Matt Zoller Seitz

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.

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

It's as enthusiastic yet inscrutable as Wonka himself, played with an elegantly withholding quality by Chalamet, who in moments of quiet contemplation and madcap inspiration could be Gene Wilder's long-lost grandchild.

While the film works as a primer for viewers who are curious about Lear but don’t know the details of his life and work, it’s more interesting as a movie about age and memory.

Luca Guadagnino directs Challengers, a time-shifting drama about a love triangle between tennis pros, as if he’s a top-seeded player so ruthlessly focused on winning Wimbledon that he’d run over his grandmother if she got between him and the stadium. Every shot is a serve, every montage a volley.

The film depicts a subtle, complicated, mostly internal process so thoughtfully — blending humility and go-for-broke nerve — that its flaws ultimately seemed minor to me.

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 Odyssey is one of my favorite stories of all time, and I was looking forward to "The Return," but it never rises above the level of an honorable but misguided good try.

It's a portrait of a hard-drinking, charismatic, obnoxious self-styled rebel who was his own worst enemy but whose brilliance and tenacity allowed him to thrive in an industry that wouldn't ordinarily have any use for someone like him.

The characters are constructs who are so aware of themselves as constructs (and the plot, too) that there's really no reason why we should feel for them, but we do, thanks to the lead performances, the direction, and the kidding/not kidding vibe of the entire production.

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.

This is an unusually intelligent and purposeful movie that doesn't say much, but is full of feeling.

Make no mistake: the planes are the stars of this production, and as hard as the filmmakers try to reassure us that there are human stories going on as well, the precision flying and all the training and practice that allow it to exist are what everyone paid to see, and the movie never forgets it.

The main appeal here is the chance to spend time in the company of superb actors who all wear their characters as comfortably as an old silk robe.

This movie is a classic of silliness—no ifs, ands, or butts.

Rogue One is a letdown in other areas, and there are creative decisions so ill-conceived they take you out of the story. But somehow these aren't enough to sink the movie, which manages to succeed as both super-nerdy fan service and the first entry since the 1977 original that will satisfy people who have never seen a "Star Wars" film.

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

Paddington in Peru is pleasurable mainly for its just-hanging-out-with-friends vibe, which it wears with quiet grace.

The movie adaptation is typically described in articles and on streaming platforms as an "erotic thriller" or simply "a thriller." But as is so often the case with Denis' films, that's a misleading way to characterize, or even think about, what's actually onscreen, which is more of a vibe than a story, and all the more fascinating because of that choice.

A jumbled, fitfully amusing, occasionally fascinating effort, but one that shows promise even when it's stumbling over its ambition and falling prey to some of the same stereotypes about "red" and "blue" (or reactionary and progressive) America that it keeps intimating that Americans need to get beyond.

This is a movie that doesn't merely tell a gripping, important story, but reminds us that the storyteller and the storytelling matter just as much.

The film that Memphis most reminds me of is Bruce Weber's "Let's Get Lost," a meandering, ostentatiously gorgeous black-and-white documentary about Chet Baker.

This is one of Scott’s best-directed movies and one of his most entertaining overall, partly because he’s working in a genre, the science fiction spectacle, that he does better than anyone since Stanley Kubrick, but also because he seems to be approaching it almost entirely in terms of visceral impact and emotion—as symphony of fire and blood, poetry and schlock.

True to the spirit of the original film, "Monsters Inc.", and matches its tone. But it never seems content to turn over old ground.

Good Night Oppy may be especially resonant for younger viewers who are interested in science but might not yet realize that there's more to it than crunching numbers and drawing charts.

The homages and borrowings—not just from Scorsese’s oeuvre but other widely-seen films, including a brazen lift from “Boogie Nights”—constrict the movie and prevent it from breathing on its own.

As its subtly confident title suggests, it carries itself as if nobody had ever made a Transformers movie before. It’s so earnest, bringing notes of freshness and innocence to a prequel that, by all rights, shouldn’t have had any.

The goofy and charming Klaus probably plays better if you don't know going in that it's a Santa Claus origin story.

It’s a disturbing, sometimes beautiful film that, by the end, is disquieting for all the wrong reasons.

If I were nine years old, I would see the monsters-versus-robots adventure Pacific Rim 50 times. Because I'm in my forties and have two kids and two jobs, I'll have to be content with seeing it a couple more times in theaters and re-watching it on video.

This is a solid, intelligent, occasionally inspired comic book movie that delivers most of what a popular audience demands from the genre (including interstellar voyages and massively scaled action sequences) plus a little bit more.

It's fragmented by nature—a work of impressionistic moments in which intellectual and philosophical ideas are considered, and powerful emotions summoned and then allowed to dissipate.

A frustrating missed opportunity, The Lovers and the Despot takes a fascinating story about filmmaking, politics, kidnapping and propaganda and gives us almost no insight into the work of its two main characters, a director and his actress wife.

As written by Sean Baker and Chris Bergoch and directed by Baker, it's assured and immensely likable, and truly independent in story and style.

I don't think Kimberly Levin's debut feature Runoff entirely works as a story or a statement. But as an experience, it's amazing — so unlike most other recent American independent films in its style and mood.

The film's hazing scenes evoke the boot camp sequences in "Full Metal Jacket" but without the merciless coldness, because the film's hero, Brad (newcomer Ben Schnetzer, in a career-making star turn) desperately wants to belong to the organization.

It's sensitive, subtle, and restrained, and asks more of the audience than it's typically willing to give.

The Daniels have made a film that's at once a labor of love and a work of sheer arrogant nerve, one that is as likely to be described as a classic, an ambitious misfire, and one of the worst films ever made by any three people who see it together. How many movies can you say that about?

Holy Hell should have dug a lot deeper and told its story with a lot more finesse. What happened? Maybe, after all these years, Allen was still too close to his subject?

Coming Home in the Dark settles into the memory as a mesmerizing missed opportunity at worst, a promise of future classics at best.

The problem is, for all its surface intelligence, "Mockingjay, Part 1" has little depth, and that sometimes makes it much more frustrating than a more knowingly shallow and silly movie might have been.

It feels a wee bit padded even at a brisk 96 minutes (it’s tough to do “deadpan” in a comedy and not have it come off as merely slow) and has trouble staying on the right side of too-cutesy. But it sustains an innocent storybook tone throughout, thanks mainly to strong performances from its lead actors, Elijah Wood and Nell Fisher, and lush images of the New Zealand countryside.

Stanfield is a true movie star, radiating decency even as the character's shell hardens.

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.

Considering that the entire movie is about pushing boundaries — for art, profit or both — it’s disappointing that director Danny Wolf tells the story in such a tediously prosaic way — though this, too, might be a crafty strategic move, as the many copyright owners being shrugged at here might have gotten a lot angrier had “Skin” been an exciting, innovative work, as opposed to a merely informative one.

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

As a portrait of a great artist and activist, Finding Fela is worth a look, but it's Gibney's weakest work as a filmmaker.

While it offers some gripping and/or darkly beautiful images, it's ultimately more about ideas than spectacle, proving (like every previous film by this team) that you don't need a gigantic amount of money to create an engrossing work of science fiction and/or fantasy.

The twenty-something drama Waiting for the Light to Change is an impressive debut from director-cowriter Linh Tran. Set in a Michigan lake house during winter, it's a minimalist youth drama with lakefront atmosphere, a controlled, at times minimalist directorial style, and a cast that approaches the material with disarming naturalism.

An intelligent but not terribly effective drama. And its discussion of military ethics, especially with regard to what it means to be able to kill people without physical consequences, is promising, but it does not go far enough.

Unfortunately this film has none of their urgency or sense of control; for long stretches it just doesn't seem to have any idea what, exactly, it wants to say, or be.

Don't see this movie if you have a weak stomach, or if you don't like movies that mix horror-movie violence and cornball humor. Don't see if it you're expecting production values beyond a couple of vehicles, a farmhouse and about twelve buckets of gore. Don't see this movie if your definition of a great or classic film is one that bowls you over with the importance of its subject or the awesome scope of its vision. Do see if it you want to be be reminded that it's possible to make a relaxed, engrossing, funny, sometimes scary movie on almost no money.

Burning Sands, Gerald McMurray's feature filmmaking debut, is one of the fresher entries, thanks mainly to its setting: a historically black fraternity on a historically black campus like Howard, the university where the co-writer and director got his degree.

This ensemble drama about troubled upper-middle class strivers is slick, confident, and rather empty, and structurally more self-defeating than clever.

It doesn't go quite far enough into melodrama to fuse all of its different pieces together into a satisfying whole but it's an engrossing film all the same: intelligent, sincere and unabashedly goodhearted.

This is not the kind of film you put on during a holiday when you want something that the extended family can relax and enjoy. This is bitter, sharp stuff, verging on the Paul Schrader film Affliction but without the murder plot.

The movie is a lot of fun and masters a pleasingly detached yet sardonic tone early on, but unfortunately, it doesn’t have a lot more to offer after that, aside from a growing human menagerie of admittedly lively characters and a philosophical through line that’s pretty worn out—something like, “Humans are the real monsters.”

Just bloody eye and ear candy.

For all its ferocious focus, this is a relatively quiet movie that embraces its smallness.

Free Fire is neither the best nor the worst of the Tarantino wannabes; at its worst, it's tediously unoriginal, and at its best, it's funny and reasonably involving.

Zero Charisma is a movie about emotionally inert people who labor mightily to change their lives in small ways, and whose efforts at self-improvement are thwarted by emotional feedback loops that cause them to make the same mistakes over and over. If it were possible to roll your way out of real world crises, these guys would do just fine, but there are no saving throws in life.

In the Earth is a film made for midnight showings. It's ominous, brutal, pretentious, and often stirring. Even though some sections feel rushed and it falls apart at the end, every part of it is memorable.

A Haunting in Venice is the best of Kenneth Branagh's Hercule Poirot movies. It's also one of his best, period, thanks to the way Branagh and screenwriter Michael Green respectfully adapt the source material (Agatha Christie's Hallowe'en Party) while at the same time treating it as a chance to make a relentlessly clever and visually dense "old" movie that uses the latest technology.

François Ozon's "Peter von Kant" is an odd, chilly film, even by this director's standards.

There's nothing fun about panning a feature by a first-time director, especially when it seems to come from a place of good intentions, but Music, a musical fantasy drama about an autistic teen, is bad. Mystifyingly bad. Verging on "What were they thinking?" bad.

Part of the film's specialness lies in the fact that there seems to be little rhyme or reason to the choices it makes, or when it decides to make them.

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.

Iron Man 3 builds on the first film's political cynicism by suggesting that politicians and arms dealers dream up foreign policy crises to consolidate power and make money, but it doesn't develop this notion in detail, because if it did, the audience would tune out.

The sheer filmmaking craft on display here shames almost any comparably budgeted superhero picture you can name.

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.

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.

For the most part, Stay Awake stays low-key and believable, particularly when the actors are moving through real-world locations while living their lives.

When a movie loves its characters and story as much as this one, and dedicates every aspect of filmmaking and performance to doing them justice, and consistently puts virtuosity in service of meaning, the result conjures a feeling that's close to what you experience when someone you adore has a great and richly deserved success, and you're privileged to be able to witness it and cheer them on.

Control Freak is a film so raw, messy, and sincere that it seems to have been torn from the bodies of the people who made it.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is a return to form for director Tim Burton only in the sense that, like Burton early in his career, it’s not interested in form except at the immediate level of the image and the scene. It’s an overstuffed toy bag of a movie: every minute or two, the director digs into the bag and produces a new toy.

Black Sea looks so gorgeous and moves with such muscular grace that you might forget, or never imagine, that it's a relatively small action movie.

The monsters are brilliantly designed and skillfully animated (except for a few shots where Kong looks a tad cartoony), and the army of visual and sound effects artists convince you that that these CGI titans live and breathe and weigh hundreds of tons.

I can't imagine anyone who liked the show not enjoying this film, even though the first half is stronger than the second, which spirals into a frenzy of double- and triple-crossing that's less engaging than watching the characters reconnect, awkwardly but with feeling.

A mediocre film that's unaware of the poor choices it's making is much harder to watch than a bad film that relishes its stupidity and poor taste. At least the second kind of film can be fun.

The problem, though, is that we never get enough sense of Paz's interior life to judge this movie as anything other than a comeback story about a nice guy who got knocked out by the cosmos and hauled himself up.

Sly is a frustratingly unrealized work, always hovering on the edge of real insight but rarely jumping into it.

It's all so rich—and so richly executed by Ellis, a total filmmaker—that one wishes it added up to more than a series of smart variations on a certain type of film.

It creates a world with its own rules and tells a story in its own visual language. It seems it will come to a very obvious conclusion, but then it pivots and introduces elements that create a new frame for the movie. Fifteen minutes later, it does this again, and then again.

Lamb is empathetic and untrustworthy, haunting but often unpersuasive. In the end it's hard to say what the film's point is. But it lingers in the mind.

Like many films by Besson — "The Professional," "The Fifth Element," "The Messenger" and other high-octane shoot-'em-ups — Lucy starts out riveting but becomes less engaging as it goes along.

It’s patchy and digressive, and the overreliance on syrupy music becomes off-putting towards the end. But fans of the actor will probably enjoy it, because it’s a chance to appreciate the life and art of a remarkable talent whose period of superstardom was actually much briefer than we might have realized.

It’s a tour-de-force of voluptuously bloody slapstick that knows that we know how these movies work.

The film's solid grounding in friendship and comic teamwork carries the day. Unpregnant becomes more affecting as it goes along thanks to the sincere, committed, and mostly unaffected lead performances by Richardson and Ferreira.

There's a good movie in Romano the feature filmmaker, but this isn't it.

Lacks the original's momentum. It only sometimes builds to the peaks of lunacy that you want and need from this sort of picture. It goes here, it goes there, it does this, it does that.

Martin Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street is abashed and shameless, exciting and exhausting, disgusting and illuminating; it's one of the most entertaining films ever made about loathsome men.

Luckily, the performances and characterizations add heft, and the very Russian vibe of soulful heaviness sets it apart from its American cousins.

This is a compelling story about persistent problems that affect the majority of Americans, even though you don't hear about them very often in mainstream media. The blunt title says it all.

The entire thing has a whiff of missed opportunity, and sometimes you might wonder if Lowery and his co-writer Toby Halbrooks wanted to dive deeper than they knew Disney's copyright-tending, merchandise-selling executives would have allowed.

The voice-over explains things that we could have understood from looking at the images. It rarely passes up the opportunity to drop in a cliche.

Does the movie work? Intermittently, sometimes brilliantly.

What a singularly weird, gross tale this turned out to be.

The problem is that the relatively brief running time (less than two hours) works at cross-purposes with the movie's laid back characterizations and populated cast.