Marc Mohan

Despite the solid performances (Roberta Maxwell as Jude's mother is the exception), the one-note intensity wears you down, until a shocking coda wraps things up. It turns out that being trapped in a bathroom together is nothing compared to being trapped in a marriage, or a nearly two-hour movie, with a crazy person.

Despite familiar elements, including the classic family-versus-work conflict faced by almost every movie cop in history and the equally hoary discovery of corruption among Michel's colleagues, The Connection remains tense and believable.

A bit too familiar, and at times gentle to a fault.

A recent article in Film Comment magazine praised Saint Laurent for avoiding "banal psychologizing," but Bonello avoids any insight into his subject's state of mind, banal or not.

Some of the combat scenes work, including a kitchen-set hand-to-hand battle that's one of the movie's highlights, but more often they feel superfluous at best.

Despite convincing work from its cast, the movie remains oddly uninvolving.

Multiplex audiences can choose over the next few weeks between two starkly different views of the future. The remnants of humanity struggle for survival in the brutal world of "Mad Max: Fury Road," while Tomorrowland offers an optimistic retro-future paradise full of jetpacks and robots. Me, I'll take post-apocalyptic desert wasteland over soulless corporate utopia any day of the week.

Making a movie with a sad-sack protagonist this hard to root for is like laying track for the main line express to nowhere. Watching it is like taking a ride so bumpy, with scenery so boring, that you end up hoping for a derailment. Either way, buying a ticket for The D Train is something to regret.

As I sat slavishly (and needlessly) through the entire end credit roll, it was hard to muster anything more fervent than "Yeah, it was pretty good." Even a clean, white hate would have somehow been more satisfying.

The movie runs the risk of coming off as misogynistic tripe, especially considering it was written by two men and directed by another. Somehow it avoids that fate, rising to the level of a serviceable YA fantasy about the way mortality gives meaning to life.

To dismiss Ex Machina as just another robot movie would be like calling the Grand Canyon a hole in the ground. It's one of the most original, smart, thought-provoking science fiction movies of recent years.

White God holds some fascination. But as an indictment of the evil that men do, it's all bark and no bite.

With a deft touch that veers from wry, absurd humor to appalled outrage, the Italian journalist and satirist Pierfrancesco Diliberto makes a noteworthy film debut with The Mafia Kills Only in the Summer.

The clichés at its core make Metalhead something less than a full-bore, head-banging triumph. But it does perform the service of reminding us that even Judas Priest is capable of saving souls, and any film that features a cross-generational dance-off to Megadeth's "Symphony of Destruction" can't be all bad.

Today, Randi's stooped, gnomish gait and expansive white beard give him the appearance of a Tolkien wizard, but the man's passion for rationality and for exposing fraud and misbelief are stronger than ever. An Honest Liar is a fitting tribute to a figure whose stamina and wit only appear to be magical.

It's a sad commentary on the independent film business when a proven filmmaker like Hartley has to go hat in hand to the Internet for his budget, but at least he got to make the movie on his terms. It turns out to be the best thing he's done since "Henry Fool."

The octogenarian pianist Seymour Bernstein is the charming, inspirational subject of this appreciative, occasionally fawning documentary.

Merchants of Doubt is an important film. It's a riveting film, a necessary film, one that every American should see.

It's a shame that a movie centered on such a powerful and unique work of art is itself so obviously a corporate product.

Without a more coherent perspective, the movie remains a collection of genuinely scary scenes and not much more.

Home is like when someone gets you a birthday present by just clicking on an item from your Amazon wish list. It's well-made, suitable, and appreciated, but there wasn't really any thought put into it.

An unrelenting and important exposé of a system that, as depicted here, has no place in the modern world.

There's also something tired and way too familiar to the story of a white guy who acts as the savior of Africa while the only major black character in the movie stands ineptly on the sidelines.

In the quest to purge this Cinderella of anything sly or post-modern, though, the filmmakers have eliminated any wit or distinction, making this a pre-modern disappointment.

With a titanium body and a child's mind, Chappie is a fascinating figure, vividly rendered, enough so that you wish there was a better movie around him.

If Song of the Sea had had the promotional muscle of Disney or Dreamworks behind it, it may have won this year's Oscar for Best Animated Feature instead of merely being nominated. It certainly would have deserved it.

Once things get going, and especially when Moore takes center stage, "Maps" becomes more involving, sometimes queasily funny, and even, almost despite itself, a tiny bit moving. Hooray for Hollywood, indeed.

As an artist who can craft an ebullient postmodern pastiche but maintains links to an idiosyncratic heritage, Amirpour has instantly become one of the most exciting, globally relevant filmmakers working today. Her film is a testament both to her own creativity and the infinite elasticity of the vampire mythos.