Nick Pinkerton

All might be good for a flask-to-the-theater laugh, if not for the unconscionable price gouging.

If the M:I films are immune to the tarnish on the Cruise brand, it's precisely because their spectacle requires us to be impressed by Ethan Hunt, not to like him.

Park's view - clearly inscribed in his well-structured, practically chapter-headed ("After Hours," "Payday," "Back at the Village") documentary - is that the hideous working conditions and low wages are due to man-made avarice; the workers, though, tend toward a fatalism based in religious predestination.

The characterizations never comfortably accommodate Haroun's pat metaphor, though his stoic visual storytelling has an oblique gravity.

Devotees will perhaps find something new in this deep pool of archival footage, and newcomers will get an appropriate introduction to the beguiling charisma of a most media-savvy isolationist.

Single-mindedly action-oriented to the point where Milius's film seems relatively ruminative.

Ultimately, however, People Like Us is infected with the "life-affirming" pox; this means making a narrative priority of redeeming everyone before adequately explaining them.

The Double Hour sustains a minimum of attention thanks to the naturally beguiling presence of long-stemmed Rappoport-but what might've a less cautious director done with the material?

Director Alan Parker (still living) nicely describes the tightrope teeter of Cardiff's hothouse imagery: "It's great art, and then it will be kitsch, and then it will be art again." Or is he summing up cinema itself?

Old line-gargler Nolte remains an effortlessly moving presence, while Hardy and Edgerton embody their archetypes and handle the physical demands.

Shea's documentary is a well-arranged if rather drawn-out parade of talking heads telling Wally's story, including a trenchant and funny Morley Safer, never missing a chance to knock the art world.

Danhier has made a lifestyle-nostalgia oral history after the popular "Please Kill Me" model, but gets none of the tall tales and internecine grudging that made that tome so entertaining.

These self-imposed limitations prevent Teddy Bear from having the breadth of a great work, but they give it the coherence of a good tale, simply told.

The cumulative impression is of figures being lightly traced in the sand only to be inevitably washed away, intentionally ephemeral and quite charming for it.

It's quibbling to draw up columns denoting what Lanthimos, a difficult but undeniable talent, does right and does wrong. He's seemingly working intuitively here, and whatever missteps he makes while feeling his way forward, he manages to pass quite near to one of the essential conundrums of being human.

Arthur was made, in co-production with Sony, by Aardman Animations, the U.K. company best known for Nick Park's Wallace & Gromit shorts, and the character animation has some of the same homely charm.

Penn's lachrymosity and hotheaded indignity seem cartooned against Watts's contained conviction-though more incongruous couples have certainly existed-but the film's assertion of Plame and Wilson as real people rather than characters consists mostly of draining them of anything compelling.

Améris's recipe here calls for everything in moderation, resulting in a movie that never threatens to offend nor, particularly, to delight, though it does offer a good view on a modestly charming actors' duet.

Mendelsohn's first film since 1999's "Judy Berlin" is devoted to finding descriptive correlatives to liminal emotional states through the cast's eloquent reaction shots and the camera's depiction of homely environments - with ornate, flowing visual vocabulary.

The idea is to show love in incidentals rather than big scenes, but the fragments selected do not build to any significance - this is a rote story, arbitrarily scattered into abstraction.

The grungy setting and unflattering photography are only camouflage for callow, creeping sentimentality.

Adventures is an awesome movie mechanism, but awe comes at a cost. The Tintin character is something like a blank spot at the movie's center, most vivid (unfortunately) as a plucky, priggish motivational speaker when he coaches Haddock out of a drinking problem.

This self-consciously modern movie contains classical pleasures.

Vision is more immediate and immersive when dealing in the jealous attachments among sisters; when circumstance and politics tear Richardis from Hildegard, Sukowa's performance rears to towering heights of abjection.

As tight as the parallel homo sapiens storylines are lax, Caesar's prison conversion to charismatic pan-ape revolutionist is near-silent filmmaking, with simple and precise images illustrating Caesar's General-like divining of personalities and his organization of a group from chaos to order. All of this is shown in absorbing, propulsive style, as Caesar broodingly bides his time like a king in disguise awaiting restoration.

There's an overapplication of split-screen and woozy soundtrack cues to this end, but Lister Jones and Rosen do an appealing back-and-forth with lively dialogue, not dulled in the interest of realism.

There's material from a phone-in psychoanalysis center, the dumping grounds of London's surveillance-camera feed, and the detox tent at some massive biergarten - like much of the film, mordantly funny in a kind of pursed-lips, arched-eyebrows way.

It's all here, from the design contests to the farcical series of ribbon-cuttings, including a photo op cornerstone-laying, to the stupid Jeff Koons balloon that recurs as an incidental sight gag.