Kyle Smith

May serve as a useful way to introduce teens to what World War II in Europe was like.

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

As subtle and careful and slyly disturbing as Child’s Pose is though, it and many others of its genus suffer from an airlessness, pacing like the growth of algae, a dishwater color palate and a dirge-like monotone.

A warning: One scene in the middle is almost outrageously cruel and graphic. If you're the type of person who has to be reminded, "It's only a movie," stay away. This is the most depraved and dreadful piece of screen horror since last year's "Funny Games."

Once it calms down and stops trying to be funny, it turns into a thoughtful and intriguing drama.

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

A captivating Tom Hardy is in the driver’s seat for the one-man show Locke, but like many experimental films, this one suffers from its self-imposed constraints.

A desperado drama wrapped around a Bernie Sanders campaign speech, Hell or High Water overcomes its vapid political leanings with loads of West Texas atmosphere, smart dialogue and acutely observed relationships.

Gentle, tender and very French, The Hedgehog is cinematic poetry -- too bad about that prosaic plotting.

At the end the film turns into an infomercial for President Obama’s Iran deal, but Gibney delivers plenty to think about — and fear.

Role Models isn't a classic like "Superbad" or as hilarious as this summer's "Step Brothers," but it's excellent fun for males in the mental age bracket of 14 to 22, which is most males.

Typically, To the Wonder seems mostly locked in the thoughts of its characters, whispered so only we can hear, with no more actual back-and-forth dialogue than would cover the back of your ticket stub.

A clever, elliptical, slightly bizarre and altogether transfixing psychological thriller.

A film I admired, but didn’t especially like, The Revenant is a master class in craftsmanship, marrying the ethos of 1970s Hollywood, with its beaten-dog heroes forever roughed up by a brutal system, to the technological prowess of today’s digitally obsessed blockbusters.

Director Matthew Vaughn, who did last year's delightful "Kick-Ass," doesn't do witty this time around, but he does keep up a spiffing pace while making the action blaze.

The film never flags. To find a smarter bug-man saga, you’d have to go back to “The Metamorphosis.” I was far from sold on insect superheroes, but now I say: Bring on Cockroach Chick.

October Country doesn't really have a point, or a story, but it's an almost unbearably vivid portrait of four generations in a single working-class family.

Beaded with amusing moments.

A sometimes insightful, sometimes absurdly devotional but steadily engaging film.

Earth, you had me at baby polar bears.

There is stuff in This Is the End that had me laughing so hard, I sensed new body parts joining in to help out — my pancreas was heaving, my bile ducts ripped.

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

A pleasingly weird, dryly funny little indie.

Picture Monty Python writing an unusually odd "Twilight Zone" episode directed by surrealist Luis Buñuel. Or just empty your mind of all sense: This is Rubber.

What keeps the movie nervy and kinetic is that, for a good hour, it never seems that Jack and family are anything but average people who somehow manage to survive one hellacious trial after another, even when it comes to having to kill another human being.

Fighting arrives fully charged by the charisma of its star, Channing Tatum, who has landed the lead in the upcoming "G.I. Joe."

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.

Some bits are too stagy, but for the most part this long night feels like an interview that could have actually happened. Miller is so good - dumb, smart, wounded, wounding, a lollipop of sweet poison that you'd buy every day until it killed you - that you feel you not only understand her but all actresses.