Joe McGovern

Despite the silly and sentimental nature of his dialogue, Bridges, in this wondrous emeritus phase of his career, sells every single line. Well, almost every.

Too much of the plot is spun with vanilla, especially tacked-on scenes of Walls’ starched careerist life in New York City with her Banker Boyfriend (Max Greenfield), presumably to engineer more screen time for the lead actress.

It’s stronger as a collection of Ferguson voices and figures, such as rapper Tef Poe, who quiets a crowd in one scene by warning, “You ain’t gonna outshoot [the police].” In moments like those, Whose Streets? is a tragic yet essential portrait of a community under siege.

Lieberher delivered such a nuanced performance in Midnight Special (ditto Tremblay, in Room) that The Book of Henry can (we hope) just be chalked up to a case of early-career hiccups.

Years from now, when the orbital politics of the film have dissolved, what will resonate about Beatriz at Dinner will be the sight of Hayek — leaps and bounds more enchanting a screen presence than the performers surrounding her — as a poignant object of neglect.

Schreiber buoys the film with his characteristic blend of nuance and smirking humor, exuding likability though never lionizing the self-described “selfish prick” that he’s portraying.

Director Gaby Dellal (On a Clear Day) admirably avoids the trap in which transgender characters are portrayed as victims, but she way overcranks the “movie” neuroses of her three characters, muffling any human spark.

In terms of content and meaningfulness, Terrence Malick’s Song to Song is the cinematic equivalent of a Trump press conference. Incoherent, disconnected, self-interrupting, obsessed with pointless minutiae and crammed full of odd, limp stabs at profundity from a closed-off man in his 70s who apparently has no ability to edit or accept constructive criticism.

Shirley MacLaine’s well-deserved reputation as a salty, snappy grand dame — forged from later-career work like "Terms of Endearment," "Steel Magnolias," "Postcards from the Edge," "Bernie", etc. — unfortunately precedes her in this sloppy, saccharine drama costarring Amanda Seyfried.

Land of Mine is essentially bomb porn.

By the film’s shattering end, you’ll feel the spirit of Arthur Miller, one of the great dramatists of the 20th century, reaching across the transom to touch one of the great dramatists of the 21st.

Lavish with stunning imagery, the experience will ripple into your dreams.

Patriots Day benefits from a robust, concentrated timeline and sheer bat-out-of-hell pacing.

The directorial debut of actress Katie Holmes, starring herself as Rita, a drunk single mother living out of her car, is the latest well-intentioned yet lousy-with-clichés treatment in the hard-luck-woman subgenre.

The weirdest and rarest misfire in Lee’s illustrious career.

Two key aspects elevate the whole experience above its modest trappings. First, the dark, beautiful musical score by composer Jeff Grace works excellently as a lush, hummable homage to Ennio Morricone, while still feeling very true to West’s horror movie roots. And second, in the film’s best performance, John Travolta appears as the frustrated father of Ransome’s bad boy.

13th is a titanic statement by a major American voice. Viewing — right now — should be mandatory.

Schnetzer, whose stock is sure to soon rise, is a shape-shifter — you’d never look at this gay Irish 1980s activist in Pride and conclude that it was the same person — but in only a few roles so far, he’s shown an extraordinary ability to portray both vulnerability and the mask screwed on to hide it.

The movie’s premise has trouble sustaining a feature-length running time, getting mired in repetitive jokes and a third-act swing into harder-core suspense that never really connects.

The pace of the drama is riveting, as it jumps back through the decades to place the accident in the context of the nuclear arms race.

Portman’s evocation of this world has a strange, captivating pull. Assisted by the great Polish cinematographer Slawomir Idziak (Gattaca, Black Hawk Down, The Double Life of Veronique), she has created a visual landscape filled with nightmares.

British director Sean Ellis has a knack for staging the film’s early plotting-the-scheme scenes in dimly lit, monochrome interiors, but the storytelling is disappointingly square.

This arena, unfortunately, is no Thunderdome. The chariot race is sloppily framed, choppily edited, and droopily choreographed, with special effects that look like they needed another few passes through the CGI machine.

The dean was more of a cartoon in Roth’s book, but Letts lends him a slippery wit that, much like the movie, is surprisingly potent.

The shaggy, semi-focused but assuredly offbeat debut film from Zachary Treitz (co-written with House of Cards actress Kate Lyn Sheil) blends the Civil War with Mumblecore for one of the year’s most authentic trips in the way-back machine.

Despite fine intentions and four lovely performances from the female leads, Our Little Sister is simply too light to be felt. It floats away in the wind—and the memory — like a paper umbrella.

The Suskinds’ humongous hearts are obviously in the right place and their openness is to be admired and encouraged — even if a book, more than a movie, remains the better venue to fairly and honestly tell Owen’s extraordinary story.

Ross wants to shake up the format­—notably with a few scenes set 85 years after the war—but like so many directors who have tackled ­historical social issues before him, he confuses noble, cornball sermonizing for art.

The powerful thrust of the film comes from its critique of the media.

The film takes a false turn in its final act, but there is a certain melancholy enchantment in Davies’ golden-hued countryside. When a crowd sings “Auld Lang Syne” at a wedding reception, he makes you feel the tender warmth of a hearth fire alighted in the world.

Criminal’s story moves like a fat cow. Costner and Oldman’s characters are sluggishly chasing after — irony alert! — a big black duffel back full of $100 bills, hidden behind a stack of George Orwell books.

A twisted helix of "Memento" and "Munich" without either of those film’s craft, depth, or thematic murkiness.

The visual effects are excellent, but director Roar Uthaug, who’s been tapped to reboot the "Tomb Raider" franchise, splashes in the clichés of big, dumb American action movies.

The movie version of his life, fittingly, is a massive vat of hot cocoa with a mountain of whipped cream on top — sweet and warm and made with a ­mission to satisfy everyone who takes a sip.

Once again, the shaky handheld camerawork in the battle scenes don’t portray chaos so much as a sense that the cinematographer was being attacked by desert bees

The film’s glacial pacing and drily absurd tone mimic their relationship with a bit too much discipline.

The movie’s silly-arty aesthetic is regurgitated Polanski, and there’s a shameless script steal from "Presumed Innocent."

Erupting like a scalding geyser from the ground right beneath our feet, Spike Lee’s daring, dizzying, sympathetic, symphonic, vital, vehement Chi-Raq is the most urgently 2015 movie of 2015.

How could a movie about a great screenwriter have such a terrible screenplay?

The film disappointingly ditches the cartoonist’s modest visual formula for a photorealistic 3-D playground courtesy of the animation studio behind "Ice Age."

The big draw should be 3-D, which enhances the visual intimacy, though only in shooting a male orgasm does Noé go gonzo with the format.

Hugh Jackman gives the movie a bit of twinkle as a pirate who breathes pixie dust to stay fresh and relevant. Maybe the people behind Pan should have snorted some.

The 17-minute wire-walking sequence is the most majestic simulation of a real event since the ship sinking in Titanic—a dazzling triumph of photorealistic digital effects, which exhibits Zemeckis’ mastery of both CGI and pace.

The thin story has been stretched like Silly Putty to feature-film length and the result is utterly see-through in its sledgehammer moralizing.

War Room is a gold-plated piece of Bible thumping that’s resonating with the same audience that watches Jimmy Stewart get touched by an angel every December in "It’s a Wonderful Life" — and cry next to Christmas trees, despite that film’s many hackneyed religious devices.

Goodnight Mommy, a brilliantly sinister horror film in the recent art-house mold of "The Babadook" and "It Follows," has a premise that cracks like the whip of a devil’s tail.

Gibran’s little life lessons have been turned into three-minute haiku by different animators and spread across the film. Each one soars (especially clay painter Joan Gratz’s color-bursting snippet, “On Work”), even if the plot holding them together is frustratingly Disneyish.

A wondrously sly, moving, odd portrait—perfectly befitting its subject.

In a bold move that pays off, the movie jettisons dialogue altogether and tells its whole story through barn-animal noises, goofy sound effects, and sight gags so silly they’d make Benny Hill spin in sped-up ecstasy. The effect is contagiously cute.

The plot is just implausible enough to keep the film from greatness, but director Christian Petzold (Barbara) stirs up a powder-keg metaphor about rebuilding after war.

Tangerine is touching for its non-condescending stance toward working girls and the spirit of the sidewalk.

It’s a decent critique of romance in the digital age—until you realize how boring it is to watch people break up on Facebook.

If Minions were a toy, you’d hide its batteries.

The animation is dazzling.

The sight of Schwarzenegger in this small, subdued role makes us root for his survival. That’s the power of star wattage at work. Not even the undead can kill it.

Actor Ulliel, who’s been the face of both Chanel and Hannibal Lecter (in 2007’s Hannibal Rising), knows how to slither. His version of Yves is spoiled, insecure, cruel—and, in the movie’s ironic final shot, tickled to death that we still seem to care about him.

Quebecois director Maxime Giroux mistakes long, wordless scenes of characters gazing at each other for tenderness, but he imaginatively uses gospel music as the forbidden food of love.

While the original movie benefited from narrative simplicity and an admirable lack of villains, this one paints the screen with too many characters and frequent diversions from the main story, but nevertheless serves up a bountiful and sugary feast for the 3-D-bespectacled eyes.

Herzog’s death-defying endeavor (executed with the help of an indigenous Indian tribe, not special effects) is the basis for Burden of Dreams, Les Blank’s lyric chronicle of the film’s four-year evolution.