Michael O'Sullivan

Betting on Zero makes such a strong and effective case that the company does, in fact, engage in shady business practices that it’s likely to leave viewers in a state of Documentary High Dudgeon (that brand of cinematic outrage that is not entirely unmixed with a pleasurable feeling of moral superiority).

At nearly three hours long, and told with the book’s peripatetic structure, moving from nightmare to nightmare, The Painted Bird is not for the faint of heart.

Wickedly funny, jarringly transgressive, obdurately unpigeonholeable and startlingly moving.

The Signal has visual style to burn. And it takes good advantage of the current state of paranoia arising from our surveillance culture and the pervasive mistrust in government. On paper, this sounds like a good formula. If handled well, it could really pay off.

As happens with many time-travel films, this one ultimately paints itself into a bit of a narrative corner.

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.

Worse yet is the insincerity of the film's central performances. Too cool by half, Glodell, Wiseman and Dawson speak every line as if it had air quotes around it. In fact, the entire movie feels as though it has air quotes around it.

[A] well-told tale.

Under normal circumstances, nothing kills a joke faster than trying to explain it. Yet here, such examination is the film's strong suit and provides much-needed respite, quite frankly, from the exhaustion of constant laughter.

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.

Candyman can’t seem to decide whether it wants to scare you or make you think.

Too often, in a film about an ostensibly peaceful form of dissent, it feels like adversaries are being targeted, albeit subtly, when the real enemy is war itself.

Scorsese creates a film so resonant that it is both a work of great art and an anthropological document.

[A] meandering, deliberate and tearless — yet oddly moving — western vehicle.

Youth is intoxicating, I’ll admit. Had I never tasted this wine before, I could easily see myself yearning for another glass. But this time it feels like an old vintage in a new bottle, one that’s grown slightly stale rather than better with age.

A Compassionate Spy is less a full companion piece to “Oppenheimer” than an intriguing sidebar.

A bustling, overly busy mess.

All in all, Doctor Strange is a fun and trippy excursion to a place where Marvel rarely seems to go: that is, to the retinal roots of the comics.

Escapes is an eccentric portrait of a not especially eccentric — or even terribly interesting — subject: Hampton Fancher.

Sweet without being saccharine and funny without being forced, the closely observed romantic comedy treats the culinary arts as a metaphor for personal healing.

There is a quality of enchantment to When Marnie Was There that can’t be faked, and that the studio behind this animated feature is justifiably famous for.

Visually stylish surrealist drama.

It's the flaws that Kurtzman builds into People Like Us that make it interesting.

It’s crazy and ridiculous at times. But I can’t help agreeing with Assaf, who observes, of his companions’ rescue plans, “I like it. It has the logic of a dream.”

While the movie is best viewed as an examination of a specific place and time, it also can be seen as a celebration of a larger, more generic cultural phenomenon that one might call creative foment.

It’s kind of a downer, yes, but also stimulating as hell.

A film that is by turns darkly comic and disturbing, both sensations brought into vivid, caustic relief by the film's mesmerizing star.

It’s just a giant missed opportunity to be something more.

Fed Up isn’t so much a warning to the ignorant shopper or a tip for the unimaginative chef as it is a rallying cry. It succeeds in firing up the choir. Whether it will convert the complacent is an open question.

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.

The plot is far from intricate, but Waking Ned Devine more than makes up for its narrative simplicity with a uniformly engaging cast of Hibernian oddballs.

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.

Monument Ave. is a cinematic dead-end street that is not without its gloomy, gritty thrills -- assuming, that is, that you're not in the market for a hero or even the slightest feather of that thing called hope. [09 Oct 1998, Pg.N.49]

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

Director Rodrigo Plá, working from a spare yet jangly screenplay by Laura Santullo, steadily builds suspense, craftily calibrating subtle shifts in perspective that allow us to alternate, seamlessly, between impartial observers and, as it were, active participants.

Despite Blomkamp’s efforts to make some kind of commentary about the human soul, which the auteur bolsters with his trademark social consciousness — a tone of preachiness that, after three films, has worn out its welcome — the movie exhibits precious little humanity.

It remembers to have fun. It’s a kick to watch — often literally — and the kind of popcorn movie summer is made for.

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

Di Girólamo delivers a performance that is, like the combustible fuel inside the tank strapped to her back here and there throughout the film, intense, hot, destructive — and hard to look away from.

Aniston delivers an utterly un-Rachel-like performance. It's neurosis-free and unmannered, by turns funny, sad and profound.

It's over-the-top. It's wild. It's filled with outrageous behavior all around.

For more casual consumers of the costumed comic-book superhero’s exploits, mileage may vary. But there’s a whole lot to like here.

As a simultaneously slick and provocative entertainment, “War Game” is chilling and a tad infuriating, offering a white-knuckle ride — “Civil War” for policy wonks — that may feel a bit too fresh in the memory for viewers who are still traumatized by the real thing.

Will keep you awake, jittery and perched on the edge of your seat for pretty much the entire flight.

What becomes clear is that Trumbo's humor is only one thing that helped him survive the professional and personal hardships of the blacklist, which drove more than one of his Hollywood friends to kill themselves and took a toll on Trumbo's children.

Despite broad satire about racism and border fences that will appeal to some liberals, the movie doesn't line up neatly along party lines -- except in that other sense of the word "party." It's a movie that just wants to have fun.

Ultimately, Divide and Conquer offers useful lessons — and maybe even a little hope — for people on both sides of the national divide, about just how we came to this terrible, but not irreversible, place.

There’s some fun to be had, as long as your idea of fun includes being grossed out.

Though marketed as a comedy, this film is too creepy and acerbic to be consistently comic.

The real problem isn’t an overabundance of potential killers. Rather, it’s the fact that the film, from writer-director Aaron Katz (“Land Ho!”), does so little to make you care about the crime, or its victim, that the whole thing feels like an academic exercise.

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.

Engrossing, educational, amusing and disturbing. And who could ask for more than that from a film?

Fortunately, Ahmed (an Oscar nominee for last year’s Sound of Metal and more recently seen in the niche Mogul Mowgli) delivers another one of his reliably watchable performances.

Like A Quiet Place, Part II is a lean, nearly flab- and gristle-free piece of sci-fi steak.

Sweet and wise little film.

Pure David Mamet is an acquired, but delicious, taste.

It’s a more than serviceable pleasure, for fans of Austen’s 19th-century comedy of manners and romantic misunderstanding.

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

Shot with a shaky hand-held camera, Wonderland is a sentimental fairy tale with a gritty documentary feel.

This familiar-sounding melodrama works because of the extraordinary performance, in the title role, by Alba August, a young actress whose every emotion is made manifest, like passing clouds or a burst of sunshine, on her uncannily expressive face.

This cinematic Macbeth possesses a terrible beauty, evoking fear, sadness, awe and confusion. Presented with the aesthetic of a dark comic book, it’s also a mournful masterpiece, rendering Shakespeare’s spectacle with all the sorrow and majesty that it deserves.

The empowerment trajectory of Ms. Purple, whose title may refer both to the color of two dresses worn by its protagonist and to the hue of hard-won bruises she sports by the end of the film, will surprise no one.

Ingrid Goes West doesn’t quite go south, but in diving headfirst into the swamp of Internet addiction, its vision gets a little murky.

Despite her biting legal writing, she comes across, on camera, as unfailingly mild-mannered, decorous and polite, especially when the film explores her rather unlikely friendship, based on a shared love of opera, with her late conservative colleague Antonin Scalia.

A gorgeously morbid meditation on the interconnectivity of life.

It is Carandiru's ability to humanize its central characters ... that gives the movie its wrenching, tragic power

Directed by Heather Lenz, the film offers insight and eye candy, despite the fact that it is far more traditional — in style and format — than its subject.

As exhausting as it is exhilarating to watch, the film in the end is less than fully satisfying.

The first story “Giraffes” tells is one of endangered animals. The second — and equally powerful one — is a narrative of not just one woman’s struggle to be taken seriously, but the struggle of all women to do so.

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

The tale, from Brazilian writer-director Daniel Ribeiro, is told with such tenderness, such intelligence and such aching honesty that it takes on the weight of something far more significant than puppy love. Like its subject, first kisses and best friends, it’s hard to forget.

The director Alexander Sokurov is a visual virtuoso. So it’s odd, not to mention a bit disappointing, to find that the Russian filmmaker’s latest project, Francofonia, is so talky and, with rare exceptions, visually dull.

A compelling, exquisitely acted drama about the shock waves emanating from -- and toward -- a single act of almost inexplicable violence.

Both wry and sobering, if such a thing is possible. In Jerusalem, apparently, it's inevitable.

All about undertones, obliqueness and expectancy, about the scent, if you will, of something no one can stop

Wise, funny, sweet, sexy and kind.

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.

Portman, a vegan, is the main tour guide to this challenging excursion to the world of slaughterhouses and CAFOs, which one commentator likens to petri dishes for antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

Lieberman and Gordon direct this almost family affair with a touch that is paradoxically light yet broad, from a screenplay expanded from their 2020 short by the same name.

Sundown is at its most engrossing as an individual portrait, even if its inscrutable subject is a person to whom virtually no (sane) viewer will relate. Roth is still a great and mesmerizing actor, even when he’s drifting, vacantly, through a hellscape.

Long Way North combines thrilling ad­ven­ture with a slightly somber mood. It’s a beautiful trip, even if it’s a little chilly and sad when it finally gets to where it’s going.

Honest because it gets a paradoxical truth: There's more to life than football, even when there isn't.

The point being: Even when questions of life and death loom large, someone still has to make dinner. That observation doesn’t make Ordinary Love a major motion picture event. But it does, in its own quiet, wise way, nudge it just a little bit closer to the extraordinary.

The wisecracks fly fast and furious

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.

Argentine filmmaker Daniel Burman's shaky-camera, cinema-verite-style dramedy meanders in charming fashion.

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

As channeled by the extraordinary Hoffman, Dan Mahowny is less a freak than a nerve-deadened Everyman with the courage to search for something that makes him feel alive.

It’s an informative, if slightly unstructured, narrative, yet it plays more like a horror story.

A lovingly laid-back documentary about the charms, liquid and otherwise, of the traditional Irish watering hole.

Moretti mostly avoids weepy melodrama, choosing instead to focus on a side meditation about the slippery nature of reality.