Manohla Dargis

Pfeiffer, Majors and Douglas (as Hope’s equally big-brained dad) are the truer stars of this show, and each brings something valuable to the mix.

This paranoid thriller has all the failings we expect...but Enemy of the State also has enough wit, talent and narrative thrust to mostly transcend those flaws, at least until that ludicrous finish.

The tediously convoluted plot involves the foursome’s attempt to pay him back, a labored venture that involves crooks with names like Dog and Plank, a man on fire, some fine cinematography, plenty of gore though no real point.

The results are likable, unsurprising and principally a showcase for the pretty young cast, notably Mr. Miller, who brings texture to his witty if sensitive gay quipster.

Although the novelty of this repetition and Mr. Benson’s adjustments pull you in like a new puzzle, his actual ideas — about people, their stories and how to tell those stories — turn out to be fairly straight.

Water Lilies is a nice, watchable, attractive, minor work. What it lacks is a sense of purpose, a commitment not just to its characters but also to its own reason for being.

Unforgivable isn't one of Mr. Téchiné's greatest achievements, but it's engrossing even when its increasingly populated story falters, tripped up by unpersuasive actions, connections and details.

Long Shot isn’t going to save the romantic comedy, but it’s an adrenaline shot of pure pleasure to the genre’s failing heart.

A buoyantly funny, sometimes desperately sad film.

It’s tough being a hitmaker who isn’t weighed down by corporate expectations, but for a while, Mr. Gunn does a pretty good job of keeping the whole thing reasonably fizzy, starting with an opener that winks at the audience with big bangs and slapstick.

Benoît Jacquot's tense, absorbing, pleasurably original look at three days in the life and lies of a doomed monarch.

Ejiofor fills in Marty with dabs of personality and a sense of decency that suggests that while humanity is lost, not every individual is. It’s too bad the movie doesn’t stick with Marty, who warms it up appreciably.

Although there's more romance in "Buck," a classic American survivor story in the triumphant individual vein, in Pianomania the very dry, very accomplished Mr. Knüpfer makes engaging company both because he keeps enviable company and because he's a full-on geek, though one possessed by pianos.

Mr. Stewart’s interest in the material is obviously personal, but his movie transcends mere self-interest.

"Final Reckoning” is flat-out ridiculous, but it’s a model example of blockbuster entertainment at its most highly polished, and I enjoyed it thoroughly, despite its clichés, extravagant violence and gung-ho militarism.

The movie tries to convince you that Douglas is better than his worst self and can transcend the dehumanizing degradations in which he’s mired. But not even the filmmakers seem convinced, which may explain why they embrace baroque brutality topped by a dollop of audience-mollifying sentimentality.

Horny is as horny does in the sweetly absurd high school comedy Superbad.

It's a pleasant-enough creation story to revisit, one weighted down by melodrama and lifted up by some rocking tunes.

All these attractions are a necessary balm given that Ho turns out to be a deeply uninvolving character (Mr. Shih mostly smiles, grimaces or looks amazed), a wan placeholder for a character in a narratively thin film that runs over three very leisurely hours.

A film in which the mechanics of the plot are far less interesting, and vital, then the interior landscape of men who exist outside the law.

There is no poetry here and little thought.

It is a depressing story, certainly, as well as moving, confusing and, at a fast 72 minutes, at once undercooked and overpadded.

On a purely visual level, it's the most powerful and viscerally exciting movie to come out of Hollywood this year. Which doesn't mean that it's all good.

Not everything is as elegantly executed, including a tiresome, would-be comic subplot involving an African diplomat and a clandestine casino that drags the story down badly and comes close to noxious racial stereotype.

The on-screen results are weird and watchable, by turns frustrating and entertaining, and predictably a little morbid.

There are different ways to describe Garbus’s telling of this mystery: it’s serious, respectful, gravely melancholic. Yet anger best describes the movie’s atmosphere, its overall mood and its authorial tone.

This often beautiful and too-often moribund, if exhaustingly frenetic, feature tends to be less energetic than the dead people waltzing through it.

A would-be psychological thriller with next to no psychology and shivers instead of thrills, The Page Turner is a nervous-making, lightly amusing vengeance story that owes an obvious debt to Claude Chabrol.

Mr. Branagh’s ascension into big-budget studio directing largely remains a mystery, and there’s little in Cinderella beyond its faces and gowns that captures the eye or the imagination.

For Tian, who was banned from directing by Chinese authorities for a decade, it marks a triumphant return; for those who have loved the filmmaker's work in the past, few resurrections have seemed as welcome.

Alternately hilarious and alarming documentary.

It's an exasperating, irresistible, must-see mess of a movie about life in the modern world and so very good that even when its story finally crashes and burns the filmmaking remains unscathed.

Mr. Feig handily manages the mood and scene shifts, using regular laughs to brighten the deepening dark. By far his smartest move was to give Ms. Kendrick and Ms. Lively room to create a prickly intimacy for their characters, a bond that’s persuasive enough to push the story through its more forced moments.

A moody little number, The Eclipse makes good on its name by sometimes obscuring its themes and even point, which can have its charms though also severe drawbacks.

A deadpan comedy shot through with a vein of despair, the Uruguayan film Whisky is a pint-size pleasure.

Sleek and ever more unsettling, Speak No Evil is closely based on a far colder, downright nasty 2022 movie of the same title from the Danish director Christian Tafdrup. For the most part, Watkins adheres to the original’s overall design and trajectory while adding some new details and scenes; he also pads the running time an unnecessary 15 or so minutes.

Mr. Ridley’s ambitions and refusal to treat Hendrix as a solvable mystery are welcome, given how often biopics re-embalm their subjects. Here, a legend is born, and a man too.

The brilliant, unsettling action scenes — ugly, savage, dehumanizing — speak volumes.

A likable, lightly sticky valentine to childhood, the 1980s and the dawning of movie love, Son of Rambow was written and directed by Garth Jennings and produced by Nick Goldsmith, the duo behind the underappreciated fantasy "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy."

In Good Company lacks both the emotional sting and the bright pop-culture snap of "About a Boy," as well as Mr. Hornby's carefully cultivated irony, but it makes for an agreeable solo directing debut.

It’s an extremely well-lubricated entertainment machine filled with attractive images and wall-to-wall appealing performances.

For a Marvel agnostic like me, the single most interesting thing about Age of Ultron is that you can sense that Mr. Whedon, having helped build a universal earnings machine with the first “Avengers,” has now struggled mightily, touchingly, to invest this behemoth with some life.

A lovely, drifty first feature that feels less like a documentary and more like an act of rapturous devotion.

He (director Mark Waters) keeps the story light and bright, and he brings out real comic performances from his cast, including newcomer Seyfried, who plays her ditz with Judy Holliday charm.

The body has its needs, and one of the problems with Diary of the Dead is that it doesn’t get into your body; it doesn’t shake you up, jolt you, make you shiver and squeak. It’s clever, or at least clever enough to keep you going and interested from start to finish. It just isn’t scary.

There are no big surprises in Caetano's film, which plays out exactly as ordained, only a sense of life at its most precarious and real.

In Auto Focus, the strangely wonderful and weirdly touching new film from Paul Schrader, the comedy and the tragedy keep getting mixed up.

Astonishing isn't the word -- neither is incompetent, incoherent or just plain crap. Indeed, none of these words really gets at the very special type of badness that is Deuces Wild.

Ray remains an unanswered, not especially compelling, question, but Mr. Keaton comes close to making you believe there’s soul to go with the fries and freneticism.

It’s lightly funny and a little sad, filled with ravishing landscapes and juiced up with kinetic fights (if not enough of them). It has antiseptic violence, emotional uplift and the kind of protagonist that movie people like to call relatable.

Modestly scaled and loosely plotted, it is an unusually tender movie and an ideal vehicle for Coppola’s gift for expressing the intangible and the ephemeral.

While it’s no surprise that Mr. Lumet can spin a tale, these murky-looking, less-than-flattering sit-downs are irritatingly suboptimal, particularly given that he was so great at telling intimate stories about men in shadows.

In a free-for-all like this, where the laws of gravity and dictates of narrative logic are left to eat dust, it doesn't matter when anything takes place or why.

Meta to the max, filled with clever jokes and observations that stick like barbs and deflated ones that land with a thud, Seven Psychopaths is a leisurely riff about movies, violence, storytelling and the art of the steal.

Strangely entertaining.

Only once, in a quick sketch of "Planet of the Apes" -- does the humor seem to spring from pure movie love. In nearly every other respect, the film is so lazy, solipsistic and overpleased with itself it's hard not to believe that this time the Evil Empire has won not just the battle, but the war.

It is Mr. Soderbergh’s insistence on seeing the A.D.M. scandal as a collective tragedy rather than as another white-collar crime that gives the movie force, resonance, feeling.

There’s a mystery here, some thrills and blood, but mostly there are beautiful people and the kind of human hunger that devours everything and everyone in sight.

A comedy without a shred of obvious filmmaking and an endless stream of good, bad, sometimes terrible, often absurd jokes.

It looks like Disneyland and sounds, well, like a bad Broadway musical, with all the power belting and jazz-hand choreography that implies.

[A] deceptively sincere movie about masculinity and its discontents that Mr. Gordon-Levitt, making a fine feature directing debut, shapes into a story about a young man's moral education.

Their (filmmakers Oxide and Danny Pang) sense of pacing is nicely arrhythmic, which makes the "boo" moments all the more heart-thudding, but what's even more pleasurable are the pockets of quiet, those lacuna of low-frequency dread when nothing much happens.

Mostly, Judy offers the familiar spectacle of one star playing another. Zellweger’s performance is credible, with agitated flutters and filigreed touches, though it leans hard on Judy’s tremulous fragility, as if she were a panicked hummingbird. The take is also cautious, too comfortable; it never makes you flinch or look away.

The movie is overly busy, as these kinds of eager-to-please diversions tend to be, and at two hours it overstays its welcome.

The problem with Elegy has nothing to do with faithfulness and everything to do with interpretation. The film is an overly polite take on a spiky, claustrophobic, insistently impolite novel.

[Proyas] hasn't yet learned how to enliven his characters as fully as his sets. Part of this is structural (somnolence is built into the script), but the greater fault lies with Proyas' direction of his performers, most of whom deliver their lines in a strangulated whisper.

A taut, unnerving, forcefully unromantic fictional film.

Ozon misses some chances with Sarah, but Rampling doesn't skip a beat. Freed from the burden of likability, the actress pushes the character from near-farce to near-tragedy, without once appealing to sentimentalism.

The woman in Christopher Munch's lovely, delightfully idiosyncratic Letters From the Big Man, resplendent with its own dense forests and cloudy Oregon days, has already fallen to earth and is looking for a way back up or maybe just forward. She gets help from a sasquatch.

Again and again, as the story shifts between women, times and moods, Mr. Jordan adds a punctuating flourish...that exquisitely illustrates the once-upon-a-time mood.

As sticky as "Strictly Ballroom," if far better behaved, Shall We Dance was written and directed by Masayuki Suo, a man who really knows his way around clichés both benign and tiresome.

Ms. Moretz is by far the best thing about the film: she holds the screen as gracefully as she executes a running back flip.

The Good Dinosaur is charmingly different, but its oddness sneaks up on you only after the filmmakers lay out some storybook bona fides.

There are, once again, too many busy, uninterestingly staged battles that lean heavily on obvious, sometimes distracting digital sorcery. But there are also pacific, brooding interludes in which the actors — notably Mr. Freeman, an intensely appealing screen presence — remind you that there’s more to Middle-earth than clamor and struggle.

A coming-of-adulthood story that improbably blends a plaintive drama with romantic longing and far-out science fiction.

An agonizingly familiar refrain, but one that the young Argentine director Alexis Dos Santos relates with such tenderness and with so much ethereal beauty that it feels like something fresh.

One of the other pleasures of Challengers is that despite some tears, tightened jaws and its fussy chronology, the movie isn’t trying to say anything important, which is a relief. It wants to engage and entertain you, and it does that very nicely.

The camera movements are graceful, almost ethereal, yet the objects themselves - with their impastos of organic and inorganic materials, their metaphoric resonances, historical allusions and intimations of war - feel unmistakably weighty.

Mr. Webb's Spider-Man movie works only because he keeps the whole package, at least until the requisite final blowout, tethered to his two appealing leads.

Stuffed with zingers and zippy stunts, it comes with pretty young things of all hues and hair types - few prettier than its lead, Joseph Gordon-Levitt - and start-to-finish clever special effects, none more clever or special than Michael Shannon.

Like his character, Mr. Boseman is the star of this show, while Mr. Gad is the second banana and often comic relief. Both performers are natural showmen who never step on each other’s moment; they’re fun to watch.

Mr. Natali, whose earlier films include “Cube,” hasn’t reinvented the horror genre. But with Splice he has done the next best thing with an intelligent movie that, in between its small boos and an occasional hair-raising jolt, explores chewy issues like bioethics, abortion, corporate-sponsored science, commitment problems between lovers and even Freudian-worthy family dynamics.

Can he do the thing? Well, yes and no. He -- Mamet, David, celebrated celebrity playwright and less-certain maker of movies -- can do some of the things, like assemble a cast sleek as a cat.

It's impossible not to cry at their suffering, but whether you'll feel anything is another story.

Mr. McDowell manages and massages the mystery, even while he forgets to do much with the camera except periodically have it chase after someone. He can be frustratingly inattentive to the visual possibilities offered by the story.

Mr. Gibson makes a persuasive derelict John Wayne with a loose, energetic performance, finely tuned comic timing and an amused, self-aware “Lethal Weapon” glint.

With the strange caws and showy displays, these beasties provide a lot of the movie’s easygoing pleasures. The adults are rather less engaging.

It’s no surprise that the teams hired to bring a property like Deadpool to the screen know how to keep the machine oiled and humming; it’s the ones who somehow manage to temporarily stick a wrench in the works, adding something human — a feeling instead of another quip — who are worth your attention.

Before long, the fleetingly liberated child and the filmmakers’ imaginative playfulness are boxed up, and the whole thing turns into yet another superhero adventure.

Mr. Hoffman enlivens Mission: Impossible III, which otherwise droops, done in both by the maudlin romance and by Mr. Abrams's inability to adapt his small-screen talent -- evident in his capacity as the television auteur behind "Alias" and "Lost" -- to a larger canvas.

Like so many political films of this type made for British television, this documentary contains more information than analysis, not to mention predictably spooky music.

Robot Stories isn't any good. I don't say this lightly. There's no pleasure in giving new directors bad reviews and it's especially unpleasant when what's wrong with their work isn't a clumsy performance or two, a sagging second act or a repugnant worldview, but a near-total absence of filmmaking talent.

The most appealing character in Suspended Time is Assayas, a hovering offscreen presence who delivers the confessional, gracefully digressive narration.

What’s odd here is how closely the new movie follows the original’s arc without ever capturing its bliss or tapping into its touching delicacy of feeling.

An alternately effortless and forced French-language diversion.

The movie is an awkward cross between a domestic comedy and a marital tragedy that's laced with laughs, soggy with tears and burdened by a booming, blunt soundtrack that amplifies every narrative beat.

Known for an elegant visual style, Jarmusch has a great gift for playing actors against one another, for finding complementary eccentrics (Murray and RZA) and uncovering rare gems (Bill Rice and Taylor Mead in "Champagne").

There is pleasure in such useless beauty, of course, and pleasure too in drifting with the jellyfish amid the wild blue yonder of a great filmmaker’s imagination.

A grave and quietly moving story about a South African girl of extraordinary character, does something that few painful dramas accomplish: It tells a tale of resilience without platitudes about the triumph of the human spirit or without false promises about an unclouded future.

A clumsily directed, painstakingly faithful adaptation thats heavy on plot, light on nuance, and features in its title role a young newcomer whose most striking quality is an almost preternatural absence of oomph.

A nondramatic work best appreciated as a pure image-and-sound event.

Has the virtue of sincerity but not that of restraint. Unlike Terrence Malick, whose shadow looms over the film's visual style, the Smiths over-explain, not grasping that all those barren fields and blood-red clouds are doing plenty of work for them.

This kind of glance at history is a poor substitute for a hard, steady and expansive examination.

Mr. Cruise’s brisk, ingratiating performance — all smiles, hard-charging physicality and beads of sweat — does a lot to soften the edges. But Mr. Liman doesn’t press Mr. Cruise to dig into the character, and the actor mostly hurdles forward in a movie that never gets around to asking what makes Barry run and why.

Watching this well-behaved adaptation of one of Greene's most personal novels, you can't help but wish that the novelist had been around to write his own script.

A diverting neo-noir, Deadfall brings to mind those dark, old-fashioned entertainments in rotation on Turner Classic Movies that suck you in with their genre machinery, sullen beauties and despair.

Spielberg's infidelity to Aldiss (and perhaps to Kubrick, who knows?) would be pardonable if it didn't ruin his movie. In the end, he has failed to make a persuasive, smart movie about robots and people.

It’s a full three-ring affair, complete with puffs of smoke, glitter and grunge, some hocus-pocus, mumbo jumbo and even a dwarf.

For whatever reason here, Aronofsky always remains at a frustrating remove from Hank, which flattens the emotional and psychological stakes that Butler works so hard to raise.

Drama/Mex means to say something about its country of origin, though it’s hard to know exactly what.

Although too compressed by half, the film manages to recreate what, at one point, the hectoring narrator will call an "archaeology of repression."

Ms. Williams tries her best, and sometimes that's almost enough.

There's plenty of frantic energy here, lots of noise and money too, but what's absent is any sense of rediscovery, the kind that's necessary whenever a filmmaker dusts off an old formula or a genre standard.

Mr. Broomfield maintains a level of cool detachment throughout. That's to the good of the movie, which, though technically exemplary, falters dramatically on occasion, becoming dangerously close to overheated whenever the characters speak for any length.

What makes the material still feel personal — other than the yearslong investment and love that transform entertainments into fan communities — is the combination of Katniss and Ms. Lawrence, who have become a perfect fit.

It's no doubt rude, and perhaps irrelevant, to point out that John Waters still doesn't know how to make a movie.

Mr. Tavernier’s filmmaking here is loose, almost casual, and you may not always notice what he’s doing with the camera as he frames the ministry’s choreographed chaos with its whirling people and parts.

The overall effect is part BBC-style biography, part Hollywood-like hagiography, and generally pleasing and often moving, even when the story wobbles off the historical rails or becomes bogged down in dopey romance.

Indeed, one of the nicest things about this jewel of a film is that there isn't much of a story at all -- just a handful of delicately drawn characters moving through life that is at once familiar and yet slightly elevated by a director who loves the good in people more than the bad.

With its spy-on-spy globetrotting, old-fashioned villains, flirty but prematurely swinging minis and fan-boy bits (look for an eye-blink-fast tribute to "Basic Instinct" and a cameo from the cult actor Michael Ironside), the whole enterprise has an agreeable lightness, no small thing, given its rapidly moving parts.

As to be expected, it's all very beautiful; too bad it's also often annoying, save for a heartbreaking final half-hour.

Demands to be seen, if only for its beauty.

While it’s a visual enchantment (there’s a knockout compendium of horror film clichés), its reversion to a largely male domain after “Brave,” its first and only female-driven story, is a drag.

If Lies were better, the most obvious point of reference would be "In the Realm of the Senses," but the filmmaking isn't good enough to warrant such comparison, and the ideas are half-baked.

Jennifer Lopez's butt? Alas, the moment is over all too soon; the movie, sadly, is not.

The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part isn’t as distractingly fun, shiny and bright as the more satisfying franchise installments. It drags and sometimes bores, which makes it easier for your mind to drift elsewhere.

Stick with the movie for its leads, Sally Hawkins and Ethan Hawke, a beautifully matched pair who open up two closed people, unleashing torrents of feeling.

The limp title says it all.

The film is at once breathtaking and ridiculous, and it's the tension between these two extremes, as well as Carax's own intoxicating style, that makes it essential viewing.

Always adept at hitting emotional cues cleanly, Foster in this role also lets herself get lost in the moment, which is something she hasn't often allowed herself to do since "The Silence of the Lambs."

Filled with small, cute kids and large, goofy laughs and buoyed by fine supporting work from Greg Kinnear and Marcia Gay Harden, the director's latest effort won't rock your movie world, but the fact that he manages to keep the freak flag flying in the face of our culture of triumphalism is a thing of beauty.

A cringing romance that Mr. Vinterberg tries and fails to spin into a political allegory.

While it's frustrating that Mr. Palmer doesn't dig deep into the complexities of the fights, one of the movie's strengths is the honesty with which he confesses his doubts about them.

An intimate, discursive inquiry into religious belief that opens to include questions about cinema.

The larger problem is that there’s not enough here — in story terms or in the filmmaking — to sustain even the movie’s 90 minutes.

As with "Youth Without Youth," this new movie feels like a transitional work but also an inspired one, the creation of a director who, having recently turned 70, has set off on a new adventure that requires more from his audiences than some might be willing to give. Which is itself a sign of vigorous artistic renewal.

Crammed with friendly, sympathetic talking heads and pretty images of a stunned-looking Mr. Bruce, then 35, relearning life (he remembers how to walk but forgot family and friends), the film comes up frustratingly short when it comes to the particulars.

There's so little going on with either the film's story or its characters, however, that there is plenty of time to get lost in cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki's eerily beautiful visuals.

At some point, though, Mr. Byrkit turns one too many corners (characters, meanwhile, begin bustling in and out of rooms like Marx Brothers extras), and what began as a nifty puzzle feels more like a trap.

The Overnight ends just as it starts to get interestingly messy, tapping into something real and sweetly touching.

In the end there might not be much to this tale other than titillation, but there's plenty to be said for Ms. Ronan, who was the best thing about "Atonement" and holds her ground against forceful screen presences like Ms. Blanchett and Mr. Bana.

It was a hellish encounter, as well as a portent of the 10 years to come, and as such deserves far better than Mel Gibson's glower and writer-director Randall Wallace's guns-and-Moses platitudes.

Despite its flaws and will to kitsch, The Lovers and the Despot has enough enigmas and chills to merit a look, even if some of its spookier moments involve cinephilia rather than the usual weapons of mass destruction.

Mr. Farrell and Mr. Doyle continue to hold your gaze, even as Mr. Jordan's screenplay sets your mind to wandering. There is, as noted, a wisp of a tale tucked into this film, one that, as the story wears on, becomes ponderously weighed down with melodramatic filler and even some halfhearted genre action.

Perfectly acceptable watched on the back of an airline seat or at home while you're doing housework.

There's nothing obscure about young love and loss, and a story, as Mr. Jiménez put it, about "youngsters who have to deal with this sudden lack of certainties which makes them more lonely than they could have ever imagined."

About the only good thing to say about this mess is that it's rotten enough that even Altman cultists may be forced to reconsider their devotion.

With no grand speeches or oversized gestures, Mr. Katz creates a specific world that gracefully enlarges with universal meaning.

Coup de Chance is more sketched-in than satisfyingly detailed. Most of the characters are types, and despite some local color, the story might as well play out in New York, but it’s amusing, technically adept and looks like a professionally made movie (no small thing in the streaming age).

Vaporous and chilled to freezing, Interview lacks a single honest moment, but it does have plenty of diverting ones.

A first-rate, seemingly sweat-free entertainer, Mr. Boyle always sells the goods smoothly, along with the chills, the laughs and, somewhat less often, the tears. He’s wickedly good at making you jump and squirm in your seat, which he does often in Sunshine, but he tends to avoid tapping into deep wells of emotion.

Thou shalt not covet any thing that is thy neighbor's. Maybe DreamWorks should stop trying to be Disney.

Tangerine encompasses dizzying multitudes — it’s a neo-screwball chase flick with a dash of Rainer Werner Fassbinder — but mostly, movingly, it is a female-friendship movie about two people who each started life with an XY chromosome set.

Alien: Romulus is a nuts-and-bolts action-adventure horror story with boos and splatter. It doesn’t have much on its mind but it has some good jump scares along with a disappointingly bland heroine, a sympathetic android and the usual collection of disposable characters who are unduly killed by slavering, rampaging extraterrestrials.

The ensuing adventure is lively, amusing and predictably predictable with revelations, reconciliations and some nebulous politics for the grown-ups. It’s never surprising, yet its bursts of pictorial imagination — snowflakes that streak like shooting stars — keep you engaged, as do Elsa and Anna, who still aren’t waiting for life to happen.

Although it starts off vaguely amusing, 8 Women grows progressively sour, curdled by the filmmakers' bad faith and lack of compassion. It isn't just the tone that's off; it's the point.

Ms. Headland has a concept for a latter-day screwball comedy — two romantically challenged friends whose hang-ups create a roadblock to coupledom — but she doesn’t have the jokes or the emotionally textured characters that can fill in that conceit.

Things happen in Wanted, but no one cares. You could call that nihilism, but even nihilism requires commitment of a kind and this, by contrast, is a movie built on indifference.

As is sometimes the case with movies that take on civil and political rights without force-feeding the audience,A Better Life" plays the human interest angle hard. It tries to put a lump in your throat and a tear on your cheek (it succeeds), pumping your emotions doubtless in an attempt to look nonpartisan.

Principally a work of gorgeous surfaces, shot mostly in silvery black-and-white film by the cinematographer Mott Hupfel, with an occasional splash of saturated color.

There are many words that you can use to describe Ms. Westwood (born 1941), an early punk rock tastemaker and merchandizer turned global couture brand. Boring certainly is not one of them. And as the movie jumps from past to present, from street to palace, from the Sex Pistols to Queen Elizabeth II, Ms. Westwood’s claim sounds increasingly strange and borderline ridiculous.

All too predictably, as if obeying some rule of genre, the director trades in his more involved ideas about alienation and voyeurism for an eruption of violence, then tags on some nonsense about marital fidelity.

Greengrass knows how to shoot and cut, but The Lost Bus is at once too high-minded and too exploitative to work. However skilled the cinematography and editing, there is no saving a movie predicated on looming death with badly written characters and such a frustratingly narrow point of view.

Mr. Rahimi opens up an entire world inside the couple’s modest house, filling its few rooms with enough air, sharp words and slow-boiling intrigue that the walls never feel as if they’re closing in on you.

Is there a point? All the filmmakers seem interested in is the ugliness of the main Israeli characters.

It's the same old bootstraps story, an American dream artfully told, skillfully sold. To that calculated end, the filmmaking is seamless, unadorned, transparent, the better to serve Mr. Smith's warm expressiveness.

Godard has always made films that are as thrilling for their ideas and ideals as for the sheer beauty of their images; the difference here is that for the first time in years he's more interested in turning us on than in turning us off.

Part of what works in the movie is that it does a good job of presenting the ordinary assaults that women, even those with great privilege, can endure simply to get through a day, including dehumanizing “compliments.”

The weave of the personal and the political finally proves as irresistible as it is moving, partly because it has been drawn from extraordinary life.

As the first hour of Suspiria grinds into the second and beyond (the movie runs 152 minutes), it grows ever more distended and yet more hollow. Unlike Argento, who seemed content to deliver a nastily updated fairy tale in 90 or so minutes, Guadagnino continues casting about for meaning, which perhaps explains why he keeps adding more stuff, more mayhem, more dances.

Avenue Montaigne is a bonbon, not a bouillabaisse. But because this is finally a film about desire, it carries a bittersweet tang.

No life is seamless, and not every biographical portrait needs to be, but this one is so riddled with awkward transitions, including on the soundtrack, that it tends to lurch distractingly, as if Mr. Mori were still trying to figure out how to piece the whole thing together.

A divertingly eccentric, often comically absurd movie.

The movie should be manna for anyone who likes animated fantasias without wisecracks, commercials and overwrought warbling about self-actualization, meaning that it's suitable for those who will grow up either to be the next Tim Burton or simply to enjoy his movies.

Although its leisurely pace might be a bit tough going for restless Westerners, Mongolian Ping Pong is the kind of film that should rightly be seen by children, not just adventurous adults.

Napoleon is consistently surprising partly because it doesn’t conform to the conventions of mainstream historical epics, which is especially true of its startling, adamantly unromanticized title character.

Straight-up ridiculous, but it's also consistently funny and nicely played by a well-complemented cast that finds its collective groove and never misses a beat.

In Infinitely Polar Bear, Ms. Forbes hasn’t made a movie about her father’s illness; she’s made one about her father, who, through hard and weird times, clearly helped give her what she needed so that one day she could tell this story.

Like too many big-studio productions, Cloverfield works as a showcase for impressively realistic-looking special effects, a realism that fails to extend to the scurrying humans whose fates are meant to invoke pity and fear but instead inspire yawns and contempt. Rarely have I rooted for a monster with such enthusiasm.

Does it matter that stretches of Miles Ahead — a gun-rattling, squealing-tire car chase included — came out of the filmmakers’ imagination rather than Davis’s life? (Mr. Cheadle shares script credit with Steven Baigelman.) Purists may howl, but they’ll also miss the pleasure and point of this playfully impressionistic movie.

Despite the filmmakers’ efforts to persuade us that The Young Victoria is a serious work, and despite some tense moments and gunfire, the movie’s pleasures are as light as its story. No matter. Albert may never rip Victoria’s bodice, but he does eventually loosen it, to her delight and ours.

Tykwer may want meaning to go with his special effects, but the problem with his filmmaking, both here and earlier, is that he's more interested in his own bag of tricks than in actually saying something.

If the screenwriter and director had followed their cinematic instincts fully, they would have collaborated on one of the more satisfying political thrillers in years; instead, they've managed to create three-quarters of one.

A "slam, bam, thank you, ma'am" trifle of an entertainment.

Mr. Maggio's strengths here are his people (not their stories), a sense of intimacy and textured place rather than the generic hoops he forces the characters to jump through.

The script for Mockingjay Part 1, credited to Peter Craig and Danny Strong, gets the job done, but the performers matter far more than the words they deliver.

Nothing but the Truth has nothing much at all to do with the historical record, which wouldn't be bad if it offered something persuasive and worthwhile in return, like a reckoning of journalism and its abuses.

This well-meaning but irritatingly naïve feature delves into the horrors of prostitution, or more accurately, the filmmaker's horror about the subject.

A B-movie throwback with plentiful winks, it has few thrills, but it has a touch of science, a plausible-enough threat, suitably disgusting splatter, appealing actors and a fleet running time.

Mr. Moretti finds broad comedy in the antics of some clerics, who can seem as sweet as children, but in Melville there is pathos and there is tragedy, and not his alone.

It's an unshowy, generous performance [by Franco] and it greatly humanizes a movie that, as it shifts genre gears and cranks up the noise, becomes disappointingly sober and self-serious.

The actors don’t do all the heavy lifting by themselves. The uniformly good performances make it clear that Mr. Melfi knows how to handle actors, and there are some funny bits.

Robbins has made a drastically different film from the one Welles envisioned -- it's wacky where Welles is absurd, cynical where Welles is canny.

While Mr. DiCaprio turns out to be an ideal fit for Blood Diamond, there's an insolvable disconnect between this serious story and the frivolous way it has been told. There is no reason to doubt the filmmakers' sincerity; only their filmmaking.

Reasonably enjoyable until its guys are forced to grow up. Because bad behavior is usually more fun to watch than good, the movie is especially fine during the preliminaries.

In Freedom Writers Hilary Swank uses neediness to fine effect in a film with a strong emotional tug and smartly laid foundation.

The film's strength and its entertainment lie in John Myhre's production design, its generally appealing cast...and, perhaps most importantly, a canny degree of self-parody.

It's a modest film, if only in scale and apparent budget, about some of the greatest questions in life, like the existence of God, our capacity to see beyond our own vanity and the legacies of fathers, both blood and state.

Like Scott’s filmmaking in this pleasurably immersive spectacle — with its foreign ancients and mentalities, exotic animals and equally unfamiliar calls to human nobility — Washington’s performance has skill, intensity and absolute confidence.

The film is good news nonetheless - it's a store-bought valentine with real heart.

While Mr. Moshé’s ambitions can be frustratingly modest, he does know that — however fraudulent the genre’s myths — the image of a man riding a horse into the sunset is in our cinematic DNA.

Casts its spell by drawing out the horror of everyday existence bit by bit, and then tossing in some otherworldly weirdness that makes the hair on the back of your neck try to run for cover.

Though Edward and Bella reach certain heights in Twilight, notably during a charming scene that finds them leaping from piney treetop to treetop against the spectacular wilderness backdrop, the story’s moral undertow keeps dragging them down.

It's funny how movies about smart people often play so dumb.

You’re unlikely to turn away. The problem with aesthetic shocks is that their power can drain off and their original effects become harder to replicate, so we’ll just have to see what happens next.

Although that's enough plot for two movies, Niccol proceeds to clog up his meticulously mounted story with a murder and a romance (hence Uma Thurman), allowing needless intrigue to distract from his ideas.

The only news here — and, really, the greatest surprise — is how thoroughly this ribald, at times predictably unflattering movie humanizes its protagonist, a classic American striver.

Roger Nygards’ sweet, gently funny documentary about the wild and woolly fans of all things Star Trek doesn’t really reveal much about the original landmark series and its various spinoffs, nor does it ever really get to the heart of the shows’ enduring appeal.

Looney Tunes doesn't have much on its addled mind other than pure entertainment, and on this level it succeeds quite nicely.

In Search of a Midnight Kiss has its derivative moments along with awkward patches -- the inelegantly shaped climax tries to force uninteresting parallels between the two central couples -- it manages the difficult task of creating a sustained, plausible and inviting world.

Despite such floundering, Lymelife keeps you hooked, mostly through Mr. Hutton, Mr. Baldwin and Kieran Culkin as Scott's older brother, Jimmy.

An ode to the joy and sweet release of sex, the film manages to be a sincere, modest political venture that finds humor where you might least expect it, notably in a ménage à trois featuring a cheeky rendition of "The Star Spangled Banner."

It’s pleasurable nonsense and another reminder that one of the great pulls of cinema is the spectacle of other bodies in blissful motion.

This is, it’s worth remembering, a movie set in the American West that was shot in South Africa by a Danish director with a Danish star. In other words it’s another dream of America, feverish, lovely and absurd.

Mr. Hong is not yet the equal of Mr. Antonioni, but it has become increasingly difficult to see intellectually stimulating, aesthetically bold films like this in American theaters.

Anna and the Apocalypse is more sketch than developed movie. Directed by John McPhail from a script by McHenry and Alan McDonald, the movie is thinly plotted, its pacing slack, its staging uninspired; Anna remains merely an idea for a plucky heroine, despite Hunt’s smile and sweat.

The director Gavin Hood, who wrote the script with Sara Bernstein and Gregory Bernstein, fits the pieces together coherently, no small thing given the complications. But the characters are malnourished and Hood’s attempts to build suspense often fall flat because he leans hard on genre conventions, on dark shadows, ominous music and abrupt sounds straight from a horror flick.

Mr. Willis has always been an acquired taste, but for those who did acquire that taste, riding shotgun on his good times and bad, it's a pleasure to see him doing what comes naturally.

The irony is, it's his vulgarity, this mixture of the gaudy and the glossy, that distinguishes Lyne, that makes his work identifiable and, when the story's right, such a guilty pleasure.

It's a slam-dunk of an opener in a film filled with terrifically choreographed action and very little on its mind.

There's something about the movie that sets it apart from the usual thriller. Franklin may not be a master of genre like Hammett and Chandler, but he knows that it means SOMETHING when a character throws a punch or fires a gun.

For all the dolorous trim, Secretary is a genial romance that maintains a surprisingly buoyant tone throughout, notwithstanding some of the writers' sporadic dips into pop Freudianism.

A B-movie-style throwback that’s consistently diverting and blissfully free of morals and messages, A Perfect Getaway is just the thing for the summertime movie blahs: it’s a genuinely satisfying cheap thrill.

The film is more funny ha-ha than LOL; it’s a smarty-pants satire that mocks and embraces almost every cliché in the biography playbook.

The movie keeps moving, the story keeps flowing, but these images — which feel suspended between cinema and still photography — create a pause in the action that your anxious imagination can’t help but fret over. That’s especially true because Mr. Saulnier’s images are often in service of spooky, blood-drenched tales.

It’s all very pretty, but too often the movie’s beauty isn’t tethered to deep feeling or strong ideas, one reason you may often find your eyes and thoughts drifting away from the quietly escalating drama toward the vast green fields, the majestic horses and nice detail work.

There are modest pleasures in a familiar story told differently enough that you're happy to keep guessing and watching.

Scott's ravishing visual style, characterized by a fetishistic attention to surface detail and unrelenting beauty, can work wonders with big subjects, but this is also a director who needs actors powerful enough to shoulder narrative and emotional extremes.

Unfortunately, Ms. Faucher's screenplay, written with Gaëlle Macé, never finds its focus or reason for being, and Ms. Naymark just doesn't have enough screen presence to make up for the lack of a story or to justify all those tenderly attentive close-ups.

Louis is a funny, complicated character, and while the movie could have expanded its horizons (particularly in view of the changes roiling the art world), Cumberbatch fills in this expressionistic portrait exquisitely.

Mr. Jennings and Mr. Goldsmith have held onto a genuine sense of childlike wonder, which works as a nice corrective to what might otherwise come across as an overabundance of hip.

It’s a heavy, solemn tale of blood ties that turns into a melodramatic gusher filled with abstractions about masculinity, America and violence, but brought to specific, exciting life by Christian Bale, Casey Affleck and Woody Harrelson.

Once Vivi and Eva are forced off the train and start wandering the countryside, the forest seems to fold its arms around them, and Endzeit modestly deepens into beguiling mystery.

As she does, Ms. Theron locks down your attention immediately, holding you with her beauty and quiet vigilance.

There's something poignant about the image of this actress (Pfeiffer) sitting in a pool of sunlight without a smile or trace of visible makeup. But she's trying to reach a character that her director seems intent to keep from her grasp.

The results are about as naughty as that sounds (not very), but it also makes for a fairly giggling good time.

It’s all handsomely managed, polished and professional, but the pieces are too neatly manufactured to feel as if anything is truly at stake.

Song after song, as relationships and rebellion bloom, you wait in vain for the movie to, as well, and for the filmmaking to rise to the occasion of both its source material and its hard-working performers.

In this context Ferrell seems more than just comic relief. He's a reminder that the greatest, deepest laughter doesn't come at the expense of some other guy, but from the glints of self-recognition we get when the screen becomes our mirror.

Paradoxically, it is precisely because Mr. Devor refuses to acknowledge the murkiness that clings to every frame in his film, because he refuses to engage with the world beyond that of the zoophiles, that they seem like creatures from some never-ending night.

No matter how he shuffles the pieces, Mr. Benson can’t shake free of the old storytelling ideas, from his steamroller plot to his programmatic characters and narrative beats that, by their very existence, signal that everything will slide into place as expected.

Mr. Svankmajer’s provocations skew toward the intellectual and the shivery rather than the pop and the visceral, and at his best, he doesn’t just get under your skin, but also deep in your head, too. Here, unfortunately, he does neither, despite some marvelous stop-motion animated sequences involving a literal moveable feast of severed animal tongues, loose eyeballs and errant brains.

Ari Folman’s genre mash-up The Congress could use a freakier title, something either more appealing or appalling to go with the weird, sometimes wonderful visions flowing through it.

One of the better documentaries I'd seen in years -- it plays like a suspense thriller because that's exactly what it is.

That The Assassination of Richard Nixon is as well directed, acted and shot as it is makes Mr. Mueller's inability to invest his film with significance all the more disappointing.

Part of the kick of “Master Gardener” is that the writer-director Paul Schrader manages to pull off this improbable movie. It shouldn’t work and, even after seeing it twice, I don’t think that it entirely does, which only makes it more fascinating and strengthens its power.

An unnerving, surprisingly affecting documentary about our environmental calamity, is such essential viewing.

Mr. Soderbergh’s quick-and-dirty approach works here better as a conceptual gambit than as an entertainment. What keeps you watching even as the story becomes more off-putting are the actors and Mr. Soderbergh’s filmmaking.

In Spring Breakers [Mr. Korine] bores into a contested, deeply American topic — the pursuit of happiness taken to nihilistic extremes — but turns his exploration into such a gonzo, outrageously funny party that it takes a while to appreciate that this is more of a horror film than a comedy.

An inert, respectable bore.

At their best, they're closer to the Three Stooges; at their most banal, they're as original as the Red Hot Chili Peppers performing nude with socks on their penises -- It's a hoot.

Indirection can be a beautiful tool in comedy and so it is in “Hello, My Name Is Doris,” which uses this funny, outwardly ridiculous character to tell a simple story about a love that rarely speaks its name, including in movies: that of an older woman for a much younger man.

A quiet, steady burn filled with stretches of unsettlingly reverberant silence cleaved in half by a midpoint eruption of violence. Here there is before, and then there is after.

Breaking the Frame is a tantalizing teaser for a story that still needs to be told.

Works its charms slowly but steadily.

Like the first movie, the second is a sleek diversion with brittle and sharp laughs, truckloads of couture threads and lashings of light drama.

As the genre machinery chugs along, the bang-bang begins to overwhelm the movie, and the underlying critique gives way to a what-me-worry shrug.

Despite these attractions and in spite of Phoenix’s aura and his focus — and how he plays with the character, opening Beau up a wee bit with flickers of yearning and teasingly humanizing fissures — it is tough to care about a mouse who matters so much less to the filmmaker than the shiny mousetrap where he’s imprisoned you both.

The clubby, predictably self-amused comedy from Joel and Ethan Coen, has a tricky plot, visual style, er, to burn, but so little heart as to warrant a Jarvik 8.

The actors’ sincerity and effortlessly synced performances have always been this series’ greatest special effects, and watching them slip back into their old roles is a pleasure. The movie they’re in is still as beholden to the same old guns and poses as the earlier ones, the same dubious ideas about what constitutes coolness, the same box-office-friendly annihilating violence. But it’s still nice to dream of an escape with them.

Neither the screenplay nor the direction has the requisite depth to turn the banality of one unremarkable life into the stuff of Chekhov, much less of Mr. Payne.

Soul-baring and furious, the documentary One Child Nation takes a powerful, unflinching look at China’s present through its past.

Last Summer is complex, tricky, at times very uncomfortable and thoroughly engrossing.

Chalamet proves an ideal conduit in A Complete Unknown because the music and its maker have such power. As with any great cover band, it’s the original material that carries you through the night.

Easier to admire than love, Bubble is a fascinating exercise that seems calculated to repel most audiences, which probably suits Mr. Soderbergh just fine.

Sweet and slight and often charming coming-of-age tale.

Ms. Swinton demands to be seen even when her character is on a self-annihilating bender so real that you can almost smell the stink rising off her. So I sat in my seat, cursed the screen and was grateful to watch an actress at the height of her expressive power claw toward greatness.

The more valid question is how anyone who isn't 14 or under could possibly mistake a corporate bread-and-circus entertainment like this for something subversive. You want radical? Wait for the next Claire Denis film.

Like most commercial movies about feminist history, though, it also has a toothless vision of protest and empowerment that’s doomed to fail its subject because its makers don’t (can’t) risk making the audience uncomfortable.

Some filmmakers give us dreams and false worlds in which we can find refuge. For others, though, like the young Mexican filmmaker Carlos Reygadas, the movies aren't an escape from the world but a way more deeply into it.

A screenplay that not only has a way with genre cliché, but manages to score some deviously witty political points

Stuff blows up and then more stuff blows up because that’s what happens when diversions like this hit movie screens around this time of year: chaos reigns and then some guy cleans it up.

Ben Affleck has packed on the pounds, slipped on some tights and given this exasperating film far more than it gives in return.

Mr. MacDonald’s ability to notch up dread moment by moment — with a rustle of leaves, the snap of a twig — is all the more impressive given that it takes a while to warm up to the two souls he cuts loose in those woods.

Nagy tries to push the story beyond its cautious framing, but it’s tough going.

Alas, Mr. Fabian, directing his first feature-length fiction film, uses a club whenever a feather would do. He also mishandles the actors, in particular Mr. Neill and Ms. Okonedo, both of whom have been incomparably better elsewhere.

A would-be erotic thriller with no heat and zero chills, Deception has the kind of glassy, glossy sheen and risible story that mean to suggest "Basic Instinct" but instead invoke lesser laughers like "Jade" and "Sliver."

In A Burning Hot Summer (a pulpy title that sounds better in the original, "Un Été Brûlant), two men fall into friendship, and while little happens, everything is at stake.

Mr. Friedkin, a director with a talent for kinetic screen violence, never finds his groove with Killer Joe, which lurches from realism to corn-pone absurdism and exploitation-cinema surrealism.

Like everything else in this film, Mr. Cage's performance is watchable if never credible because his director never resolves the disconnect between this star's function (to entertain) and that of his character (to repel).

There’s no denying the real Heyerdahl’s bravery, but if this movie is to be believed, his voyage was largely bereft of tension and interesting conversation.

The Argentine writer and director Lucía Puenzo, shooting in wide screen, takes an effective, largely low-key approach to her fictionalization of Mengele’s time in South America.

As it turns out, Mr. Perry, while busily establishing his economic independence, has been finding his voice as a filmmaker. And here, working with fine performers like Ms. Elise, Anika Noni Rose, Phylicia Rashad and Kerry Washington, he sings the song the way he likes it - with force, feeling and tremendous sincerity.

It’s a film that wants to play as if it were ripped from today’s headlines, but has been shredded into near incoherence.

"Ocean's 23," oops, Ocean's Thirteen, is also a gas; it's lighter than air, prettier than life, a romp, a goof and an attentively oiled machine.

This is Garai’s feature directing debut, and it is as satisfying as it is promising, despite an unfortunate wind down. She has a great eye — and a real feel for the power of silence and visual textures — but she stumbles when she explains too much.

An overstuffed, intellectually underbaked portrait of a poor little rich girl.

To a degree and certainly by studio-sequel design, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice has a cozy familiarity. If the manic edginess of Keaton’s original performance suggested that his character had ingested way too much caffeine, though probably something a great deal stronger, he now seems more like a super-eccentric uncle — only, you know, dead.

The first 20 minutes of Wolfgang Petersen’s new action adventure, Air Force One, are so thrillingly choreographed (and so very, very loud), it’s all the more disappointing that the balance of the movie tends to move less like a Stealth bomber and more like a jalopy — jerking fitfully from plot hole to plot hole, only occasionally finding momentum.

Here, it's the creepily quiet stuff, the stuff that might be rushed over in a different movie -- Annie shivering alone in bed or being visited by her dead grandmother as she hangs out the wash -- that makes the film more than a generic distraction.

“Skull Island” has momentum, polish and behemoths that slither and thunder. The sets and creature designs are often beautifully filigreed, but the larger picture remains murky.

Director Tony Kaye may be reaching for opera, but screenwriter David McKenna has set his sights distinctly lower.

A likable, unmemorable, feature-length footnote to the admired television series.

Working from Richard Raymond Harry Herbeck’s script, Mr. Thelin plays with genre clichés without upending them, and the results are more creepy than scary.

Turning ordinary life into movie magic is one of the most difficult, least-heralded challenges for any filmmaker. What makes Freaky Friday a charmer isn't how far-out things get for this mother and daughter, but how sweet and distinctly un-freaky a kid, her mom and their love for each other can be.