Michael Phillips

Without undue fawning, Neville’s moving portrait does a lovely job of presenting Rogers as two people, the public figure and the private one, sharing the same closet full of zip-up sweaters.

The film is not for the frantic of spirit. Its steady rhythm and even-handed tone threaten occasionally to stultify. But little things mean a lot in this universe, as they should.

Fruitvale Station works because Coogler and his leading man present a many-sided protagonist, neither saint nor unalloyed sinner.

Torres is one of those screen veterans with a surgically precise relationship to the camera, never pushing, always searching for emotions expressed even as they’re being hidden, or held in check, because someone’s watching.

A triumph of ambience, Rachel Getting Married is the first narrative feature since the 1980s from director Jonathan Demme that feels like a party--bittersweet, but a party nonetheless.

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

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.

Desplechin's films are great, chaotic, unsettling fun. This one's scored, elegantly, to a mixture of standards and classics and original music by Gregoire Hetzel.

“Elephant” may have won the Palme d’Or at Cannes but it really didn’t have anything to say about anything. Modest and artful, Paranoid Park says a great deal.

It has the air of an officially sanctioned tribute rather than a probing study, but it's stirring all the same.

The result is a narrow slice of a much, much larger story, somewhat akin to the hands-off, eyes-wide-open documentary approach of Frederick Wiseman — if Wiseman were a war correspondent. Rarely has recent global history seemed so far away, yet so present. It’s one of the year’s essential documents.

This book deserved a really good film version, and writer-director Kelly Fremon Craig (”The Edge of Seventeen,” also really good) captures Blume’s humane wit and spirit, while adding some new emotional and narrative wrinkles.

It is that rare futuristic thriller: grim in its scenario, yet exhilarating in its technique.

Judas and the Black Messiah is my kind of dramatized Chicago history. It’s a real movie, for one thing — brash, narratively risky, full of life and sneaky wit (even if the dominant tone is one of foreboding) and brimming with terrific actors.

Revanche has an unusual rhythm: Once it leaves the grotty urban despair behind for the deceptive calm of the countryside, it relaxes and explores the character’s interior lives.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

It sounds sentimental, icky, even, but Heart of a Dog sparkles with its creator's wisdom and droll philosophical insight.

Much of the action takes place in the couple's haphazard apartment, but the movie really does feel like a movie, with Farhadi's camera unobtrusively energizing the close-quarters exchanges, both verbal and non-verbal. The acting is splendid.

While we all, as moviegoers, experience franchise and sequel fatigue on our own unpredictable timetables, this film brightens the summer without simply going through the motions.

The Marx Brothers in one of their messiest, sloppiest, greatest Paramount comedies. [27 Feb 2015, p.C5]

Deeply personal, wryly funny and fantastically cinematic.

Haneke’s vision is gripping. The craftsmanship, classically shaped narrative and icy visual beauty cannot be denied.

Like the modest but wholly winning precursor to “Hamilton” it is, In the Heights works as an essentially apolitical embrace of the American possibility and the American roadblocks to that possibility, in a canny variety of musical styles, from hip hop to salsa