Joshua Rothkopf

The drama it might remind you most of, oddly enough, is "Six Degrees of Separation," also about the snowballing connections between unlikely people. And as in that urban clash, the bedrock of it all is social responsibility, ever crumbling and rebuilding. A total triumph.

Nothing here is new, but you can’t call expert craft like this warmed-over. Solidly satisfying with ruthless forward momentum, the film plays like a minor triumph.

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.

It’s as pure an expression of Tarantino’s voice as he’s ever mustered—easy to savor, even if the aftertaste leaves a trace of nasty bitterness.

From its title on, Come Undone is as dully generic as is imaginable.

It all really happened but surely with a lot more passion than writer-director Angela Robinson’s script would have it.

Land Ho! avoids schmaltz to get at that rarest of male timber: rekindled hearts.

Thank You for Your Service is as necessary as top-flight journalism.

Writer-director Von Trotta, an icon of the New German Cinema, doesn't have the technical chops for the fireworks you desire, so she settles for wan earnestness.

It’s hard to give sibling co-directors Joe and Anthony Russo (makers of the thornier Captain America films) any credit—or blame, really—for steering a product that’s been so corporately fine-tuned. They toggle dutifully between million-dollar quips and Wrestlemania smackdowns, and when they find room for a vista of galactic stillness, it’s not out of any inspired vision so much as the need for air.

By the time Sorcerer gets around to its rain-soaked, rickety-bridge set piece, you’ll either be obsessed or fully checked out. Give yourself a chance to pick sides.

Stopping just short of the devastating exposé it might have been (but plenty creepy).

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.

Alas, this is a film that builds to a backroom compromise on carbon emissions, not the most thrilling of dramatic structures. The serious issue of global warming won’t be minimized by a mediocre documentary, but it has yet to find a filmmaker inflamed with rage and visual passion.

The more substantial material, including Spitzer's feuds with vindictive New York politician Joe Bruno and financier Ken Langone, gets short shrift.

An eerie resurrection regains some good will, but we'll have to wait for Neshat to catch up with the art of storytelling.

The middle section of the story is where Rise truly takes off, perhaps in ways that will have viewers forgiving the rest.