Kyle Smith

Its young director, however, has a considerable flair for surprise and visual gusto, and he even, on a shoestring, delivers sharp-looking special effects.

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 main flaw is that, as an actor, Duplass isn't able to make the audience love him. Picture "Bottle Rocket"-era Owen Wilson in the role, and you've got something special.

As a comedy, the film isn’t especially funny, and as a screwball drug caper a la “Go,” it’s raggedly plotted, with ridiculous coincidences popping up everywhere.

Bugonia isn’t merely dark; it’s a black hole. But Mr. Lanthimos’s vision is sternly compelling, and Bugonia is that exceptional movie that’s extremely hard to forget.

It's not a knock on Steven Spielberg to say he is history's finest maker of children's movies. His capacity to evoke simplicity, awe, beauty and unconditional love are his genius, and his vision of the children's story War Horse is a gorgeous, majestic fable about a boy who yearns to be reunited with his steed.

The dull, predictable direction is the perfect match for a watery, nondescript cast.

Every element other than Mr. Grant is brain-scarringly awful—the flat characters, the dull acting, the rusted-battleax dialogue, and above all the action scenes, which are frenzied, chaotic, meaningless and vapid, overflowing with CGI that is no more awe-inspiring than the average TV commercial about lizards selling auto insurance.

That mildness is characteristic of the film, which is colorful to look at but dull. The story is plodding, the characters are boring and earnest, and the supposed comic-relief act provided by the trio of stumblebums on Arco’s trail is a wince-inducing failure.

Slow West certainly lives up to its title: It’s one poky Western, plodding and perambulating and moseying across the 1870 frontier on a grim march to a pointless ending.

If Ed Wood had directed "The Silence of the Lambs," it might have been as unintentionally hilarious as the goofball would-be thriller The Abduction of Zack Butterfield.

Two dull people have a dull love affair in Summertime, a French drama that drags on like an August afternoon.

Just when this thing seems dead, though, the movie picks up considerably, and the much-better second half nearly redeems it. I give the credit to an experienced conjurer of the unexpected triumph: Peyton Manning.

The twists are executed superbly, right up to a climax that fits the David Mamet definition of what makes for a perfect ending: It is both surprising and inevitable.

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.

The film's attempt at a sort of beautiful anguish works best in its middle section. It takes far too long to get going, and it doesn't have much of an ending.

The considerable talents of Banks make the movie bearable.

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.

A sort of grown-up version of “Moonrise Kingdom,” France’s Love at First Fight has some youthful free-range charm but not nearly as much as its predecessor.

Though Despicable Me is a little ragged on story, it's got a lot of imagination and a heart as warm as a fluffy kitty.

What started out as something that promised to be akin to a droll, twisted Coen Brothers comedy instead wanders off into reverie. And when the movie ends, critical questions are simply left unresolved. Mr. Cronenberg may not care about closure, but a movie can benefit greatly from it.

This indie documentary is egregiously Hollywood in spirit. That a take-charge white football coach can buck up a place like Manassas HS with some gridiron grit is a lie we want to believe.

There needs to be a 12-step program for movie people to stop sharing their "deeply personal" yet insight-free stories of addiction.

Even at a cramped and frenetic 82 minutes, the movie feels long. That’s what happens when the audience can guess everything that’s going to happen in advance.

Inspector Bellamy leaves a sense not unlike a summary of Chabrol's entire career -- of guilty stains seeping away in every direction, of motives hidden and of endless stories that frustrate full understanding. To Chabrol, no life is ever a closed case.

At 86 minutes, the film spends exactly 86 more minutes with its subjects than can possibly be tolerated. Coincidence?

Turing’s tale needs to be more widely known, and while The Imitation Game may not be a great film, it is an important one.

A wan effort at "Annie Hall"-style comedy, has about as much Manhattan sophistication as a gas station in Chippewa Falls, Wis.

Adults will sniff out a general air of phoniness - the period detail isn't particularly convincing, and the Scottish factor is overcooked to the point where the script starts to resemble the national cuisine.

Although it is unashamedly a genre piece, Heretic is not only an expertly engineered work of suspense but also an ingeniously structured colloquy about the most deeply held belief systems.

A cinematic enchantment, a low-key 1970s-style kids’ movie brimming with sincerity and heart. It’s one of the best films of the year.

The real mystery is this: Even if you find this guerrilla art project utterly fascinating, why would anyone bother to release an incomplete film about it?

The misleading documentary Trumbo paints a golden nimbus of holiness around the onetime highest-paid screenwriter in Hollywood, Dalton Trumbo, an on-the-record hater of democracy, defender of authoritarian rule and avowed Communist.

The direct, intimate way in which the movie is filmed and acted, however, makes it an affecting study of two people’s attempts to forge some kind of relationship despite huge psychic damage on both sides.

Any movie that finds a plausible reason to give Lindsay Lohan a nun's habit and a machine gun is worth your attention.

War was both cruel and magnificent, as Churchill once put it. To Gibson, it still is.

Grunting and boarlike, Gérard Depardieu supplies a one-note rendition of Dominique Strauss-Kahn in Abel Ferrara’s peculiarly unilluminating Welcome to New York.

What’s the difference between “21 Jump Street” and 22 Jump Street? Same as the difference between getting a 21 and a 22 at blackjack.

To keep this one-man show visually engaging, director Sophie Fiennes places the professor in sets and costumes from the movies, talking about “Full Metal Jacket” from atop a barracks toilet and “Brief Encounter” from a 1940s British train.

Initially, this low-budget film writes a lot of checks on the First National Bank of Whimsy, but I was astonished when none of them bounced.

The hopelessly dated 1968 play "The Boys in the Band" yields a surprisingly sprightly and multifaceted documentary, Making the Boys.

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

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is, as you'd expect, rubbish, but the word is slightly too kind. The David Fincher film (like the very similar Swedish one - released in the US just last year! - and the book) is not even good rubbish.

In an odd way, Predator: Badlands is a date-night movie posing as merely a sci-fi killing jamboree. All of those lovable lummoxes out there with their hyper-verbal lady friends will learn a little about cooperation.

Despite the underlying wretchedness, though, the characters exude a sense of having so little interior life that none of this, or anything else, fazes them. That’s disturbing, too.

Lately, the Shakespeare plays on film tend to be either too self-consciously irreverent on the one hand or too stodgy on the other; Kurzel’s Macbeth takes a point of view without betraying the Bard.

A cheap exploitation picture wrapped in miles and miles of stale would-be Oscar scenes.

It'll be a real miracle if anyone manages to stay awake throughout this extravagantly dull film.

Apart from its thin characters and occasional trite moments, as well as a silly attempt to set up a sequel, Don’t Breathe is just about perfect. It’s as lean and relentless as the best John Carpenter films.

Can a series of irritating events make a movie? Yes, but an irritating one: Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day.

The film is occasionally heavy-handed, and the priest character is almost absurdly saintly, but there is an awful power to scenes such as one in which the Europeans are evacuated on trucks.

Although it has affecting moments, the film can't quite decide whether it's about aging or about the effects of war on the home front.

On the one hand, Black Book has the artiness of subtitles, the dramatic weight of history, and the desperate heroics of Jews hiding from Nazis. On the other hand, it has Paul Verhoeven.

Mr. McQueen seems consciously to be shedding his past style—the icy minimalism of “Hunger” and “Shame” and the scarifying gauntlet of his Oscar-winning “Twelve Years a Slave”—in a bid to make a big, warm-hearted, conventional holiday-season tear-jerker. Yet the film . . . will strike many viewers as a bait-and-switch exercise.

It’s a film about tableaus and texture that strives, largely successfully, to re-create the experience of being an extremely small part of a vast, historic conflagration. In effect, it’s an anti-spaghetti western, eschewing all things grandiose and bold-faced in favor of the small and prosaic.

It’s as if a ruthless gang of Richie Cunninghams terrorized the Fonzies of the world.

The dystopian sci-fi drama Vesper is a gallery of astounding images set in a weirdly enticing future. The new world it depicts is both primitive and advanced, full of richly detailed flora and fauna representing strange new species that came about after mankind experimented heavily with genetic engineering as society crumbled to dust.

The movie is an entertaining stroll through a colorful gallery of characters including, in villain mode, former Metropolitan Museum of Art director Thomas Hoving. "She knows nothing. I am an expert," huffs Hoving, who is so nasty he might as well be wearing a monocle - making Horton that much more fun to root for.

This exhilarating brain-twister is a nonstop visual, aural and intellectual delight, steeped in movie conventions and yet fizzing with freshness. It’s what happens when film noir goes out to a rave.

By the end, we wind up pretty much where we were four years ago when the pictures first appeared in the papers: Inexperienced troops did disgusting things, but it's a mystery who else knew.

Watching this movie is like listening to Michael Jackson tell you what real men are like.

It’s a knockout: arch, unpredictable, thematically hefty and told at a gallop. In one or two cases, I thought the twists didn’t really work, but for the most part Mr. Hancock keeps the audience richly entertained.

Dylan was the idol of an era; many weedy intellectuals have sought to explain why. Mr. Mangold and Mr. Chalamet don’t expound on the man’s talent; they simply, exuberantly, show it.

There’s no goal to be met or secret to be uncovered. Instead, it’s a collection of odd, wonderfully realized vignettes that plunge us into an alternative way of life that it neither glamorizes nor satirizes but simply strives to understand.

The film, made by two Cuban-American exiles (and produced by their friend, Charlize Theron), makes an ironic point about Cuba: This is a land where the grandparents are revolutionaries (or at least say they are) but the kids are yearning for capitalist globalization.

Villains who aren’t good at their jobs are a bit boring, and despite their menacing regalia these Nazis are effectively lambs to the slaughter. “Sisu” is simply the slaughterhouse Mr. Helander has built around them, with all of the narrative and thematic artistry that implies.

Illustrating the many ways nuclear weapons could kill you makes Countdown to Zero one of the most frightening documentaries you'll ever see, or endure.

Lovable misanthropes can be a lot of fun, but someone forgot to put in the lovable.

Like a Pixar movie shorn of the cutesy and manipulative aspects that marred “Inside Out,” the animated remake of The Little Prince, hitting theaters and Netflix, is as fragile and beautiful as the beloved rose guarded by the wee fellow of the title.

The film seeks no more than to be fan service, a two-hour hangout with favorite characters and situations. Like many a runway trend, it isn’t going to last more than a season in anyone’s memory.

Superb Noo Yawk attitude, dialogue and performances (including one from the essential Kevin Corrigan, now well into his second decade of being indie movies' dirtbag on demand) keep the movie lively and tart.

When they came in to pitch A Thousand Words, no doubt by calling it "Jerry Maguire" meets "Groundhog Day," a studio exec should have raised the palm of rejection and said, "When you stop being sadly derivative and write an original idea that's as good as those two, come back."

Although Hill failed to derail Thomas’ career, she seems to consider her testimony a success: She remains a highly sought public speaker about workplace sexual harassment, which in large part thanks to her is much less tolerated than it once was.

The exhilarating documentary Sunshine Superman, which melds gorgeous aerial photography of Boenish’s jumps with sublime musical cues, finds in Boenish a kind of poet-adventurer, equal parts pixie and desperado.

Watching it is like being the only non-stoned person in the room as someone tells a long, long story.

Only in the heartfelt closing minutes does the film cut any deeper than a tired episode of a sitcom about children of immigrants complaining about their hopelessly old-fashioned parents.

Smith’s appeal, just, holds together a thin plot upon which Bennett, who wrote the script, and director Nicholas Hytner have loaded gimmicks.

Quiet, sober and tense, the movie makes some interesting points -- contrasting the frenzied hookups of the two men with the butcher's rote, dismal lovemaking with his wife as their bodies are carefully hidden under sheets -- but it lacks the emotional firepower of "Brokeback Mountain."

As the movie drags on, though, it takes on a throbbing, sick monotone. This isn't a concert, it's a bass guitar solo, all thumping blackness.

So this bourgeois-bohemian movie is, in a way, as serene in its obliviousness to the exterior world as its man-child subject. It's not essential, but it is endearing.

Its personal, newsmagazine touch will make your heart ache for its cross-section of humanity.

Writer-director Kirk Jones doesn’t do a great job finding anything fresh to say about this unnerving situation, with one exception.

Doesn't have as much behind-the-scenes juice as you'd hope.

A comedy for no ages, has an amazing amount of CGI - Cuba Gooding Incompetence.

For rock fans, hearing many Led Zeppelin and U2 classics on a theater sound system is worth the price of a ticket.

A thoroughly amateurish effort at capturing clued-in and smartass teens.

Though Materialists only partially delivers on its promise, is only occasionally funny, and has little to say that’s new, Ms. Song and her cast put enough feeling into it to make it glow.

It’s amusing but trifling; busy but at times inert. It hints at an emotional payoff but is too wary of actually going there.

Directed with great sensitivity by Norway’s Joachim Trier, the film is superbly, subtly acted.

Maybe the Midwest isn't actually like this, but if it were, would that be so bad?

This material cries out for big-budget treatment by a real master like Paul Thomas Anderson or Martin Scorsese.

This charming kid's-eye movie, full of comical and vivid detail about the lives of these cheerful children, has the loose, lanky feel of a memoir and of French New Wave films.

There can only ever be one Bad Lieutenant: Harvey Keitel. In Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, Nicolas Cage, pretend tough guy (Malibu accent, long floppy coiffure, nervous smile), is more like the Bad Used-Car Salesman.

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