Matt Zoller Seitz

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.

Whenever Spontaneous starts to run out of imaginative juice, it turns a tonal corner and either puts a smile on your face or wipes it off.

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.

All in all, it’s heartening to hear a major figure in American political history talking about the future as if it might actually happen.

In its lumpy-porridge way, this film makes a better case than any other Marvel picture for the notion that quarter-billion-dollar-budgeted, CGI-festooned slabs of multimedia synergy can be art, too, provided they're made by an artist with a vision, and said artist appears to be in control of at least part of the production.

The physical or visceral aspects of the movie might sink into your brain and change how you look at these creatures. It had that effect on me.

If Zootopia were a bit vaguer, or perhaps dumber and less pleased with itself, it might have been a classic, albeit of a very different, less reputable sort. As-is, it's a goodhearted, handsomely executed film that doesn't add up in the way it wants to.

The interviews are the best part of the film, which lacks the sleek, focused, concentrated quality of the best Merchant Ivory movies but succeeds on its own terms as sort of a “hangout” movie, non-fiction division.

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 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.

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

All in all, this is a thoughtful, remarkable piece of nonfiction, working in an accessible commercial vein but doing its best not to take the easy way into any aspect of Reeve’s story.

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.

Jem and the Holograms is one of the weirdest big screen adaptations of a cheap TV cartoon that I've seen. That's praise.

It’s a smart, mostly light movie that will teach viewers a lot about processes they might not otherwise think about. You come away from the movie seeing the world in finer shades than when you went in.

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.

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

Without giving too much away, suffice to say that there's a reason why human beings have traditionally described doing work on one's own psyche as wrestling with demons.

Speak No Evil is a throwback to the 1980s-’90s era of medium-budget thrillers like “The Hand that Rocks the Cradle,” “Unlawful Entry,” and “Fatal Attraction,” in which representatives of supposedly respectable bourgeoisie society were menaced by dangerous outsiders who smelled weakness in them and/or wanted to punish them for their sins, perceived or real.

It's a real shame that "The Beekeeper" isn't the righteous trash masterpiece that it keeps threatening to turn into. There's a great pop hit in here somewhere—probably one that focused exclusively on Adam and the awful people he's going after. But the film is scattered and annoyingly glib at times.

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.

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.

The entire movie feels like something out of a dream, probably one that struggles to work through something real that keeps getting hijacked and twisted by the mischievous unconscious.

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.

As a personality portrait, it’s superb. The inherent instability of the filmmakers’ approach fuses with the manipulative charm and psychic damage of their subject.

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.

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.

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.