Gary Thompson

Cowriter and director Dee Rees (Pariah, Bessie) does a skillful job making us feel these inequities as they take place over time and become the fabric of lives, the basis of the assumptions people make about race and culture — the way things are.

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.

It is a portrait not of grinding earnestness but of a penetrating sincerity, the kind that reduces the cynical, the skeptical, and the callous to tears.

The Last Days is full of children and grandchildren. This idea of regeneration is a common thread that connects the stories of the five survivors, and provides the documentary with its unexpected warmth and redemptive power. [05 Mar 1999, p.51]

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

It’s not very deeply felt. Phoenix gives his all, but Ramsay plops us down in the middle of Joe’s breakdown, before we can get our emotional bearings. We figure out who he was — abused child, traumatized soldier – before we get a sense of who he is.

Well, the movie is trippy and almost willfully opaque — all I can say for sure is I left A Ghost Story feeling full.

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.

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).

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.

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.

The title promises something of a biography, but I left the movie wanting to know more about Stallworth.

Spielberg and Co. are obviously excited to be making The Post, and that palpable enthusiasm makes the movie feel so unusually lively for a big-studio movie. It’s nimble, crisp, passionate, full of verve and invention.

One part beautiful fable, one part cheesy "Rocky" clone, "Fly Away Home" is nonetheless a notch above most flimsy Hollywood movies made primarily for children. [13 Sep 1996, p.44]

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

The contributions of the actors now blend more seamlessly with the animation to create digital characters, and the characters are being integrated more successfully and believably into the landscape — director Matt Reeves works on a big widescreen canvas of sweeping, picturesque exteriors.

Krasinski makes suspension of disbelief easy, and the movie mostly works — I can’t remember the last time I was in a movie theater so quiet.

Hearts Beat Loud (despite is gooey title) has a bittersweet tone that tells us that Frank’s dreams are mostly wishful thinking. In that way, Hearts is of a piece with other movies by writer-director Brett Haley, wherein the art has the power to ameliorate rather than transform.

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.

The chief pleasure of Isle of Dogs is admiring its lovably tactile stop-motion creatures (more than 1,000 rendered characters, a stop-motion record) and meticulous backdrops, giving the movie a deep-focus depth of field uncommon to animation.

Night Comes On isn’t a docudrama, but it’s informed enough to give us a sense of the obstacles facing young women like Angel.

It is often a captivating visual marvel, using newfangled special effects in ways that aspire more to the poetic than the kinetic.

In general, Coco is the kind of first-rate technical production you expect from Pixar. On the other hand, it often feels more frantic than exciting, and it counts on moments of humor that often do not materialize.

Wilson and Hathaway don’t click. The characters feel as if they were workshopped separately, and efforts to combine their comic energy on screen fall flat.

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