David Edelstein

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

It's an unusually funny, literate, worked-out script, and Mendes seems hell-bent on making the best Bond since "Goldfinger" - or the best, period, given that he exhumes Bond's old Aston Martin only to shoot it cheekily to pieces.

The vision is as hateful as it is hate-filled, but the fusion of form and content is so perfect that it borders on the sublime.

Boorman pays a price for his neutrality: The General isn't an emotional grabber. But on its own terms it's nearly perfect. The magic is there but below the surface.

No, I couldn't be more pleased with what the screenwriter, Steven Kloves, and the director, Mike Newell, have wrought this time.

Adam Shankman's movie of the Broadway Hairspray gets better as it lumbers along, but there’s something garish about its hustle--it’s like an elephant trumpeting in your face.

This is an amazing movie.

A spectacular three-hankie tragic love story--sometimes dumb and often clunky and always pretty cornball, but just about irresistible.

Isn't just the most explosively entertaining movie musical in a couple of decades. It's going to be the most influential: the one that inspires the rebirth of the Hollywood musical.

Starred Up is an edgy, teeming thriller, brilliantly disorienting, making strange a world we thought we knew, at least from other movies.

This supernatural comedy isn't just Allen's best film in more than a decade; it's the only one that manages to rise above its tidy parable structure and be easy, graceful, and glancingly funny, as if buoyed by its befuddled hero's enchantment.

First-time director Richard Kwietniowski has fun with the collision of high and low culture, and he does elegant work.

Lindholm finds a unique balance between social and individual responsibility. There’s plenty of blame to go around.

This is by light-years the most entertaining movie of the year. How many apocalyptic sci-fi action extravaganzas leave you feeling as if the world is just beginning?

Woman at War takes its tone not from von Trier but deadpan pranksters like the Finnish Aki Kaurismaki, whose absurdities have an undercurrent of tragedy. Erlingsson has a magnetic heroine in Geirharðsdóttir, who’s lithe and athletic without being a show off, and underplays as a good soldier would.

The movie is an old-fashioned rouser with a lot of new-fashioned virtuosity.

No actor is as brilliant, or as cunning, as Denzel Washington at portraying superhuman coolness and the scary prospect of its loss.

It's Lawrence who knocked me sideways. I loved her in "Winter's Bone" and "The Hunger Games" but she's very young - I didn't think she had this kind of deep-toned, layered weirdness in her.

Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me is one of those showbiz docs that’s not exactly pleasurable but offers a penetrating glimpse — sometimes too penetrating — into what it means to eat, drink, and be contrary in the public sphere.

This is one of the most galvanizing documentaries I've ever seen.

Midway through, an eerier theme creeps in, all the more powerful for Herzog's lack of insistence. By the "end of the world" he means the end of the world.

The Martian is shot, designed, computer-generated, and scripted on a level that makes most films of its ilk look slipshod. Scott and writer Drew Goddard aren’t trying to make an “important” sci-fi movie like Interstellar. They aim lower but blow past their marks.

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

I found the film -- excruciatingly flat-footed, with one of the most exasperating scores (by Philip Glass) ever written. The most fascinating thing in the movie is a nose.

None of the characters has a true home. Comedies end with weddings, with order replacing chaos, but After the Wedding is not a comedy and weddings don’t fool anyone.

It's hugely entertaining, it's spectacularly acted, and it pricks you in all kinds of places. Maybe the best thing is to see it and let it bug you, too.

The sheer scale of the movie is mind-blowing--it touches on every aspect of modern life. It's the documentary equivalent of "The Matrix": It shows us how we're living in a simulacrum, fed by machines run by larger machines with names like Monsanto, Perdue, Tyson, and the handful of other corporations that make everything.

It's impressive, in the sense that a sucker-punch impresses itself on your skull.