Peter Keough

Tom Hiddleston puts in a performance as Williams that ranks with that of Joaquin Phoenix as Johnny Cash in “I Walk the Line.” And Hiddleston gets to do it in a better movie.

Despite outstanding performances, the characters lose subtlety as they grow more extreme, and their secrets when spelled out become anticlimactic. Maybe with a little more mystery, the evil would seem less banal.

It’s a mordant if unwieldy thriller examining how evil not only becomes the norm, but a virtue.

That’s one of the problems with Brian Ackley’s no budget sci-fi psychological thriller. No horror can compensate for the preceding 75 minutes of tedious, repetitious bickering. It’s about as thrilling as a couple’s therapy session with a married pair who hate each other and for good reason.

Field next tries to touch our hearts with her pitifulness. Stay away, crazy woman! At times she seems about to turn into Glenn Close in “Fatal Attraction.”

Egoyan ekes out an engaging and meaningful potboiler.

Riggen has no shame when it comes to jerking the tears — surging music, cute children, suffering children — and sometimes her manipulations work even on the hardest of hearts.

Though some of the concepts may be New Age boilerplate, the film’s images linger; especially that of the river, the snake devouring us all.

Why do Parker and the other clinic owners and staff persevere despite constant harassment and potential assassination? Not for the money, certainly. Perhaps because no one else will.

An illuminating celebration of music and the art of teaching, comes at a time when both art and teaching are held in low esteem.

It follows the lead of more recent Hollywood disaster movies like “2012” and “The Impossible.” It features just one family; everyone else is part of the scenery.

For answers, prepare to sit through two hours of complications, though you will probably figure it out before the spectacular ending.

This is not “Rain Man”; it’s better.

May also be among the best war movies of all time.

Enigmatic, atmospheric, and seductive, the film unfortunately sheds little light on subjects that have too long been hidden in the dark.

As played by Fiennes, who has the aquiline face and piercing eyes of Max Van Sydow, Clavius is no pushover. You believe his disbelief, so when it wavers, yours might as well.

Exhausting and seemingly endless.

In his second directorial effort, Mojave, Monahan has no such map to follow, and he wanders in a land of sophomoric pretentiousness and banal profundities.

He (Hui) does not achieve the surreal grandeur of Hayao Miyazaki’s animated films, but he has enough imagination and talent to engage his audience on its own level.

Denounce the cynics who pander such pabulum as entertainment for children.

It takes a few minutes to catch on, and it would be indiscrete to specify what it is, but once you figure out what’s really strange about it you have entered the solipsistic prison of a tormented mind.

Zada gets credible performances from Dormer and Kinney, but their characters undergo such unlikely psychological contortions that these efforts are to no avail.

Only occasionally, as in “Thank You for Smoking” (2005), do these men — and the audience — understand that bucking the system doesn’t always make you less a part of it.

The fundamental problem with this Macbeth is that it insists on reducing the mystery of motivation to the pop psychology of a magazine article.

The pre-Thanksgiving release of Jonathan Levine’s The Night Before celebrates those Christmas blessings that are beloved by all: scatological humor, smarmy sentimentality, and gross product placement.

Whether unclassifiable and inconsequential oddity, or overlooked key to the meaning of life, or both, The Creeping Garden is the slime mold of documentaries.

Only in the epilogue does the film mention that none of the miners was compensated and no one was held responsible.

As often happens in Guzmán’s films, The Pearl Button keeps returning to the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship of 1973-90, during which thousands of Chileans were “disappeared,” taken away and never seen again alive.