Joshua Rothkopf

Although the film takes place in a fantasy version of brownstone Brooklyn, it’s more cutting than the book, especially for the way it shuns the concept of a star vehicle and sharpens the material into a forum for several moments of guilt.

Blackfish, a troubling exposé of Sea World’s hazardous entertainment trade, does much to restore a realistic sense of danger, interviewing former park workers who detail their shoddy, nonscientific training, and chronicling the much-suppressed history of whale-on-human violence.

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.

To the Wonder is arty for sure, but for the first time, its maker is working with anxieties we all feel. Let’s hope this Malick sticks around for a while.

The man himself stares into Davis's lens, both confident and scared; for these moments alone, the movie is key.

The year’s most shocking transformation arrives in the form of Gary Oldman’s Winston Churchill, a creation for the ages.

The pieces here are wonderful, even if the documentary fails to make any kind of overall analytical point.

Kids train for guerrilla fighting in a gorgeously atmospheric film that feels like a transmission from the future.

If this profile is marred slightly by thematic tidiness and a willingness to overglorify the champion's rise (Fischer didn't even write his best-seller, Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess), it still supplies a cracked, conflicted genius trapped in his ceaseless endgame.

Deeply irresponsible, this a film that will give parents seizures-and Roger Corman a big old smile.

Girls Trip is so successful because it lets its cast of improvisers ease into a bond that feels bone-deep.

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

A wonderfully crude film (we're talking "Superbad" levels of raunchiness), but one in which the overall vibe is sweet: kids patiently waiting for their parents to grow up already.

Walker integrates stranger-on-the-street testimony to further her general vibe of ignorance, thus pinpointing the true target of an agitated doc--our own blithe apathy.

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

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.

You'll be arguing with your friends about the ethics of secrecy and defense for hours; that's what makes these exit interviews so essential. They come late to the spy game, but are welcome regardless.

It’s definitely a horror movie but a wonderfully witty one, not for gentle souls.

For a movie that's essentially about a piece of hardware-the legendary Neve mixing console, an imposing slab of knobs and meters - this geeked-out documentary beats with more heart than could be imagined.

Almost as an afterthought to the ringingly true performances--and Marco Bellocchio’s unusually approachable direction--comes a deft analysis of fascism, likened to lovesickness, insanity and a gust of orchestral strings. It’s all of that and more, not to mention a lousy matchmaker.

This isn't the kind of doc to explain everything (or anything, really)-it does honor its subject, though, and that's plenty.

Robustly entertaining.

Return is almost too underdramatized to seem like a piece of today's zoomy entertainment, but its anxieties-the bare cupboards, the vague sense of purposelessness-are at the heart of the American experience for many. It's what indie filmmaking ought to be.

Brace yourself and go see it.

You will see the man toiling and revising - killing off half-good ideas, struggling for clarity - and it's a routine well worth demystifying.

If I call the movie a love story, don’t laugh. Torres has made it with love in his heart.

There's savvy in Schwarzenegger's understanding of his appeal. Always foreign yet weirdly Americanized in our dreams, the big guy is a craggy monument in need of a countryside. He's back in the place that deserves him.