Matt Zoller Seitz

Sly is a frustratingly unrealized work, always hovering on the edge of real insight but rarely jumping into it.

It's all so rich—and so richly executed by Ellis, a total filmmaker—that one wishes it added up to more than a series of smart variations on a certain type of film.

It creates a world with its own rules and tells a story in its own visual language. It seems it will come to a very obvious conclusion, but then it pivots and introduces elements that create a new frame for the movie. Fifteen minutes later, it does this again, and then again.

Lamb is empathetic and untrustworthy, haunting but often unpersuasive. In the end it's hard to say what the film's point is. But it lingers in the mind.

Like many films by Besson — "The Professional," "The Fifth Element," "The Messenger" and other high-octane shoot-'em-ups — Lucy starts out riveting but becomes less engaging as it goes along.

It’s patchy and digressive, and the overreliance on syrupy music becomes off-putting towards the end. But fans of the actor will probably enjoy it, because it’s a chance to appreciate the life and art of a remarkable talent whose period of superstardom was actually much briefer than we might have realized.

It’s a tour-de-force of voluptuously bloody slapstick that knows that we know how these movies work.

The film's solid grounding in friendship and comic teamwork carries the day. Unpregnant becomes more affecting as it goes along thanks to the sincere, committed, and mostly unaffected lead performances by Richardson and Ferreira.

There's a good movie in Romano the feature filmmaker, but this isn't it.

Lacks the original's momentum. It only sometimes builds to the peaks of lunacy that you want and need from this sort of picture. It goes here, it goes there, it does this, it does that.

Martin Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street is abashed and shameless, exciting and exhausting, disgusting and illuminating; it's one of the most entertaining films ever made about loathsome men.

Luckily, the performances and characterizations add heft, and the very Russian vibe of soulful heaviness sets it apart from its American cousins.

This is a compelling story about persistent problems that affect the majority of Americans, even though you don't hear about them very often in mainstream media. The blunt title says it all.

The entire thing has a whiff of missed opportunity, and sometimes you might wonder if Lowery and his co-writer Toby Halbrooks wanted to dive deeper than they knew Disney's copyright-tending, merchandise-selling executives would have allowed.

The voice-over explains things that we could have understood from looking at the images. It rarely passes up the opportunity to drop in a cliche.

Does the movie work? Intermittently, sometimes brilliantly.

What a singularly weird, gross tale this turned out to be.

The problem is that the relatively brief running time (less than two hours) works at cross-purposes with the movie's laid back characterizations and populated cast.

Elton John: Never Too Late is an affecting movie that the musician's fans will likely appreciate, but it's the equivalent of those official oil portraits that the more intelligent and self-aware royals used to commission.

Altogether, it’s a solid film of kind that used to be more common: an earnest, unpretentious Oscar Movie that wants to be seen by everyone, and consequently doesn’t try to be too complex or arty.

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.