Kimberley Jones

Dissent – or a remotely critical eye – doesn’t have any place in RBG; this is an entirely admiring doc.

If you're gonna hire one of the funniest American comedians working today – Zach Galifianakis – and shove him to the side of the frame, then frankly, you can take what happens in Vegas, keep it in Vegas, and keep the rest of the us out of it.

If overly conventional, the film is so bursting with compassion, I felt like a heel any time I sniffed when the tone tipped toward corniness. Best to meet Bob Trevino on its own terms – with open arms and an unjudgey heart.

Much has been made of the fact that Swanberg has cast for the first time bona fide movie stars and not just his mumblecore pals: In fact, it's the making of the movie. If you're going to build an entire film on microexpressions, then a certain innate magnetism is required. Swanberg gets it in spades from his top-shelf cast.

So much here is equally befuddling and beguiling; I caught myself leaning in toward the screen repeatedly, trying to somehow get closer to the gorgeous impenetrability of the story, of the boy.

Undone by Blanchett's dull, wooden delivery. She's the pap that kills the pulp the rest of the film is bellowing out to be.

A film that wants you to get happy.

I suspect a second viewing would uncover more information embedded in the mise-en-scène; had Trance – tonally a jumble and disorienting to the point of distraction – rewarded the audience with the pure perfection of a Keyser Söze-like reveal, I’d be more inclined to make the return trip.

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

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.

Chalamet embodies Dylan in a quite literal sense; he’s clearly studied the tape and does a more than passable mimicry of Dylan’s voice and performing style. Problem is, it’s an intentionally opaque characterization, in a film overcrammed with musical performances – onstage, in the studio, on the bed noodling on a new song – which basically means half the movie is like watching pretty good karaoke.

Neeson, taking a welcome break from his late-career reinvention as a man of action, and Manville (Another Year, Phantom Thread) are such gifted performers, and they play this couple – their tenderness and stress – at a likably subtle frequency.

With a saga this sprawling and byzantine, it makes sense that the emphasis is not on Schiele, but rather on what the sorely wronged Bondi never stopped calling "my Schiele."

Something is terribly amiss when the American actors sound like English is their second language.

Cotillard doesn't look part Native American or sound like a Thirties Chicago moll, but damned if she isn't a sight and sound to behold. Whatever her technical limitations, she rises above them to breathe a flesh, blood, and battered verisimilitude into the part. You can't tear your eyes off her, any more than you can Mann's flawed but still engrossing picture.

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.

Everything that was sharp in the original text has been rounded and buffed.

Teetering toward made-for-TV in its facile depiction of Walter’s many wives and veering tonally from too broad to totally mawkish (the score wants to arm-wrestle tears out of you), The Friend is all soft edges.

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.

If A Thousand Words' formula seems familiar, that's because writer Steve Koren has tripped down this quasi-metaphysical path before in "Bruce Almighty" and "Click."

You can easily lose five minutes making sense of it - and another 10 poking holes in it - but what of it? The preceding 100 minutes pass so pleasurably, the few false moves barely register - maybe the biggest con of all, but consider me happily snowed.

With so many soldiers interviewed, some only fleetingly, it's impossible to keep track of them all.

Perfectly passable film.

A devastating and weighty picture.

Ultimately Hedges’ film, like the turkey, comes out underdone.

No doubt about it: Bad Santa is blasphemous. But, to borrow a phrase from another famous hedonist, Homer Simpson, it’s also sacrilicious.

Materialists is messy in a good way – there’s a lot to chew on here, and Lucy in particular feels recognizably unresolved – but as good as Song is at succinctly compacting her characters’ past lives, I struggled to entirely understand what everybody in the present was thinking. That mystery might be fun on a first date, but as a romance, Materialists left me wanting more.

After 2023’s exalted Asteroid City, as raw and ragged with grief a film Anderson has ever made, anything was going to feel like a comedown. More charitably, The Phoenician Scheme is a palate cleanser – a lovely lark, a spirits lifter.

This one’s not going into the conspiracy thriller pantheon, but for the duration of its tense, terse 112 minutes, it scratches the itch.

It's the kind of movie that lives and dies by a viewer's own idiosyncrasies.

The subdued characters I can abide, intellectually speaking, but subdued filmmaking with material this fundamentally gut-punching is a lot less easy to swallow.

For all the fierceness of the elements, co-directors Anna Rose Holmer and Saela Davis, who previously collaborated on the well-regarded 2015 indie film The Fits, are in no rush here.

Shannon is monstrously good – unpredictable where the other actors are clipped and careful – and he steals the whole picture in two short, shattering scenes. When Shannon exits the film, the air gets sucked out again, and you realize the pretty artifice extends to more than just the Wheelers.

The script is chockablock with al dente amusements – obvious targets still make for wickedly funny one-liners – and the German actor Waltz (Inglourious Basterds) is terrific as the only parent unburdened by decorum.

Gilroy zings the film with tantalizing bits of absurdity (one wonders, wistfully, what the Coen brothers would have done with this material), but too often he returns to his darker, more ponderous instincts.

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.

Giamatti is masterful.

Still, it takes a special someone to sell this larger-than-life character onscreen, and to make you forgive how the galloping script glosses over some crucial beats.

From "Hands on a Hard Body" to an 89-minute ogling of another hard body: It boggles the mind that 11 years after his engrossing documentary about an endurance competition to win a truck in Longview, Texas, filmmaker Bindler has channeled his talents into this regrettable comedy.

The film’s greatest strength is its unabashed sentimentality. The look on these artists’ faces – their obvious pleasure in being in the room with their heroes, making great music? It’s not just good on the ears; it’s good for the heart.

She knew what "it" was going to be before anyone else. Or maybe she invented "it," and the magazine-buying public simply did as they were told.

The film becomes a kind of meditative act.

I’m coming down harder than I meant to. If you’re a fan of the series – and I am – you’re still going to fan. (There’s no entry point for newcomers; it’s too in medias res.) The scenery is lush. There’s ever the pleasure in Steve and Rob’s company. I just wanted to feel by film’s end like I’d arrived somewhere new. Like the journey had been pulling me somewhere inevitable but still enlightening.

A stiff drink or maybe some pharmaceutical assistance might have made me overlook the film's sour tone, or the unremarkableness of its direction.

So potent it nearly succeeds even as a vacuum sits squarely at its center.

Trumbo certainly has pep. Theodore Shapiro’s jazzy score doesn’t just boast a tom-tom – you could choreograph it with pom-poms. Maybe Roach worried that general audiences wouldn’t cotton to a yellowing story about the Red Menace, so he ginned it up with a jazz-hands idea of midcentury Hollywood, with everyone mugging like it’s a lobby-card photo shoot

Shot in winter grays with no warming ambers and the whiff of tuberculosis hanging around all the players, Inside Llewyn Davis is a chilly thing – a nominal comedy in brisk shivers.

Isn't Lee's most personal piece, but it may very well be his most mature.

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

There's nothing that feels like real rage, nothing that even remotely approximates the spiritual decimation of a termination.

The film moves so subtly, in fact, and so seamlessly between wry humor and the emotional wreckage of life-or-death, that it was with some shock that I found myself weeping halfway through the film.

There’s something a little pious about how resistant the film is to portraying Nicky not just as an admirable character but as an interesting one, too.

Wright takes the tools of a bloodless medium, the video game, and crafts an action-comedy with a true-blue beating heart.

Kazan appears in every scene of The Exploding Girl’s perfectly paced 80 minutes, and you’d miss her if she ducked out for even a moment.

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.

There's no question that the actors and filmmakers have fashioned a compelling (if unformed) love story of a certain age – which is not to be confused for a love story for the ages.

Tonally, it all makes sense, but there’s such a thing as overmuchness. Gibney laudably launches a withering attack here on the pay-to-play relationship between lobbyists and lawmakers. But this viewer felt withered, too, by the end of his battering ram of a movie.

Failed feminist statement or not, Coyote Ugly is a likable, if confused film.

Something that falls just shy of greatness.

Early Man is wanting: of a cleverer narrative, of memorable characters. It’s not bad, necessarily. It just feels like an early draft of a better movie to come.

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.

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

The film can feel a touch overscripted, but Polley and her actors effect true-to-life rhythms of speech.

The Wedding Banquet, Ang Lee’s’ 1993 breakout feature, is actually an inspired vehicle to revisit.

Funny and fierce and deeply moving.

The only weak link here is Aniston's character – her Olivia, stuck in a holding pattern, feels like a holdover from Holofcener's previous, single-girl pictures, and Aniston underplays the role to the point of expressionlessness.

(It should also be noted that Page One wears its pro-Times bias on its sleeve, right up to the rankling but now-common inclusion of a "get involved" Web address at film's end.)

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.

To a one, they're terrific. But in this overpacked ensemble cast, it's Binoche you want to see more of.

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

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.

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

Amusing enough, but weirdly joyless.

This is provocative stuff, to be sure, in which the stakes are so high that a pratfall concludes with exploding limbs and the anguished effect of its final minutes is a quiet shock to the system. A comedy of errors and terrors? Who woulda thunk it?

Moon doesn't belabor anything, really, so confidently measured and philosophically nuanced it all plays out (aided by a striking, under-the-skin original score by Clint Mansell).

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.

It’s best to situate yourself in the middle of the row; a seat at the end will most likely leave you feeling cross-eyed for an hour.

What a weird, winning little movie is Robot & Frank, which explores what happens to the essential self as the memory goes. Oh, and it's a heist picture. With robot butlers. I'm not sure I've ever seen anything quite like it.

To do no disservice to the impressive work of Bridges' co-stars, anytime his ragged writer, in flowing caftans and floppy hats, is on screen, it's impossible to take in anything else, so commanding is his presence.

As is, it's simply too much information crammed too haphazardly into a running time that at times borders on interminable.

"By practicing his art, he revealed himself to us." Fellini: I’m a Born Liar provides proof positive: The art indeed reveals far more than this pedestrian documentary ever does.

Perhaps there was some confusion – should we play this as a lark or a lesson in geopolitical unrest? – or maybe there was some studio involvement to defang the politics; whatever the case, the noncommittal Charlie Wilson's War treads a good-natured but yawning in-between.

It's unclear if Van Sant intends to inspire guilt; here, as elsewhere, he is exasperatingly abstruse. And in this striving to not say too much, he ends up not saying much of anything at all.

Chbosky surrounds his hurting characters with the cinematic equivalent of a hug circle – which is sweet, but rather antithetical to tension-building.

In the Aisles is a triumph of mood, aided by an eclectic soundtrack that skips from Delta blues to electro-pop to Strauss and Donizetti, and a worthy stage for Rogowski to continue introducing himself to an international audience.

The script, and Theron, matter-of-factly illustrate the old adage about Ginger Rogers, that she did everything Astaire did, only backwards and in heels. That the film actually gives her credit for it? That’s the best kind of wish fulfillment fantasy.

Holy hell, having to sit through nearly three hours of M:I making like Ethan Hunt is the Messiah is not just exhausting: It’s a total misread of what makes these movies so fun. What a bummer.

While Kate Novack’s documentary suffers from a certain vagueness in the telling of Talley’s life, what’s clear is that it’s been an exceptional one.

Amusing but never rousing, this fourth installment in the Ice Age cartoon franchise comes fretted with freezer burn.

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

As an unsparing portrait of disaffection among the small-paycheck, faux-creative class, The Future is rather astute … which isn't to say it isn't also bang-your-head-on-the-wall annoying.

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 Girl Who Played With Fire's chief frustration is in how removed Salander and Blomkvist are from each other.

In a startling, last-reel freeze frame, the male ego pops like a balloon, and I wanted to pre-book for the next Trip right away.

Funny and sweet and guaranteed to flood you with good feeling.

Grace and Johannson's courtship has all the heat of a wet wipe and, worse yet, leaves Quaid offscreen for long stretches.

A romantic comedy, too, but this time the romance is between two women, and one of them, truth be told, is a dud.

The final conflict is so protracted as to comfortably accommodate a bathroom break. Don't worry. You won't miss anything you haven't seen before.