Matt Zoller Seitz

In his mind, Cohn was still the hero of his own story. And we get the impression from this film that, right up to the bitter, agonized end, he was engaged in an internal battle to justify himself to himself, and to the world.

It works. It really works. It's goodhearted and clever, and it knows when to end.

It isn’t until deep into “Moonlight Sonata” that you start to realize how many patterns Brodsky has woven into the fabric of this tale.

This is the kind of film that explains itself too early and then has nowhere to go except into rote, B-picture thrills.

This documentary does a fine job of capturing what made her special.

Although Friedkin was notoriously grandiose at certain stages of his career, he comes across as mostly calm, self-deprecating and centered here, at least when he's concentrating on the nuts and bolts of moviemaking.

The goofier and more random the movie is, the better it is, and it certainly gets goofier and more random as it goes.

This is a Sad Rich People movie, no more so than a lot of American films dating back to the dawn of cinema, but it's no "The Leopard" or "The Royal Tenenbaums" or "The Great Gatsby" or you-name-it.

Full antihero equality will only be achieved when women are permitted to carry a crime drama by being so charismatic that viewers would consider following them into hell rather than give up the buzz they get from watching them be bad.

The acting and filmmaking are so much more imaginative than the script (which also falls into the rookie trap of mistaking a lack of humor for seriousness) that in the end, this feels like a dry run for something deeper and more daring.

The worst thing you can say about this movie, and maybe the highest compliment you can pay to it, is to say that it would be even more dazzling if it told a different story with different animals but with the same technology, and in the same style — and perhaps without songs, because you don't necessarily need them when you have images that sing.

The movie is sleek, smart, and reasonably thorough, and it offers the enticement of never-before-seen home movies provided by Armstrong's family. But it can't really stand out from the flood of material released to cash in on the 50th anniversary of the moon landing, because it arrives on the heels of two daring ones, Damien Chazelle's "First Man" and Todd Douglas Miller's "Apollo 11."

It's rare that you see an American film that is essentially comedic placing so much faith in the the landscape of the human face and the sound of the human voice. If the entire film were this focused and minimalist, it might have been a knockout.

Unfortunately, Three Peaks is so thinly conceived and executed that, for the most part, it fails to justify its existence as a stand-alone feature.

This franchise has demonstrated an impressive ability to beat the odds and reinvent itself, over a span of time long enough for two generations to grow up in. It's a toy store of ideas, with new wonders in every aisle.

The Dead Don't Die is far from Jarmusch's best, but there's something to be said for its zonked-out acceptance of extinction.

Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story is one of the most frustrating Martin Scorsese films as well as one of the most out-of-character.

Funan is structured as a series of carefully choreographed set pieces in which things go from bad to worse to unimaginably awful.

Frustrating but engrossing, and impossible to critique in-depth without spoilers because it's driven by regular plot twists, I Am Mother adds another memorable creation to an already packed gallery of intelligent science fiction robots that are as complex as most humans.

This is an impressive piece of work that deploys low-budget filmmaking techniques with cleverness.

Its imperfections are compensated by magnificence.

It’s a dancing elephant of a movie. It has a few decent moves, but you’d never call it light on its feet.

The tone starts out bleak and steadily darkens. The movie is sometimes fascinating, though—particular in the early stretches, before the dominos of catastrophe start to fall, and the little details of the characters' relationship and their world are replaced by a constant fear of getting arrested or killed.

All in all, this is a very likable, if sometimes a bit too polished and vague.

A love letter from one iconoclastic Italian Catholic artist to another, Abel Ferrara's Pasolini stays far from the cliches of the Hollywood biopic, embracing a fragmented, intense, impressionistic approach.

Once the action kicks in, though, Shadow is on rails. Zhang, co-screenwriter Li Wei, cinematographer Zhao Xiaoding, production designer Horace Ma, and costumer Chen Minzheng work in seemingly perfect harmony to create a visual scheme that the director has said is based on the brush techniques of Chinese painting and calligraphy.

It's as if the group had studied the "Rabbit season! Duck season!" exchange from the Bugs Bunny-Daffy Duck classic "Rabbit Seasoning," and figured out how to turn the punchline into a political movement.

The result is a narratively relaxed yet intensely tactile experience.

With its brutal violence, explicit sex, and up-close views of blood, sweat, urine, and semen, it is proudly an R-rated film, verging on NC-17—though the X-rating, which was discontinued by the MPAA almost 30 years ago, might feel more appropriate.

The evident smallness of the production belies its power to disturb. It's like one of those knives that are small enough to be hidden in a coat sleeve or the lip of a boot but that can still cut a man's throat.

It's a study in deception, and as told by filmmaker Alex Gibney ("Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room"), it's a disturbing and sad one.

The Eyes of Orson Welles doesn't rank with the best Welles scholarship, mainly because it's too overreaching and disorganized, and commits itself to central creative decisions that increasingly come to seem misguided.

So much of the needlessly complicated and rules-driven action inside the park plays like wasted motion, visually as well as narratively speaking.

From the looks of it, Huppert had a grand time playing the title character in Greta, a film that could have been released in the era of MTV veejays and VCRs.

It's magnificent and unique, an adrenaline shot of wonder and skill.

It's worth seeking out no matter how much trouble you have to go to, because it's special: assured but modest, full of surprises. It doesn't go the way you expect it to, and yet in retrospect each move seems inevitable, like the incremental fulfillment of a prophecy.

At its best, it plays like a wry critique of this unexpectedly lucrative period of Neeson's career, and a borderline-spoof of the genre as a whole.

Then comes another scene nonsensical scene, and another, and another, each seemingly disconnected from the scene that preceded it. Plot, logic, continuity, become even more meaningless than they were already, which is saying something. It's as if the movie itself has lost its mind. And it was at that point, dear reader, that the reviewer fell in love with the movie.

Caveats aside, this is, in my estimation, a typically stimulating but opaque and deliberately frustrating late-period Godard film, good but not great, distinguished primarily by the fact that it's the first Godard film to use no actors at all.

Close is aces when it's watching its star move through the world, silently checking everyone and everything out, hiding her mental math until it's time to kill some dudes. The action is frenzied but comprehensible, brutal but not wantonly sadistic.

Aquaman is as concerned with scientific accuracy as “SpongeBob Squarepants.” And that’s one of many reasons why I like it.

The whole movie feels oddly stranded and dramatically inert, despite the obvious passion that went into making it.

This is an ambitious and enlightening documentary, filled with wisdom and asking great questions, some of which may never have a satisfying answer.

You could build a suspension bridge over the gap between what Robin Hood could have been and what it is. Its hero is credible as a man who wants to rob from the rich and give to the poor, but the storytelling is so impoverished that the message can't stick.

The devil figure is Federico (Riccardo Scamarcio, last seen in "John Wick: Chapter Two"). He's eloquent, charming, faintly sinister man who, as Bryan points out, seems to magically appear in their lives at moments of crisis.

The women are all compelling though never too-polished storytellers. Whether they succumb to the horror of what they're describing and start to cry or remain stoic throughout becomes part of the experience of hearing the tale.

Wang's movie is empathetic enough not to pass negative judgment on the characters as they muddle through their experience.

Part rap musical, part social satire, with elements of Westerns and kung fu pictures, Bodied is one of the funniest, freest movies of the year.

It feels immediate and rings true, thanks to the performances of its lead actors, and the storytelling of director Yen Tan and his co-writer, co-editor. and cinematographer, the single-named Hutch.

A Bread Factory is an idealistic statement about the importance of art in everyday life. It's about how a scene from a play or a line from a poem can cast a new light on your problems or dreams, maybe put a whole new frame around your life, your community, and the culture and nation that helped shape you.

The most surprising and challenging thing about Part Two is how it takes one of the central ideas from Part One—art's ability help us understand and express ourselves in everyday life—and externalizes it, so that creativity that might otherwise have been confined to the stages of the arts centers erupts into the world outside.

Galveston is the film equivalent of a familiar, not too special song that's been brilliantly re-arranged and performed.

The objective seems to be to make you feel, by the end, as if you've walked a million miles in Neil Armstrong's boots. On that score, judged solely as a spectacle, First Man has to be considered a success — especially if you see it in IMAX format.

The film's writer-director, Tamara Jenkins is a brilliant chronicler of upper-middle class white people and their foibles, and her eye for detail is anthropologically exact, empathetic but never begging for sympathy.

Nothing about it makes a lot of sense, but then, nothing about classic old comedies starring people like W.C. Fields or Laurel and Hardy made much sense, because they about oddballs getting into trouble and then trying to get out of it.

Bisbee '17 is also about the artifice of storytelling and the alchemy of acting, and that magic moment when we decide to forget that we're seeing performers pretending to be long-dead people.

Its easygoing intimacy is what puts it over the top.

A solid hangout movie as well as a band-of-buddies film — genres that tend to revolve around young men. It's also a movie that deliberately blurs the line between documentary and fiction: the main characters are all real New York skaters who are playing characters who are very close to themselves in real life.

The movie never entirely convinces us that its heroine has the capacity to kill, although her pain and loss are conveyed with skill by Fishback.

Unfortunately, the film never finds a way into Berg's personality that explores his many facets without reducing him to a blank-slate character at the center of a traditionally-made period thriller.

It's satisfying, for the most part—a solid romantic comedy with sharp dialogue, amusing characters, a soundtrack of well-worn feel-good hits, and a few surprises up its sleeve. Its only major flaw is an inability to imagine the bosses as richly as the leads.

Creepy beyond belief, Hereditary is one of those movies you shouldn't describe in detail, because if you do, it will not only ruin surprises but make the listener wonder if you saw the film or dreamed it.

As unnecessary prequels go, Solo: A Star Wars Story isn't bad. It's not great, either, though—and despite spirited performances, knockabout humor, and a few surprising or rousing bits, there's something a bit too programmed about the whole thing.

Since Deadpool 2 shows no sign of wanting to rewrite a whole genre with its audacity, we might as well concede that it does the job it apparently wants to do with professionalism and flair, and that the faster we end this piece, the faster you can go on social media and complain about it.

So preoccupied with giving its star's wish fulfillment fantasies that it forgets to make sure all the other major characters seem like characters, rather than underdeveloped notions.

The comedy thriller The Con is On is a Who's Who of 1990s indie film character actors, but the movie ends up delivering a lot of cliches from that brief but extremely specific era of filmmaking, and not necessarily the ones you might want.

This movie shouldn't just engage and amuse and occasionally move us; it should shock and scar us. It should kill Ned Stark and Optimus Prime and Bambi's mommy, then look us in the eye after each fresh wound and say, "Sorry, love. These things happen."

This all sounds like it could make for a fascinating movie. But The Devil and Father Amorth feels at once bloated and slight, like a DVD supplement puffed up to feature length (an hour and eight minutes, just long enough to be exhibited in theaters as a stand-alone title).

This is not a particularly fascinating movie, unfortunately, despite being well-done in most of the superficial ways.

If you have a good idea, a strong cast, a smart script, and directorial chops, you don't need a lot of money to make a compelling movie. The Endless is proof.

The cast is filled with actors doing everything they can to make their characters as memorable as possible even when the script (credited to four people) isn't lending them the support they deserve.

The cast's heroic exertions fail to save Flower from its own worst tendencies.

Much better and more original than anyone could have expected.

It's less concerned with covering the totality of his life than evoking his life force, which is good-humored, earthy and inspiring.

There's a lot here that feels insufficiently shaped or fitfully realized, but at the same time, there's a lot to like. It's the Platonic ideal of a mixed bag. The newness of the new parts counterbalances the ineffectiveness of the stuff that seemingly every fantasy blockbuster does, and that this one doesn't do well.

The new Death Wish is a vigilante film that's also about vigilante film cliches, when it remembers to think about such things, which is only occasionally. Most of its attempts to subvert or freshen up familiar elements aren't well developed, and they're certainly never strong enough to counter the bloodlust and gun worship that's invariably going to power this kind of project.

This is one of the best surprises of a still-young movie year: a comedy that takes nothing seriously except fun.

What makes Early Man enjoyable is the way Park and his writers detail the heroes' good-natured oafishness and the bad guys' snooty arrogance.

Golden Exits made me want to get up and go do something sensible and productive, so as to not be like the characters in the film.

To call Clint Eastwood's The 15:17 to Paris a mixed bag would be generous. It packs all the wild action you came to see into a 20-minute stretch near the end, and elsewhere gives us something like a platonic buddy version of Richard Linklater's "Before" trilogy.

The Cloverfield Paradox is a bit of a scam job, promising to reconcile entries in a series that have little in common save for a shared genre. It fizzles so badly at the end that you might legitimately wonder if it ever had anything to do with the other two films in the first place, or if it was produced independently of the series and retroactively added.

Despite a few good scenes and ideas, and a final ten minutes that will be affecting for anyone who lived through the aftermath of the attacks on New York, the end product often feels like a standard-issue high concept romantic comedy with scaffolding of 9/11 solemnity built around it.

As an evocation of on-the-ground political reality, The Final Year is a a solid and often entertaining work in much the same wheelhouse as the durable political documentary "The War Room."

Frustratingly not-quite-there from start to finish.

The film is worth seeing because, regardless of things that I wish had been done better or differently, it feels like the beginning of a major filmmaking career, and because Pettyfer and Freedson-Jackson are so strong.

A long-winded but engrossing kidnap thriller.

This is a likable, funny diversion, and sometimes more than that.

Writer/director Rian Johnson’s Star Wars: The Last Jedi is a sprawling, incident- and character-packed extravaganza that picks up at the end of “Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens” and guides the series into unfamiliar territory. It’s everything a fan could want from a “Star Wars” film and then some.

This is all fascinating stuff. But you pretty quickly get the sense that Buirski either doesn't find it interesting enough to let it stand on its own or else is afraid audiences will rebel against too many bare-bones elements.

I had some minor quibbles about Coco while I was watching it, but I can’t remember what they were. This film is a classic.

The film’s clever editing (credited to Klinger and Geraldine Mangenot) jumps back and forth through time in intriguing, sometimes intoxicating ways, and even when the drama flags there’s always a stunning image to stare at.

If the film is a potluck stew of half-cooked notions, it's at least a tasty one.

No Stone Unturned at times veers close to a rant. It's clear that Gibney is going for something along the lines of Errol Morris' "The Thin Blue Line," which also used stylized re-creations, but the pieces don't fit together as neatly here.

This is a close-but-no-cigar movie, but so enjoyable for the most part, and so modest in its aims, that its disappointments aren’t devastating. I’d watch the first 90 minutes again anytime.

Thank You For Your Service, an involving and often wrenching drama about Iraq War veterans adapting to civilian life, is a film that teaches you how to watch it.

One of Us is so strong as-is that its more harrowing sections — particularly Ari's account of his childhood suffering and the details of Rachel's fight for freedom — are so already hard to watch that you might want to turn away.

It pays attention to issues of racial, religious and gender discrimination without wavering from its main objective: giving us an entertaining film about a couple of guys who are in way over their heads.

The movie would fit nicely in a film festival comprised of works with a similar theme, including "Legends of the Fall" and "The Revenant" and older wilderness dramas like "Jeremiah Johnson" and "Bend of the River."