Joshua Rothkopf

Room 237 asks that you bring your own noodles; as docs go, it leaves you with questions, some worry and rib-sticking satiation.

There has to be room for this kind of plea, especially a work that, obliquely, captures so many largely unreported details: the night raids rounding up children, the torn-up olive trees and kids' soccer games in the battle zone.

It’s wonderful to think that a movie is, for a change, ahead of you.

Union's sour presence suggests the tougher film that could have been, bookending the movie with a double dose of viciousness; theirs is a relationship that won't be solved by a crisp uniform. If this is Bratton's calling card — and it should be — her scenes are the ones that suggest the real promise to come.

There's a deeper idea here — really! — and it's one that only gets more obvious with time, something to do with arrested boyhood and the gleeful self-ruination of one's own body.

A team of screenwriters more creative than Pat Casey and Josh Miller (best known for two manic Sonic the Hedgehog movies) might have done more with the backstory, and director Tommy Wirkola's beatdowns never transcend the merely serviceable. But there's no denying the joy in a child's eyes when she sees Santa's weapon of choice, a sledgehammer hefted with brutal artistry, and squeals its name: "Skullcrusher!"

Once you let go of the understandable dream of Coppola returning with another masterpiece, there is much to enjoy in “Megalopolis,” especially its cast members, leaning into their moments with an abandon that was probably a job requirement.

Saw X may not be the best one to start off with, but it’s hard to imagine a better one to end with.

While the new movie is laced with Easter eggs and homages to the late master, it doesn't build its sequences with the same meat-and-potatoes solidity as Craven did. Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett don't have those chops yet.

At least Mia Goth, herself recently reborn as indie horror's new scream queen with Pearl, understands the assignment, getting more unhinged with every scene (her character starts off with vigorous flirting and a brusque handjob, and goes from there).

Affleck and Clooney make sense as collaborators; both of them became directors to get out of the way of their public images. Hopefully, the next time they decide to work together, they'll lean even further into the intimacies of a setting like the Dickens, a universe unto itself.

Unlike The Father, which expanded Zeller's stage source material with maze-like complexity, The Son pins us in for an endgame that you wish had more of a takeaway than a gut punch.

Yet after the actorcentric fireworks of Cianfrance’s "Blue Valentine" (2010), it’s impressive to see him going after a wider sociopolitical scope, one that would have been better served by a less repetitive structure.

For 
the most part, you’re in the hands of a capable lunatic who has a tale to tell.

Damon and Bale are unfailingly enjoyable company to be among, steering the psychology away from alpha-male dominance to something more complex and occasionally mystical.

The navel-gazing artist class that gave Williamsburg its character (now more of a marketable “brand”) has in Friedrich both a vigorous defender and, it must be said, something close to an angry parody of itself.

Berlinger is fully invested here, but a little distance might have helped.

Redemptively, the cast goes a long way: Jean Desailly is perfect as a jowly literary celeb deep in midlife crisis, while the aloof Françoise Dorléac is magnetic as his airline stewardess and all-too-scrutable love object.

As with 1999’s deceptively deep South Park: Bigger Longer & Uncut and, more recently, The Lego Movie, the script works hard to invest its scenario with an existential and political dimension, crudely but effectively expressed.

The dueling dirty tricks zing half the time.... But subplots involving naive volunteers getting their hearts broken feel like strands from a less ambitious movie.

The metafriction between these classic dupes and today's idiots chafes uneasily.

You sense the Demme-esque working-class comedy that might have been.

Heroically, Double Tap’s new actors, rare though they are, save it from being completely brain-dead.

Dree Hemingway, daughter of Mariel, commits to some unnecessary nudity, but also impresses with her subtlety.

There's lots of volume in these tunes--the soundtrack is killer--and at least everyone gets their rocks off.

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

As games go, this one’s a little too easy to outfox, but it’s worth playing if you need a quick diversion, or if the chess moves of The Favourite felt overly vicious—Ready or Not is pure checkers.

Swaddled with a lacquer of nostalgia that passes for cultural insight, this one-night-in-sweatpants drama will make you yearn for a moratorium on teen movies-at least ones so aggressively dewy-eyed.

Clangorous and nonsensical, the fifth installment of the toys-to-world-saviors franchise still has a spark of grandeur that could only come from one director.

No exchanges flare into true weirdness; rather, the mood is lingering and tentative. Undoubtedly, this is the movie's intent, but it's a fairly banal comment on foreign estrangement (or love) that could have used some roughing up.

No one is going to explain any of this for you — and the slightly snobby implication of Upstream Color is that explanations are for suckers.

The film doesn’t know how innocent it wants to be. Establishing shots of Manhattan’s 1998 skyline arrive in the cutesy form of a colorful diorama, just like Mr. Rogers’s show, but that gesture feels utopian and unearned, not to mention a little boring.

Of course we all hate insidious environmental destruction; it’s valuable to have movies about that. This one works fine enough. But let the other less-talented filmmakers make them.

It all comes down to the Big Birthday Party and a furious bike ride, which he's clearly done before, in "The 40 Year Old Virgin."

When Sarah's Key leans into the horror (as it should), it's harrowing. Alas, that's only half the time.

West holds your interest with material that should feel like a rip-off of The Shining. If this is mere placeholding until something more ambitious comes along for the rising director, it'll do.

The movie isn’t adventurous, but I’m sure glad it exists.

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).

The oddest thing about the movie - and perhaps the asset that will tip it over into the plus column for you - is that it's a bona fide scuzz-Western.

Alas, it all comes off as hit and myth, mainly due to our leaden, buzz-cut hero, Perseus (Avatar’s Worthington, no Harry Hamlin), and zero sparks of heavenly-body chemistry or humor.

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.

Crushingly, the dependably perverse art-action director Nicolas Winding Refn has finally made a boring movie.

Daringly plotless and disconnected (“just like my life!” squeals the target audience), Noah Baumbach’s latest, a breeze, feels a lot less self-absorbed than usual, mainly for not having a neurotic at its core.

You outsmart the movie way too soon.

The Grandmaster, five years in the making, feels like a waste of Wong’s talents.

The world's worst film gets an affectionate making-of dramatization that's half as weird as the real thing.

Like that giant metaphorical carousel looming over them, it’s a movie that’s spinning its wheels.

For the first time in Miller’s now-five-film franchise, he seems to be falling shy of the immediacy he’s sustained, often deliriously, for an entire feature.

The 3-D effects, so promising on paper, don't really add much-and, worse, there's a overreliance on slow-motion, which kills the fun.

But scary? Not so much.

Basically, it’s an electrifying three-person play, as the determined Winstead, the complexly furious Goodman and Tony-winner John Gallagher Jr. (playing a lucky neighbor who made his way down) have it out in scenes that impart the nauseating futility of George Romero’s mall-ensconced "Dawn of the Dead."

If you'll pardon the cleverness, Frank takes time to wrap your own cranium around, faults and all, and that's a wonderful thing.

Jessica Lange, as rare as a unicorn these days, seizes on the role of a grieving mother with two taloned hands. If there are any tremors of shame to be felt here, they emanate from her.

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

Safety Not Guaranteed doesn't quite know what kind of comedy it wants to be; the humor works best in its first hour, when the news-of-the-weird plot takes on a suggestive dimension of romantic desperation.

Tyrannosaur won't translate into entertainment, nor as a wake-up call to the dark side of humanity - though it does work nicely as a tart slice of hard-bitten acting; the entire cast is superb.

A deep supporting cast brings its A-game to the ridiculous dialogue.

The movie works best in the clan’s private world (even if rock climbing in the rain seems like poor parenting). But then it deflates: Frank Langella, normally a welcome presence, is clownishly directed as a mean grandfather, and the plot abandons its tensions too abruptly.

So why is this songwriter, so articulate on vinyl, so vague and spacey in current-day interviews? Something happened here, deeper than an aborted quest for fame, and the documentary hasn't gotten to it.

But you do take the film home with you - to all your own toys - and that's what decent horror is supposed to do.

It feels like a massive retrenchment—privately, a rebellion seems to have been fought and lost—and only the most loyal fans will be happy about it.

It feels too flabby for the company it keeps.

After the Wedding contains enough domestic revelations for several seasons of something delicious, but Freundlish’s showdowns all seem to dissipate or get curtailed abruptly.

Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates follows a sturdy trajectory toward incipient maturity (and ceremonial catastrophe). If you don’t think about it too hard, you won’t hate it.

The material isn’t excited or shaped toward any insight — the Mike Leigh of "Naked" did this sort of thing brilliantly — and the arrival of a sluggish investigating journalist (Richard Jenkins), himself a bar fixture and underachiever, doesn’t offer a valid counterpoint.

The movie works-to the extent that it does-because of its sharply un-PC script (credited to Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky) that sometimes feels like a Hollywood rewrite of "Election."

There’s no denying the movie’s climactic gathering of females bent on saving the species.

As scripted by Bryan Sipe, Demolition buries its lead actor under a rubble of clichés.

Executive-produced by Steven Spielberg, the movie's special effects are seamless and far more cleanly cut than any of Michael Bay's hash. But the element that lingers longest is a subtle strand - also woven into last week's "Take Shelter" - of recessionary anxiety.

For all its episodic, gleeful inappropriateness, the movie Klown most resembles - not that it tries to or anything - is Alexander Payne's half-soused flight from maturity, "Sideways."

Philip Seymour Hoffman and a ratlike Paul Giamatti are the competing spin doctors - you wish the whole movie were about them. And Marisa Tomei brings a hungry sense of scoopmaking to the (unavoidable?) role of a New York Times journalist who's seen it all.