Kimberley Jones

The middle of a movie is often where filmmakers lose their way, but Friends With Benefits nails this stretch, in which nothing very remarkable happens as two people talk, in bed and out of bed. There's a fine line between fun-dirty and ick-dirty – sometimes you can't identify the line until it's been crossed – and this film keeps its toes on the right side of raunch.

It's a dirty, ugly, joyless world these fathers and sons live in, and for all the passion involved, of retribution and a father's fierce love, Perdition is as emotionally distant as Sullivan. The feelings are all there, just submerged.

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.

Isn't quite a home run: The visually flat film leans on a pop culture crutch that probably won't age very well, and the finale – while terrifically funny – feels piped in from another, far sillier movie.

The internet is infinite. So, too, are the ways it can breed creepy behavior and new opportunities to commodify human connection. People’s Republic of Desire explores only a tiny swath of the internet of grossness, but it’s a subject so epic it deserves much longer examining than a quick 95 minutes affords.

Square peg, round hole. That's what the twentysomethings who drift through Margarita Happy Hour are like.

An undeniably novel film that nevertheless lost its novelty for me around the time the Shakers washed up on American shores (that’s about an hour in?), The Testament of Ann Lee still had me in its grip every time a musical number rolled around, which is often enough.

Giamatti is masterful.

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.

As an experiment in mood, as a love song to Paris and to the French New Wave, as a fun, flirty little number, Charlie provides a giddy satisfaction.

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.

When the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River began construction in the early Nineties, an estimated 2 million people's lives were impacted. That's a staggering number to contemplate, but Up the Yangtze effectively personalizes that near-meaningless number by putting a face on at least a few of those 2 million.

A nice-looking, nice-feeling exercise in conventionalism that sure could use a couple of transvestites and maybe a house falling from the sky.

The all-around excellent cast swings with aplomb from silly to sweet.

Mostly it will just make you hungry to revisit Ashman’s work. That’s perhaps not the intended result of this fond tribute/merely serviceable survey of a too-short career – but it’s not necessarily a bad one.

It’s not an altogether convincing portrait, but it is an entertaining, even moving one, and the forcefulness of Bullock's presence goes a long way in pulling the film back from the brink of cuddliness.

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.

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

Affectionate but uninsightful biopic.

Mercifully, the frosted icing-icky title bears little relation to the film's actual content.

Just because the jokes about micro-dosing, Crossfit- and social media-obsessive city folk are a little obvious doesn’t mean they won’t resonate with any townie aching for the before-days.

If tradecraft is what you like best about the espionage genre – the dead drops and dead-of-night tailings – then All the Old Knives will feel comparatively pokey, especially put up against the kind of spry spy entertainments long-form television so capably produces.

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

It Ends With Us pours most of its nuance into the beginning, middle, and harrowing climax of its central relationship.

The twentysomething talents behind Mystery Team are still in the comedy minors, but this nerdy, nutty, perfectly pitched first swing suggests there are major things to come.

Those moments, as affecting as they are, can't surmount the overworkshopped feel of the whole film.

What the film itself is trying to communicate proves more elusive; whatever meaning Millepied meant to impart by tethering this “entirely new and unique artistic endeavor” to a century-and-a-half-old opera never quite made sense to me.

It’s an electrifying watch in its profound discomfort, and a testament to McKenzie’s ability to disarm with a smile, then land a righteous blow against the bad guys.