Matt Zoller Seitz

Its imperfections are compensated by magnificence.

It’s a dancing elephant of a movie. It has a few decent moves, but you’d never call it light on its feet.

The tone starts out bleak and steadily darkens. The movie is sometimes fascinating, though—particular in the early stretches, before the dominos of catastrophe start to fall, and the little details of the characters' relationship and their world are replaced by a constant fear of getting arrested or killed.

All in all, this is a very likable, if sometimes a bit too polished and vague.

A love letter from one iconoclastic Italian Catholic artist to another, Abel Ferrara's Pasolini stays far from the cliches of the Hollywood biopic, embracing a fragmented, intense, impressionistic approach.

Once the action kicks in, though, Shadow is on rails. Zhang, co-screenwriter Li Wei, cinematographer Zhao Xiaoding, production designer Horace Ma, and costumer Chen Minzheng work in seemingly perfect harmony to create a visual scheme that the director has said is based on the brush techniques of Chinese painting and calligraphy.

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.

The result is a narratively relaxed yet intensely tactile experience.

With its brutal violence, explicit sex, and up-close views of blood, sweat, urine, and semen, it is proudly an R-rated film, verging on NC-17—though the X-rating, which was discontinued by the MPAA almost 30 years ago, might feel more appropriate.

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.

It's a study in deception, and as told by filmmaker Alex Gibney ("Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room"), it's a disturbing and sad one.

The Eyes of Orson Welles doesn't rank with the best Welles scholarship, mainly because it's too overreaching and disorganized, and commits itself to central creative decisions that increasingly come to seem misguided.

So much of the needlessly complicated and rules-driven action inside the park plays like wasted motion, visually as well as narratively speaking.

From the looks of it, Huppert had a grand time playing the title character in Greta, a film that could have been released in the era of MTV veejays and VCRs.

It's magnificent and unique, an adrenaline shot of wonder and skill.

It's worth seeking out no matter how much trouble you have to go to, because it's special: assured but modest, full of surprises. It doesn't go the way you expect it to, and yet in retrospect each move seems inevitable, like the incremental fulfillment of a prophecy.

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.

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.

Caveats aside, this is, in my estimation, a typically stimulating but opaque and deliberately frustrating late-period Godard film, good but not great, distinguished primarily by the fact that it's the first Godard film to use no actors at all.

Close is aces when it's watching its star move through the world, silently checking everyone and everything out, hiding her mental math until it's time to kill some dudes. The action is frenzied but comprehensible, brutal but not wantonly sadistic.

Aquaman is as concerned with scientific accuracy as “SpongeBob Squarepants.” And that’s one of many reasons why I like it.

The whole movie feels oddly stranded and dramatically inert, despite the obvious passion that went into making it.

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

You could build a suspension bridge over the gap between what Robin Hood could have been and what it is. Its hero is credible as a man who wants to rob from the rich and give to the poor, but the storytelling is so impoverished that the message can't stick.

The devil figure is Federico (Riccardo Scamarcio, last seen in "John Wick: Chapter Two"). He's eloquent, charming, faintly sinister man who, as Bryan points out, seems to magically appear in their lives at moments of crisis.

The women are all compelling though never too-polished storytellers. Whether they succumb to the horror of what they're describing and start to cry or remain stoic throughout becomes part of the experience of hearing the tale.

Wang's movie is empathetic enough not to pass negative judgment on the characters as they muddle through their experience.

Part rap musical, part social satire, with elements of Westerns and kung fu pictures, Bodied is one of the funniest, freest movies of the year.