Michael Phillips

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

A beautifully spun and morally searching tale of interlocking compromises.

It works from a specific place and lets audiences relate to that place, and the people in it, like trusted intimates.

The story lurches forward in spasms. We’re fully in the head space of a messed-up, hollowed-out psyche. Backed by Jonny Greenwood’s sinister wash of a musical score, You Were Never Really Here feels like a waking nightmare.

David Lowery's film A Ghost Story is best seen a second time, though obeying the customary rules of time and cinema, you'll have the mysterious pleasure of seeing it a first time to get there.

Ballast strikes me as one of the few American pictures of 2008 to say what it wants to say, visually and narratively, about a specific situation and part of the country, in a way that transcends regional specifics.

You always get more than one genre with this filmmaker. Volver draws upon all sorts of influences -- a little Hitchcock, a little Douglas Sirk, a little telenovela -- but from those sources Almodovar and his collaborators, both on screen and behind the camera, make an improbably organic whole.

For all its cynicism, the movie floats on a darkly exhilarating brand of escapism. It’s one of the year’s highlights in any genre.

Some may find the film underpowered. Not me. With elegant understatement, Cohen creates a humane testament to reaching out, whatever our habits and routines.

It's one of the year's most pleasurable American movies.

I’m glad Chazelle’s film offers some fresh points of view on its subject; it’s proof he’ll be able to keep his filmmaking wits about him, no matter what genre he’s exploring. He has made his Apollo 11 movie. And it’s a good one.

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.

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

There’s something of the harlequin in Leigh’s conception of this bright, manic young woman.

The relative success or failure of Adult Beginners, directed with a steady, nonjudgmental hand by Ross Katz, depends on how funny you find Kroll. I find him funny-ish.

Are the results funny? In the margins, yes.

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.

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

Weirdly touching documentary.

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

For me, it's a sign that a filmmaker is on to something if you love hanging out with the characters as they eat and drink and talk and reveal little bits of themselves through everyday action.