Kenneth Turan

Every once in a while, a small, unheralded film comes along, so smart and funny, such a pleasure to experience, you can't believe your luck. Hunt for the Wilderpeople is such a film.

If this labor-of-love portrait is any indication, forgetting Frank Zappa is not going to happen any time soon.

They both saw themselves, "Dying to Know" posits, as adventurers exploring alternate realities, and hearing where they ended up is a trip all by itself.

A trapeze enthusiast himself, Moore is not shy about displaying his passion. His shambling, amiable film has a tendency to wander and digress, sometimes effectively, sometimes not. But its core of balletic trapeze footage is always gripping.

Because no one compensates for a thin concept like the people at Pixar, there is a lot to admire in the animated “Dory,” including stunning undersea visuals and an ocean full of eccentric and engaging aquatic creatures. But, as the 13-year gap between “Nemo” and “Dory” indicates, this was not a concept that cried out to be made.

Made by a first-time feature director working with a microscopic budget and a tiny, 11-year-old protagonist, it’s a 72-minute wonder, a self-assured, gently mysterious little film that is hypnotic in unexpected ways.

De Palma's biggest asset, not surprisingly, is the man himself. A formidable talker who is invariably smart, candid and acerbic, De Palma is a person of considerable self-confidence, and listening to him hold forth gives us an always-involving glimpse inside a singular cinematic mind.

As directed by Morgan Neville, "Strangers" turns out to be as concerned with emotion as with performance, spending much of its time investigating how so much joyous music was able to come out of exploration, disturbance, even pain.

Most of Time To Choose is concerned with demonstrating that, as more than one speaker says, every crisis is an opportunity. That for every human action that increases global warming there are already workable alternatives in place just waiting to be embraced by a wider constituency.

Disorganized but engaging, full of visual pyrotechnics and earnest emotion, it is diverting, if not necessarily convincing.

Money Monster is all over the map, mixing earnest contemporary relevance, black comedy, bogus emotion and tragedy with its nominal thriller plot, all to frankly bewildering effect.

"In His Own Words" is a deeply involving look at the man's entire life, using archival footage, home movies, private letters but most of all filmed interviews Rabin gave, to let us hear him tell his own story just about from cradle to grave.

The best parts of "Elstree," not surprisingly, are the war stories these nine men and one woman share, their vivid memories of a shoot one calls "as primitive as it gets."

If you live and breathe Marvel, this is one of the MCU's stronger offerings. If you are a spy coming in from the cold, the answer is not so clear.

Nothing happens you won't see coming, but it's all so deftly done you're more than happy to wait for the inevitable to arrive.

A thoughtful, nuanced examination of a complex thinker.

Hockney is less interested in providing a conventional top-to-bottom narrative than in capturing a sense of who Hockney is and what is important to him.

Hologram for the King is a baffling film, cinema without weight or heft. The problem is not that anything on screen is troubling, it's that nothing there, not even star Tom Hanks, is capable of holding our interest or attention for very long.

This lively and engaged documentary lives up to its name.

Half science-fiction tale, half espionage thriller, it's a pleasantly far-fetched endeavor that moves along so briskly that it leaves no time to consider its implausibilities, which are many.

By turns sweetly amusing and surprisingly unnerving, crammed with story, song and computer-generated visual splendors, it's such a model of modern crowd-pleasing entertainment that it brings to mind a celebrated quote by F. Scott Fitzgerald about filmmakers who were "able to keep the whole equation of pictures in their heads."

What pulls us into Fireworks Wednesday is the universality of the emotions its characters display and the familiarity of the situations they find themselves in. Farhadi is a master navigator of these waters, and even his earlier films reward our close attention.

Demolition is a well-meaning misfire, terribly earnest but unconvincing for all of that.

For all its gifted collaborators, "Film" was not a match made in heaven. But for moviegoers who care about film not just as a title, Notfilm can be unreservedly recommended.

This is one grand adventure, and, animated or not, those are always welcome.

The sophistication gap between the character Cheadle has created and the film that contains him is so great it begins to feel like you're watching two different stories that have been unaccountably spliced together.

I Saw the Light is solid but not spectacular, a retelling of a sad story that never catches fire.

The director, a strong technician whose slam-bang emphatic, occasionally operatic style seems made for comic book adaptations, has been well-served by an adept script co-written by Chris Terrio (an Oscar winner for Ben Affleck's "Argo") and David S. Goyer, which raises a number of interesting issues.