Michael Phillips

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.

The damper here is Affleck, who appears to have been too concerned with placing himself just so, and then posing, so that nothing drew attention away from cinematographer Robert Richardson's pretty light.

The easiest thing you can say about Silence is that it's a labor of love, made by a valiant soldier for his chosen storytelling medium.

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.

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

It's just a mediocre action movie, poorly edited and larded with a terrible musical score, based on a video game. Nothing new there.

Robust, delicate, sublimely acted and a close cinematic cousin to the theatrical original, director Denzel Washington's film version of Fences makes up for a lot of overeager or undercooked stage-to-screen adaptations over the decades.

Stone is spectacular, and she's reason enough to see La La Land. Chazelle is a born filmmaker, and he doesn't settle for rehashing familiar bits from musicals we already love. He's too busy giving us reasons to fall for this one.

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.

It's an odd, hermetic and fascinating picture.

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

LaBeouf's quivering instability creates the impression that his performance is constantly buffering on us. He's never dull — he is, in fact, a compelling actor in any circumstance — but the material ends up cheapening the experiences of so many real-life veterans, which surely was not the filmmakers' intention.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful.

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

The film is bright, busy, enjoyable, progressive without being insufferable.

In a movie built around two characters, Pitt does not hold up his 50 percent.

An interesting misfire. It's also the victim of lousy timing.

Don't expect miracles. Not every biopic needs to reinvent the form. Sometimes it's enough to inhabit it, engagingly.

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.

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.

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.

Vince Vaughn, plainly enjoying himself, plays his casually astonished sergeant, who encourages hazing and beatings of Doss.

This latest in the ever-broadening Marvel movie landscape is fun. For an effects-laden franchise launch it's light on its feet, pretty stylish, worth seeing in Imax 3-D (for once, the up-charge is worth it) and full of tasty, classy performers enlivening the dull bits.

The reason it's distinctive has less to do with raw emotion, or a relentless assault on your tear ducts, and more to do with the film medium's secret weapons: restraint, quiet honesty, fluid imagery and an observant, uncompromised way of imagining one outsider's world so that it becomes our own.

This is a franchise with lead weights tied around its ankles.

They're lifelike, I suppose, in that you believe and become invested in what happens to everyone. But they're poetic, too, in that Reichardt and her first-rate ensemble find intersections of the mundane and the mysterious all around this broad, blustery landscape.

Braga isn't quite the whole show in Aquarius, but she's certainly a lot of it.

The latest Reacher film is directed, with reasonable skill and no trace of personality, by Edward Zwick, based on a screenplay taken from the 18th novel. I wish I had more dynamic news to report, but contrary to Reacher's own violent tendencies, some things in life and the movies practically defy a strong reaction.

I admit I would've had a hard time getting through it without the help of Simmons and Addai-Robinson, over there in the B plot. The character at the center of the story is treated with respect and admiration, but in dramatic terms he's about as real-world plausible as Batman.

Parts of The Birth of a Nation are bluntly effective and beautifully acted, though one of the drawbacks, ironically, is Parker's own performance. Even the rape victims of the screenplay have a hard time getting their fair share of the screen time; everything in the story, by design, keeps the focus and the anguished close-ups strictly on Parker.

For one thing, and it's a big thing, it's filmed all wrong. Director Taylor and cinematographer Charlotte Bruus Christensen favor handheld, Rachel's-eye-view close-ups, by the woozy hundreds. The toggling editing rhythms get to be a bit of a chore.

Burton's never been especially good at finding the internal motor or the rhythmic drive within a scene. This, I think, is why Miss Peregrine stalls, again and again, while the bird woman or Samuel L. Jackson's pointy-toothed, fright-wigged Barron tells us what's up with what we just saw, and what'll happen next.

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

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.

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.

Nair's film, her best in a long time, is hardly the first to use a chessboard as a symbol of one life's struggles. It is, however, one of the best.

This movie's all over the place, trying too hard to be all Westerns to all sensibilities.

It's fairly absorbing though, increasingly, a bit of an eye-roller, and it's designed, photographed and edited to make you itchy with paranoia.

Any film with Jennifer Ehle, perfect as the tightly wound but loving therapist, tends to be worth seeing in the first place.

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

With Hands of Stone, Robert De Niro officially enters his Burgess Meredith-in-"Rocky" phase, bringing the ringside grizzle and rumpled gravitas by the pound.

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.

The leading actors labor valiantly and to little effect.

The movie coasts on a blase, easygoing highway of cynicism regarding how America conducts its business of war. Despite all the Martifications and Scorsese-ing, we're left with virtually nothing, except the feeling that a pretty good anecdote has been inflated into a bubble-headed American Dream morality tale.

What the movie has, above all, is a dramatic line, clean and straight. In its faces, its scenery and its plain satisfactions it makes us feel like we've been somewhere, when we get to the end of that line.

[Lowery] has made a larger, very different movie without losing his instincts, his directorial stealth or his ability to finesse his actors' performances, in this case in the vicinity of an achingly expressive and unexpectedly furry dragon with a little bit of bulldog in him.

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.

Lerman's excellent as Marcus, capturing his principles as well as his bullheadedness. Sarah Gadon's Olivia is no less fine.

But folks, this is a lousy script, blobby like the endlessly beheaded minions of the squad's chief adversary. It's not satisfying storytelling; the flashbacks roll in and out, explaining either too much or too little, and the action may be violent but it's not interesting.

A genuinely charming comedy about real people challenging themselves to create new realities for laughs and a little truth, one made-up scene at a time.

Bad Moms keeps settling for less than it should, given the talent on screen. It's lazy, and tonally indistinct; half the time you wish it went further, and risked something with the Kunis character. The other half of the time you may find yourself frustrated with the puerile caricatures filling in the margins.

At its best Jason Bourne crackles with professionalism; at its worst, it's rehashing greatest hits (as in, "assassinations") from earlier films, with a lavish budget.

The whole thing feels a bit desperate.

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.

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.

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

Cafe Society is a good-looking nothing, but there are times — thanks more to Allen's direction than his writing, and thanks mostly to the people acting out the masquerade — when "nothing" is sufficient.

The beauty of the film is undeniable, as is the cruelty of the bull's lives. (This is not a picture for animal-sensitive viewers.)

I don't the think the "look" is quite right for the story. Nor is the dreamy, wandering score by Marcelo Zarvos, which adds the blandest sort of ambient "tension music" to whatever's going on. McGregor struggles to make Perry credible in his credulousness; Harris, far better, doesn't have enough to do; Skarsgard is fun.

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.

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

I saw Resurgence an hour and a half ago, and I feel like an alien wiped my memory clean already.

Ross' smooth, steady film is just interesting enough to make you wish it were a lot grittier, and better.

The climactic battle of wits between human and shark leads to a conclusion that got the audience whooping pretty good. The rest of it's OK.

Weirdly touching documentary.

Neat and tidy and well-mannered and dull, and not even Colin Firth and Jude Law and Laura Linney and Nicole Kidman and some very sharp fedoras can enliven it.

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

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.

Now You See Me 2 is more fun than "Now You See Me," which says something, I guess. It fits snugly in the long list of easygoing nothings, the narrative equivalent of a Fruit Roll-Up, designed to be forgotten in as many minutes as they took to watch.

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

Clarke has loads of talent, but in Me Before You she's undermined by director Sharrock's technique, and an endless slew of overeager reaction shots (She's clumsy! She's twinkling!) exacerbated by editor John Wilson.

There are comedies that make you double over in laughter, and there are comedies that are eerily unfunny to the point where you start thinking about a class-action suit.

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.

Parts of Sunset Song rank with Davies' very best work.

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

Is it fun? Parts, yes, and many will get exactly what they wanted from The Nice Guys.

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

Foster's direction, aided by cinematographer Matthew Libatique's sharp, clean light, is the most fluid and well-considered of her career. The script is an asset, too. Until it becomes a mixed-bag liability.

This one’s no gem. It’s simply large, and long (two-and-a-half hours, the usual length lately with these products). I remain unpersuaded and slightly galled by the attempts to interpolate the history, locale and tragic meaning of Auschwitz into what used to be known as popcorn movies.

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

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.

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

The movie is hit-and-miss in an unusually clear-cut way. It's funny for 45-50 minutes. Then it's strained and abrasive and entirely too devoted to action-movie tropes for 45-50 minutes, minus end credits. I can recommend the first half.

It's a small film, perhaps less ambitious or probing (even in a comic vein) than it might've been. But it's a good one, and the actors go to town without turning Elvis & Nixon into a chance meeting between an Elvis impersonator and Rich Little.

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

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

Gyllenhaal certainly holds the screen; at this point in his career, he has found a way to rise above whatever needs rising above. But midway through Demolition, I longed for a sequel to "Nightcrawler" instead.

The reason I like Miles Ahead, despite its problems, has everything to do with Cheadle both behind and in front of the camera.

The Boss has zero finesse as a comedy.

Hiddleston, his eyes full of fire and melancholy longing, was an inspired choice. Everything not-quite-right with most movies, however, goes wrong long before the actors arrive on set.

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

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."

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

The naked emotions, when they finally break loose, carry serious weight, akin to a John Cassavetes psychodrama.

Snyder is not without skills, or ideas, but when a critic finds himself at odds with almost every aspect of a director’s visual approach to material like this, material like this becomes pretty joyless.

It's a pretty dull picture, I must say, because it's my duty to say it. And it's a pretty dull picture, I must say, because something about its particular grade of dullness may cause memory loss.

It's a tasty primer on the man, the eater, the critic and the city.

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

While it's no disaster, it's oddly indistinct and uncertain.

The film, with its wearying gamer-style rounds of death, is routine at best.

It's not a ridiculous degree of complexity per se, but screenwriter Matt Cook mistakes solemnity for gravity, and a high body count for dramatic urgency. The cast is terrific, unfortunately.

Call it "Clash of the Whitans," and call it a folly that doesn't have the energy or delirium to qualify as entertaining crap. It's just crap.

What's the point of telling Jesse Owens' story if you don't get into what made him tick, and drove his success as an athlete?

Writer-director Robert Eggers' "New England folk tale" film isn't likely to go bonkers in the popular culture the way "Blair Witch" did. But it's an infinitely richer, more meticulous, more elegant and more unnerving horror film — the best since "The Babadook," and very likely a 21st century classic in its hardy yet malleable genre.

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

Roughly half the scenes are terrible, nervously edited and predictable. The other half transcend the innate shrugginess of the script. At the end there's a dose of voice-over narration assigned to Johnson that is so, so very Carrie Bradshaw, you half-expect Sarah Jessica Parker to show up with a lawsuit.

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.

For all the splurch and head-lopping, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is monotonal. It turns its action sequences into a noisy blur.

The tone of "Hail, Caesar!" is even and assured, yet the comic inspiration is sporadic.

The script embraces certain character archetypes wholeheartedly (pig-headed crew mate; ramrod-stiff officer) and not always successfully. Yet the tone, the mood of the picture, with its desaturated color palette, maintains the right atmosphere.

This is a small, tight, starkly claustrophobic film, closer in impact to Elie Wiesel's first-person account of the concentration camps, "Night," than to the artful, slightly suspect emotional catharsis of director Steven Spielberg's "Schindler's List."

The script by Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi gives you next to nothing for narrative complication and surprise, and a meager amount of verbal jokes.

Shepherd, apparently, was a genuine, needle-sharp wit and the way Smith plays her, the character's tart rejoinders are superhumanly perfect.

It's more than a first-rate film showing up and doing its job. It's cathartic, and moving, without any of the usual obvious contrivances or manipulations.

Some of this is slick and enjoyable in what I'd characterize as the wrong way, the painlessly bloody, box-office-friendly way.

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.

For the record, Gus Van Sant recently made "The Sea of Trees," set in the same infamous suicide forest, starring Matthew McConaughey and Ken Watanabe. In its contrived sentimentality that film is twice as frightening as this one.

It's a beauty, all right. It's more a style show than a deep philosophical treatise, but with surfaces this sleek and faces this interesting, I'll take style over substance any day.

It's Chekhovian screwball, a perfect little tale of love (or thereabouts) in bloom among the weeds of an ordinary life. It feels like a classic already.

This excellent film works the way Blanchett's characterization of Carol works: It's meticulous about appearances, while fully aware that appearances can deceive.

The Hateful Eight is an ultrawide bore.

Compared to so many varied and skillful female-driven hits such as "Bridesmaids," or this summer's "Trainwreck" and "Spy," Sisters isn't worth talking about.

It is good. Not great. But far better than "not bad." Solidly, confidently good.

Strange as it seems, if you choose to set aside the female roles in The Ridiculous 6 reducing women to cleavage or to mute humiliation, the movie is a long, long way from the worst Sandler movie ever made.

Wiseman's film allows everyone their say, so that In Jackson Heights becomes one of the truest images of gentrification and its costs on film.

Lawrence is very good in the role, as far as the role goes. But the script never jells; the comedy feels forced and mechanically boisterous, particularly in the crucial early passages.

I wish Howard's film had more of a distinct personality and drive behind it; Howard's made some supremely enjoyable films, in various keys, but this waterlogged, effects-crazed picture isn't one of them.

Partly, I think, the problem lies in Kurzel and his key performers being so determined to make the language conversational and naturalistic, they forgot to make the individual scenes move.

If a film can essentially succeed while also remaining essentially frustrating, here's a prime example.

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

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

Still, it's pretty rich watching Rogen puke all over a Christmas Eve Mass in front of his in-laws.

Writer-director Billy Ray's Americanized redux isn't a disaster, exactly; it keeps its head down and does its job. But nothing quite gels, or clicks, or makes itself at home in its adopted setting.

Half the film, written by Coogler and Aaron Covington, revels in cliches, skillfully. The other half sidesteps them and concentrates on scenes and relationships that breathe easily and draw us in the hard way: not by narrative fiat or bald calculation, but through well-written and shrewdly acted encounters.

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

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

Director and co-writer Tom McCarthy played a weasel of a journalist in "The Wire." Now he has made a meticulous, exacting procedural on real-life journalists who excelled at their job; had the resources to do it properly; and in early 2002, published the first in a Pulitzer Prize-winning series of grim, carefully detailed stories of pedophile priests.

It's one of the most satisfying films of 2015.

What these men endured is remarkable, and the logistics of the rescue are remarkable as well. The 33 settles for an unremarkable chronicle of that endurance test.

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.

For all its workmanlike devotion to out-of-control helicopters, “Spectre” works best when everyone’s on the ground, doing his or her job, driving expensive fast cars heedlessly, detonating the occasional wisecrack, enjoying themselves and their beautiful clothes.

From its initial first-person, behind-the-wheel viewpoint to its final implication of all-pervasive surveillance, Panahi creates a fascinating hybrid that becomes a microcosm of Tehran.

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

Director John Wells dices the action, even the simplest conversation, into five harried shots when one would suffice. The many food-prep montages are cut and paced to the same numbing rhythm.

The parent/child relationship at the movie's core is endlessly fascinating.

Star vehicles this rickety have a way of making the world unsafe for comic democracy.

I never felt emotionally exploited by the terrors on screen. Rather, Beasts of No Nation is an act of gripping empathy.

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.

The film is an anomaly — a confident, slightly square, highly satisfying example of old-school Hollywood craftsmanship, starring a major movie star brandishing a briefcase, and a handkerchief, rather than a pistol.

The movie, a formidable technical and design achievement, has everything going for it except a sense of Jobs' inner life.

The most joyless revisionism since Disney's "The Lone Ranger.

Muylaert's picture relates to many other South American domestic comedies pitting "the help" against the economic overlords, but this one has the grace to humanize everyone on screen. The results are both smart and curious.

At its best, 99 Homes finds Bahrani tightening the screws on his own style, going for speed, concision and an agitating rhythm where his previous films took their time. I hope he'll go on to make movies combining the vital aspects of all his work.

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

It's one of the most comforting science fiction films in years.

I cannot say how I'd feel about The Walk if I'd never seen "Man on Wire," because I did see "Man on Wire," and I can't un-see it. I love it. I can only say The Walk struck me as an honorable good try of an also-ran, though with some lovely things to offer.

A fair amount of Uncle John puts us behind the wheel or alongside Ashton as he drives, preoccupied with his misdeeds, along country roads lined with cornfields. No dialogue needed; in these transitions, Ashton and his surroundings are enough.

Flashes of Goodnight Mommy are forceful and blackly funny.

Sicario doesn't fall apart in its second half, exactly, but it does settle for less than it should.

Because Stonewall turns everyone into a sentimental or suffocating "type" instead of a dimensional character, the results are sheer noise.

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

It's a strong reminder of the times, then and now.

Has its bright spots but is practically blinded by its own privileged perspective of life among the landed gentry of Brooklyn.

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.

Though Ball's workmanlike handling of the second in the trilogy, "The Scorch Trials," proves mainly that he can keep a franchise from running completely off the rails when the tracks have been laid perilously near a swamp of "dys-lit" cliches.

A fairly good, extremely grueling movie as far as it goes — tracks the true-life fortunes of a battered group of climbers to the highest place on Earth. Yet somehow it doesn't go far enough.

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

It's not a difficult picture to watch. All you want from A Walk in the Woods, honestly, is a chance to enjoy a couple of veteran actors. But the book's comic tone hasn't found a comfortable equivalent for the screen.

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.

I wish Learning to Drive imagined a fuller, more dimensional inner life for Wendy, but Clarkson develops a push-pull rapport with Kingsley that fills in the blanks — or, rather, mitigates the script's on-the-nose tendencies.

The actors save it, periodically, from itself, simply by setting a natural tone and finding some truth in an extended sketch.

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.

When the songs themselves take center stage the movie works. What remains in the wings constitutes another, fuller story.

Movies concerned with the life, the mind, the body and the dawning self-respect of a 15-year-old girl running every sort of risk — these are rare. The Diary of a Teenage Girl is one of them, and it's terrific.

Painful and unforgettable — a serious and honorable form, perhaps the highest, of "gotcha" journalism imaginable.

How is that Vikander, who played the robot in the recent (and worthwhile) "Ex Machina," was twice as lively and five times as human in that picture than in The Man from U.N.C.L.E.?

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

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

Why does this film, with so many first-rate artists in its corner, not quite work? Partly it's a matter of style, but mostly it's because the script is made of tin.

From Miles Teller to Kate Mara to Reg E. Cathey, everyone on screen in Fantastic Four speaks in a flat, earnest monotone with a determinedly low-keyed air bordering on openly not giving a rip.

The cast is full of strong actors, among them Tahar Rahim (riveting in "A Prophet") as Samba's allegedly Brazilian friend and confidant. It's easy to enjoy what the cast does on screen; it's harder to buy the nutty mood swings.

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 most assured and satisfying of the five so far.

If any of this was surprising or cleverly timed, you'd laugh and then cringe. In Vacation you cringe first and ask questions later.

Irrational Man is full of holes. Abe's supposed to be a disillusioned activist, yet that side of him is so half-assedly developed, it's as if Allen himself didn't believe it.

Does it succeed? Sort of. It helps if you don't mind your boxing movies made up of massive granite chunks of previous boxing movies.

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.

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

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.

Self/less hews closely enough to the premise of the 1966 John Frankenheimer thriller "Seconds" to qualify as an unofficial remake. Then again, anyone who remembers that one is not in the target audience for this one.

Amy stays above the tabloid fray, up to a point. Kapadia hasn't made a groundbreaking documentary; it's more like a classy, high-end edition of "Behind the Music."

Lofing and Cluff certainly know the found-footage ropes, and the tropes; we'll see if their next project reveals a little more imagination.

Everything's at stake yet nothing comes to much in Terminator Genisys.

It retains the original's sunny, democratic vibe and refreshing lack of meanness, as well as Soderbergh's interest (if not his precision) in keeping several of the ensemble members in frame, interacting, without a lot of routine close-ups.

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.

The Coens' film is a wisenheimer, a mordant black comedy. Eden is utterly different, more muted and humane in tone. It won't be enough for some audiences.

It's worth seeing, on balance, simply for what Mark Ruffalo does in a hundred different, discrete, telling ways as he creates a character who was a capital-A Character, outlandish one minute, scarily unpredictable the next.

I laughed three or four times, mostly at verbal byplay since director MacFarlane struggles when it comes to timing, filming and cutting sight gags.

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

The tone of Dope is very interesting — funny, but rarely stupid-funny.

The life of Riley is not exotic; her troubles are not unique. But they are rendered with serious imagination by Docter and company.

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

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

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.

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

Bailed out by a few good jolts, Jurassic World gets by, barely, as a marauding-dinosaurs narrative designed for a more jaded audience than the one "Jurassic Park" conquered back in 1993.

It's the best musical biopic in decades.

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

Piven's performance basically made the series, and to the degree the new film works, which is a little, he makes that too.

Despite a blue-chip cast, Aloha is just frustrating. It can barely tell its story straight, and Crowe's attempt to get back to the days of "Jerry Maguire" and "Almost Famous" is bittersweet in ways unrelated to the narrative's seriocomic vein.

I enjoyed large chunks of San Andreas, largely because the actors give it a full load of sincerity, and there's some bizarrely effective comic relief thanks to Hugo Johnstone-Burt and Art Parkinson as Brits who picked the wrong week to visit the Bay Area.

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

It's a two-hour lesson in how to act like a frenemy to your alleged friends. And it's not funny enough.

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."

The movie is small, but the actors make it seem larger, like binoculars turned around the right way.

Uncommonly good ensemble storytelling.

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."

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

Director Monteverde, whose previous feature, "Bella," came out nine years ago, clearly meant his film to lift up everyone and condescend to no one, least of all Pepper and Hashimoto. But Little Boy comes off as a picture-postcard fake.

Crowe's feature directorial debut, The Water Diviner, stems from an honest impulse to dramatize ordinary people who honor their dead. Yet the results are narratively dishonest and emotionally a little cheap.

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.

Even though the film shows very little of the rough stuff, it's still fairly traumatizing. By the end you may feel like seeing a documentary about a more fair-minded and evenhanded treatment of a society's citizens.

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.

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.

True Story is a case of a well-crafted film, made by a first-time feature director with an impressive theatrical pedigree, that nonetheless struggles to locate the reasons for telling its story.

Broken Horses raises the question of what is cockamamie, and what is cockamamie and outlandish and ridiculous yet a perfectly swell time for those very reasons. This one's just cockamamie without the swell part.

Even when Eastwood and Robertson, pleasant enough company, threaten to float off the screen, The Longest Ride glides along and delivers its reheated comfort food by the ton.

Is what we see grief porn or an epic, careerlong study in the best and worst we can find on Earth? See the film and decide for yourself.

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

There's really no other word for what Helen Mirren is doing in certain reaction shots, out of subtle interpretive desperation: mugging. She's mugging. She is a sublimely talented performer, and this is material with fascinating implications, and I doubt there's a moviegoer in the world who doesn't like Helen Mirren. But even the best actors need a director to tell them to tone it down.

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.

There's a delayed-secret hitch in the narrative that hijacks the movie, for better or worse. You don't have to believe any of it to enjoy a lot of it, however.

It's a mystery why two bona fide comic stars, working very, very hard to keep this thing from tanking, couldn't pressure their collaborators for another rewrite or three.

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.

Engrossing and weirdly funny.

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

The actors are more or less saving this franchise's bacon. Insurgent is a tick or two livelier than the first one.

Director Morel brings some style and speed to the proceedings, though I found The Gunman increasingly numbing in the carnage department. Compared with someone like Neeson, Penn's avenging angel is a less relatable fellow.

Swift and exciting, with no taste for the usual war movie heroics, first-time feature film director Yann Demange's film belongs on a short list of immersive, rattling, authentic fictions right next door to the fact of survival inside a war zone.

Directed, frantically, by Jaume Collet-Serra, written by Brad Ingelsby, Run All Night promises a sprint punctuated by a lot of gunfire, and bleeding, and bodies. Mission accomplished.

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.

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

A misjudgment from metallic head to titanium toe.

The movie's smooth to the point of blandness, but its faces really do tell a story. And having Gere's silverly mane share the same film with Strathairn's is almost too much fabulous hair for one diversion.

Screen chemistry between two individuals isn't really a pass/fail proposition. There are degrees involved. But let's pretend otherwise and say yes, Smith and Robbie pass, barely, with less than flying colors and in a pretty dull movie.

Betzer's title suggests a hardy spirit and the resilience of childhood; the story, which unfolds in elliptical but often intriguing chapters, indicates the healing might be a little more complicated and difficult.

Like the great, bittersweet Thomas Dyja account of Chicago's 20th century, "The Third Coast," Hogtown is hip to both the glories and the disgraces any great city can claim.

A small, shrewd movie about large, messy emotions and regrets. It is a grown-up work about people who grow up the hard way, leaving one heart in disrepair and the other in reckless forward motion. It's a sad piece, but not maudlin.

Whitman's a wily cross between Janeane Garofalo and Ellen Page and in her scenes with her motivational-speaker single mother (Allison Janney), you sense a better movie lurking in the shadows.

It's nice to see a movie that is, well, nice. Nice but not dumb. It's also a comfortable fit for Costner.

Silly, sadistic and finally a little galling, Kingsman: The Secret Service answers the question: What would Colin Firth have been like if he'd played James Bond?

The surprise, if there is a surprise here, is that the film has found a slyly humorous tone for much of the running time.

The movie doesn't really work, but the jet boots would be the envy of Iron Man, and they allow our hero, unwisely named Caine Wise, to speedskate through the air, leaving pretty little trails of light over downtown Chicago.

It's passable.

See it; see those three performers go to town.

Still Life is a very different story, small and quiet and, unfortunately, airless.

Many will forgive all the contrivances and a muted ending that doesn't quite come off. It is, after all, a submarine picture.

Black or White may not be racist, exactly, but it patronizes its African-American characters up, down and sideways, and audiences of every ethnicity, background, hue and predilection can find something to dislike.

I wish the movie were messier, more surprising. But as with most of what we see, made on small budgets and large: The performances are not the problem.

I wish The Boy Next Door were a different, zingier sort of mediocrity, but whenever it threatens to go the full Zalman King "Two Moon Junction" route, it pulls back and behaves itself and settles for a grindingly predictable series of escalations.

A thickly plotted disappointment, yet it has three or four big sequences proving that director Michael Mann, who gave us "Thief," "Heat," "Collateral" and others, has lost none of his instincts for how to choreograph, photograph and edit screen violence.

As is, Cotillard (nominated for best actress) scrupulously avoids melodrama. There's enough without it, in watching a story of an ordinary woman argue for her dignity, her colleagues' better instincts and her own livelihood.

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

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

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

The film is rarely dull; it's one life-and-death sequence after another, and the filmmaking's efficient, crisply delivered. But Eastwood honors his subject without really getting under his skin.

For some of us, Anderson's LA lamentation is a siren song, and there's no more ardent and poetic chronicler of California mythology.

It's a small story set in a memorably desolate location. The actors, all quite magnificent, enlarge it, just as cinematographer Mikhail Krichman illuminates the vistas and roadways and even the furtive kitchen table glances between clandestine lovers.

I love it, not simply because I love Chekhov or because I've loved so much of Ceylan's earlier work. I love it because the director, having come into his own as a master international filmmaker years ago, gives us so much to see and think about, so many astringent observations about life's compromises and longings.

Like "Lincoln," written by Tony Kushner and directed by Steven Spielberg, DuVernay's Selma ushers us into the world of the backstage, back-room and back-scratching political process, dramatizing how the sausage was actually made.

Leigh's film — one of the year's best — honors its subject in all his tetchy ambiguity.

The Keanes' story is one of eventual triumph over adversity for Margaret, but Big Eyes struggles on the page to make much of her as a character. Adams struggles as well; she's acting in one movie, a sincere, often anguished one, while Waltz (mugging up a storm) works in an entirely different key.

Rightly, Jolie didn't want to tell the man's entire life story. But as is, at too-convenient dramatic junctures, the screenplay darts back into flashbacks of Zamperini's childhood or young adulthood, when we should really be sticking with the crisis at hand.

The movie works best whenever Corden and Blunt, performers of nearly limitless appeal and sweet-natured vulnerability, take the story back from their cohorts, though Kendrick is no less beguiling.