Matt Zoller Seitz

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.

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."

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

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

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.

Sembene! is most illuminating when it is simply showing us clips from the director's features and behind-the-scenes or "making of" footage, with very little in the way of verbal setup, and then letting them play out.

"Cars" and its various derivatives aside, Pixar has never released a flat-out bad film. And this is a good one: pleasant and clever, with a generous heart, committed voice acting, and some of the kookiest images in Pixar history.

If Black & Blues returns to the same melody a few too many times, it doesn't diminish the overall achievement, which feels free in a way that these sorts of films rarely do.

This is a more-than-solid observational comedy with a melancholy undertone, reminiscent of early Albert Brooks movies like “Modern Romance.”

What we’re seeing in “September 5” is the birth of live news as entertainment. It’s the opening salvo in a long and sadly successful war against journalistic ethics and ideals that would lead to the current pathetic conditions of cable and Internet “news,” which consist largely of “takes” rather than original reporting.

It's to the credit of Anthony, who wrote and edited as well as directed, and his cinematographer Corey Hughes, that you come away thinking about parts of the film that felt like cut-able digressions and undergraduate musings when you were watching them.

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.

This movie should probably be considered more promotional material than journalism, but that's not necessarily a bad thing because it's the most intellectually stimulating kind of promotion, concentrating on the illumination of the artistic process rather than cliches and hype.

This isn’t a classic, but it’s good enough to make you think Fuller has a classic in him.

It’s a pretty good movie that, thanks mainly to its performances, has a lot more life than you might expect, given the concept and the formulaic way that it hits its major story points.

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

By the time the film eases into its final stretch, it becomes a sub-genre of drama that I call "accidental radio," meaning that even though there are pictures, you might not see them all because you're covering your eyes a lot of the time.

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.

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.

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

Ian McKellen is stunningly good as the older painter, Julian Sklar, a 1960s Swingin’ London sensation who has aged into a decrepit caricature of himself.

Rams is an involving, at times curiously exciting film, because the story is so clean and simple and we always know what's at stake.

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.

Remote Area Medical is a rare contemporary documentary that is determined to tell by showing.

The jump scares work (jump scares almost always do; they're the easiest way to convince the audience that they've gotten their money's worth), but Malum is much more impressive when it turns its talented ensemble cast loose on material that was obviously a lot of fun to play with.

The mission statement is right there in the title. Whether it succeeds will be up to the viewer. As is so often the case with these types of non-fiction films, the people who stand to benefit the most from watching it are likely to avoid it after hearing what it’s trying to do.

It's a self-aware movie that makes fun of the macho clichés it indulges.