Mark Feeney

This is not the most promising dramatic material — legal and actuarial material, yes, dramatic, no. Yet Worth manages to combine process and emotion in a way that works.

Much of the film is pure romantic comedy and a good one. Yet the filmmakers want it to be more.

Much as there is right with Wonder, there’s just as much that isn’t. Emotionally, the movie rarely feels false.

The proof that the “Trip” formula hasn’t become formulaic? How often, and hard, these two can make an audience laugh.

Is Borgman a fable? A fairy tale? A parable? An allegory? A burlesque of Western bourgeois life in the 21st century? One thing Dutch writer-director Alex van Warmerdam’s film isn’t is a black comedy, even if that’s what it’s meant to be. The movie’s black, all right, but a comedy has to be funny.

To Dust has several things to recommend it. It’s decidedly different, and that is no small accomplishment in this day and age. Snyder’s direction has real assurance, though not enough to overcome the films self-conscious — maybe self-congratulatory — weirdness.

It's a morality play, full of hopeless tosh. Still, Hitchcock manages to include a hallucination sequence and a highly suggestive spurt from a soda siphon. [12 Jan 2020]

The best thing about the movie is its look. The great Dick Pope, Leigh’s go-to cinematographer, returns to the 19th century he so masterfully re-created in “Mr. Turner,” earning an Oscar nomination. The colors in Peterloo are rich but not at all sumptuous. They look lived in. The moviemaking line between beauty that’s absorbing and beauty that’s distracting is thread-thin. Pope, who also served as chief camera operator, makes sure that the thread never breaks.

Well, fair's fair. George W. Bush got Michael Moore and "Fahrenheit 9/11." Now Barack Obama gets Dinesh D'Souza and 2016: Obama's America. Both films are wildly partisan attack documentaries made by wildly partisan and generally annoying polemicists (D'Souza is more personable, actually, than Moore).

It’s never a good sign when the most dramatic scene in a movie owes its power to C-SPAN footage. That’s the case with The Report.

A very middling movie, it does have a nifty premise.

Open-endedness in a narrative can be a good and challenging thing; or it can be a sign of having gotten in too deep and not being able to figure out how to get out. “Get Out” knew how to get out. “Master” doesn’t.

Premium Rush has a lot of energy - too much, it's kind of exhausting.

The heart of the movie is the discussions among the divers and, even more, the scenes in the caves. Simply as a technical achievement, the underground and underwater filming is highly impressive.

You feel embarrassed for Streep and Jones (Streep especially) because of the situations, often sexual, they're put in. They're definitely not mailing in their performances.

Notwithstanding its irresistible rhinestone array of mid-’60s popular culture, Last Night in Soho is an exercise in nostalgia only in passing. What it is is a horror movie, released just in time for Halloween.

The problem is that the heart of the movie is McGowan. He's just not a very compelling figure. He's a bit doughy and inert.

Stars at Noon trades too much on a tradition of older, maybe not better but certainly more urgent movies. Somewhere deep, deep in its heart is the memory of Jane Greer and Robert Mitchum.

Where the Crawdads Sing, based on Delia Owens’s best-selling novel, is long on setting and atmosphere. It’s short on most everything else. Droopy in pace, it’s increasingly drippy in feeling.

A fine cast — Colin Firth, Matthew Macfadyen, Kelly Macdonald, Penelope Wilton — do their stiff-upper-lip best. It’s not good enough.

Assured and well made (Dominic Cooke directed), The Courier offers bits of tradecraft — Penkovsky photographing documents with a miniature camera, a special tie clip used as identity-establishing bona fide — and a high-stakes extraction plan gets put in motion. But it’s less about what gets done than the persons doing it.

Alice Creed isn't as good as Tarantino's directorial debut, or another movie it calls to mind, "A Simple Plan.'' But the genetic resemblance to those two films indicates how good much of this extremely assured picture is.

Once the comedy does kick in, around the 100-minute mark, it does so quite nastily. The movie never quite recovers.

That we don’t hear more from Ruscha is one of the documentary’s flaws. Hockney, the subject, is like a great painting. Hockney, the documentary, is a pretty plain frame.

The result is like an issue of National Geographic gone mad.

Crump has directed Troublemakers with assurance and energy. Perhaps too much so.

The Good Nurse is at its best as a medical police procedural. It helps that Noah Emmerich and Nnamdi Asomugha, playing the cops, give solid, understated performances.

For all that “Eddington” variously concerns itself with politics and conspiracy theories and violence and the Western landscape, what it’s really about is social media.