Kimberley Jones

Owen’s story is unique, and deserving of singling out.

The actresses are so quick and so supple, the force of their individual personalities and their irresistible camaraderie hoik the film up from its middling story and scripted jokes. I would have happily stayed in my seat another two hours to continue keeping their company. Just in a better movie.

Crafted by much of the same creative team behind the "Despicable Me" franchise, The Secret Life has wit, for sure, but it could use more balls.

What it does have in its favor are two sit-up-and-clap supporting turns from Skarsgård, all barking bear in tacky gold chains, and Lewis, who wears the sour mouth of someone who just underwent a prostate exam. Collectively, they’re the film’s fail-safe: Whenever Our Kind of Traitor threatens to go completely inert, they show up and give it a good goosing.

A lauded Shakespearean actor and adapter who won an Oscar last year for his collaboration with director Steven Spielberg on "Bridge of Spies," Rylance portrays the body (via motion-capture) and certainly soul of this gentle giant. In his mournful, lyrical cadence, he makes poetry out of the BFG’s gobbledygook command of English.

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.

Where "Finding Nemo" capitalized on the awesome splendor and danger of the ocean, this follow-up shifts much of its action to an aquatic park and becomes broader and sillier, or at least reality-busting, for it.

Maggie’s Plan is an ensemble piece, with Maya Rudolph, Travis Fimmel, and a magic, romantic New York rounding out the cast. They’re all great, but it’s Gerwig who’s just so damn gosh-wow.

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

Me Before You isn’t going to win any awards for sophistication in storytelling or direction, but it tenderly reproduces the book’s most iconic scenes, and their tearjerking effect.

What wicked good fun it is watching this bad girl do her worst.

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.

While the Occupy Wall Street rage supposedly fueling this thing is flimsy, what’s left is still solidly entertaining.

But being Charlie – what’s going on inside this angry kid’s head, what made him turn to drugs, and finally turn away – that is more elusive. And that is the film’s great disappointment: that something so clearly conceived in earnestness and from real-life, first-person experience ends up feeling, well, kinda fake.

Civil War’s main battle sequence is so effective because it’s six-on-six, and we’ve spent the past decade getting to know the combatants.

The actors are all game, but the job’s beneath them – Hemsworth, a pro, and a real champ at faking enthusiasm for this dud; Theron, still doing camp but this time with no tempering complexity or empathy; Blunt, stuck playing a frost-bitten Mommie Dearest.

Criminal is a perfectly passable thriller, if you’re cool with no one here passing as an actual human being.

The whole film is a delicious excuse to gawk – at the magnificent costumes, at the diplomatic dance of museum personnel and party planners, and at the sumptuous squish of so many egos sharing space.

It’s a fun watch, and familiarity with Los Angeles isn’t required to get a kick out of these toe-dips into Koreatown and Tehrangeles and all the other micro-communities that make the city a macro-paradise for eaters.

Maybe a dare to Desplechin, in fact: Next time, more Esther, less Paul. She’s still got stories to be told.

Three films into the ongoing Divergent series, one would hope we’d moved beyond laying plates and folding napkins to get to something more substantial. Yet Allegiant barely makes it to the appetizer course.

The material begs for a much longer consideration than the film’s trim 79 minutes, but it’s still a must-watch for serious film fans.

I like the declarative clarity, the strength of conviction in the title. I wish the movie itself bore the same certainty, or sturdiness.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, at least among Janeites, that we’ll spend long hours scouring every streaming service out there, hungering for a corseted drama to watch. In that respect at least, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is fresh meat, if a tough cut.

“Subtle” is the watchword for this kind of arthouse film. That can be a backhanded compliment, a buyer-beware to attention-deficit audiences, but Haigh is really quite plain with his preoccupations: the constant tick-tock of time, and the illusion that in marriage two are melded into one.

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 filmmakers don’t endorse Michael’s solipsism, but we’re stuck with it anyway – the film is entirely from his point of view, save a lovely, pacifying final shot.

McKay makes moral outrage wickedly entertaining.