A poky but blood-freezing throwback to the gothic horror films of the seventies, when ingénues moved tremulously down dark corridors without holding digital video cameras.

The film is visually worked out to within an inch of its life, but after 15 minutes you can see where it's going, and along the way there are no surprises.

It's a different sort of experience: a stately, somewhat plodding but endurable science-fiction saga.

The idea is that vulnerable women will give up their autonomy — their very identities — to such an entitled being, which I found a stretch but which certainly has historical precedents. It’s best to view The Other Lamb as a rite-of-passage fantasia with a gossamer heroine.

Conrad's last film, the underrated "The Weather Man," was a parade of miseries, too, but the protagonist (Nicolas Cage) didn’t move very fast in the throes of his existential crisis, and the palette (it was Chicago in winter) was glacial. Here, those crazy San Francisco hills give the movie a lift, and Muccino frames it all airily, with a glancing touch.

An interesting take. The problem is that Guadagnino can’t cast a decent spell.

Avenue Montaigne would be difficult to stomach if it weren't so light and uninsistent, and if its actors weren't so charming. I still rolled my eyes--but sometimes I do that when I get a really good croissant.

Che is an impressive physical feat, but especially in the second part, which gives you day after day of rebels being killed and indigenous poor people not joining the good fight, you start to look forward to Che getting riddled by bullets. The whole movie is a forced march.

The movie ends abruptly-too abruptly for my taste-but the gaiety lingers through the closing credits. Not even apocalypse can dispel the sexy vibes.

Nearly perfect for what it is.

Suicidally insecure.

I laughed all the way through Team America: Scene by scene, it's uproarious.

Living Out Loud becomes an ode to openness, to letting in everything that the world throws at you.

He's [Pitt] not particularly inventive - with his appraising eyes and a toothpick in his mouth, he's like Redford without the edge - but he uses his stardom cannily, to kill with softness.

We’ve never sat through anything with Cloverfield’s subjective sting. You’d have to be tougher than I was not to be blown sideways by it.

This is probably Cheadle’s most electrified performance since the one that made him a star, as the incorrigibly homicidal Mouse in "Devil in a Blue Dress."

The revulsion that Steven Spielberg maintained to the end of "Saving Private Ryan" is nowhere in sight — Ayer betrays his own values with a climax that’s like a hack gamer’s recreation of Peckinpah’s "The Wild Bunch." The final encounter between Ellison and a German soldier is meant to offer humanist balance, but in context it’s ludicrous. You can’t believe Ayer thought he could get away with it.

Evocative as it is, The Road comes up short, not because it’s bleak but because it’s monotonous.

True Crime gives you sleaze on toast--a heap of tabloid bathos, a dusting of high-mindedness, a dash of gallows humor. It's a bizarre concoction, but it's riveting.

Don't worry, parents, only you--and not your 5-year-old--will get that the chicken's stoned out of his gourd.

The film has a foggy cast to it--flat and insinuatingly creepy, like the actor. But then it can be lit, in an instant, by searing flash-pots of cruelty and wit. Even when it's slightly opaque, it's transfixing.

Isn't as campy or as unhinged as the delightful Bailey and Barbato Tammy Faye Baker documentary, "The Eyes of Tammy Faye"; it's more like your standard HBO documentary (and HBO co-produced). But it's extremely entertaining.

The Happy Prince proves that a film can be both bleak and warm-spirited, as befits its mighty subject.

Ant-Man isn’t much more than pleasant (Peyton Reed directs limply), but anything Marvel that doesn’t feel Marvel-ish makes me smile.

A part with this much sobbing, hand-wringing, and mournful gazing into the middle distance could be, in the wrong hands, a laugh riot, but Lawrence’s instincts are so smart that she never goes even a shade overboard. She’s a hell of an actress.

The movie is barely sufferable.

I'm looking forward to buying Blades of Glory on DVD so I can get my head around the phenomenal skating routines. Obviously, there were wires and lifts and computer-generated effects, but for my money it looked like the lumbering Ferrell and nerdy Heder were Olympic-worthy stylists.

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.

The documentary has its roots in a monologue in which the "guest of Cindy Sherman" (what H-O's place-card read at a gala) stood up for his personhood and made himself the center of the story—only there's NO STORY, not even insight into what made this unlikely couple click. Remove the boldface names and there's no movie; that center does not hold.

Linda Hunt's spooky nun speaks of "a hundred levels of consciousness" between death and full, earthbound awareness: Where on that continuum do the executives who green-lighted Dragonfly reside?

It's empty and formulaic, with plotting that's lazy even by stoner-comedy standards. Without all the yuck-o sight gags, it would be a huge bummer.

Given that the movie doesn't have a single narrative surprise--you always know where it's going and why, commercially speaking, it's going there--it's amazing how good Blood Diamond is. I guess that's the surprise.

The script by Steve Faber and Bob Fisher is one of those high-speed, ping-pong-banter marvels in which you're still laughing from the last great line when you're hit by the next.

It's a rich, impressive comic-book fantasy -- easily the summer's best "blockbuster."

I could quibble with the conventionally romantic ending and a couple of small but not-so-cosmetic alterations, but on the whole, this is just how I'd always imagined one of my favorite comic novels should look and sound.

The best thing in the movie is Stewart. She was the leggy hobo-camp teen in love with Emile Hirsch in "Into the Wild," and she's better at conveying physical longing than any of the actors playing vampires.

There’s not much wrong with the movie on its own terms. But there’s nothing great about it, either. It doesn’t have the breathless exuberance, the highs, of Spielberg’s best “escapist” work, maybe because everything is so filtered, so arm’s length.

After an electrifyingly feral opening, the movie settles down into a cogent courtroom drama, with no real cinematic highs but no jaw-dropping lows, either.

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.

It’s both dumber and more entertaining than anyone had a right to expect.

The visuals have so much intrinsic motion that it's too bad Robots is oppressively rollercoasterish.

A nutty, zany, wacky, unruly, spastically hilarious hodgepodge that hits at least twice as often as it misses—which is a big deal, since there are more gags per square foot of celluloid than in any film since Joe Dante's "Gremlins 2: The New Batch" (1990).

What's left is a wan and impersonal whodunnit -- a movie that never gets into your blood.

Neeson's gravity elevates the action, and there's a fine, prickly performance by an actor new to me, Frank Grillo, as the asshole of the group. But The Grey, despite moments of sublimity, is as predictable as a funeral. When Ottway angrily calls out to God, the nonanswer is sadly redundant.

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.

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.

The 61-year-old Stallone would deserve a measure of respect for pulling Rambo off, appalling as it is, but this Fangoria-worthy circus of horrors also features footage of actual Burmese atrocities.

At times the movie's crudeness has an eerie beauty, but the musical fantasies are a bewildering hash, and the protracted climax on death row is nearly unendurable.

Bloody hell, the Brits do low-key, paranoid procedural dramas like Official Secrets well, with a pervading chill and no flash: The crispness cuts like a knife.

The movie's themes are enormously resonant, which makes its doddering tastefulness that much more frustrating.

Potent enough to make me wish it were less clunky. It certainly won’t convert the jingoist fighting keyboardists, who probably won’t care that the president at the time the film is set — 2010 — is Obama, under whose watch the use of warrior drones has escalated exponentially. For them, Dick Cheney’s “dark side” still shines brightly.

Better approached as an “oooooh” and “awww” fest.

There are a couple of hundred instances in which Johnson or her actors could take condescending short cuts and slip into white-trash stereotypes, but I didn't see any - only gifted performers vanishing into their characters, refusing to pass judgment.

I reckon 90 of the movie's 106 minutes are thriller heaven. The windup, alas, isn't in the same league: Both humdrum and confusingly staged, it pales beside the volcanic climaxes of Franklin's "One False Move" (1992) and "Devil in a Blue Dress."

Most love stories are bland and generalized. This one takes you deep inside the dance.

It's depressing that this first movie in years to dramatize the American Revolution has so little to do with the politics of secession and so much to do with pop-culture themes of vigilantism.

My Cousin Rachel is a fascinating hybrid. It uses clunky devices out of a 19th-century melodrama, but its subject is modern: mistakes of perception and of metaphor. It’s about the myopia of the male gaze.

This Merchant of Venice comes roaring to life--when it stops, in effect, apologizing for its terrible anti-Semitic worldview and just gives itself over to some of the most furious courtroom drama ever written.

I'd have a lot more respect for Scott if he were actually the virtuoso he pretends to be. "Gladiator" had lousy, disjunctive action, and Kingdom of Heaven is even more maladroit.

It has its own explosively twisted originality. It's a geyser of exhilarating tastelessness.

An extremely pleasant, consistently amusing diversion that is never as uproarious as you might hope. But don't panic, as the Guide would say. In a pinch, it will do.

We’re supposed to take this more seriously because it takes itself more seriously.

I’m also guessing Kendrick did not want to come back. I’ve never seen her so flat-out bad — distracted, depressed, conviction-less. Anna, I still adore you, but you should have tried to make it work.

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.

Every unhappy movie is unhappy in its own way, and Joe Wright's Anna Karenina is as boldly original a miscalculation as any you're likely to see.

The farcical revelations — with their attendant puking and pounding on bathroom doors — work better than the grimly sincere ones. But only one bit goes clunk — the rest is deftly staged and acted.

Michelle Pfeiffer is brittle in a way that's not especially French, but she's poignant and very lovely. Rupert Friend, on the other hand, is difficult to warm up to, especially with his features hidden behind all that hair. It's not a good sign when you have to take the movie's word for it that the lovers at its center are really, really into each other.

Overlong at nearly two hours but still a sharp and amusing and subtle piece of filmmaking.

The tasteless bombardment that is Les Misérables would, under most circumstances, send audiences screaming from the theater, but the film is going to be a monster hit and award winner, and not entirely unjustly.

It strides above its crudeness like a colossus. It's smart people telling dumb jokes with a brilliant sense of irony. Anchorman gives you permission to laugh like an idiot.

It would be a horrific story even if underplayed, but Eastwood shoots it like a horror movie.

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

Does Rocky Balboa deliver? Weirdly enough, it does: I was jumping out of my seat during Rocky's bout. If you close your eyes and try to halve your IQ--aim for something between a baboon and a lemur--you might even think it's a masterpiece.

Pirates is OK, in patches even better.

It's also rather tawdry. The climax is as ludicrous as any Jack Bauer adventure, and Greengrass is always on shaky ground. Literally.

This is one of Penn's punishing, single-dimension performances, and it seems to be even more whiningly masochistic than what's called for in the script.

I was alternately delighted and irritated, though mostly a very happy camper.

I can't think of a movie this long that has left me so starved for a movie.

It isn’t much of a movie (unless your aesthetic was formed in high-school science class), but it will be hugely informative to aliens who land on this planet in a thousand years and wonder why there’s no welcoming committee.

In spite of the somewhat-cheesy climax, I came away admiring Unsane.

Spring Breakers strikes me as another of Korine’s calculated punk outrages, a sploog in Disney’s direction.

Bogdanovich has been so smooth and loving in his directorial attentions that he has forgotten to give the tragical farce proceedings any terrible momentum.

This is not to say that it is bad writing, shooting, or acting: It would need to be more ambitious to be bad. It is simply the most mundane sort of behavior presented in the most mundane sort of way.

If Luz had been a play, I’d probably have walked out halfway through, but as a film I found it eerie enough to stay rooted.

City of Men is clunky and often contrived, but there’s something haunting about fatherless boys in a blighted place fumbling to teach themselves what it means to be a man.

Without a character, he’s (Pitt) back to that soft, appraising, Robert Redford Jr. stare, his mouth half open as if he’s about to speak but plainly with nothing on his mind apart from, “This is what a movie star looks like without any lines.” The ghouls are having deeper thoughts.

My loathing of Split goes beyond its derivative ideas and second-hand parts.

A climactic twist that's among the stupidest I've ever seen-almost up there with another Costner movie, "No Way Out," and "The Life of David Gale."

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 result is reasonably entertaining and totally disposable. Which it shouldn’t be, given that its focus is on guns and the way that they facilitate mayhem. Gory farce can be bracing. It’s the glibness that’s unconscionable.

In my frequent role as “laugh accountant” for mainstream comedies, I’d estimate two-thirds of it works, and when it’s good it’s sooooo good — good enough to make you want to see Jordan Peele and Keegan-Michael Key and director Peter Atencio and co-writer Alex Rubens do it again and go farther out.

The movie has grand (and Grand Guignol) bits and pieces, but despite the hype it’s no big deal. By horror standards, the premise isn’t especially outlandish.

Burn After Reading is untranscendent, a little tired, the first Coen brothers picture on autopilot. In the words of the CIA superior, it’s "no biggie."

The ending is powerful..., but Shutter Island is a long slog.

A fine movie, beautifully acted, but it isn't easy to love--or to watch. It's a parade of miseries, made even more miserable by Gore Verbinski's direction.

Miss Potter hardly deserves ridicule. It's sweet with lovely Lake District vistas and a heartfelt endorsement of land conservation. It will certainly play well with older audiences and the kind of adolescent girls who draw faces in their O's.

A hilarious, poignant, lovingly ironic celebration of (Tammy Faye Bakker's) rise and fall and her refusal to be broken.

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

It’s a devastating film, almost too terrible to contemplate.

Miguel Arteta’s rollicking Youth in Revolt is one of several recent movies to elevate the generic coming-of-age teen sex comedy to a plane of surrealism.

Spiderwick. There’s nothing wrong with it that passion and personality couldn’t fix.

Such a clunkerama that it made me rethink all the nice things I wrote about its predecessor, "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe." Could the same people have made both films?

Solo: A Star Wars Story hits all its marks except the one it needed to hit most: accounting for one of pop culture’s most cantankerous charismatics.

At least this time "Goopy" Paltrow gets to perform a few superheroics herself, along with enduring some heavy-duty torture that’s bound to please her haters — for whom the sight of the top of her face being peeled off in "Contagion" was like Christmas in July.

Even with her stinko lines, Weaver has never been as flabbergastingly gorgeous and charismatic. She's tall and lean and meteor-hard, and you can almost believe there's really acid in her blood, and that no alien in its right mind would mess with her.

The first truly countercultural apocalypse fantasy.

One way you know that D.J. Caruso is a resourceful director is that he scares you silly with a minimum of violence and a few smears of blood. His job was certainly made easier by Morse, whose glassy demeanor and high, soft rasp suggests horrors that not even Quentin Tarantino could imagine.

This is ho-hum, straight-to-video material. And yet, even at its most crawlingly linear, Jackie Brown is diverting. If nothing else, I was diverted by the director's gall at stretching out those vacuous scenes.

The problem is that he — unlike most modern sci-fi directors, who throw so much CGI at you that they make miracles cheap — seems peculiarly stingy when it’s time to deliver.

A frightening, infuriating, yet profoundly compassionate documentary about the indoctrination of children by the Evangelical right.

As splashy as Killer Joe is, it's also, beat by beat, meticulously orchestrated, with no shortcuts to the carnage. When it comes to mapping psychoses, Letts and Friedkin are diabolically single-minded cartographers.

Jenkins is so desperate to give his love story a social and economic context that he stops the movie cold for a bunch of unrelated white people to articulate their grievances over gentrification--it's as if "Annie Hall" had paused for a seminar on agrarian reform.

Begin Again is very funny, mostly because Ruffalo makes such an adorably rumpled drunken a--hole.

A sour little psychodrama.