Moira Macdonald

Much of The BFG, perhaps a little too much, is devoted to watching Sophie madly scurry away from the giants; it’s a beautifully rendered chase but still just a chase. When the movie slows down to allow Rylance and Barnhill to converse, it finds its magic.

By the end, you look at the musician’s faces — particularly Ma’s beaming smile — and find a truth: through music, we can always find our way home.

You wish Perkins would have shown up with his red pencil during the screenwriting stage, when he might have done some good.

For all the witty voices and great escapes (maybe one too many of the latter), Finding Dory is ultimately a character story, and DeGeneres’ lovable, brave Dory swims right into our hearts.

The blend of Johnson’s laid-back hero-dudeness and Hart’s whippet-fast comic timing should have been good fun. But somebody, alas, had an idea, though not a good one: Make Johnson the comedian and Hart the straight man.

It’s a sweet, faintly screwball, faintly Shakespearean look at love, families and what happens when a well-made plan goes just a bit awry.

Should you decide to watch all of Blackway, a decision I cannot endorse, you’ll get to know Lillian (Julia Stiles), a determined if rather personality-free woman who’s moved back to the small Oregon logging town where she grew up.

Try to remember this movie, a few days after seeing it, and you’ll find that — like magic — it’s disappeared.

Eventually, the film muddles its way into a self-indulgent, overlong mess, complete with a flowerlike beating heart, a miraculous new life and a lot of soccer. Long before anyone in Ma Ma expires, the movie does.

The British documentary Dark Horse is a delightful story well told — and, like so many good stories, it begins with a dream.

His name might be a punchline, but his story — and the human toll that it took — isn’t.

Love & Friendship is pure pleasure, from the lavishly precise sets and costumes to the pitch-perfect tone. It’s self-consciously mannered and merrily playful; a mixture that Austen herself might find just right.

Alice Through the Looking Glass isn’t without pleasures, but this empowerment-meets-fantasy mixture could have used a few more sprinklings of quirk.

The action, aside from the cloudy 3D, looks impressive (particularly the destruction of the Sydney Opera House), and X-Men: Apocalypse moves along tidily, but you watch thinking that all this used to be a lot more fun.

These characters don’t seem like types chosen from a screenwriting manual but like people we might know, with quirks and feelings and flaws and hearts.

It’s predictable — throughout the film, I kept thinking that I’d seen it before — and a bit sentimental, yet thoroughly pleasant.

Luca Guadagnino’s moody drama A Bigger Splash is, unexpectedly, a study in charisma, with two wildly different performances at its center.

It should have worked, and it almost does, but Black buries his characters in a sputtering, chaotic story, seeming to realize only sporadically that we aren’t watching this film for the plot and the stunts...but for the byplay between the two main characters. And — who knew? — Crowe and Gosling have comic chemistry to burn.

The Angry Birds Movie is unnecessary but cute, like a bonnet on a cat — and there are certainly worse recommendations than that.

All of this is sporadically funny and cheerfully tasteless in its low-budget way, but it’s also unevenly acted, a bit overlong and never quite as daring as it seems to want to be.

Unfortunately, Money Monster, though perfectly competent, is one of those movies that promises more than it delivers.

Mostly, we watch Binoche’s face, in eloquent, mesmerizing close-up; pain and grief engulf her expression like water flooding into a still pool. She has few words. She doesn’t need them.

Because so few movies focus on stories about women, it’s incredibly frustrating to see this strong cast drifting away on a tide of soap bubbles — there’s no movie here, just scene after scene of melodramatic cliché.

Sing Street reminds us of being young and lost in a song, realizing with a jolt that someone else had the same feelings we did.

We don’t even see that much of Cuba. Most of the action takes place at Hemingway’s estate there — the actual house, a vanilla-ice-cream-colored mansion (now a Hemingway museum), which gives a restrained, elegant performance. Pity the rest of the movie doesn’t rise to its standard.

Key and Peele’s fast-talking chemistry, as they shift their language instantly from suburbanite to street (a theme in many of their sketches), make Clarence and Rell’s transformation into bellowing, gun-wielding tough guys and back again feel fresh and often very funny.

It’s a lazy movie that fades from memory the instant the credits start to roll; a blandly pretty cog in a studio wheel. Moms deserve better. So do moviegoers.

For the most part, the movie finds a family-friendly balance between stunning scenery, hold-your-breath action and animals having goofy conversations with each other.

It’s a film that effectively combines two distinct — and very different — pleasures.

Sky, despite its Hitchcockian beginning, is no thriller; instead, it’s a character study of a woman seeking a second act, and of a landscape that gradually transforms from foreign to welcoming.

This stranger-in-a-strange-land mood piece has an appealingly serene pace.

The Huntsman is a flabby mess — yet another sequel with no reason to exist.

There’s much pleasure to be had in Elvis & Nixon from its two lead performances.

Frot’s performance, as a woman so caught up in the joy of music that she doesn’t quite understand how bad she is, is particularly delightful, and often quite moving.

Blending archival footage, actor re-creation and special effects (sometimes all in the same shot), [Sokurov] creates a sense of specific place and time — and, in doing so, crafts a sort of cinematic ode to art.

The horror is all the more effective for having sneaked up on us quietly.

Rockwell and Kendrick, both of whom can really sell this film’s brand of laid-back quirk, keep things lively.

McCarthy’s trademark blend of chipper likability and treble-voiced rage just isn’t quite enough to carry things through.

None of this has any real reason for being; even the tiniest bit of drama that Vardalos’ screenplay scares up...gets wrapped up by the hour mark. But Vardalos has created a community of characters and players so likable, it seems almost mean to criticize.

Field, carrying the movie on her shoulders and handing it to us for our approval, makes us root for wistful Doris. Single-handedly, she makes the movie work. I didn’t always believe Doris’ behavior, but I knew I wanted to see her smile again.

At times, the film approaches gallows comedy...perhaps a little too much so; at others, it’s a tense, chilling look at a seemingly unbearable choice — refreshingly, without telling its viewers what to think.

I found myself admiring The Bronze for its stalwart refusal to soften Hope, and for Rauch’s carefully detailed performance.... But admiring isn’t quite the same as liking. This film is a comedy wrapped in barbed wire; approach with caution.

You keep waiting for the film to come together, for Rick to emerge as a character rather than a cipher, for the women to seem less interchangeable — in short, for a point to it all. By its end, I was still waiting.

While Eddie the Eagle feels formulaic and overstuffed with weirdly random scenes...it’s still a charmer.

You leave Touched with Fire wishing there were a little more to it — the screenplay needed to flesh out Carla and Marco a bit more as people, rather than Bipolar Poets in Love — but undeniably moved.

A mostly agreeable but empty-headed mess. It’s sort of the movie equivalent of Derek Zoolander himself.

Hail, Caesar! isn’t the great film you might like it to be, but it’s very, very good fun.

In the cast, only Isaac makes a vivid impression, in a swaggery, relaxed turn that seems to imply that he’s in on the joke, or at least having a good time.

The filmmakers have described Band of Robbers as fan fiction, and that feels about right: They don’t quite hit the mark, but it’s fun to watch them trying.

The ever-game Dormer and that lovely green forest — which is, according to the press notes, played by a photogenic woodland in Serbia — deserve better.

The movie murmurs, when it — and others — should be shouting.

You leave the film’s soft-grained world reluctantly, as if taking off a warm coat when it’s still a little chilly inside.

While the perpetually charming Lawrence isn’t the worst habit a filmmaker can develop, she’s valiantly miscast here in a story that never quite hits its mark.

Eddie Redmayne’s performance in “The Danish Girl” feels like it’s in soft focus; like the movie, it’s gentle and blurry and not quite there.

The result is a stylish, inventive film that kept me intrigued, even as its story twisted so mightily I feared it might snap.

Watching “The Tales of Hoffmann... feels like walking through a Technicolor field of poppies; you’re happily immersed in it and often a bit lost within, eventually emerging a bit dazed and dazzled by the experience.

The film feels long and slow, and the subject matter familiar. We never quite get caught up in it, despite the appealing cast; a thriller directed at a snail's pace simply isn't very thrilling.

Watching it leaves you lighter, happier, younger — dancing your way out of the theater to the Heads’ irresistible beats.

Unfortunately, King Arthur is somewhat less compelling than the "Lord of the Rings" movies; there's serious intent here, but an often thudding execution.

Yes, the film does strum the heartstrings a bit too emphatically toward the end, by cranking up Williams' music and giving us perhaps one tear too many, but that's a minor quibble. When Elliott and his friends soar on their bicycles, like flying Peter Pans who must soon grow up, it's as touching and note-perfect a moment as any in the movies. [2002 re-release]

There's something about Fiscuteanu's quietly desperate performance (with much of the emotion conveyed through his eyes), that gets under your skin.

Barney's Great Adventure may be a magical journey of emotion for the little ones, it's rather a puzzlement for uninitiated adults. [03 Apr 1998, p.G9]

It’s a remarkable personal-is-political drama, set in barely postcolonial Senegal and France.

It’s a film — and a city — to get lost in, and it’ll haunt you afterward, like a face you thought you recognized under a streetlamp, before it disappeared.

Whether the new scenes make "Apocalypse" a better movie is debatable; for me, they were fascinating but not essential.

Directed by Carlos Saldanha, who co-directed "Ice Age," the film feels visually richer than its predecessor (thanks to all that plain white ice melting) but has the same brand of uncomplicated all-ages charm.