Joshua Rothkopf

Recreating the crime for The Walk, director Robert Zemeckis does a crackerjack job with the thrills and a so-so one with the laughs (at least the intentional ones) and skips the deeper magic altogether.

Tirola’s punchy timeline hits the breaks at the ’80s flameout, wobbling in its handling of self-destructive editor Doug Kenney. But until the defunct Lampoon starts magically reappearing in your mailbox, this excellently titled pic will do nicely.

Bringing optimism, nerd-itude and a touch of crazy to his character's solo ordeal—at one point, scraggly Watney calls himself a “space pirate”—Damon is the key to the movie’s exuberance.

This is a brutal movie that finds unusual freedom in limitations, as do wiry bassist Pat (Anton Yelchin) and bleach-blond concert attendee Amber (Imogen Poots), who both turn out to be pretty handy with weapons. Chalk it up to their killer instincts.

The movie ultimately feels both too glib and too hermetically sealed to resonate beyond its chaotic interiors.

A remarkably committed portrait of NYC homelessness in which Gere—grizzled and often topped in a wool cap—hunkers destitute. Call it an actor’s stunt if you must, but that would be overly dismissive of an indie with a serious mission of social awakening on its brow.

Strikes an intelligent balance between funk-scored pride and a more universal story of activism threatened by in-fighting and accidental celebrity.

The question of winning Ann sexually takes on an ugly character, and the film dumbs down fast. This is how the world ends: not with a bang but a wimp.

An open wound, Moss is terrific, yet Queen of Earth feels a touch brittle and precious, like the swirly pink-hued script Perry employs for his end credits. It’s a movie about not getting over it, as oppressive as that sounds.

Would that Grandma had given rascally Sam Elliott more time to express his magnificent unease as Elle’s old flame, still wounded by her own choices. Single-handedly, he saves the film from its cutesy instincts.

No Escape takes pains to pause for some unconvincing speechifying about Western meddling abroad, but its showbiz racism gets an infuriating pass.

There’s way too much inside-baseball money talk here, when a simpler plot—one about a band whose apocalyptic vision comes to pass—would have been plenty.

A movie that gives Streep her most emotionally blocked character in years, without caricature.

The truly mystifying thing about the movie is how desperately it caters to Gen-X junk nostalgia without bothering to think that maybe those Reagan-era kids have grown up a bit.

Like a "Raging Bull" that’s been clocked one too many times in the head, Antoine Fuqua’s blood-simple boxing melodrama is so loaded with obviousness, it gets more pained groans from the audience than the guys in the ring.

After several tedious jump scares and boneheaded escape plans, a bag over your head won't seem like such a bad idea. Or the noose.

Fans hoping to watch Schwarzenegger growl his catchphrases with a slight edge of shtick are underestimating the patience involved in sitting through a two-hour slog. As for those who want a little apocalyptic tension or (dare to dream) romance, this new model is not for you. It’s the Skynet cut.

Ultimately, Jenkins teases out a fascinating theme of black identity shaped and altered by sales and evolving tastes.

Dope has thrilling moments and flies like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, but its caustic intelligence glints fast and furious.

Those euphoric moments, scored to Black Sabbath, show the brothers sneaking out in their masks, discovering activism and growing into individuals. You’ll wish Moselle had started, not ended, there.

While slickly enjoyable in parts, the biggest misstep here comes by puncturing Spielberg’s grandeur.

As gritty as Heaven Knows What often feels, it’s leavened by empathy and poetic moments: desperate kisses, a passed-out couch nap lit by slanting sunbeams, the beautifully eerie synth music of Tomita. This isn’t an easy watch, but it validates every risk we want our most emboldened filmmakers to take.

Wilson, a pop savant, was chasing some kind of dragon, and as the movie toggles years forward to the scared, overmedicated Wilson of the 1980s (John Cusack, absorbingly strange in the tougher part), you sense that the dragon bit back.

Apfel is constantly chatting to “Albert” off camera, not to us, and the affection adds an unusual meta level to Iris, a conversation between two old-timers who have gone from making history to becoming it.

Dazzling on his recently concluded Kroll Show in multiple caricatures, Nick Kroll makes a savvy pivot to a role that allows for similar shades.

If you’re even remotely a fan, you need to see this.

Even though Unfriended begins to cheat, springing loud noises and gory cutaways that can’t be explained, there’s a rigor to its dopey, blood-simple conception that you might smile at.

Crawford has produced an inspiring primer, sure to remind viewers that the power has always been in their hands.

It’s made with too much slickness, and you’ll be way ahead of it.

Blessed with a wealth of golden b&w footage (Lambert and Stamp always planned to document their managerial brilliance), James D. Cooper’s poundingly fun, scrappy profile has an unusually satisfying nuts-and-bolts perspective on the ’60s fame machine.

Where he ends up going—a place of real anxiety and envy—speaks to the filmmaker’s nervy ambitions. If this is Baumbach’s commercial breakthrough, he will have made it several steps up that staircase with nothing lost.

Miraculously, the movie doesn’t feel mean-spirited so much as profoundly awkward. Scripted by smart guys like Etan Cohen (Idiocracy, Tropic Thunder) and two behind-the-scenes writers on TV’s consistently excellent Key & Peele, the film feels both daring and foolhardy.

Al Pacino’s done so much Acting over the last 25 years (hoo-ah), it’s disquieting to see him digging deep again—often with subtlety—into a rich role with hidden depths.

The doc’s most intriguing moment has Summers dropping into a Japanese karaoke bar and singing along to an in-progress Police hit, an affable man wandering through his own legacy.

For a group with property assets in the billions, it’s a major piece of the puzzle, revealing a critical failing: For a religion with so much to give, why do they do so little for so few?

When the movie is doing its tough-guy-seeking-redemption thing, it’s more than just good.

Buzzard is both deeply unfun and something you can’t take your eyes off. It gets our edge of recommendation because there’s real focus to it: Marty’s ambitions are so low (his life seems to climax while wolfing down a $20 plate of spaghetti in a hotel room) that you truly fear for the future. Meet the new slacker.

The doc makes a hairpin turn into sentiment, as the realities of immigration law impose themselves on Randi’s private relationship with his Venezuelan lover of 25 years. We already know that professional charlatans run from their pasts. Where they head to, though, is the better question: For a while, An Honest Liar brings a captivating crusader into view.

Entertainingly, the klezmer-scored Deli Man charts the history of urban eateries, nowhere near as prominent as they were during the early 20th century but still a vital link to Yiddish-accented comforts.

Never once does the film feel sharp on black identity (as did Bill Gunn’s original), and the terror is theoretical only.

Look, the movie didn't have to cure cancer or anything. But sans the original's redemptive nostalgia or any newfound cleverness, it's just a manic, flop-sweat-drenched mess.

The acting, especially from Menash Noy as an ineffectual attorney, is phenomenal, resulting in a feminist knockout told in inverse.

The movement of the story—from wrenching homesickness to blooming confidence and a smile on one’s stroll to work—elevates the movie into universal urban poetry.

It teases out the distinctly modern subject of celebrity profile-writing, a rare one for the movies, detouring into avenues of attraction and envy.

For a movie with a critique of mediocrity well within its grasp, this one settles for an embrace of it, barely breaking a sweat.

Cake chokes you on its self-seriousness, even as it trots out potentially interesting supporting players.

Still Life constantly threatens to become a better movie: John’s scrutiny of photos feels vaguely serial-killer–esque, and there’s a late-inning love interest (Downton Abbey’s Joanne Froggatt) that you privately cheer for.

Unlike most directors, style is hardly a side dish with Michael Mann—it’s the main entrée. No one captures city lights at night or luxury cars slinking down the highway like the creator of Miami Vice, and his conversion to digital video continues to yield breathtaking results.

Something, Anything doesn’t really engage with issues of faith or materialism.

This version’s shadowy Las Vegas underworld and convenient adoring female coed (Brie Larson, who deserves better) play like clichés.

American Sniper is a superbly subtle critique made by an especially young 84-year-old.

The film plays like a better episode of "Mad Men," pitch-perfect in its details yet fully lived-in: a universe of rolled-up shirt sleeves, sweat-laden brows and screams that don’t sound canned.

Workman’s study, complete with a fawning sit-down with Steven Spielberg, feels slightly awestruck: The films certainly deserve it, but you’ll want more of Welles’s Illinois schoolmate, rolling her eyes when the subject is described as “humble.”

A lost-artist comedy in the vein of Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories, but more deeply, a referendum on the dead-end choices Rock himself might be feeling.

Unfortunately for us, Dern — only seen in flashback — isn’t the main character.

Olsson requires us to connect the dots to today's struggles (a missed opportunity), but his discoveries are more than sufficient.

The plot’s tired blood is jumped up considerably by style; all in all, it's an intoxicating blend of eerie horror and ’80s pop, made by an artist to keep an eye on.

It’s a ruined community grappling with belated ethics; that’s the real story here.

A Most Violent Year, Chandor’s absorbing no-bull NYC drama, further clarifies what might be the most promising career in American movies: an urban-headed filmmaker attuned to economies of place and time, with an eye on the vacant throne of Sidney Lumet.

The main flaw — twirling farm girls and grunting oxen aside — is an utter lack of insight into the future leader’s character.

At its best (which is often), director James Marsh’s affecting biopic of the cosmos-rattling astrophysicist Stephen Hawking plays deftly against schmaltz.

John Wick feels like action manna for its cleanly designed gun-fu sequences—ones you can actually follow—and brutal takedowns. But the revenge plotting is deeply dopey and we shouldn't have to choose one or the other.

Younger audiences will see "The Fault in Our Stars’" Shailene Woodley once again excelling in an emotionally tricky role: Kat, a 17-year-old blooming into her wild years while reckoning with an increasingly unhinged mother, Eve (Eva Green, crazy-eyed and just this side of Faye Dunaway).

The film builds riotously via a series of verbal takedowns as male authority goes limp in the wake of a regrettable impulse. This is slender material to build a whole film around, but Östlund turns it into something deep, for viewers with patience.

Stations of the Elevated plays like a time capsule, particularly for having no dialogue or plot. It swings to Charles Mingus’s hardest bop and evokes a long-gone city, somehow more adult and confrontational even in silence.

It’s a movie that loves boldly “important” ’70s-style dust jackets, loves its own lecturing voice (courtesy of neurotic narrator Eric Bogosian) and somehow makes that mélange strangely appealing.

Seeing as how Kill the Messenger comes down firmly on the side of Webb’s truth, it’s unfortunate that his discoveries are only confirmed via the end credits. Missing from the action, too, is the merest hint of our hero’s demise by suicide in 2004. These aspects should have been better showcased; as is, it’s not the whole story.

St. Vincent has nothing on Rushmore, an obvious forebearer, even though it strains for the same egalitarian spirit of thrown-together family, one that includes a pregnant Russian stripper (Naomi Watts) and a sympathetic but firm Catholic schoolteacher (Chris O’Dowd).

Inherent Vice, Anderson's sexy, swirling latest (based on Thomas Pynchon's exquisite stoner mystery set at the dawn of the '70s), is a wondrously fragrant movie, emanating sweat, the stink of pot clouds and the press of hairy bodies. It's a film you sink into, like a haze on the road, even as it jerks you along with spikes of humor.

Centrally, the title character remains an impressive piece of propwork, and Leonetti's restraint in never animating it (à la Chucky) is the only thing worth appreciating here.

The final third is a crush of genius, with several Nas tracks (including his lovely, Michael Jackson-sampling “It Ain’t Hard to Tell”) receiving the kind of detailed breakdowns rare in pop-artist conversations.

The Equalizer is a stone-dumb movie.

It's a hypnotically perverse film, one that redeems your faith in studio smarts (but not, alas, in local law enforcement, tabloid crime reporting or, indeed, marriage).

Both overindulgent and the writer-director's most fascinatingly strange movie to date.

The first Reitman film to make the 36-year-old director seem about 400 years old.

Gilroy, vastly supported by cinematographer and Los Angeles specialist Robert Elswit (Boogie Nights, Magnolia), directs with the verve of a seasoned pro, even though Nightcrawler is his debut.

The film has a traditional appeal that's wholly separate from its surface.

It helps that Milo (Hader) and Maggie (Wiig) are cranky adult siblings, sharing a whip-crack shorthand that longtime skit partners know how to muster effortlessly.

Until the movie's cathartic showdown (and a few backstory revelations that impress too late), The Drop putters along in a dozy register, less a simmering pot than a cooling one.

Dank with the effluvia of a proudly unhygienic, sex-obsessed German teen, this frenetic adaptation of Charlotte Roche’s notorious 2008 best-seller is a standing dare to anyone who thinks the movies have gotten too tame.

Provocatively, the film suggests that winning small battles was victory enough; Saigon natives, also interviewed, were left behind to endure death camps.

A superior work of confrontational boldness, it might be the movie Oppenheimer wanted to make in the first place.

You don’t often see style this gorgeous (however empty), and that must count for something. Groovy soundtrack cues by Ennio Morricone and others do the heavy lifting.

This one belongs to the women: As a gold-digging mistress, Isla Fisher does half-smart expertly, while Jennifer Aniston demonstrates her underrated timing as a wealthy kidnapping victim turned confidante.

[Eva] Green is the only one able to excite this silly material into the spiky shape it’s supposed to take. You wish the rest of the cast was as clued in.

Indeed, the doc works best as a relationship study, filled with endearing moments of intimate bickering. Takei is a self-admitted ham but a playful one, projecting his confidence in increasingly meaningful directions.

From "Police Academy" to "Hot Fuzz," there are satires to be made about undisciplined law enforcement; this will not join their ranks, try as it might.

There’s social satire for those who want it — don’t tell the rest of the neighborhood our daughter’s risen from the dead! — and a fine, simmering sense of apocalypse that turns this suburban community into a war zone. Still, it’s a lot of heavy lifting for what amounts to “he’s just not that into you,” mainly because you’re as ripe as a cadaver.

Such is Kim’s plotty momentum that the whole thing feels like an extreme joke made of pained silences, one that somehow strips bare the subtext of overbearing parents. Meryl Streep herself couldn’t improve on it.

In its early scenes, Dinosaur 13 works nearly as well as a certain Steven Spielberg thriller, creating the giddy, ominous mood of past and present colliding in excitement.

For all its eye-opening material, The Dog still feels unfinished, but for students of New York scuzziness, it’s an essential addition.

Utterly inessential, this slightly cheap-looking reboot of the Turtles franchise is froth too — it might even be too tame for the kids who make up the target audience.

So much of Get on Up is uncannily perfect, from its nightmarish Georgia childhood flashbacks to delirious concert re-creations and the casting of Blues Brother Dan Aykroyd as Brown’s longtime manager.

Barreling toward its rapidly modernizing future, China takes Internet addiction more seriously than most nations: To watch Web Junkie, an often scary yet half-realized documentary, is to see a society trapped in its old solutions.

Ultimately, for all its running around in the middle of the night, Sex Tape plays it remarkably coy, reaffirming love, not lust. It’s the cinematic equivalent of sleeping in the wet spot.

The film is weak on its essential indictment, vaguely suggesting a mood of battlefield boredom without quite pinpointing the pathology that would lead military men to squeeze the trigger pell-mell.

Mainly, though, this is a humorless film that skimps on the delicious opportunity for spousal retribution.

Some will find the director’s toothless brand of epiphany comforting (and download his mixtape), but the vast majority will find it tired.