Glenn Kenny

The details of how the father cleaned up, became a caregiver to his terminally ill second wife and tried to help his son are terribly moving.

The compassion expressed here, and the rich complexity of everything the movie takes in, make this Poitras’ best film.

Overall this remarkably glum, logy, convoluted and unengaging movie has only a vestigial relation to McCay’s work. McCay fans should beware. So should everyone else.

Even if you can sense the fun Crowe is having with the camera setups in certain scenes, Poker Face is simultaneously a lot and not all that much.

The film, directed by Jason Kohn (“Manda Bala” and “Love Means Zero”), turns the slogan “a diamond is forever” on its head with its title. Which is not about the durability of a diamond itself, but about the diamond market, which is being roiled by the high volume, and high quality, of synthetic diamonds.

The movie’s generic quality is spruced up by eccentric plots points (go-go dancers who also serve as undercover eco-activists, a nice Andy Sidaris-like touch) and kooky dialogue.

Utama sounds a warning even as it casts a spell, and the spell is one of life and death and eternal returns and never-ending struggles, and the rest we can try to take when the work is done for the day.

There are revealing glimpses into the early work of artists who would morph into entities that were slicker and ostensibly cooler.

After Hal and Josie’s meet-cute, they see sights blandly, philosophize blandly, blandly tiptoe around the notion of romance, and criticize each other — yes, blandly, but with an occasional touch of “salty” language.

The movie interweaves the contemporary sessions with a very selective — and, while not wholly sanitized, certainly discreet — account of her tumultuous past. Overall it’s a better-than-competent piece of fan service and a not unpersuasive bid for an auxiliary youth audience.

Filmmakers have arguably lost the plot, turning “War is hell” into a “Can you top this?” competition.

The movie builds up enough steam, and has a sufficient supply of jolts, to make Old Man stick to the ribs at least a little by the time it’s over.

It’s a provocative addition to the literature of incarceration.

The movie, directed by Jon Weinbach, offers several eye-opening mini-narratives on the way to a rematch with Argentina.

In the end, "TÁR" is not a diatribe or parable, but an interrogation, one that seeks to draw the viewers in, and compel them to consider their own place in the question.

The ending, in which the reunited Sirens play before an enthusiastic crowd, is heart-tugging and rousing, even for non-metal heads.

All of it staged and shot with conscientiousness and ingenuity rarely seen in films from any country anymore. It is indeed a phantasmagoria, and perhaps an overload.

A Jazzman’s Blues proves that when Perry applies himself in a particular fashion, his work can stand entirely on its own.

Nothing Compares is a worthwhile appreciation of the artist.

It’s all pretty predictable . . . This has the effect of making the finale, which actually takes an exit ramp off triumphalist clichés, genuinely surprising.

This is not an objective film. It is a polemic, a work of activism, a challenge to the viewer.

Three words characterize the first third or so of the picture: not funny enough.

This story is bound to lead to several showdowns at once, and the action climax is beautifully orchestrated by Hill: it’s suspenseful, jarring, and never descends to formal cheating of narrative cheapness to give the audience what it wants and deserves.

With 2008’s “In Bruges,” and now “The Banshees of Inisherin,” the Irish actors, under the writing and directing aegis of frequently pleasantly perverse Martin McDonagh, display a chemistry and virtuosic interplay that recalls nothing so much as the maestros of the early 20th-century Comedy of Exasperation.

This is one of the most satisfying films, genre or otherwise, of the year.

There’s a lot more here for tennis fans than you get in average sports documentaries.

The verbal analysis here isn’t always profound — one interviewee trots out the banal phrase “the conversation we should be having” — but the narrative as presented in archival footage (Kaepernick did not sit for an interview for this film) is exemplary.

[Miller's] mastery makes the movie eye-popping; his freedom and audacity make it surprising and unsettling.