Michael O'Sullivan

At times, May December feels like an interrogation of the elusive nature of truth.

It’s not a bad movie. It’s like several pretty good ones.

Needlessly complicated and at times almost impossible to follow, its narrative inscrutability often coming across less as the result of nonlinear storytelling than as simply a cinematic affectation.

As far-fetched as it sounds, such torque-y plotting works, catching the audience off guard, even if the quasi-feminist payoff is less satisfying than it should be, thanks mostly to the film’s puerile fascination with girl-on-girl action.

It’s an emotionally stagnant affair, whether it’s going for laughter or tears.

In the end, what mars "Timothy Green" most is its middle-of-the-road approach. Its appealingly quirky, fairy-tale-like center is so coated with sugar, it cloys. It's not that "Timothy Green" is odd, but that it isn't odd enough.

Uprising is loud, packed with impressive effects and propulsive — or as propulsive as a car with no brakes going downhill — but it lacks the heart of del Toro’s original.

Your Name is still highly watchable, even when this mystical Young Adult love story cloys — or confounds.

The anarchic spirit of the film suggests the screenwriters (brothers Kevin and Dan Hageman, Paul Fisher and Bob Logan) may also have been a little high on bee venom when they wrote this thing.

It has certain je ne sais quoi, if graphic nudity, self-referential humor and serial murder — neck stabbing, eye gouging, alligator munching and shotgun blasting — are your thing.

It's hard not to feel a certain affection for a tale that is so unapologetic about just that: affection.

The insecurities that seem to feed Rivers's often angry humor -- and that have left her face looking like a mask frozen in horror -- are left unexamined.

Parker the movie, like the man, delivers exactly as promised.

Aficionados of gore and guts may not mind the comfortably lived-in feel of this blood-spattered Green Room. But anyone looking for the ferocious originality, and unexpected humanity, of “Blue Ruin” will be disappointed by Saulnier’s uninspired cover version of a song we all know.

Let Me In wants to make your flesh crawl, and it probably will. But it's unlikely to ever get under anyone's skin, the way "Let the Right One In" did.

It's an infusion of zip that's sorely needed, because the chief deficiency of A Bug's Life so far is its blandness….The film's other weakness is the low-octane vocal performances of its leading cast.

It’s a heady dramedy, albeit without terribly many tears or laughs, except those that arise, perhaps unintentionally, from the incongruity of Stevens being repellent.

This very thinly sliced character study of beautiful if benighted adolescence is more a pre-coming-of-age tale, one that takes us close to, but not through, the transformative acquisition of good judgment.

With a surprisingly unhappy, anti-Hollywood ending that will appeal to those who like things dark.

Alice, Darling deserves praise for emotional verisimilitude and shading. It’s just a shame that, in some of its packaging, it oversells a story worth hearing.

The Marksman proves itself to be the cinematic version of comfort food: satisfyingly familiar but full of starch and empty calories.

The kind of stunning and contentious work of art that will leave a lot of folks speechless.

Lords of Dogtown isn't a cop-out, but rather an ever-so-slight concession to commercialism.

A well-crafted story with a unique voice. But its literary gifts are outweighed by its pictorial prosaicness. Dimming the screen in every shot is the unmistakable shadow of the page.

Maybe the whole endeavor is some kind of self-portrait of an artist who doesn’t know what he wants to say anymore, or how to even say, “I don’t know how to say what I want to say anymore.”

Hiddleston steals the show here, making wickedness and treachery look a heck of a lot more fun than virtue.

Plays like a piece of mediocre music, gorgeously rendered.

Strikes several beautiful and lingering chords about the human condition, but the notes of the music ultimately never come together to form a coherent song.

They're enough to elevate the film above its somewhat by-the-numbers plot and add a little juice to its slightly sluggish forward momentum.

It's tasty enough, and probably good for you, but at 73 minutes, the film is hardly a very filling entree.

I remained strangely dry-eyed up to the final shot.

There's actually a lot going on in this little movie, and first-time feature director Stephen Daldry, turning his talents from the theater, handles all of it deftly.

The relationship is the best thing about the film, which otherwise feels hopelessly sad and tawdry.

Plays more like a philosophical debate than a war drama.

There’s an air of “High Noon” to Török’s drama, which features an intrusive sound design, including Tibor Szemzö’s jarringly contemporary score and sound effects that include the ringing of a clock tower, buzzing flies, rumbling thunder and noisy birds — which transition from pleasant tweets to ominous caws of crows by the climax.

Like Father, Like Son grows on you, subtly and over time. Just as with the unexpected realignments forced on its characters, it may be difficult to fall in love with the movie, but eventually you do warm up to it.

In the end, 13 Minutes isn’t about the timing or logistics of one man’s plot to kill Hitler at all, but about what made that man tick.

This slight but insinuating documentary by Abbas Kiarostami...will do nothing to advance or detract from the reputation of the acclaimed Iranian filmmaker.

Sunset Song is a gritty and gorgeous film. Perhaps a little too gorgeous, in fact, and not gritty enough.

Hardy is extraordinarily good at evoking the fraught fraternal connection between the Krays.... But the film is ultimately unable to plumb the Krays’ deepest souls, if they even have any.

That existential paradox — are we all in this thing called life together, or is it every man for himself? — gives the film and its protagonists something meaty to chew on as it, and they, progress. But “The Long Walk” doesn’t dig into it in any deeply satisfying way.

Emphasizes action and eye-popping visuals over emotion.

A funny thing happened while watching Luce. With only a half-hour or so of the movie left to go, it suddenly occurred to me: I wasn’t sure what the movie was actually about. Or, more accurately, it was about so much that, at the point where most films are starting to wrap things up, this one felt like it was still just setting the stage.

It does exactly what its subject didn’t do: toe the line.

A great performance does not necessarily make for great tragedy, and Christine remains mired in the minutiae of its portrait of a doomed, bitter young woman.

Ultimately, the problem with this Red Dawn is the same problem with the first one. Despite the more realistic battle scenes, nothing in it feels more fateful than a football game.

Smashed never really rises much above the level of a dramatic public service announcement. That's not so much because of its tone, but because what it's announcing isn't exactly news. Alcoholism is a disease. Alcoholics aren't bad people. Quitting is hard.

Land of the Dead is fairly intense. Intensely gory and violent, that is, as has come to be expected from the genre. It's just not very frightening. Not half as frightening as, say, last year's "Dawn of the Dead."

And that's the moral of this story. Or one of them, anyway. Clash's success is shown as the result of a combination of talent, gumption, pluck, misadventure, supportive parents, following your dreams, luck and, yes, love.

It takes every resource available to a recently minted Oscar nominee — but does almost nothing with it.

Despite the vastly improved visuals, the new film is just as soft-hearted — and, unfortunately, just as mush-headed — as the earlier one.

Cares not a whit for such arbitrary concepts as justice, crime or punishment. It understands the relativism of right and wrong and takes a kind of perverse pleasure in reminding us that there are some things we'll never know.

There remains a maddening emptiness where the film's ostensible subject should be.

The smart but slight film implodes under the weight of its own "excessive linguistic pressure."

There’s a little too much happening in the film’s violent, frenetic conclusion, which involves the retrieval of fractured memories, the confession of betrayals and so many narrative loops within loops that the film’s big reveals never make perfect, deeply satisfying sense. Maybe it’s not supposed to.

Resurrection ultimately leaves us, like Gwyn, wondering if the story that’s just been dropped in our laps — a kind of sick, surreal poetry, fashioned out of curdled blood and guts — is a new breed of monster movie or some old-fashioned metaphor of loss made flesh. Sadly, given its acting pedigree, it doesn’t really work on either level.

Mostly, this is a problem of storytelling, not acting. Moss is riveting, even if the material is not.

Charming but slight comedy.

Buffed and waxed to within an inch of its life, Stella registers as more of a sequence of slick commercials than an actual drama.

If these repugnant people were really your friends and neighbors, your time would be more profitably spent reading the real estate listings than the movie reviews. But for 1 1/2 hours in a darkened theater, the derailment of their unhealthy emotions makes for one compulsively watchable train wreck.

The main problem, despite committed and at times vivid performances by the three main actors — and a mostly perfunctory supporting appearance by Tom Holland as Edison’s loyal assistant Samuel Insull — is the sheer amount of information that the movie tries to convey.

Plays less like a conventional medical thriller - think "Outbreak" - than like a dramatic reading of a "Nova" episode, performed by Hollywood's elite.

There's a visceral, albeit somewhat goofy, satisfaction to this stuff.

The characters in Aloft seem to float over their strong passions, like birds riding on columns of air, without ever alighting. I kept waiting for the sharp sting of a talon to take hold of my heart, but it never came.

The pleasure is entirely like eating cake made from cake mix. It's not like you don't know how it's going to turn out, or how it tasted the last time you ate it.

Fitfully amusing and ultimately kind of heartwarming in a twisted sort of way

It feels sharply, even painfully true, while also hazy and nonspecific. Its head is in the clouds, while its feet are grounded in the very real catastrophe we are all currently suffering through.

A considerable cut above the crop of recent features by other 'SNL' alums.

A meticulously balanced if oddly inert film.

Still, what separates Walking With Destiny from a run-of-the-mill war documentary isn't necessarily its insights into its main subject but its tangential stories about fascinating nobodies.

A jaundiced view of litigation, however authentic, is not necessarily the stuff of great drama, even of the legal-thriller variety, which by definition is confined to a claustrophobic courtroom.

Despite this tale's surface sheen and propulsive momentum, it never transports one very far.

Now for the bad news. The filmmakers seem to have spent so much attention and, presumably, money on getting the primates right that they completely forgot about the people.

The film’s steady accumulation of little quirks... soon grow tedious. After a while they’re less delightfully oddball touches with a promise of more to come than dead weight with no payoff.

The movie never exactly loses sight of Bayard Rustin, but neither does it ever let us get inside his heart.

And, yes, Kung Fu Panda 2 is a little darker and a little more intense than the first film, especially for very young viewers.

An ambitious but ultimately ungraceful meditation on pop superstardom that spans decades, awkwardly weaving themes of school shootings, terrorism, obsessive fandom and post-traumatic stress into the psychological portrait of a singer whose career was born of tragedy.

Does it matter that Maggie might be a charlatan if she's truly capable of helping people? That's the film's most intriguing, and open-ended, question - not the more gimmicky one that will leave you hanging, and probably disappointed, at the end.

It’s a mildly engrossing if wonky exercise in what could be called a kind of selfish activism.

The bigger mystery is whether the models actually work. Though the Armstrong partisans in the film strongly suggest that they do, director Marcus Vetter struggles to convince the lay viewer.

A compelling if singularly sour tale.

Don’t think about it too hard. Freaky isn’t AP Bio. It’s a shop class project: a couple of mismatched planks cobbled together well enough to get a passing grade.

Although laced with adrenaline and flavored with noirish seasoning, John Frankenheimer's Ronin is a disappointingly conventional thriller.

The fly-on-the-wall film is fascinating at times, but less than essential.

The film is full of quiet little truths.

Wastes no time getting very loud and very silly and never really lets up.

It's just that, in this world of clanking, hissing machines, even the people seem like robots.

This may be the world’s first movie micro-targeted to several thousand of the people who live and/or work in Washington, and no one else.

Disorder is, in other words, more of a technical achievement than an artistic one. The movie is at its best when it recreates what it must feel like to be in a constant state of paranoia and pain. If only that feeling were accompanied by one or two other emotions.

Feels like a hazy high that takes too long to shake.

The film actually gets to tackle some larger questions than one normally finds in the average fireball drama.

Storks delivers its package, but it’s a bundle of just-okay, not joy.

As a fairly soggy, two-hankie melodrama, “Swan Song” is effective. But I wouldn’t recommend thinking about it for too long.

In the end, “Breaking” feels like a foregone conclusion: a dismal portrait of a system — and a someone — already irreparably broken.

As large as Earth Two looms - literally - in the frames of Mike Cahill's film, so do its implications. It's one big, honking metaphor, as much as a special effect. As a symbol of second chances, it's as intriguing as it is frustratingly obvious.

Without at least the tawdry pleasure of a little bodice ripping, the film moves along sluggishly, even though it is well acted and handsomely shot.

One half of a very funny movie, and half a funny movie is better than none.

Even if you agree with the film’s argument that teenagers shouldn’t be locked up for life when there are other ways to save them, “Monsters” doesn’t offer a convincing argument that a screenwriting class is that lifeline.