Michael O'Sullivan

At times, In Order of Disappearance is a bit too self-consciously clever. But what saves it, paradoxically — even, at times, delightfully — from skidding off course into cliche is the profound appeal of its middle-of-the-road, but never dull, protagonist.

The Duke, based on the 1961 theft of Francisco de Goya’s portrait of the Duke of Wellington from the National Gallery in London, features delightful performances by Jim Broadbent and Helen Mirren, both of whom help ground this strenuously heartwarming film in something a little more solid than the ether in which it otherwise seems to be set.

It is when Ivins herself opens her mouth that the film is at its best.

It’s a movie that’s as fun to watch as it is funny. But the real appeal of Big Hero 6 isn’t its action. It’s the central character’s heart.

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

Beast sounds like a straightforward erotic mystery thriller, but that atmosphere is at times overshadowed by Pearce’s exploration of British classism, bullying and bigotry.

Nicolas Cage delivers what may his best, most nuanced performance yet in the gritty, hypnotic and deeply moving Joe.

Plays more like a philosophical debate than a war drama.

It’s a movie that, to put it in terms that the film’s screenwriters might appreciate, is Thor-ly needed.

The film and the ticktock of recovery it follows are at times difficult to watch. At the same time, watching feels almost necessary in an age when mass shootings seem to have become all too common.

By the end of this troubling film, the cognitive dissonance that it highlights — between the theoretical glorification of the illegal Mexican drug industry and its actual cost in blood — is jarring. It’s an important film, but Narco Cultura is also maddeningly hard to watch.

It's part sugar, part spice (cayenne, not nutmeg) and all-around brilliant.

Like a haiku, it is not what is said, but what is unsaid, that leaves the most lasting echoes.

Far filthier and a good bit funnier than Trey Parker and Matt Stone's sophomoric cable TV show ever dared to be.

Betts has put together a talented acting ensemble, and the performances are, for the most part, uniformly good and subtle, particularly among the actresses who play the young novices.

The film deepens and grows more thoughtful — and, yes, sad — as its spotlight on the need for human connection — at any age — comes into focus. The stories of the four people at its center show Villagers to be more than statistics.

Georgian writer-director Zaza Urushadze avoids histrionics or moralizing, relying on a strong cast that expresses the film’s central argument about war’s absurdity largely through taciturn action, not words.

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.

About a musical genre not known for quiet contemplation, “Rumble” asks us to be still for a moment and to listen to the heartbeat — at once familiar and newly strange — that pumps the lifeblood that flows through the songs this country is known for.

The combined impact of these scenes, augmented with Robinson’s lecture — which, while deeply informed and informative, is anything but dull or academic — makes for a powerful one-two punch.

Frantz contains revelations unrelated to the manner in which it protects, and then peels away, its central mystery. Ultimately, it addresses the question: Why go on living when life itself betrays us?

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.

Young Plato is a fascinating, sometimes funny and often touching film. It’s easy to see why the directors were drawn to McArevey and his school.

The underwhelming, only fitfully amusing movie left me hungry for more.

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.

It transfixes, not with artifice or cheap sentiment, but with a strange alchemy of gloom and light.

Although the cast is uniformly fine, Hoffman shines in a role that demands not showmanship, but a kind of complexity and contradiction that can be rendered only through the kind of dull character details that he excelled in, accumulating them from the inside out.

There are early warning signs that “World” isn’t going to end well. But Fastvold, a Brooklyn-based Norwegian actress and filmmaker making only her second effort behind the camera, never gins up the sentiment, the melodrama or even the sensuality.

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

In tone, School Life feels like a recruiting film for prospective students. It isn’t exactly profound, except perhaps in the way it makes a case for the theory that happiness comes first, and then learning.

The absence of legal details makes the movie something of a cheat. It offers few insights about the case from the official side, let alone about the machinations of Ai’s legal team.

In his most bracing and maddening morality tale yet, Lanthimos doesn’t so much paint himself into a corner as he runs into it, headlong, dragging us with him all the way.

There is just enough story here to give the brutality shape and purpose, and to keep that numbness from turning to boredom. “Parabellum” — the name comes from a Latin phrase meaning “If you want peace, prepare for war” — picks up precisely where “John Wick: Chapter 2” left off: with John on the run.

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

Tucci and Firth have never been better than they are here, and they earn every superlative that has been laid on them in early reviews.

One big, fat, honking comic book of a sci-fi-martial-arts adventure flick.

The film is studded with many tiny, lovely moments.

Deliberate disorientation keeps the audience constantly off balance, and it's brilliantly effective.

Super Size Me is an anti-junk-food screed that manages to entertain even as it informs and alarms.

The drama itself packs a powerful -- and timeless -- gut punch.

This is a small film with some big-ish names in it: Jeffrey Wright plays Stuart’s boss; Taylor Schilling is his love interest; and Gabrielle Union is a TV reporter. But it topples under the weight of its unwieldy themes.

In addition to McKay, Danes makes a sassy, sexy Sonja. And Efron more than gets by in his role as the sweet, plucky, starstruck newbie. It's a part that doesn't require much heavy lifting, though.

The battle scenes are alternately tense and thrilling, especially during one climactic sequence.

“Moonlight” is actually not about one thing, but many, and Brodsky threads her themes together nicely. The film also charts Paul Taylor’s incipient dementia, a development that “Moonlight” weaves into its other story lines by noting, poetically, that our mistakes — the metaphorical, and inevitable, false notes we play in life — can become, as Brodsky puts it, “our music.”

Like many Aardman films, The Pirates! is awash with silliness. There are far more fleeting visual jokes than one can possibly digest in a single viewing. It makes for an experience that, while geared toward younger, more fidgety audiences, has enough humor to keep Mom and Dad from falling asleep.

It's a thriller that feels like a documentary.

In a role that challenges our very notion of morality, Cox comes across as both predatory and fatherly, sometimes at once, in an acting turn as astonishing as it is stomach-turning.

Cogent, scary and, at times, sickening.

In its heart burns the indomitable flame of the human spirit.

The film, for much of the first two acts, takes itself just about that unseriously, maintaining a jokey, self-aware tone that is nicely evocative of the original comics.

In Sheridan's warm and glowing treatment, the moral of the story feels less like a reheated fable than like something utterly, indescribably original.

Live From New York! is a fun, not academic walk down memory lane.

As it is, The Killer is less a diamond than a piece of good-looking but cheap quartz: all sparkling surface and not much value.

Complicated? Yes. Potentially heavy? Sure. But it's also highly engrossing and, in a dark way, ultimately rather sweet.

Sorry, stinging fire ants couldn't make me reveal the outcome of this witty and, yes, surprisingly suspenseful adventure.

"News” is like almost every other western. Still, it works.

Wickedly funny.

Toward the end, the film veers a bit out of control, as the residents engage in behavior that is incomprehensible, even given their previous transgressions.

Director Marc Levin's shaky, hand-held camera lends "Slam" an unvarnished, documentary feel. The script – credited not only to Levin, Bonz Malone and Richard Stratton, but to acclaimed performance poets Sohn and Williams – is dense and difficult.

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.

The whole thing looks like an ad for cologne.

The first half of Cold is tense and suspenseful, albeit in a conventional way; the second half is sickeningly compelling. It’s hard to watch and hard to look away from.

It's a kind of 18th-century "Dead Man Walking" but with that earlier film's foreground arguments against capital punishment pushed to the background here.

You can't fault the filmmakers for reshaping a diary into a cohesive film. You can however, fault them for taking one of the great antiheroes in preteen literature and turning him into, well, an even wimpier kid.

Vreeland’s film, for the most part, is structured around spoken passages from Beaton’s voluminous diaries, which are read, expressively, by Rupert Everett. The actor ably channels the persona of the self-described “rabid aesthete.”

What keeps The 40-Year-Old Virgin out of Rob Schneider territory, however, is: 1) the fact that it's pretty darn funny, and in a way that feels consistently real, and 2) the fact that it's actually an excellent date movie.

Dark Waters is an effective outrage machine: If you like “Erin Brockovich,” you’ll probably like this too.

There's nothing stodgy about these court jesters or their humor, even though their act is a decidedly grown-up affair.

As is his wont, Spielberg can't resist stuffing the ending of the movie with a bit too much cheese and baloney. Despite those quibbles, War of the Worlds is taut, gripping and surprisingly dark filmmaking.

Gradually, and with the methodical patience of someone unearthing buried treasure with a tiny brush, The Dig reveals itself to be a story of love and estrangement, of things lost and longed for, of life and death — of what lasts and what doesn’t.

It’s a mushy and unsuspenseful melodrama.

As a storyteller, Amalric is a master of manipulation, first leading the audience in one direction and then another. The Blue Room is a hall of mirrors, reflecting every detail but making it hard to know where you stand.

Garrone has created a world of both rich and ugly textures — visual, narrative and imaginative — that transports, delights and imparts disturbing lessons.

All the Money in the World may not have that many surprises up its sleeve, especially if you already know how this story ends. You will, however, get your money’s worth, one way or another: whether it’s from the crime thriller or the thought-provoking sermon on filthy lucre that it throws in, at no extra charge.

It’s nice to be reminded of what old people look like, since they are, at least in movies these days, ever more invisible.

The film, despite being mostly set in a huge, expensive apartment that inexplicably seems to be illuminated only by low-wattage lightbulbs, by and large resists the easy tropes of conventional horror. Instead, Jusu focuses, with an assured storytelling that slowly builds a mood of real-world dread, on more corporeal concerns.

It's the sort of movie that can make normally well-read and intelligent viewers feel stupid.

The movie is an intellectual puzzle, the outcome of which is never in doubt. Its minor thrills come not from not knowing what will happen, but from watching the cagey choreography of two acrobatic minds.

The picture that emerges is fractured, making for a portrait that’s as fascinating as it is baffling.

Gorgeously animated and stirringly told, Disney's Mulan is a timeless story that will delight kids and divert adults with its sweeping scope, emotional intimacy and screwball humor.

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.

It's actually quite satisfying, in a weird, magical-realism sort of way that manages to disturb and confound as much as it appeases the romantic.

Happy End, for its part, signals a return to form for the director, who here makes a stark departure from the sweet tone of “Amour” — perhaps his most mainstream work — in favor of the vinegary outlook on life manifested in such films as “Funny Games,” his 2007 horror movie about violently psychopathic home invaders, and “The White Ribbon,” his 2009 pre-World War I period piece about, among other things, child abuse.

A gorgeously photographed storybook.

Its egotistical, wishy-washy and otherwise flawed protagonists are no less heroic because they look -- and act -- like you and me. On the contrary, they are more so.

Newcomb is especially good and poignant, but Abbott also brings a pitiful emotional honesty to a repugnant character.

It is an engrossing tale, full of betrayal and chicanery, and it casts the Egyptian political-military complex and the religious hierarchy as riddled with corruption.

It takes us someplace, yes, but the trip is just this side of transporting.

By the end of Invisible Beauty, it’s obvious from all the accolades that [Hardison] made a difference in the lives of a new generation of Black models.

Nine Days is, in the end, meant as a wake-up call: a bracing splash of fake seawater in the face that somehow, against all logic, feels like the real thing.

It’s also a telling personal moment, because it opens the door to a discussion of Wallace’s struggles with depression and suicidal thoughts.

The director, who is the son of filmmaker David Cronenberg, seems to have inherited some of his father’s worst excesses, which are here unleashed in a manner that is sophomoric, fetishistically violent and hyper-sexualized.

Thanks mainly to Bell's abundant charisma, Hallam makes for a strangely likable antihero.

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.

Good old-fashioned movie storytelling that steadily builds, over the course of nearly three hours, to a white-knuckle conclusion that satisfies on nearly every level.

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

A fascinating, funny and informative documentary.