Owen Gleiberman

The film keeps acting like it has something big to tell us; it plods and broods with self-importance. Yet in almost every crucial way, The Yellow Birds is a flat and listless piece of moviemaking, a monotonous indie dirge.

Hayek’s performance, by the end, grows unexpectedly moving. Yet Beatriz at Dinner is a little tidy. It seizes and charms without soaring.

Watching MacLaine’s Harriet embrace her life, after spending too much time rejecting it, leads The Last Word to a touching finish. MacLaine has something that shines through and elevates a film like this one. The movie is prefab indie whimsy, but she gives it an afterglow.

In Wilson, Daniel Clowes’ voice, which was once acerbically hip, sounds dated.

Wind River adds up, and skillfully, but in the end it’s not all that exciting. It’s a vision of the new American despair — not an inner-city movie, but an inner-wilderness movie — and it could have used another twist or two.

Landline is a dramatic comedy about a family full of secrets, and what’s mature — and, in its way, reassuring — about the film is that it views this state of affairs as an all-too-natural one.

Gore has been talking up this issue for 25 years now, and as the film makes clear, he isn’t tired of talking. You feel he’s got enough wind to power another sequel. What’s extraordinary is that this one, after a decade of global-warming fatigue, feels as vital as it does.

It has a few traumatic and bedazzling scenes of combat, but mostly it’s about the backroom bureaucratic gamesmanship of war.

It isn’t bad, but it’s kind of a trifle. Though it treats its themes with reasonable honesty, it can’t help but come off as a bit diagrammed.

Sleepless is a propulsive thin exercise, “energetic” but tedious, the kind of January movie that Jamie Foxx should have permanently graduated from. Foxx is too good an actor — taut and committed — to phone in his performance, yet that hardly matters, since the whole movie is phoned in. It’s far from incompetent, but it’s a who-cares? thriller.

Even when it seems to be making things up as it goes along, its slapdash hallucinatory quality is a token gesture toward placing you inside the characters’ heads.

There’s a story, and a mythology, and a prestige actress who knows how to push moodiness to the point that, in this series, it’s just about her only mood, but none of it, in the end, gets in the way of the splatter.

Bright Lights: Starring Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds is a droll, spirited, and disarmingly intimate documentary that now feels karmically timed.

There’s hardly a moment in Dangal that doesn’t go according to the numbers, but after 160 minutes’ worth of formula, the movie certainly hits a note of touching tribute to the way girl power is sweeping the world.

The film is sharply written and crafted, lavishly photographed, impeccably acted, with lots of twists and turns — yet for all that, it somehow lacks zing.

In Assassin’s Creed, Michael Fassbender is like the ultimate special effect. Just by showing up, he confers respectability on two hours of semi-coherent overly art-directed video-game sludge.

There’s only one place for Passengers to go, and once it gets there, Jon Spaihts’s script runs out of gas. Tyldun handles the dialogue almost as if he were doing a stage play, but he turns out to be a blah director of spectacle; he doesn’t make it dramatic.

By the end of Collateral Beauty, you’d have to have a heart of stone for the film not to get to you a bit, but even if it does, you may still feel like you’ve been played.

It’s bluntly cheeky, it goes on for too long, but the concept keeps on giving.

The Bounce Back was co-written, directed, and edited by Youseff Delara, and for a while he creates some lively screwball tension.

It’s poised between reality and paranoid daydream, it’s about the dangerous ways that love can go wrong, and it does the thing that noir was invented to do: It sucks you in.

A dutiful and diverting but rather bare-bones documentary portrait.

Magnus, it turns out, is the anti-Bobby: a fascinatingly “normalized” prodigy.

Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened is a nimble documentary made with a personal touch of nostalgia, and it should prove nothing less than catnip to Sondheim obsessives.

Fences has passages of fierce and moving power, but on screen the play comes off as episodic and more than a bit unwieldy.

Allied is tense and absorbing, yet the film’s climactic act somehow falls short.

Lazy Eye makes you realize how rare it is to see a movie, even an indie movie, that gives you the privilege of listening to authentically smart conversation. The understated flow of talk makes us feel like we’re eavesdropping.

David E. Talbert, the writer-director of Almost Christmas, has assembled a gifted cast and given them a chance to stretch out and play with their roles. He has made a heartwarming gripe-and-grouchfest that pushes a lot of buttons, though with a vivacity that’s exuberantly funny and sincere.

"USS Indianapolis” is a World War II “epic” that’s overscaled yet underimagined. It’s a tale of survival that never provides the audience with a basic entry point into how and why we should care.

There are moments when the movie tugs at your heart, but the subject matter, because it’s so epic, deserves an even more probing and definitive treatment.

The movie is simply Lumet and his films, which turns out to be an astonishingly satisfying experience, because he’s an incredible talker, with the same earthy electric push that powers his work.

Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro is the rare movie that might be called a spiritual documentary.

It’s another of Perry’s raucous and slovenly comedies of responsibility, which means that its heart is in a very old — and right — place. If only a message that was this solid equalled solid laughs.

Michael Moore In TrumpLand turns out to be a tossed hand grenade that doesn’t fully detonate.

An amiable time-killer of an espionage comedy.

The Lost City of Z is a finely crafted, elegantly shot, sharply sincere movie that is more absorbing than powerful. It makes no major dramatic missteps, yet it could have used an added dimension — something to make the two-hour-and-20-minute running time feel like a transformative journey rather than an epic anecdotal crusade.

There’s a grand paradox at work in Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk. The film isn’t simply a technological experiment; it’s also a highly original, heartfelt, and engrossing story. And part of the power of it lies in the way that those two things are connected.

He leaps so quickly into exaggeration that he bypasses reality, and the result isn’t very funny.

It’s an ecstatically happy movie, a giddy EDM kiddie musical that sends you out on a high.

20th Century Women is an endless chain of anecdotes, and though many individual moments are winning, the movie as a whole is rudderless. It never achieves an emotional power surge.

As a big-screen thriller, The Girl on a Train is just so-so, but taken as 112 minutes of upscale psychodramatic confessional bad-behavior porn, it generates a voyeuristic zing that’s sure to carry audiences along.

More than just another documentary, it’s a crucial and stirring document — of racism and injustice, of politics and the big-picture design of America — that, I believe, will be watched and referenced for years to come.

Generation Startup is too blurry about the grass-roots wheeling and dealing it shows.

It’s hard to say what the title of Trespass Against Us actually means, but then it’s hard to know what anything in this movie thinks it’s about. Even Ed Wood would have said, “Needs work.”

In Storks, the jokes fall flat, but the pace is relentless, and those two things seem somehow intertwined, as if the filmmakers had convinced themselves that comedy that whips by fast enough won’t go thud.

A gripping and incisive documentary.

Planetarium is an inert and slipshod movie — messy and aimless, a period tale told with zero period atmosphere (you have to keep reminding yourself that it’s not taking place in 2016), built around a situation with enough possibilities to make you wish that the director, Rebecca Zlotowski, had taken advantage of at least one of them.

My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea feels like a first draft, the one that needed to be written before the second draft added flesh and blood.

It lopes along, merrily but a bit slack, always reminding you of the earlier Guest films, and then it works up a bit of a fizz in the competition.

It’s a teen movie that starts off funny ha-ha but turns into something more like a light-fingered psychological thriller. The drama is all in Nadine’s personality, in how far she’ll go to act out her distress.

For all the powerful relevance of its subject, Denial, directed by Mick Jackson from a script by David Hare, never finds its grip. It’s a curiously awkward and slipshod movie that winds up being about nothing so much as the perverse, confounding eccentricities of the British legal system.

You could almost watch Barry even if you’d never heard of Barack Obama: The movie is simply interested in what it looks like when a guy who’s got this much going for him has a piece missing.

“Kampai!” is scattered and rudderless, though the film’s biggest letdown is that it barely whets your whistle for a taste of sake. It might have been made “for the love,” but by the end the movie has squandered it.

It’s the most important and galvanizing political drama by an American filmmaker in years.

Fuqua is trying for John Ford meets Sergio Leone: a funky classical sweep, with room for delirious shootouts. The trouble is that he mimics the trademarks of those directors without their élan, and the plot that was once catchy is now rote.

Voyage of Time has too many spellbinding images to count, but as a movie it’s just okay.

If it’s sometimes a rambling, indulgent experience, it’s also a beautiful one.

Hacksaw Ridge is the work of a director possessed by the reality of violence as an unholy yet unavoidable truth.

Ford is a true moviemaker — a social observer who’s a junkie for sensation and narrative. He has structured Nocturnal Animals beautifully, so that the past feeds into the present, and fiction into reality.

Adams draws on her gift for making each and every moment quiver with discovery. The actress is alive to what’s around her, even when it’s just ordinary, and when it’s extraordinary the inner fervor she communicates is quietly transporting.

La La Land isn’t a masterpiece (and on some level it wants to be). Yet it’s an exciting ramble of a movie, ardent and full of feeling, passionate but also exquisitely — at times overly — controlled.

The Light Between Oceans winds up taking one too many self-serious twists and turns. The film earns its darkness, but it might have been even more affecting if it didn’t shrink from the light.

It’s little more than a schlock replay of “Ex Machina.” It toys around with some of the same situations, but it doesn’t know where to take them. Instead of developing its themes, it uses them as grist for an overload of “commercial” action.

In “Mechanic,” [Statham's] a mechanic of murder, of escape, of ingenuity, of combat. He’s too good (and too badass) to be true, but that’s why we like him. It would be nice to see Statham make a movie one day that’s accomplished enough to raise his game. Until that happens, Mechanic: Resurrection will do.

The trouble isn’t that Greenwald is preaching to the choir; a good documentary can increase the passion of the choir. It’s that he isn’t adding in any meaningful way to the choir’s knowledge.

Minus a hero who has the macho charisma to wrap a movie around him like he owned it, the new Ben-Hur is an oddly lackluster affair: sludgy and plodding, photographed (by Oliver Wood) in nondescript medium close-up, an epic that feels like a mini-series served up in bits and pieces.

War Dogs marks a key turning point for Phillips. After all these years of yocks, it’s his first true grown-up movie, and it’s a nimble, gripping, and terrific one, with plenty of laughs, only now they’re rooted in the reality of fear, and in behavior that’s authentically scurrilous.

The Lost Arcade is an engaging minor movie, but it touches on something that’s being lost in the age of technology that’s much bigger than video-game arcades: the feeling that there’s a reason — driving and inescapable and romantic — to leave home.

Nine Lives is a lot like a cat: It occasionally bestirs itself, and it would like to be stroked with love, but mostly it just sits there. It’s a pet farce so flat it makes you long for the Lubitsch touch of the “Alvin” comedies.

“Dream Is Destiny” is a pleasurably crafted career snapshot that doesn’t overstay its welcome.

As a documentary, “Olympic Pride” is a little on the staid side. The film’s writer-producer-director, Deborah Riley Draper, works in a variation on the Ken Burns style.... Yet she does an absorbing job of capturing a historical moment that was even more fraught than it’s generally imagined to be.

Where Bad Moms plunges into zesty new satirical terrain is in capturing the ruthless one-upmanship of the mommy-wars era, when all the progressive thinking of the last 40 years has only ratcheted up the perfectionistic demands on children and parents alike.

Hieronymus Bosch: Touched by the Devil brings us literally closer to Bosch’s images than one could probably get in almost any museum. As directed by Pieter van Huystee, the film offers a true immersion in his artistry. But it’s also a little slipshod — an off-kilter window into the politics of the art world. It’s like a fascinating magazine feature with some missing pieces.

Nerve is a comic-book vision of how the Internet has become a gladiatorial arena of voyeurism. But the movie, like the game it’s about, is hard to stop watching, even when you know it’s playing you.

"Hillary’s America” is a slow-motion seizure of ideological rancor, served up in the filmmaker’s trademark style of wide-eyed schoolbook infamy. The only novelty here is that there’s been a subtle shift of emphasis in the D’Souza vision. It’s now really all about him.

It’s a sturdily built movie that gets the job done, and it’s got a likable retro vibe.

It’s a prosaic piece of muckraking, shot in a functional flat visual style, but it grazes a nerve.

Bryan Cranston gives the most authentic and lived-in performance as an agent pretending to be a criminal that I have ever seen.

What’s funny and winning about Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates is that it’s a comedy of equal-opportunity raunch, where everyone in sight is right at home inside the animal house.

You’d think the concept would now be wearing thin, but Election Year, which feels like the final chapter in a trilogy...is the best “Purge” film yet. The action is excitingly sustained in a way that it wasn’t in the previous two, and the political dimension, while crude as hell, exerts a brute-force entertainment value.

It reveals Robert Cenedella to be an artist far too infused with life to ever let a movie like this one live up to its title.

It’s not necessary, of course, for The Phenom to be an all-out sports drama, but writer-director Noah Buschel sets up the rare opportunity to explore what makes a jock tick, then doesn’t follow through.

The Duel promises a battle of wits and wills, then turns into a violent grab-bag. But it does make you want to see Woody Harrelson get another movie worthy of his leering bald Nietzschean bravura.

It may be a slight entertainment in the grand scheme of things, but it’s been made with a busy, nattering joy that is positively infectious

For all the ravaged surface appeal of McConaughey’s performance, the character is a little too good to be true, but then, that’s just the sort of movie Free State of Jones is. It’s a tale of racial liberation and heroic bloodshed that is designed, at almost every turn, to lift us up to that special place where we can all feel moved by what good liberals we are.

It delivers — on some basic, giddy, turn-off-your-frontal-lobes level. It’s an action-comedy utensil, like “Rush Hour” crossed with an old Arnold Schwarzenegger shoot-’em-up, with a few goofy added sprinkles of “Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion.”

It’s a passionate comic book in which the combat has meaning.

If a diagram were the same thing as a script, then Therapy for a Vampire might be a smashingly silly lark. But as written and directed by Daniel Ruehl, the film is a blueprint of mild anemic kitsch.

It’s a film that spills over with laughs (most of them good, a few of them shticky) and tears (all of them earned), supporting characters who are meant to slay us (and mostly do) with their irascible sharp tongues, and dizzyingly extended flights of physical comedy.

The movie, despite enthralling moments, is so self-intoxicated by its blissed-out vision of global healing that it’s a little soft.

Time to Choose may come off, at moments, like the “Koyaanisqatsi” of environmental devastation, but it is also a dreadfully beautiful achievement. It shows us what the building blocks of climate change look like.

Wan has a gift that most slam-bang horror directors today do not: a sense of the audience — of their rhythm and pulse, of how to manipulate a moment so that he’s practically controlling your breathing.

Now You See Me 2 is more like a giddy piece of cheese from the ’80s, a chance to spend two more hours with characters we like, doing variations on the things that made us like them in the first place. The revisit, in this case, is well-earned.

It longs to be a close-to-the-bone lampoon in the scathing spirit of Christopher Guest, and it has a few amusing moments, but it’s really a predigested one-joke comedy. It’s less an honest satire than an overscaled satirical package.

Gets the job done, but it’s hard to escape the feeling that you’re watching a routinely conceived, rather generic boxing flick. It’s utterly competent, yet it makes Duran’s story seem a little so-what?

Make no mistake: Endless Poetry is still very much a Jodorowsky film, dotted with his trademark phantasmagorical conceits, which are like candified bursts of comic-book magic realism. Yet more than any previous Jodorowsky opus, it’s also a work of disciplined and touching emotional resonance.

Blood Father is trash, but it does capture what an accomplished and winning actor Mel Gibson can be. Just because he lost his bearings, and his career, doesn’t mean that he lost his talent.

The technical bravura that Guiraudie summoned in “Stranger” — the subtle manipulation of light, weather, shot language, and temporal cunning — now falls by the wayside in a story that lurches from episode to disconnected episode.

For a healthy stretch, The Salesman is even more low-key, minimal, and contained than the earlier Farhadi films. Yet the writer-director’s technique is just as assured as before. Every shot is in place, every line leading to an outcome that feels quietly up for grabs.

Paterson, Jarmusch’s wee dramatic curio starring Adam Driver as a New Jersey bus driver – his name is Paterson, and he lives in Paterson — is a movie that’s all too aware of how much it diverges from contemporary tempo. That’s because the entire film is a self-conscious anachronism.

The Last Face would have been a better movie if it had an actual screenplay, rather than the bare-bones one credited to Erin Dignam.

I, Daniel Blake is one of Loach’s finest films, a drama of tender devastation that tells its story with an unblinking neorealist simplicity that goes right back to the plainspoken purity of Vittorio De Sica.

Gimme Danger has an ironic tone for a Stooges portrait: dutiful and engrossing, but not electric or crazy.

Hell or High Water is a thrillingly good movie — a crackerjack drama of crime, fear, and brotherly love set in a sun-roasted, deceptively sleepy West Texas that feels completely exotic for being so authentic.

The Neon Demon is a tease. It starts off as a relatively scannable, user-friendly thriller, but it turns out to be a movie made by a macabre surrealist gross-out prankster.

The Nice Guys is an ultra-violent burlesque, the sort of cheerfully hostile buddy bash that’s been a staple since the ’80s, only this one is singularly clever about its own triviality, and it offers the scruffy pleasure of seeing two great actors dial down their gravitas with style.

The movie, watchable as it is, never quite overcomes the sense that it’s a lavish diagram working hard to come off as a real movie.

The Killer Inside Me may be the darkest film noir ever made.

Dinesh D'Souza's documentary is no mere screed: 2016: Obama's America is a nonsensically unsubstantiated act of character assassination.

A notch more watchable than Volume I, if only because Joe, the self-destructive heroine, is now played front and center by the magnetically dyspeptic Charlotte Gainsbourg instead of the vacuous model Stacy Martin.

The creators of Captain America: The Winter ­Soldier have brought off something fresh and bold.

To take the playfully convoluted, semi-nonsensical aggression of Rumsfeld's language and make it the whole point of a movie is to fall into the trap of mistaking the spin for the story.

If ever there were an actor ripe to ''McConaughnesize'' his career, it's Jude Law — and guess what, he has done it, spectacularly, in Dom Hemingway.

A spooky, heartbreaking documentary.

Rachel Boynton’s gripping doc shows you what happens when the greed of oil companies meets the chaos of postcolonial Africa.

In the title role, Michael Peña has a no-nonsense fire: He captures how Chavez borrowed from Martin Luther King Jr. but also fueled the struggle with his own improvisatory brilliance.

The finest rock doc since "Anvil: The Story of Anvil." Matt Berninger, lead singer of the National, is a 40ish indie-rock star who carries himself like a hip lawyer.

Woodley, through the delicate power of her acting, does something compelling: She shows you what a prickly, fearful, yet daring personality looks like when it's nestled deep within the kind of modest, bookish girl who shouldn't even like gym class.

Bateman deserves props for sustaining Bad Words as a little balancing act between sulfurously funny hatred and humanity.

As directed by series creator Rob Thomas, the movie, like the show, is entertainingly fast-talking in a tidy, faux-serious way. Kristen Bell, if anything, has only gained in appeal.

Back in his day, Mr. Peabody was a dog whose over-civility had bite. Now he's a genius you want to cuddle with.

A marvelous contraption, a wheels-within-wheels thriller that's pure oxygenated movie play.

It’s neorealist corn, but it gets to you.

The movie never finds a way to blend the emotional and the rat-a-tat-tat into one seamless package the way that Besson did in his one and only good movie, The Professional (1994).

Most of the film is a chintzy but watchable B-movie knockoff of "Gladiator," with Kit Harington, the English actor from "Game of Thrones," mustering very little in the way of facial expressivity in the role of Milo.

In Shoot Me, she wears her spiked cynicism like a cutting form of grace, and everyone around her (including audiences) gets healed by it.

In About Last Night, Hart blows up, to hilariously oversize proportions, the eternal male desire for freedom. He’s raunch on wheels.

In the hands of director and co-writer Shana Feste (Country Strong), Endless Love has become a solidly engaging neo-'50s romantic melodrama.

The film has lots of energized mayhem, and Murphy's unraveling of the conspiracy against him isn't dumbed down, yet it's as if the comic-book action poetry of the original has been encased in a suit of generic armor.

If you're not at the bull's-eye center of the target audience, a movie like this one can suck the life out of you.

It's hard to think of the last time a Pixar film made you go ''Wow!'' That's part of why The LEGO Movie is such outrageous and intoxicating fun.

The Monuments Men sounds like a what's-not-to-like? movie, but it turns out to be a bizarre failure.

The movie is voyeuristic, sure, but in a way that evokes Alfred Hitchcock's "Rear Window" more than William Friedkin's "Cruising."

Branagh did a nice job of directing "Thor," but all he can do here is try to energize the recycled pulp of the script.

The Past, is hugely ambitious — it's Farhadi seizing his moment — yet it's also a wrenchingly intimate tale of lives torn asunder by forces within and without them.

An exquisitely fun documentary.

The movie is red meat for anyone who thrives on a certain brand of punchy, in-your-face emotional shock value. Yet the pull of what happens on screen came, for me, with a major qualification: I went with it, but I didn't totally buy it. The film is a contraption that spreads its darkness like whipped butter on a roll.

Madea is still a witty character, but the gutter wisdom of her tossed-off verbal hand grenades can’t shock us anymore; even the outtakes that play through the closing credits feel like reruns.

Bilbo, as played by Freeman, suggests a sly-dog Dana Carvey without irony, and he is certainly overmatched, but that doesn't mean he's outplayed. Desolation is now his business.

It's a film of jaw-dropping virtuosity and pleasure, one that leaves you revved, enthralled, tickled, moved, and amazed.

With Inside Llewyn Davis, they've made a film that is almost spooky in its perversity: a lovingly lived-in, detailed tribute to the folk scene that — hauntingly — has shut their hero out.

In the end, the most impressive performance may be Spike Lee's. He uses skill without gimmickry, flash without fuss, to tap the mesmerizing soul of this pulp.

Frozen is a squarely enchanting fairy tale that shows you how the definition of what's fresh in animation can shift.

Catching Fire is smoothly exciting but a bit of a tease.

The Best Man Holiday is an eggnog that's sticky-sweet and heavy at the same time.

Hiddleston, with pleading eyes and a mad-dog grin, plays Loki as a wounded sociopath who's cackling at the world but seething on the inside. Which makes you realize he's just about the only character in the movie who has an inside.

After a while, you truly start to see the formula gears churning, but given that, it helps to have an actress like Mary Steenburgen, who at 60 still possesses an amazing glow, as well as a snappier comic timing than ever.

Gleeson and McAdams make a touching, lifelike couple, but by the time the movie starts telling us to live each day as if we were going back and doing it all over again, you may feel Curtis has mistaken hokum for wisdom.

At the end, when the grandson, in drag, enters a little-girl beauty contest, the movie far outdoes the crowning moment of "Little Miss Sunshine." But most of Bad Grandpa lacks that delirious mad kick of surprise.

But now we're a lot more accustomed to seeing movie characters mold their destiny through special effects, and since Peirce films the climax in a rather depersonalized, shoot-the-works way, Carrie comes close to seeming like an especially alienated member of the X-Men team. She blows stuff up real good, in a way that would make the devil — or Bruce Willis — proud.

The Fifth Estate is flawed (it grips the brain but not the heart), yet it feverishly exposes the tenor of whistle-blowing in the brave new world, with the Internet as a billboard for anyone out to spill secrets. Call it the anti-social network.

This is Robert Redford doing what too many stars should do and don't: taking a chance. And reinventing his art. It's an extraordinary thing to see.

It's Ejiofor's extraordinary performance that holds 12 Years a Slave together.

Machete Kills is gruesomely baroque trash staged with a kinetic freedom that is truly eye-popping, so you can forgive its lapses, like how it goes on a little too long. Rodriguez's only real sin as a filmmaker is that he wants to give you way too much of a crazy ultraviolent good time.

A great many filmmakers — too many — use handheld cameras to evoke a sensation of raw, this is really happening immediacy. But director Paul Greengrass is unique. At a glance, his live-wire, ragged-camera method may seem overly familiar, but the way he employs it, that method is as expressive as the style of a superb novelist.

Adam Scott has a controlled, almost overly impeccable charisma. Handsome, with small precise facial features, he has a witty, hiply downcast delivery that, on screen, can make him seem like a unit unto himself.

The miracle of the movie is the way that director Alfonso Cuarón, using special effects and 3-D with a nearly poetic simplicity and command, places the audience right up there in space along with them.

Paula Patton is such a terrific actress that even in the ultra-tacky romantic comedy Baggage Claim, she gives a luminous, thought-out performance, not just walking through but digging into the role of an eager, nervous doormat with a people-pleasing grin.

Gordon-Levitt proves a natural filmmaker, nimbly staging Jon's highly amusing Catholic confessions, along with porn montages that mimic the dopamine-charged editing of "Requiem for a Dream." He also gets a terrific performance out of Tony Danza as Jon's hilariously blinkered brute of a dad.

The thriller that's exciting, cathartic, and powerfully disturbing. Prisoners is that type of movie. It's rooted in 40 years of Hollywood revenge films, yet it also breaks audacious new ground.

Touchy Feely is minor, but these people are good company.

Adore has the distinction of featuring some of the most laughable dialogue in any movie this year.

Passion turns into vintage De Palma — which is to say, the film seems almost engineered to get you giggling at the extravagance of its absurdity. Any enthusiasm in the viewer is bound to be a shadow of the film's passion for itself.

It has a chillingly matter-of-fact cynicism that is very au courant.

Tony Leung plays Ip Man with his old-movie charisma and reserve, but the film, despite a few splendid fights, is a biohistorical muddle that never finds its center. Maybe that's because — big mistake! — it never gets to Bruce Lee.

Brie Larson, as the caring but tormented Grace (who's pregnant and doesn't know if she has the faith to have her baby), and John Gallagher Jr., as her gentle-dweeb fellow worker Mason (who fears his love can't save her), show you what emotionally naked acting is all about.

The actors all blend terrifically, making this the film equivalent of great hang time.

Austenland is kind of a one-joke movie, and the film's rhythm is a bit flaccid, but the joke, at least, has a twinge of wit.

The ironic thrust of the movie is that Jobs' humanity is there in that perfectionistic insanity. He pushes and pushes to make home computers more and more appealing, accessible, and user-friendly, and that's his great gift to the world.

What Planes lacks in novelty, it makes up for with eye-popping aerial sequences and a high-flying comic spirit.

I wish that the film had more of the tasty futuristic detail promised by that dummy parole officer. I also wish that Blomkamp took us deeper into the world of Elysium.

Schrader tries to find the human side of it all, and he scores with Lohan, who taps a vulnerability beneath her dissolution to remind you why she's still a movie star.

The Spectacular Now doesn't shrink from being an all-out teen movie (it has hookups and a senior prom). Yet it's one of the rare truly soulful and authentic teen movies. It's about the experience of being caught on the cusp and not knowing which way you'll land.

The trouble with this stunted sequel is that the doughy, blobby-hatted Smurfs are mostly window dressing for an abrasive slapstick bash built around a tiresome kidnap plot, pancake-flat gags about Facebook and ''Smurf-holm Syndrome,'' and Neil Patrick Harris mugging his way through the role of a daddy with daddy issues who once again helps out our heroes.

The movie is rich with class tension, and if Allen nails the moods of the wealthy, he also gets surprising, dynamic performances from Hawkins, Cannavale, and Andrew Dice Clay as the folks who have no money but may have a fuller sense of what life is.

A summer-adventure comedy, and its tone is fairly synthetic, yet it gets major props for giving us the first movie heroine who is clueless and easy in such a hardcore way.

The best thing about RED 2, like its predecessor, is its lightness of tone. Too many movies with comic-book roots come on too seriously, even when the comics themselves have a loose, fast, jocular wit about them.

It's a solemnly preposterous piece of designer revenge pulp, with actors who stand around bathed in red and blue light like David Lynch mannequins in between scenes of torture and murder.

For Sandler, it's not just when he grew up. It's the garden of idiotic innocence, something that, in Grown Ups 2, he is helping to keep alive.

Fruitvale Station is great political filmmaking because it's great filmmaking, period.

Sweetgrass is austere enough to make Frederick Wiseman's films look like Jersey Shore episodes, yet it has its own suspense.

The action climax just goes on and on, making The Lone Ranger the sort of movie that delivers too much too late and still manages to make it feel like too little.

With Bullock doing a variation on her Miss Congeniality geek-tomboy-who-has-to-bloom character, and McCarthy letting her acidly oddball observations rip, the two actresses make their interplay bubble.

The best thing in the movie is Arterton's sultry, claw-baring turn, but mostly it's a rudderless riff on "Let the Right One In."

The things that once made Neil LaBute's movies seem like tossed grenades — the loutish protagonists, the sadism toward women — now come off as more dated than scandalous.

The actors are charming, but the movie is like a helium balloon with a leak in it.

By the end, every child in the audience will want his or her own monster-minion toy. Adults will just regret the way that Despicable Me 2 betrays the original film’s devotion to bad-guy gaiety.

It's scary good fun.

For a while, the girls' personalities seem almost interchangeable, but that's part of the texture. Katie Chang gives the leader a ripe synthetic glow, and Emma Watson does a remarkable job of demonstrating that glassy-eyed insensitivity need not be stupid.

There’s a reason that it lacks the highs of "Wedding Crashers": The Internship puts us on the side of those who are trying to hold on to respectability, not tear it down.

It's the wildest screen comedy in a long time, and also the smartest, the most fearlessly inspired, and the snort-out-loud funniest.

At times, Now You See Me suggests Christopher Nolan's "The Prestige" made with a throwaway wink.

The movie takes off from a concept as basic as a videogame, and it sticks to that concept, without surprise.

Before Midnight confounds expectations in powerful and even haunting ways. It's not just darker than the previous two films. It's bigger, deeper, and more searching. It follows the characters through a tale of embattled love that extends far beyond them.

Into Darkness is a sleek, thrilling epic that's also a triumphantly witty popcorn morality play. It's everything you could want in a Star Trek movie.

Director Tina Gordon Chism keeps the innocuous class-meets-crass jokes bubbling, and the actors are amiable, but Peeples often seems to want to turn these characters into benignly goofy role models. Maybe that's why the basic comic collision never explodes.

By the end, the rug gets pulled out from under us, showing that even the reality we think we see may be an illusion.

Penn Badgley saunters around with an air of spooky self-possession, and he does a dead-on impersonation of Buckley's high-vibrato wail.

Iron Man 3 is an ominously exciting, shoot-the-works comic-book spectacular.

The movie, in its basic concept, is corny and contrived, but as written and directed by Justin Zackham, it's executed in a pleasantly wry and understated fashion.

The way Firth embodies the character, with a robot stare and a flat affect that expresses each thought as a kind of minimalist hologram of emotion, he's playing a cipher who pretends to be a different cipher. How indie-ironic!

Through the character of a saddened priest, Malick seems to be saying that the reason for our breakups, for our fragmented lives and relationships, is that we can no longer see God. If we could, we would be whole again. That may be true, but in To the Wonder, it's Terrence Malick who isn't letting his characters be whole.

Helgeland works in what I think of as a conservative — or maybe it's just really, really basic — neoclassical Hollywood style, spelling everything out, letting the story unfold in a plainspoken and deliberate fashion, with a big, wide, open pictorial camera eye. It's like the latter-day Clint Eastwood style, applied to material that's as traditional as can be.

I love a good mind-bender, but it's getting more common these days to see thrillers that don't so much bend your mind as chop it, smash it, and place it in the Cuisinart. Trance, the new film directed by Danny Boyle is a high-brainiac art-world thriller that wants to do nothing more (or less) than give your head a majorly pleasurable spin.

Shia LaBeouf, who appears to be on hand to prove that a movie with a crusading newspaper reporter can still exist, perks up his scenes, and Redford acts with his usual hyperalert, placid control.

It's really a dramatic sinkhole.

Room 237 makes perfect sense of "The Shining" because, even more than "The Shining" itself, it places you right inside the logic of how an insane person thinks.

It's well-executed technocratic action fluff. But it did leave me buzzed rather than drained.

Admission, a likably breezy campus movie directed by Paul Weitz (About a Boy), is blissfully non-insulting.

The countdown-to-Armageddon structure generates almost no tension, but Olympus Has Fallen does have lots of squalidly bloody hand-to-hand action, all of which is so pulpy and standardthat the film actually makes you grateful for the presence of Gerard Butler, gnashing his teeth in the Bruce Willis role.

Upside Down is a very fancy piece of junk.

Harmony Korine's first ''mainstream'' movie, Spring Breakers, is by far the best thing he's ever done.

The movie itself is too cautious and unimaginative to bring off what a great magic trick — or comedy — should do: make us laugh out loud with surprise.

Emperor explores the delicate postwar dance of revenge, justice, and realpolitik, yet its focus on the issue of Hirohito's guilt or innocence (did he order the attack on Pearl Harbor? Or did he, in fact, oppose the Japanese military machine?)

The movie wants to be Hitchcockian, but it's the flat-footed Hitchcock of "Marnie" that Park evokes. His filmmaking here is hermetic and lugubrious, with each physical movement meaninglessly heightened and every line hanging in the air with (empty) significance.

This is how a fairy-tale movie gives us our money's worth today. Even if once upon a time, it was called overkill.

It's conventional stuff, only executed with a smart, improv-y verve.

The movie is scattershot (intense at some moments, slack at others), but it earns its docu-style creepiness, and Karpovsky's stretch as an actor is daring and authentic.

The Jeffrey Dahmer Files is for hardcore Dahmer obsessives only.

The movie is playful and makes no easy moral judgments.

Beautiful Creatures, more than the "Twilight" films, lacks danger and momentum. The audience, like Ethan, spends way too much time waiting around for Lena to learn whether she's a good girl or a bad girl.

As a politico, Ed Koch loved power a little too much. But as a leader, he was a storybook embodiment of New York's contradictions, which is why his chapters in the city's saga loom so large.

Side Effects is mostly a good Saturday-night movie, but by the end, it's caused a few unintended side effects of its own: a bit of head-scratching, and a giggle or two of disbelief.

Stand Up Guys reminds you that these three are still way too good to collapse into shticky self-parody, even when they're in a movie that's practically begging them to.

It's a crackerjack B movie worthy of comparison to such stylishly low-down, smart-meets-dumb, hyper-violent entertainments as the 1997 Kurt Russell thriller "Breakdown," Clint Eastwood's infamous police bloodbath "The Gauntlet," John Carpenter's original "Assault on Precinct 13," and Arnold's own overlooked 1986 outing "Raw Deal."

The rapper and actor Common has become a highly skilled screen star, but this touchy-feely dud does him wrong.

Highlights Gaskin's down-home gumption as an advocate for the glory of natural childbirth.

The truth is that we're way past being outraged by these sorts of Crimes of the One Percent, not because they don't happen, but because the real version is so much more interesting.

The film casts a hypnotic spell all its own. It artfully sketches out the events for anyone who's coming in cold, but basically, its strategy is to take what we already know and go deeper.

Brolin and Gosling are both supposed to be playing World War II veterans who bring their knowledge of battle into the tough turf of the streets, but that's just a concept that the sketchy, half-baked script tosses out there.

A sign of how desperate the series' producers have become is that the big twist here is that Leatherface, the slobby butcher-boy demon in his mask of human skin, is now...the good guy. (That's a ''jump the chainsaw'' concept if ever there was one.)

What Salles doesn't conjure is the rapture of Kerouac's bohemian romanticism. Without it, On the Road is a remote experience, all reason and no rhyme.

Urgent, heartfelt, and not-quite-as-predictable-as-you-think environmental rabble-rouser.

In Amour, these two actors show us what love is, what it really looks like, and what it may, at its most secret moments, demand.

In the occasionally funny but mostly facile '80s-style culture-clash comedy Parental Guidance, Billy Crystal, who now resembles a very cute puffer fish, plays Artie Decker.

This Is 40 isn't always hilarious, but it's ticklishly honest and droll about all the things being a parent can do to a relationship. And why it's still worth it.

DiCaprio, having a blast, makes Candie the equivalent of Waltz's Nazi in "Inglourious Basterds": a racist villain who mesmerizes us by elevating his ideology into a puckishly thought-out vision of the world. Yet Django isn't nearly the film that Inglourious was.

There isn't much to the characters in this morose thriller.

When we finally see the time-lapse images his cameras took, they're awesome and terrifying - a meltdown out of a poetic horror film.

Once in a long while, a fresh-from-the-headlines movie - like "All the President's Men" or "United 93" - fuses journalism, procedural high drama, and the oxygenated atmosphere of a thriller into a new version of history written with lightning. Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow's meticulous and electrifying re-creation of the hunt for Osama bin Laden, is that kind of movie.

Spitting obscenities at the film's director, Jay Bulger, Baker recalls his days as: the '60s thrash caveman who gave Cream and Blind Faith their transcendent power surge; the pioneer of druggy hotel-room rampages; and the damaged purist who left the pop world for Africa. The movie salutes the rhythms and the wreckage.

Most of us consider Marilyn Monroe a born star with modest acting skills, but Love, Marilyn deepens the argument that the ditzy, dim-bulb ''Marilyn'' was every inch a performance, and a brilliant one.

Killing them Softly is a lurid and nasty little nihilistic hitman noir, with an ingenuity that sneaks up on you.

Cotillard, with stringy long hair and a coal fire of severity in her eyes, has what it takes to play a woman who feels that she's lost everything. But she's forced to flail and mood-swing from scene to scene. In an insult to the disabled, there is never much to her but her hellacious injury.

It's all more lightweight-likable than exciting.

It's a perfect summation of why he was the ultimate filmmaker.

Breaking Dawn - Part 2 starts off slow but gathers momentum, and that's because, with Bella and Edward united against the Volturi, the picture has a real threat.

The Comedy pretends to be a satire of entitlement, but it's made in a style so indulgent that the whole film feels entitled in the extreme.

It's like watching "Yellow Submarine" laid over a celebrity-therapy episode of Dr. Phil.

Posey, her attention divided up into slivers, is funny as hell, but she's also terrifying in her evocation of a kind of moment-to-moment PowerPoint existence.

The movie wants to be deadly cool, but mostly it's just deadly.

The movie is grand and immersive. It plugs us into the final months of Lincoln's presidency with a purity that makes us feel transported as though by time machine.

Cloud Atlas is certainly out to be a ''visionary'' mindbender, but the film's secret is that it's a nimbly entertaining and light-on-its-feet Hollywood contraption, with the actors cast in multiple roles as if playing a game of dress-up.

I knew perfectly well, after a while, what Sinister was going to scare me with. But I got scared anyway.

What starts off as a neighborhood scandal becomes a liberating thing for everyone involved - an attitude that seems as if it's trying to be oh so European, and might have been had the director, Julian Farino, not been working so hard to convince us of the Deep Inner Goodness of everyone involved.

David Simon, creator of "The Wire," who argues that the targeting of minorities, fused with mandatory sentencing, has turned the war on drugs into ''a holocaust in slow motion.''

Much of what happens in The Paperboy is so luridly bizarre you can't quite believe what you're seeing.

Argo is never less than wildly entertaining, but a major part of its power is that it so ominously captures the kickoff to the world we're in now.

Won't Back Down says that whatever your feelings about the subject, lack of change cannot be the answer to our public-education crisis. Trying to cram an informational exposé and a vintage inspirational awards-bait weeper into one movie, Won't Back Down is awkward at times, yet it's also passionate in a surprisingly smart way. It makes a genuine drama out of impossible issues.

Without the music, the movie might have been painful, but the songs, Auto-Tuned and processed as they are, generate a hooky bliss. They're the chewy center of this ultra-synthetic hard candy.

This is the rare horror film so bad that you almost wish it had turned into a good old connect-the-gory-dots slasher movie. The only mystery at work is how Lawrence's agent ever let her sign on to this.

The movie is tough-minded: It zeroes in on Patrick's anger at dating a closeted football star, and it doesn't let Charlie off the hook for his cruelty or self-pity.

Olsen, moody and apple-cheeked and intellectually avid, proves a true star: She turns being wiser than her years into an authentic generational state.

Lindhardt, sweet and childish and achingly vulnerable, gives a stunning performance.

The drama is so minimalist that it's hard to glimpse the man behind the woe.

The film doesn't turn its issues into a glorified essay, but it does use them to give the audience a vital emotional workout.

Yet if Bachelorette takes the form of a romantic ensemble comedy, it's purged of any true romantic feeling. You'll laugh, maybe a lot, but you won't feel great about it in the morning.

The trouble with Guillaume Canet's French gloss on "The Big Chill" is that it has no underlying chill.

It's a lesson in character to hear directors from David Lynch (digital believer) to Christopher Nolan (celluloid diehard) spout off.

An alienated-teen movie that surfs along on the whims and casual cruelties of its central character runs a risk: It can wind up as random and undisciplined as she is. Instead, Little Birds is a touching and distinctive achievement.

For a Good Time, Call... tells the tender tale of two roommates who team up to launch a phone-sex line. Whatever their virtues or flaws, each of these movies makes the dirtiest episode of "Sex and the City" look like Doris Day fluff.

Hardy, speaking in low, flat, almost musically macho tones, has the bruiser charisma of a caveman Kevin Costner. It's not the money he's clinging to - it's the freedom.

Premium Rush earns its place as end-of-the-summer escapism, but I can't say that it's more than a well-done formula flick. At this point, it's just one more movie-as-ride. But this one at least lives up to its title.

Robot & Frank is sentimental high-concept fluff that works.