Michael O'Sullivan

At times, Apples feels superficially slight, even — pardon me — forgettable. But Nikou, in his feature directorial debut after working as an assistant director on sets with such filmmakers as Yorgos Lanthimos (“Dogtooth”) and Richard Linklater (“Before Midnight”), has pulled off a neat little trick: He’s told a story that, for reasons that are more easily felt than explained, is hard to shake off.

Maybe Thomas Wolfe was right: You can't go home again

Memory is by no means a deep film. But there’s something here that lends the familiar proceedings a bittersweet aftertaste that lingers in the mind.

Feels like something I know is supposed to be good for me, but that I just couldn't stomach.

First Love isn’t art, by any means, but it’s way more entertaining than it should be. One brief sequence, involving an airborne car, was probably too crazy — not to mention too expensive — to actually film, so Miike renders it as animation.

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.

It has, simultaneously, the exhilarating feel of a departure and the finality of a full stop.

Personal and private almost to the point of self-absorption, the film is ultimately saved from neurotic narcissism by the director's self-deprecating humor and unapologetic honesty about his own dysfunction.

A portrait of a sometimes surly, often foulmouthed, always brilliant artist that is at once humane, horrific, hilarious and deeply moving.

The whole thing is played for laughs that almost never come. To be sure, the film has its moments, but they’re few and far between.

The real value of poetry - of the contest itself - is not revealed until the closing credits, when we see the impressive list of colleges that the movie's four subjects have gone on to.

Code Black is a powerful and quietly damning film. While training his lens narrowly on the heroic workers in a single emergency department, McGarry has made a broad indictment of a system that is badly in need of surgery.

Tries to put your tear ducts in a headlock with a litany of catastrophes.

This sweet, affectionate (and unapologetically slight) comedy is an all-too-rare homage to harmless, hilarious incompetence, at a time when there is plenty of the more hurtful kind to go around. If it isn’t quite up to the standards of “Ed Wood,” Tim Burton’s 1994 tribute to the auteur of such misbegotten fruits of moviemaking as “Plan 9 From Outer Space,” it is nonetheless a much-needed distraction.

One wonders what someone who has never heard of the guy...would make of the film, which is defiantly, even, at times, obnoxiously, obtuse. Which, come to think of it, is actually kind of like the Russell we see in the film.

Vikander never goes for the easy emotion, though, choosing instead to play against what conventional melodrama would dictate her reaction should be. This understatedness is always the right choice, and it makes for a far more effective — and affecting — film.

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

It manages the trick of being both an unironic sci-fi action-adventure flick and a zippy parody of one. It’s exciting, funny, self-aware, beautiful to watch and even, for a flickering instant or two, almost touching.

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

The film is a documentary, pure and simple. But the movie, by director Rick Rowley, plays out like something of a murder mystery.

The film, whose title may or may not refer to a slang term for a dog’s erection, often teeters between compassion and something that feels perilously close to cultural voyeurism.