Michael Phillips

For all the boozed and abusive amusement provided by the great Bill Murray in the good-enough St. Vincent, the moment I liked best was Naomi Watts as a pregnant Russian stripper, manhandling a vacuum across the Murray character's ancient carpet. In movies as in life, it's the little things.

As MI6 head Stewart Menzies, Strong is my favorite of the supporting players — witty, knowing, deserving of his own movie and yet comfortably a part of this one.

All four key actors are lovely, none of them playing to the camera — Durkin likes nice, long, slow-zoom set-ups, roomy and generous — and all of them affecting. Coon has the built-in advantage of playing the character undergoing the most evident and playable changes. But she’s extraordinary in her contained emotion.

Original, it's not. Exciting, it is. This jacked-up B-movie hybrid of "Black Hawk Down" and "War of the Worlds" is a modest but crafty triumph of tension over good sense and cliche.

Ford v Ferrari works as a stylish, enjoyable mash note to its era, and the need for speed and all that.

Shot under gray skies and in artful shadows by cinematographer Bradford Young, scored to wickedly disorienting music by Oscar-nominated "Sicario" composer Johann Johannsson, Arrival will cast a spell on some while merely discombobulating others. Right there, I'd say that indicates it's worth seeing.

Director and co-writer Eytan Fox is going for a sexually democratic, politically aware variation on story themes familiar to "Sex and the City" viewers. (At one point Lulu is referred to as "Miss Israeli Carrie Bradshaw.") Surprisingly, it works, and the entire cast is excellent.

At this point in Pixar's history, the studio contends with nearly impossible expectations itself. This is what happens when you turn out some bona fide masterworks. Brave isn't that; it's simply a bona fide eyeful.

The film's emotional claustrophobia may not be for everyone.

A far more Tyler Perry-ish mixture of comedy and tragedy than the easygoing "Best Man" was, back in the pre-Perry movie era.

One Crazy Horse staffer, also female, is asked on camera by a visiting journalist to define the cabaret's notion of eroticism. To "suggest," she says. To "seduce."

Everything about it flows and pays off better than the ’84 original.

It’s a pretty good time, and often a pretty good movie for the nervous blur we’re in right now. It’s cozy.

A weirdly old-fashioned affair. If it weren't for the explicit sexual encounters, this could be an Ibsen or a Strindberg play, unclothed and unmoored from the late 19th or early 20th century.

The actor (Segel) creates a dreamy, solemn but subtly vibrant version of Wallace that works for him and for the material.

Through good scenes and derivative ones, Adams is disarming.

By the end of this modest, strange venture, Leto made me believe it was worth being forced to hang out on the sidewalk with this man, if only to get a creeping sense of what that might’ve been like.

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

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

Campbell’s film offers not surprises, exactly, but craftsmanship and low, brute, cunning satisfactions.

It's not a frenzied head-trip, the way Roman Polanski's "The Tenant" was, nor does the movie have half the energy and nightmarish allure of David Lynch's "Mulholland Drive." It's best taken, I think, as a jape and a wry male-centric fable on transgression and desire.

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.

Wholly predictable yet serenely enjoyable.

What strikes me about the new Robin Hood, directed by Ridley Scott, is how its preoccupations and sensibilities lie almost precisely halfway between the derring-do of the 1938 film and the harsh revisionism of the '70s edition

Small but sure, this low-keyed actors’ feast marks the feature directorial debut of writer-director Elizabeth Chomko, who grew up in Chicago and the western suburb of Hinsdale, among other stops in a relocation-heavy childhood.

The Brave One is "Death Wish" with a guilty conscience, and while it may be a bit of a hypocrite as vigilante thrillers go, the internal contradictions of the thing make for a very interesting picture.

The latest, produced by Abrams and directed by "Fast and Furious" alum Justin Lin, isn't quite up to the 2009 and 2013 movies. But it's still fun, you still care about the people and the effects manage to look a little more elegant and interesting than the usual blue blasts of generica.

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’s an efficient, well-acted thriller from the writing-directing team — relative newcomers to features — of Danielle Krudy and Bridget Savage Cole.

Palmer and Bello really do seem like world-weary, spook-addled daughter and mother, and they play the stakes just so, favoring neither blase understatement nor yellow-highlighter melodrama. They're strong enough to take your mind off some lapses in narrative judgment.

Every effect, each little detail in the “Blade Runner” sequel’s formidable arsenal, creates the texture of a wondrously hideous near future, full of holographic accessories, slave-labor replicants and, as one character puts it, products and services of “the fabulous new.”

Mom and Dad may be a blood-soaked lark of uneven quality, but it has the good sense to use Reagan Youth’s punk anthem “Anytown” as an accompaniment to Cage’s parental … change of heart, let’s call it.

While it's a cliche to praise a performance requiring some harsh, fairly explicit on-screen behavior and interactions, Silverman's doing the opposite of grandstanding here.

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

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.

Timecrimes doesn't end as well as it begins. Then again, writer-director Nacho Vigalondo deliberately fudges the beginning and endpoints of his premise, which involves one of those nutty causal loops so dear to writers and consumers of science fiction.

What's striking about the picture, I think, is its lack of violent threat.

As a visual capture of a tour supporting an album, “Renaissance” may not hold a candle to her remarkable, 65-minute visual album “Lemonade” that appeared, more or less out of nowhere, in 2016. But it’s holding an entirely different sort of candle, or rather two candles. One’s a concert movie; the other’s a how-I-made-the-concert-and-this-movie movie.

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

The director and co-writer David Lowery has made nothing but interesting features, six so far, and while his latest (co-written by Toby Halbrooks) turns into a bit of a Lost Boy here and there in its brooding investigation of why Captain Hook, played by a happily camp-averse Jude Law, got that way, it’s a stirring adaptation of J.M. Barrie’s fantasy.

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.

Rounding, named after the hospital rounds medical students conduct with their mentors, casts enough of an atmospheric spell in its tale of psychological demons haunting a young medical student to linger in your psyche a while.

Problems aside, this is a good, twisty, absorbing work.

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

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.

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 is a tour de force for the actress, needless to say. Iranian Golshifteh Farahani is wonderful in the role.

Swift, amoral and nicely unpredictable.

This is very light material, and, unusually for a Lee picture, not everybody in the ensemble appears to be acting in the same universe, let alone the same story. On the other hand: It’s fun.

If Wal-Mart, the Lucifer of multinational corporations in many liberal eyes, sees the fiscal sense in stocking an increasingly wide array of organic foodstuffs, consumer habits truly are changing. Not fast enough, though, for documentary filmmaker Robert Kenner.

Director Carlos López Estrada’s Summertime creates a mosaic of pre-COVID Los Angeles (it was filmed in 2019) through words, action, dance and music. The usual movie musical building blocks, in other words. But not in the usual way.

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

Will The Innkeepers be enough for the young folk? These days there's little middle ground between the determined lack of gore in the "Paranormal Activity" franchise and the determined overabundance offered by so much else. West works in that No Man's Land, intelligently.

Why does “New Moon” basically work, even with its grave self-seriousness? A few reasons. Weitz lets the material breathe, and his actors interact. The film does not try to eat you alive.

It's a Solondz film; it's a given. Abe may deserve all that comes to him, but the question of how he got this way sustains the picture, against all odds.

Huppert, Poelvoorde and Dussullier are experts all.

At its best, Nightbitch is many things at once: funny, unruly, bizarre, tender.

It's roughly as realistic as Georges Melies' "A Trip to the Moon," of course. But revisiting our old pals (one of whom is played by an actor who is no longer with us) and watching them survive one unsurvivable collision or plunge after another, continues against the odds to have a walloping charm all its own.

Aside from Henry, Gunn's cast is on a collective wavelength. Banks, whose perkiness carries a slightly demented edge, matches up well with Nathan Fillion, who plays the lovelorn police chief.

Everything that was false about the tsunami sequence in the recent Clint Eastwood film 'Hereafter' - the bland overview perspectives, the lack of human immediacy - is corrected, terrifyingly, by the first half-hour of director J.A. Bayona's nerve-shredding docudrama 'The Impossible.'

True to form, Guest's newest doesn't pull out the long knives. On the gentleness scale, this one's way over here, as opposed to the film of the moment, "Borat," which is way, way over there.

In the end, as proven by that mixed emotional chord, any director this far along in developing an assured visual style truly is a director to watch.

The latest “Emma,” marking the feature directorial debut of Autumn de Wilde, is a little edgier, driven by a more ambiguous and emotionally guarded portrayal of the blithe young matchmaker played by Anya Taylor-Joy.

From the beginning, the animators got something very, very right with Toothless, who works with an artificial tail just as his human friend works with a prosthetic hand. He’s adorable, yes, of course. But he’s not conventionally flawless, and he’s all the better for that.

Alden Ehrenreich resembles a young, somewhat graver Robert Wagner, though he’s a better actor than the young Robert Wagner was. Ehrenreich’s contained, methodical brand of swagger matches up pretty well with the Han Solo we know from the ’77-’83 Harrison Ford edition.

The acting's very strong throughout, though few would argue that the final half-hour satisfies either as suspense, or narrative, or social observation.

I liked the movie mainly for Barrymore. The way she handles the crucial, early "I love you" moment (he's saying it to her, and the camera shows us what she's thinking), you think: This is one canny actress.

When a new actor slips on the Spandex for a superhero franchise reboot, we should, you know, notice. And we do with Andrew Garfield.

In other words, nothing much held me back from enjoying writer-director Stephen Merchant’s engaging, charismatically acted underdog fable.

So it's a bit squishy at the center. But the film is sleek, purposeful and extremely well acted.

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

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

It’s probably best to call it after this one. But I remain astonished at the rewatchability of these “Trip to” films.

Pugh excels throughout. The movie works best, I think, as a black-comic treatise on what can befall a garden-variety passive-aggressive mixed blessing of a boyfriend if he’s not careful.

Its devotion to the untamed territory of the human heart, its artfully discombobulating time and locale shifts, the shifting personae handled with marvelous fluidity by Seydoux; it takes you somewhere, and more than one somewhere.

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.

The film doesn't so much build as glide, in a pleasing, half-stumbling way, to the first day of school, which links Everybody Wants Some!! to Linklater's previous film, the gentle masterwork "Boyhood."

Fleifel’s film favors well-paced if slightly schematic prose, though the actors are more than good enough to keep you with these people every fraught minute.

You may buy the ending or not. The filmmakers certainly do, which helps. And the film is modest but skillful and heartfelt, spiced just so by Plaza and company.

While the film is roughly half grit and half sugar, it works because Smith sticks to a tougher, more rewarding recipe of 99.9 percent grit and only .1 percent sugar.

After playing one too many sullen poseurs it’s clear Colin Farrell and Ralph Fiennes had a ball making an inky black comedy seething with grandiose invective.

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

Still, it's a pleasant surprise about an unpleasant guy brought to life by an ingratiating paradox, a movie star who has turned into a wily character man.

McCarthy is following well-established story grooves here, but scene to scene, he allows the dialogue to breathe and reveal bits of character along with the more expedient bits of plot advancement.

I can't help but wish this new Far From the Madding Crowd came with the thrill of interpretive discovery, the way Jane Campion gave Henry James' "Portrait of a Lady" a good shaking-up or, more conventionally, the way James Ivory mainstreamed E.M. Forester in "A Room With a View" and "Howards End."

I hope Spacek gets a role as spacious and accommodating as Redford’s someday. By contrast, Spacek’s co-star delivers what he has been best at: a single, careful look, or mood, or understated note at a time. Redford is not a chord man. I wouldn’t call the film itself complex, but it’s sweet-natured.

Nick Kroll is shrewdly cast as the Lovings' ACLU lawyer, green but enthusiastic; my favorite of the supporting turns comes from Sharon Blackwood, as Richard's rock-solid midwife mother.

Instead of a modern classic, able to travel the globe with ease, Il Divo is merely a wonderfully cast, tonally assured achievement, with a uniquely strange tour de force at its core.

Sharp, well-acted film.

There’s nothing vague about the narrative of The Killing of a Sacred Deer. Its strangeness is crystal clear. It plays out in ways both sardonically funny and extremely cruel.

It's Complicated isn’t: It’s pretty simple. It’s simply a good time.

The interview sessions are all disastrous in one way or another; Let It Rain is at its wittiest when Michel flails around, grousing about his own divorce and child custody troubles without ever quite asking his interview subject an actual question

Ladron plays like a telenovela without the melodrama. The characters are brightly drawn archetypes, and the humor's very broad. But the tone is nice and brash.

The film sags in the middle section, and it's more a novelty item than a fully formed work . But it's very entertaining. And Van Damme proves himself a brave, possibly foolhardy actor, which is more than Steven Seagal ever did.

The film isn't much as cinema, but it doesn't really matter. The final half-hour, in particular, generates the sort of suspense you rarely get in a sports documentary.

The latest film version loosely adapting the Wells story exploits it both ways, subtly and crassly. It works, thanks largely to a riveting and fearsomely committed Elisabeth Moss mining writer-director Leigh Whannell’s stalker scenario for all sorts of psychological nuance.

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

Mainly, Booksmart works because Kaitlyn Dever and Beanie Feldstein are so magically right together.

The movie — certainly Daniels’s best since “Precious” — is as turbulent and zigzaggy as Holiday’s life no doubt felt like to the woman who lived it. If this risky movie hits some bum notes, Andra Day cannot be found anywhere in the vicinity.

Leoni is one of the truly distinctive comic actresses we have in the movies today, a tough broad with murderously effective timing and phrasing.

Not a zingy marvel of narrative momentum. But it's not trying for that.

The film has a quietly relentless quality. Redford is fully engaged and vital. I'll leave it to others to read greatness into All Is Lost. It's enough that it's good.

It’s good. It’s fun. It goes out of its way to salute the visual effects armies that have made the MCU what it is today, for better or worse.

There's a numbing aspect to Goat. But the best of it, I'd say, is honorably harsh; the subject should be difficult to watch, or the filmmakers aren't being honest about the way we operate as a culture, and what we allow and encourage our young men (and the young women who suffer the fallout) to put up with, still.

Air is a good time, as well as a triumph of sports marketing in every conceivable way.

It's sweet, and low-key. It's very '70s in its vibe, which helps when the script veers in and out of formula.

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.

Good story, well told. Interesting concept. I wonder if people will go for it.

Changeling fundamentally works; it holds you. But these issues of texture and detail matter too, and they hold clues as to why Eastwood's latest is a good, solid achievement rather than a great, grieving one.

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.

Scott’s production works on the level of classy, confident yarn-spinning.

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

Operation Mincemeat takes liberties. All historically based movies do. Call Madden’s version a civilized shell game that accomplishes its mission, more or less in the spirit of how things actually got made up and went down.

Che is Soderbergh's most interesting film in years, defiantly eccentric and absorbing at its best.

A year into their new lives, all three men experience profound isolation. How, they wonder, can Americans live such anti-social lives, so unconcerned with the idea of societal interdependence? This is the chief unexamined question raised by a worthy picture. What is there holds you all the same.

Kidman rises to the occasion, and while one-note mediocrities like “The Substance” offer gallons of fake blood where the provocations should be, Reijn’s film — seen the second time, at least – only needs its nerve and its interest in what Kidman can do, which is more than I even realized.

What works best is whatever's completely incidental to the story, such as the totes-magotes/slippy mcgippy jive talk.

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.

She delivers a solid and easy star performance. Some young performers lack a relatable quality; Seyfried has it, even with those old-school, big-screen peepers.

The actors, by and large, are first-rate. And the songs don’t hurt.

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.

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.

The director, New Zealander Christine Jeffs ("Sylvia"), loosens the plotting as best she can, letting the interactions breathe. Her work, and the film, is strictly about the performers.

Until the last 20 minutes, which stumble around in an attempt to set up a sequel, The Incredible Hulk keeps slamming everything forward, satisfyingly.

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

Frost/Nixon is wholly absorbing.

See it; see those three performers go to town.

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.

Sleek and, until a stupidly violent climax, very entertaining, Unknown is the opposite of "Memento."

The actors are excellent. Rogen falls very comfortably into the role of a 29-year-old who has fallen very comfortably into a living thing - a marriage - and stopped working on it.

The very antonym of "fun," writer-director Craig Zobel's new film Compliance is one of the toughest sits of the movie year 2012. But it's an uncompromising and, in its way, honorable drama built upon a prank call that goes on and on.

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

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.

It's refreshing to see a non-mainstream movie that wears its heart and lust on its sleeve, and has anything but violence on its mind.

The issues at play in Mustang are gravely serious but the tone and rhythm is brisk, headlong and intelligently lively, like the women at the center.

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.

Think Like a Man is what it is. But its hangout factor is considerable, because the actors' charms are considerable.

While Blue Beetle isn’t the same representation achievement the first “Black Panther” was for the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the movie works on a canvas broad enough to include some wrenching emotional sequences along with the usual superhero selling points.

The fetching comedy Priceless”(“Hors de Prix”) weighs about as much as its star, Audrey Tautou, but like Tautou’s pleasingly craven heroine it knows exactly what it’s doing.

Diop is a reactive wonder as well as an exceptional scene partner as she strategizes, subtly, how to work with or around or deflect the microaggressions coming from her “new family” and, more happily, her few friends in this strange new land.

Davis is reason No. 1 the film extracted from Kathryn Stockett's 2009 best-seller improves on its source material.

The Photograph treats all its characters with some decency and understanding, in a genre where straw villains and cardboard adversaries typically run rampant. The plaintive, jazz-inflected musical score by Robert Glasper establishes the right vibe and level of drama, which is to say: more like life and less like the movies.

Breathlessly paced bordering on manic, but propulsively entertaining.

Vox Lux is the sardonic yang to the sincere, heart-yanking yin of this season’s big awards fave, “A Star is Born.”

Landline follows the contours of a conventional ensemble comedy-drama. Which it is, from one angle. But the writing's often prickly and funny. The actors aren't tested or challenged, necessarily, but they're playing in comfortable grooves and there's a lot of satisfaction in watching the results.

This addiction drama is primarily a showcase for its superb leading performers, and in its compressed time frame (24 hours around Christmas) it feels like a well-made play more than a fully amplified feature film. The acting is enough, though.

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.

Cleverly structured, Horrible Bosses works in spite of its cruder, scrotum-centric instincts.

Palmer delivers an on-the-fly masterclass in overlapping comic skills, sometimes heightened (I love her eyeblink-quick, frozen-statue reaction to the good-looking, possibly homicidal hunk named Maniac, played by Patrick Cage), sometimes subtle and heartfelt.

The Book of Eli works, even if the preservation of Christianity isn’t high on your personal post-apocalypse bucket list. Establishing its storytelling rules clearly and well, the film simply is better, and better-acted, than the average end-of-the-world fairy tale.

Several aspects of Weiner, from Jeff Beal's sardonic music (interpolating, among other cues, the theme from "S.W.A.T.") to the shock-cut editing strategies, nudge the movie toward entertaining if facile mockery mixed with just enough empathy to prevent curdling. It's pretty irresistible viewing, though, which is a pretty sad thing to concede.

I appreciate Haynes’ craft and ambition. I love the Ledger/Gainsbourg scenes, which are sweet and sad and delicately shaded. And Blanchett’s inspired not-quite-impersonation of Dylan is reason enough to tussle with the rest of it.

A strong, blood-boiling documentary from director Amy Berg, who made the similarly fine "Deliver Us From Evil".

If you’re new to the Dardennes, Lorna’s Silence will serve as a fine introduction.

Berg sticks to the job at hand, imagining what it is was like to be there, and to be the victim of sloppy, deadly safety practices in the name of a good day on Wall Street.

Everybody Knows finds Farhadi (working with longtime editor Hayedeh Safiyari) consciously going for quicker-than-usual cutting, rarely lingering over anything, always setting up the next part of the mystery. The acting’s uniformly strong, always at the service of a knotty story.

Liman's sensibility isn't sophisticated enough to tease out the nuances of what must be a pretty interesting marriage; the movie is more about texture and surfaces and surface tensions.

Coppola and her brilliant cinematographer, Harris Savides, keep the action simple, but the perspective is perfect.

The film is entertaining and disingenuous, which doesn't make it wrong.

It’s not great superhero cinema — the verdict is out on whether that’s even possible in the Marvel Phase 6 stage of our lives — but good is good enough for “The Fantastic Four.”

It's closer to the hammering "Transformers" aesthetic than expected. Yet the weirdness around the edges saves it from impersonality.

The creator of the original "Mad Max" trilogy has whipped up a gargantuan grunge symphony of vehicular mayhem that makes "Furious 7" look like "Curious George."

Ever since she took "The Grifters" by storm, Bening has been a spectacular if often ill-used actress. Here, it's a marvelous fit of performer and role, and she makes Dorothea a dozen things at once: warm, chilly, open, wary, worldly, insecure, grave, blithe.

What’s effective and touching in A Compassionate Spy relates directly to the satisfaction of getting to know Joan Hall, a terrifically vital and reflective presence. We get, among other things, a glimpse of a long-lived marriage hounded by secrets and surveillance, but an abiding mutual trust.

Sollett works easily and well with Cera and Dennings, and lends a touch of awkward realism to what, from a screenwriting perspective, is pure formula.

If the film is more solid and satisfying than terrific, so be it.

Sweet and flinty in roughly equal measure, the movie's a big hit in its native country.

It's a fascinating bundle of contradictions -- authentic in a million details, deeply romanticized in others. Cool, calm and collected, this is more love story than gangster picture.

The result is McDonagh’s most fully realized work since his breakthrough play, “The Beauty Queen of Leenane,” a generation ago. “Banshees” has its limitations; it’s pretty glib, like everything McDonagh writes, in its mashup of blackhearted laughs and occasional sincerity. He’s akin to the Coen brothers in that regard. He’s also a formidable craftsman and his best lines are pearls.

The film is distinguished by the grubby velocity of his foot chases, and the effectiveness of its craft.

Delpy has always challenged Hawke to find a simpler, more direct form of acting in Linklater's films, which gives them their unique suspense and rolling tension.

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

By design, the dialogue from the (fictional) play comments directly on the central, shifting power relationship in the film, sometimes elegantly, sometimes a little awkwardly.

While Represent could’ve used another 20 minutes to flesh out its unguarded moments, this is a strong feature-length directorial debut. Regional politics is local politics is national politics. It’s revealing to see how the sausage gets made, and who gets to make it.

The film works best when it pays specific attention to how hard it is to write a rhyme worth hearing.

Nothing elegant about Adams here, but she's terrific -- a sparkling screen presence. Her Earhart hoists this big-budget sequel above the routine.

This one’s more than one kind of comedy, too. It’s a sweet yet nicely vinegary immigration fable; a deadpan fantasy; and a tale of two Brooklyns, one (1920) a repository of rat-infested factories and Eastern European Jewish immigrants, the other (2020) the gentrified land of their progressive, pea milk-drinking great-grandchildren.

Holland provides the glue and the webbing for the latest Spidey outing Spider-Man: No Way Home. He’s physically nimble — he’s soon to play Fred Astaire in a biopic — quick-witted with his darting comic timing and an all-around easygoing presence. When the movie treats the mayhem and brutality for real, he’s there with the right degree of anguish.

The film, a sleek and oddly moving study in the cost of debauchery, has its gleeful excesses.

It's still worth seeing. This ambitious and powerful sphinx, a major force in a particular chunk of recent history, may not give away much. Watching and listening to how he doesn't give it away — that's the known known here.

The film operates on a peculiar, somewhat languid rhythm, and there are times when the story’s needs take a back seat to the visual detail. But “Nightmare Alley” has nerve and relentless, fantastic style.

Part "Law & Order" morality play, part "Wall Street" with a dash of the more recent and topically pertinent "Margin Call," Arbitrage hums along, complicating its narrative without tying itself in knots.

Smith carries it, even after the story loses its nerve. This film is the opposite of “Transformers”: It’s all about the unsettling silence, not the noise.

The plot's the same old thing. Mad, mad, mad, mad science; imminent apocalypse; parent/child issues; blah blah blaggidy blah. The tone of Ant-Man, however, is relatively light and predominantly comic.

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

Does it matter that Wolfs is about literally nothing except itself and its star packaging? Maybe not. On the other hand, Watts hasn’t written a single fleshed-out character. It’s about genre tropes, distilled to minimalist quipping amid maximalist mayhem.

Not everyone can act his material with ease. But Ejiofor, who brings a serene gravity to every exchange, was born to do Mamet.

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.

The film's surprising, enveloping jazz score is often deliberately at odds with Niko's moody outlook.

It’s a surprise and a small wonder, then, when The Best of Enemies starts getting good and pretty much stays that way to the end. This may be an apples/oranges comparison, but: For a true-ish story of racial animus, bone-deep prejudice and the American South in the civil rights era, it’s a better, more nuanced and more interesting feel-good movie than a certain, recent, less interesting Best Picture Academy Award winner we could mention.

When Aster lays off the easy comic despair in favor of more ambiguous and dimensional feelings, interactions and moments, Eddington becomes the movie he wanted. His script has a million problems with clarity, coincidence and the nagging drag of a protagonist set up for a long, grisly comeuppance, yet Eddington is probably Aster’s strongest film visually.

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.

Twenty minutes in, Hardy notwithstanding, you might be tempted to bail on Locke. Don't.

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

If you want a list of comics-derived spectacles less successful and worthy than this one, "Suicide Squad" heads the list. And that's the only list it'll ever head.

Its dramatic vexations are at war with Denis' prodigious visual skill. And the fight, ultimately, rewards the viewer.

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

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.

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.

Even when it's stiff and staid in moviemaking terms, Peyton Place has every kind of performance working for it, or against it. Over here, there's Turner's gliding charisma; over there, you get the powerful skill of Oscar nominees Varsi and Hope Lange. Through it all, Lloyd Nolan anchors the frothy seas as the sensible, seen-it-all town doctor, the one who knows all and tells some, depending on the needs of the story. [31 Mar 2020, p.C1]

Leave it to the first-class actors dining out on those roles to make the cat and the mouse interesting and unpredictable.

However sterling the craftsmanship, the film adaptation inflates the meaning and buffs the atmospheric surfaces of Yates' story, rather than digging into its guts.

The last 25 minutes of Thor aren't much better than the first. But that hour in between - tasty, funny, robustly acted - more than compensates.

Janssen is an intense screen presence. Too often she's stuck playing humorless towering antagonists. Here, happily, she's allowed to be a real person.

As close to fraudulent as a documentary can get and still be worth seeing.

This is a modest but expertly performed piece. And this summer, surrounded by lesser, louder, bigger and dumber diversions, it's especially welcome.

The movie is pretty droll, and it agitates for cross-species friendship; its aggressively packaged heart-tugging elements come with an interplanetary friendly resolution. Followed by a dance party.

Writer-director Tilman Singer casts a trancelike swirl incorporating elements of hypnosis, demonic transference, memories of sexual abuse and one of the furthest-out, least by-the-book police procedurals put on film.

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.

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

If anything, director Cooper is so intent on portraying Bulger as a man, not a monster, the man comes off a little softer than he was, probably.

The drug humor in 21 Jump Street carries its own distinction, in that it's actually humor.

The reason Just Wright works is simple. It finds ways to let familiar characters move around inside a familiar premise like living, breathing, likable human beings.

The movie is held together by the scenes between Thomas and Zylberstein, which are superbly acted.

Abrams knits together the ordinary stories of the mill town's inhabitants in a way that feels dramatic without showing their contrivances too obviously. And his casting of Courtney and Fanning was fortuitous, though Abrams' banter for the supporting kids grows tiresome in that "Goonies" way.

The movie itself occasionally gets lost in those woods, but finds its way back out again.

Much of Nebraska is ordinary prose, but the best parts are plain-spoken comic poetry.

Emmerich has no time for poetry or magic, even when the director and his digital wizards (here doing wildly variable work) are trying to dazzle. He’s a taskmaster and a field marshall, not a visionary. But I enjoyed 10,000 B.C. more and more, and more than just about anything Emmerich’s done before.

The film is a success. It works. Greatness eludes it, yes. But greatness eludes almost every film adaptation of a major novel, which we must remember when confronted by a good one.

Wahlberg remains one of our most reliable and least actorly of movie stars, innately macho but vulnerable enough to seem like a human being caught in an inhuman situation.

On the whole I’d rather watch a few more episodes of “Loki.” But Black Widow is pretty good Marvel, with an excellent cast, the usual generic third-act destruction and a bonus plot twist.

I like the new “Jurassic World” movie better than the 2015 edition. Bayona’s direction is considerably more stylish and actively mobile than Colin Trevorrow’s was.

It's simply a more focused scenario than usual, full of violence done up with a little more coherence and visceral impact than usual.

It boasts the filmmaker’s usual high level of unassuming craft; a superb cast; and a couple of limitations, though not flaws, worth noting.

You don't believe a second of it, but it's easy to enjoy, partly because of the casting of all three leads.

As pure, outlandish outlaw cinema it's undeniable.

What’s frustrating about this worthwhile movie is pretty simple: All Anderson needed to do, really, was to let more of the characters, dog and human, female and male, have a say in how the story gets told.

An unusual, agreeable heist picture with just enough feeling behind the style to make it stick, Lucky Grandma rests almost wholly on the withering glances of Tsai Chin.

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

The film works because the screenwriters, Elizabeth Hunter and Arlene Gibbs, have a knack for juggling a dozen-plus major characters without succumbing to the obvious class-warfare gags every 90 seconds.

For once, underneath all the motion capture folderol, the key performance really does feel like a full, real, vital performance.

Be sure to hang around for the closing credits, which imagine all sorts of "Jump Street" sequels to come.

The central relationship in Unexpected ebbs and flows, and even when you sense the edges smoothed over to the point of blandness, the actors keep it on track.

It’s a familiar but enjoyably vindictive PG-13 thriller about mother/daughter trust issues. Plus a little psychopathology.

Small as it is, the film itself functions as a catchy, bittersweet waltz. You've heard it before, but the dancers are fun to watch.

It's Williams you never question, who makes every detail and close-up and impulse natural. She's spectacularly good.

I do think “Wakanda Forever” has plenty of what the enormous “Black Panther” fan base wants in a “Black Panther” sequel. There’s real emotion in the best material here. The loss of Boseman was enormous. So is the skill level of the actors, returning and new, who make the most of a pretty good sequel.

It's nice to see an action movie take more than a passing interest in where our country is at the moment, and then exaggerating that moment into the realm of shrewd exploitation. To wit: Any film combining an indictment of false religiosity with an indictment of violence-solves-violence political pandering in a single line of dialogue — "These weapons have been cleansed with holy water!" — is OK by me.

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.

Happiest Season” isn’t full-on farce; it’s lower-key, and runs into trouble only when the script contends with confessional monologues right up against hiding-in-a-literal-closet routines or routine slapstick, as it does in the climax. But you know? It works.

Nicely acted by all and photographed in creepy, cold, under-lit tones.

For Campion, the personifications of Western heroism and toughness are practically indistinguishable from their own nightmarish distortions. “The Power of the Dog” lays out this theme pretty bluntly, in a story that can feel a mite thin. It’s also well worth your time, because it imagines the time, place and people it’s about so intriguingly.

Cutler is selling a certain kind of product with If I Stay, but he sells it honestly and well.

Doggedly, or rather wolfishly, the film doesn't go in for camp or mirth, at least until its misjudged and semi-endless wolf-on-wolf climax.

A little of Barinholtz goes a pretty good distance for me, but sharing scenes with Mann (who has the timing of a wizard) and blocklike Cena (funny just standing there, with his “cop haircut” and perpetually aghast reactions), he’s what the movie needs: a relaxed wildcard.

Eichner makes Bros easy company, even when the character isn’t easy, because he knows there is more than one side to even the most rabid pop culture fiend. And more than one way to score a laugh.

"Popstar" is most comfortable with material that simply comes out of nowhere.

Sue wins out, and the film is worth seeing, if only for the reminder of how badly justice can miscarry if enough millions are spent by the U.S. government.

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 visual style is typical, ultra crisp computer animation, bright, sharp, somewhat clinical.

The movie's fun. And now, thanks to our annual Neeson thriller, spring can come soon.

Even if Godzilla vs. Kong feels more a tad more mecha than human, it satisfies nonetheless. The MonsterVerse remains a better-than-average franchise, pulling enough variations on its theme of Titans, clashing, to keep on keepin’ on.

A Fantastic Woman is the likely front-runner for this year’s foreign language Academy Award. Its clarity of purpose translates to an effectively lean and straightforward story of adversity and survival, in any language.

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

The attitudes evinced by most of the characters, and the movie itself, are those of the admiring tourist, and as two-hour tours go, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel goes smoothly.

The film may be depressing. But even with a terrible, watery musical score, it's also good.

With his thin-lipped grimace and big, soulful eyes, Lindon's an ideal actor for this sort of puzzle.

It’s wonderful to watch Gosling mine the non-verbal comedy in his character’s 50/50 swagger and insecurity. Blunt’s both a sterling comic foil and a soulful romantic one. Audiences crave romantic comedies with real wit, and the spirit of adventure, because romance is nothing without it. If someone could write one of those for these two, I’d appreciate it. The Fall Guy will do for now.

The sexual component to Splice pushes the story in provocatively eerie directions.

Whatever audiences think of it, I'd say the latest "Apes" picture is just that: a solid success, sharing many of its predecessor's swift, exciting storytelling and motion-capture technology virtues.

The component genre parts coexist, excitingly, without veering into camp or facetious desperation. Alien-invasion aficionados should be pleased. Western nostalgists may be pleasantly surprised. Fans of cowboys-versus-aliens movies, well, it's been a long wait and here's your movie.

The most coldly compelling version yet of the tale dreamed up by the late Stieg Larsson.

Cheesy, yes, hit-and-miss, maybe, but the bits that work really do work.

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.