Michael Phillips

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

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.

As a performance vehicle The Drop does the job. As a story, and an uncertainly padded script, the movie lurches and lets us get out ahead of its developments.

At its best, Wright's film is raucous, impudent entertainment.

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.

Raiff most likely wanted to make a movie about a well-intentioned guy in his early 20s who gradually finds his way to a better life. What undermines his efforts is a creeping smugness and self-regard, positioning every side character as an intern in the Andrew Improvement Program.

Near the end, we hear Cobain reveal his disdain for adults who “can’t even pretend, or at least have enough courtesy for their children, to talk to one another civilly.” A painful and unexpected moment.

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

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.

Though stylistically all over the place, it's not without interest.

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.

Schoenaerts is often affecting and just as often scarily intense. The film's intensity, by contrast, beams on and off.

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

The games have begun, and so far they're pretty gripping.

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

The filmmaker's access was impressive, the results moderately entertaining.

The documentary infers a good deal about Mulvihill’s underworld connections and political maneuvers without quite nailing them down.

This is the "Babel" or "Crash" of ensemble romantic comedies, with screenwriter Dan Fogelman mapping out several narrative surprises that throw you for little loops as they're delivered.

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.

In what is essentially a three-human story (they’re outnumbered by their animal co-stars), Rapace brings the heart and soul to every close-up.

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

The drawback of the film's visual approach, however, is a considerable one. The relentless first-person shooting in End of Watch - figurative and literal - is less about YouTube factuality than it is about Xbox gaming reconfigured for the movies.

With "Braveheart," "Passion" and now Apocalypto, Gibson clearly has established his priorities as a director. History is gore, plus a few hearthside family interludes. The trick is instilling the audience with enough rageful bloodlust to make the story work.

The latest “Purge” is an erratic, fairly absorbing and righteously angry prequel.

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

I laughed at a good deal of the movie, but a good deal more of it left me with (Cohen’s intention, probably) the taste of ashes in the mouth.

I fear Spielberg and Jackson hitched their wagon to the wrong technological star here.

The movie belongs to the women, for once, and The Conjuring doesn't exploit or mangle the female characters in the usual ways. Farmiga, playing a true believer, makes every spectral sighting and human response matter; Taylor is equally fine, and when she's playing a "hide-and-clap" blindfold game with her girls, she's like a kid herself, about to get the jolt of her life.

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

This one's a margin Western. Frustratingly uneven, rarely dull.

All the movie has, really, is Tilda Swinton acting up a storm, which is more than enough for some. For me, given what's up with the rest of the picture, it's not quite.

It works, even when the material’s routine, because Pugh’s forceful yet subtle characterization of a heavy-hearted killing machine with an awful childhood feels like something’s at stake. She and the reliably witty Harbour work well together.

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

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.

Sharp, well-acted film.

The film is a singular achievement, a piece of realist cinema with the pull of a suspense thriller.

The Hateful Eight is an ultrawide bore.

The depiction of Havana neither sugarcoats nor grunges-up the harsh reality. The movement intoxicates, but the situations are tough.

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

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

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.

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

Richard Jewell is a sincere and extremely well-acted irritant from 89-year-old director Clint Eastwood. It’s destined to get under the hides of different moviegoers in radically different ways.

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

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

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.

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.

A rich, vexing experience.

The film has its momentary diversions, a few good throwaway jokes amid a tremendous amount of PG-13 maiming and destruction.

It's a strange, fascinating exercise in what Joel Coen once described as "tone management," job No. 1 for any director.

F1 is a pretty decent summer picture, and if it were half as crisp off the track as it is on the track, we’d really have something.

The film's not as good as its cast, but The Way, Way Back has its moments.

Favreau's masterly light touch as an actor hasn't yet translated to a similarly deft offhandedness behind the camera. The movie, slick and shallow, is fairly entertaining anyway.

The oddly beautiful documentary made by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Gray is subtler and richer than its blunt title suggests.

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

At its sharpest Elissa Down's feature directorial debut is guided by intense, rough-edged emotional swings that feel authentically alive, even when the script settles for tidiness.

For all these self-effacing but highly valuable reasons, when the triumphs of the human, agricultural and engineering spirits arrive, they work. It’s moving, and it’s earned. Ejiofor is off and running as a director.

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.

If it has the edge over the 2018 and 2020 movies, the reason is simple though her talent certainly isn’t: Lupita Nyong’o.

As bittersweet farewells go, this one’s quite good.

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

Reynolds retains his skittery comic timing, and Jackman (while tonally a little lost here) certainly put in his time with a personal trainer. But there isn’t a single shot in Levy’s film that flows excitingly into the next one.

By the time Watanabe encounters a holy senile fool in the forest, the film has foregone contemporary urban “King Lear” territory for something a lot closer to the Lifetime Channel.

What’s missing, I think, is a sense of human complication within an inhuman judicial sphere. While Foxx works wonders, especially in his scenes with Jordan, Just Mercy rarely gets under the skin or behind the eyes of McMillian.

It is a better, more fully felt and moving picture than "Blue Valentine."

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

The actors, remarkable and seasoned, take care of their end of things, stylishly and (when and where it can be arranged) truthfully.

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

It is a film, often breathtaking without settling for being pretty, filled with nervous silence.

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

The acting is quite deft, if extremely broad, but screenwriter Kundo Koyama seesaws uncertainly between jokes and grief.

A grim yet snappy little thriller.

Veber's early stage training serves him well both as an adapter (he wrote the "La Cage aux Folles" screenplay) and as a maker of originals though, truth be told, The Valet isn't especially original.

You find yourself smiling at some of the bits, wincing through many, many others, and ultimately wondering if the pacing would've improved had either H or K developed a terrible cocaine habit.

All four stories are worthwhile, though together they’re an awful lot for one modest doc to cover. Yu’s integration of cinematic and theatrical elements is uneven, and a bit stiff.

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

Neither fish nor fowl, neither foul nor inspiring, director and co-writer Darren Aronofsky's strange and often rich new movie Noah has enough actual filmmaking to its name to deserve better handling than a plainly nervous Paramount Pictures has given it.

Rhythmically Crimes of the Future maintains a rigorous sense of calm throughout, which can get a little pokey in some scenes. But Mortensen, Seydoux and especially Stewart invest fully, so some of us, anyway, can too.

I suspect the Cage fans who will enjoy this movie won’t care if it’s fundamentally sloppy and lazy moviemaking. The star of the show is neither.

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.

Barrymore’s direction is generous to a fault, and there are times when you wish Whip It simply moved faster, on and off the track. It succeeds because of the emotional rather than comic payoffs.

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.

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

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.

As written, “Rustin” does a pretty good job of making the (re-)introductions. As acted, the movie transcends pretty-good.

All of Us Strangers is a lovely way to begin 2024, not because it’s especially seasonal — though one key scene takes place around Christmastime — but because it’s just so beautifully acted and tenderly observant.

It is less a film than a puny trampoline -- an occasion, though a grim one, for this most fervently movie-mad of American directors to show off his love for the various pulp genres mooshed together by the 2003 Dennis Lehane novel.

It's a very small piece, working in a deceptively casual storytelling style. But it's my favorite music film since "Stop Making Sense," and it's more emotionally satisfying than any of the Broadway-to-Hollywood adaptations made in the last 20 years.

Hanna presents the problem of the well-made diversion that is, at its core, repellent.

The movie’s an artfully sustained guessing game, tense and rarely dull. It’s also afflicted with a jokey, jaunty tone as deliberate as it is limiting.

It's worth seeing just for the banter between Segel and Hader, which recalls the peak conversational riffs from "Knocked Up."

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

Green is a rare bird in American filmmaking: a humanist who knows how to tell a story.

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

It's an intriguing premise, weakened by a script lacking in strong forward motion.

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.

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

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.

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

It's a seriously withholding action comedy, stingy on the wit, charm, jokes, narrative satisfactions and animals with personalities sharp enough for the big screen, either in 2-D or 3-D.

Outrageous-plus, but often hilarious.

The Wall is no endurance test; rather, it presents the facts of the case, adding an eerie low hum to the soundtrack whenever Gedeck's character edges near her outer limits.

It’s a fairly engrossing bit of fan service, boasting many clever touches and a few disappointing ones. Director and co-writer David Gordon Green’s picture veers erratically in tone, and the killings are sort of a drag after a while, en route to a rousing vengeance finale.

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

It is well made as far as it goes. I wish it went beyond its own carefully prescribed limits of the commercially acceptable.

It never should've been OK'd in the first place and never should've gotten past the first day. This has a mixed effect on the movie itself, which inevitably fights against its own sense of dulled outrage and methodical role-playing. But it's pretty gripping all the same.

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.

Anne Hathaway basically saves it from itself.

By accident or design the film is seriously unbalanced.

In terms of its title, Haywire doesn't quite go there; it's more "Haywire-ish." But it's eccentric, and the on-screen violence is sharp and exciting - brutal without being either subhumanly sadistic or superhumanly ridiculous.

The acting is uniformly strong, the visual approach self-effacingly honest.

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

Chappaquiddick misses that target. But it’s a fairly intriguing mixture of strengths and weaknesses, a case of a sharp cast and a careful director toning up a script best described as “a good try.”

Almost all of it works as wish-fulfillment fantasy.

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

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

The movie, let it be said, is not awful, but the kinetic battles are chaotic, and the look of the Quantum Realm is oddly drab in its interweaving of digital and VFX elements, seeming at times to be more like several first drafts of a new “Star Wars” franchise instead of a natural extension of this one. Midway through, as everyone on screen was restating their interest in getting home again, I thought: Same!

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

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

Some actors are dinner. Kevin Kline is dessert, and his comic brio saves the film version of The Extra Man from its limitations.

The script is corny and cliched and goes the way you expect it to go. But those things never stopped any movie from working with an audience.

Pulls you into a well-observed world and its characters.

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!

The movie is tightly packed with incident, maybe overpacked, but Saxon’s fairy tale is an intense, lived-in experience, its centuries-old folkloric atmosphere dotted with all the usual intrusive elements of progress.

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.

Whannell is learning how forward motion can allow a filmmaker to get away with some pretty outlandish brutality. I wish the talk-dependent sequences weren’t so foreshadowed and clunky; only Gabriel transcends them.

The film ticks a lot of boxes. Underdog triumph. Showbiz triumph. Working-class heroics. Flagrant, often effective filmmaking technique, from a first-time feature writer-director, Geremy Jasper.

This one's a step down from the original.

After the persuasively strange first chapter’s over, “The Life of Chuck” is a duller kind of strange.

This is straight-up commercial comedy, low-keyed diversion, and while it can't hold a candle to recent, dark-comic Israeli achievements such as Joseph Cedar's "Footnote," the actors more than save it.

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

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

There are times when the facile flimsiness of Hello I Must Be Going threatens to float right off the screen. But Lynskey has her ways of surprising us, even when nothing in the script itself is doing so.

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

The climax of “Final Reckoning” is likewise impressive and scenic, but paced and edited less for the good of the overall movie and more for risk-verification purposes. That said, this franchise has class.

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.

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.

It's all very "Scarface"--the De Palma remake of "Scarface," not the Hawks original. In other words, it doesn't feel modern at all. It feels about a generation late and 400 years short.

The movie's all right, if you can take its rampant artificiality - and I'm not even talking about Parton's face yet.

There are flashes and occasional whole sequences when Edwards’ directorial eye snaps into focus.

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.

Spiritual journeys, even if they’re comedies, don’t really lend themselves to the extreme, anal-retentive formalism found in every frame of The Darjeeling Limited.

The movie version of that life, directed by Richard J. Lewis, gives the adaptation an earnest go. But the script lacks juice.

The style is brash, and it works. Tucker and Epperlein illustrate Yunis' account of his eight-month imprisonment, much of that time spent at the notorious Abu Ghraib compound, with literal illustrations--pages seemingly torn out of a Frank Miller graphic novel.

Souza comes off as a genuine and genuinely humble talent. There is, however, an element of intentional or inadvertent image-packaging that goes with any White House photographer’s beat. One wishes Souza were heard on the subject of the fine, tricky line between reportorial authenticity and visual flattery.

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

At its best, Seasons shakes off its predecessors and captures the simple, grand ideas it's after purely visually.

He could dance brilliantly right up to the end, it’s clear.This Is It may be a court documentary, but as a heavily lawyered portrait of an artist, it’s still pretty compelling.

It's not very funny, but your kids might like it.

A small but, in its way, daring picture.

Smile 2 goes in a newish direction, to frustrating mixed results — but it’s a mixed bag you can respect because it’s not hackwork and it’s trying new things.

Except for the tractors, and the tanks in the later desert battle sequences, Flanders could be taking place centuries ago. Or centuries from now.

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

The film is a fancy-pants muddle in terms of technique. And if Bloom doesn't do something about his smirky tendency to troll for audience approval, his career may be severely limited.

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

The picture, intelligent but mild, has more of a 10-volt hum than a true spark.

Hinds has been ready for a role of this size and shape for years; it was simply a matter of finding it, and its finding him.

As an actor (not onscreen here), Kravitz is so effortless, you rarely detect any overt planning or determination in her performances. Her movie’s a different case: a precise visual telling of a tale heading somewhere awful, but also cathartic.

From director Ken Loach, England's longtime disciple of social realism, comes his most audience-friendly picture yet

The actors put it over, and Watkins is a genre filmmaker who believes in using his actors as more than pieces of plot in human clothing. That, I appreciate, with no reservations whatsoever.

For a good hour, this is the picture Kevin Smith was trying to make with "Cop Out."

The second film lingers less determinedly on the degradation of Lisbeth and concentrates more on moving the narrative furniture around. The relationship between the main characters is the glue holding the balsa wood together.

One can’t help but wonder if Ephron would’ve been better off focusing exclusively on Child: She’s simply more interesting screen company.

Entertaining as much of Avengers 2 is, especially when it's just hanging out with the gang in between scuffles (the "Guardians of the Galaxy" lesson, learned), Whedon’s picture meets expectations without exceeding them.

The most stylish comics-derived entertainment of the year...It's paced and designed for people who won't shrivel up and die if two or three characters take 45 seconds between combat sequences to have a conversation about world domination, or a dame.

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

I laughed a lot in the first half, before the movie's repetitive jackhammer pacing, which isn't ideal for any kind of comedy, began working against its better instincts.

The directive behind this sequel, clearly, was non-stop action. Let's think about that phrase a second. Do we really want our action movies to deliver action that does not stop? Ever? I get a little tired of action sequences that won't stop.

The way Diary of the Dead chooses to deliver its gore, you know you’re in the hands of a grown-up uninterested in the excesses of the “Saw” or “Hostel” pictures. I mean, there’s gore, sure, and flesh gets eaten. But the way Romero shoots and cuts the shot of a girl’s reunion with her parents, one dead, one undead, it’s played for keeps--the right kind of gross, with a touch of mournful gravity.

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.

By the end, the movie has become a shameless and, yes, effective ode to fathers and sons everywhere.

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.

Certain things get fudged in The Founder, among them Kroc's middle marriage, and director Hancock can't completely resolve the warring strains in what he sees as Kroc's personality. But that's what gives the movie its tension, and it works.

Shooting largely on New Zealand’s South Island, Caro has a beautiful knack for fluid transitions: the witch entering the body of an unsuspecting traveler in silhouetted shadow, for example, or a simple, fixed composition of Mulan riding from one side of the screen to the other, in extreme long shot. The dizzying wuxia martial arts action, with warriors sprinting up, down and sideways, defying gravity, propel the action scenes without overwhelming them.

The results in this, Coppola’s third feature, are roughly half-good, half-less. The good comes when the director, working with cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw, focuses on evocative silent footage serving as interludes and visual grace notes capturing Shelly, primarily, in moments of reflection. The dialogue and the dramaturgy, in contrast, strain for jokes and over-ladle the pathos.

The result is a clever, violent daydream. But McDonagh's skill behind the camera has grown considerably since "In Bruges." And the way he writes, he's able to attract the ideal actors into his garden of psychopathology.

Whit Stillman's Love & Friendship is compact, modestly budgeted, sublimely acted and almost completely terrific.

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

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.

Eighty-four minutes is about right for this style of animation. Even at that trim running time, the silhouette approach won't be for everyone. Ocelot's unity of vision, though, cannot be denied. Your kids, even the preteens, will likely fall headlong into his worlds.

More than any previous screen role, this one affords Damon a chance to work his sly comic chops.

Not even the film's occasional bursts of ultra-violence, or the endlessly oozing red clay, or Hiddleston crying a red tear, or Chastain swanning around in one flaming crimson ball gown after another, can infuse this gorgeous bore with anything like red-blooded suspense.

Sloppy, grimy but quick on its feet, which puts it ahead of certain other (“The Hangover”) R-rated comedies (“The Hangover”) we’ve seen this summer (“The Hangover”).

The movie, full of talented performers in search of a more propulsive vehicle, settles for workmanlike cover-band status, which makes this a cover-band tribute to a jukebox musical - a long way from true, trashy exhilaration.

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

The best thing in Diggers, besides the close-up of the back end of the Vista Cruiser, is the interplay between Rudd and Tierney. They really do seem like brother and sister, adults yet not entirely grown up.

Game Night itself is not a long night; it’s reasonably snappy. But co-directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein place a misjudged emphasis on keeping the violence and the action “real,” so at its most routine and generic, the movie forgets it’s supposed to be a comedy.

Behind the camera, Gordon-Levitt shows serious promise.

The Vow is agreeable enough. It may be puddin'-headed but it's not soul-crushing.

Rhino Season unapologetically favors poetry over prose, layering its images and time frames in elegantly wrought detail. At times the visual landscape feels fussy. [12 Oct 2012, p.C3]

Many, I suspect, will fall for The Prestige and its blend of one-upsmanship and science fiction. I prefer "The Illusionist," the movie that got here first.

It's too bad Spurlock settles for so little here, beyond the surface gag.

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

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

The interviews are often revealing and funny. And much of the music is tremendous.

The film feels dodgy, tentative and uncertain as to how to frame its own protagonist in a complicated story of journalistic compromise (and worse).

Elegy is a curious example of misplaced good taste.

Fairly inventive and exceedingly manic.

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

Danny Trejo plays Sherry's sometime lover and friend, and he's a big asset to a small, sharp film that won't be for everyone. That's a compliment.

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.

It's the big stuff that doesn't really work, at least well enough to be called special.

Those looking for some human interest in their human interest may be equally frustrated.

The film is a clever if increasingly mechanical suspense contraption, yanking our sympathies this way and that, before turning into a different sort of movie entirely.

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

In the best possible way, Reeder has returned throughout her career to stories and characters rooted in trauma, while expanding the fantasy/reality boundaries of her narratives. This is her best realized work so far.

In Pieces of a Woman Kirby never seems to be building up artificial climaxes or big reveals; she works on a quieter, truer level. Too much going on around her ends up working against her.

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

Baumbach’s achievement stings. It also has the sureness of tone and direction of a Chekhov story.

It may well be a hit, but me, I'm waiting for "Iron Man 2."

If there’s anything rarer than a film about money that truly makes us think, it’s a film about politics that makes us feel like there’s something to it beyond money, and luck.

It's refreshing to hear some old-fashioned percussive tension in service of a director who knows what he's doing. Even when the screenwriter is losing his way.

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

Wildly uneven.

At its best, Hobbit 2, which carries the subtitle The Desolation of Smaug, invites comparisons to Jackson's "Lord of the Rings" threesome.

It’s one of the essential titles of the year so far, if only for its sheer kinetic assurance.

Vivid in bits and pieces, Mid90s feels like a research scrapbook for a movie, not a movie. The more Hill throws you around in the name of creating a harsh, immediate impression, the more the impressions blur.

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

Premium Rush is great fun - nimble, quick, the thinking person's mindless entertainment.

It is a film of many ploooooches, meaning: stake in the chest? Ploooooch goes the sound effect. Yank it out again: ploooooch. Wipe. Rinse. Repeat.

A workmanlike but vividly acted courtroom drama.

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

The result is a brisk trot through a story that is, at heart, a tough slog.

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

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

The movie's far from dull. But first-time feature director Tim Miller's film serves as critique as well an example of what ails the superhero movie industry.

There’s no way to experience Becoming apolitically, not now. You don’t have to consider it first-rate documentary filmmaking of any sort to feel something watching it.

Here’s the surprise: Bandslam may come from synthetic materials, but the characters are a little more complicated than usual.

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.

Deadpool 2 is just like “Deadpool” only more so. It’s actually a fair bit better — funnier, more inventive than the 2016 smash...and more consistent in its chosen tone and style: ultraviolent screwball comedy.

With The Way Back, Ben Affleck didn’t have to deliver his biggest or most attention-getting performance, simply — and simplicity is hard — his truest.

Much of Puzzle feels schematic and, in the convenient solution to the family’s financial problems, a bit lazy. Yet Macdonald is so good, on her own or with a scene partner, director Marc Turtletaub’s movie refuses to fall apart.

The acting’s uniformly strong, and the script is distressingly weak.

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

The original “Mary Poppins” was exuberant, fueled by terrific Sherman brothers songs. Mary Poppins Returns is often just pushy.

For the record: Josh Duhamel brings some welcome exuberance to the role of the goofball suitor, Hobart. Like Oh, he's fun to watch. This is something never to be underestimated

As Kay and Arnold struggle to reconnect, Hope Springs stays close to the task at hand. The characters aren't fabulously dimensional, but the actors are.

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

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.

Aubrey Plaza is so deadpan she's undeadpan, and not just in her new zombie movie.

I do wish Felicity Jones’ character popped the way Daisy Ridley’s did in last year’s franchise offering. “The Force Awakens,” directed by J.J. Abrams, was smooth, consistent, even-toned, nostalgic. Rogue One zigzags, and it’s more willfully jarring. Yet it takes time for callbacks and shout-outs to characters we’ve seen before, and we’ll see again. And again. And again.

This exercise in racked nerves makes most of the year's thrillers look like flailing maniacs by comparison.

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

While White plays it supercool, Tommy Davidson and Arsenio Hall (as Cream Corn and Tasty Freeze, respectively) swing for the fences, without much in the way of a bat.

The results are pretty, and sometimes beautiful. They're also a tad stiff, and the dialogue and voice-over narration sometimes has the ring of a scrupulously faithful adaptation.

The second half’s a letdown — the audience knows where the movie’s going, and gets there before the movie does. Nonetheless it bodes nicely for longtime horror producer Travis Stevens, here making his feature debut behind the camera.

The Butler tells a lot of different stories, some more effectively than others.

Tommy Lee Jones is marvelous in the film. He has one scene in particular, a simple two-person encounter, that's as good as it gets in the realm of American screen acting.

Director Madden vacillates between treating the issues and historical context of The Debt seriously, and as the story demands, as pure, heavy-handed pulp. The cast does what it can in the service of this assignment. But some jobs simply resist satisfying completion.

For the film to be truer to the school’s reputation, it would have had to dig a little deeper.

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

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

It’s fairly entertaining even when it doesn’t quite work, directed for maximum pace by Cruise’s “Edge of Tomorrow” cohort, director Doug Liman.

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

Too often The Express sidelines its own main character in favor of the lemon-sucking, jaw-jutting glower patented by Quaid.

The movie, directed by Paul McGuigan, may be a bit tame and well-behaved for its subjects. But it’s a valentine, not a psychodrama.

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

As interesting, certainly, as “American Gangster,” and operating with a truer street sense of the characters involved.

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.

Wan is a humane sort of sadist. His latest offers little that's new, but the movie's finesse is something even non-horror fans can appreciate.

The way Moncrieff has structured The Dead Girl, it's catnip for actors: Divided into five chapters, the script affords juicy roles requiring only a few days' work from each member of its impressive ensemble.

The film wages an internal battle between its ripely sensual atmosphere and its often stilted pacing and plotting.

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.

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.

A rich and surprisingly old-fashioned musical biopic, The Runaways has neither the bloat nor the blather of your average Hollywood treatment of stars on the rise.

Such stalwarts as Judi Dench, Julia Ormond, Toby Jones and Dominic Cooper spice things up as characters of various degrees of familiarity.

Does not know when to quit. Nor does it extract much fun from a cockamamie story provided by George Lucas.

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

The Hunger Games has completed its tasks well and met fan expectations.

Noisy, unsubtle, but it gets the job done.

The results go only so far. Yet already Ferrell has come a long way as a seriocomic screen presence.

Apted and his collaborators are so in awe of their subject they neglect to bring him to full human life.

Director Hancock knows a few things about directing crowd-pleasing heartwarmers, having made "The Blind Side." This one wouldn't work without Thompson.

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.

Still, the deadliest single element in this film can be traced not to Bacon's character, but to composer Henry Jackson, whose music seems determined to kill us all with waves of dramatic nothingness.

It's a maddeningly uneven picture, with an action climax staged and executed with the air of a contractual agreement.

No better or worse than the average (and I mean average) time-filling sequel cranked out by other animation houses.

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

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

Maudie works valiantly, and not entirely convincingly, to suggest a happy-ish marriage, all things considered.

It is craftsmanship incarnate and the embodiment of tonal unpredictability.

The biggest distinction between the first “Twister” and the new “Twisters” is one of conscience: This time, Kate, Javi and Tyler wrestle to varying degrees with how much of their time should be spent on their own pursuits versus helping tornado victims clean up after the latest round of misery.

As a director Hedges is smart enough to allow his actors to share the frame and interact and let the material breathe.

Extremely raunchy, Get Him to the Greek is also very funny

Gere remains a unique camera object, with a stunning mastery of filling a close-up with an unblinking stillness conveying feelings easier left behind.

Samsara is gorgeous. And sometimes, depending on expectations, looks are enough.

The film may be a silly thing, with manic swings from intimate (and pretty rough) violence to abrupt comic relief. But Fahy and Sklenar provide the glue.

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

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 result is a picture that is baldly manipulative yet weirdly sentimental, and while Considine (a fine actor) can write, he is capable also of writing dialogue you've heard before.

It’s Blocker’s story, and Bale’s very good. But for Hostiles to fully make sense of its introductory on-screen D.H. Lawrence quotation — “The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted” — we’d need a tougher, less comforting ending than the one Cooper provides.

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

I like it up to a point — not a specific story point, but to a certain degree throughout. It's engaging but thin, and I couldn't buy screenwriter Brice's idea of Charlotte's antidote for her 10-year itch.