Kimberley Jones

Happy Endings is unabashedly sentimental (cheekily couched in a black-comic guise), with Roos acting as a sort of benevolent god over his characters.

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

Swinton is heartbreaking. She's not just craft; she's high art.

Dwayne Johnson may not be the world’s most nuanced actor, but he’s a marvelous showman. His and co-star Emily Blunt’s combined “it” factor transcends the sillier stretches of this somewhat forgettable but still chuckling good-times ride.

It’s in this space that masculinity is interrogated, imagination is nourished, and these men get to be defined not by their past trauma but by their resilience and renewed capacity for joy. This is the space in which the empathic Sing Sing soars.

What is lost in translation from Wolitzer’s novel is her particular vision of Joe – short, Brooklyn-born, Jewish – and her sidelong portrait of midcentury men of letters like Bellow and Roth. The Welsh-born Pryce makes a halfhearted swipe at mimicking an Outer Boroughs accent; he’s better at capturing Joe’s gluttony and overgrown-child sulks.

Maybe someday there will be a better commercial comedy about a girl taking charge of her sexual education, but for now, this is the only one we’ve got, and it’s a filthy-fun charmer.

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.

An ambitious comedy with not-negligible dramatic depth, but Bell, a first-time feature writer and director, is frankly too generous with her large cast.

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

Heartfelt felicitations to Soderbergh on his rebirth of the cool.

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

In short, the actors deserve a big round of applause -– especially Affleck, for finally wiping the smug look off of his face (OK, 80% smug-free); Garner, for her dead sexy mix of attitude and adrenaline; and the grunting, googly-eyed Farrell, for … well, for being "fookin’" nuts, I guess.

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

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.

Cooper mostly tamps down that Sexiest Man Alive demeanor that follows him from film to film, and Lawrence – a continually startling young talent – counterpoises her Bardot beauty with a blistering snarl. They both play hurt people clawing their way toward wellness, but it's Lawrence who makes you feel the hurt in your heart – and the hope that it'll get better soon.

Forget life lessons: I much prefer a lemur king doing the robot.

It smartly skips the goofier aspects of the original, too. Once you’ve shed musical numbers and Eddie Murphy cracking wise as a dragon, you’re in far less jocular territory...And that feels right for the material.

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."

A film that is at once elegant and sublimely silly.

Small in its movements and thoughtful in its observations, All We Imagine As Light is quietly resonant – so quiet you might wonder if it has much impact.

McKay has made a protest film, plainly seething – a primal howl from a guy who used to just goose howls of laughter.

With very little dialogue and no cookie-cutter story beats, this fraught family life is vividly, tenderly rendered by Romvari and her naturalistic cast.

A staggering document of the lengths parents will go to for the sake of their child.

They don't make women, sexy but regal, like Pfeiffer much anymore, and Cheri is quite a monument to her.

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.

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

Indie filmmaker Azazel Jacobs (The Lovers, Terri) has assembled so many tender spots – sibling estrangement, dead moms, dying dads, the sad drudgery of hospice care, the messed-up family dynamics we reproduce in successive generations – that you might reasonably wrap the entire film in a trigger warning for anyone who’s ever had a family, full-stop. But it – his deft script, their aching performances – is absolutely worth the trauma watch.