Kimberley Jones

Seeking Mavis Beacon is a dizzying product of our digital age. In its look and energy, which uses a desktop screen as an aesthetic and organizational device, the zigzagging film can have the feel of too many browser tabs open, emblematic of its wide-ranging but sometimes under-explored topics of interest.

This modest French-language film follows the time-honored cinematic tradition of plot as spearheaded by a simple twist of fate.

The former mayor is an alert onscreen presence, but the film surrounding him is not always so lively.

And yet that is what is so very remarkable about the film: In a slim 72 minutes, it heart-tethers us to these teenagers, paying tribute to their unique and private selves while allowing the audience to see its own reflection in them.

Refn’s artful and energetic film never goes further than face value.

These dragons are rendered so expressively, and they have become so dear. We may not deserve them, but that doesn’t stop the heart from wanting.

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.

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.

Sleepwalk With Me is never anything less than awfully likable. But I so wanted it to be more.

I don't want to oversell the thing. It is, quite simply, something very special indeed.

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.