Keith Phipps

It’s a funny, bittersweet film that opens as a cautionary tale about growing up too fast, but deepens into a movie about the unplumbable gulf between childhood and adulthood, and what it feels like to stand on either side, wishing for a way over.

It's an agreeably unambitious comedy that might be called a romp, if that word didn't imply a little too much energy.

The humanity behind The Square‘s jabs save it from seeming nihilistic but they also implicate everyone watching. The film seems less nasty for having such a well-developed protagonist, but also that much more squirm-inducing for anyone who recognizes a bit too much of themselves in Christian’s unexamined attitudes.

The director’s observant approach to the material helps pave over the frustrations.

As Cruise clings to the side of the building using malfunctioning equipment, and a sandstorm looms in the distance, the question shifts from whether Bird can direct an action film to whether there's anyone out there who can top him.

It should be a personal triumph or a personal tragedy, but it's neither: just another moment between curtain-rise and curtain-fall in the glorious business of creating beauty.

It's more Thompson-for-beginners than an exhaustive inquiry, but as introductions go, it's thorough and thoughtful.

Black's sadistic streak remains as uncomfortable as it ever was, and his direction is very much in the house style of producer Joel Silver. But both elements perfectly suit the material, which sneaks in a lot of sly stuff beneath the slick surface.

It doesn’t feel as fresh as the winning original, but it also never plays like a desperate cash-in, which immediately makes it better than a lot of Disney’s recent output. But is it worth seeing? Sure. Why not?

However complicated the historical issues at play, the poetic introspection that consumes The New World's characters could only take place in a Terrence Malick movie. But, here at least, history and lyrical drift go together surprisingly well.

The imagery eventually becomes the only reason to keep watching. This is the first of an announced trilogy, but it already feels as long as the 20th century itself.

It could all be done much more efficiently, but any other approach would lose Tsai's unique mix of stone-faced comedy and dewy-eyed lyricism.

Zhang Yimou is a master of intimate character pieces.

Thirst never picks up the momentum of Park’s best-known work. But its turgid pace creates a queasy fascination all its own, drawing viewers into an ever-darkening locus of sin and obsession where even the wish for redemption comes at a terrible cost.

Polyester splits the difference between Waters’ earlier cult movies and his later mainstream work. A melodrama that touches on everything from punk rock to abortion to pornography.

Neither condemning nor forgiving, the film is a model of documentary evenhandedness, even though James makes no claims of objectivity.

Mendes' second effort plays like a familiar song transposed to a minor key, a gangland fable soaked in portent and fatalism until its familiarity ceases to be an issue.

In one of the film's most persuasive bits, Farley Granger talks about chucking a lucrative film career in order to tread the boards in New York. Maybe it's that kind of magnetic draw that makes an age golden.

There’s another level to it as well: Even while laying bare the mechanics he would use to tell a story likely to trip viewers’ bullshit meters and calling out one genre cliche after another, Zodiac Killer Project almost works as a compelling true crime doc anyway, up to the way it repackages a crushing anticlimax as a thrilling conclusion.

Like "The Girlfriend Experience," Magic Mike doubles as an of-the-moment film about life in a down economy, so much so that it would play like a bait-and-switch if it didn't just as thoroughly deliver as a movie about stripping.

It's an exercise in metafiction that, while providing grisly fun, never distances viewers. And it's entertaining, while asking the same question of viewers and characters alike: Why come to a place you knew all along was going to be so dark and dangerous?

It looks good. It seems to work. It occasionally coheres into a priceless moment. But in the end, the pieces don't all fit together as they should.

It's a hard-won comfort, found here over a bleak stretch of days, but All Or Nothing makes it look like the best life has to offer.

Webber displays a great sense of understatement and a keen eye for careful framing, with cinematographer Eduardo Serra beautifully re-creating Vermeer's signature play of shadow and light.

A low-key charmer that balances half a dozen winning performances, Welcome To Collinwood's momentum occasionally stalls, and it doesn't always produce laughs.

Eventually Stein's habit of dodging its own issues grows frustrating.

It’s a lively but also lovely kids film about what happens when you can’t just be a kid anymore.

Pretty much impossible not to like a little, but it's also hard to like a lot. There's a fantastic film to be made from this material, but now, the burden of making it falls to a sequel.

Mistaken For Strangers, which covers Tom’s time with the band and his subsequent attempts to piece together a movie about that time, is a sweet, funny, and sad film, but also an exceedingly odd one.

Happily, what Dope does well, it does extremely well—namely letting Malcolm, Diggy, and Jib hang out together and navigate the world on their own terms. All three leads are charming, and together, they convey a real sense of camaraderie, the kind that only develop between misfits who find each other.

At once uncomfortable and compelling, Bugonia builds toward a wild and misanthropic final act that plays like nothing less than a sincere rejection of humanity itself. By that point, Lanthimos has kind of made it feel like we have it coming.

It looks handsome but seems infected by the idea of playing different roles; a comedy in one scene, it adopts a mood of a high seriousness the next and clutters the stage with minor characters that contribute little. In the end, this inability to make up its mind does the film in.

It is, without a doubt, a striking debut. But it's also punishingly distasteful and disjointed almost beyond coherence, a repetitive heap of a film that feels disgorged rather than crafted.

Blade of the Immortal raises some compelling questions: What does it mean to be virtuous in a world that doesn’t value virtue? Is there any way to shuffle off the burden of past sins? When does immortality become a curse?

Its pleasures are borrowed, but durable.

To create his disarmingly earnest film, Spielberg draws from the past. Its tone is humanistic and its technique classic.

The film is at its best when it isn't afraid to be earnest.

Marginally watchable-in part because of the odd presence of Dan Aykroyd and Courtney Love-it's ultimately pointless, repetitive and more concerned with appearing offbeat than actually doing anything inventive.

The Curt Siodmak-penned, George Waggner-directed film uses werewolf legends as an excuse to put modern minds comfortable living with moral ambiguity into conflict with undeniable evil.

This time out, Shelton seems to be playing the part of someone who doesn't know how to finish what she started.

Though Wan is stepping away from horror, at least for now, to direct the next The Fast And The Furious sequel, the latest Insidious entry suggests he’s a long way from running out of new tricks, or at least finding infinite variations on old ones.

For long stretches, Is This Thing On? works better on a scene-by-scene basis than as a cohesive film. Arnett and Dern believably summon the off-kilter chemistry of a couple going through a rough patch in their scenes together and the lost-at-sea fogginess of the newly separated in their scenes apart.

Becomes precisely the sort of film its elements demand. As tearful goodbyes and joyful montage sequences set to lite-jazz saxophoning take over, "neatly winsome" trumps "messy drama" yet again.

Viewers who dislike movies in which all drama hinges on one character withholding information from another for no reason beyond the need to keep the plot chugging along should stay far away from People Like Us. The film does have its charms, but getting to them means seeing past a Buick-sized contrivance.

A harsh (though slightly toned down from Moody's book), deeply moving, emotionally rich and intelligent film about the difficulty of rebelling against social restrictions--and the inescapable consequences of such attempts when they do succeed--The Ice Storm should not be missed.

Earth To Echo is yet another found-footage film, and not a particularly inventive one at that.

Eason's twist of fate and too-sudden ending seems as rooted in Washington Heights as the music that pours from the neighborhood's car windows, the smoke that billows from its late-night eateries, and the stoic resignation inscribed on its inhabitants' faces.

The satire is headline-fresh, the action scenes keep pace with summer blockbusters, and no one shoots an evisceration with as much skill.

The ability to find performers who never seem for a moment to be performing is also here, giving Bleak Moments, like all of Leigh's films, an almost voyeuristic feel.

Though sloppily structured and sometimes dangerously flimsy (not to mention truncated at a mere 78 minutes), Tadpole has an unforced charm that compensates for the absence of more traditional cinematic virtues.

Deschanel and Schneider--who both give rich, funny performances--and everyone around them have inner lives that don't always translate into words. When they speak, it's usually in dialogue halfway between poetry and inarticulate fumbling.

As an action movie, Red Dawn is a repetitive headache, and anyone with Blue State sympathies will be appalled at its manipulations and exaggerations. But there's smart subtext beneath the big dumb explosions.

An ambitious undertaking, but not a successful one: It unfolds with the studied determination of a grade-school book report.

Skillfully sketches the parameters of its small-town existence but never quite fleshes out the inhabitants of those parameters. Without the well-considered humor and strongly defined characters of "Chuck," only a good cast stands between Girl and some familiar stereotypes.

After a compelling opening act and some shocking late-film developments, the film feels disengaged from the action at hand and the issues raised.

Van Sant's direction is surprisingly static and conventional, which doesn't help this earnest, underwhelming misfire.

Offers a strange mix of sentimentality and social criticism, sometimes mixing the two to awkward effect.

Edge Of Tomorrow’s finale can’t live up to what’s come before, though that’s mostly because what comes before is so rich and unusual, particularly in the middle of a summer blockbuster season that doesn’t always value richness or novelty.

After an opening stretch that retains the film’s first-person perspective, Kawamura skillfully uses long, fluid takes and compositions that create a sense of unease about what might be just out of frame. But Exit 8 only fully commits to horror in a few select scenes.

One of the not-so-nice qualities of Real Women Have Curves is that it occasionally is as preachy as its title suggests.

As a groundbreaking examination of the reality-bending potential of film, it's of a piece with Un Chien Andalou and L'Age D'Or.

Without coming out and saying it, The Nomi Song creates the sense that its subject might simply have been a few hundred years ahead of his time.

To concentrate on the minor faults of a fable as beautiful and unusual as Pleasantville would be missing the point.

The mostly wordless film simply presents Ground Zero, the dust-covered surrounding areas, and the city's immediate rescue efforts. As a document, it's invaluable, and as a viewing experience, it's somewhat shocking.

It’s a painfully minor movie that doubles as an accidental study in how pros handle themselves when given less-than-challenging material.

Though Levy's film feels shapeless at times, what it loses in structure, it gains in handheld intimacy, letting viewers get to know the mercurial but fundamentally sweet Pleskun.

The film, which bears many marks of the Vietnam era, isn’t against any particular war, it’s against war itself. By immersing viewers in the horrors of one man’s suffering, it forces them to consider the implications of sending soldiers out to fight for a cause.

The energy never flags, the film conveys a deep love of Brown’s music (which fills almost every scene), and Boseman remains magnetic whether onstage or in quiet moments.

A rousing, reverent, often brilliant re-creation of a seminal comics character, Batman Begins proves Batman is at home in the 21st century as he was in the 20th.

When Friday Night Lights gets to the big games, the time it's spent creates an atmosphere thick with tension, one akin to the real-world experience of watching a favorite team play for its life.

Swimming Pool returns Ozon to the psychological complexities of "Under The Sand" and his early mini-feature "See The Sea," and he again proves himself a master of building shocking moments from a series of seemingly insignificant gestures and throwaway lines.

At its best, The Broken Circle Breakdown has the feel of life as it’s remembered—moments out of time tethered together by the feelings of those living them.

Deliberately paced at the outset, the film slowly establishes a sense of hatred that makes the violent explosion of the film's second half as plausible and inevitable as the laws of physics.

Mann reduces a legendary game of cat-and-mouse to the size of a standard police procedural. His refusal to mythologize Dillinger’s exploits is audacious, but too much of Public Enemies feels disappointingly smaller than life.

There are many fine works by and about Wilde, and if you haven't read them, you should. Nearly all are preferable to this one.

Realized through old-fashioned camera mastery and newfangled special effects, it’s a stunning technical accomplishment, but one seemingly designed only to broadcast banal sentiments, when it says anything at all.

Another actor might not have been able to carry the film, given such a creepily monomaniacal character, but Hoffman lets the humanity soak through, registering split seconds of panic when he's on the verge of getting caught, then just as quickly creating and working a new plan.

One the truest-feeling political portraits in years, as well as a fine piece of drama.

A combination of criminal smoothness and overloaded neuroses, Cage pulls off the lead role better than any actor imaginable.

For those who like Carrey and are waiting for a film they can honestly say they enjoyed through and through, this ain't it.

Using a single set for each act and cutting minimally, Jacquot seems to recognize his limited ability to make the opera cinematic.

The filmmaking is so strong and the scope so large it helps obscure the fairly simple moral at the heart of the script by Zvyagintesev and Oleg Negin.

As a filmmaker most often comfortable working within a genre, De Palma also knows how to deliver thrills, a skill he displays with remarkable regularity in Sisters, which still looks like one of his best.

It's an intense, uncompromising take that restores some of the shock that made Wuthering Heights so notable when it first appeared.

The Bellboy strings together artfully choreographed comic setpieces as it follows a silent Lewis through his rounds at a posh Miami Hotel.

Soderbergh creates an unnerving mosaic from the smaller pieces, a vision of a world that's simultaneously tightly knit, delicately balanced, and prone to breakdown, whether due to disease, bad ideas, or unenlightened self-interest.

Stearns directs with a slow-burning intensity that becomes more unsettling the deeper Ansel goes into his task, and the more it becomes apparent he doesn’t have an easy way out.

It's as subtle as a spinning kick, but some films aren't built for subtlety.

The ultimate vision here is of a hard world in which civilization is the aberration, and the things we fear are always waiting for an excuse to make life normal again.

The setup almost needs footnotes, which makes it all the more puzzling that Zombie's obvious love for horror's past would translate into such a joyless, grisly rehashing.

It's a familiar story, but Mills and Pucci treat it as if it were the first time anyone had thought to tell it.

its moments of greatness--and there are more than a couple--feel weirdly disconnected, stuck in a movie that doesn’t know how to put them together, or find a good way to move from one to the next.

Yet for all Ashes' frustrations, it's still a gorgeous piece of filmmaking.

Both director and cast keep the familiar journey intense, but after capturing the death of love in those opening moments, the rest of the film too often feels like a study in dissection.

It’s fun to watch the decades go by and the fashions change, but though Fresh Dressed takes its subject seriously, it ends up feeling superficial.

While watching Gazzara, Huston, Kevin Corrigan, Rosanna Arquette, and others take things two steps beyond over-the-top is inherently compelling, it becomes embarrassing before long.

Despite the casual homicide and a premise rich with Reagan-era political undertones, the gleeful satire draws inspiration as much from Bugs Bunny as Luis Buñuel.

Brown's respectful film offers the usual music-doc mix of archival footage, song clips, and talking heads, but with a figure as enigmatic and underreported as Van Zandt, the safe course works well.