Matt Zoller Seitz

The entire thing has the tone of an elegy or memorial throughout, including the hero's voiceover, which has a resigned inevitability. It is also, to its credit, a movie that plays fair with the viewer, establishing very early that it's going to honor its subject matter by being complicated, because almost nobody's life can be interpreted just one way.

It’s simultaneously a parody of American middle-class notions of contentment yet at the same time a disarmingly sweet and sincere endorsement of it.

It's filled with big sets, big stunts, and what ought to be big moments, but few of them land.

If you loved the 2003 “Freaky Friday,” you’ll probably enjoy “Freakier Friday,” for the simple reason that it’s more or less the same movie, but with new characters added to the existing cast, and more complicated plot mechanics. Way more complicated. This is “Freaky Friday” to the fourth power.

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

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.

Lean, sincere, impassioned filmmaking, yet it fails to leave as much of an impression as it clearly wants to.

Trocker is deft at creating situations that go right up to the edge of blatant symbolism or metaphor, bit resist the urge to pitch themselves over the brink and become blatant and simplistic.

The most surprising thing about director/writer/star Edward Norton’s Motherless Brooklyn is how drastically it departs from its source.

If you treat Tomorrowland mainly as an immense cinematic theme park that unveils a new "ride" every few minutes—just as Bird's last feature, "Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol" was mainly a series of action scenes—its weaker aspects won't be deal-breakers.

Bell's performance is the best reason to see Raze.

I've seen this film twice and I'm just not convinced it's all that interested in the subjects it claims to be interested in. And that's a deal-breaker of a problem.

It's a mess, but a glorious one, and it's so clearly the expression of one artist's vision, seemingly immune to studio notes, that when you find yourself wondering "Who on earth could this possibly be for?" you realize that it's a compliment. As an entertainment, Rules Don't Apply deserves an extra half-star for audacity.

Chomet’s gift for deftly caricatured faces, expressive movement, and clever compositions hasn’t deserted him, and there are many flat-out beautiful bits scattered throughout, but this is altogether a work that’s best appreciated with the sound off, while blasting a playlist of Django Reinhardt’s greatest hits.

It’s beautifully constructed and executed, with a lead character who reveals new biographical and emotional layers to us with each new scene, and a backup cast stocked with small-scale underworld types.

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.

Lively is superb here, giving one of those hyper-focused, action-lead performances that's as much an athletic feat as an aesthetic one.

A lot of this is figuratively and literally standup material, with the interview subjects framed head-to-toe in front of bright, primary-colored backdrops, and keeping things as light as possible.

Godzilla vs. Kong is a crowd-pleasing, smash-'em-up monster flick and a straight-up action picture par excellence. It is a fairy tale and a science-fiction exploration film, a Western, a pro wrestling extravaganza, a conspiracy thriller, a Frankenstein movie, a heartwarming drama about animals and their human pals, and, in spots, a voluptuously wacky spectacle that plays as if the creation sequence in "The Tree of Life" had been subcontracted to the makers of "Yellow Submarine."

The film's plot is articulated cleanly, if a bit too plainly at times, but as is so often the case in Sayles' movies, that's not where the director's interest lies. Go for Sisters lacks the epic quilt qualities of such sprawling Sayles pictures as "Lone Star" or "City of Hope," but this seems more a matter of intent than evidence of any sort of failure of vision.

It's better than OK, and a few elements sing; but overall it frustrates. Its delights come from its willingness to depart from formula, but formula still rules it.

This is subtly acted by both leads, especially when the characters fall silent and you see shades of doubt and sadness flicker across their faces.

Only fitfully entertaining or illuminating.

Despite its lack of originality, as well as its lackadaisical storytelling and world building, it satisfies in that amiably weird way that only a "Cars" film can.

As the pandemic is still raging at this moment, it's obviously too early to tell whether "Together" is one for the ages or another one from that time. It's alternately brilliant and amateurish—a four-star acting masterclass at its best and a two-star ripped-from-the-headlines botch at its worst. Split the difference and you'll arrive at something like a holistic consideration.

One of the most influential science fiction films that most people haven't seen, Jean-Luc Godard's 1965 Alphaville is a combination film noir, social satire and riff on tough-guy movies, set in a world of nearly nonstop night.

It's possible to filter out the irritating aspects and enjoy the movie as a raucous, often brilliantly assembled spectacle. But we shouldn't have to. The fact that we do makes an otherwise hugely impressive sequel feel small-minded.

There's no denying that Cruella is stylish and kinetic, with a nasty edge that's unusual for a recent Disney live-action feature. But it's also exhausting, disorganized, and frustratingly inert, considering how hard it works to assure you that it's thrilling and cheeky.

Roach is a director who can do stylish, clever compositions when it suits him, as demonstrated in his flamboyantly silly “Austin Powers” movies. But you wouldn’t know it from this film, which prizes information delivery over visual pizzazz to such a degree that it often feels more like a pilot for an HBO comedy series than something that can only be properly appreciated on a big screen.

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

Directed by Rod Blackhurst from a script by David Ebeltoft, it tells you what kind of movie it is from its gruesome opening image and continues in that mode for another hour and forty-five minutes. It's anchored to a lead performance by Scoot McNairy that ranks with the best of classic neo-noir.

The action set-pieces are thrilling and intentionally hilarious, though the digital effects and compositing vary in quality.

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.

An American Pickle is charming and moving whenever it is content to be a two-man play. That's where the dramatic and thematic action happens. And it happens mainly through Rogen's dual performance.

Turbo is just strange and lively enough to make you wish it were better.

An appealing comedy with an unabashed streak of melodrama, sharp dialogue, and a superb ensemble cast, anchored by a lead performance by Al Pacino in lovable scamp mode.

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 movie offers the most psychologically complex screen portrait of a Native American character in at least twenty years, probably more.

A dark, weird, smutty, fitfully amusing comedy that ultimately wears out its welcome. As a provocation, it's aces, especially if — like the film's writer-director, Randy Moore — you hate Disney and everything it stands for.

Still the Water knows what it is and what it's doing, and even if it doesn't quite come together in the end, it's a mistake to think that there's no point or plan just because the movie doesn't regularly announce its intentions.

A very good jazz movie and a very good heroin movie, if indeed there's much practical difference between the two modes—and perhaps there isn't.

All in all, it’s stupid fun, done with enough panache that its thin story and sometimes too-glib attitude doesn’t hurt it too much.

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."

As a comedic confrontation with the inevitability of aging and death, it’s no “Jackass Forever.” But it’s funny and a wee bit poignant, and the main trio has the good taste not to ask us to feel too deeply about three guys whose chief appeal is that they’re miserable and petty and witheringly sarcastic and don’t try to hide it.

The star rating at the top would be two-and-a-half if I were only judging what's on the screen. The other half-star is for audacity.

Some composited landscapes and helicopters don't pass the believability test, and a few big camera moves that take us from outside to inside and vice-versa are too clever for their own good. But it's all so intricate and expertly timed that you still appreciate it, as one might a performance of a fiendishly difficult piano concerto where just hitting the notes is beyond most players' capabilities.

The result feels like one of the many thoughtful films made about life under dictatorship, but with a unique twist: This one isn’t critiquing past events in Argentina, Chile, or Uganda from a safe historical distance, but events happening right now in the U.S., from behind a scrim of metaphor as thin as tissue paper.

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.

It glides along the surfaces of its characters and its world and rarely digs as deep as one might like. But the experience is intense, and the surfaces are beautiful.

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.

The completeness and sureness of the movie’s aesthetic is a joy to behold, even when the images capture human beings doing savage things. You don’t really root for anyone in this film. They are criminals engaged in contests of will. But the film is not a value-neutral exercise. There is an undertone of lament to a lot of the violent action.

The entire thing—as written by Gavin Steckler and directed by Marc Turteltaub—is sensitive, intelligent, sweet, and presented with considerable integrity, right down to the direction, which is scrupulous in now showing anything that doesn't actually need to be seen. But it also seems to be battling and sometimes succumbing to a case of TIFC, The Indie Film Cutes.

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.

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

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.

[Aselton's] excellent playing Erin, despite scenes of questionable worth concocted by the screenwriters. But it’s not enough to save a collection of ideas that never quite cohere.

War Dogs is a film about horrible people that refuses to own the horribleness.

Mufasa never quite bursts free of the constraints placed upon it, but those constraints never stop it from moving, or from being moving. It has a signature, rendered with a steady hand.

If this movie and her previous project signal a shift in Watts' career that will be dominated by survival tales that put her at the center of a movie and showcase her doing things that give most viewers a pulled tendon just sitting there in the audience, so much the better.

Frustratingly not-quite-there from start to finish.

There are compensatory pleasures. The supporting performances are above and beyond, and Glen is so likable and so believable as a decent man pushed too far that if this film does well, he might be in line to have a late-in-life career renaissance in another of the senior action flicks that have become ubiquitous.

Frustratingly poised on the knife's-edge of "pretty good but not as good as you want it to be," the movie might've benefitted from a more leisurely but focused pace that would've allowed the characters to breathe more, and the legal and scientific concepts to be explained with greater clarity.

The movie expects you to just roll with all this stuff. Or slither. Sometimes you can’t. But when the film escapes the confinement tank of its numerous hand-me-down cliches, you’re happy to follow the water trail to see where it leads.

It's executed with such passion that it holds together better than you might expect.

Despite being played by two charismatic and more-than-capable actors, the title characters never click in the way they need to. They're too cool and vague for the volcanic story they enact.

The movie is a mess, but it's a rich mess. It has weight. It matters.

There’s no compelling evidence onscreen that the huddled masses that the script is so concerned with are truly moved and edified by watching Ben’s rebellious acts and anti-capitalist slogans on TV, or if he’s just their latest shiny object of distraction.

The crime comedy Pixie dissolves in the mind as you're watching it. You've seen it before. And the "it" you've seen before is the most derivative version of "it."

The most striking and curious aspect of Man of Steel is the way it minimizes and even shuts out women.

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

This is not a film about individuals who have lost their moral compass, but a movie that lacks one, by a director who also lacks one but for many years did a convincing impression of a man who never lost sight of true north.

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’s raw and often powerful—less of a carefully shaped drama than the equivalent of a series of boxes filled with explosive material being slung about.

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

One of the most spectacular and frustrating mixed bags of the superhero blockbuster era, The Flash is simultaneously thoughtful and clueless, challenging and pandering. It features some of the best digital FX work I've seen and some of the worst.

Netflix's The Prom is billed as a musical comedy because people sing in it while making funny faces, but beyond that, the relative levels of comedy and musicality ought to be subjects of debate.

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 first Malick film I’ve watched where the dots never came together to form a legible image.

Even when the movie's not working, its style fascinates. That "not working" part is a deal breaker, though — and it has little to do with Luhrmann's stylistic gambits, and everything to do with his inability to reconcile them with an urge to play things straight.

Clare Lewins' new documentary I Am Ali is a great introduction to the boxer, activist and super-celebrity if you don't know much about him. It doesn't break any new ground, not does it claim to, but it's likable and reasonably thorough.

The film is quite repetitive, essentially a very long sketch, and offers little in the way of character development for supporting players. In contrast to the original "The Office," everyone else is there mainly to stare in shock at David as he offends people or does something stupid.

Even if you have a high tolerance for whimsy, Mood Indigo may still be too much.

The climax of “Last Rites” is as tense and unsettling as you want to be, but it’s also warm and inspiring, because unlike a lot of movies that sell the idea of families being stronger when they all work together, this one totally believes in it and sells it with all the skill and emotion it can muster.

It's so bombastic that it makes "Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice" seem modest.

It's frustrating to watch a movie that seems so unable to get out of its own way—all the more so because this is one of the last collaborations between the Oscar-winning screenwriting team of Diana Ossana and Larry McMurtry.

Stiller has become a deeper actor with age, and he's perfect here: you know he has a good soul, because this is a comedy, and not a dark one, but he keeps you guessing.

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.

Camp X-Ray has cinematic and moral intelligence.

The Holocaust drama “White Bird” is a sensitive, well-meaning but ultimately rather programmatic film, presenting the tragedy mainly as a school lesson for present-day kids.

Empire of Light never entirely coheres, but it's worth seeing for the power of Colman's lead performance and the expertly judged backup acting.

Woo is a virtuoso. This movie is music.

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.