Kimberley Jones

This “one crazy night” taps out at lightly kooky; there’s nothing here that gets within striking distance of the sheer weirdness of "Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle" or the darkness of "After Hours", to name two genre stablemates.

Director Catherine Hardwicke doesn’t need that easily-cut path through long grass; she already has a willing cast and story to get to the guts-splaying.

With this kind of competition doc, a filmmaker has to be incredibly savvy and soothsaying in selecting his subjects early on: They have to be both charismatic enough to hold the camera’s gaze and competitive enough to advance to the final rounds. In both respects, Baijnauth struck gold with his five baristas.

There’s never any doubt that redemption is the end-game for Jones, but the claim for his saving is weak sauce; the case against him has been too emphatically, if unintentionally, argued.

Sorkin smashes the cradle-to-grave biopic mold with Steve Jobs. R.I.P., I guess. It’s called a mold for a reason.

The film is as thin as a picture postcard.

Ill-conceived from any number of angles, this Peter Pan origin story, scripted by Jason Fuchs (Ice Age: Continental Drift), plays topsy-turvy with J.M. Barrie’s beloved characters.

That Peace Officer cannot provide a complete picture of the myriad of problems that come with the increased militarization of police isn’t an indictment of the film. This trouble is too big for one film to contain.

It’s a shrewd last move in a movie that’s uncommonly smart about when to buck convention and when to conform to the warm feels we all want.

Best yet is Liev Schreiber playing Spassky, big as a Russian bear and as ice-cool as the country’s signature 80-proof spirit. Is it unpatriotic to wish this was his movie, not the twitchy American guy’s?

Playing a 70-year-old seeking renewed purpose as an intern at an Internet start-up, Robert De Niro is gentle as a kitten. Is it disrespectful to want to greet this icon of American cinema with a snuggle and a tumbler of warm milk?

The trouble comes when somebody opens their mouth and you’re reminded this is supremely silly stuff, and overall a much lesser version of teens versus the titans of post-apocalypse industry – a copy of a copy of a copy.

By necessity, Black Mass begins in a hole it can never dig out of. It’s the portrait of a monster told in a flat line.

By the end, I was moved. Not floored, but moved.

Digging for Fire fails its title’s own promise: It has the capacity for startling insight and artistry, but mostly it’s just a toe listlessly pushing dirt around.

Mistress America is maybe Baumbach’s most probing consideration of the writer’s process and development, a continuing point of interest in his filmography, from "Kicking and Screaming" to "The Squid and the Whale" and "Margot at the Wedding."

I lodge no complaint against the film’s emphasis on prayer, even if, dramatically, it’s not scintillating stuff to watch.

Gently funny and admirably, even unfashionably humane, People Places Things is at its best beat-to-beat.

The music so wholly engulfs the second half of the film, there’s no room left to expand on characters that feel less than lived-in or on the film’s more ambitious ideas.

Even more extraordinary than the concept or its conceptualization is how intensely moving an experience it all amounts to.

If you ever thought "Footloose" might’ve been improved with an Irish brogue and a short pour of agitprop, then by all means look to this latest from Ken Loach, Britain’s elder statesman of cinema and its evergreen champion of the working class.

Oh, how I rued my failed foreign-language skills in the opening moments of Gemma Bovery. Who wants to read subtitles when a French baker is rolling out such pliant, such pokeable, such heavenly looking dough?

Trainwreck can be furiously funny. It just goes down too easy. It’s scared of its own sharp edges. The sly raging against the machine of Inside Amy Schumer has gone missing. Here, the rage, curiously, is turned inward.

Best yet, there’s a mid-film bedtime story, made to look like stop-motion, that’ll take your breath away.

It’s muddy, bloody, and studded with amputated limbs, yet still rather generic-feeling; it lacks the visceral impact of Joe Wright’s version of Western Front atrocities in "Atonement."

Magic Mike XXL isn’t really a movie. It’s a bachelorette party, or a book club, or any other safe space where women gather for some of that “you go, girl” good feeling. It’s an amusement-park ride. Fasten the safety belt, secure your purses, and get ready to scream.

This film is sweet and frequently very funny. It isn’t perfect. Some of those imperfections – or, more to the point, irritants, such as the twee chapter headings and college-essay framing device – are carryovers from the YA novel, written by Jesse Andrews, who also adapted the novel to screen.

Its audacity is entirely matched by its artistry.

Size matters, too, in Live From New York!, a portrait of SNL at 40, but in inverse: 82 minutes isn’t nearly long enough to consider every angle – or even many angles – of a cultural institution.

Danner’s even better on her own, as she honestly, even angrily, wrangles with not a paradox, per se, just the raw rub of life: that it sucks to be alone, and it’s scary to try not being alone. She’s exquisite.

Surely the most unconventional romantic comedy of the summer, Results isn't anti-plot; it just moves in weird ways.

Saint Laurent gets across how isolating celebrity can be, how exhausting it is to keep a toehold on top of a mountain that keeps shifting underfoot. But the film is allergic to insight: It’s as numbed-out as its hero addict.

All told, it’s a likably misfit little movie, even if you can imagine it better suited as a lengthy short film or as a superior installment on one of those midcentury television playhouse series.

The cult of Iris caught like grassfire, and the film catches this nonagenarian nonpareil, ever in her defining owl glasses and heavy jewelry, at peak heat.

She’s (Mulligan) got the best lopsided smile in the business, and she uses it well to size up her three bachelors. They’re just no match for her.

The language barrier borders the Babel-esque; it’s a surprise fount of humor, too, as when a translator is terrified to pass along an Italian tailor’s request to the French-speaking chief seamstress, knowing she’ll be furious at the added work.

What’s most dispiriting about this garbage burger is its nonsensical characterization of Blart himself.

A rattling and ruminative piece of speculative fiction, Ex Machina is good enough to wish it were even better.

There’s little here to convince the audience of boy and girl’s special chemistry, and nothing to attach the audience to them, either.

When the action shifts to Bill’s childhood home – an islet along the Thames, downriver from the legendary Shepperton Studios – some of the magic of that place rubs off on Boorman’s picture: It becomes lighter on its feet, moves with the breath of life and not just the strength of memory.

The subject itself – the musicians, the music – and the spirit of the thing – one son’s obvious devotion – transcend the film’s technical shortcomings.

With the documentary Ballet 422, Lipes’ first return to dance after notable narrative cinematography work (on TV’s Girls and the upcoming Trainwreck, among other projects), he’s somewhat boxed himself into a corner with the cinema verité directive to capture the moment and keep out of the way.

This con artist caper from the writer/director duo behind "Bad Santa" and "I Love You Philip Morris" bears some superficial resemblance to the 2005 romantic comedy "Hitch."

An adaptation of Kody Keplinger’s YA novel, The DUFF is exponentially dumb.

Most Americans will be unfamiliar with the late British writer Kyril Bonfiglioli’s Mortdecai novels, on which this Johnny Depp comedy is based; still, no reference point is required to come to the conclusion this is a rotten movie all around.

A Most Violent Year is its own thing, hypnotic and exacting and as subtly savage as mellow-voiced Marvin Gaye’s “Inner City Blues (Makes Me Wanna Holler),” which opens the film and sets the tone. I was fully in thrall to it all.

What lingers is the feeling that the filmmakers may pay lip service to Turing’s sexuality, but they prefer to keep his sex life strictly theoretical. Careful, there: No tracking dirt on the nice clean prestige picture.

Little girls will love it. I used to be a little girl once, too. I didn’t care much for the Top 40 glossy coat slathered over every song, but this heart will never harden to a spunky kid who’s certain the sun’ll come out tomorrow.

Wild lands some hard punches, but it can’t sustain the impact. Some of that lies in its inherited arc: Strayed found some peace – the whole point of the trek – but arriving-at-peace is less provocative than the struggle, at least in a movie.

A merry entertainment that never pretends to greatness, Penguins of Madagascar is all about antics, verbal and visual.

The movie lumbers on some more, reiterating the obvious and relying on overfamiliar imagery. Audiences have a long year to wait for Part 2. Would it not have been better to leave them breathless than heaving a sigh?

Saving Christmas will hold little interest for anyone not already a believer. It’s too single-minded in its instructional purpose, too averse to multidimensional characters, too youth-pastor-like in its dorky humor.

The film gets its biggest laughs – and there truly are some grandly bleak belly-shakers here – by upsetting the apple cart on traditional gender roles.

Interstellar is riddled with ridiculisms; the but how comes … never stop. And yet: Nolan, a notoriously chilly filmmaker who’s never shown much faculty with matters of the heart, is pinning that heart squarely on his sleeve.

The leads’ prolonged, puffed-feathers sparring is entertaining while it lasts, but the sensation of something sizable is only fleeting.

The film is so soaring, sometimes literally, I hardly missed the feeling of hard ground underfoot.

As much a portrait of a community as of its brilliant, de facto mayor, Harmontown is a stirring tribute to the restorative power of finding your people.

Not just narratively crude but aesthetically ugly, Men, Women & Children’s framing occasionally cuts characters off at the forehead, in effect lobotomizing them. I couldn’t think of a better metaphor for this brainless splotch of self-important scaremongering.

Already hobbled by an overwrought story that turns positively Hallmark-Movie-preposterous in its third act, journeyman director Michael Hoffman (Soapdish, The Last Station) can’t conceive of a single memorable set-piece or rouse his actors into action. By the time Marsden’s character has very polite sex with the love of his life with his pants still on, I was done.

Canadian director Philippe Falardeau (Oscar nominee for Monsieur Lazhar) films these early, subtitled scenes mostly with a documentarian’s observational remove and slightly shaky camera – an effective way to dramatize the horror of war without exploiting it, tarting it up with Hollywood techniques.

It’s worth a watch to see these two reliably comic actors do some heavy dramatic lifting and tenderly spot for each other.

Once a crucial piece of backstory is revealed, the picture becomes more rewarding for it, emotionally and aesthetically, but that doesn’t temper the feeling that half the film was wasted on arty misdirection.

Subtle it ain’t, but there’s an undercurrent of palpable rage that pokes through the (very funny) banter-banter gloss of the thing, and the actors rip into it with relish.

God Help the Girl is not so perfectly crafted, but the promise – oh, the promise is irresistible.

The film provides invaluable context in its detailing of institutional racism in the Sixties and Seventies and in its emphasis on Ellis as an advocate for equality and as a righteous shit-stirrer.

Director Lenny Abrahamson establishes a twee tone early that renders tinny the transition into melancholy, and it’s a shame the film so clings to Jon’s perspective. The takeaway is as flat as Frank’s mask. Bemused smile, followed by deflated feeling.

Wright is terrific – sensitive and alert – in the live-action opening. But that opening runs more than 45 minutes long, a way too heavy-handed preamble to the crazed animation to come, and the actress’ vocal delivery – soft-spoken, gently bewildered – is too soporific to pull off lines like, “Look at me, I’m your prophet of doom.”

It’s an impossible standard, maybe, but in 42 minutes, TV’s "Friday Night Lights" delivered all-star-level emotional complexity and action. When the Game Stands Tall is strictly JV squad.

Occasional animated inserts inspired by Chantry’s work as an illustrator, while accomplished, inject an off-note of whimsy that doesn’t quite square with the script’s stabs at edgier humor.

Because “all in” – to me, at least – suggests a certain standard of enthusiasm, of emphaticness, and what this latest Step Up movie indifferently chunks out falls far short of that standard.

The Hundred-Foot Journey is elevated comfort food. The flavors aren’t complex, but it’s nourishing nonetheless.

Guardians of the Galaxy is an outlier: a space opera in a largely earthbound movie cycle (excepting the occasional red-eye to another dimension in the Thor pictures), candy-colored and bopping where the other Marvel movies are muted and imposing, and the funniest one to date, without a doubt.

Patinkin and King’s characters’ wrangling with spirituality is sincere, and specific. Everything else in this everything-and-the-kitchen-sink film feels like too many ideas stored up over an especially long winter.

Forget divining who’s predator and who’s prey. Everybody’s chum here.

Unimaginatively filmed and of a misbegotten construction, Tammy goes all in with its namesake character (played by McCarthy), hanging the entire movie around a person who is immediately and irreversibly established as being thoughtless, unperceptive, destructive, and uneducated.

Snowpiercer holds its own; it’s an unruly but rattling – and ravishing – work of art. On first watch, I wondered if there was anything to scratch beneath the surface – it seemed so straightforward, I worried there wasn’t enough there there – so I rewatched it almost right away and was surprised to find it still left me panting.

It’s an indie film about abortion that comes snuggled in the broad strokes of a quirky relationship comedy. A grump might wonder when indie films got so soft, but I’m more intrigued by the inverse: Why aren’t more studio films this clever and winning and conversant in the same language as their audience?

Sweet-spirited and sometimes meandering but always working in the service of its young protagonists’ perspective, We Are the Best! might come off as slight if you aren’t paying attention, or you pay too much attention to the too-cute closing credits montage.

I laughed, I cried, I longed for a pet dragon to call my own.

Elgort’s performance is more mannered than Woodley’s open-faced, direct line to the heart, but it works.

The Immigrant is two hours long, but I stayed even longer in my seat, through the credits, still in thrall to it all. The title is singular, but the scope is not so easily quantifiable.

The material is interesting, and the production values are top-notch. Anushia Nieradzik deserves special notice for her costume design; her luxurious dresses in deep shades of purple and magenta race the pulse more than anything particular in the plot or characterization. It’s all quite well done, if only a touch too decorous.

Capitalizes on the audience’s familiarity with the many players and their complex backstories, but never advances the ball down the field, tenders no new thought or wrinkle to the franchise. It’s the difference between a diverting entertainment, and a riveting one.

A restless, nervy actor, Hardy seems to get a kick out of tying one hand behind his back. He dominated "The Dark Knight Rises" even with a modified ball gag obscuring most of his face. Here, locked behind a steeling wheel and a conceptual gimmick, he only has the upper half of his body to work with. No surprise to anybody who’s been paying attention: Half a Hardy adds up to a hell of a lot.

The filmmakers have cast their underdogs well: Madhur Mittal plays the anxious, upright Dinesh; Suraj Sharma is the loose-limbed, pizza-loving Rinku; and they’re both funny and endearing, two words that apply to the whole of the supporting cast.

Amusing enough, but weirdly joyless.

There are no hard truths to be found in Finding Vivian Maier (really, how could there be?), but it’s an engrossing doc nevertheless – a portrait of an American artist hiding in plain sight, a mystery with too few clues, and a sincere inquiry into how best to divine the wishes of the dead.

Screenwriters Andy Paterson and Frank Cottrell Boyce (who wrote many of Michael Winterbottom’s early films) adeptly shift the action back and forth between these two timelines, and the drama – exterior and interior – is engrossing in both tracks.

A bright idea, disappointingly dulled in the execution.

The promising-sounding football movie would turn out to be a movie about men talking on phones.

Director Roger Michell and his frequent writer Hanif Kureishi (their last film together was Venus) regularly dance to the very cliff’s edge of despair, and only for the grace of good casting do you not wish they’d just jump and get it over with.

Teenage is an art film – an engrossing one at that – so it isn’t required to respect Queensberry rules vis-à-vis documentaries.

The bestselling first book in yet another dystopic Young Adult series, Veronica Roth’s Divergent is engrossing enough to devour overnight, and flimsy enough to forget by morning light. Neil Burger’s film adaptation faithfully reproduces the same effect.

Marshmallow nation, you may now exhale: Rob Thomas did ya right.

The Grand Budapest Hotel is nothing short of an enchantment.

The spirit of the thing – the way it champions intellectual curiosity and critical thinking – warmed this nerd’s heart tremendously.

Isaac and Olsen are both mesmerizing actors, and Lange and Felton also do very good work in supporting roles, but their collective gameness – all that acting their pants off (sometimes literally) – is underserved by the film’s script and direction.

It’s the funniest, friskiest date movie in a good long while.