Joe McGovern

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Land of Mine is essentially bomb porn.

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.

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.

It features the best real-life husband-wife pairing onscreen ever.

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.

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.