Matt Zoller Seitz

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.

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

Israelis call the events of 1948 The War for Independence, while Palestinians call it Nabka, or The Catastrophe. It's hard to imagine how the two could be reconciled, and "Tantura" doesn't try. It has its hands full just trying to establish what happened, and encouraging participants and beneficiaries into accepting what it meant.

If smart dumb comedies hold a place in your heart, you'll like Masterminds. The main characters are masterminds only in their own heads, and the thoughts that tumble out of their mouths are as nonsensical as they are sincere.

A furious and often terrifying documentary about the militarization of US police.

As a showcase for young American talent, it’s tough to beat. At its best, it reminded me of a rougher, more glassy-eyed 21st-century version of the kinds of movies Whit Stillman—and later, Noah Baumbach—have made.

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

A film like Linklater's brings you inside the consciousness of a person whose perceptions of the world are simultaneously constrained and curious, and open to new experiences.

The top-to-bottom cast of proudly eccentric actors, including Holland Taylor, Jessica Harper, Zosia Mamet, and Bob Balaban (as Dianne’s father), ensures that every scene has moments of truth, and the filmmaker’s empathy pushes the movie over the finish line.

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

We take moving pictures for granted now. We can’t go back. But the film “Lumière, Le Cinema!”, about the gradual rollout of the automated motion picture projector and the goals of its inventors, Louis and Auguste Lumière, is a very good try.

If the film is a potluck stew of half-cooked notions, it's at least a tasty one.

For its near-miss moments, the inside-out approach of The Mission results in a richer film than one might have expected from reading the summary on a streaming menu.

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.

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.

The film’s boundless enthusiasm for the idea of the library wins the day.

Unfortunately, The Public Enemy isn't as tightly scripted a movie as some other Cagney gangster pictures. Even at 81 minutes, it meanders a bit, and one setpiece doesn't often seem to follow another, logically or psychologically.

Worth seems to get it, all of it, in a way that films of this type rarely do, which makes it all the more irritating when it appears to retreat from the implications of the way it's telling its complex narrative.

Breaking Fast is a sweet romantic comedy that shows how it's possible to observe nearly every convention of the mainstream romantic comedy yet still deliver something that feels new.

Sallywood should be required viewing for anyone who thinks fame equals wealth.

At its most controlled and insinuating, Dark Waters is reminiscent of paranoid thrillers from the 1970s like "The Parallax View" and "Chinatown," where you know going in that you're going to see a story about how profoundly bad things are, thanks to corporate influence over government as well as the economy, but the extent of the corruption is still shocking.

Its greatest asset is its performances, which operate in strikingly different registers (some more subtle or ‘naturalistic’ and others more heightened) yet somehow work together to further the film’s story and themes.

Night Patrol is far from perfect, but it’s got a certain something that pulls you in. The bleakness of its worldview is matched by the integrity of its filmmaking and performances. The life it depicts is not sugarcoated. It’s drenched in blood.

It's as if the group had studied the "Rabbit season! Duck season!" exchange from the Bugs Bunny-Daffy Duck classic "Rabbit Seasoning," and figured out how to turn the punchline into a political movement.

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.

There's something off-kilter about it, in a good way. It has a confidence that might not be earned but is still enjoyable to see. It's tapping into something true and knows it.

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.

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