Jordan Hoffman

If anyone other than Hawkins were in this film, it would be very hard to recommend. With her in virtually every scene, it is a lovely, tiny character study.

I spent the bulk of Paradise Love mimicking Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.” It’s been a long time since I’ve seen such a disturbing film.

The on-stage moments of Entertainment are revelatory but, unfortunately, some of the in-between meat of the film doesn’t quite connect.

There's a ton of technobabble that you have to take on faith, but Jones and Powell do more than sell it; they make it compelling.

The good news is that Ejiofor is great even in the scenes that don’t go anywhere. Those who find heaven here on earth in the form of strong film performances ought to commune with Come Sunday. The rest can sleep in.

It’s one hell of a yarn, which makes The Lovers and the Despot’s strangely soporific style something of a disappointment.

A dark, dreary and dull “Mad Max in Neutral” from director David Michôd (“Animal Kingdom”) that tries to pass off its blunt narrative and repetitiveness as some sort of style.

It's got the thrills, it's got the creepy-crawlies, and it's got just enough plot to make you care about the characters. Alien: Romulus is a hell of a night out at the movies.

It’s coarse and it’s stupid, but it is, thanks mostly the two good performances and some stylish use of music and editing, a little bit moving.

Cheadle’s got the cred, and the period evocation is tremendous. It’s just that I’m not sure he has all that much to say

This is a gift to cinephiles everywhere from deep in the cellar and we’re all lucky to get a sip.

Finding Fela does an exemplary job of explaining, in musical terms, what made Fela standout, a simple enough step that most music documentaries ignore.

Nymphomaniac Vol. 1 is the worst thing Lars Von Trier has ever associated himself with.

Out of the Furnace is no disaster, but it doesn’t achieve what it hopes to achieve, and it has no one to blame but itself.

The first half of “The Congress,” while still fascinating, does suffer a bit from keeping its focus on the gripes and accusations between Hollywood actors and producers...Once the Philip K. Dick-meets-”Inception” second half kicks in, the implications grow more universal.

The remarkable storytelling that eventually emerges in Eden is something you should see, providing you feel that you can stomach it.

There are a lot of twists and turns in the plot, but not all of them are satisfying. What does work are the performances, specifically Cooke and the richly sympathetic character she creates.

It’s shallow, it’s boring, it’s poignant, it’s clever, it’s poorly acted, it’s intentionally poorly acted, it has no story, it has marvelous scenes, it is artful, it is hallucinatory, it is shoddily put together. All response is valid.

Split goes all-in on McAvoy slipping from persona to persona, and luckily he’s got the acting chops to sell it.

The scenes of artistic, scientific and communal triumph were significant. The isolated, solipsistic anger of each character, lost in their own identity loop, seemed like a perfect analogy for the conflicts in eastern Europe in the mid-1990s.

Directors Katie Graham and Andrew Matthews create a great framework for the epic nemesis battle, but also know when to pull back to keep the movie grounded in reality.

The movie starts with the volume cranked to 10, then never takes a breath. At three hours it is unbearable. Yes, this is meant to be a “bad trip” of a movie, taking you inside the experience of someone undergoing a crisis, but there’s a limit. And then it’s revealed that this grown man has mommy issues. For that you made me sit through all this noise?

Young kids will find the second, more action-heavy half of the film entertaining, but everyone else will want to crawl into their shell.

In this 75-minute straight shot of Discovery Channel cinema, no emotional crests are peaked, but viewers will come away informed.

First with the telephone, then early cinema, the magic of wireless radio and, finally, television, Dreams Rewired bombards the senses with a thorough and clever montage of found footage from the 1890s to the pre-war era.

The specifics of the journey get all the attention, while the fundamental conflicts remain not just unoriginal, but alarmingly nonexistent.

It isn’t just the sheer density of jokes that is impressive, but the diversity.

Certainly we care for Margaret and the way Walter has her trapped, but her character comes across as a cypher representing a great number of issues without being a real individual. This movie wants to be an oil painting, but ends up being more of a mass-produced, though good-quality print.