Jeff Baker

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.

A featherweight comedy in which he fetches coffee for twentysomethings and calls them "ace" and "boss" without a hint of irony. It's painful to watch for anyone who remembers the thunder De Niro used to have at his fingertips.

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.

Jason Schwartzman is upstaged by his dog in 7 Chinese Brothers.

The Visit is not a head-scratcher, like so many of Shyamalan's movies. It's more of a shoulder-shrug. That's it? That's all you've got?

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.

It doesn't help that director Ken Kwapis stages everything like a sitcom, has no sense of pace, and buries the theme of late-life friendship under a haze of sentiment and trail dust.

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.

No Escape is xenophobic claptrap of the highest order.

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

Peter Bogdanovich made a great screwball comedy. This isn't it.

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.

Looks great, sounds great -- what's the problem? Everything else.

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.

Sorry. The sight of the 66-year-old Streep gyrating her way through "Wooly Bully" has a way of blocking out rational thought. It's frightening but temporary, like a bad dream. Or this movie.

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.

Nothing really connects, not the bullying brothers, not the frustrated parents, not the sight gags familiar to anyone who's seen the giveaway trailer. The whole production has a cheap, tacky look that the talented leads, Helms and Applegate, can't save despite considerable charm and effort.

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.