Michael Phillips

There are moments in the second half of After Yang when some of the narrative beats get a little confusing or vague. Kogonada’s steady, often still, but never static compositions may not be enough for some viewers. Whatever. Clearly, actors respond to what he’s after.

While the film's patient, moody progression into personal nightmare territory won't be for everyone, it's a genuinely evocative creation.

The movie overall is engaging, though it's more cavalier regarding story and relentless in its action than its predecessor.

There’s life, lived with serenity and purpose and, yes, plenty of money and property, in the lives depicted in Hung’s film. Binoche and Magimel see to it in every scene, with or without utensils.

Too much of “John Wick 4″ mistakes grandiloquence for excitement. But yes, as bloody diversion goes, the audience gets its money’s worth.

This is not a raucous family takedown; nor is Karam’s tale a matter of artificial family conflicts, tidily resolved. The Humans gets a lot done in a short amount of time, in a single, two-level setting, plus a few fraught intimations of what’s down the hall or around the corner.

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.

Some may find Results a little light on plot (it is). But with the Smulders character, we're treated to a refreshingly dimensional female lead. Kat isn't one of those aggravating Type A Katherine Heigl cliches. Nor is she a mere attractive doormat. She's prickly, a little lost, but running her own show, and on the road to something better.

Swift and compelling, winner of this year’s Oscar for best foreign-language picture, The Counterfeiters may not be destined for the large international audience that embraced last year’s winner, “The Lives of Others.” But it’s the better, tougher film, with a more provocative moral dilemma at its center.

This is a superb picture, sharp, open-minded, wised-up and cinematically accomplished.

After the Wedding defies the odds: For once, the bigger the emotion, the truer the moviegoing experience.

Now comes The Dark Knight Rises, which makes "The Dark Knight" look like "Dora the Explorer" and is more of a 164-minute anxiety disorder than a movie.

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

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.

Part Joel & Ethan Coen and part John Millington Synge, this grotty little fairy tale casts a deft line and reels you in. I'd see it again just to hear the drug smugglers argue over the use of the Americanism "good to go."

Contrivances come, and go, but The Ballad of Wallis Island rolls along, with just enough casual wit to buoy the story.

The movie sidesteps the conventional breadth of a documentary subject’s resume. We learn nothing about Sakamoto’s early years, and little about his private life. Yet simply by lingering with his pensive, compelling subject at the keyboard, or engaging Sakamoto (discreetly) in his thoughts on his life and his music, Schible casts a spell and captures the spirit of a uniquely gifted composer.

Alas, the movie cannot resolve its story in any sort of surprising or truly fresh way. Where's a good old-fashioned deus ex machina capper when you need it? It's worth seeing nonetheless.

Amid this conundrum of a movie, the actors provide what the facile screenplay cannot: a human pulse, shrewdly underscored by composer Alexandre Desplat’s time-traveling musical landscape.

The latest, meticulously atmospheric and wonderfully acted Potter adventure lands happily--broodingly, but happily---near the top of the series heap, just behind Alfonso Cuaron's "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban."

She tackled "The Tempest" on stage, years ago. On screen I wish she'd (Taymor) adapted it with a freer hand, and then directed it with a more considered one.

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 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.

Finally! A romantic comedy that works. And not just because of Shakespeare.

Spontaneous allows Langford’s Mara, blasé swagger incarnate, and Plummer’s stealth charmer enough unaffected sincerity to make it stick. Onto that sticky stuff, the script applies comforting reminders: Stuff happens. We don’t know how long we have. Seize the day.

The picture's visual style is clean, exact and beautifully photographed by Yorgos Arvanitis.

Wasikowska is wonderful here, unaffected and affecting, but then she has long been a young actress conveying a rich and shadowy interior life on screen. She humanized the Tim Burton "Alice in Wonderland," so clearly she can do nearly anything.

It’s a provocative, serious, ridiculous, screwy concoction about whiteface, cultural code-switching, African-American identities and twisted new forms of wage slavery, beyond previously known ethical limits.

It is not an easy film to watch, nor should it be. It is, however, beautifully made. Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern, the co-directors, wrangle their information and lay it out clearly, vividly and with a sharp sense of focus.

[Moore's] gripping in ways the rest of the picture is not, transcending the thesis points and comic exaggerations simply by playing against the comic extremes and holding a card or two, always, in reserve. She reminds us here how good, and tough, she is at her best, when she gets half a chance.

Everything about Kung Fu Panda is a little better, a little sharper, a little funnier than the animated run of the mill.

The movie’s engagement is more about casual precision than cinematic exuberance, and the banter’s democratically distributed among all its characters, right on the edge of caricature.

The jokes, mostly bitter, deadpan asides in a depiction of U.S. anti-terrorist activity as its own form of domestic terrorism, arrive just in time. The pacing’s both swift and, in proud, sour comic tradition, Swiftian.

Tilda Swinton’s a tightly wound riot as Copperfield’s snappish aunt, living seaside and fending off stray donkeys while her serenely mad lodger Mr. Dick resides in his own universe. He is played by Hugh Laurie, beautifully, as if Bertie Wooster had taken a few wrong turns.

I love Pete Postlethwaite as a rule, but here - as a murderous florist who pulls all the strings - he overacts his key scene so badly it's as if he did it on a dare. Also, Jon Hamm may rule on "Mad Men," but here he's stuck as a rather dimwitted FBI agent who's two beats behind the action, always.

All I can tell you is this: It’s more than movie enough to justify the theatrical experience.

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.

The beauty of the Turkish film Climates, a small but indelible masterpiece, is more than skin-deep. No 2006 film meant more to me. It's as sharp and lovely as the best Chekhov short stories.

The visual personality of the movie is fantastically vivid and bright, the story itself, less so.

Rescue Dawn is Herzog's first English-language screenplay, and this is part of its problem: The hushed conversations between prisoners sound only fitfully idiomatic. Also--crucially--Herzog can't find a way to make his own big finish feel authentic, even if things did happen roughly this way.

A lot of director George Miller's film is gorgeous and exciting. Its craftsmanship and ambition put it a continent ahead of nearly every other animated feature of the last couple of years.

We meet a variety of interdependent characters, from tuna vendors to rice experts, all in thrall to Jiro and his sons. I really wish Tokyo were closer.

It makes the dream of flight itself a vehicle for bittersweet enchantment.

All three leading performers are scarily convincing on the film's own tight, clammy terms.

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.

An exorcism movie for the rest of us, the gripping German drama Requiem contains not a single special effect. It doesn't need one. It has terrific actors fully invested in a casual-seeming, docudramatic brand of storytelling, notably Sandra Hueller.

Perry may never make a movie for the masses, whoever they are. But his truest work burrows into weird, blackly comic places few other filmmakers would dare explore.

Any movie that manages to work in a dig at the National Theatre's heavier pretensions — in a subway sequence, Paddington trots by a National poster for a (fake) play with the amusingly dour title "Damned by Despair" — is OK with me.

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

Both the man and his times resist a compact 93 minutes. This much anguished history, and Aleichem's inspired literary response to that history, has difficulties being confined to conventional documentary feature length. Yet Dorman's touch is sure, his pacing fleet and his chorus of voices marvelous.

Green has made two very different, extraordinarily efficient and compact movies in a row. That, too, may look easy but is anything but — unless you’re a filmmaker and writer of her particular gifts.

Director James Kent’s pretty, frustrating picture has atmosphere in spades, and a diamond-like sheen, but its tale of hearts aflame is slowly clubbed into submission by an excess of taste.

Polanski turns a conventional conspiracy thriller into a triumph of tone, ensemble playing and atmospheric menace.

Director Jon Favreau's voice cast for the animals is tiptop.

From its first moments, the new documentary The Hunting Ground instills a sense of dread that is very, very tough to shake.

As Cornelia's revered documentary filmmaker father, a crusty truth-teller in the Frederick Wiseman mold, Charles Grodin provides a master class in minimalism.

Porumboiu's picture, small and pungent, lacks the resonance of "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu," Cristi Puiu's masterpiece of contemporary Romanian malaise released in the U.S. last year. But this one's less forbidding, and it has a satisfying shape and fullness.

A seriously entertaining highlight of the fall season.

The most charming comedy in town, writer-director-editor Katsuhito Ishii's 2003 piece is a modern Japanese variation on "You Can't Take It With You," with some lovely fantastical flourishes.

McConaughey is first-rate throughout, on top of every dramatic and blackly comic situation, even when the character isn't on top of anything.

The movie finds what solace it can in giving voice to those who escaped this church's grasp.

Some films are destined for nervous laughter, with enough of a pungent aftertaste to linger. This is one of them.

Some films aren't revelations, exactly, but they burrow so deeply into old truths about love and loss and the mess and thrill of life, they seem new anyway. A Single Man is one such film, one of the best of 2009

The Messenger is not itself grueling, which is practically a miracle. Rather, this pungent little chamber piece offers a full yet delicate range of emotions, and it humanizes its characters so that polemics are left in the background.

Crushingly realistic one minute and melodramatically hokey the next.

With “The Babadook” and now The Nightingale, Kent joins the ranks of a few dozen precious filmmakers able to transport us somewhere awful and beautiful, challenging us every step of the way.

It's very slight, and very short (barely 75 minutes minus the end credits), but the material is just effective and affecting enough to make up for its own schematic quality. It's a matter of watching a series of actors, led by Tomlin, tag off on their respective scenes.

The movie operates with a nicely unpredictable rhythm, both short and longer shots ending abruptly, sometimes comically, popping us into the next one.

As for Janney: Hers is a performance of such astute, subtle and compulsively watchable hamming, it’s guaranteed to win a supporting actress Oscar nomination.

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).

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.

An Israeli-on-Arab version of "Shampoo," You Don’t Mess With the Zohan is terrible in many ways, and shoddy in every way that has to do with filmmaking. But politically it's sort of interesting.

It doesn’t duck the messy, unresolved contradictions, the way so many movies about famous artists do.

It’s worth seeing in any case, any format, if only to see a seriously skillful debut feature director breathe new life into a familiar Old Dark House scenario.

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.

Starts out wobbly but ends up quite nicely, primarily because Carrey has a wonderful acting partner in Zooey Deschanel.

If Chi-Raq disarms even a small percentage of those who see it, and provokes any reflection about a gun culture, the uses of satire and the plight of a sadly emblematic city, it was worth the effort. However mixed-up the results.

Now 94, Squibb takes care of business every minute in the enjoyable contrivance Thelma, which succeeds, sometimes in spite of itself, for reasons revealed in the first minute of writer-director Josh Margolin’s comedy.

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.

Gleeson carries the film with wonderful, natural authority. He's a little better than the movie itself, which is glib to a fault.

The Beguiled probably could've benefited from a little more energy in its telling. Still, Coppola offers some gorgeous images of the past made present.

The film’s impressive as far is it goes, and Schoenaerts is a fine actor with considerable emotional resources. But it’s exceedingly tidy in its beat-by-beat developments, and outside Roman and Marcus, the supporting character roster struggles to make an impression.

Deliver Us From Evil has a few things wrong with it, including an egregious musical score, but without resorting to sucker punches, it takes your breath away while making your skin crawl.

This film, calm but full of feeling, relays an intriguing story brought to life by some beautiful actors.

A handful of films, from "The Battle of Algiers" to Paul Greengrass' splendid "Bloody Sunday," have met the challenge of dramatizing civil unrest and law enforcement outrages, memorably. Detroit comes close.

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.

See it, and I dare you not to care about what happens to these kids, these Yankees of chess.

Logan is deadly serious, and while its gamer-style killing sprees are meant to be excitingly brutal, I found them numbing and, in the climax, borderline offensive.

It’s absorbing. The world came perilously close to losing so many Rembrandts, so many Klimts. The cultural casualties, near and actual, may be dwarfed by the millions slaughtered in the same churn of history. But we are what we create, and when emblems of a civilization are reduced to pawns of wartime, there is no victor.

It's Bay World. And after an hour of Pain & Gain, it felt more like "Pain & Pain."

An unusually good adaptation of an unusually good novel.

Looks, feels and flows like a real movie. It's better than the last few Pixar features, among other things, and from where I sit that includes "Toy Story 3."

Fans of “The Room” — they’re everywhere — will get something out of it, though I’d argue not enough; director Franco’s camera sense is neither quite in synch with Wiseau’s (thank God) or quite distinct enough in its own style.

The theater building is a four-story monster, and by the end of the picture we know it very well, in all its broken-down glory.

If Kneecap has a somewhat pushy sense of broad comedy or, in the final third, some predictable dramatic beats, its visual invention wins the day, because it’s so comfortably allied with the songs of protest and release.

The movie putters near the end, but it's a film lover's delight.

A sweet, sharp coming-of-age romance, Adventureland is a little warmer, a little funnier and a lot more truthful than the last 20 or 30 of its ilk. Especially its Hollywood ilk.

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

Vera, as written and as acted, remains a sympathetic and watchful conduit, a peg, rather than a vividly realized engine. We see everything she endures, and all she sacrifices. Yet we are not left with lingering impressions beyond the facts of a fascinating life.

It's also gorgeously acted by all, and while this may not be one of Kiarostami's finest, the craftsmanship nonetheless is so high, it makes everything else currently in theaters look slovenly.

The best material, however, keeps returning to the unstable power dynamic between Q-Tip and Dawg.

Throughout Lady Macbeth we see Pugh's eyes, full of possibility and optimism at the outset, gradually darken. Even her breathing changes. It's a wonderful performance in a very fine film.

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.

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."

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

Not all the anachronisms work, but Corsage works anyway because Krieps makes Elisabeth a dimensional woman for all seasons.

The first hour is terrific; the second one, disappointingly, grows weaker and more conventional.

The acting is its chief strength. Russell Crowe brings a cocky charisma to Ben Wade.

I couldn't help but feel this adaptation needed more of the thing for which Jane herself yearns: a sense of freedom. At their best, though, Wasikowska and Fassbender hint at their well-worn characters' inner lives, which are complex, unruly and impervious to time.

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.

Dreamgirls is performed, shot, edited and packaged like a coming-attractions trailer for itself. Ordinarily that would be enough to sink a film straight off, unless you're a fan of "Moulin Rouge." But this one's a good time.

Flight is exciting - terrific, really - because in addition to the sophisticated storytelling techniques by which it keeps us hooked, it doesn't drag audience sympathies around by the nose, telling us what to think or how to judge the reckless, charismatic protagonist played by Denzel Washington.

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.

Super/Man should introduce many people, young and older, to a fine actor’s work and, more importantly, to what Reeve accomplished for himself and so many others in the life he was dealt.

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.

Shine a Light is one of those lions-in-winter affairs, and Jagger, who has a body fat count of negative 67, can still dance like a maniacal popinjay, and Richards still looks like a satyr who has stayed up all night every night of his adult life.

The second half of The Mother settles for the usual. But getting there makes for a fairly diverting series of melees in the name of child protection, with services rendered by a tough-love mom who does it all.

Rather than go for the throat, its central friendship makes room for feeling, but also for listening, and watching, and reflection. You may cry or you may not. But the movie is up to far more than making sure you do.

The funky, enjoyable Hamburg-set comedy Soul Kitchen is a celebration of co-writer-director Fatih Akin's home base, a spacious, moody city of apparently limitless industrial warehouse space - like Chicago.

The musical score, and some of director Lane’s editing strategies, have a way of playing into the more comic aspects. Yet it’s not a mean-spirited affair. In fact, it’s a sly primer in homegrown grassroots activism.

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.

What happens, when it happens, is … well, either enough or too much, depending on your taste for the fantastic.

When the secrets of David's circumstances and motives start spilling into the daylight along with more and more blood, The Guest does a strange thing. It becomes flat-footed and a bit dull.

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

Writer-director Perry has made a bracing and very Roth-y study of ambition and itchy literary yearning. In another time and another world, Robert Altman captured the essence of William Faulkner's landscape by filming a non-Faulkner crime story, "Thieves Like Us." This is comparable to what Perry has done here.

For the first time in a long time, I came out of a DC comic book movie feeling ready for a sequel. It feels right, at this actual historical moment, when men made of something less than steel are bumbling around trying to run things. Paging Paradise Island!

What the film has is visual authority and an eye for composition.

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

Die-hard devotees of “The Crown” likely won’t like the taste of ashes swirling around in all that’s served here. But there’s more than one way to dramatize the public/private schisms of celebrity, and this way feels right for this director, this actress and this movie.

If The Image Book is just a great whatsit, like the thing everyone’s trying to find in the Mike Hammer picture, why is it bracing and finally very moving?

That first hour is big, and imposing. The rest grows smaller, with the script's self-conscious deeper meanings either layered on top, like pelts, or — more successfully — left to Luzbeki's meticulous images of a sun-dappled 19th century Eden now home to one too many Wal-Mart stores.

Stronger is a movie you need to see, no matter how much you think you don’t need to see it.

What’s missing, even at its trim, tidy run time, is the sort of glancing realism and true nuance of a Paul Greengrass docudrama such as “Bloody Sunday.” What’s there, though, is enough for a consistently absorbing version of what the media did right and what it did wrong.

Dafoe never begs for attention or sympathy; he’s there, like the seasoned, craftsmanlike actor he is, as a conduit and a sort of medium.

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

The actors take your mind off things when they can: I like the way Hathaway jabs her elbow at the elevator buttons for punctuation, and the ardent commitment to language Ejiofor brings to his character’s public poetry readings. But a movie shouldn’t rely on Hathaway and Ejiofor to shell-game your attention away from the movie itself.

The tweaks are interesting, even if they can’t do anything about larger narrative frustrations.

Even the verifiably true material in King Richard has a way of coming off like a Hollywood movie in the most “Hollywood movie” sense of those words.

Howard does a fine, loving job tracing who he was as a gay Jewish boy growing up in Baltimore; as an aspiring playwright and theatrical impresario, schooled at Boston University, Goddard College in Vermont, the summer theater program at Tufts University, and a graduate student at Indiana University; and as a hungry young New York City transplant, eager to make his mark.

It's best to approach this crafty, intriguing offshoot as its own thing. And this time you actually notice the people.

The wonderful thing about Fassbender and Mortensen? Several things, actually. They're effortlessly convincing in period, and they know how to make recessive characters intriguing.

Rretains what made it work on stage, chiefly a disarming sense of humor amid the grimmest sort of personal crisis, and a pair of juicy leading roles.

It’s a big, juicy 1970s period piece, one foot in real life, the other in the movies, the preferred stance of many Hollywood crime sagas.

Despite the familiarity of its themes — the bottom-feeding news media; the pathology born of extreme isolation and a little too much online time; the American can-do spirit, perverted into something poisonous — Gilroy's clever, skeezy little noir is worth a prowl.

This is a film driven by what makes its characters and conflicts tick. It’s freely fictionalized, and some of it’s overpacked. But “The Woman King” feels human-made, not machine-learned.

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.”

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.

The flaw in Death of a President isn't one of morality. It's one of dramatic interest.

Isn't merely joke-funny. It's texture-funny.

Marguerite achieves what the protagonist herself never managed: perfect pitch.

Like the Danny Boyle film version of "127 Hours," Wild is extremely nervous about boring its audience with its protagonist's aloneness. Still, Witherspoon and Dern are reason enough to see it.

In this teen-boy universe, sex is everywhere and nowhere, it's oozing out of every pop culture pore and every other insane boast, yet the idea of figuring out how to talk to girls without turning into a yutz remains elusive.

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]

Even if this sex-forward comedy-drama is slightly miscast, directorially, and always slightly favoring the male gaze, the actors are excellent.

Happy Valley might've fleshed out some of these larger implications. The film could've benefited from another 15 or 20 minutes of detail and nuance. What's there, though, is strong, thoughtful and disturbing.

Just when movie theaters don’t need another one, The Amateur comes along to join the roster of 2025 releases that lack the knack, the juice and exciting reasons for theatergoers to theater-go.

Extraordinary.

The film version stars a wonderful Swedish-Icelandic actress named Noomi Rapace as the hacker and Michael Nyqvist as the reporter. They are excellent and subtle and honest.

An impressive, often enraging feature-length debut from director Robert May, deals carefully and well with the so-called kids for cash scandal.

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

The supporting players in Man on a Ledge bring more to the party than the leads, and my suspension of disbelief seems to have gotten hung up in traffic while attempting to cross the suspension-of-disbelief bridge from the Brooklyn side.

Mainly it's about fast and brittle talk, a lot of it peachy. The dialogue has one ear on the screwball '30s, the other on the way people actually speak when their minds are racing faster than their lives can carry them.

It is, for what it is, a work of considerable care and craft. And it's completely soulless.

Emily the Criminal delves only so far into character on the page, but working from what writer-director Ford gives her, Plaza creates a woman defined by incremental degrees of economic stress and simmering resolve.

A functioning, funny, weirdly touching fable of artistic angst and aspiration, a meditation on fame and its terrors and the metaphoric usefulness of masks and huge fake heads.

They put the "obvious" in "obvious."

It’s not bad. The reboot of The Naked Gun tosses off a few sharp and/or stupidly effective gags of the hit-and-run variety, nice and quick.

Much of the material in “Ennio” will be a revelation to the garden-variety American fan of film music (i.e. me).

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

A satisfying heist movie, animated or live-action, requires more selectivity and less clutter than this one. The movie dashes by door after door, but it lacks the key.

Movies about reckless, chemically addled men rarely have the nerve to go whole hog with the bad behavior, because it makes for alienating company. Still: Blaze comes closer than most to an honest look at this sort of troubadour and this kind of life.

It takes something like a miracle to unlock the magic in his exquisite aggravations, the essence of the human comedy. This film is indeed something like a miracle.

Like "Control," the recent Anton Corbijn treatment of rock star Ian Curtis' short life, the powerful British drama Boy A announces its gravitas with a look--organically achieved, with cinematography, production design and direction working together--you are meant to notice.

We know where The Order is going; the actors ensure our interest en route.

The acting in Durkin's feature is excellent. Olsen is utilized largely as an object for camera adoration, but not in the usual glamorizing way. Olsen, Hawkes and company play slippery figures with lovely assurance.

Funny Games is fundamentally a bourgeois exercise in authorial sadism. As the methodical games grind on, the suffocatingly beige and white surroundings start to look like a mausoleum.

It’s a modest film, but a very good one, and by the end I was quite moved by its valiant belief in decency and in the duo’s eternal appeal.

The movie's benumbed by its own parade of bad behavior. Like some of Scorsese's other second-tier works — "Casino," "Bringing Out the Dead" — the gulf between virtuoso technical facility and impoverished material cannot be bridged. It's diverting, sort of, to see DiCaprio doing lines off a stripper's posterior, but after the 90th time it's like, enough already with heinous capitalistic extremes.

It’s reassuring to see Hopkins return to form, after several years of authoritative coasting. As for Pryce, his affinity for morally comprised men of high achievement (“The Wife,” etc. ) keeps his portrayal of the film’s clear moral paragon from hardening into sainthood.

The film offers plenty of good screen company along the way.

So how's this "Thor" sequel? It's fairly entertaining. Same old threats of galaxy annihilation, spiced with fish-out-of-water jokes.

Heaven Knows What, will not appeal to the majority of casual moviegoers. Likewise, I have no doubts regarding the film's remarkable achievement.

It’s an unnerving portrait in forbidden desire and matched wills, sometimes acting as one barely controlled organism, often at fierce odds.

The National Society of Film Critics recently cited Jean-Luc Godard's Goodbye to Language, the nuttiest lil' picture ever released in 3-D, as the best film of 2014, nosing out "Boyhood" by a single vote.

In his fastidious, exacting, extraordinarily blinkered creation, writer-director Anderson this time has driven straight into a cul-de-sac, stranding every sort of good and great actor in the cinematic equivalent of a design meeting.

As composite sketches go, it's a good one.

The film doesn't pretend to be anything other than what it is: a story of one woman overcoming low expectations. Gugino and Burstyn and the young performers playing the young players do likewise.

Wiig's natural and savvy instincts to go easy, and let the audience come to her, serve her and Bridesmaids well.

Even if you don't entirely buy this version of events, director Ralph Fiennes has given us a speculation that works as drama. It's an elegant bit of goods.

At its spiky, intermittent best, Tully is the best work Cody has done in the conventional feature format since “Juno.” And yet I’m all over the place on it.

At its best, though, The Muppets cuts back on the '80s-flashback self-consciousness and believes in the dream.

Darkest Hour pulls from both extremes of Oldman’s prodigious but often unexploited skill set, the subtlety as well as the flamboyance.

True to the egalitarian allure of the restaurant chain itself, Lisa Hurwitz’s documentary The Automat is both a touching farewell and a fond hello-again for those old enough to remember the salisbury steak, creamed spinach and peach pie behind those little windows of nickel-fed discovery.

This is the most satisfying thriller of the year, capping the Bourne trilogy.

A half-silly, half-earnest indie with the soul of a John Hughes-era sex comedy.

Through good scenes and derivative ones, Adams is disarming.

The problems here, I think, are weirdly simple. The movie takes our knowledge and our interest in the material for granted. It zips from one number to another, throwing a ton of frenetically edited eye candy at the screen, charmlessly.

It's a relief — even though the movie isn't much — to see Danner in a leading role on screen again.

The fun of Spy comes in watching the right actors mess with their own images, blithely.

The stories we hear in 24 City belong to its specific place, but they are universal.

John Wick 2 stages its gun-fu melees sleekly and sometimes well, from the catacombs of Rome to the subway platforms of New York City.

The Witnesses may be schematic, but it lets each character live and breathe. The film captures a time and place that seems very distant now.

Seeing "Dragon" in 3-D really is a must. Its formidable realm of Vikings and dragons and nerds (oh my!) should be enjoyed to the fullest extent theaters allow.

I found it coldly gripping, as well as a mite ham-fisted. At its best, this vision of American end times, an election or two from now, sets aside its less persuasive “tell” for more persuasive “show,” without generic spectacle (though with a $50 million production budget, it’s Garland’s and distributor A24’s biggest gamble to date) or diversionary thrills.

With Rooney Mara as the woman in question — a poised, tense Manhattanite prescribed anti-anxiety medication by her psychiatrist with newsworthy results — Side Effects finds its ideal performer.

That’s Blindspotting all over: an exuberant, brightly colored, zigzagging portrait of a city, an uneasy transformation and a friendship.

The new film A Private War ranks higher than most, in the truth department and in cinematic storytelling. Whatever your personal interest or disinterest in Sunday Times reporter Marie Colvin’s line of work, the way she did it — and the bloody global conflicts she ran towards, full gallop — makes for a tense, engrossing account.

Unnervingly good, Little Children is one of the rare American films about adultery that feels right--dangerous, hushed, immediate.

Even when Shanks hits the primary theme of his movie a little too insistently, the actors are vivid throughout. Brie, especially, is spectacularly effective in every emotional register, in the keys of D (Distress), E (Eh what’s going on with our suction-lips?) and C (Commitment is all).

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.

Nothing in “Civil War” takes your breath away. All the exteriors are shrouded in the same overcast, indistinct light. Little in story terms is what you’d call daisy fresh. But almost everything in it works on its own prescribed terms, and the quiet moments register.

The movie is made well, if you’re buying what it’s selling, and if you don’t consider a story or a script as crucial to the quality of a thriller.

Vivian Maier is a great Chicago story. And what she did for, and with, the faces, neighborhoods and character of mid-20th century Chicago deserves comparison to what Robert Frank accomplished, in a wider format, with "The Americans."

An unusually strong crime thriller, Eastern Promises comes from director David Cronenberg, a meticulous old-school craftsman of a type that is becoming increasingly rare.

What “Frida” does, it does well. It also does too much, probably, crowding its subject with expressive add-ons.

A nerve-racking noir from Australia.

For material that started out for the stage, Finley’s directorial debut really does feel like a movie. It’s elegant and well-plotted but not at the expense of the performances.

The Lego Batman Movie offers more mayhem and less funny.

Trainwreck is all kinds of funny, and like any talent showcase worth its salt, the tone of the humor adjusts to suit the talents on screen.

100 percent right about our corrupt and hypocritical industry-controlled movie ratings system. Being right, however, doesn't automatically make for a strong documentary. I enjoyed a lot of it. Yet fully half of what's on screen is beside its own point.

It is, I suppose, educational; it’s also vibrant and adroit and searching as human drama.

Frantic, violent and unrelenting, it is all of a piece, its tightly packed storytelling making cassoulet of its own implausibilities and familiar terrain covering a web of political and institutional conspiracy.

The most assured and satisfying of the five so far.

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

And it's too bad The Skeleton Twins settles for tidy, slightly hollow narrative developments. The performers are ready to rip. For many they'll be enough.

The chief limitation of Me and Earl and the Dying Girl is an old story: However touching, Cooke's Rachel is there mainly to prop up the sweetly messed-up young male lead, and then to quietly guide him toward adulthood.

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.

Sicko doesn't formulate a way out of this heartless craps game we're playing. It is, however, a very entertaining position paper, and a reminder that we should do better by more of our citizenry.

I don't know if what the Safdies endured growing up was akin to what audiences experience in Daddy Longlegs. But I'm very glad they survived to make a very good film about it.

One of Morris' swiftest works, yet also one of his saddest, Tabloid reveals among other things what happens when one person's definition of ordinary healthy romance is undone by another's.

The entire project is carefully wrought in visual terms and more than a little familiar. Sometimes even a well-applied pair of jumper cables can't do the trick.

I like this film for many reasons. Its sensibility is truly a gentle one. The screenplay may not cohere in ways designed to please the dream-logic-averse, but its wit is neatly matched by the wit of the visual landscapes.

Southside with You is best taken as a reminder of the value of the slow relational build, of taking your time and actually talking, and actually listening, with someone new. Even if there's not a staggering political future in your shared future.

In the end, all these young women want is a foothold on life, a little less humiliation and some physical intimacy. If that makes Bottoms snarky on the outside but conventionally heartfelt on the inside, well, that’s fine, actually.

The wondrous cinematography is by Gokhan Tiryaki. It is not an easy picture. Not many masterpieces are.

The film favors more subtly melancholy strains and, at its best, a poetic touch.

After the fourth electrocution gag, the 10th smack in the face and the 12th assault on a wee rodent crotch, we could all use something quiet.

The film is Nolan's labyrinth all the way, and it's gratifying to experience a summer movie with large visual ambitions and with nothing more or less on its mind than (as Shakespeare said) a dream that hath no bottom.

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.")

This complicated but absorbing tale is not told through primarily American eyes ( Willem Dafoe plays a CIA. figurehead); primarily it's about French and Soviet brinksmanship, and those who succeeded at it, or failed, and one man who died for the risks he took.

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.

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.

The movie is a small marvel of contained spaces, exploited beautifully by Kusama and cinematographer Bobby Shore.

The Armstrong Lie gets going, and gets pretty good, when Gibney is able to focus on the 2009 Tour de France itself, a race fraught with old rivalries and backstage dramas. It's the movie he set out to make in the beginning, after all. But getting there is tough going.

The film basically and improbably works, even with some limitations.

It's big, brash and dramatically it goes in circles. The first two may be enough for most people, especially if they're into Formula One racing, to overlook the third.

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 grandly kitschy rendering of Genghis Khan's early years.

The movie has a sense of humor, but its sense of dread, micro and macro, overrules it.

The marriage on view here, a little ridiculous, a little galling but full of interesting sharp edges, presents Knightley and West with a full array of emotions to explore. The tone remains deceptively light, but it feels both true and in period.

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.

Even with its limitations, I find Silent Light spellbinding.

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.

A fairly entertaining gloss of a docudrama elevated by its cast.

Farmiga's film doesn't state things directly, but we sense what is happening to Corinne, and how some turn to fundamentalism for complex and interconnected reasons.

Since he popped up and broke hearts in Altman's "McCabe and Mrs. Miller," Carradine has learned a wealth of practical acting knowledge about how much and how little need be done at any given moment. He provides the on-screen link to those earlier days and brings the natural authority a director craves in a performer.

Amuses and unnerves in equal measure.

Engrossing and weirdly funny.

The film is a river of pain, weirdly funny in places, as are all of Herzog's filmic essays.

A knockout one minute, a punch-drunk crazy film the next, Interstellar is a highly stimulating mess. Emotionally it's also a mess, and that's what makes it worth its 165 minutes — minutes made possible by co-writer and director Christopher Nolan's prior global success with his brooding, increasingly nasty "Batman" films, and with the commercially viable head-trip that was "Inception."

The film is a singular achievement.

The actors are more than fine. Demoustier is the key, making her character's shifts in astonishment and perplexity honest and plausible.

Dear White People isn't perfect. And yet the flaws really don't matter. This is the best film about college life in a long time, satiric or straight, comedy or drama.

This is a film for actual moviegoing grown-ups who don't mind a little quality now and then.

The on-screen talents, savvy and fine company all, have been ready for something like this far longer than the opportunity has been available.

I admire this film’s craft. And I would’ve appreciated a messier, inner-life impulse to go with it.

The film is worth seeing, if you have any fondness for the writer who co-created "Beyond the Fringe" and who is second only to Stoppard in his sprightly but mellow wit.

A worthy film on a great, tragic subject.

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.

Without making a big deal out of it, Big Hero 6 features a shrewdly balanced and engaging group of male and female characters of various ethnic backgrounds. It'd be nice to live in a world where this wasn't worth a mention, but it is. And yet the movie belongs to the big guy.

Earns its happy ending like few other contemporary dramas concerned with the fate of a child. It puts you through hell for that ending, in fact, hell being modern-day Russia.

The very elements of Eat Pray Love that helped make it a success in 40 languages -- the breezy prose, the relentless sorting-through of dissatisfactions, a steady stream of intriguing sights -- turn the film into a travelogue with a little spiritual questing on the side.

See it; see those three performers go to town.

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.

To become a true screen action hero outside the “Wonder Woman” realm, Gadot needs better material than this, and only when she gets to square off with Bhatt’s increasingly conflicted superhacker does Heart of Stone suggest a human pulse.

The performances reveal precisely what Rivette wants to reveal, which is to say, in conventional psychological terms, not a great deal.

It's an odd film in some ways. The porn milieu is detailed in ways at once sparing, in terms of actual screen time, and bluntly explicit. The odd-couple relationship guiding the story has its familiarities. But where it counts, 'Starlet' ... allows its characters room to maneuver within the potential cliches.

It is a wonder, marked by a sense of wondrous skepticism that has nothing to do with cynicism.

With its one-of-a-kind poetic lamentation, Young's voice sounds more peculiarly lovely than ever. A small picture, but good and true.

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.

Source Code is a contraption, no doubt. But it works.

Amid so many earnest, forgettable COVID-era and COVID-acknowledging movies around the world, here’s one that truly goes for it.

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

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.

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."

Seeing what may be Coppola’s least compelling film has a way of reminding you of all her better ones, especially in the seriocomic vein. Those include the aforementioned “Lost in Translation,” along with “The Bling Ring,” “Somewhere,” even the playfully anachronistic “Marie Antoinette.” If they’re new to you, have at them.

Arnold reminds us that the best thrillers don't settle for taking the audience away from their everyday experience; rather, they burrow inward and, by sheer power of cinematic observation, make it hard for us to look away lest we miss something--on a screen or off.

Besides being super-duper gory, of course, the new movie is jaunty, good-looking and full of what you might call esprit de corpses.

It’s half-crock and half-sublime, which seems about right for its subject.

It is a fine little old-school thriller.

Everything within the film connects to neighboring elements, performance to performance to cryptic absurdity (the opening is one of the strangest of the year) to surprisingly heartfelt acknowledgment of the power of love. Whether things work out or not.

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."