Lawrence Toppman

This suspenseful drama reveals pieces of its puzzle steadily and slowly, until the final heartrending picture can be seen at last. Remarkably, it comes from a screenwriter who had never had a feature film produced and a director who had never made one in English.

Eastwood has directed five war movies and acted in others, and he knows there’s no single truth to convey about combat.

If we can’t believe these characters could really be friends, we can live for 101 minutes in a world where they do.

The story’s unbelievable, end to end.

We don’t see his alcoholism and post-traumatic stress disorder after coming home, the decay of his marriage, the vengeful hatred that led him to strangle his captors in his nightmares. Nor do we see his conversion to Christianity after a 1949 Billy Graham crusade in Los Angeles, an event he credited with saving his sanity, marriage and perhaps his life.

The Hobbit concludes as it began: in a welter of continuous action, with characters who have become archetypes but seldom rise above that level, and with a host of ideas J.R.R. Tolkien didn't put into his short novel.

Fear not. It’s as silly as the first, a shade faster and nastier (though also sloppier) and features a new psycho more dangerous than anyone in the original.

Gone Girl offers interesting, even amusing audio cues: the sound of a distant mourning dove when we suspect Amy’s been killed, or Blue Oyster Cult’s “Don’t Fear the Reaper” playing on a car radio as Nick returns his obnoxious father to an assisted care center.

Winterbottom has darkened the tone: The final scene takes place during a golden sunset that brings no closure to either man.

It’s the rare animated film that might amuse adults and kids while slipping a useful message to the latter.

Denzel Washington doesn’t demonstrate how great he is with first-rate scripts such as “Flight.” He does it by elevating sophisticated pulp like The Equalizer to a higher level.

Well, this is the best adaptation of Block – in fact, the only decent one.

The movie ends so abruptly you might wonder if a piece is missing, and it relies on one extraordinary coincidence I couldn’t swallow. Yet scene by scene, I found people I knew or wish I knew: Ben’s romantic advice to the straight but awkward Joey would give any boy confidence about himself.

The story has overtones of “On the Waterfront.”

The rest of the film couldn’t convince a sixth-grader it might happen. CIA agents search a home for evidence but leave the front door unlocked and unguarded, so Devereaux sneaks in and knocks them out.

If you wanted to, you could see this movie as an allegory about people who love each other but can never connect. Or maybe it’s a warning to parents who turn a blind eye to children’s failings until the family self-destructs.

The Giver has an unsavory reek of box-office calculation about it, from the overworked “teens-must-save-a-world-ruined-by-adults” plot to the casting of pop star Taylor Swift in a small and irrelevant role.

Is “feel-good” a bad word? Critics often think so. But when a movie explores real emotions en route to its gladdening end, when it takes time to touch on serious issues along the way, it earns the right to make us feel good.

Many movies require us to turn off our brains, and many rely on clichés and/or coincidences. It takes a special kind of shamelessness to do both, and Into the Storm has that in spades.

The most important thing, though, is that we come away feeling we know him. He died on Christmas Day eight years ago, and people listening to samples of his music in rap and hip-hop may have no idea why he mattered. Now they’ll see.

The film’s fast, amusing, good-looking and not overlong, which is all sensible non-geeks ask of such movies.

Whether you take to it will depend on whether you consider “high-octane” or “nonsense” the more important word.

As in “Restrepo,” we never have the sense that Junger makes judgments. Near the end, soldiers in their 20s say their bonds with other servicemen run immeasurably deep, and they never expect to have relationships this meaningful with anyone else again.

Director Matt Reeves, working from a script by Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver and Mark Bomback, elevates the apes to primary importance in this intelligent thriller.

Guy Pearce isn’t as physically formidable as Clint Eastwood or Charles Bronson in Leone’s classics, but he’s just as determined and dangerous.

“22” merits a B grade. The long final credits, in which Dickson imagines dozens of future scenarios for the undercover boys, kicks it up one notch.

All three leads give effective, low-key performances. (I don’t remember a single character raising a voice.) Their acting fits the tone of this movie and all the ones Reichardt directs: Her camera moves slowly, and she accumulates tension by showing detail after detail.

The Fault in Our Stars beautifully captures the hesitancy, shyness masked by outward confidence, feelings of unworthiness and quiet intensity of teenagers in love.