Gary Thompson

A movie that succeeds as a tearjerker, if you can withstand those pushy moments (and there are a few) when it kind of makes you want to hate kindness.

The movies may be frivolous (and stitched together from British TV shows), but they are unique — they have an astute understanding of mature male friendship that is rare, even in a male-dominated industry.

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.

The movie sticks to formula, and spells everything out.

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.

Game Night is not the greatest comedy in the world, but it has a great grasp of the ingredient that makes comedy work, identified centuries ago as brevity.

The shared energy created by audience and performer that is so restorative to Garland is where the movie finds life.

What stands out, though, is the dynamic between Dana and Ali. It’s been some time since I’ve seen sisters drawn this well and this convincingly.

Marshall overcomes some early stiffness and flat-footed storytelling and evolves into an engaging courtroom drama, where witness-stand theatrics and Perry Mason flourishes give the movie needed narrative momentum.

Here, Leitch uses brevity to do for witty action what it famously does for wit alone.

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.

Seal, though, makes for a poor fall guy. Liman had it right in that first scene: The turbulence in Seal’s life was of his own making.

There is enough space for Bell and Bening to do some good work, particularly Bell, who has more to chew on here than anything he’s done since Billy Elliot.

Last Flag Flying lacks the casual, lived-in realism you usually find in a Linklater film. You don’t buy the men as long-separated pals, and so you don’t really buy the premise — the connection that caused Doc to seek out these men is not visible on screen.

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.

Hawkins — small and mighty as usual — draws her energy from the quiet courage in Maud’s drive to create, to modify and adorn her bleak world with the images that express the contentment she knew as a child.

What Kruger does is remarkable — showing Katja paralyzed with grief, but doing so in a way that does not paralyze the story.

What is Cooper after here? He seems to want us to gasp at the naturalistic horror of it all, drawn from history and accompanied with the sober denunciation of actual frontier massacres (Blocker is a veteran of Wounded Knee), but the parade of grotesque violence (murders, rapes, suicides) suggests something more surreal, less literal.

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.

Years from now, chances are that when people sit around and talk enthusiastically about that movie with Brie Larson and Samuel L. Jackson, the subject is most likely to be Kong: Skull Island.

Clockwatchers is an updated 9 to 5, and as such, replaces that movie's straightfoward story of liberation from male oppression with something more Generation X-ish - liberation from a kind of self-imposed malaise. [12 Jun 1998, p.F7]

Fast Color is disciplined and restrained, yet feels a few tweaks away from being the rousing origin story it aspires to be.

Although the sci-fi trappings of Downsizing make it seem like a big departure from Payne’s previous work — The Descendants, Sideways, About Schmidt — it is the same in important ways. It’s a movie about a man suddenly separated from people he’s loved, trying to learn how to live again.

It finds the right harmonized note of melancholy and humor in its closing moments.

It’s a quietly inspiring portrait of selflessness, although not always a stirring one. The movie has a muted tone that tamps down emotions, and the acting is intentionally low-key throughout.

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

Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One is competent, occasionally rousing entertainment that nonetheless left me a little bummed.

Sheridan leans toward the lurid, but with the blood is a marrow you don’t get from other movies, where action is increasingly tied to fantasy. Soldado bludgeons its way into touchy border politics, and maybe lucks its way into a story focused on the moral imperative of protecting a single child.