Matt Zoller Seitz

Change is about decisive shift in speed, emphasis, and norms over a period of time, as much as it's about the shock of any individual event. Homeroom is at its best when it's helping us see this.

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.

While far from being a classic, “The Day the Earth Blew Up” is a charming and often invigorating reimagining of key Looney Tunes characters (Daffy Duck and Porky Pig), with a look and sound that links it to past versions without feeling indebted to them.

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."

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.

By the time you get to the end, Cronenberg has pinned all his people against the screen like so many laboratory specimens, ripped off their scabs, and vivisected their longings: an old wound here, a long--deferred dream there. Still, the movie sticks with you. It's a fleeting nightmare that refuses to fade.

Two Pianos is a melodrama, and damned proud to be one.

This one is a mostly likable effort, but it doesn't quite feel like a self-contained movie with a shape and a discernible point; it's more of a collection of material arranged in a way that more or less makes sense.

The result is a narratively relaxed yet intensely tactile experience.

There's nothing about this kind of film that is innately less "formulaic" than what you get when see a Marvel, Star Wars, or Fast & Furious movie; it's just gentler and more human-scaled.

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.

This is a special movie. It has a life force unlike any other crime thriller I’ve seen. It’s about characters who suffer a personal failure but emerge transformed. It’s a violent movie, but not a cruel one, and unexpectedly moving by the end.

The end product is true to the spirit of the franchise while pushing its self-aware humor and fourth wall-breaks until it all seems like the result of a dare: how big can we make the air quotes around “sincerity” while still tugging on heartstrings?

Noah is more of a surrealist nightmare disaster picture fused to a parable of human greed and compassion, all based on the bestselling book of all time, the Bible, mainly the Book of Genesis.

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.

Worse, Z for Zachariah is ultimately too dramatically slight and brief for its ambitions, despite its sometimes labored myth-making script and visuals.

Through the ending and postscript, which leave you unsure how to feel about what you’ve seen but eager to discuss it with others, this is a nostalgia trip of the best kind.

This is is the kind of movie that makes you appreciate Schwarztman's unique brand of screen energy, if you didn't already.

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

Is it a must-see? No—the middle hour is fun, in that patented easygoing "Ant-Man" way.

It inadvertently puts Hawke in the position of having to carry a film that's more of a series of half-formed notions, some intriguing, others ill-advised, and a few verging perilously close to cute.

Unfortunately, Lucy Walker's Buena Vista Social Club: Adios plays more like a well-intentioned but unsatisfying addendum to Wenders' movie and Cooder's recording.

The result is a sprawling urban drama with eruptions of violence.

What elevates it and makes it special is the attention it pays to local geography and atmosphere, the mundane aspects of working-class Northeastern U.S. life, and the culturally super-specific types of people you'll find in that environment

This is a musical movie, not just because it features musical numbers. It weaves its spell not merely by what it does, but how it moves, and what it chooses to say or not say, and when it decides to proceed to the next scene.

What makes “The Wrecking Crew” worth seeing is what the cast and filmmakers do with the material. Simply put, this movie is better than its synopsis suggests, though not good enough to entirely overcome the familiarity of the component parts and the alternately jokey and sentimental tone (which is harder to pull off than studio executives seem to think).

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."