Matt Zoller Seitz

The character is so one-note, always tying everything back to his need to redeem himself and his dad and articulating so many of his concerns verbally rather than through his eyes or body, that after a while I wanted to put in earplugs to get a break from him.

Had The Founder focused solely on Kroc’s relationship with the McDonald brothers, it might have been one of the great intimate, sour character studies of recent times.

Sleepless is one of those movies that needed to be a lot better or a lot worse to make much of an impression.

Silence is a monumental work, and a punishing one.

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.

Rogue One is a letdown in other areas, and there are creative decisions so ill-conceived they take you out of the story. But somehow these aren't enough to sink the movie, which manages to succeed as both super-nerdy fan service and the first entry since the 1977 original that will satisfy people who have never seen a "Star Wars" film.

Baldwin's voice as a writer comes through powerfully anyway. It was wise to have Jackson read Baldwin's words plainly in his own voice, rather than attempt an impersonation.

There are two movies in Jackie, Pablo Larraín's film about Jackie Kennedy (Natalie Portman) immediately before, during and after the assassination of her husband, President John F. Kennedy. One of these movies is just OK. The other is exceptional. The first one keeps undermining the second.

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.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

The problem, though, is that we never get enough sense of Paz's interior life to judge this movie as anything other than a comeback story about a nice guy who got knocked out by the cosmos and hauled himself up.

Hunter Gatherer doesn't look or feel like many movies being made right now.

True to form, Hacksaw Ridge draws equally on Gibson's bottomless thirst for mayhem and his sincerely held religious beliefs — or some of them, anyway. It's a movie at war with itself.

If you go into a Herzog documentary hoping for a definitive, deep look at a certain subject, you're bound to come away disappointed. But if you go into them expecting a series of portraits of obsessed people, each painted by one of the most likable obsessives in cinema, you're likely to come away satisfied.

It is voluptuously beautiful, frankly sexual, occasionally perverse and horrifically violent.

It’s a pity that Jack Reacher: Never Go Back fails to support Cruise and his co-stars, all of whom are acting as if their lives depended on it. There’s a great movie buried somewhere in here—a strange but beguiling family comedy and a meditation on nature vs. nurture, with a bit of shooting and punching thrown in—but the filmmakers never figure out how to excavate it.

Tower is explanatory journalism and history, but also personally expressive, and the two impulses never cancel each other out.

Newtown is being characterized as an apolitical documentary, just a portrait of Newtown before, during and after the shootings, but that's not entirely true.

Like many Mel Gibson films, as well as such revenge-driven revisionist Westerns as "Posse" and "Django Unchained," The Birth of a Nation is an intriguing object, passionate and furious and shameless and slick, distorting history in both defensible and problematic ways.

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

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 frustrating missed opportunity, The Lovers and the Despot takes a fascinating story about filmmaking, politics, kidnapping and propaganda and gives us almost no insight into the work of its two main characters, a director and his actress wife.

The film's hazing scenes evoke the boot camp sequences in "Full Metal Jacket" but without the merciless coldness, because the film's hero, Brad (newcomer Ben Schnetzer, in a career-making star turn) desperately wants to belong to the organization.

They all ultimately seem as if they are participating in a dubious enterprise, devised by gifted individuals who somehow can't take a big picture view of a story that would seem to demand one. London Road is brilliant in all the wrong ways.

The collage film Cameraperson is one of the most original, challenging, sometimes infuriating documentaries of recent times.

Just good enough to make you wish that it were better.

The process of transformation is the story, and the story truly belongs to the artist.

The mosaic arrangement of material ensures that no one subject can be covered in detail -- the sum total sometimes plays like a very good themed edition of "CBS News Sunday Morning" but with a wickedly funny narrator -- and a couple of segments, notably one about a rehab clinic for gaming addicts, feel intellectually undercooked.