Kimberley Jones

Heartfelt felicitations to Soderbergh on his rebirth of the cool.

The film’s third-act reach for a redemptive arc plays hollowly, and Harrelson teeters over the line into hillbilly affectation. Still, it’s not enough to erase the memory of Harrelson’s subtler moments, or to ruin what is an altogether worthy adaptation.

The Exception’s line is not an easy one to walk, this marriage of soapy melodrama and real-world events, and with Courtney leading the parade, it’s destined for failure.

The Big Sick is as personal as it gets, but Gordon and Nanjiani pull no punches and steer well clear of preciousness. I laughed plenty at their film, cried my guts out, too, and went home elated.

Ultimately, it’s the kind-of mystery that undermines Past Life’s emotional kapow. You can hardly fault writer/director Avi Nesher for trying to tease suspense out of the story, but he establishes early an ominous tone and stubbornly holds steadfast to it.

Unvarnished and often silent, she (Hayek) holds the camera’s gaze like a dare. She cuts such a striking figure, you’ll want to follow her anywhere … and where the film ultimately follows is utterly gutting.

The Tavern footage is terrific stuff – unstaged and unmediated and the closest the camera gets to penetrating the enigmatic yet magnetic chef.

The story never drags – it’s too frenetically paced for that – but it’s still kind of a drag.

A Quiet Passion’s manneredness overwhelmed me at times, but it is very effective – chilling, even – in its charting of one woman’s disappointed journey to the rhetorical coda of her own life: “Why has the world become so ugly?”

The film gets there eventually, but one wishes it weren’t so timid about embracing the inherent schlockiness of the genre.

What sets apart this eighth outing is its giggling bouts of male henpecking, all puffed feathers and nyah-nyah taunts.

The investigation is dull, the jokes dispiritingly flat-footed, with Ponch’s sex addiction and squirminess over male intimacy supplying most of the setups for CHIPS’ puerile humor.

Alas, the younger actors in the Sixties stretch are no match for the senior set, weightless and blank next to the gravitas of Broadbent, Walter, and Charlotte Rampling.

As light on his feet as he is as a musical-comedy showman, Jackman is perversely even more pleasurable when he’s popping neck veins from the effort of heavy drama.

This is a strange and beguiling film to the end.

Rana’s voice comes roaring back in the film’s held-breath third act, in which these amateur actors return to their old apartment to enact a drama with life-or-death stakes. This final 30 minutes are the film’s pièce de résistance.

An actor most at home playing devilish, Keaton’s got the last-reel Machiavellian shrug down cold. But neither he nor the filmmakers do much to illuminate the neural pistons fired from brain to bodily shrug.

This movie is delightful – funny and dreamy and sometimes desperately sad.

Before a foot of film was ever shot on Live by Night, Affleck had already made a decision that would be the film’s undoing. He cast himself as the lead.

It’s nowhere near as soulful or questing as "2001" or "Moon" – but as popcorn entertainment, it’s surprisingly provocative.

It’s almost criminal to have to stay in your seat when the contact high of La La Land is goosing you to grand jeté in the aisle. The heart, at least, is at liberty to swell to bursting.

The film is less successful at exploring the chinks in her armor – the stuff that makes her human, and a person of interest. Chastain is great – she’s always great, right? – and the brittle braininess she radiates is the film’s crowning seduction.

Either way, Beatty has taken an object of enduring fascination and made him … not so much.

I recognized a lot of my younger self in The Edge of Seventeen. It’s crummy that teenagers just shy of 17 won’t get the same chance.

The adaptation, by screenwriter John Romano and McGregor, debuting as a director, roughly sticks to the plot points of the novel but sheds its nuance, and reduces Zuckerman’s role to a mere background information delivery system.

Returning director Ron Howard somewhat belabors the Botticelli-inspired hallucinations Langdon suffers from following a konk on the head – though you really can’t oversell the creepiness of a beaky plague mask – but he continues to have an inspired hand in casting his supporting players.

The film is chockablock with terrible actors (including Tyga, in a bizarro cameo rapping at a frat party), and the jokes he gives his inferior cast to work with are stinkers.

Never Go Back is boilerplate action-thriller, filmed with an anonymous style and scripted so that characters talk in catchphrases.

It’s a tedious watch, inferior in every way to David Fincher’s slick, grinningly grim "Gone Girl." Any chance for lightning striking twice is going, going, gone.

The Dressmaker’s twists are best experienced blind, and its treats are modest but genuine.

Goodhart’s film is a winner – sweet but not sentimental, tart without turning sour. The studio-produced romantic comedy may be flatlining, but who cares, so long as snappy indies like this one step up to fill the void?

Other People is gentle, heartfelt, and of a delicate build. Kelly’s best observations are small but true: the touching banality of a bad pop song, and that “other people” is in fact most people, if you’re paying attention.

Is this latest outing as bold or bracing or funny as the original film? Certainly not. We’re well settled into our seats now, but there’s some comfort in how the cushion already knows a body’s grooves.

For truly affecting, there is Margherita’s teen daughter, Livia (Mancini). I don’t know if Moretti cares about catharsis, but Livia’s silent sob broke me, in the best way.

Nobody’s a monster here, and that’s the subtle, aching rub of Little Men: Everyone is right in their claim, depending on the right angle, be it economic, sentimental, moral, or fraternal.

As Lo and Behold anecdotally lays it out, in the blink of the eye of human history, this invention has become essential, and in another blink – a solar flare, or cyberwarfare – its failure could trigger a civilization’s collapse.

It’s not the unmitigated disaster early reviews suggested. Instead, it is a blandly competent and doggedly uninspired redo of material adapted a half-dozen times already.

Whenever War Dogs plods, close your eyes and count the seconds. Hill’s next deranged little giggle will be along shortly to pick you up.

Sausage Party glints of greatness, but this is half-cocked comedy at best.

Lin’s F&F films are operatically dumb, which was what makes them so much fun; maybe if Star Trek Beyond were stupider it wouldn’t feel like such a chore.

Owen’s story is unique, and deserving of singling out.

The actresses are so quick and so supple, the force of their individual personalities and their irresistible camaraderie hoik the film up from its middling story and scripted jokes. I would have happily stayed in my seat another two hours to continue keeping their company. Just in a better movie.

Crafted by much of the same creative team behind the "Despicable Me" franchise, The Secret Life has wit, for sure, but it could use more balls.

What it does have in its favor are two sit-up-and-clap supporting turns from Skarsgård, all barking bear in tacky gold chains, and Lewis, who wears the sour mouth of someone who just underwent a prostate exam. Collectively, they’re the film’s fail-safe: Whenever Our Kind of Traitor threatens to go completely inert, they show up and give it a good goosing.

A lauded Shakespearean actor and adapter who won an Oscar last year for his collaboration with director Steven Spielberg on "Bridge of Spies," Rylance portrays the body (via motion-capture) and certainly soul of this gentle giant. In his mournful, lyrical cadence, he makes poetry out of the BFG’s gobbledygook command of English.

When it’s Law reading aloud in his awful cornpone accent, it sounds like curdled grits. But when Firth narrates, low and measured, the prose springs to life. I wouldn’t call Genius inspired, but not for nothing it inspired me to pick up "Look Homeward, Angel" for the first time.

Where "Finding Nemo" capitalized on the awesome splendor and danger of the ocean, this follow-up shifts much of its action to an aquatic park and becomes broader and sillier, or at least reality-busting, for it.

Maggie’s Plan is an ensemble piece, with Maya Rudolph, Travis Fimmel, and a magic, romantic New York rounding out the cast. They’re all great, but it’s Gerwig who’s just so damn gosh-wow.

Hard truths: Popstar’s jokes land pillow-soft.

Me Before You isn’t going to win any awards for sophistication in storytelling or direction, but it tenderly reproduces the book’s most iconic scenes, and their tearjerking effect.

What wicked good fun it is watching this bad girl do her worst.

I’m not sure I’ve laughed harder all year than at Gosling in a bathroom stall, accidentally dropping a lit cigarette down his pants leg.

While the Occupy Wall Street rage supposedly fueling this thing is flimsy, what’s left is still solidly entertaining.

But being Charlie – what’s going on inside this angry kid’s head, what made him turn to drugs, and finally turn away – that is more elusive. And that is the film’s great disappointment: that something so clearly conceived in earnestness and from real-life, first-person experience ends up feeling, well, kinda fake.

Civil War’s main battle sequence is so effective because it’s six-on-six, and we’ve spent the past decade getting to know the combatants.

The actors are all game, but the job’s beneath them – Hemsworth, a pro, and a real champ at faking enthusiasm for this dud; Theron, still doing camp but this time with no tempering complexity or empathy; Blunt, stuck playing a frost-bitten Mommie Dearest.

Criminal is a perfectly passable thriller, if you’re cool with no one here passing as an actual human being.

The whole film is a delicious excuse to gawk – at the magnificent costumes, at the diplomatic dance of museum personnel and party planners, and at the sumptuous squish of so many egos sharing space.

It’s a fun watch, and familiarity with Los Angeles isn’t required to get a kick out of these toe-dips into Koreatown and Tehrangeles and all the other micro-communities that make the city a macro-paradise for eaters.

Maybe a dare to Desplechin, in fact: Next time, more Esther, less Paul. She’s still got stories to be told.

Three films into the ongoing Divergent series, one would hope we’d moved beyond laying plates and folding napkins to get to something more substantial. Yet Allegiant barely makes it to the appetizer course.

The material begs for a much longer consideration than the film’s trim 79 minutes, but it’s still a must-watch for serious film fans.

I like the declarative clarity, the strength of conviction in the title. I wish the movie itself bore the same certainty, or sturdiness.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, at least among Janeites, that we’ll spend long hours scouring every streaming service out there, hungering for a corseted drama to watch. In that respect at least, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is fresh meat, if a tough cut.

“Subtle” is the watchword for this kind of arthouse film. That can be a backhanded compliment, a buyer-beware to attention-deficit audiences, but Haigh is really quite plain with his preoccupations: the constant tick-tock of time, and the illusion that in marriage two are melded into one.

This is a visually stunning picture, a rhapsody of saturated color and contrasting texture, from the painstaking detail of coarse panda fur to the painterly dreamscape that is the spirit world.

The filmmakers don’t endorse Michael’s solipsism, but we’re stuck with it anyway – the film is entirely from his point of view, save a lovely, pacifying final shot.

McKay makes moral outrage wickedly entertaining.

Sisters has a patchily funny first act but unleashes pure comedic chaos once the party gets started.

The trouble comes, and not just for Fassbender, when it’s time to tackle the actual text. The toil of it is exhaustingly felt. The lines are spoken, but their weight sometimes is as vaporous as that Scottish fog.

Mostly Legend just lurches.