Kyle Smith

It's smart, funny, agreeably perverse and simultaneously abrupt and exhausting.

The story quietly builds to a rueful and fraught climax in which Campbell Scott does his usual exceptional work

The film could have been improved if it had been less aggressively limp. But the post-adolescent, pre-adult moodiness is spot on: Everyone's favorite author is a bitter recluse, and the soundtrack heaves with the suicide sounds of Joy Division. Trier's intent is to reproduce a sweet, hazy vision of the agony of youth. Ever so elliptically, he succeeds.

Writer-director Antonio Campos, making excellent use of the queasy rhythms of a percussive musical score, keeps piling up the dread as we wonder just how dangerous Simon can be to the women who keep taking pity on him.

An intensity of purpose and a patient, suspenseful directing style make the B-movie Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning superior to most of the big-budget action films I've seen lately.

Eva Green...Gaspingly beautiful, wouldn't you say?

A study in intoxicants: drink, drugs, youth and Emily Ratajkowski. All four are potentially dangerous, yet nearly impossible to leave alone.

Jason Statham, possibly the greatest B-movie leading man of this era, stars in a complicated and clever imagining of what might have happened in the mysterious 1971 London bank heist dubbed the "Walkie-Talkie Robbery" - in other words, it was unbelievably high-tech.

Nature films don’t come any more spectacular than the BBC’s One Life.

The Avengers is neither overwhelming nor underwhelming. What it expertly is, is whelming.

A sickening horror parable disguised as a comedy of mores, the Netherlands’ Borgman is a rarity: a genuinely shocking, upsetting movie.

No one loves a broad comedy like the French, but Gallic touches of restraint tend to keep such light entertainment pleasing rather than blundering.

Poison Friends deftly sketches the fine line - is there one? - between "critic" and "loser."

I wouldn't want to see five movies like this one each week but it's a cheeky, madcap joyride.

For its wicked innocence, this is the finest rock movie since "Almost Famous."

A working-class hero of a film.

A mashup of Nick Hornby and Martin Scorsese? Why not?

In the most thrilling sequence of this consistently rousing old-school adventure, Heyerdahl grabs a passing shark with his bare hands, thrusts a hook into it, drags it aboard and guts it with a knife. Now that’s what I call entertainment. I haven’t seen such crazed brutality since Lou Lumenick’s review of “Movie 43.”

Like a lesser Python entry ("The Meaning of Life"?), it's alternately brilliant and frustrating.

Django Unchained might have been a revelation in 2005. But after Quentin Tarantino and others have spent years spoofing '60s and '70s genre movies, this mock spaghetti Western tastes like it came out of the microwave.

Thick-necked, booze-loving and angry men beat each other with their naked fists: so far, so Irish. But the feuding clans in the documentary Knuckle actually think their habits of antagonizing one another can be fixed by just one more problem-solving brawl.

Fans of deadpan comic fantasy writers like Douglas Adams and Kurt Vonnegut are likely to be intrigued by this lively little packet of weird -- then dive like a dolphin into Keret's loopy story volumes.

Essentially amounts to an extended interview with a psycho, fleshed out with background material that, while suitably shocking, is not always illuminating or even frank. The film is curiously shy about calling Varg what he is: a Nazi.

Laden with witty ironies, the film by Anne Fontaine suggests men may not play exactly the roles they think they do in women’s lives.

Cruise's Jack Reacher is a loner who doesn't smile, charm, love the ladies, aim his index fingers to the heavens or sing "You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling" in bars. Here he just snarls and kills people. Yes, please, and let's have more of the same.

The Young Victoria achieves a fine balance. I guess that's what you get when a film is produced by both Martin Scorsese and Sarah Ferguson.

The dialogue, while filthy, is wickedly funny, and sounds perfect coming out of the mouths of these beaten-down characters in their low-rent surroundings.

This is the British way to mingle ideas and entertainment.

Davies’ quiet, painterly film largely eschews musical cues that would heighten its emotional impact, but as it is, Sunset Song is captivating in its sincerity.

It's ragged, and at times it scrapes your comedy ganglia like a cheese grater. But 15 minutes or half an hour is an ideal chunk of time to set aside for truly inspired absurdism.

What's best about the film are its quick jumps from one depravity to the next as jazz rambles on the soundtrack: Youth is a candle to be burned at both ends, with (as it was once said about Bob Dylan) a blowtorch in the middle.

The smart indie comedy Diminished Capacity deals with three kinds of dementia: those relating to aging, concussions and being a Chicago Cubs fan. Tying those three things together is a task that the witty script does with surprising adroitness.

Baumbach seems mainly interested in capturing the whimsical rhythms of unformed post-college life, with money too scarce and roommates too ample — but he already did that, did it better and with more rueful feeling, in the much funnier “Kicking and Screaming,” the debut he made at 25 and one of the best films of the 1990s.

Red has more snappy joy in store than practically all of last summer's busted blockbusters.

Not since "300" have I seen such manly mano-a-mano-ing as the iron clash of wills in the docu mentary King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters.

The Romantics isn't as consistent or as well-rounded as its parent, "The Big Chill," or as entertaining as its less literate but more extroverted cousin, "St. Elmo's Fire," but with its tart dialogue and its perfect ending, it is sensitive as well as sagacious. It's a rare combination.

Bateman has rarely had the opportunity to play a snarling lawman, but with his cool aviators and his bristling putdowns he's perfect, too.

A rock bio minus the fun. The sex is guilt-stricken, the drugs are used to treat epilepsy, and the rock 'n' roll is about isolation and despair.

How dark is this comedy? It's a big hit in Ireland.

Splashed with Monte Carlo glamour, physical comedy and nimble scams, the movie rolls along enjoyably to its goofy but endearing big scene: an homage to "Dirty Dancing."

Stirring as it frequently is, The Way Back is a good movie that should have been a classic.

A sharp comedy as well as a punk-pulp spree. Don't go if you can't handle Brit slang. ("Grass" = informer.)

Dryly comic, arch, sleek, and suffused with mood-setting tracks by the likes of X and Depeche Mode, Electric Slide has some of the mordant absurdity of the novels of Bret Easton Ellis. Like its dim hero, it’s going nowhere, but traveling in style.

Never before have I been so emotionally involved with an apple core, or seen salvation in a flip-flop. Taika Waititi, you had me at nunchuks.

Though it does have a handful of dirty jokes meant to earn the audience-pleasing PG-13 rating and features Marge swearing, it falls short of classic status.

Still, if 13 Hours lacks the gravitas of “American Sniper,” it’s powerful stuff. Bay’s goal is to put you right in these men’s boots, to feel the heat, the fear, the fatigue, the weight of the weapons and the web of camaraderie.

It is said that everyone either loved or hated radical defense lawyer William Kunstler. A documentary by his daughters asks, "Why choose 'or' instead of 'both'?"

Its plot is simple and direct, albeit enlivened by well-timed surprises. The film isn’t especially funny—droll is more accurate—but its approach to Antoinette’s character adroitly balances sympathy with mockery.

Though the documentary is clearly meant as a fan letter, not an even-handed report, it does overlook some important matters.

Uneven though it is . . . No Hard Feelings devises some smart new twists for the teen sex comedy while expertly counterbalancing Mr. Feldman’s doe-eyed innocence with Ms. Lawrence’s vamping.

As a love story, Fantasy Life isn’t particularly original, but the low-key way Mr. Shear realizes some familiar situations is warm and human, with comic aspects and sad ones kept in an appealing balance.

Wittily written and directed by Gerard Johnstone, who directed but did not write the first film, the follow-up is notably clever, amusing, ambitious and densely plotted. Unlike its predecessor and most works from the horror-thriller production company Blumhouse, it combines a high-concept premise with a highly complicated story.

If “Spinal Tap II” doesn’t quite earn an 11 on a scale of one to 10, I’d say it rates a strong 7.

Mr. Chu knows exactly how to bring this story emphatically home, and as we’ve heard before, there’s no place like it.

At times, it’s scary how derivative it is. Still, as crepuscular weirdness seeps across the story and leads to a delirious ending, it’s largely effective.

Belgian writer-director Michiel Blanchart’s debut feature is snappy and tart.

Many have observed that the first “Avatar,” despite its outsize box-office, didn’t leave much of a cultural footprint. The second is more of the same. It may be a visual buffet, but the pickings are merely eye candy.

It is the year’s sweetest cinematic surprise so far, containing much of the childlike tenderness and dry whimsy of a Wes Anderson film, minus that director’s sometimes-suffocating obsession with surfaces.

The almost nonstop fighting and Mr. Quaid’s low-key charm are enough to make the movie a serviceable action offering. Moreover, the script, though focused on wacky spasms of violence, has a strong human element at its core.

It’s a bloody comedy that’s also a buddy comedy.

The overall effect is appropriately trippy, and revealing.

Though the movie is consistently fun and has some clever ideas to go with its marvelous look, its story is thin and episodic, without much in the way of momentum.

The power of the film lies in how it crafts excitement out of a granular understanding of Russian state brutishness and the degree of determination it will require to evade it. It will take a spy’s level of resourcefulness to emerge from the labyrinth, and Kompromat has the punch of a first-rate spy thriller.

M3gan is wittily written and smoothly plotted by Akela Cooper, from a story by her and James Wan, as well as tautly directed by Gerard Johnstone, who hearkens all the way back to Mary Shelley’s warning. Like Dr. Frankenstein, we’ve created a monster, but there’s no way to kill off tech.

It settles for being amusing when it could have been interesting as well.

The clash Mr. Roberts devises between the lunchbucket blues of operating a crane at a shipyard and the dazzle of big-time sports raises pertinent questions about the relationship between vocation and avocation, about where we truly locate meaning in our lives, especially as time grows less disposable.

Blunt, brassy and chatty, she makes for a refreshingly open host of her own life story.

Touch is a worthy consideration of the things that matter most when the clock is running out, but it could have been more focused.