Matt Zoller Seitz

A very good jazz movie and a very good heroin movie, if indeed there's much practical difference between the two modes—and perhaps there isn't.

All in all, it’s stupid fun, done with enough panache that its thin story and sometimes too-glib attitude doesn’t hurt it too much.

The movie is sleek, smart, and reasonably thorough, and it offers the enticement of never-before-seen home movies provided by Armstrong's family. But it can't really stand out from the flood of material released to cash in on the 50th anniversary of the moon landing, because it arrives on the heels of two daring ones, Damien Chazelle's "First Man" and Todd Douglas Miller's "Apollo 11."

As a comedic confrontation with the inevitability of aging and death, it’s no “Jackass Forever.” But it’s funny and a wee bit poignant, and the main trio has the good taste not to ask us to feel too deeply about three guys whose chief appeal is that they’re miserable and petty and witheringly sarcastic and don’t try to hide it.

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.

Some composited landscapes and helicopters don't pass the believability test, and a few big camera moves that take us from outside to inside and vice-versa are too clever for their own good. But it's all so intricate and expertly timed that you still appreciate it, as one might a performance of a fiendishly difficult piano concerto where just hitting the notes is beyond most players' capabilities.

The result feels like one of the many thoughtful films made about life under dictatorship, but with a unique twist: This one isn’t critiquing past events in Argentina, Chile, or Uganda from a safe historical distance, but events happening right now in the U.S., from behind a scrim of metaphor as thin as tissue paper.

At its best, it plays like a wry critique of this unexpectedly lucrative period of Neeson's career, and a borderline-spoof of the genre as a whole.

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.

Unfortunately, Three Peaks is so thinly conceived and executed that, for the most part, it fails to justify its existence as a stand-alone feature.

The completeness and sureness of the movie’s aesthetic is a joy to behold, even when the images capture human beings doing savage things. You don’t really root for anyone in this film. They are criminals engaged in contests of will. But the film is not a value-neutral exercise. There is an undertone of lament to a lot of the violent action.

The entire thing—as written by Gavin Steckler and directed by Marc Turteltaub—is sensitive, intelligent, sweet, and presented with considerable integrity, right down to the direction, which is scrupulous in now showing anything that doesn't actually need to be seen. But it also seems to be battling and sometimes succumbing to a case of TIFC, The Indie Film Cutes.

The acting and filmmaking are so much more imaginative than the script (which also falls into the rookie trap of mistaking a lack of humor for seriousness) that in the end, this feels like a dry run for something deeper and more daring.

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

The film is worth seeing because, regardless of things that I wish had been done better or differently, it feels like the beginning of a major filmmaking career, and because Pettyfer and Freedson-Jackson are so strong.

[Aselton's] excellent playing Erin, despite scenes of questionable worth concocted by the screenwriters. But it’s not enough to save a collection of ideas that never quite cohere.

War Dogs is a film about horrible people that refuses to own the horribleness.

Mufasa never quite bursts free of the constraints placed upon it, but those constraints never stop it from moving, or from being moving. It has a signature, rendered with a steady hand.

If this movie and her previous project signal a shift in Watts' career that will be dominated by survival tales that put her at the center of a movie and showcase her doing things that give most viewers a pulled tendon just sitting there in the audience, so much the better.

Frustratingly not-quite-there from start to finish.

There are compensatory pleasures. The supporting performances are above and beyond, and Glen is so likable and so believable as a decent man pushed too far that if this film does well, he might be in line to have a late-in-life career renaissance in another of the senior action flicks that have become ubiquitous.

Frustratingly poised on the knife's-edge of "pretty good but not as good as you want it to be," the movie might've benefitted from a more leisurely but focused pace that would've allowed the characters to breathe more, and the legal and scientific concepts to be explained with greater clarity.

The movie expects you to just roll with all this stuff. Or slither. Sometimes you can’t. But when the film escapes the confinement tank of its numerous hand-me-down cliches, you’re happy to follow the water trail to see where it leads.

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

Despite being played by two charismatic and more-than-capable actors, the title characters never click in the way they need to. They're too cool and vague for the volcanic story they enact.

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

There’s no compelling evidence onscreen that the huddled masses that the script is so concerned with are truly moved and edified by watching Ben’s rebellious acts and anti-capitalist slogans on TV, or if he’s just their latest shiny object of distraction.

The crime comedy Pixie dissolves in the mind as you're watching it. You've seen it before. And the "it" you've seen before is the most derivative version of "it."