Michael O'Sullivan

It isn't as sad a movie as "Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work," another behind-the-mask documentary. It's funnier. But it's just as illuminating.

The second half of this nearly two-hour film is a pure delight — fast-paced and funny and filled with special effects and humor as great as any recent Marvel movie, with the possible exception of “Guardians of the Galaxy.”

It’s a sweet and savory morsel of storytelling, drowning in a puddle of special-effects sauce.

It has as much of an ax to grind as the humorless and misguided bureaucrats it mocks.

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.

By turns sweet, sad, funny and poignant, We Have a Pope is the story of a man who doesn't want to be God's representative on Earth.

At times, The Man Who Sold His Skin plays like a cultural parody, but its aim is dead serious, and more sobering. The pathos and tragedy of the global refugee crisis is its target, not the pretensions of the international art market, and it, from time to time, delivers a sting.

Everest gets several things right, but it fails to find a way to make the average viewer relate to the people on the mountain.

Downton Abbey is eye and ear candy of the highest order: rich and delicious, but not especially nutritious.

Beltrn, for his part, makes a solidly believable Garca Lorca. The problem is with the man with whom he's obsessed. In Pattinson's performance, we never see what Garca Lorca sees in Dal.

The documentary makes an effective and rather chilling case that there is an almost unbroken chain between Adolf Hitler and Saddam Hussein.

For the most part, The Other Guys is seriously silly stuff, in the best sense.

To make matters worse, this third “Hangover” is dull.

For anyone with a taste for the stylized violence and self-aware cartoonishness of the John Wick films — a taste for blood and mayhem that comes closer to corn syrup than most cinematic carnage — Nobody is a brutal treat.

[A] captivating and meticulous new film by Alex Gibney.

Much of Greenland features chaotic crowd scenes. The real disaster is how quickly mankind descends into dismaying depravity.

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.

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

If Ready Player One is tedious at times, it’s also oodles of fun at others.

All in all, Jack Goes Boating is an auspicious -- if slightly ostentatious -- debut by Hoffman, one of today's greatest actors. Maybe next time his performance in front of his camera will be as subtle as his performance behind it.

The Lodge isn’t a perfect treat. But for those who like their movies dark and disturbing, it does the trick.

Feels like a song you may have heard before, but one whose aching beauty makes it endlessly listenable.

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

A blend of gentle comedy and poignant drama.

Admirably restrained melodrama.

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.

Van Dormael has crafted a saga that, even at two-plus hours, is endlessly, enormously watchable.

No ordinary horror film. If it were, it might be a bit better than it is. As the movie stands, it's a less-than-compelling relationship drama, with aliens.

Much of the film's humor hovers around crotch level. If jokes about mental illness, terminal disease and sex with orangutans sound funny to you, go for it.

There is still a self-consciousness and a forced quality to much of the humor that this TPT redux just can't shake.

The movie, for all its uneventfulness, is intensely memorable.

May not change the world, but it's deeply creepy and richly satisfying.

Shakes, rattles and rolls the house, building to a climax that makes you almost forget you're in a movie theater and not a football stadium at halftime.

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.

Ozon has created a monster that he can’t seem to let go of. Isabelle doesn’t just frighten her mother (and us). She seems to terrify Ozon, and I’m not sure I want to know why.

Its one-sidedness flirts with propaganda.

Simple without being slight, and profoundly moving without dipping into mawkishness.

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.

Yes, “Honk” picks some low-hanging fruit. But it also, as it turns out, leaves a sour aftertaste in the mouth.

The subtitle refers not only to the twilight of the 1920s but to a changing of the guard in this entertainment franchise as well. In that sense, maybe Downton Abbey isn’t really giving its fans what they want, but what they have always needed to accept in this epic saga: that time doesn’t stand still.

Despite the hot-button subject matter, there is no sense of currency, or even controversy, here. The drama seems less personal or political than one calculated for shock value. One late, violent plot twist is so preposterous as to defy the level of credulity one normally reserves for a horror film.

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

Ultimately, Atomic Blonde is, like its heroine, something of a machine. Lit by glowing neon, fueled by the rhythm of ’80s power pop and fashioned from stiletto heels, cigarettes, guns and sunglasses, it looks and sounds good, but it isn’t much of a conversationalist.

I’m Your Woman isn’t so much off-kilter as it is ballasted by a different, perhaps lower center of gravity. The title sounds exploitative — perhaps even silly — but the tale it spins is one of power and, ultimately, of coming unexpectedly, satisfyingly, into one’s own.

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

The Christian-themed Where Hope Grows wears its heart on its sleeve, hawking its message of salvation through faith to anyone who’s in the market for cheesy uplift and saccharine sentiment. It’s a soft sell, to be sure, but it’s salesmanship all the same.

The discussions that take place on camera, in tastefully appointed suites, are frank and often offer fascinating insights into these dilemmas. But it is the sharply jarring — and dismayingly repetitive — footage of carnage that will stay with you long after the echoes of the film’s subjects’ words have faded from your mind.

At the core of the movie is the message that the real lonely hunter is the heart.

The Eyes of My Mother looks marvelous.... But that’s about all this absurd, illogical and underwhelming thriller has going for it.

With its cast of back-stabbing functionaries and desk jockeys, Spy Game makes the sport and hard work of espionage seem chillingly real.

To anyone who feels, at times, so overwhelmed by the drumbeat of climate disaster, economic collapse, crime, mass shooting and terrorism, deadly viruses, and political polarization that it feels as the apocalypse is upon us, Knock at the Cabin will resonate powerfully.

Because The Summit jumps around in time and because the events on the mountain happened over two days and at locations often far apart, the already garbled chronology of deaths is made even more confusing.

"Him” and “Her” make for a remarkably powerful film experiment, retaining the insights into relationships of “Them” while filling in many of its invisible storytelling fissures.

Not enough to keep this celluloid ship from sinking under the weight of its own stupidity.

I wanted to buy this story. I really did. But its protagonist floats through the action — filled with jealousy, lust and violence — as though he were anesthetized.

A straightforward, B-movie horror flick — “The Snake Pit” without the prestige — complete with intentional overdosing, electroshock torture and patients threatening each other with a sharpened spoons, when they’re not either screaming or catatonic. It also is very, very bad.

How on earth is it possible for one film to be so tiresome? Spring Breakers isn’t deadly dull despite all the nudity and violence, but because of it.

It’s not the familiarity of this setup that irks, but its silliness.

If you’re a fan of broad black comedy — the kind in which someone blasts a hole in someone else’s head, and then the next camera shot is framed by that gaping aperture — Villains may be your cup of strong tea. The dialogue by writer-directors Dan Berk and Robert Olsen is less than witty, and peppered with a heavy sprinkling of dully numbing f-bombs.

An elegant drama about power and its frightening uses, The Cat's Meow is the bee's knees.

The film's maudlin focus on the young woman's infirmity and her naive dreams play like the worst kind of Hollywood heart-string plucking.

Elemental speaks to the importance of protecting the natural elements: water, air, earth. It’s a beautifully filmed piece, even when it’s showing us white clouds of pollutants billowing out of a smokestack.

Surprisingly gripping and moving modern western.

Batkid would be easier to swallow if it focused less on self-congratulation than on the epidemic of unselfishness that inspired the magic in the first place.

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.”

For all the outrageousness of Kevin’s alters, the movie falls oddly flat: less tantalizingly enigmatic “et cetera” than “blah blah blah.”

Sweet, strange and at times slightly scary.

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

You’ve got to give Wheatley credit: In the Earth is like nothing else you’ve seen — although some might wish it were a little less, er, original.

Megamind has presentation in spades. But it also has something even rarer than that. It's got heart.

There are pleasures to be had here, though it wouldn’t be accurate to call “Peter” fun, by any stretch of the imagination. At times this admiring but uninspired making-of movie feels like the cinematic equivalent of the Karl/Marlene character: fawning to the point of sycophancy.

The argument in Amigo is so heavy-handed - and its execution so crude - that by the time the movie winds its way to a predictable but uninvolving conclusion, nobody will be listening anymore.

The callousness with which the terrorists operate is palpable and conveyed with a degree of verisimilitude that borders on sadism. Hotel Mumbai is a clockwork thriller, but man, is it hard to watch.

Simon and the Oaks is not merely the story of two boys from opposite sides of the tracks. It's also a larger meditation on life's hardships and what endures: love, art and civilization.

If you didn't know that it was based on a true story, Skin would be a little hard to believe.

Maybe not wonderful, but still pretty darn good.

Fortunately, the monsters are actually kind of a kick. And isn’t that why you go to see a movie like this anyway?

Puenzo has a knack for plumbing the heads and hearts of teenage girls. The director coaxes a mesmerizing, unmannered performance out of Bado, who is making her feature-film debut.

It's hard to imagine that any self-respecting man would want to sit through two hours - let alone two minutes - of such caustic man-bashing.

Go expecting the very worst. Just don't expect to laugh.

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.

It's a love letter to the myriad ways, large and small, that mail handlers change lives the world over.

The film’s patina of richly textured grime lends the film a gloomy, claustrophobic beauty that serves its mood, as well as its satisfyingly misanthropic message: Greed isn’t good, and most people aren’t either.

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

This trio of losers somehow forms a kind of loony family. Like the one in "Little Miss Sunshine," which also used the metaphor of a broken-down car to drive home its point, the interpersonal dynamics are out of whack, but not unworkable.

Dizzy, delightful and just a bit deviant, "The Rugrats Movie" blends all the sarcastic sensibility of "The Simpsons" with the old-fashioned silliness of Soupy Sales.

A sweet, true and, at times, universal love story it is.

Manages to take the cerebral act of literary creation and make it exciting, sexy even.

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.

The framing device of the conversation between Henry and Celia, which includes a bit of flirtation, necessitates a certain ennui, though director Janus Metz (“Borg vs. McEnroe”) does his level best to open up the claustrophobic setting with frequent jaunts to other times and locales. Come to think of it, there’s an air of a tennis match to the proceedings of All the Old Knives, with its two protagonists playing a mental game of volley and return, as it were.

Echoing Liam’s review of Sinclair’s work in progress, I’d call the first two acts of the film cleverly constructed, fresh and fascinating, yet marred by a climax and conclusion that are unworthy of what came before.

Lots of people pay good money to endure the kinds of thrill rides that make them wish they were back on solid ground. Fall does the same thing, but with the added benefit of being entirely vicarious.

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

The Matrix Reloaded is about sensation, not logic. As such, it delivers, in spades, exactly what you should expect from a popcorn flick -- thrills, chills and spills -- plus a little more for good measure, just to keep anyone from whining who might want a beginning, a middle and an end.

It's the story of changing chefs and changing seasons. It looks at food as not just something that nourishes our bodies, but as something that enriches our lives and our relationships.

The new story is decidedly, deliciously dark, veined with thin layers of Burton’s trademark macabre sensibility, which adds texture and tartness to the inherent charm of the story (at heart, one about the parent-child bond and the possibility of the impossible).

Director James Watkins knows how to make a body jump out of its skin, even if he does use the face-reflected-in-the-mirror/window trick once too often. At the same time, the film is kind of, well, silly.

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.

If you're mocking holier-than-thou-ness, you can't very well strike a hipper-than-thou tone.

Cranston is consistently watchable in the title role, although Howard’s journey into — and, at least potentially, out of — madness is a tough one to keep up with.

The sprawling cast, the naturalistic, overlapping dialogue (here by screenwriter Jenny Lumet, daughter of director Sidney) and the swirling action: it seemed pure Robert Altman.

Plays a little like a mystery, the central question of which is not whodunit but why.

Plane is a shot of adrenaline and fast-paced, brain-free fun.

Like a fat slab of pastrami, Deli Man is the cinematic equivalent of comfort food: warm, generous and made with love.

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.

Although he comes across as a sort of elfin crypt-keeper in this intriguing portrait by documentarian Belinda Sallin, Giger was also, quite literally, close to death.

The Cursed is stylish and scary enough for what it is. That’s an old-fashioned creature feature, effective enough to give you a mild case of the heebie-jeebies but nothing chronic.

On Chesil Beach can feel like observing a deli worker slice a small piece of rancid cured meat, in increasingly transparent slivers of prosciutto-like thinness, and then holding them up to the light for inspection.

Vita & Virginia may be about two fascinating characters, but it’s also case of words, paradoxically, obscuring the real people who wrote them.

A blandly middling crowd pleaser.

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

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

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

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's real problem is that it can't seem to make up its mind about whether it wants to frighten us or make us laugh.

Dragon imparts these pearls of wisdom with verve and delight, in a telling that is as visually impressive as it is emotionally stirring.

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

A taut, escapist legal thriller.

It’s a richly engrossing drama, so long as you understand that it’s aiming for the head, not the gut.

Though there’s no reinvention of the genre here, Louder’s mesmerizing mouse proves more than a match for the assembled tomcats — all exuding machismo — with whom she must deal.

Under the direction of George Tillman Jr., these two young performers exercise remarkable restraint, never milking the material for unearned tears.

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.

If there’s a quibble with the film, it’s that it glosses over what it’s like to grow up in the glare of worldwide celebrity.

There are corners of this quiet little film — less a plot-driven narrative than a two-person character study — that feel powerfully true, in ways that surprise.

Before You Know It isn’t a deep movie, or a hilarious one, and Utt and Tullock probably don’t expect it to be. But it is, in its undemanding, almost effortless way, warm and wise and watchable enough to be just this side of wonderful.

Even as Brick Lane manages to sidestep one formula, it falls prey to another.

A mediocre production that nevertheless will strike a deep and resonant chord with viewers.

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.

The humor is generic. And the film’s most obvious comparison — it’s been called “Toy Story” with animals — only points up the one thing “Pets” lacks, and that any animal lover will tell you their furred and feathered friends have, in spades: personality.

Servin and Vamos clearly have a healthy sense of the absurd, which they use, like good satirists, to highlight hypocrisy, greed and corruption.

Some of it sounds, quite frankly, nuts. And a few of Lomborg's enemies have said as much. But throwing tons of money at the problem with little result? That also sounds kind of crazy.

A misbegotten marriage of sweet and sour.

Oculus director Mike Flanagan has crafted a satisfyingly old-fashioned ghost story that, in its evocation of shivery dread, is the most unnerving poltergeist picture since “The Conjuring.”

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.

Enormously entertaining.

It never really feels like we've gotten to know the man himself, leaving the figure at the heart of I'll Sing for You a cipher.

Planet 51 is cute, but it's no "Shrek."

Unfortunately, the experience of actually watching the movie is less compelling than the circumstances of its making.

The notions of the good man's complicity through inertia and of innocence tarnished by association are ones that have been more powerfully explored before.

Cirque du Soleil: Worlds Away has plenty of eye candy... What the movie lacks, unfortunately, is coherence.

Produced by the New York Times, which broke the story, and with its authors Melena Ryzik, Cara Buckley and Jodi Kantor appearing on camera and listed as consulting producers, “Sorry” sticks a finger in a wound that, for some of those involved, hasn’t quite healed.

There’s the potential for some real emotion here, as well as a touch of real-world commentary about a woman with 21st-century sensibilities trapped in a 19th-century world that feels, at times, medieval. But we can only catch glimpses of it beneath all the flickering layers of paint.

Touching, funny, unflinching and true.

The film is a small study in the dignity of letting go.

As agenda-driven as Documented is, it also is a deeply engrossing self-portrait.

Like the gender-flipped “Ghostbusters” before it, this new movie neither reinvents not dishonors its inspiration, instead adding a modicum of zip — if less than turbocharged horsepower — to a vehicle that runs you through the staging of a crime by, ironically, obeying all the traffic laws.

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.

Blackthorn feels less like a proper sequel to "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," which it purports to be, than a coattail rider.

The humor is even more wildly inappropriate, with a running joke about getting a baby stoned on pot, coke and ecstasy, and a scene inspired by the famous incident in "A Christmas Story" where the kid gets his tongue stuck to a frozen flagpole.

The movie is not for the squeamish, but for those who are unafraid to look at what is, perhaps, their own metaphorical "backyard," for those willing to stare into the long, dark night of the contemporary American soul, its bone-crunching message is worth hearing.

Works on two levels. First, it's a pure celebration of riding the waves. -- Second, Blue Crush is a clear-eyed portrait of the unique kind of power that women possess, a power that shows us that victory doesn't always mean vanquishing someone else. Either way, it's thrilling.

Sean Penn makes a striking screen presence in This Must Be the Place, a smart, funny and original road movie by Italian director Paolo Sorrentino ("Il Divo").

All this can make Transit a bit confusing at times, in addition to lending it the patina of metafiction. It’s almost as if the tale is being acted out by people who know they are players in a drama, and not real human beings.

Blue Beetle, the next chapter in the DC Comics-inspired universe that tells the origin story of a not particularly well-known character, is in several ways refreshingly new. It is also, for a few other reasons, tediously familiar.

The Persian Version is an ambitious effort to suture up the rift between past and present, parent and child. But like its heroine, it also suffers from a bit of split personality. It’s a tale with too much drama for the candy-colored comedy of its telling, and too much comedy for the drama to leave much of a mark.

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

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.

On a grand scale, Tetris offers a window into the looming collapse of the Soviet Union, and from that vantage point, it’s actually pretty fascinating. On the smaller stage, it’s a classically heartwarming underdog story — one that involves backroom wheeling and dealing and an 11th-hour escape from thugs that’s straight out of a Cold War espionage film.

It’s a slight and simplistic family dramedy: vividly rendered if vaguely cartoonish in its depiction of a parent and adolescent, once close, who find themselves unable to connect.

It plays like a baldfaced, brazen insult, but it is a stunningly accomplished one.

In the final scenes of Scream VI, there are a lot of deaths unfolding, including, arguably, the demise of a once-vital film franchise.

Psychological suspense at its finest.

A refreshing summer cocktail of action-movie staples, The Wolverine combines the bracingly adult flavor of everyone’s favorite mutant antihero — tortured, boozy X-Man Logan, a.k.a. Wolverine — with the fizzy effervescence of several mixers from the cabinet of Japanese genre cinema: noirish yakuza crime drama, samurai derring-do and ninja acrobatics.

Most gratifying — if also gruesome — are the many examples of Battaglia’s powerful photographs of Mafia victims. Although black-and-white, they are deeply disturbing, and it is easy to imagine that Battaglia found the work difficult. Imagination is necessary, because Battaglia herself doesn’t provide the deep introspection you might expect.

Kingsman delivers on its promise of escapist fun, with a touch that alternates between Galahad’s old-school polish and Eggsy’s roguish charm. Like the rookie who knows that you have to make a few mistakes while following the master, the movie shrugs off its missteps with a wink and a smile that makes them easy to forgive.

The odd and disturbing thing about the film is just how comfortable [Mancini] — and we — have become putting moments on camera that, once upon a time, were meant to be shared between two people.

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

Charming but slight.

The final, deeply satisfying conclusion to the trilogy of Swedish thrillers based on Stieg Larsson's bestselling novels.

Like the TV show, The X-Files movie is stylish, scary, sardonically funny and at times just plain gross.

Preaches most effectively to the converted.

There’s stuff to like in “Multiverse”: amazing effects, surprise cameos, even the unexpectedly moving scene in which Wanda realizes she has, at last, become a monster. But there’s also stuff that’s just, for lack of a better word, annoying.

Fans of Greenaway’s work — a mix of the brainy, the controversial and the grotesque — won’t necessarily be surprised by any of this. They may, however, be disappointed at how little of it actually works.

The colorful characters of Stoppard and Stalker loom large here, as detectives so often do — Hercule Poirot, Jane Marple — in such fare. But even larger is the shadow cast by Christie’s 1952 play, which provides a fun backdrop, if one rendered irreverently, for this diverting puzzle within a puzzle.

Despite the film’s heavy-handed effort at vindication, Renner manages to deliver a performance that is complex and satisfyingly contradictory.

All of these make for engrossing, if hardly untold, tales. But what gives the lurid, titillating — and even, at times, fun — aspects of “Scandalous” a more sober edge are the journalistic implications, best articulated by former Washington Post reporter Bernstein, who calls the Enquirer’s frontal assault on truth and integrity “as corrupt as you can be.”

After a somewhat tedious and overly episodic first half...Trumbo becomes a far more successful movie.

Torpid, syrupy melodrama from the Chinese director of 1993's "Farewell My Concubine."

It's powerful, gut-wrenching stuff, and it doesn't need tarting up.

The film's title suggests the wry irony of hindsight: We've come a long way, baby, but we're not there yet. Any Day Now could do with a little more of that astringent humor and a little less sap.

As the espionage plot surges toward its nail-biting conclusion, the path it’s traveling feels less open-ended than preordained.

There is such a thing as toxic fandom, to borrow the term used by one of this movie’s young protagonists, and “Scream,” which is filled with endless conversation about the difference between a sequel and a “requel” and more rules than a penitentiary, suffers from it, fatally.

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

Thrillingly told, compellingly acted and beautifully shot.

Cute without being especially clever, Warm Bodies is almost as pallid and as brain-dead as its zombie antihero.

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.

The film is pretty conventional Disney fare: silly, slapsticky, all-too-neatly wrapped up and punctuated by a surfeit of poignant moments.

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

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.

Unfortunately, the actors seem overqualified for their parts, delivering earnest monologues that come across as clumsy transplants from the proscenium stage.

It’s a thoughtful and workmanlike portrait, but a less than profoundly moving one.

Is Spartan a perfect, or even a great, movie? Probably not. But in its prickly irascibility and deeply unsettling intelligence, it makes for a very, very good one.

It is also, despite the all-too-rare focus on the Filipino American community, a creakily familiar take on an age-old family dynamic.

Drew Barrymore has figured out what works, and what works for Drew Barrymore is this: Cinderella stories.

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

Shows more hopelessness than optimism but is never less than honest.

If Little Joe’s message is never less than apparent, it avoids hitting you over the head with it. It’s a movie that grows on you, planting a seed that only comes to flower long after the closing credits.

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

It's a kid's Cirque de Soleil, for a lot less money.

The swells of inspirational storytelling sometimes threaten to swamp the underlying inspirational story.

It is redeemed by an appealing cast, tart dialogue and the preponderance of genuine emotion over the manufactured variety.

What’s missing here is something, or rather, someone, to care about.

None of which would be a problem, if “Gucci” were half as much fun as I’m afraid about to make it sound. After all, who doesn’t love a good, tawdry scandal?

Imagine a 10-episode podcast about the making of a single episode of the 1950s marital sitcom “I Love Lucy” — a podcast dense with behind-the-scenes details about the show’s real-life husband-and-wife stars, Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball, who played wildly caricatured versions of themselves on the hit show for six seasons. Imagine a trove of inside-baseball trivia about the early days of television, as well as details about the stars’ real lives, including Ball’s 1952 pregnancy, which Arnaz — a TV pioneer who popularized the three-camera setup — wanted to weave into the show’s plot. Then imagine dumping all that material, like a box full of marbles, into a two-hour movie.

Life of Crime feels like a rambling car ride through the countryside with friends. The scenery is great, and the passengers are diverting, but you keep wondering where the driver is headed.

Crafted by writer-director Jill Sprecher and co-writer sister Karen - a filmmaking duo who are sometimes jokingly referred to as the "Coen sisters" - it will erase any lingering memories of "Fargo."

“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.”

White Boy Rick is permeated by an atmosphere of grimy hopelessness that makes it hard to watch.

Unbroken may not exactly be mired in sanctimony, but it’s standing, almost up to its ankles, in an unhealthy sense that its subject — about whose simple humanity the film otherwise goes to great lengths to illuminate — is a candidate for sainthood.

Is The Shallows a thriller for the ages? No, but it’s decent popcorn fare. It’s about as deep as the titular lagoon on which it’s set, but the breakers promise a short and heart-pounding ride, with no wipeout.

This tedious slog through the highland muck should win no Oscars, only groans and raspberries. Even the much-buzzed-about glimpse of a nude Pine, as his character emerges from a lake, doesn’t make this worth watching.

A movingly told tale of tragedy and its consequences, not just for the players in the original tragedy but also for those touched by their actions, in an ever-widening circle of aftershocks.

Jackson’s storytelling at this point is so driven by green-screen trickery and digital legerdemain that he seems to have forgotten about human emotion.

A syrupy Italian power ballad along the lines of the ones on the movie's soundtrack. Its tune is mawkish, bombastic but, in the end, not especially resonant.

Sternfeld has created a garden on film that opens up its blooms for us, not in the dark of the movie house, but long after we've left the theater.

Utterly delightful fable of romantic destiny.

Stoker plays out like a Kabuki “Macbeth”: gallons of style slathered on a story you already know by heart.

One half of Godzilla vs. Kong wants to tell a human story. Believe it or not, it partly succeeds. The other half just wants to break stuff.

It is also very much a Mike Flanagan film, for better and for worse. Part homage to Kubrick’s moody atmospherics, and part hyper-literal superhero story, Doctor Sleep is stylish, engrossing, at times frustratingly illogical and, ultimately less than profoundly unsettling.

Its important if inflammatory message will bore all but Chomsky's fellow travelers to death.

By visual standards alone, the characters, rendered in eye-popping 3-D, resemble nothing so much as Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade floats. They’re just as lifeless and inexpressive, too.

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.

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.

The sexual backstory is a new twist, one the filmmakers handle with less finesse than is healthy for the argument that they ultimately make.

There is little in the film that offers insight into what makes him tick as a person.

Despite some cool camera work and the kind of noir-lite moral ambiguity that barely gets your shoes dirty (courtesy of a shallow script by Brad “Out of the Furnace” Ingelsby), the movie is the cinematic equivalent of junk food. It satisfies the craving for the sensation of nihilism, without its substance.

Really nothing more than "Clueless" redux but without the edgy, knowing wit.

Simultaneously violent and droll, The Final Girls is a way to have your blood-soaked cake and eat it, too.

The unsatisfying thriller A Perfect Murder is a triumph of style over substance, with style in this case winning only by default.

There isn’t quite as much pep to the film’s narrative engine on this trip.

This is the lightest, brightest and tightest film confection to come down the date pike in quite some time.

Yes, it's essentially a remake of a sequel, albeit a sequel that happens to be one of the greatest horror movies ever made, but it more than surpasses the original.

Presents an America that is as much about the pathological display of imperial power -- a showmanship of arrogance and violence -- as policy.

My Zoe is well acted and well filmed, yes, but the storytelling, in which Delpy stitches together mismatched parts like a Dr. Frankenstein, is its weak suit.

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.

Rolls straight over silly, smashing through stupid without stopping and then barreling into a kind of insane comic brilliance without so much as a speed bump to slow it down.

Filmmaking at its purest and most visceral – a tale full of sound and visual fury, signifying, if not exactly nothing, then something not so readily articulated in words.

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.

A classic example of a film that doesn't trust the strength of its source material - or the intelligence of its audience.

When Miss You Already works, it’s because of the cast.

The good-natured tension and ribbing between the two old “boys” is still there — and still a bit old hat — but there is a new dynamic that juices the entertainment factor.

Though the setting is a retreat from the world, where not terribly much happens, within its confines Lorenzo gets an eye-opener about both human frailty and interconnectedness, courtesy of someone even more troubled than he is.

It becomes, after a while, little more than a mind-numbing bloodbath.

Overlong, unnecessarily sex-obsessed and downright nasty at times, This Is 40 feels haphazard and unfinished, despite a few moments of laugh-out-loud humor.

As messages go, I've certainly heard worse. As movies go, Wimbledon is a generally painless float down a lazy river.

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.

It’s a movie about exploring the vast, “dark continent” of the ocean’s deepest places (to quote Cameron, who produced and narrates the film) that ends up feeling claustrophobic. Much of it was shot inside a metal sphere the size of a fitness ball.

Clocks in at close to two hours. It feels much longer. By comparison, Malick’s World War II epic “The Thin Red Line” tipped the scales at a whopping 170 minutes. But at least that 1998 film had people shooting at each other. There’s no such excitement here.

Unfortunately, whatever steam has been built up during the more compelling first act slowly dissipates under the overly talky, on-the-nose conclusion, despite some modest suspense ginned up as Argentine authorities get close to discovering the safe house.

Life in a Day is, without exaggeration, a profound achievement.

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

Made me feel like a Christmas goose being fattened for slaughter. Its force-fed diet of whimsy cloyed long before the eagerly anticipated romantic payoff arrived to put me out of my misery.

Jason Bourne belongs to Damon and Greengrass, whose admirable — and entirely appropriate — goal of playing it for kicks comes across, this time around, as an oddly joyless chore.

It’s not especially new to see a story about a guy who pulls himself up by his bootstraps, even one this hyperbolic. One might say that Flamin’ Hot is just another serving of cinematic junk food: corn chips sprinkled liberally with the moviemaking equivalent of maltodextrin.

Victoria and Abdul might have aimed for poignancy — and at times it almost strikes that tone — but for the most part, it plays like broadly clownish comedy, treating crusty British prejudice with all the subtlety of “The Benny Hill Show.”

It's a comic book at heart, albeit a thoroughly, grandly romantic one in the end.

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.

An excellent and entertainingly old-fashioned police procedural.

Believe it or not, there's life in the old boy yet. After a disappointing third outing, this "Shrek" brings the cycle of fairy-tale-themed films to a fine finish.

A blistering political satire that may rip the bandage and the scab, as well as a lot of the skin, off a political wound that has barely had time to heal.

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

Despite the subtext of screen addiction, it is still essentially a by-the-book monster movie, despite some better-than-average jump scares and clever rendering of Larry, who for the most part can be seen only through the camera lens of a cellphone or tablet device.

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.

The Midnight Sky only looks like a disaster film. Slyly, and by misdirection that cleverly conceals its true intent until the poignant end, it reveals itself to be a story of regret over a lost opportunity for connection.

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.

There’s a whiff of autoerotic indulgence that carries over to the entire film, which despite its handsome black-and-white aesthetic and gloss of social critique seems a bit too smugly self-satisfied for its own good.

For a movie that relies so heavily on a single, not especially groundbreaking visual effect — now you see the bogeyman, now you don’t — Lights Out is crazy scary.

A confection that is ultimately better because of its bitterness.

Maybe it’s true that it’s never too late to find a new home. But in some ways, it feels like “Cry Macho” has missed the bus. Perhaps Eastwood should have kept his hand on the reins of this pet project while letting someone else sit in the saddle.

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

Populaire is a mostly delightful and entirely unironic throwback to the kind of film they stopped making about 50 years ago.

This third outing climaxes with a dark and melodramatic twist that, while adding a layer of nuance and back story that the previous two films never had, also feels wildly out of sync with its audience's expectations.

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

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

Overwhelmingly predictable despite its cute surprise ending, Tortilla Soup is a filling but unoriginal dish.

Easy on the eyes and hard on the head, Suriyothai is absolutely unaffecting where it matters most, in the heart.

Somewhere in here, there’s a pretty decent movie. The Finest Hours is probably the best of a bad bunch of recent releases. But it’s a shame that this terrific story’s engines keep flooding in the face of wave after wave of narrative inertia.

The film's exploration of loss and the gulf of time and memory that separates us from our pasts is beautifully and subtly handled by Kore-eda. But it is his concern with the sometimes insurmountable distance that lies between knowing and not knowing why we do the things we do that is the filmmaker's true -- and most profound -- subject. [2 April 2004, p.T47]

The way that conflict plays out is also surprisingly plodding.

There is also something over-intellectualized and bloodless about this version.

Goes beyond interesting, though, to moderately annoying.

Blue Bayou strikes a nerve, of that there is no doubt. But then it keeps poking at it, pointlessly.

There’s a far more interesting movie taking place alongside this more than slightly silly one.

If The Dial of Destiny takes its cast somewhere far-fetched — and boy, does it ever — it makes sure to bring us all back to where we belong, just in time for the closing credits.

Cute, kind of clever and oh, so topical. But also problematic.

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.

7500 is, at heart, a chamber piece. The setting, the number of characters and the setup are all constrained in an elegant yet dramatically effective way that belies the film’s low budget. There’s a taut, piano wire-like quality to its simplicity: None of the drama comes from action-movie cliches, but rather from the actors, along with the disembodied voices of an air traffic controller, a police officer and others.

In the end, Daybreakers doesn't really want to make anyone think too hard. If that were to happen, they might stop to wonder why all the human survivors out there hiding in fear of their lives don't just become garlic farmers and call it a day.

Whether it works depends less on piety than on taste. Beneath the giddy subversion, there’s a cheerless solemnity — a splash of Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ,” as it were — that often comes close to curdling the farce.

Startlingly erotic and surprisingly moving.

The derriere-flashing, dope-smoking, potty-mouthed antics of this antisocial E.T. justify every bit of the rating that the MPAA has slapped on him.

A blackhearted little film. What's being marketed as a frothy French confection about jealousy (specifically the jealousy of a regular guy married to a famous movie star) also just so happens to be a portrait of a marriage going down the toilet.

There's so much wrong with this movie.