Keith Uhlich

The question lingers as the movie comes to its triumphant body-swapping close: Is this a pro-environment parable or a prophecy of virtual realities yet to come? Cameron's new world may very well be a verdant Matrix.

You still can't help admiring the project's ambition; an odd combo of "Babe: Pig in the City" and Godard's "Histoire(s) du cinéma," Hugo is the strangest bird to grace the multiplex in a while.

A 25-words-or-less pitch for The Day He Arrives - shot in luminous black-and-white - might go something like: "Hong Sang-soo does Groundhog Day."

Reitman, who also cowrote the screenplay, feels the constant need to "deepen" his characters, granting them wants and motivations--especially during the moralistic third act--that are totally alien to how they're initially portrayed.

This is in many ways a white-knuckle brand extension for Honnold above all else. Still, the film frequently treads into knotty territory.

Moreover, the story doesn’t climax in all’s-well-that-ends-well matrimony, instead building to a beautifully bittersweet moment of self-realization, one with a light-touch profundity that would make the Bard proud.

Chomet builds this beguiling symphony of sadness to a poignant finale that does ample justice to the many layers of Tati's tale, both in text and out.

Wang has made a confidently intimate movie that is devastatingly larger-than-life.

It's McConaughey who is the real revelation: All Grim Reaper strut and cutthroat stare, he savors each of Letts's vividly ghoulish lines.

At its best, which is often enough, the film does provide that sort of intimate and evocative insight into a culture too often vilified due to Western ignorance. At others, the gentle exquisiteness with which Longley approaches even the most unappealing sights and sounds feels like an evasion of something more troubling, and potentially more profound.

No side overwhelms the other in the back-and-forth; you feel more like a profoundly uncertain moment is being marked, with little concrete sense of the outcome beyond mankind's enduring hunger for moving pictures.

Though Stranger by the Lake leans a bit too heavily on its long-take, slow-cinema bona fides, there’s a clear purpose to Guiraudie’s rigorous perspective. He’s out to unearth the very potent (and often terrifying) emotions underlying every explicit act, sexual or otherwise.

By the end, you feel curiously closer to the performer and her process without having any clue how you got there. It's exhilarating.

These characters are more than what we see on the surface, and it's thanks to Leigh's rigorous yet generous eye that we never just gawk at the drama.

An Arabic-German coproduction, it is a rare movie shot entirely in Saudi Arabia, which has no cinema industry to speak of, and the first feature by a female filmmaker from that country. Forbidden from mixing with the men in her crew, Al-Mansour often directed via walkie-talkie from the back of a van.

Toward the end of the film, a few hard-hitting cuts between young and old brings the title's meaning home: These children have an inescapable life of drudgery before them, and there's little likelihood it will change anytime soon.

For all the unbridled destruction, Godzilla Minus One remains perversely light and fun, a Roland Emmerich-like disaster flick helmed by an actual talent.

Shots of the kids and their friends running around unfamiliar environments have the fantastical qualities of Spike Jonze's "Where the Wild Things Are," minus the forced whimsy.

What starts as an intriguing reverie ends as a hollow allegory.

Once Miller lays all his cards on the table, however, you realize you haven’t been watching people struggling with the very real temptations of unchecked privilege, so much as fumbling blindly in a glib, gloomy satire of American exceptionalism.

A movie with an unflinchingly tough heart.

Writer-director Jane Campion approaches the tale with an artiste’s respectful solemnity, but it too often comes off like "Twilight" transplanted across oceans and centuries.

No simplistic status parable. It’s more a psychological snapshot of a person forever doomed to remain a voyeur to her own life

Weekend settles into an intentionally minor-key groove, caught somewhere between bracingly direct honesty and cringingly mumbly pretense.

The cast to die for is almost entirely wasted in this machismo-marinated slab of Brit-crime nastiness.

A grimy kitchen-sink melodrama with an Ajax cleanser script: The muck is all surface, the turmoil cleanly shallow and contrived, though never less than gripping.

No one makes movies like Peter Strickland.

Every monster-movie archetype is here, from nerdy scientists (Charlie Day and Burn Gorman) to hard-stare leaders (Idris Elba) with a penchant for 11th-hour inspirational speeches. (Watching the former Stringer Bell bellow about “canceling the apocalypse!” is one of those great, giddy pleasures you didn’t know you needed.)