Gary Thompson

The idea of knowing your place may be offensive, but the idea of having a place is appealing.

There is honest sentiment in the arc of this story, aided by the chemistry between Gottsagen and LaBeouf, and by the warm mood of the film.

The movie sometimes seems (like its title character) to drag its feet. It’s messy, but with the untidiness of real life.

Your fear that the movie will never end is the most palpable fear offered by Chapter Two, which substitutes spectacle for the creeping, escalating dread the story is meant to have, and that the first movie had in modest amounts.

Part of its appeal lies in the truth and specificity behind the clunky presentation.

Linklater is a naturally empathetic filmmaker, and you can feel him trying to find something he can latch onto in the Desperate Housewives cat-fighting that dominates the movie in the early going. He’s helped ultimately by the story, and by the performances of Blanchett and Wiig, who are given room to embellish their characters and relationships.

Like many a good documentary, Honeyland takes us to a faraway land and culture in a way that reveals what is distinctive and what is universal about people.

Its purpose is to make the lives of the oppressed seem real by making their suffering real.

Despite the movie’s emphasis on physical action, it’s this chemistry that keeps the movie going.

There is a lot to like here, a few things to love. Like the fact that someone in Hollywood can still assemble a cast this large and impressive — someone who does not work for Marvel.

The new King is competent, reasonably entertaining, faithful to the original, wholesome, sometimes even enjoyable.

Stuber and Shaft are the kind of movies Hollywood made every month back in the ’80s and ’90s, until audiences — after a half dozen or so Lethal Weapons — grew tired of them. Stuber serves to remind us of why we liked them, and also that they wore out their welcome.

The script is shrewd about the problems that money can and can’t solve. Wild Rose also threads the needle between the genre expectations and its own brand of realism, grounded in the very palpable heartache Rose feels as she tries to survive in the space between her family obligations and her artistic ambitions.

A movie as atmospheric as Hereditary, narratively more satisfying, but much, much longer.

The value and uses of spectacle become part of the story in Far From Home, which can be read as a bit of playful in-house MCU criticism of CGI fatigue.

The movie simply has the best use of music (Talbot is also a musician) that I’ve seen this year, starting with a gorgeous score by Daniel Herskedal , and embellished with the smart, eclectic use of songs that speak to the city’s cultural history.

A funny, freaky, often profound animated adventure that is certainly the best movie ever made about a spork.

Jarmusch, in his droll way, both celebrates and subverts the familiar elements of the genre.

The movie mainly rides on the chemistry and charm of its two leads, and writer Kaling has given Thompson a substantial character to play.

Developments give Erskine a chance to play hurt and wounded, and she handles this as beautifully as she does the light comedy. She’s the plus in Plus One.

In some ways the movie’s crazy fictions suit today’s modern mash-up sensibilities, and its cast reflects the patterns of modern migration that are creating a whole new world.

The movie clicks, and given the sorry state of movie comedy, its ability to be consistently funny stands out. It is expertly, briskly paced — shout out to the judicious and effective editing of Jamie Gross.

A tweak toward conventional drama might have added to the movie’s impact, but it’s scrupulous and straightforward.

The movie is romantic and sexy, and its exploration of the masculine and feminine (fire and water, yin and yang) is inventive and playful.

Often fascinating, and sometimes even moving. There are lessons here about the cycle of life that can only be driven home by the real, random, and sometimes cruel dictates of fate.

The goal for director Stahelski is escalating violence and bloody chaos, pushed to the point of the preposterous and beyond.

The movie is at its best when the women are focused on the common enemy: getting older.

Yes, Tolkien is a little on-the-nose. But there is also an undeniable appeal to the life-art allusions that drive this earnest movie, which is handsomely mounted, well-cast, and well-acted.

This is an intriguingly weird, gender inversion of the Cinderella fantasy at the root of Pretty Woman.

Their personal stories are just as interesting, and taken together, they add insight into our nation’s unusual political moment, equal parts instability and possibility.

I wasn’t sure, after the tedium of Infinity War, that Marvel could wrap this up in a satisfying way. Turns out, it was a snap.

It’s a movie touching on labor issues that some may find a bit labored, but for the patient viewer there are insights — Leigh is giving us a history lesson that makes some pointed nods toward the current Brexit debate.

Result[s] in pleasant but forgettable results.

High Life has the trippy profundity of 2001, the human treachery of Aliens, and it also includes an Orgasmatron.

Yeoh’s fantastic as usual, making an impressive series of moves while not disturbing a single hair on her period Joey Heatherton hairdo.

The idea that “little” Jordan’s response to attractive older men is guided by her inner adult yields some creepy-funny laughs that many will find mostly creepy.

The direction by Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer, is competent and efficient, if not especially stylish or ambitious, and the squeamish should know the movie is backloaded with stabby, graphic, slasher-movie content.

Pulling us through all of it is Place, who imbues her character with a touching persistence, and gives striking depth and dimension to this “regular” woman, who used to be a regular.

The movie itself is chill. The filmmakers were going for (and mostly achieve) the 1980s Amblin Entertainment feel of a movie out to have an unpretentious good time — a welcome throwback to days before comic books movies became gargantuan and grim.

Hotel Mumbai sometimes surrenders to melodrama and action-genre imperatives, and it mixes actual people like Oberoi with fictional composites in a way that strays from the stringent just-the-facts discipline of a docudrama like United 93. But there is value, too, in its subjective approach.

The small miracles that do occur in The Mustang feel real, and well–earned.

The title character in Gloria Bell is a fiftysomething divorcée, and the movie is uncommonly generous to her by the sometimes standards of contemporary Hollywood.

Though mired in arcane subject matter, the movie is always lucid and reasonably engaging.

What Peele conjures here in the final moments is clever enough to remind us that he was telling an intricate story all along, and not just piling up bodies.

The movie is actually not bad, until it goes full Lifetime Channel crazy in the third act.

Though it’s been many years in development, it remains a timely look at the dangers of our increasingly outsourced, privatized military-intelligence network.

Neil Jordan gives us a fancier version of the Lifetime staple in Greta.

It’s easy enough to guess where this is going, but the movie gets the details right, and the relationships play out in a satisfying way, aided by Merchant’s consistently funny writing and light touch.

The movie really soars when the dragons do the same — as in previous installments, the best shots are of dragons maneuvering through the clouds.

It’s a story with too many influences, no cohesion, no apparent narrative purpose.

The acting is fine throughout, and director Labaki (she plays Zain's lawyer) has a genius for handling untutored performers like Al Rafeea.

They Shall Not Grow Old avoids geopolitics to concentrate on the lives of the common soldier and the reality of trenches — the horseplay, camaraderie, boredom, disease, squalor, and terror that were all part of life on the front. It’s a sobering, moving success.

Cold War, a love story about music and musicians, is for people who found A Star Is Born way too cheerful and optimistic. It’s pretty downbeat, but it’s also another black-and-white (subtitled) marvel from Pawel Pawlikowski.

There is a lot of plot in those final minutes, and don’t bother trying to outguess the magician. He pulls a rabbit out of a hat, just to distract you from the next rabbit.

This is a funny, affectionate and surprisingly touching film.

Even if you haven’t seen The Intouchables, you have a pretty good idea where the drama is headed. Still, The Upside nonetheless does an amiable job of taking you there, thanks to hard work by the two leads.

The story circles cleverly back on itself, putting an original spin on the familiar tale of the burned-out investigator reckoning with the defining event in a checkered career.

A more nuanced Bale portrait of a man enamored of secrecy, strong-arming, militarism, and vigilante impulses can be found in The Dark Knight.

Ben is Back, operating with the flexibility of fiction, flirts with the idea that a mother’s intuition and love can be decisive, even as it acknowledges the pitiless, relentless nature of the disease. Or maybe all the movie wants to propose is that miracles — rare as they are — can happen.

The movie works best when it falls back on plain old acting. Merritt Wever is sweet presence as the hobby shop worker and gentle soul who understands Mark’s obsessions, and appreciates his art. Her scenes with Carell are the movie’s least technological, and its best.

The elegiac air that surfaces here and there in Bathtubs blends nicely with Young’s own final days on Late Show, reading his separation papers and wondering how to look for a job in his 50s.

The more-is-more approach to superhero movies is usually a deadly mistake, but it works nicely in the animated Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.

While the movie is often dazzling, it’s also frequently dull.

Ronan is good (as usual) as the spirited and rather haughty Mary, making the most of what, to be fair, is the plum role.

This glossy, handsomely budgeted musical deploys topflight talent throughout, from casting to choreography to songwriting to animation and modern digital effects, and though it achieves a Poppins-like level of hyper-competence, it lacks the most elusive attribute we associate with Mary — magic.

The foster-care comedy Instant Family has more heart than laughs, but enough of the former to squeak by.

The premise is a borderline gimmick, but director Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave) invests the movie with enough grit — it's set in the world of hardboiled Chicago politics — to draw us in.

As played by Jackman, he's imperious, self-righteous, and humorless, and it's hard to imagine such a figure capturing the imagination of the public, policy acumen notwithstanding. The movie is better at showing Rice (Sara Paxton) as a woman trampled by the press stampede — ditto Hart's wife Lee, played elegantly by Farmiga.

Buster Scruggs, it seems, is about not just the Old West, but The West in a larger sense.

Ali and Mortensen make the friendship feel real, using some unexpected tools from Farrelly's kit. His comedic instincts help the movie tiptoe through some dangerous cultural minefields.

The movie sticks to formula, and spells everything out.

Hedges is an efficient, expressive actor, and has the knack for conveying complex information with a look or a gesture, as he does here, suggesting the turmoil within his character on the night when his parents assign him to undergo therapy.

Pike plays Colvin as selfless, but also a woman who would have pitched a drink in your face for calling her that. The movie takes Colvin's cue. At no point is her personal drama bigger than the suffering of the people on whom she is reporting, and the concluding events in Syria are particularly well-handled and tactful.

Kahn surveys artists, dealers, auctioneers, and gallery operators to provide a synopsis of the New York art world, and is at its most interesting when profiling artists who represent differing attitudes toward the way money affects their work.

Can You Ever Forgive Me? charts the offbeat alliance and ultimately the friendship that develops between the Hock and Israel, a bond that exists somewhere between proximity and affinity.

It's a bold and borderline eccentric performance by Mulligan.

Psychologists quoted in the film have a scary-sounding term for one of the ingredients found in most exceptional athletes. It's called a "rage to master."

There are a number of movies about addiction scheduled to be released this fall, and although The Oath isn't mentioned as being among them, maybe it should be.

He's not an easy man to read, and he's not meant to be (Foy carries most of the emotional load). First Man relies on Gosling's own low-rev screen presence to hold the viewer's interest. Not until we reach the surface of the moon does the movie really venture into his head (almost literally in terms of camera point of view).

It's a nice gesture that he's chosen The Old Man and the Gun as his exit vehicle, gifting fans with heaping helpings of his relaxed charm, making a nod to the Sundance Kid, and even the flimflam fun of The Sting.

Phoenix has a way of drawing most of the camera's energy toward him, but Reilly, in his own mysterious and quiet way, can hold his own with anyone, be it Ricky Bobby or King Kong.

Jenkins does something daring with the story's resolution – conceptually brilliant, but you may think that it pays a small dividend on a large emotional investment.

At every turn, Starr's situation gets more nuanced and more engrossing, and in the hands of director George Tillman Jr., the movie maintains a confident, sweeping scope without every losing command, or its nerve.

We're meant to thrill at Colette's emancipation, but when she breaks it off with wild Willy and finds true love (with Denise Gough) for the first time – built on respect and honest affection — it looks dreadfully dull.

You see that Cooper has taken the frayed ends of American culture and knitted them together — male and female, urban and rural, folksy and hip, rich and poor, finding common ground through music. You see songs move through different musical idioms, and you see the power that can have, as long as people are willing to listen.

Sometimes these anecdotes show courageous and admirable striving, and a genuine love of science. Sometimes they show something less inspiring – the way systems can be gamed by competitors whose specialized knowledge of rules combine with tactics and strategies that give them an advantage, so what's being measured and honored is not always aptitude and innate genius.

Based on a novel by Ian McEwan, The Children Act wanders into the tricky space created when what is moral and what is legal diverge, and law is made to suffice.

The movie's best window into Foley comes via his music, played expressively by Dickey, whose performance finds humor in Foley's rather sad life.

The most engaging passages in the scattershot Fahrenheit 11/9 address the water scandal in Flint.

There's something to be said for the movie's heavy pour of mommy noir — a jigger of Bombeck, a dash of Highsmith. It's a cocktail with a kick.

You could call Juliet, Naked a romantic comedy, and you could probably predict with some accuracy how the relationships play out. But it's the details here that count, and they paint a substantive and truthful picture of middle age, and the way it is acquainted with regret and failure.

It's Close who nearly rescues The Wife, grabbing control of it in the crucial final moments, managing to transcend the script to suggest a more complex portrait of Joan, whose life choices form their own narrative, with their own reward.

Isaac and Kingsley are game, and their scenes have decent dramatic tension, but of course the outcome is never in doubt, and in the end, Weitz is left to rely on more contrived thriller elements to give the movie a finishing kick, which feels nonetheless like a letdown.

This is another fine performance from Hall, who's given a good character to play by writer-director Andrew Bujalski.

The story is nonlinear, a collection of images that can suddenly assemble into an emotion.

The movie will play in IMAX theaters and 3-D, which is the best way of seeing it. Director Albert Hughes (yep, the same guy who along with brother Allen did Menace II Society and Dead Presidents) and cinematographer Martin Gschlacht (the recent creep-out Goodnight Mommy) capture and construct some compelling images.

Crazy Rich Asians is a romantic comedy and a fairy tale, and it helps to keep the latter in mind as you ramp up suspension of disbelief to necessary levels.

The movie is a cheerful pastiche, unpretentious and efficient, and the giant shark, when it finally shows up, is a pretty good special effect, although I’m not sure I’d value it at $150 million (the amount of Chinese money it took to make the movie).