Michael O'Sullivan

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.

A surprisingly intelligent and effective (if slightly pulpy) psychological thriller.

Human Flow asks us, implicitly, why we seem to care so much about certain living creatures and not others.

What is their passion for? Not newspapers, or even a single newspaper, per se, but for journalism itself, the practice of which is nowhere stronger than at the Times. That, at least, is how Page One argues it. It's a compelling argument.

The Hedgehog is a treat: a movie that's smart, grown-up, wry and deeply moving. Best of all, this is accomplished with the lightest of cinematic strokes. It sneaks up on you, without grandstanding, melodrama or outright jokes.

The fate of these birds, which, the film tells us, could live into their 40s, becomes as engrossing as many a human drama.

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

It’s a while before we learn anything, even a name, about the title character in The Wedding Guest. Played by Dev Patel, who delivers an unexpectedly stoic — yet predictably appealing — lead performance, he is a man of deep professionalism and equally deep mystery.

Billed as a spoken-word musical, but only occasionally utilizing the visual idioms of song and/or dance — and only rarely harnessing the two together — the film is nevertheless an exuberant hodgepodge of everyday joy and frustration (and the occasional mild trauma).

Life has cool effects, real suspense and a sweet twist. It ain’t rocket science, but it does what it does well — even, one might say, with a kind of genius.

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.

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

It’s a haunting story of love between two misfits who shouldn’t be together. In its doomed yet somehow hopeful spirit, it’s closer to the noir sensibility of “Let the Right One In” than the pop-horror of “Twilight.”

Ultimately, Next Goal Wins isn’t really a sports movie at all, but one whose deceptively simple mantras — “Be happy” and “There’s more to life than soccer” — are the most subversive (and winning) things about it.

Whatever your belief system, this much is gospel: Movies like The Conjuring are less about the battle between God and Satan than the battle between the silly and the scary.

It's great fun.

The movie is called Love Crime. But its hidden message has more to do with business than with passion. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. Especially one in a power suit, who knows how to work a room.

It is a remarkable, strange and politically potent first film.

As this film’s engrossing character study makes clear, this woman of extraordinary tastes and appetites was ahead of her time, in more ways than one.

It's the rare 2 1/2 -hour film that doesn't make you look at your watch once. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is such a film.

The story of The Boxtrolls, in lesser hands, might have turned out only so-so. Under Laika’s loving, labor-intensive touch, it takes on a kind of magic.

A lean and hungry thing. With the sparest of storytelling, the French filmmaker ("35 Shots of Rum") devours her audience, swallowing us up in a yarn that is as enigmatic as it is engrossing.

Not all of its surprises are pleasant ones, but there is a certain satisfaction in experiencing a yarn that is so obstinately un-anticipatable.

In the case of Sharper, we’re treated to puzzle boxes within puzzle boxes, each one delivered in sequential chapters — titled after the film’s main characters, Tom, Sandra, Max and Madeline — and unpacked, initially in reverse chronological order, with satisfying, if somewhat predictable, style and suspense. If you’re seeking substance, look elsewhere.

Together, under the assured direction of first-time feature filmmaker Oren Moverman, these three actors tell a story that is at once hard-hitting and bizarrely gentle.

[Fox] still has an immensely likable and funny on-camera persona, and now he is using that gift — along with a different one, this nakedly honest film memoir — to share hope, joy and perhaps a sense of acceptance with others.

The film’s writers, directors and stars lovingly impale bloodsucker mythology with the sharpened wooden stick of comedy. As with “Shaun of the Dead,” their satire is a crude but effective tool.

A balanced and deeply satisfying documentary assessment of his work, which is lavishly on display in hundreds of the artist’s images.

In the end, “Nutcracker” is a delightfully old-school diversion. The plot may not always hum with the clockwork precision of one of Drosselmeyer’s mechanical toys, but like a music box, it nevertheless plays a sweet tune.

An Oscar nominee for best international feature, Denmark’s harrowing, slow-boil thriller “The Girl With the Needle” has been described by some as a horror film. And from the hallucinatory opening montage of distorted, leering faces, this black-and-white drama promises to be the stuff of nightmares.

In the end, Marguerite isn’t a comedy so much as a love story. True love, it seems, isn’t just blind; it must be deaf, too.

The filmmakers’ focus-shifting approach to telling this story is smart and effective. But its true power lies in the history lesson it eventually segues to, landing with a gut punch.

Despite the story’s familiarity, its star manages to turn its many tropes into a winning formula.

For the most part, it works brilliantly.

Japanese writer-director Hirokazu Kore-eda’s follow-up to “Shoplifters,” his Oscar-nominated 2018 film about a family of liars, cheats and thieves, is, like that unexpectedly heartwarming drama, a story whose darker themes of social dysfunction and fissure are sublimated into a fable of surprising sweetness.

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.

This “Mean Girls” may be a sugarcoated object lesson about unhealthy, ingrained behaviors, but it’s no downer.

Its smallness is its strength — as is its silence. That’s the odd and evocative resonance of Hearts Beat Loud. For a movie that is so rock-and-roll, it turns out to be less about making noise than about listening to the message that can only be heard in the stillness that comes after the song.

Days of Future Past is, in itself, as intoxicating as a shot of adrenaline. It’s what summer movies are meant to be.

Peace Officer piles up evidence of outrageous excess, provoking what is likely to be a response, from its audience, that is far less measured than that of its main subject.

It’s hard to say what is most difficult to digest about Prophet’s Prey.

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.

Jamal Khashoggi was a complex, even contradictory human being, and his death an affront to freedom and decency. Does the world need two documentaries about him, coming in rapid succession? Maybe not. But you wouldn’t go wrong by watching either one.

The films are highly entertaining and highly disturbing, in the latter case for both the right and the wrong reasons. While admirably delineating moral decay, which eats away at one character like a virus, the movies never really get at the seed of evil.

The love language of the Russo family is shouting — one of several cliches deployed here — but Romano and his co-writer, Mark Stegemann, deftly deflate and dodge most other stereotypes, creating a funny and touching father-and-son tale about aspiration and finding your own path.

Thoughts become things. That's the message of Rise of the Guardians, a charming if slightly dark and cobwebbed animated feature about how believing in something makes it real, or real enough.

Elaine Stritch’s strength, along with the film’s, comes from her honesty. She is herself, even when — maybe especially when — she knows she’s being watched.

There’s nothing unheard of here: a bad guy, a haunted house, a hero. But it’s what The Black Phone does with those simple parts that sparks a spooky connection.

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 one that speaks not just to Presley’s (and, arguably, America’s) fall from grace, but to the imperfections — and, yes, the lofty ambitions — of this strange, in some ways beautiful and in some ways overburdened little film.

It's both straight-faced spy film and sly spy spoof. That's a difficult balancing act, but director James Mangold gets it exactly right.

Antlers obeys the rules of horror — many of which are familiar, even at times cliche — while also bending them. It’s a creature feature at heart, yes, but its footing is grounded in the tragedies we hear about in the news every day.

By looking closely, clinically and ultimately compassionately at one eccentric practitioner of a dying way of life...Peter and the Farm nevertheless manages to harvest not just understanding of one peculiar, broken little man, but a broader wisdom about the cycle of seasons that we all must endure on this planet.

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

It isn’t easy to explain the appeal of the “John Wick” movies, and they are inarguably not for every taste, but there is a purity to them that transcends their barbarity and has something to do with the central character.

In writer-director David Chase's heartfelt delivery, this same old tune somehow comes out sounding fresh.

A fascinating saga, especially for fans of animation.

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

Hey, I never said The Covenant wasn’t manipulative. It is — skillfully, entertainingly and at times almost overbearingly so. But oh, boy, does it work.

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

For many, the story will pose an insurmountable challenge to even enjoy. But enjoyment it seems, is not Potter’s point. Yes, it is an unvarnished portrait of a mind breaking into fragments. Yet it is more than that, too.

That we almost don’t question the plausibility of this oddest of odd couples is a tribute to the sensitive direction of French Canadian filmmaker Maxime Giroux, who wrote the relatable yet keenly observant script with Alexandre Laferrière.

The most compelling thing about Winter in Wartime, the Netherlands' official entry for Best Foreign Language Film at this year's Oscars, is not the story. And the story is pretty darn compelling.

The only artwork by Ai that Klayman's film dwells on at any length -- aside from the iconic "bird's nest" stadium he helped design for the Beijing Olympics, and then denounced as tasteless -- is "Sunflower Seeds." Created for a 2010 exhibition at London's Tate Modern, the installation featured 100 million hand-painted ceramic sunflower seeds spread out on the floor.

Don’t expect more of Teen Spirit than the movie can deliver: It’s an unapologetically slight story about a girl with ambitions that many would call shallow. But even as it obeys the rules of the Cinderella story in many ways, it defies them in some others.

The second part of Peter Jackson’s “The Hobbit” trilogy goes a long way — and at 2 1/2 hours, I do mean long — toward righting the wrongs of the first movie, which was even longer.

You’ll be glad that A Hard Day isn’t happening to you, but you won’t regret observing it all from a safe distance.

Like the best ad man, he makes his point by making us laugh.

[A] well-told tale.

Infinity War is big, blustery and brave, taking viewers to places that they may not be used to going.

By the standards of the traditional ghost story, A Ghost Story isn’t much of one. By the standards of the moody art-house meditation on love, loss, memory, forgetting, attachment, letting go and the nature of eternity, it’s pretty darn great.

It does take half the movie before the story --really kicks in. When it does, it'll knock the air out of you.

After all, it isn't every kid's movie that wrestles with the subject of faith in a higher power, or sin, or the afterlife. And it isn't every kid's film that can do it so entertainingly. Sure, that's heavy stuff if you're looking for it. But it doesn't spoil the great, great fun to be had in Narnia - or the magical spell it casts - if you're not.

The most interesting parts of this conversation come when Dorf­man talks about the art of portraiture.

Mostly, The Bookshop is a pretext to watch three great actors do their thing: Mortimer, as the film’s mousy but surprisingly formidable heroine; Clarkson, as her smiling adversary, Violet Gamart; and Bill Nighy, as the town’s reclusive loner — and its only voracious reader — Mr. Brundish, who comes to Florence’s aid and advocacy.

God Loves Uganda clearly lays the blame for it at the feet of the American evangelical movement. The movie doesn’t really argue its case, preferring to stand back, in quiet outrage, as the representatives of that movement are shown with the match in their hands.

Sometimes a movie makes a point that's been made before, but makes it so beautifully and so quietly that it feels like you're discovering it for the first time. Hideaway does that, with the obliqueness of an off-hand comment. The glancing touch makes it all the more hard-hitting.

A funny and touching coming-of-age story.

The question that looms large here, lingering long after the closing credits, is whether, despite our human need for forgiveness, absolution is ever truly possible.

It’s a story of standing out and blending in, sometimes at the same time.

It’s a small film made larger by Ahmed’s ability to take something so interior — hearing loss — and make it so visible, so palpable.

The film is studded with many tiny, lovely moments.

The film suggests that it doesn't really matter whether Harris ever gets back in uniform. He's forever carrying around a piece of unexploded ordnance in his head.

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.

The ensemble cast, reunited from the 2018 production, is never less than mesmerizing, even in the context of what is essentially a museum piece.

Only the third feature from writer and co-director Ilker Catak, who won a student academy award in 2015 for his film school project “Fidelity,” “Teachers’ Lounge” is far more than a conventional whodunit, though it does build a nice head of suspense as it grapples with themes of justice, doubt and bias.

A surprisingly sweet and sassy rom-com about childhood best friends.

Lamb is weird and disturbing, even by the standards of the movie’s indie distributor, A24, which is known for its eclectic and times unsettling content. But it’s also strangely beautiful.

Living mostly avoids sappiness. And it shows an actor at the peak of his powers.

Horror works — or it doesn’t — in the flickering, moving images of the screen, not the page. Sandberg knows that. His artistry, for that’s what it is, is like that of the dollmaker Sam Mullins: to take inert material and create a living, breathing thing.

The filmmaking, by first-time feature director Dan Trachtenberg, is suitably claustrophobic and suspenseful, working up to a level of stress that may be unhealthy for anyone with a weak heart.

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.

In the end, An Honest Liar becomes a far more layered tale than it starts out to be.

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.

A tale so raucous, raunchy and punch-drunk with love for the rebellious spirit of rawk -- and so disdainful of those who have tried to squelch it -- that it pretty much negates any claims to objectivity, let alone factuality. In other words, it's not a documentary.

It’s a noir tale for contemporary audiences who have developed an appetite for sensation from comic book movies, not literature. The film doesn’t need all that spectacle, and it is at its best when it is at its simplest, relying on the power of storytelling and vivid language, not gory effects.

Regardless of the silliness of the situation -- or, in truth, because of it -- they're a joy to watch.

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

Coupled with the fact that the plant and animal life (hoopoes, zorilles and ground squirrels, among other beasties) really look African, and that the film's original score is by the great contemporary Senegalese musician Youssou N'Dour, Kirikou and the Sorceress's surprising honesty about the banality of evil makes the movie -- even with all its magic -- feel truly authentic.

There are gray hairs on some of the people in this fascinating film: Jimmy Buffett, Tom Jones (yes, that Tom Jones — he played the 2019 show) and others. But the energy that the film puts out is vital and full of sap.

The movie takes place in Iran, yet it’s really situated in the crack of daylight that separates truth from a lie. It’s a tight squeeze, Farhadi seems to say, and one whose pinch this tragedy of the everyday makes us feel, acutely.

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

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

Like his other films, this one takes an admittedly slender thread of an idea — one that would make a perfectly good premise for a four-minute comic sketch — and stretches it to almost the breaking point, and sometimes beyond, twisting and intertwining it with other nonsense along the way, just for the heck of it.

Bad role models sometimes make the most interesting movie characters. The ill-mannered, unkempt, foulmouthed and hot-tempered title character of Hesher is just such a walking contradiction.

In addition to presenting a parable about the collapse of society, Amirpour’s film is also a kind of postmodern Adam-and-Eve story.

It's a muscular, physical movie, pieced together from arresting imagery and revelatory gestures, large and small.

Clemency, which won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, isn’t really a death row drama in the same way that “Just Mercy” is. Rather, it’s a character study of a witness who, vicariously, is a stand-in for each of us.

Fiddler’s Journey aims to tell a story that delves into more than creative and technical details. Although it is also about those details.

It’s a larky bunch of malarkey, laced with just enough moral complexity — washed down with car chases and capers — to set your own tush a-twitching.

It is not a story of justice, but of a kind of standoff between good and evil. Initially, there seems precious little of the former.

As usual, Marling is a pleasure to watch for the psychological complexity and contradictions of her character. This time, the story almost lives up to the performance.

As the movie makes clear, none of these conditions are reversible. Music isn’t a cure for anything. But it does seem to be a key to unlocking long-closed doors and establishing connections with people who have become, through age or infirmity, imprisoned inside themselves.

Scrupulously unpreachy, it resists all attempts to distill a moral or message, seeking truth in the honesty of its characters and their process of self-discovery.

It’s a series of small and seemingly meaningless incidents that, in Wells’s telling, loom large only from the vantage of hindsight.

10 Years doesn't completely avoid the road-not-taken theme. It does, however, neatly navigate around many of the potholes, finding a novel and nuanced approach to addressing the ways that our mistakes make us better, wiser and more human.

Offers up the kind of pleasures that only a summer movie can...The cast is good-looking, the soundtrack is loud, the plot is stupid.

Keys isn't given much to do except look as though she's posing for an album cover, but Okonedo's face is a marvel. Every thought, every emotion flickers across it like clouds obscuring the sun.

Delivered with the kind of English aplomb that PBS audiences around the country have come to know and love. It must be the accent.

Satisfies a hunger for the basics: a decent mystery to chew on, a bit of juicy suspense, maybe a plot twist as garnish. The fare is all on the standard menu, but it goes down well just the same.

At least it's a pleasant walk, with attractive people and nice conversation

I will admit that this TV skit stretched out to a filament-thin 83 minutes is idiotic, but I mean that in a good way.

It's a sweet but slight film whose undeniable appeal is largely due to the performances of its flat-out adorable leads.

Maybe not wonderful, but still pretty darn good.

The frequent, mundane talks -- which Alexandra engages in with her grandson, Malika and the base camp's enlisted men -- are not so much about politics as they are about people.

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

Very funny in a way reminiscent of "Babe: Pig in the City."

The disparity between Cindy and Jerry is itself obscene, but less so than that illuminated by the customers of Farewell Cruises, whom Yung shows to be almost parasitic in the way they feed off the misery (albeit without knowing it) of those who serve them.

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.

Enriched by a strong and unforced supporting cast, "Bread" nourishes the heart, even if its fairy-tale ending feels tacked on and unnecessary.

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.

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]

Starting out as a wacky little comedy about a mousy Spanish couple who become unwitting porn stars, Torremolinos 73 suddenly morphs, during the third act, into a far more sober and tender story about the lengths to which a man will go to give his wife what she wants.

A turbo-charged remake that should alienate no fans of the adrenalized 1975 original.

Much to my surprise and delight, the movie is nothing like its marketing.

Admirably restrained melodrama.

Within this overly familiar trope, there's plenty of room for small surprises, not the least of which are delightful, understated performances all around.

The acting of the main cast is uniformly nuanced, and, except for some bad makeup on Mendy's father, the film never looks as low-budget as it must have been.

It's a thoughtfully constructed story, with nuanced performances all around and even a mild surprise thrown in, but the whole thing feels ever so slightly enervated, like a game of chess between codgers in the park.

An entertaining and surprisingly serious look at the infamous New York discotheque, with a genuine nostalgia for the late '70s and early '80s.

If you saw the French version, well, here it is, in Disney language, with John-Hughes-style slapstick.

Zahn is the single biggest reason why Management is a delightfully screwball romantic comedy and not a crazed-stalker film. And why it works. Like watching a puppy chase its own tail, it's a pleasure watching Mike try to win Sue over.

Upon this fine mess shines Janeane Garofalo like a ray of sarcastic sunlight as FBI agent Shelby...With her gift for sweet bile, the sardonic Garofalo makes every second on screen a treasure to be cherished.

Jim de Seve's cogent pro-gay-marriage argument appeals equally to emotion and reason.

By equal measure tragic and hopeful, it is both a love song to escapism and a warm embrace of the real world.

It might make you tense, it might make you nauseous, and its clangorous roar could well give you a migraine headache.

A bodice-ripper for intellectuals.

The real question is whether the film moves the "Brideshead" ball down the playing field in any meaningful way since the acclaimed miniseries. And I'd have to say that it doesn't so much advance it as it shrinks it into a golf-ball-size nugget.

When it comes right down to it, the talking animal thing is sort of secondary to what is, at heart, just a simple but perfectly satisfying little story about a boy who wants to keep his dog.

Mind you, there's lots to like, if not love, in this London-set, star-studded comedy. Unfortunately, there's a little bit to hate, too.

A chick flick for guys, with a pH balance in perfect equilibrium between the crass and the sweet.

A gorgeously photographed storybook.

It's French. It's sexy. It's got a killer soundtrack.

It's always nice to see Clint, and especially nice to see him play someone whose humanity -- no, whose mortality -- is all too apparent.

Sobering yet faintly optimistic documentary.

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.

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

Yes, The Yes Men is funny, but it's humor that hurts.

A parody of B-movies stupid enough -- and yet with just enough brains -- to appeal to the most discriminating fans of the genre.

Will probably win over as many fuddy-duddy fathers as fillies with its mixture of sweetness tempered with genial cynicism.

The Irish independent feature I Went Down is an elusive leprechaun of a film that doggedly resists being pigeonholed. Once caught, however, it yields a small pot of gold in its droll performances and deadpan wit. [3 July 1998, p.N46]

The path taken by the film is somewhat labyrinthine and obscure, but it offers enough rewards to counterbalance its frustrations.

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

The words more than hold their own against the pictures.

One rousing, if rote, adventure.

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.

Eavesdropping on the glib conversations of witty urbanites can be a pleasant diversion, but after so much volubility, you might find yourself wishing that they would all just shut up and dance.

With this bold stamp [director Jane Campion] lays claim to the story that follows as wholly her own.

Although the rest of the story plays out with melodramatic predictability, it's timely, not to mention refreshing, to see an affirmation of true love over hot sex, along with a reminder that the two aren't necessarily mutually exclusive.

A touching documentary on the immigrant experience -- or at least one very tough slice of it.

Fortunately, Jackson and Spacey have enough sassy wit and crackling intensity between them to keep The Negotiator from becoming hostage to its own inanity.

I got exactly what I expected: Scared and tickled, within an inch of my life.

The scenes of Green lavishing affection on his charges under the closing credits go a long way to rounding out this entertaining portrait of a volatile but effective educator.

Under Our Skin has a major ax to grind, but if even half of what it alleges is true, it's more deeply terrifying than any slasher film you'll ever see.

Fox's film seems to say that the kind of saintly purity that would enable one to walk on water -- or to kill with impunity and without repercussions -- doesn't exist.

The two-hour film never feels a minute too long.

An odd and oddly endearing romantic black comedy.

That movie is not half bad, either. The trial, by comparison, will feel familiar to anyone who has ever watched any David take on any corporate Goliath before a court of law ("Erin Brockovich," "A Civil Action," etc., etc.).

Highly watchable stuff (not to mention listenable, with a relentless but not overly obtrusive hip-hop soundtrack propelling the action).

In the end, it may leave its audience, young and old alike, just as charmed as its bewitched young heroine.

Genial rather than an affront to good taste. It's also pretty darn funny.

On the whole, Twilight works as both love story and vampire story, thanks mainly to the performances of its principals, Pattinson and Stewart.

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

Not the sharpest political humor I've ever heard, but it gets my vote for the stupidest fun I've had in a long time.

Trenchant and visceral, American History X may not be perfect, but it's a darn sight better than good.

A provocative and uncomfortable comedy.

The outspoken congressman is just as entertaining as his liberal fans already know him to be.

Unlike some of its recent ilk – "Spider-Man," for example – The Punisher is, no disrespect, a thoroughly morose and bilious affair. That is precisely what I like best about it.

Gently entertaining tale.

An innocent comedic revenge fantasy that somehow manages to be sweet and wickedly satisfying at the same time.

With its spooky atmosphere to spare and a riveting central performance by Kingsley, an actor who manages to elicit both terror and sympathy, I was able to forget all those things, basking in the pleasure of my own goose bumps. So, for an hour and a half, will you.

Is Along Came Polly a great film? No, probably not, but it is a very amusing one.

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

Gets most of its juice from listening to groups of people who were students and activists in segregated Clarendon County, S.C., and Prince Edward County, Va., during the years leading up to the case.

A thoughtful and surprisingly affecting portrait of a screwed-up man who dared to mess with some powerful people, seen through the eyes of the idealistic kid who chooses to champion his ultimately losing cause.

What separates Calvin and Eddie from the typical comic hero -- and each "Barbershop" movie from the standard yuk-fest -- is that these folks know how to back up all the hot air with meaningful action.

Fairly fascinating little documentary.

XXY is, in the best possible sense of the word, an awkward film.

Momma's Man takes that germ of an idea and lets it flower, in a way that is both odd and oddly compelling.

Corny? Oh, yeah. But it's also reasonably good fun.

It somehow feels richly, hilariously real, even -- at its most bizarre -- familiar.

Henry Fool, the fascinating and often infuriating new film from the idiosyncratic Hal Hartley. [24 Jul 1998]

If anyone can sell the idea of ... some psycho "Sherlock Holmes," it's Samuel L. Jackson.

Fitfully amusing comedy from director and one-time sitcom king Garry Marshall, the fantasy is alive and well among little girls of all ages.

What sticks in my craw -- just a bit -- is the way the film doesn't fully trust the true story's inherent power.

What a shame, therefore, that in its puritanical treatment of the only strong female character, the otherwise politically correct police story is blithely unaware of its own closet misogyny.

A modest yet moving fact-based drama.

A charming, poetic and at times surreal stop-motion animation co-written with Etgar Keret and based on the Israeli writer's short stories.

By going back to its origins and dusting itself off, the King Arthur story has proved itself to have a very contemporary resonance.

Surprisingly brusque yet likable film.

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.

A sweet and funny take on the crossed-wire romantic couplings of 'A Midsummer Night's Dream.'

Shakespeare asked, "Or in the heart, or in the head?" It's not a new question by any means, but it's one that is given a fresh and refreshing adult twist by Decena's heady yet steady-handed Dopamine.

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.

Levine brings a lot of visual style to “Mandy,” in addition to coaxing subdued, believable performances from his young cast.

As Eleanor, Bonham Carter delivers a sweetly oddball performance playing a high-maintenance but fiercely determined grouch who is mostly impossible to like. Swank, for her part, is no picnic either: A former psychiatric nurse who discovered law later in life, her Colette is a largely charmless workaholic.

Final Account aims to provide insight into the psychological mechanism that would allow otherwise good people to stand idly by (or actively participate in) the perpetration of mass murder. As such, it’s only partly effective, and frustrating.

The movie marches so quickly past the many milestones of Welles’s career and life that it doesn’t have to time to linger — lovingly or otherwise — on any of them.

Hello I Must Be Going isn't heavy lifting, to be sure. But it's still worthy of a little end zone dance.

21 Bridges will win no prizes for originality or twists. (It won’t win any prizes for anything, to be honest.) But it’s made well enough. Brothers Joe and Anthony Russo (“Avengers: Endgame”) are the producers, and Irish director Brian Kirk (“Games of Thrones”) knows how to keep an old jalopy like this well-oiled to get us across the finish line.

The film is far from prestige fare, yet more often than not, it hits that summer sweet spot between the silly and the satisfying.

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.”

Directed and co-written by Israeli filmmaker Eytan Fox, whose films often deal with gay themes, Sublet feels like it’s setting itself up, just a little bit, as a same-sex version of How Stella Got Got Her Groove Back.

After dispensing with the sluggish setup of the film’s first act, Berg shifts into high gear, powerfully evoking the feelings of dread and white-knuckle excitement that much of America no doubt felt as the manhunt progressed.

Sweet, strange and at times slightly scary.

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.

It’s all kiss-kiss, bang-bang and backstabbing, with a twist that, while effective, leads to a denouement of questionable — and not entirely satisfying — moral reckoning. In some ways, Yardie plays out like a film noir, but with a strangely sweet ending, and without that genre’s deliciously bitter aftertaste.

Hits all the expected marks for raunch and vulgarity, with the bonus that it is actually also kind of sweet.

Hauser, as Richard, is absolutely superb: nebbishy, so solicitous of authority that he barely bothers to defend himself and seeming, at times, slightly dimwitted. As Watson, Rockwell often steals the spotlight, playing his client’s most ardent defender and, when called for, his most dismayed life coach, as Richard naively finds himself playing into the hands of his enemies again and again.

Ma is, at heart, an overly familiar story of terrorized teens, albeit one that manages to find a few new twists to that tired trope.

The film’s counterintuitive success is largely due to Derbez, who demonstrates why he is beloved, both south and north of the border.

A good-looking, engrossing, true tale, superficially much like 1981 best-picture winner "Chariots of Fire," but without that Olympic drama's themes of antisemitism and faith. If The Boys in the Boat is missing something, it's substance.

The film is less deeply affecting than merely admirable. It’s a good, slick and well-intentioned film that wants so hard to be an important one that the slight feeling of letdown it leaves is magnified.

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

A heck of a ride. On the way to its unpredictable (if less than wholly satisfying) conclusion, it is entertaining, a little silly and visually dazzling.

The documentary might make you believe in miracles, considering how tedious — if not impossible — this interactive artwork comes across.

Inside is a one-man show. Its rewards — such as they are, in this bleakly depressing thought exercise — will depend entirely on your appreciation of its star. Is it entertaining? Nemo has only art for company. We at least have Willem Dafoe.

Liman knows how to keep the convoluted, almost impossibly far-fetched story on the rails, without losing our attention, and he adds many details that will bring a smile.

Despite Page’s excellent voiceover, “Bettie Page” suffers from embarrassingly choppy editing and a parade of stock film clips used to illustrate episodes recounted by its subject.

If it sounds wholly bleak, it isn't. Remember, this is a movie about a yard sale. Over the course of the film, Nick struggles with the idea of, as he puts it, "selling all my crap" - he means that both literally and metaphorically - and getting on with his life. That sentiment, and Ferrell's refusal to sentimentalize it, is reason enough to smile.

If The Exorcist: Believer is all about devotion to spiritual (or at least cinematic) faith, its failure to live up to the power of the first film, which made zealots of even the most cynical moviegoers, borders on sacrilege.

The film suffers a bit for its slowness. But once you get used to the fact that this is not “World War Z,” it has its small pleasures, which are both cerebral and emotional.

The joke seems to be that in 2013, it’s hard to teach an old bloodsucker new tricks. Still, Byzantium has a few moves that might surprise you. They have nothing to do with blood, but everything to do with the heart.

There’s something in the relationship between these two partnerless men — their yearning for connection — that feels, beneath the jokes, very real and very recognizable.

When Words on Bathroom Walls is at its sunniest and most blithe, the moral of the story feels a little more like a punchline than is appropriate.

The film is at its best when evoking the painful labor of adolescent self-discovery, a process — as rendered here — that is not unlike a butterfly struggling to emerge from a chrysalis.

Sing ends, predictably and without straining, on a high note, with everybody’s problems resolved. If only real life could so easily be realigned, by a singing pig.

Stirring at times, soggy and overly sentimental at others, the film moves surprisingly slow, even though its action, which takes place over many years of legal maneuvering, has been condensed for narrative expediency.

The film feels claustrophobic at times, and stagy. It helps that the supporting cast is uniformly good.

The movie is about so much more than politics. Growing up, growing disillusioned, gaining wisdom — these are the themes of Levitt’s slight but eminently watchable film.

Too frequently and too loudly, the sci-fi bells and whistles of Chaos Walking overwhelm its quieter, more engrossing elements, making it hard to hear what the film really seems to be saying.

This makes for an entertaining, if familiar ride.

There is no narration. There are no interviews. Just rote, monotonous activity — a recipe for repetitive stress injury — and the occasional fly-on-the -wall conversation on which we are allowed to briefly eavesdrop between several representatives of what Ascension suggests is as a nation of strivers, with hearts set on achieving what might be called the new Chinese Dream: wealth and success, in the world’s second largest economy.

One thing the film does do, if only inadvertently, is offer insight as to how we have gotten to this state of affairs.

Cousteau is a thorough if somewhat by-the-book profile of a pioneer in the field of marine ecology and an activist for better environmental stewardship.

Scorchingly raunchy - and yes, pretty funny.

The Mountain is what it is, and any attempt to recapitulate its meaning in some other form (like — ahem — a movie review) is a fool’s errand. With that in mind, it is probably best to set this thought down, and leave it with you: The Mountain is not for everyone, but it is, most emphatically, something else.

As Ravel puts it, the disproportionate influence of money on elections isn’t a Democratic or Republican problem, but a “gateway issue to every other issue you might care about.” Dark Money makes the case, as well as any film can, that she’s pretty much right on the money.

I'll say one thing for The Skin I Live In, Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodovar's ambitious, crazy, even a-little-bit-infuriating new film: I did not see it coming.

Unfortunately, the sequel shortchanges the very relationships that gave the first movie its surprising heart.

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.

The disconnect between Barry’s mature and adolescent selves, a running gag, can be amusing. But coming on the heels of the parade of similar content that we’ve been subjected to for the past several years in the world of superhero films and shows, the device cloys.

While cute, enormously entertaining and stuffed with more jokes than you can count, is only a half-step up. Partly, that’s a problem that’s built into its very premise.

Plummer is particularly good, delivering every line of dialogue as if it’s improvised, and with an astringent snort that only partially hides the fact that Jack really does care about people. Farmiga, for her part, never strays into histrionics, although she comes close after allowing herself to be seduced by her caddish ex.

Yes, it’s handsomely shot, but there are long sequences where little happens. True to life, perhaps, but slow.

Without being parodistic, it manages to poke fun at the air of privilege and strenuous political correctness common to lefty, liberal arts schools, while retaining a certain affection for their heartfelt quirks.

The film’s success is due to the twinkly commitment of the large and talented cast.