Michael Phillips

As Assayas himself has pointed out, the passing years have magically transformed a movie made in 1994 into a seeming product of post-1968 cultural turbulence and unresolved matters of the heart. It feels honest, in other words.

The moral conundrums aren’t particularly thorny, since Balram’s revenge is well-earned. Yet Bahrani works so well with the individual actors, they seem like people, not archetypes or stereotypes.

Mafioso is shaped like a comedy, and it is one, but its intentionally jarring clashes of tone and rhythm are truly out there.

The payoffs here begin and end with Oduye, and as we see this character confront her obstacles with bravery, grace and resolve, "Pariah" exhibits many of the same traits, for which filmgoers can be thankful.

Documentary filmmakers can make any number of rookie mistakes with their first features. Casting too wide a net is one of the most common. "La Camioneta" avoids that pothole, beautifully.

I hoped for a movie relatively free of Hollywood hogwash and melodramatics, and got it. What I didn’t expect was the calm brilliance of scenes such as Jennifer Ehle and Samantha Morton, playing two of Weinstein’s 1990s targets, telling their stories so truthfully, with such economical emotional punch, that it’s both heartbreaking and enough to make you seethe.

It's a strong reminder of the times, then and now.

The result is an act of partial, tenderly observed guerrilla filmmaking. It works; it takes you somewhere, quietly but evocatively, and it’s affecting without pulling at your heartstrings with both hands.

It’s not straight-up realism; nor is it the usual moralizing, candy-coated melodrama. It’s just very, very good, and the scenes between Tenille and Perrier are very, very easily among the plaintive screen highlights of this new year.

The most assured and satisfying of the five so far.

Is director David Fincher's film the stuff of greatness? Not quite. But the picture is very, very good.

As a director, Kaufman isn't yet his own best salesman. He's not enough of a visual stylist to sell his script's most challenging conceits. But the cast rises to a very strange and rich occasion.

First-time Anderson performers such as Willis, McDormand and especially Norton fold effortlessly into the melancholy end-of-summer vibe.

Death, dying, hearts in winter, the thrill of a sexual reawakening: Sandra’s life, as “One Fine Morning” delineates, makes room for it all because it must. Hers is an ordinary life, in the end, full of small, extraordinary grace notes. Thanks to both filmmaker and star, it’s a consistently screenworthy one.

It's a big ice cream sundae, this one -- not great documentary filmmaking but tasty all the way.

I’m not sure the story’s resolution entirely serves what comes before it; it’s not predictable, exactly, and it avoids turning into a different sort of genre just for thrills, yet Domont’s writing and direction are both skillful enough to make me want a few extra minutes in the final round.

While director Armando Iannucci's brand of satire -- just plausible enough to be painful -- isn't for all tastes, it's a little bit of heaven to hear screen characters spew such eloquently vicious bile.

This is a really good film. It just isn't the traditionally rousing one many will expect, and the trailers promise.

[Lowery] has made a larger, very different movie without losing his instincts, his directorial stealth or his ability to finesse his actors' performances, in this case in the vicinity of an achingly expressive and unexpectedly furry dragon with a little bit of bulldog in him.

Whatever this new adaptation’s popular reception, it’s five times the movie the ‘61 movie was. Spielberg has never made a musical before, but this one looks and feels like the work of an Old Hollywood master of the form — someone who knows when, where and why to move a camera capturing bodies in rhythmic motion.

John Hawkes is wonderful as O'Brien, as is Helen Hunt as the surrogate whose sessions with O'Brien form the crux of the film. The results are extremely moving and, in general, low on egregiously yanked heartstrings or the usual biopic filler.

A vital and wily seriocomic odyssey. And Gere has never been better, more alive, on screen.

Fallen Leaves, by contrast, strikes an adroit balance between dark and light, stoicism and optimism. There’s a stealth buoyancy at work.

A beautifully spun and morally searching tale of interlocking compromises.

One of Anderson's cleverest and most gorgeous movies, dipping just enough of a toe in the real world — and in the melancholy works of its acknowledged inspiration, the late Austrian writer Stefan Zweig — to prevent the whole thing from floating off into the ether of minor whimsy.

It's hard not to like it. And in both senses of the phrase, America keeps asking for it.

The cast is excellent, particularly Riley and Morton and, as Joy Division’s brash manager, Toby Kebbell. He’s a great character, bitter and hostile and a scoundrel: a born manager of talent destined to tear itself apart.

Though uneven and less witty than the first two, Toy Story 3 delivers quite enough in two dimensions.

A workmanlike but vividly acted courtroom drama.

The storytelling rhythm gets a bit pokey for the amount of story being told.... But director Yates knows his way around this stuff. The visual evocation of '20s Manhattan with a twist offers considerable satisfaction, as does Redmayne's embodiment of a boy-man more comfortable in the company of animals than with humans.

It’s frustrating, although I’m grateful Kaufman didn’t simply film the book as written. The actors couldn’t be better attuned to the nervous system of this universe.

The First Omen hardly qualifies for landmark or pantheon status. But it’s a movie that maximizes all its elements with some panache.

For a while it’s engaging but pretty thin. Then it gets more interesting, especially for the actors.

The performances and Marcos Siega’s direction put a pleasing sheen on the material.

Sinners is all over the place yet somehow all of a piece. Its themes aren’t new, but the variations feel fresh.

It's an odd film, ultimately rewarding, because it's about an odd venture.

The inevitable disappointing CinemaScore exit polls aside, it’s worth seeing — if you don’t mind a little insanity in escapism that offers no escape, only the promise of a new fairy tale on another page.

It’s a lively and absorbing picture — intelligently sexy, tastefully salacious but serious enough to stick.

A rewardingly twisted hybrid of low-fi mumblecore and stylized thriller.

The first 90 minutes of Avatar are pretty terrific - a full-immersion technological wonder with wonders to spare. The other 72 minutes, less and less terrific.

The smooth, cozy charm of writer-director Lorene Scafaria's "The Meddler" offers considerable seriocomic satisfaction.

Modest in every way, the screenplay by Phil Johnston is enjoyable in the telling even when the details smack of contrivance.

A model of conventional thriller suspense, the movie isn’t. A stimulating cry for “Black culture and artistic integrity,” in King’s words, and for the true value of a well-made commodity, whether it’s shoes or songs — that, the movie surely is.

A 1960s-set Western laden with big skies, steady gazes and slow-roasted narrative corn, Let Him Go gets by on the strength of its female leads, Diane Lane and Lesley Manville. Kevin Costner’s effective, too, and he’s right in his taciturn sweet spot, muttering about this and that.

It's entirely possible, maybe even inevitable, that Like Crazy will win over a good many moviegoers despite its bouts of semipreciousness. In the end, I was one of them.

It's a vivid ensemble experience, and the acting is wonderful.

Porter and his ingratiating actors do all they can to humanize the material. The movie works because a lot of that material is engaging and genuinely humane to begin with.

The actors and director Lemmons accomplish what the screenplay does only partially: make us believe the circumstances and the behavior.

The best of it is a riot--a "Bad Boys II" fireball hurled with exquisite accuracy at a quaint English town peopled by Agatha Christie archetypes.

In the spirit of previous Disneynature film voiceover artists John C. Reilly and Tina Fey, Helms contributes a winning inner-monologue voice for Steve, while also delivering the alternately threatening and comforting narration.

Cooper is the reason to see the film, which was photographed by Tak Fujimoto in the dour tones he brought to a more flagrant realm of evil, and FBI detective work, in "The Silence of the Lambs."

A worthy film on a great, tragic subject.

A pre-teen on the autism spectrum, lonely and isolated, becomes the online prey of an unwanted stranger, a monster from another realm. That’s Come Play in one sentence. The results unfold more like a collection of reference points to previous film than a film unto itself.

The movie works best whenever Corden and Blunt, performers of nearly limitless appeal and sweet-natured vulnerability, take the story back from their cohorts, though Kendrick is no less beguiling.

It's relaxed without being sloppy, or patronizing, and in particular Witherspoon and Lemmon - sorry, make that Rudd - bring charm to burn.

While Wonka overfills its slate with two or three escalating climaxes, the throwaway verbal jokes en route keep the contraption humming.

It’s nicely packed and quite funny, when it isn’t giving into Gunn’s trademark air of merry depravity.

Like the "Bourne" franchise to which Noyce's film is indebted, Salt is a combination of pursuit, evasion, name-clearing and a reversal or two.

The film is organic, all of a piece and, for Garland, somewhat on the nose and didactic. It’s also haunting in ways you can’t easily categorize.

It’s dumb but quick and dirty and effectively brusque, dispensing with niceties such as character.

The original was a very good thriller. The new one is simply a good one.

The way Lawrence captures a young woman's fear and resolve, often non-verbally, well … this is a considerable talent well on her way to a great career. It's for performances like this that moviegoers find themselves taking a chance on a title that doesn't have a fast-food tie-in.

It retains the original's sunny, democratic vibe and refreshing lack of meanness, as well as Soderbergh's interest (if not his precision) in keeping several of the ensemble members in frame, interacting, without a lot of routine close-ups.

Braga isn't quite the whole show in Aquarius, but she's certainly a lot of it.

When Ferrell and Hoffman do their thing together, a charming bit of whimsy becomes something more. It becomes really, really funny.

After last year's black-hearted "No Country for Old Men," the Oscars may well be in the mood to embrace a fairy tale sampling every imaginable genre, with a note of triumph accompanying even the worst suffering, capped by the snazziest ending money can buy.

It’s the time travel conceit that keeps “Endgame” hopping, and the trial-and-error sequences recall some of the best parts of the first “Iron Man” 11 years back.

The movie is very hard on its protagonist, and not all the obstacles, humiliations and setbacks escape the realm of cheap pathos. Bell and company keep it honest, though.

All the performances are terrific, even when some of the scenes sputter or reiterate the grievances.

State of Play isn't a kinetic fireball like the second or third "Bourne" installment; like its protagonist, it's defiantly old school, "Three Days of the Condor" bleeding into "All the President's Men."

It’s fun to hang out with these people for a while.

A lot happens, some of it life-changing, some of it heartrending, parts of it (in story terms) a bit rushed or on-the-nose. The actors, unerringly well-cast, more or less take care of those last parts.

A weirder and more interesting movie than “Wreck-It Ralph,” Ralph Breaks the Internet tells a lie right in its title because isn’t that thing broken already?

The movie’s a little thin; it’s also on the glib side regarding what, in the case of Wallace’s condition, qualifies as something deeper than a crummy anti-social attitude. But Kline, shooting on film in collaboration with the excellent cinematographer Sean Price Williams, explores a wide range of visual expressivity in Funny Pages.

It’s best taken, I think, as a romantic gesture to a writer who loved movies. Well, two, really: Herman J. Mankiewicz, and Jack Fincher.

Nothing in director Paul W.S. Anderson's schlock drawer--prepares you for the peppy, good-time nastiness that is Death Race.

Life of Pi, Yann Martel's beautiful little book about a young man and the sea and a tiger, has transformed into a big, imposing and often lovely 3-D experience.

For visual noise by the ton, Emmerich is my kind of hack, the pluperfect blend of leaden self-seriousness and accidental-on-purpose self-satirist.

Shepherd, apparently, was a genuine, needle-sharp wit and the way Smith plays her, the character's tart rejoinders are superhumanly perfect.

The satisfactions of the film are in seeing what a screen full of excellent players can do to steer you around the holes. Bana never quite seems enough to anchor a picture for me; all the same, he acquits himself sharply here.

Killing Them Softly isn't anything major. But it's a pungent minor film only vaguely resembling the one The Weinstein Co. is advertising, and that's fine with me.

If one thing holds the picture back, it’s the self-conscious album-cover aesthetic of Sebring’s visual approach.

I would see The Ides of March again just for the way Jeffrey Wright takes command of the screen in the secondary role of a senator who is either a cipher, a sphinx, a two-faced sphinx, a lying sack of D.C. dung or a steely man of principle.

Birdman proves that a movie — the grabbiest, most kinetic film ever made about putting on a play — can soar on the wings of its own technical prowess, even as the banality of its ideas threatens to drag it back down to earth.

Eighth Grade works you over, audience wincing followed by audience gratification, narrative tension followed by release, crises leading to just-in-time catharsis.

This relaxed, agreeable comedy, filmed near but not in Montauk, works because the stars make it work, and the premise — a little hoary — doesn’t sweat the logic part. Lawrence has fantastic timing and a kind of take-it-or-leave-it confidence that energizes a formulaic comedy.

The film may be slight, but it is not stupid, and director Robert Cary keeps both stickiness and shtickiness at bay.

It's a small film, perhaps less ambitious or probing (even in a comic vein) than it might've been. But it's a good one, and the actors go to town without turning Elvis & Nixon into a chance meeting between an Elvis impersonator and Rich Little.

Typical of a pretty good Sayles movie. There are few, if any, heroes and villains.

Branagh's regular composer, Patrick Doyle, delivers a persistent dribbling stream of forgettable mood music, and that's too bad; most of the scenes are acted so well, you don't want anything competing with them.

Damon is becoming one of the truest, most reliable actors of his generation. And Eastwood has more films in development, proving, at 79, that 79 is just a number like any other.

Destined to be remembered as the one that handed the screen Harry his first kiss. Like much of the film, the smooch comes and goes briskly, without a lot of fuss.

I hate hidden-camera gags on principle and have since “Candid Camera.” It takes something at least as funny as the first “Borat” (and, at its sharpest and sweetest, the second one), or this movie, for my jaw to unclench long enough to enjoy the brutal slapstick and the faux human misery.

The best, eeriest parts of director Jordan’s Peele’s third feature, “Nope,” are as good as anything in “Get Out” or “Us,” and they’re very different from either of those earlier triumphs of imagination. This one is a three-fifths triumph, which means whatever you want that to mean. To me, it means go.

Don't expect miracles. Not every biopic needs to reinvent the form. Sometimes it's enough to inhabit it, engagingly.

Demons of mediocrity, be gone! Here we have a shrewd sequel a touch better than the original.

It’s a low-fi rumination on inexplicable and gradually more threatening loneliness — the sort of childhood trauma typically explained to death by horror movies less interesting than this one.

But by the end, when Gandolfini and Sarandon sing their sweet, hesitant little duet, it’s clear Turturro knew where he was going all along.

What you’re left with, finally, is the pleasure of a wily director’s company. In much the same way John Huston defied convention and predictability in the third act of his directorial career, with films as odd and fresh as “Wise Blood” and “Prizzi’s Honor,” Lumet is doing the same, right now.

Yes, the Frenchman Carax’s first film in English isn’t life-affirming so much as it is art-affirming. But it’s a weirdly compelling experience in blunt, arguably misogynist, harshly beautiful cinema.

Director Jason Orley (”Big Time Adolescence”) handles it all well enough. It’s Day and Slate who make the very best of it.

Howard, playing an inspirational and resourceful man up against long odds, really is an inspiration.

With that kind of financial imperative it's something of a miracle the Potter films have been, on the whole, good. One or two, very good. One or two (the first two), less good. This one's good.

This latest in the ever-broadening Marvel movie landscape is fun. For an effects-laden franchise launch it's light on its feet, pretty stylish, worth seeing in Imax 3-D (for once, the up-charge is worth it) and full of tasty, classy performers enlivening the dull bits.

Philippe’s strongest work in 78/52 is the historical context, ranging from the images and roles of mothers in 1950s popular culture to a key handful of movies photographed in black and white (as was “Psycho,” partly to get the blood past the censors) released the previous year, 1959.

The Chinese locations ache with beauty. And when Watts and Norton focus, intently, on Maugham's often dazzlingly vindictive characters, The Painted Veil really does feel like a story worth filming a third time.

It's labeled a "true-ish story," and the results are cheeky fun.

The movie’s sleekly assaultive aesthetic owes everything to the gaming world, but the amalgamation of practical, physical effects and digital flourishes, most evident in a motorcycle chase on the Verrazzano Bridge, take the movie out of an earthly realm entirely.

The documentary Love, Gilda works different ways for different viewers. For older fans, it’s a welcome excuse to reminisce. For newcomers it’s an entertaining primer on Radner’s life, times, demons and famous inventions.

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker does the job. It wraps up the trio of trilogies begun in 1977 in a confident, soothingly predictable way, doing all that cinematically possible to avoid poking the bear otherwise known as tradition-minded quadrants of the “Star Wars” fan base.

I wish the busting-loose part went further in “Love Lies Bleeding.” But Stewart, subtle and fierce, and O’Brian, sinewy and fiercer, prove exceptional at hitting two or three notes at once, and never obviously.

Noa is a genuinely touching creation, no little thanks to the expressive pain and fear and pathos finessed, artfully, by Teague in the motion capture stage.

The film owes its relative buoyancy above all to Chris Pratt as the wisecracking space rogue at the helm.

There’s not much justice and very little peace for the characters portrayed by Kaluuya (terrific) and Turner-Smith (more of a novice, but often affecting, and a singular camera subject). Does it overreach? Here and there.

Human-spirit cliches and all, the movie accomplishes job one: It moves. It also has a choice soundtrack, spiced by the likes of Missy Elliott’s “Shake Your Pom Pom” and Digital Underground’s immortal “Humpty Dance.”

Garcia's calm, steady guidance behind the camera, along with his nicely finessed faith in a very good cast, makes Mother and Child a fuller and more satisfying example of this storytelling style than we've seen lately.

Lord and Miller are two of a small handful of Hollywood screenwriters whose style is instantly identifiable. They’re adept at flicking a dozen jokes in different directions in the same minute of screen time. If “Lego Movie 2” tries too much, and gets lost in its own messages about familial cooperation, that’s the price of their brand of invention.

In every design detail, the physical production and realization of You Won’t Be Alone really does take you somewhere. However unsettling, it’s a film that knows what it’s doing.

Sorkin’s writing may be better served by a director who can bring a new set of perspectives and dynamics to the work, rather than simply presenting them head-on. Yet it works anyway. The actors win on appeal. And it’s always worth revisiting this particular chapter of Chicago unrest and injustice, because that chapter, tragically, is always up for another rewrite.

At its sharpest, The Heat actually moves and banters like a comedy, with sharply timed and edited dialogue sequences driven by a couple of pros ensuring a purposeful sense of momentum.

First-time feature director Wes Ball's version of The Maze Runner makes the cliches smell daisy-fresh.

Fundamentally Blades of Glory works; it's full of laughs both subtle and ridiculous.

Behind the camera, Gordon-Levitt shows serious promise.

The Post has a lot going for it, alongside a certain amount of hokum.

By the end of Lake of Fire, you know full well you’re in the presence of a deeply conflicted filmmaker, bound to make all sides uneasy, even enraged.

Call it a successful failure. Some movies worth seeing are like that.

The movie's lovers and its haters can agree on one thing. The third section, set in Greece and dealing with another, less interesting magic spell cast on Hoffmann's soprano sweetie (Ann Ayars), ranks as the weakest. [10 Apr 2015, p.C4]

The movie doesn’t quite stick the landing, piling on while lingering at the gate for an extra 10 minutes or so. The gore level may not be a shock to fans of Alvarez’s previous features, but for the casual franchise fan, well, it’s gory. But the best of Alien: Romulus reminds us that some franchises are more open to a variety of directorial approaches than others.

It's a strength of this carefully composed, almost obsessively controlled picture that it has no interest in the conventional biographical focus on a subject.

The stars, it must be said, are slightly more interesting than the characters, which is another way of saying Rogowski and Huller amplify what’s there on the page.

The results? More evocative than provocative. But evocative is not nothing.

Starts out like a salacious, rump-centric and blithely bare-breasted hip-hop video and ends up in the realm of scary and inspired trash. That's not meant negatively.

Not everything in “Mockingjay” is dynamic or remarkable. Director Lawrence, working from Peter Craig and Danny Strong's screenplay, occasionally mistakes somnambulance for solemnity.

As in “Pan’s Labyrinth,” The Orphanage relies on a risky blend of clinically realistic horrors and poetic suggestions of an alternate world, one that can be visited, but at a price.

It's meticulous, fastidiously controlled and a tiny bit enervated. I've seen it twice; it's successful enough in what it's attempting to merit at least one viewing. But even after two, you may struggle with what's not there, and should be, or could be.

Hinges on humiliation and vengeance, which makes it like most other modern horror titles. Its focus on sexual assault, however, puts it in a different, more primal league.

The Infiltrator works best in its unglamorous scenes of everyday deception.

If you’re at all interested in what a reliably compelling, stubbornly solemn commercial filmmaker can do with money, imagination and no little nerve, Dune is epic enough — even if there’s a wee hole in the middle, where a more compelling protagonist belongs.

It is an actors' showcase, without being showy, and Moreau and Tukur reveal radically different personalities with just enough in common to make things interesting.

A determinedly easygoing comedy about the Israeli-Palestinian divide, Tel Aviv on Fire gets by on the low-keyed assurance of its cast and its medium-grade amusements.

Like the recent "Searching for Sugar Man," A Band Called Death celebrates music born in Detroit that, with a turn of the wrist and a different roll of the dice, might've found the audience it deserved the first time.

Gives dumpster-divers a chance to slum in the antiseptic safety of a multiplex. (Planet Terror ** (out of four) / Death Proof ***1/2 (out of four).

Despite the movie's limitations, it's very satisfying to watch Louis-Dreyfus and Gandolfini enjoy each other's company on screen, as characters, because it's satisfying to watch them enjoy each other's company as performers.

The movie won't be for everyone -- it's a little rough for preteens, and it doesn't throw many laughs the audience's way -- but along with "Sweeney Todd," this is Burton's most interesting project in a decade

So it’s uneven, but the good stuff’s unusually lively and buoyant.

The performances by Pinnick and Spence are clean, vivid and honestly felt, with a lot of the best work emerging nonverbally in the spaces between characters closing a gap.

Catfish is fascinating. At the same time, it emits a condescending, pitying odor.

It plays as a comedy in its structure, and a drama in the margins, on the sidelines. Minor, clever, wonderfully acted, Non-Fiction makes room for jokes about “Star Wars,” Michael Haneke’s “The White Ribbon” and, at one point, Binoche herself. It’s funny that way.

A nerve-racking noir from Australia.

Even with its drawbacks, I found “The Watchers” worth watching, even with its odd (and perhaps too faithful to the book) final 15 minutes. The director works well with cinematographer Eli Arenson to envelop the chamber-sized ensemble in various shades of dread, or comfort.

The Departed exists in a movie-place about as far from personal statements as a storied director can get. Maybe those days for Scorsese are long gone. But Scorsese's sense of craft remains sure.

Catching Fire has the bonus of a genuinely charismatic performer at its center. Jennifer Lawrence, now an Oscar winner thanks to "Silver Linings Playbook," emotes like crazy throughout "Catching Fire," but you never catch her acting.

It's a bit schematic and sweet-natured, perhaps to a fault, yet the faces linger. Smith and his mixture of actors and non-actors remind us that an act of generosity is all it takes to change a life.

I enjoy both Timberlake and Kunis; just this side of manic, they seem right together.

Plenty gory, but graced by a jovial sense of humor and an enjoyably guts-centric use of 3-D.

The neatest effects in U2 3D are simple ones. The wow/coolness of watching a revered superstar tilt his mic stand toward the camera creates a simple but irresistible feeling of being there in the flesh, with a phalanx of expensive digital 3-D cameras.

Fox’s resolve, his ever-sharp wit and acuity, more than mitigates what’s not entirely useful in Guggenheim’s filmmaking approach.

The latest nerve-shredder from Josh and Benny Safdie is worth seeing, even if it’s not their finest two hours, and even if half of any given audience will resent the hell out of it. Adam Sandler’s excellent.

The films are not works of genius. They are, however, wily reminders of the virtues of restraint when you're out for a scare.

A small but droll big-box comedy.

Style is a tricky, elusive thing, and this film doesn’t so much have it as strive for it, constantly. But something in Watson’s story endures: The wish-fulfillment truly satisfies. And with the war clouds gathering by story’s end, the fairy tale acquires a bittersweet edge, nicely cutting all that whipped cream.

As Halla/Asa, Geirharðsdóttir never forces a thing. The actress is the honest engine of this sincere, slightly off-kilter fable.

It’s stark, unadorned drama, and it feels real, reminding us that these are fine actors, giving their all.

For some, Other People’s Children may feel a little too smooth. But the film’s success starts and ends with the natural vibrancy of the performances, and Efira leads the way.

Surprise! The Hummingbird Project basically works; it’s intriguing; the actors play it just straight enough to make it feel like a fact-based drama (though it isn’t) with a few darkly comic details.

Extremely well wrought. Not overwrought. Not underwrought. Just wrought.

The parent/child relationship at the movie's core is endlessly fascinating.

Set in 1973, amid a forest of shag carpeting, Annabelle Comes Home is a nice little summer surprise, and quite unexpectedly the freshest of the three “Annabelle” movies spun off from the larger “Conjuring” galaxy of horror films.

Even when it’s outlining its own ideas more through rhetoric than character, France keeps us on our toes regarding what’s around the corner. Seydoux’s the chief but hardly the only reason to find out.

Now, about the spider. Julia Roberts voices Charlotte in a way that suggests ... not much, I'm afraid. She may be a genuine movie star and can be a good actress, but her voice -- and what she does with it -- never has been one of her strengths.

Around the midpoint Alpha Dog becomes less sociological and more personal, developing a real sense of suspense.

On the facile side, but it's well-crafted and smartly acted.

If any one aspect of Chase's film keeps it from being more than merely coolly engaging (which it is), it's the casting.

In the end Tropic Thunder is an expensive goof about an expensive goof, and the results are very impressive and fancy-looking.

Potiche is very "Touch of Class" and "House Calls" in its comic vibe and trappings, and if you're old enough to remember those Glenda Jackson rom-coms, you'll probably respond favorably to Potiche.

On its own terms, thanks to two fine, committed performances and a coastline made for this tall tale, The Lighthouse works its own stubborn form of black magic, pulling ideas and dynamics from silent and early sound cinema, from early Harold Pinter plays such as "The Dumb Waiter,” and from the recesses of the Eggers brothers’ fertile imagination.

This is one of those poetical nonfiction eyefuls determined to make its primary subjects seem like they were alone with their thoughts, their camera equipment and their expectant yearning.

It’s a comedy with a lot of very big laughs.

It is, however, just about perfect in its wrenching emotion, expressed by an actor clearly up to the challenge of acting in a Paul Greengrass docudrama — which is to say, acting with as little capital-A Acting as possible.

It's a tasty primer on the man, the eater, the critic and the city.

For all its workmanlike devotion to out-of-control helicopters, “Spectre” works best when everyone’s on the ground, doing his or her job, driving expensive fast cars heedlessly, detonating the occasional wisecrack, enjoying themselves and their beautiful clothes.

Anderson keeps inventing and detailing new unrealities to explore. They don’t all satisfy, certainly not the same way, but they’re his, and nobody else’s. And this is his best movie since “The Grand Budapest Hotel.”

With a bare minimum of dialogue, and a brutal maximum of scenes depicting near-drowning situations in and around Dunkirk, France, in late May and early June 1940, Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk is a unique waterboarding of a film experience.

This is a droll and extremely well-acted tale of a family in crisis, and in progress.

With most films, that'd be enough to cut out half the potential American audience. But effective, evocative science fiction, which Elysium is, has a way of getting by with an ILA (Insidious Liberal Agenda) in the guise of worst-case dystopia.

The film is an exercise in improbable contrasts. The more extreme the actions of the characters, the more contained and fastidious the director's technique.

The film works best in its most acutely observed details of daily life in the trenches.

It's nice to see a movie that is, well, nice. Nice but not dumb. It's also a comfortable fit for Costner.

More than a female singing cowboy, Vargas was ranchera incarnate, whether singing the material of drinking companion Jose Alfredo Jimenez or her own cathartic cries from the heart. The film is a fond but clear-eyed tribute.

Though Sitting in Bars with Cake goes in a clearly charted direction, there’s enough going on between the plot points to make it feel like there’s something real at stake between these women.

Cooper is very much a real director, with a genuine facility with filming musical numbers. We believe in the characters’ talents, and spend time soaking them up without a lot of nervous, overcompensating editing. Between songs, he and Gaga make even the bluntest cliches about love and career and misery minty-fresh, all over again.

Linklater's working-class mosaic is seriously interested in how most of this country gets by for a living. And that, sadly, makes it distinctive.

While not everything in Jindabyne works, especially in its final, redemptive third, the film and its faces stay with you.

At its best, director Brewer’s film lounges alongside such movies about moviemaking as “Ed Wood” (written by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, who wrote this picture, too) and the more recent but very thin “The Disaster Artist,” about the making of the less interestingly terrible cult item “The Room."

Farmiga has never been better than she is here. Rarely does she get to do comedy, and she and Clooney give Up in the Air's sustained air of engaging disengagement a heartbeat as well as a romantic charge.

It’s consistent, and there’s enough juice in Hanks’ personal, human-scaled interest in ordinary heroism under fire to make the movie underneath the labels work on its own terms.

This is an effective genre piece. And Marling's quiet way of anchoring a scene is subtle enough to escape detection in almost any narrative circumstance.

It’s less about the healing power of theater and more about the persuasive power of the right actors working with two responsive filmmakers, sidestepping pitfalls and finding little nuggets of behavioral gold en route to a most unlikely Romeo’s opening night.

Disobedience sometimes wants for rougher edges, and a fuller characterization for Weisz to play. But there’s real satisfaction in watching her, McAdams and Nivola inhabit a fraught and complicated relationship.

The lightly carbonated fizz of I Used to Go Here has everything to do with Rey’s deftly chosen ensemble.

The best Hirsch's film can do, in the end, is remind us that bullying means more than we admit, and its effects aren't always immediately clear, even to loved ones.

A gentle, honest and shrewdly realized film such as Tiger Eyes, based on the 1981 Judy Blume novel, shouldn't have to fight for a moviegoer's attention or an exhibitor's screens. But it's worth seeking out.

The Spectacular Now is rare: a coming-of-age movie featuring a teenage couple about whom you actually give a rip.

The three people we meet here have worked every side of every street, by necessity: They’re artists of self-invention, activists of serious intent and just plain good company on screen.

Director Barry Poltermann’s sweet little evocation of a show business career captures Reilly at “the twilight of an extraordinary life,” in Reilly’s words.

The film treats depression and despair and young love with just enough gravity so the movie doesn't float away completely.

There’s real filmmaking here in The Batman. Matt Reeves, the director and co-writer, has a serious interest in the tantalizing Batman/Catwoman dynamic. His script, in collaboration with co-writer Peter Craig, parcels out the action sequences carefully, and when they arrive, they’re both visually lucid and excitingly reckless.

Ledoyen in particular humanizes the story-within-a-story strategy. Her character's sly verbal hesitations become part of a mutual seduction, more theoretical than practical, but enticing nonetheless.

Effective dialogue doesn't necessarily mean witty dialogue, but wit certainly helps, and you tend not to get much of it in a low-key legal thriller. Fracture is an exception.

Stewart did direct Rosewater, and even with its limitations, the film works. Stewart has serious, dramatically astute talent behind the camera, as well as (big shock) a sense of humor.

The biggest change from the '69 "True Grit" is the best thing about this formidably well-crafted picture. Portis's narrator and heroine, 14-year-old Mattie Ross, runs the show this time, not the one-eyed marshal.

At its best, 99 Homes finds Bahrani tightening the screws on his own style, going for speed, concision and an agitating rhythm where his previous films took their time. I hope he'll go on to make movies combining the vital aspects of all his work.

I like the way DiCaprio and Hammer capture the little things - the byplay, the moments in which two men are "playing" FBI agents, partly for show, partly for real. At times, DiCaprio's macho posturing recalls a junior G-man version of Marlon Brando's self-hating homosexual in "Reflections of a Golden Eye."

The acting is exceptional. If parts of A Secret veer toward soap opera, the ensemble work reduces the suds to a minimum.

The film has an easygoing, inquisitive spirit, heightened by Webb's visual conceits

Peter and Michael Spierig's earlier, campier horror outing, the zombie picture known as "Undead," was even bloodier than this one. The movie-makers are after bigger game here, and a subtler mixture of speculative nightmare and action film.

In The Night House, narratively faulty but full of insinuating shivers, Hall once again expands her range. She intensifies what could’ve been just another woman with a flashlight in a haunted house movie, peering into the beyond.

A small, shrewd movie about large, messy emotions and regrets. It is a grown-up work about people who grow up the hard way, leaving one heart in disrepair and the other in reckless forward motion. It's a sad piece, but not maudlin.

The material may be formulaic, but the spirit of the piece is friendly.

Those receptive to Godard's sense of humor will find Film Socialisme an elusive yet expansive provocation. Those less receptive will find it elusive, period.

Zack and Miri has a bright, chipper look to it, thanks to cinematographer Dave Klein, a frequent Smith colleague. Wintertime in Pittsburgh never looked so good.

Like the great, bittersweet Thomas Dyja account of Chicago's 20th century, "The Third Coast," Hogtown is hip to both the glories and the disgraces any great city can claim.

You could also say The Harder They Fall consists on a diet of flourishes.

I'm not sure Edge of Tomorrow holds much repeat viewing potential among teenage movie consumers, since the movie's a self-repeating entity to begin with. But once is fun.

It may not look like anything he's done before, but Inland Empire joins "Mulholland" and the whatzit "Lost Highway" (1997) to form the strangest show-business triptych around. All three concern artists whose identities demand more than one body. The films give new meaning to the phrase "dual citizenship."

The movie's pretty light on matters of science. It works best as a study of human vulnerability and love's way with us all, and as such, a handsomely mounted, slightly hollow picture by the end becomes a very affecting one.

The reason I like Miles Ahead, despite its problems, has everything to do with Cheadle both behind and in front of the camera.

A rich, vexing experience.

Stoopid fun, From Paris With Love doesn't do much for Paris or love, or your brain cells, but it flies like a crazed eagle on uppers and comes from the talented, propulsive schlocketeer Pierre Morel.

It may make true love look all too Hollywood-easy in the end, but en route it’s still a Celine Song film.

For all the warmth emanating from the film's core, thanks to Broadbent and Sheen, I don't know if Leigh has ever made a crueler picture.

As the title character — a professional gambler with a lot behind him, and not much impulse to dredge it up — Oscar Isaac makes for a magnetic sphinx indeed. His is not the only good performance. But it’s the crucial one.

This is a general-interest documentary, not one for the wonks or jazzbos. But the music, as we keep hearing from the cited experts, friends and admirers, covered so many different styles, Chasing Trane rides right past its own prescribed length of track.

The director is Kevin Macdonald, a documentary filmmaker making his fiction film feature debut. (He won an Oscar for his Munich Olympics hostage chronicle, "One Day in September.")

Something in the Air, is the latest screen portrait of an artist as a young man. It's a good one too, rich and assured, even if writer-director Olivier Assayas is more successful at creating atmosphere than at making his romanticized younger self a three-dimensional being.

The film is bright, busy, enjoyable, progressive without being insufferable.

Bright and engaging, and blessed with two superb non-verbal non-human sidekicks, Tangled certainly is more like it.

Piani did the right thing in casting Rutherford, whose physical embodiment of Agathe suggests a tall, gangly, striking woman trying not to be seen. The actress leans into the character’s unsettled, often sullen side, though not at the expense of the comic tropes.

One part smart, one part stupid and three parts jokes about body parts, the extremely raunchy Neighbors is a strange success story.

Frank's dialogue owes a little something to Elmore Leonard, but it's less comic and heavily brocaded.

There may be less than meets the eye here. But what meets the eye is pretty striking.

With a refreshing lack of fake glamour, the film captures what it's like to be an initially unpromising comedian on the road.

Ozon’s style as a filmmaker favors smooth technique and easy proficiency, and his resume is full of comedy. That would appear to put him at odds with this material. But his handling of difficult subject matter carries a welcome, borderline-dispassionate restraint and a respect for each character’s value.

The film has a compelling way about it. All five of the immediate Block family members emerge in full and affecting portraits.

Places come; places go. Every human being deals with loss differently. “Eephus” acknowledges that, but it’s a sweet, sidewinding paradox of a sports movie: sentimental in a quietly unsentimental and offhandedly comic fashion.

By Lithgow's standards this is pretty low-keyed acting, but he may have played one too many blowhards in his recent career. His performance works, but it lacks surprise and, as written, he's a bit much.

It’s a close call, but Grace is Gone is worth seeing for the way John Cusack works with Shelan O’Keefe and Gracie Bednarczyk, two of the least affected and most affecting young actors to hit the screen this year.

Unabashedly theatrical and richly cinematic, even when it's falling apart.

As with most Cameron blockbusters, “The Way of Water” has a way of pulling you in, surrounding you with gorgeous, violent chaos and finishing with a quick rinse to get the remnants of its teeny-tiny plot out of your eyes by the final credits.

Twenty or 30 minutes into Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium the urge to flee may rise within you like an oceanic tide. But stick with it. The film is very sweet--in fact it represents the dawn of a new sport, Extreme Whimsy.

So what is it? Primarily it's a showcase for Vincent Cassel, who dines out on the role and won a Cesar award (the Gallic Oscar) for his efforts.

A small but, in its way, daring picture.

The script’s quippy streak could’ve used better jokes. But this is one franchise that doesn’t feel fished out or exhausted or exhausting.The monsters, Toho studio classics redesigned but faithfully so, are pretty swell and monumentally destructive.

The film, a handsome nerve-jangler co-produced under the storied Hammer horror banner, amps up the scares without turning them into something completely stupid. Success!

Berge is a meticulous and intriguing host, though one gets the feeling he's relaying, very selectively, only so much of the messier side of his life with Saint Laurent. So be it.

The movie’s good even when it goes in too many directions at once, because it gets the kids right.

Well, it's a masterpiece compared with 'Little Fockers,' the last movie featuring Barbra Streisand.

Even if Talk to Me feels at times as if some crucial, characters-just-hanging-out material failed to make the final cut, the movie gets under your skin.

The best of Prometheus is nonverbal and purely atmospheric: Fassbender's "Lawrence of Arabia"-loving character bouncing a basketball as he patrols the spaceship while his human cohorts finish up their two-year nap.

The ideas aren’t exactly new here, and one need only look at the entire career of Chicago filmmaker Joe Swanberg (a producer here) to realize the difficulty of shaping living, breathing, vital art out of gormless improv techniques. Here, clearly, the actors have been well and truly guided along the way, and Howard is a serious find.

Zellweger’s film — and it is hers — creates an intimate illusion that feels authentic, witty and affecting.

While it's effects-heavy, the movie itself does not feel heavy. Consider it a fanciful extension of the recent and very fine documentary "Project Nim."

For about an hour Looper really cooks. Its second half is more of a medium boil, and less fun. But watching it, I realized how few commercial entertainments hold up straight through to the end-point.

It's entertaining, and following an old Disney tradition Frozen works some old-school magic in its nonhuman characters.

An elegant miniature, Rama Burshtein's Fill the Void labors under a narrative inevitability, but it's artful work nonetheless.

The final third of this grim, accomplished film felt sluggish to me; just when he might’ve profitably gone crazier with the scenario, and the storytelling rhythm, Cronenberg putters and lets the audience get out ahead of the developments.

The movie’s a little sketchy and underwritten, and it feels sometimes as if scenes have been pared away or cut altogether to concentrate on Ahmed. But Ahmed really is terrific. Director Marder has a knack for both observing and igniting human behavior, through character. And supervising sound editor Nicolas Baker’s work astounds, period.

In Top Five, you sense Rock trying to load all these disparate talents onto a conventional romantic-comedy structure. It's a close call, but it holds.

Even if “Inside Out 2” sometimes favors speed over, well, everything else, it’s gratifying to see an ordinary and, yes, anxious 13-year-old’s life, like millions and millions of lives right now, treated as plenty for a good, solid sequel, and without the dubious dramatics of the first movie’s climax.

Soderbergh and Burns remain exceptionally well-matched collaborators. They’re after just enough human interest to make us care, and just enough socioeconomic outrage to make us seethe — some of us, anyway.

The more you like Leone's work the more you'll likely respond to To's latest. Which is odd, considering Exiled is a gangster picture by strict definition.

Surely the gentlest American film ever made about home-grown revolutionaries.

It boasts a generous exuberance and, as entertainment products go, it's surprisingly sweet.

This sense of unruly behavior is mitigated, deliberately, by the gentleness and odd comic grace of July's presence and voice.