Kenneth Turan

45 Years is a quietly explosive film, a potent drama with a nuanced feel for subtlety and emotional complications.

Son of Saul is an immersive experience of the most disturbing kind, an unwavering vision of a particular kind of hell. No matter how many Holocaust films you've seen, you've not seen one like this.

Though a definite improvement on the last three abortive Star Wars prequels directed by series creator George Lucas, The Force Awakens is only at its best in fits and starts, its success dependent on who of its mix of franchise veterans and first-timers is on the screen.

A surprisingly intimate film, a completely involving look inside the life of a gifted and complex woman.

The whale is wondrous but the drama not so much in In the Heart of the Sea.

The film packs in so much information and comedy, it would be fun to see it twice: not just to take in what it has to tell us, but also to laugh all over again.

Youth is a film that goes its own way. Quixotic, idiosyncratic, effortlessly moving, it's as much a cinematic essay as anything else, a meditation on the wonders and complications of life, an examination of what lasts, of what matters to people no matter their age.

Smart, thoughtful and elegantly done, Hitchcock/Truffaut is more than an authoritative look at the careers and interpersonal dynamics of directors Alfred Hitchcock and Francois Truffaut, a pair of unlikely soul mates; it's also, as director Kent Jones intended, a love letter to film itself, to the value and lure of the cinematic experience.

Though much of the acting attention in Danish Girl will understandably go to Redmayne, Vikander's position as the audience surrogate plus her energy and passion as Gerda, a woman facing an exceptional challenge to her love of her husband, is more than essential.

The Good Dinosaur is antic and unexpected as well as homiletic, rife with subversive elements, wacky critters and some of the most beautiful landscapes ever seen in a computer animated film.

Coogler and company do fine work convincing us against our better judgment that nothing we see is preordained, that anything can happen within the four corners of the ring. You can't ask a "Rocky" film to do more than that.

Haynes understands that swooningly beautiful traditional technique bolstered by thrilling performances creates the greatest impact. He has made a serious melodrama about the geometry of desire, a dreamy example of heightened reality that fully engages emotions despite the exact calculations with which it's been made.

The aesthetically misguided idea of breaking the final book into two films, commercially remunerative though it might have been, has ended up making the dragged-out proceedings feel anti-climactic and emotionally static.

Spotlight doesn't call attention to itself. Its screenplay is self-effacing, its accomplished direction is intentionally low key, and it encourages its fistful of top actors to blend into an eloquent ensemble.

Yes, some of the individual stunts and action set pieces temporarily hold our interest...but the story itself is not convincing on its own terms, playing like a series of boxes (Bond asking for a martini shaken not stirred) that need to be checked off and forgotten.

A godsend for audiences who hunger for rich emotion presented with wit, grace and not a trace of sentimentality, Brooklyn illustrates the power of restraint in dealing with poignant, impassioned material.

Burnt is mildly diverting.

Don't mistake the brief running time of India's Daughter for a lack of importance or ability to involve. Though it lasts only 63 minutes, this documentary's impact is devastating.

Nominally a satiric comedy, the film is only sporadically effective, running out of energy before it reaches the end.

Though ably acted and indisputably on the side of the angels, Suffragette as directed by Sarah Gavron is more dead-on earnest and schematic than it needs to be.

Crimson Peak's astonishing visuals don't enhance its story (co-written by the director and Matthew Robbins); they overwhelm it, encouraging us to stand back and admire the look when we should be involved in the emotional mechanics of this lurid tale.

Larson has done exceptional work before... but the way she has taken the deepest of dives into this complex, difficult material is little short of astonishing. The reality and preternatural commitment she brings to Ma is piercingly honest from start to finish, as scaldingly emotional a performance as anyone could wish for.

Bridge of Spies is a consummate professional's tribute to a gifted amateur, a smooth entertainment with a strong but subtle political subtext that's both potent and unexpected.

Winter on Fire never takes its eye off the story's underlying and very dramatic theme, and that would be nothing less than revolution.

It's a film of exceptional technical virtuosity that could have used some help in the dramatic department.

Steve Jobs is a smart, hugely entertaining film that all but bristles with crackling creative energy. What it is not is a standard biopic.

Because of its strong dialogue and convincing acting, 99 Homes stays on point for quite some time, artfully disguising the film's increasing reliance on plot devices.

Having its heart and mind in the right place is not enough to make this a better movie than it is.

The Martian is a film that respects the geekiest among us, and that pays off all around.

It would be swell if all of The Walk came together as beautifully as the computer effects do, but it would also be churlish not to appreciate what we do have. This film may not talk the talk, but it definitely walks the walk, and for that we are grateful.

An organization that stubbornly resists being pigeonholed, the Black Panther Party emerges from this documentary with its significance enhanced but some of its tactics questioned.

Directors Bryan Carberry and Clay Tweel stick with this story long enough to emotionally deepen the proceedings and show us how the struggle changes lives in profound ways no one could have anticipated.

Though there is heroism as well as love here, because it involves the deaths of people we have come to care about, Everest is finally a sad story, though not always a dramatically involving one.

If the final result doesn't transcend emotionally in the manner of the gold standard of Boston noir, Clint Eastwood's "Mystic River," the fault is not in the execution but the unyieldingly oppressive nature of the underlying material.

The film's straight-ahead approach matters less than the complete and utter strangeness of the true story it convincingly tells.

A Brilliant Young Mind doesn't fit into any familiar inspirational box. Many of its characters are complex, contrary individuals who are not even close to being comfortable in their own skins, and this film refuses to shortchange how frustratingly edgy and difficult they are to interact with.

Given what it attempts, Time Out of Mind should be considered a success. An attempt to use a movie star to shine a dramatic light on the intractable problem of urban homelessness, the film's tone of austerity helps it to avoid sentimentality and simplistic answers.

Meet The Patels is more than just a hoot. Its candor and empathy allow it to make keen points about love, marriage, family and the unexpected complications that American freedoms can bring to immigrant lives.

While the filmmaker's trademark mixture of talking heads, archival footage and investigative ethos is familiar, Gibney is certainly good at what he does, and "Steve Jobs" is at its best in providing a brisk summation of the man's life. Or, more accurately, lives, for Jobs seemed to have been more people than one would have thought possible.

The Second Mother is a satisfying contradiction. It's a soap opera with a social conscience that casually mixes dramatic elements about serious class issues with a crowd-pleasing audience picture sensibility.

As revealed by writer-director Aviva Kempner, it's not just the amount of money he donated that makes Rosenwald special, it's the specifics of who he gave it to and how and why he did it that sets him apart.

Because Sauper views himself as a storyteller first, as political as "We Come as Friends" may be, it is always dramatic, never didactic.

Though the Meru climbing and outdoor footage is spectacular, it is the personal struggle of each of the climbers, and the candid way they talk about them on camera, that give this film its considerable impact.

Small, smart and inescapably independent, People Places Things has its own offbeat and charmingly low-key way of seeing the world.

Alternately riveting and wearying, up-to-the-minute relevant as well as self-mythologizingly self-indulgent — as much of a heroic origins story as anything out of the Marvel factory — Straight Outta Compton ends up juggling more story lines and moods than it can handle.

Ricki and the Flash is a sour movie masquerading as something more cheerful. In that attempted deception the film is both helped and hindered by an indispensable performance by star Meryl Streep.

If Fantastic Four is pleasantly different in its introductory segment, once those super powers kick in, the whole film goes into a more standard gear.

Playful, absurd and endearingly inventive, this unstoppably amusing feature reminds us why Britain's Aardman Animations is a mainstay of the current cartooning golden age.

Phoenix is an intoxicating witches' brew, equal parts melodrama and moral parable, that audaciously mixes diverse elements to compelling, disturbing effect.

A revelatory, strikingly emotional look at a complex, troubled, enormously gifted man.

McQuarrie is adept at keeping things moving and has overseen two areas where "Rogue Nation" stands out from the crowd.

Though placing the cheerleading Eckers front and center as key interview subjects gives their film a self-congratulatory, gee-whiz quality, "Outrageous" compensates by giving you a good sense of who Tucker was and how she got where she did.

Southpaw is so logic-defying it takes on a Frankenstein life of its own, especially with as energetic and focused an action maestro as Fuqua ("Training Day," "The Equalizer") in charge.

Maneuvering shrewdly within the boundaries of the traditional canon and aided by the impeccable performance of Ian McKellen, Bill Condon directs an elegant puzzler that presents the sage of Baker Street dealing with the one thing he's never had to contend with before: his own emotions.

Playful in unexpected ways and graced with a genuinely off-center sense of humor, Ant-Man (engagingly directed by Peyton Reed) is light on its feet the way the standard-issue Marvel behemoths never are.

If the key to price in real estate is "location, location, location," the key to success in vérité-style documentaries is "access, access, access." Which is what Cartel Land has in compelling amounts.

Minions' all-silliness all-the-time philosophy will put a smile on faces and keep it there, like a fizzy beverage on a hot afternoon.

At its best, A Borrowed Identity concerns itself with the malleability of self, with who we are and how society and culture can force identity choices on us.

It is the achievement of Amy, Asif Kapadia's accomplished, quietly devastating documentary, that it makes the story of this troubled and troubling individual surprisingly one of a kind by allowing us to, in a sense, live her life along with her.

[An] impressive and deeply felt documentary.

It tells a story irresistible to our age of rampant voyeurism and reality TV, yet it also has a potent emotional core that cannot be denied.

No matter what is going on, Hansen-Love's talent for bringing us inside a specific world makes Eden an experience we all can connect to.

Inside Out manages to be honest and unafraid but never cheaply sentimental where emotion is concerned, evoking a largeness of spirit whose ability to be moving sneaks up and takes us by surprise.

[Barthes'] measured, distanced style brings a certain stiffness to the proceedings and makes us miss even more than usual the Emma Bovary interior monologue that makes the book so memorable.

Despite the best efforts of director Colin Trevorrow, Jurassic World's story of Indominus rex on the loose, while certainly acceptable, doesn't have the same impact as the initial film.

The Farewell Party succeeds as well as it does because the core dilemma always feels real and the filmmakers take great care to see that the inevitable emotions put into play are never overdone.

Unapologetically emotional and impeccably made in the classic manner, it tells the kind of potent, many-sided story whose unforeseen complexities can come only courtesy of a life that lived them all.

Pohlad did not lack for ideas about how he wanted to portray Brian Wilson's life, but he is without the wherewithal to effectively put them into practice.

Even by the non-Olympian standards of the disaster genre, San Andreas is chock-full of cliché characters, staggering coincidences and wild improbabilities.

It deals with friendship, loneliness, abandonment and forgiveness, and though its curious narrative arc means you're never sure exactly where it's going, the film works up a considerable emotional charge by the end.

Tentpoles are rarely guilty of overreaching, but Tomorrowland has a tendency to feel out of control, a film that is finally more ambitious than accomplished.

Mad Max: Fury Road will leave you speechless, which couldn't be more appropriate. Words are not really the point when it comes to dealing with this barn-burner of a post-apocalyptic extravaganza in which sizzling, unsettling images are the order of the day.

Emotional intensity is Farhadi's métier, and to see About Elly is to revel in his skill.

Maysles' portrait of Iris Apfel, a 93-year-old self-described "geriatric starlet," is surprisingly memorable, graced with an unforced but unmistakable charm.

The uncomfortable reality remains that although this movie is effective moment to moment, very little of it lingers in the mind afterward. The ideal vehicle for our age of immediate sensation and instant gratification, it disappears without a trace almost as soon as it's consumed.

Tangerines is an example of lean, unadorned old-school filmmaking where familiar style and technique combine to unexpectedly potent effect because of the great skill with which they've been employed.

Once the stage is set and the more intense plot elements of Black Souls kick in, the film's emphasis on character and setting pays off, just as the muted nature of the storytelling adds to its considerable power.

Since Dior and I was made with the house's cooperation, the film is not exactly a slashing piece of investigative journalism, but it does give us glimpses of the reality of this kind of business.

Problematic but involving, Child 44 offers a picture of what individuals did to survive in a world turned upside down. The film's singular premise allows it to survive its various shortcomings, but it is a near-thing.