James Rocchi

The film’s so inflated with moral importance that it becomes ridiculous, a Lifetime movie shoved into a cage and fattened with sermons and platitudes until it is ready to be served up cold and bland.

This is not a film in need of creativity, passion or energy; what it needed was restraint, consideration and direction. This is not saying that Birdman is awful, or a debacle; there are superb scenes here, as well as excellent performance moments, but they get drowned out in the flood of Iñárritu’s ambition, energy and fantasies.

One of the most tedious apocalypses to come down the chute in recent years, this series gets lamer, and lazier, with each entry. The only ‘Trial’ offered by this film is the ordeal of watching it.

There’s nothing here that actually digs deep enough into any of the films’ surface-level concerns — maturity, responsibility, parenting, siblinghood — to snap the movie out of its own slumber.

Calling Love Is Strange a great gay love story is both precise and inaccurate; I doubt I’ll see a more finely performed and beautifully crafted love story, with or without any mere modifiers, up on the big screen this year.

Top Five is that movie precisely so good and yet still so flawed that you can watch greatness slip out of its ambitious but awkward reach right in front of your eyes.

It comes across less like an actual documentary you would show to a curious audience than a good-job-everyone piece of internal documentation you’d screen at a company party or to potential outside investors.

Watching Madame Bovary, you find yourself wishing that Barthes had done something, anything with Flaubert’s novel other than slap it up on the screen as yet another tale of woe from long ago.

Two things make The Sessions stand out. One is the level of acting...The other is that, while we all know sex is more than boobs and bits and butts, it also does include those things, and The Sessions does not hide behind euphemism or gentle cutaways, montages or misty light.

A Most Violent Year asks you to watch and listen and pay close attention; it also rewards that investment with subtle, real pleasures and provocations. Set in that messy place where crime, business, law and politics intersect — which is to say, the real world — A Most Violent Year is a slow-burn drama about what kinds of compromises you'll make in order to tell yourself you haven't compromised.

Not only brutal but also brutally funny, Gone Girl mixes top-notch suspenseful storytelling with the kind of razor-edged wit that slashes so quick and clean you're still watching the blade go past before you notice you're bleeding.

It’s an American film that talks about race with strong feeling, common sense and good humor; it’s an indie screenwriting-directing debut as polished as it is provocative; it’s a satire that also lets its characters be people; it’s a showcase of clever craft and direction as well as whip-smart comedic writing brought to life by a dedicated, charismatic cast that also conveys real ideas and emotion.

Drive works as a great demonstration of how, when there's true talent behind the camera, entertainment and art are not enemies but allies.

Selma is one of the best American films of the year — and indeed perhaps the best — precisely because it does not simply show what Dr. King did for America in his day; it also wonders explicitly what we have left undone for America in ours.

The thing that wrecks The Human Centipede III isn’t how the film is disgustingly, degradingly unclean; instead, Six’s work is ruined by how his film is desperately, depressingly unclever.

Mr. Holmes may not be the biggest or boldest recent updating of Sherlock, but McKellen’s performance alone is almost reason enough to see it on the big screen.

Nothing here feels cheap or hasty, which is why the horror, when it comes, is all the more chilling and grim. Slick, sharp and legitimately terrifying, The Gift is a truly brilliant thriller — and, one hopes, the first of many features from Edgerton to come.

By taking the mob film back to its basics of land, family and death, Munzi’s film strips away artifice, cliche and gun-in-fist glamor to make a story of family and fury that burns cold and slow.

Unlike the stiff-jawed heroics of the other Marvel films, this feels a little looser and lighter, with Pratt as charming, amoral accidental leader Peter Quill, an earthling among the stars who, as he will tell you, is also known as the roving brigand “Starlord.”

Obvious Child is well-made and wickedly bold, but I still found myself wishing for a little more subtle maturity on the part of its characters and creators.

Heartfelt and haunting, sympathetic while still aware of the limits of sympathy, Wild incorporates beautiful direction, smart writing and brave acting.

Promising outer-space majesty and deep-thought topics like some modern variation on Stanley Kubrick's “2001: A Space Odyssey,” Interstellar instead plays like a confused mix of daringly unique space-travel footage like you’ve never seen and droningly familiar emotional and plot beats that you’ve seen all too many times before.

Cold in July never actually turns into the film you think it's going to, and even if that means there's a few unanswered questions ricocheting around your head as the credits roll, it also provides real, rich pleasures as it zigzags into the darkness.

Brand: A Second Coming is messy, muddled and occasionally maddening; it’s also a strong and stirring portrait of a funnyman who’s realized that some things just aren’t that funny.

Even with the film’s mild flaws and arms-wide-open approach, it tells a powerful, engaging and compelling story of how America challenged and changed five young black men, and how they in turn challenged and changed America.

There's an extraordinarily tough and smart delicacy to Still Alice, and it stretches far beyond the writing or Moore's performance or even the sympathy of the circumstance.

Ponsoldt, Paul and Winstead make a remarkably effective team for this film's points and purposes, and Smashed burns long after it goes down smoothly.

Attractively made, good-hearted, and more than a little redundant even as it's trying a little too hard, Earth to Echo nonetheless will hit the sweet spot for parents looking for innocent PG-rated entertainment for their kids in a summer full of PG-13 spectacle and mayhem.