Peter Rainer

The Booksellers is a documentary for people who treasure the sheer look and feel of books. It is for anyone who has ever spent way too much time in used and rare bookstores teetering on tall ladders or squeezing through narrow, tome-filled aisles in search of that most precious of commodities: the book you didn’t know you needed until you found it – or, to be more precise, it found you.

The problem is that there is very little chemistry between the actresses, and Haynes and screenwriter Phyllis Nagy are far too studied in their depiction of passion. The most impressive performance in the movie is given by Blanchett’s elaborately coiffed, cast-iron hairdo.

The paradox of Tarantino’s oeuvre is that it is highly derivative of other movies, mostly genre pulp, and yet the films seem distinctly his. He is the most influential director of his generation because he ranges promiscuously through pop culture and brings to his borrowings an incendiary force.

I can’t imagine a world without the Beatles, but I can well imagine a world without this movie.

It doesn’t put you through the emotional wringer the way its predecessor did, but it’s consistently inventive, funny, witty, and heartfelt. In other words, it’s a lot better than it has any right to be. It’s more than good enough to justify its existence.

The role of Deb is not written with any great depth, but Miller gets into the character’s psychological complications in a way that almost compensates for the lack.

Although Howard doesn’t go in for a lot of musicological analysis of Pavarotti’s genius, which would have enriched the presentation, he compensates by giving us an ample dose of the singing.

Kaling’s naive earnestness in the role is very winning, and Thompson makes her boss lady clichés seem almost fresh. Not quite fresh enough, though, to rescue the movie.

If you care anything about the music of groups like The Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, The Mamas and the Papas, The Beach Boys, or Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, the ramshackle, engagingly anecdotal Echo in the Canyon is required viewing.

Rocketman is a campy, overblown, self-glorifying fantasia.

Whether you deem this project an extravagant boondoggle or a masterpiece, you have to admire Christo’s tenacity in finally making it happen, as chronicled in the documentary Walking on Water.

As the princess’s handmaiden, Nasim Pedrad at least has the comic timing that the rest of the cast, including, surprisingly, Will Smith, conspicuously lack. Smith understandably didn’t want to compete with Williams, but as the big, blue, top-knotted Genie, he’s uncharacteristically bland. Even the magic carpet in this movie looks bummed out.

What Batra is reaching for here is the fairy tale beguilements of Bollywood romance but without all the hoopla. He wants to tenderize the Bollywood clichés and bring the essence of their ardor into the real, teeming world of Mumbai.

Given the impossibility of crafting William Shakespeare into a believable human being, the film is an honorable try.

Most of all it’s about talking. It’s practically a nonstop jabberathon. What rescues the film from tedium is that much of the talk is enticing.

Just in case we don’t register the mismatch, Rogen is outfitted to look especially shlubby, and he sports an unbecoming beard that never comes off. With his crack timing, he still manages to get a few laughs, but he would have gotten a whole lot more if the jokes were any good. Theron, meantime, is photographed in full glamour mode throughout. This is probably just as well, since, as an actress, she doesn’t appear to have a comic bone in her body. Therein lies the true mismatch in this coupling.

The White Crow fitfully does justice to Nureyev’s overwhelming desire to be an artist, and that’s not a negligible achievement.

Ultimately it’s an upbeat movie about life’s downbeats.

Best of all is Robert Downey Jr. Amid all the hardware, he alone in the Marvel series has consistently given top-notch performances. His work in “Endgame” is extraordinarily moving and makes me wish yet again that this great actor would on occasion see fit to be great in a movie that doesn’t require him to fill out a franchise.

It’s a rarity, and a real pleasure, to find a movie that presents without condescension rural working-class people, especially women.

The latest entry in this dubious enterprise is “Dumbo,” a perfectly lovely 1941 animated movie that has been transformed by director Tim Burton into a cloddish fantasia that never soars.

The director has a good eye for semidocumentary detail, and the performances, which also include Bruce Dern as a veteran trainer, Gideon Adlon as Roman’s estranged daughter, and especially Jason Mitchell as a fellow inmate and trick rider, all have the sharp tang of authenticity.

At his best, Costner both exalts and complicates the strong and silent types who crowd, often to diminishing effect, so much of our American movie mythology.

This is not the sort of movie that offers up immediate gratifications, though there are some of those. Instead, it moves along with a steady grace. Its ruminative power creeps up on you.

What makes this film different from numerous other such movies is that, in many instances, it utilizes footage never before seen publicly.

As a piece of storytelling, Everybody Knows covers a vast expanse of human experience, but it doesn’t dive very deep.

What struck home the most forcefully for me in Cold War is its depiction, insidious and unrelenting, of how artists under communism suffered for their art. At its best, the film is like a bulletin from a benighted world.

It’s a rueful and respectful tribute that stands on its own because of the extraordinary performances of Steve Coogan as Stan and John C. Reilly as Ollie.

The Upside is a movie that somehow works, at least some of the time, even when it shouldn’t.

This is one of those radical change-your-image performances that tries too hard to defy our expectations. Kidman has indeed proved in the past to be quite versatile, but this muddled, scabrous, neo-noir procedural does her no great favors.

The casting of Jones as Ginsburg might have seemed like a good idea, but, as fine an actress as she is, she can’t quite manage to bring the future Supreme Court justice to life, perhaps because it’s tough to animate cardboard. She’s stiff and humorless.

When, at the end, we hear Cheney intone “I was the bad guy so you didn’t have to be,” the self-serving gravity of that pronouncement rings hollow because the movie is hollow, too.

It’s well crafted, well acted, and features some terrific live-action/animation combos. But it never quite achieves liftoff, which is a big problem for a musical – especially this musical.

Roberts, in her “serious” performances, is often a tad too stiff and monochromic, but she works well here with Hedges, who knows how to be volatile without chewing the scenery. They are quite believable as mother and son.

For all the film’s righteous anger and obeisance to Baldwin, it remains a baffling, amorphous construct.

In real life, Mary and Elizabeth never met, but this film, directed by Josie Rourke and written by Beau Willimon, stages numerous interactions, many of them accompanied by flaring nostrils.

It’s a charming, wistful movie, and I trust Tan will not have to wait another 20 years to direct her next film.

The actresses are so expert, especially Colman, with her grievous, hardbitten woe, that you may not care, but if one is to mock this sort of historical extravaganza, I much prefer the nutbrain Monty Python approach to all this deep-dish folderol.

Kore-eda’s slow reveal of who these people are, and what they mean to each other, has its mystery story aspects, but this is essentially a character study, or at least it tries to be, and not a puzzle picture. He fills in each of the main players leisurely, in snatches.

As evocative and soulful as I found parts of this movie, I experienced these stylistics as more evasion than immersion. Cuarón is so careful to avoid overdramatizing the narrative that his steady-state underplaying ends up seeming equally coercive. But this is not how we are supposed to react to “Roma.” We are supposed to regard it as “real life.”

One of the great achievements of this movie is that, in the end, Van Gogh’s words enter into our soul with the same force as the paintings.

Mortensen, who reportedly put on thirty pounds for the role, starts out playing Tony like a big lug but as the road trip ensues he brings all sorts of subtle shadings to the role. He even comes to appreciate Doc’s artistry. In Tony’s eyes, he’s right up there with Liberace.

How intently should we take Joel and Ethan Coen as artists? Despite their extreme unevenness and the flip misanthropy that runs through their work, I think they deserve to be taken seriously as such. In this new film, their extraordinary jeweler’s-eye attention to detail, their gift for concocting dialogue in plummy 19th-century vernacular, their lyrical embrace of wide-open landscapes, and their woeful nihilism that conceives of a world where paradise is always on the precipice of ruination are hallmarks of something much more than mere jokesterism.

Jackman, sporting a distracting, Hart-like brown hairpiece, seems miscast. He doesn’t convincingly convey this politician’s swagger and slickness, and Reitman’s attempts to mimic a loose-limbed political movie in the style of, say, Robert Altman’s “Tanner '88” series or “The Candidate” are rather leaden. It’s a film that’s less interesting to watch than to discuss afterward.

It was beset by legal woes and held in French vaults and labs for almost 40 years. Both Neville’s film and “The Other Side of the Wind” are being released simultaneously in theaters and on Netflix. I would advise seeing Welles’s film first. It’s more rewarding and less confusing that way.

As it turns out, bearing Welles’s words in mind, it becomes almost a meta version of Welles’s movie. I would like to think that the great magician himself would have approved.

Given the slam-bang slapstick featured in so many of her movies, I have to admit the subtlety and fullness of [McCarthy's] performance in this film did hit me as a shock to the system.

It builds slowly, and, at almost 2-1/2 hours, it occasionally drags. But it’s worth the time. This is a very knowing movie about the ultimate unknowability of people.

One of those movies with a terrific premise left unfulfilled.

Despite, or perhaps because of, these constraints, it’s one of the most cinematically alive movies of the year.

Whatever the approach, there isn’t enough psychological heft to the drama to make it seem much more than generic.

First Man pays lip service to the politics of the cold war that surrounded the moon shot, but it’s not that kind of movie, really. For all its scale and ambition, it’s essentially a small-scale character study. The character, Armstrong, is microscopic, and the backdrop is macroscopic. It’s an odd, uneasy fit.

The surprise is that, at least for its first half, this newest A Star Is Born is so powerfully fresh.

The cast is strong, though, and demonstrates yet again how good acting can carry audiences through movies that otherwise would not be worth the trip.

I hope this won’t be his last acting job. He’s too vital to go in for such a soggy send-off.

It’s impossible not to be charmed by these students, by their aspirations and idealism, not to mention the fact that one of them, or someone like them, may well end up winning a Nobel Prize. It’s also impossible not to recognize, although the movie does not make a political point of it, that a goodly percentage of these participants are first- or second-generation immigrants to the United States.

The best part of the movie is when the few who make it through are introduced to their new owners. It’s love at first touch.

A better movie would not have hinged its thesis so closely on Anna’s innocence. The film doesn’t fully allow for the fact that the issue of Anna’s veracity, or lack of it, is essentially a sideshow.

For a movie that is about a collection of oddballs, it can sometimes feel rather generic. But at its core, the film is not a comedy at all. The eccentricities issue from real adversity.

The movie is all nuance and it continually wafts away into artiness.

One of the bright sidelights to Juliet, Naked is the bemused way it deals with the crazy-making ramifications of hero worship.

Although the role may not have been written with great depth, Hussain’s performance as Mirza is richly layered.

If we are being asked to regard BlacKkKlansman as more than a movie, this may be another way of admitting that, on some fundamental level, it falls down as anything but revue sketch agitprop.

It takes awhile to get going but, still, it’s rather sweet.

The documentary is an attempt, in the words of those behind the film, to “investigate the very nature of family itself.” That this attempt is overreaching and diffuse does not detract from the film’s sporadic power.

Dark Money should set off warning bells for even those who believe that the Citizens United decision, equating corporations with people and money with speech, was a First Amendment victory for free speech.

Burnham avoids most of the “Mean Girls”-style tropes in favor of a more gently humorous and nuanced approach.

As summer franchise movies go, Mission: Impossible – Fallout is near the top of the heap.

What rescues the film from melodrama is that Legrand drew on extensive interviews with psychologists, emergency police personnel, female victims, and batterers. The bone-deep chill of real, observed experience cuts through this film and gives it a verity that at times reminded me of Frederick Wiseman’s harrowing documentary “Domestic Violence.”

The film cuts back and forth between the present and 1979, when Donna, blandly played as a young woman by Lily James, met her three beaus and went gaga for Greece. Scenery-wise, I can see why she did. I trust that everyone connected with this film had time to work on their tans.

It’s a rote piece of work that, oddly, also feels dated even at a time when the press and the White House have rarely been more at odds.

It’s a perplexing, fascinating, maddening movie, not quite like any other film biography of a famous painter, most of which tend to be equal parts ho-hum and hokum.

Most of the film, which also has links to Spike Jonze’s "Being John Malkovich," plays like a variation on some of Spike Lee’s more scabrous racial fantasias like “Bamboozled.” It’s also very much in the vein of films like “Get Out,” which also mixed horror, racial comedy, and social consciousness, though here to far less effect.

It brings the nature versus nurture debate into shattering focus.

Everybody connected to this movie appears to be operating on the same wavelength: They want to do justice to the lives of the people that we see. To a remarkable degree, they do.

McKay is very good where it counts the most: He understands these immigrants from the inside out, and, against all odds, he allows us to rejoice in their hopes.

Zahs, a genial obsessive, is a lot of fun, and so is the movie.

It’s another one of those films, like “Book Club,” in which the cast far outshines the material.

The Catcher Was a Spy, directed by Ben Lewin and starring Paul Rudd as the Ivy-educated Berg, who was fluent in seven languages, is a much more pallid experience than this eminently juicy subject deserves.

Pratt brings a wry derring-do to the mayhem, and the escape from Isla Nublar has its modicum of thrills.

Morgan Neville’s movie is more than just a chronicle of Rogers’s career. In some not-quite-definable way, the film itself is all of a piece with Rogers’s principled gentleness. It’s a love letter, but the sentiment and affection that pour through the film is honestly arrived at, even when, near the end, the film threatens to turn into the cinematic equivalent of a group hug.

Debbie’s assemblage of her crack team has its sly amusements, especially when Cate Blanchett, as Debbie’s hypercynical best friend, and Rihanna, playing a master hacker, show up. But Rihanna, along with Mindy Kaling, who plays a jewelry expert, are vastly underused, as is Awkwafina as a world-class pickpocket. On the other hand, hammy Helena Bonham Carter, as a cash-strapped fashion designer, is overused. Her hats are funnier than her dialogue.

What is missing here is any real sense of what it must have been like for two great writers to be living together, especially in that era, with its push-pull of progressivism and parochialism. This is a movie about fireworks where nothing ignites.

It’s questionable whether this film needs narration at all, or at least whether it needs the faux biblical lyricisms served up here. The panoramas are so glorious that I didn’t ache to hear any highfalutin hoo-ha on the soundtrack.

Rodin, directed by Jacques Doillon and starring Vincent Lindon as the great Parisian sculptor, does not, to put it charitably, add to the very small roster of Great Artist movies (such as “Lust for Life” and “Vincent & Theo”).

Of all the Star Wars-themed movies, this one is the closest to a Saturday afternoon serial/western. Don’t expect more than that. But it could have been less.

Schrader’s chief influence here, as in many of his other films, is the great French director Robert Bresson, especially his “Diary of a Country Priest.” But Bresson’s spare stylistics achieved a sublimity while Schrader’s, though intermittently powerful, too often feel schematic.

The film’s thesis is that the struggle to survive did not end with the camps. Each of the women profiled recounts, with varying degrees of intensity, the difficulties in creating a “normal” life in a world where the concept of “home” can no longer fully resonate.

The film makes clear that the soft-spoken, diminutive Ginsburg fought early and hard for gender equality in the courts in her own steadfastly clearsighted way. She’s the opposite of a late bloomer.

The movie is all a bit more airy than it needs to be, but Isabelle’s startlements are like a double take that never lets up.

A privileged sanctimony clings to this movie that is not fully recognized by its filmmakers: After all, not every distraught new mother can afford a self-help guru.

It takes a while to get into the ruminative rhythm of this film. But it’s worth it.

Some of the sequences are undeniably thrilling but, at about 2-1/2 hours, overkill sets in early.

It transcends its genre even as it fulfills it.

I was afraid at first that I would be watching a sobfest. I needn’t have worried. Nothing very grand is being attempted here, but there’s a core of feeling to what we are witnessing that keeps the sentimentality in check.

Spielberg wants us to drop the techno-gadgets and join hands, but it’s the VR world that really juices him. He’s the ultimate fanboy making a movie about the need to move beyond being a fan.

Tomb Raider, sloppily directed by Roar Uthaug, would not be worth watching without Vikander, who darts, leaps, and pummels her way through this mediocre escapade with a winning fierceness that makes you wish she had paired up with Indiana Jones in his heyday.

In a supporting role as Giacometti’s beleaguered wife, who endures her husband’s penchant for prostitutes, the great, undervalued French actress Sylvie Testud strikes the film’s most resonant note.