Lawrence Toppman

By the end, a Zen-like calm that might be mistaken for stasis settles over the story. But these lives move forward slowly, inexorably, and they move us, too.

The filmmakers fall back on melodrama fairly often.... Yet there’s freshness in the storytelling.

Director Michael William Gordon and writer Jim Davis give us a hopeful feeling about Logan without insisting on solving all his problems – or insisting that God will solve them for him.

If the cast were less likeable, the predictability of the story might become wearisome. (Of course, it’s not likely to be predictable if you’re 9.) But all the actors, especially young Fegley and Laurence, engage us.

If you don’t confuse this with history – or with the French film “Marguerite,” a fictional piece loosely based on FFJ – you’ll come away touched. That’s mostly because of Meryl Streep and Hugh Grant.

All his facets come through: the satirist, the prankster, the self-described political conservative with libertarian leanings, the anti-authoritarian who urged people to vote, the man tolerant of anything except intolerance.

“The Dirty Dozen,” one of my favorite war movies, will no doubt get a 50th-anniversary boxed set next year. Those of us who wait for it can mark time with Suicide Squad, which borrows the same concept and executes it with more lunacy and far less flair.

Mortensen has been ideally cast. He’s at his best playing fanatics, obsessives, people beyond the norm who can’t find their place in a quiet world.

This stale, redundant story goes round in the same tight circles, revealing one piddling new secret and containing one unconvincing change of character.

Jokes don’t pay off at all or take so long to do so that they lose their snap.

This good-humored bonding story emphasizes the actresses’ gifts, rather than their gender.

There’s not much new to The Infiltrator – perhaps nothing, except the setting of the climax – but the vintage stuff is satisfying.

If I understand the intentions of writer-directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, the film moved me profoundly. I’ll let you come up with your interpretation – or I’ll share mine privately, to avoid spoilers – but it’s a unique look inside a troubled mind.

A gently spellbinding drama that captures the old-fashioned enchantment of Roald Dahl’s book.

Director David Yates, who did the last four “Harry Potter” films, delivers both big thrills at the climax and small, spooky ones when Tarzan and the others move through a world of beauty, terror and mystery.

Veteran documentary-maker Louise Osmond directs with flair. She gives us just enough of the history of Blackwood to show what Dream Alliance means to the place, and she gets us inside the horse’s head.

Finding Dory can be described in exactly the same way as its title character: good-natured, funny, optimistic, darting from place to place, ranging from anxious to frenzied in tone, and unable to sustain an idea for more than a few moments.

The movie remains quiet and deliberate, a synonym for “boring” in some minds (though not mine). In the end, it becomes an allegory for the times in which we live.

Wan knows how to sustain tension through terror, though he could have abbreviated the flabby middle of the movie.

Lanthimos and Filippou have thoroughly imagined their world.

When we have to spend time with Beast and Angel and Nightcrawler and Cyclops and Psylocke and Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence, still strong), the movie too often becomes a parade of cameos. Apocalypse has no personality, merely the malevolence of a megalomaniac.

Scafaria doesn’t solve everyone’s problems or end with a miraculous change of mind or heart. She writes credible situations...and characters in whom we can believe.

Laughter trumps logic here, and the laughs flow freely.

I couldn’t tell whether the film was intended to be a comedy; as it became more and more improbable, both predictable and ludicrous at once, I heard audience members chortle again and again.

Captain America: Civil War appeals to me more strongly than any superhero movie of the last decade.

The whole movie has a matter-of-factness that extends not just to the final photographic montage but the last line of dialogue. We can’t ask for more from this genre, and we often get much less.

The real surprise is not that the high-strung Key and grounded Peele have rapport – their sketches demonstrate that – but that it can be used to anchor a full-length comedy.

If this project is some kind of huge in-joke, I’m willing to admit I didn’t get it. But if I did get it (and I’m afraid I did), it’s a huge disappointment.