Kyle Smith

At Berkeley casts a nonjudgmental eye on everyone from cement layers to students discussing Thoreau to administrators complaining about budgeting. If only everything were interesting.

As the two coaches head for a faceoff in a climactic live TV interview, writer Morgan starts to seem like a rip-off -- of himself.

A small but shattering film that marks its writer-director, Derek Cianfrance, as an artist of real depth, observes relationship dynamics at a molecular level, welling with as much understanding as Ingmar Bergman's "Scenes from a Marriage."

After Love may be a bit thin on story, but it nevertheless shines with feeling.

If Top Five doesn’t go deep, though, it is intermittently very funny.

Wajda, who lost his father in the purge, gives the film an awful silence and mystery at its core.

The movie chides us for being a sick voyeuristic society, hungry for the sight of violence. The purity of this moral stance is somewhat clouded by the movie's habit of staging sick violent acts.

Mesmerizing, eerie and unpredictably weird.

I can’t imagine a movie doing a better job bottling such an experience. Drinking it down requires a taste for the maximum dosage, though.

Clipped, controlled and composed, Jackie Kennedy was a woman of her times, but since composure doesn’t win you Oscar nominations, Natalie Portman opts to play the part with a sort of emotional incontinence.

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

Inherent Vice, meandering even by Anderson’s standards, is easily the worst of his movies, a soporific 2½-hour endurance test.

American Fiction is being heralded as a brilliant satire, which is almost correct. I’d say it’s sharp and funny, but its targets are low-hanging, and the film’s writer-director, Cord Jefferson, is hardly the first to take a poke at them.

No, which has been nominated for this year’s Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, is largely a gimmick picture: At all times, it looks like hastily assembled news footage shot on grainy videotape in 1988. That means light flaring up to spoil the image, bumpy camerawork, a nearly square picture and all-around grubbiness.

There’s laying it on thick, there’s laying it on with a trowel, and there’s laying it on like A Man Called Otto.

A real actioner, generous with the bullets and blood and chase scenes, that simultaneously mocks shoot-'em-ups.

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.

At the end of it all comes McKay’s big angry harrumph about the meaning of the crisis — a sign of failed, frustrated satire. If you can make your message clear through comedy, there’s no need to say, “Here’s my moral.” A funnyman can’t afford to get caught wagging his finger.

An affecting and beautifully realized documentary.

At its best, “Furiosa” is like a more fun, less ponderous and mysticism-free “Dune,” with every pedal properly to the metal. But it’s closer to numbing than enthralling, like a long ride with no shock absorbers.

In the utterly routine effort Skyfall, we're actually expected to cheer each chord we've heard so many times (here's a martini shaker! Look, it's a Walther PPK! And there's an Aston Martin!) We've been turned into wretched Pavlovian dogs, salivating at the bell instead of the snack. The highlight, by far, is a classic animated credit sequence: Adele, you are the new Shirley Bassey.

Mr. Elliot’s script is so rich and gently funny that he could easily have made an excellent live-action feature from it. As it is, though, the animation makes it even more lovable.

The film is smartly structured, and many viewers will happily cue up a repeat viewing to savor all of the matters that were not as they seemed the first time. The many puzzles and secrets and fakeouts keep things mostly amusing for two hours, and as with the first “Knives Out,” the cast is strong.

This all-you-can-eat thrill buffet easily bests most of the recent big-budget movies and reminds us that Mr. Cruise remains a showman par excellence.

Mr. Davies’s wit is admirable, but his structure is nonexistent. He devises no problem to be solved, no goal to be met, no riddle to be answered. Occasionally we hear bits of Sassoon’s beautiful war poetry in voiceover, but it is irrelevant to most of the action.

In Living, Mr. Nighy excels again in a performance that is magnificent in its restraint and eloquent in its sparseness of words.

The movie independently bungles everything it tries, like a Central Park busker who simultaneously sucks at juggling, harmonica playing and skateboarding.

Lost Illusions is sumptuous yet piercing, an expertly plotted social-relations saga of the kind that once typified prestige Hollywood cinema, and it dives into moral quandaries rather than dispensing easy bromides.