Jeff Baker

A highly entertaining, informative movie about how the subprime mortgage crisis led to a worldwide financial meltdown in 2007-08. The fact that such a movie is so unusual is one big reason why the meltdown occurred and why it easily could happen again.

It's duck soup for cinephiles.

It feels more like a retreat for all involved, a chance to kick back and bounce some ideas off each other and the surrounding mountains. Several of them stick and give Youth an emotional core that covers the bare spots. Caine and Keitel, old pros on the home stretch, deserve nothing less.

The subject is fascinating, the talent is undeniable, but the humanity that made Lili Elbe so memorable gets lost along the way.

A wonderful documentary.

If Abrams didn't take many chances, he didn't make many mistakes, either. First, Do No Harm became Don't Mess With Success, and it worked. Show Me the Money is sure to follow.

In the Heart of the Sea doesn't trust itself enough to be great.

All Things Must Pass is a labor of love by actor Colin Hanks, a Sacramento native who grew up on the store.

It doesn't all work. The energy and the performances by Cannon, Parris and Hudson can't carry a movie that careens from camp to tragedy to farce without taking a breath. Several scenes could have been cut, particularly a long, dumb take on sex and the Civil War that ends with a horny old goat in Stars-and-Bars skivvies.

What is special about The Good Dinosaur isn't the characters...but the backgrounds.

Creed is no "Raging Bull" -- it's a little too long and throws in an unnecessary disease to gin up the emotional content of the third act -- but it's surprising proof that iconic franchises that started in the 1970s can be revived in all the right ways.

Stick around for the credits, when the real Trumbo talks about the effect of the blacklist on his daughter. It's the real thing.

All involved bring a warm eccentricity that lifts what in lesser hands could be a collection of cliches about the contrasts between the Old World and the New.

A snapshot of what happened at a particular time and place and doesn't try to glamorize its subjects or make any larger points about what it all means. By refusing to do so, by celebrating the process over the outcome and the work over the reward, it becomes a special experience, a movie that matters.

With such actors at work and with locations including a first-time use of the Houses of Parliament, Suffragette should look and be a richer experience than it is.

Not bad, no need to wake Roger Moore from his mid-morning nap and bring him out of retirement, but not special.

Director Douglas Tirola threads his way through a minefield of egos and grudges in his interviews and does some interesting stuff with animation in his presentation of some of the magazine pieces.

A movie that underplays its many strengths. You don't realize how good it is until it's over.

It's exhausting, impressionistic, and ultimately hollow, extraordinarily well-acted but not nearly as relevant as "The Social Network."

Uses a deft mix of archival footage and interviews with historians and some very articulate Panther veterans.

Freeheld isn't bad -- with that kind of source material and topline acting talent it almost couldn't be -- but it could have been much more than it is.

The violence is shocking, effective and soaked into the dry brown landscape.

What makes The Martian work is Damon.

The rare movie that improves as it goes along, shedding its cliches and getting down to what matters.

It's fun to watch The New Girlfriend the way it's fun to drink a glass of Champagne, and about as memorable.

Makes the case that Fischer's chess prowess and his mental illness were inextricable. The chess fed the paranoia which supported the chess which drove Fischer deeper into madness, and so on.

Rather than explore and embrace the contradictions within Jobs ("he had the focus of a monk but none of the empathy" is the best he can do), Gibney puts the hammer down.

Mistress America is a different kind of channeling, straight through the screwball comedies of the 1980s, "After Hours" and "Something Wild," back to "Bringing Up Baby," where Katharine Hepburn sang "I Can't Give You Anything But Love" to a leopard while Cary Grant looked for the last bone (the intercostal clavicle) for his Brontosaurus skeleton.

What it doesn't do -- and this is what makes this "Diary" different -- is let what happens define her or ruin her.

The End of the Tour can feel like a down-home deification at times: Like Einstein riding a bike, only it's Wallace going to the Mall of America. It's not sentimental, though, at least not until the very end, and is moving in beautiful, unexpected ways.

It's overlong and sanitized but succeeds in presenting an important part of contemporary American culture to a mainstream audience.

Laverty gives the scenes between Jimmy and Father Sheridan a sharp edge, and Ward and Norton do the rest. Ryan shot on 35mm and makes the whole movie glow.

A tight little thriller that recalls the good old days of "Fatal Attraction" and "The Hand That Rocks the Cradle," back when suspicious packages appeared on the doorstep, no affair went unpunished, and the family dog was never safe.

Kyle Patrick Alvarez, whose previous movie was the filmed-in-Oregon "C.O.G.," stages the many torture scenes in a tight, claustrophobic way that works to heighten tension.

Green is onto something with this paper towns metaphor, but it's nothing Rush didn't say better in "Subdivisions."

What Ruffalo brings is a gravelly voice, soulful eyes, and absolute commitment. He's a little aw-shucksish in a Midwestern way but never corny and with a strong backbone. You like him and wouldn't want to cross him. Frank Capra would love Ruffalo. So would Hitchcock.

Ant-Man wastes the regular-guy appeal of its star, Paul Rudd, on a bland, by-the-numbers story that starts small and keeps on shrinking, a metaphor for the movie itself. Its modest ambitions are admirable and unrealized.

A highlight of Sunshine Superman is archival footage of Boenish attaching a homemade ladder to the side of the cliff, extending it 20 feet out into nothing, climbing out and sitting on a bicycle seat, and facing back toward the cliff with a movie camera.

I'll See You in My Dreams takes its time getting to unexpected places and makes you glad to follow along.

Heaven Knows What is a hard movie to recommend because of its unrelenting intensity and hideously depressing subject. It's a hard movie, period, but it's exceptionally well-made and beautiful in its execution.

That this is a documentary, this family lived in New York for decades in almost complete separation from its neighbors, is astonishing.

Writer-director Patrick Brice is interested only in his male characters; Alex and Kurt work out their issues while their wives serve as support or comic foils. The laughs stop about halfway through, and the 79-minute running time feels about right.

Two Days, One Night is timely and timeless, a social statement about current economic conditions and a parable about individual and community. Cotillard's performance is revelatory, one to be admired and studied for generations.

A movie as bold and deep as a Turner landscape, as sharp as light on water.

Strickland has the courage of his convictions and maintains a tight focus on the proceedings while allowing the occasional feather of humor to float down on the pillow.

The tone -- deadpan, wistful, silly but never stupid -- is just right and puts What We Do in the Shadows next to "This Is Spinal Tap" as a mockumentary that shows its subjects as human -- in this case, inhuman -- in their hopes and fears.

What matters in '71 is the action, and the look on O'Connell's face when he emerges from a shed into the Belfast night.

The music they made is timeless, and Denny Tedesco deserves credit for giving them the credit they deserve and for working through the music rights issues that delayed a theatrical release for seven years.

It's a sad story, and Asif Kapadia's documentary tells it without narration or commentary. Instead there's a brilliantly edited succession of interviews and performances and news footage that glides through her charmed, doomed life.

Me and Earl is smart and appealing, but it spends way too much effort saying "I'm not like that" when it really is.

Dope has energy and smarts and a heart in all the right places.

It's a welcome change from a conventional birth-to-now biography, somewhere between the straight narratives of "Ray" and "Get On Up" and the fractured, Cate Blanchett-in-sunglasses, Richard Gere-on-horseback meta-fable "I'm Not There."

Everyone is in top form. Pearce, the Australian who's elevated everything from "L.A. Confidential" to "Mildred Pierce," sinks his gleaming teeth into the comic aspects of Trevor and doesn't let up. Smulders, now part of the Marvel universe, is edgy and fun. Corrigan is best of all.

At the heart of Iris is love, between Iris and the camera, Maysles and his subject, and Iris and Carl. They nailed it, this crazy life, and they're still getting a kick out of it.

Good Kill deserves credit for framing these important issues in a credible, visually challenging drama, but writer-director Andrew Niccol doesn't take his material anywhere interesting.

The Salt of the Earth presents not just a passing of time through one man's remarkable life but a change of perspective.

The easy chemistry between Binoche and Stewart is reason enough to see Clouds of Sils Maria.

A kinda funny, kinda charming movie about finding out what really matters.

When the reenactors start to talk, In Country gets more complicated and interesting.

It's an odd concept, turning a zombie movie into a downbeat actor's showcase, but first-time director Henry Hobson gets great work from a subdued Schwarzenegger and an even better performance from Abigail Breslin in the title role.

Just when you think all the great rock and roll stories have been told, along comes Lambert & Stamp.

Mad Max: Fury Road sets new standards in old-school stunt work and car chases and does it in service of an idea-driven story with a beating heart and an action star for our troubled times in Charlize Theron.

Baumbach loses his grip a little in the third act and gives Stiller too much babbling and ranting. The denouement at a tribute dinner for Leslie is unsatisfying for all concerned but is redeemed by a coda that assures everyone that happiness is possible in this crazy world.

The writer-director has done a lot of opera, onstage and on film, and he sure is fond of the dramatic gesture. His leading man, Poelvoorde, is not at first glance the type of guy who'd captivate two such stunning women, but this is France, and his desire and anguish is real.

The 82-year-old director has a light, assured touch and wrote a script that gives his actors space to shine.

Harris, crinkly and laser-eyed, has enough gravity to hang with Neeson. Their scenes together anchor a movie that gets away from itself at times and relies on the tired family-in-jeopardy final act.

Fetisov is a jovial, imperious guide through an era of Cold War politics, when sports were a battleground between East and West and no sport was more important to the Soviets than hockey.

A genre movie like this one depends on pacing, and Focus hits at least three dead spots in the final act. Writer-directors John Requa and Glenn Ficarra get so much right -- the sleek look, the plot set-ups, those montages in New Orleans, the supporting cast -- that it's painful when they can't maintain Focus and land it, before and after the big reveal.

It's a comedy with an easy message, and it's sort of sweet. Not too raunchy, not too challenging. A good date movie for sophomores.

OK, got it. It's a spy movie spoof, "Austin Powers" with more violence and less camp, a Bond parody that zeroes in on the Roger Moore era, when the sets and gadgets got bigger and the stories got dumber.

The camera tricks, the pacing, and the superbly choreographed set pieces are all there, in the right order, primed and timed like a string of fireworks. But what's holding Blackhat together is a dopey, ham-fisted script that plays like it's plucked from the bottom of the James Bond slush pile.

The problem with Inherent Vice, and what keeps it a step below "The Master" and "There Will Be Blood" and Anderson's best movies, is that all the Pynchon threads and dead ends come apart in the middle and aren't really pulled back together.

Wahlberg's The Gambler is California Lite.