Marjorie Baumgarten

The Good Dinosaur may not be as revolutionary as 1914’s “Gertie the Dinosaur,” but as Jurassic World already demonstrated this year, we never tire of these prehistoric critters.

Spotlight is a great newspaper movie, ranking up there with "All the President’s Men" and "Citizen Kane", and it’s certainly the best of its kind since "The Paper" in 1994, which also happened to star Michael Keaton.

Julia Roberts is the only central character whose appearance is drastically different in the two time periods, and it remains to be seen if the pretty woman with the million-dollar smile will be accepted as a character bearing a pinched face and dead eyes or whether it will seem like stunt casting despite a solid performance.

This movie won’t be for everyone; you’ll need to dive back into European arthouse cinema from the Sixties to find anything quite like it.

Might be more engaging were it not for the melodrama heavily larded into the screenplay (cobbled together by numerous writers).

Room is ultimately not something you’d readily call enjoyable, but it is a cathartic and provocative reminder that life is full of possibilities and outcomes.

Despite the vividness of the movement and the philosophical underpinnings of the cause and its tactical shifts, Suffragette unfolds in a sequentially predictable manner.

Solomon’s skills as a raconteur, the employees’ unabashed love for their work, and the constant stream of rock music playing in the background advance the film into something much more than a talking-heads documentary.

Writer/director James Vanderbilt...sticks to Mapes’ version of the truth, and the film serves as a valedictory for Mapes and Rather. Still, the movie never negates the truth’s other strands, while also showing what a human profession journalism is.

The German film Victoria gives off a lustrous intensity. Filmed all in one take in pre-dawn Berlin, the film is a technical marvel inset with small jewels.

The parade has now moved on and Freeheld seems more like a footnote than a groundswell.

The atrocities against children begin to acquire an unwelcome redundancy in their relentlessness and threaten to inure the viewer.

Much more a comedy than a heist film (think Ocean’s 11 rather than Casino or Rififi), Ladrones moves at a pretty entertaining pace and maintains a good sense of humor about itself.

Don’t come to this documentary expecting to learn more about the girl named Malala.

Still, you find yourself rooting for these women, even if their adventures aren’t always up to snuff.

Sicario is at its best when its borderlines are fluid and indistinct.

By now, we’ve grown accustomed to the signature touch of Zemeckis (Back to the Future, Forrest Gump), who is one of the best creative minds to see the innovative narrative potential lying dormant in technical cinematographic advances. This does not always provide the underpinnings for great stories, but bien sûr his movies are almost always quite something to see.

Maybe Stonewall will have more value to younger viewers for whom the riots and gay marginalization in general are distant history and might be vivified by watching the film. Yet even though the film’s heart seems genuine, its structure is buttressed by falsies.

Weitz (About a Boy) is a sharp observer, and Tomlin and the rest of the cast are so superlative that any anxiety is quickly quelled. You’re happy to follow this movie over the river and through the woods.

The Christian faith-based film genre takes a dramatic leap forward with 90 Minutes in Heaven, a well-appointed work based on Don Piper’s bestseller, that, for a change, doesn’t look and sound as though it was written, performed, and recorded in some church basement.

Refreshingly, this isn’t so much a found-footage movie – although it was backed by "Paranormal Activity" overseers Blumhouse Productions – as it is a completed faux documentary, complete with onscreen titles and a cripplingly hilarious end-credits sequence featuring Tyler being Tyler.

What A Walk in the Woods doesn’t have, however, is plot, character development, narrative conflict, and resolution – in other words, a destination.

With 7 Chinese Brothers, Austin-based filmmaker Bob Byington has made his most accessible film yet. The humor is less arch than in his previous comedies (among them Somebody up There Likes Me, Harmony and Me, and RSO [Registered Sex Offender]), and it’s plentiful and less diffuse than in his earlier works.

The Diary of a Teenage Girl is the rare movie that presents the subject of the loss of virginity from the female perspective. Not only is the film unique in this regard, but also in its frankness, humor, and artistry.

If nothing else, 6 Years is a testament to the cohesion of the Austin filmmaking community. You can barely round a corner without seeing a familiar face or production credit.

The details of what went down are fascinating, but the ultimate focus of Best of Enemies is television and this demonstration that it can be both eminently viewable and illuminating.

Movies about writers can be notorious slogs but, amazingly, The End of the Tour is not one of those films. In fact, it is so much better than any movie based primarily on conversations has any right to be.

Woody Allen generates films with such rapidity and inconsistency that you can never be certain if this season’s offering will be a hit or a miss. I’m happy to report that Irrational Man is a delight.