David Edelstein

No movie in the last decade has succeeded in psyching out critics and audiences as fully as the powerful, rambling war epic The Thin Red Line.

The Lost City of Z(ed) isn’t as expansive as you might initially wish but still pulls you in and along.

Even at three-plus hours, the gargantuan Avengers: Endgame is light on its feet and more freely inventive than it needed to be. Given the year-long wait, its audience — Pavlovian dogs, myself (woof!) included — would have salivated over less. It’s better than Avengers: Infinity War, which was better than Avengers: Age of Ultron; and it is, for a change, conclusive.

Blue Ruin is more artful and evocative than any recent revenge picture, but it’s still drivel.

Clever novelist and screenwriter Alex Garland makes a half-dandy directorial debut with Ex Machina, a sci-fi film that — like much of his work — fakes excitingly in the direction of breaking new ground before turning formulaic so fast.

Obviously, this sort of taboo-flouting imagery isn't for everyone, but Park's vision is all of a piece.

It was splendid! No, it’s not a larky kid-pic. We're firmly in the realm of English horror.

What saves this big-budget cartoon behemoth is its modest, old-fashioned storytelling.

The drama is so muddled that Shakespeare seems to be getting in the way of Taymor's spectacle, the magic long gone by the time Prospera hurls her staff off into the sea.

Best in Show has an uproarious wild card in Fred Willard, who plays a hack commentator convinced that he's the most amusing fellow on television

The movie’s singular acting triumph is Nathan Fillion’s Constable Dogberry, one of Shakespeare’s simpler buffoons made poetic by understatement. Fillion speaks softly, with ­uninflected sincerity, a brilliant departure from the standard gregarious-­hambone Dogberry. It’s his insularity — his imperviousness to the interjections of more observant people — that makes him such a touchingly credible clown.

In the end, the point of this ridiculous, arduous, oft-interrupted odyssey turns out to be elusive — and is all the richer for it.

Anderson must have needed that bonkers third-hour climax because there was nowhere to go short of spontaneous combustion.

There is nothing wrong with the action sequences beyond their sheer length and number. They're in the "Road Warrior" mode: hyper-fast and vicious.

The director's beautiful detachment suggests a kind of cowardice.

Shows the dying tremors of a generation, and you might feel as if you can see every molecule, every atom give up the ghost.

The whole movie is a trick, reversing our expectations at nearly every turn and casting actors in roles that they were not exactly born to play, but do so with relish.

The film is lyrical, expansive, unbearably beautiful.

The final scenes are potent enough to save the movie.