Peter Rainer

As a piece of drama, What Happened Was . . . isn't any great shakes; it's essentially an actors' workshop exercise that exists primarily as a showcase for its cast. And because Noonan and, especially, Sillas are so good, it triumphs. [06 Oct 1994, p.F10]

The film is saying that, left to their own devices, all men would devolve into a morass of monastic grouches. Kitchen Stories is a prime piece of comic anthropology.

Schepisi may have made the first truly and intelligently uplifting spy movie. His style here is magisterial yet playful: The melancholy grandeur of Russia, on view at last for the whole world to see, has turned him into an eye-popping enthusiast.

Freddy Krueger fans will exult and horror movie mavens will not be surprised: Wes Craven's New Nightmare is much better than the usual run of scare pictures. [14 Oct 1994, p.F4]

Has a poignant undertone: We may feel we already know in our bones just how suffocating this culture is; but the people who made this movie seem to be discovering each fresh horror for the first time. It's like watching a virgin sacrifice.

It's a frisky, funny roundelay starring Stefania Sandrelli, and it features enough shouting and arm-waving to power a windmill.

A sense of unease, of incompleteness, is, I think, the appropriate response to this movie. Instead of trying to fill in the blanks, Curran and Gross leave things open and ambiguous. Just like life.

Scattershot but rousing documentary.

A lot of emotional weight is packed into this seriocomic ramble if you know where to look.

What rescues the movie from being mere flimsy fun is Rutherford’s performance. She gives Agathe’s waywardness a gravity, a hint of darkness.

Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels is in the scabrous mode, and I like it better than "Trainspotting" -- it doesn't pretend its shenanigans are revolutionary.

If Penn really lets these actors sing, his watchful camera also knows how to respect their silences.

It’s a bracing antidote to the usual “Beautiful Mind”–style Hollywoodization of mental illness.

Sylvie Testud gives such a ferociously controlled performance that the messy murder seems like a necessary release.

The film is very good at laying out the forensics of the case, but Triet is after something larger. I’m not sure she altogether succeeds: She wants to show how Sandra is being judged not just for the murder but, in effect, for everything – for her failures as a mother, a lover, an artist.

Spielberg and Kushner were right to bring modern attitudes to this beloved warhorse. Their movie, at its best, isn’t just a remake. It’s a rethink.

A marvelous literary thriller that gets at the way books can stay with people forever.

On the plus side, we get a front-row seat, often closer than that, to some of the wowiest concerts ever committed to film.

Téchiné gets deep inside the dread and exhilaration of people who have lost their bearings so suddenly they don't even have the luxury of grief.

The film is a deeply felt and beautifully acted hagiography.

The real passion here is the almost erotic thrill that acting still holds for Moreau.

The result is perhaps the most elegantly shot, and certainly the most disturbing, of the recent fantasy films.

Refreshingly uncategorizable: It’s somewhere between a marital-discord drama and a mystery thriller, but it also has its madcap moments.

The performances are amazing.

This time around, though, the Coens' usual arch deliberateness isn't quite as deliberate, and there's an appealing shagginess to some of the episodes and performances.... This is the Coen brothers' most emotionally felt movie, and that's not meant as faint praise.

Although Junge had consulted with a few historians and moviemakers over the years, she had never really unburdened herself, and this 90-minute documentary is a devastating act of personal confession.

Office Space is so enjoyable that you wish it were even better...Once the scheme to bilk Initech is set in motion, the off-kilter humor flattens into a take-this-job-and-shove-it thing, and the ending seems pooped-out.

Clearly Sorkin sees the Chicago 7 as victims of the vilification of dissent. He also sees them as exemplars – this is his version of a superhero movie – and the idealization at times gets a bit sticky.

King was not a perfect man. But as this film so powerfully demonstrates, he forced a reckoning with America’s racial history that, more than ever, resonates today. It’s a reckoning he gave his life for.

By the end of the movie, the characters are numbed, while the audience is sensitized to the mayhem to an almost unbearable degree.

Hartley has such a spare, controlled touch in this film that this landscape seems both realistic and fantastic. [16 Aug 1991]

If Nine Queens were a great film, instead of just a very good one, this rottenness would be so pervasive that it would burst the bounds of the plot; it would make us shudder.

Unsatisfying at a very high level. It fritters away more than most movies ever offer up.

To the film’s credit, Diana’s gilded-prison desperation is not displayed as a martyrdom for which she is blameless. This royal can be a royal pain, and Stewart doesn’t flinch from the more unsavory aspects of Diana’s woe.

If all three of the women’s lives had come across with equal weight and artistry, the film, which glides back and forth among them, might have approached the symphonic. But only the Streep section truly inspires the kind of awe and terror that the film as a whole strives for.

Manville carries it all off effortlessly.

By relying too much on snappy dialogue and by adhering to the philosophy that "steel should feel like steel and glass should feel like glass," the filmmakers have bridled their imaginations and created a movie about toys that are too blubbery and not rubbery enough.

As a piece of filmmaking, Becoming Bulletproof is haphazard and overloaded with talking heads. But as a window into the lives of some of these actors, it’s often moving.

Intermittently powerful drama explores a cross-cultural estrangement.

It's a heroic story, and Zwick frames it rather too strenuously as an antidote to the generic Holocaust stories of Jewish passivity and martyrdom. And yet, as a piece of historical redress, a great service has been done in bringing this narrative to the screen.

Throughout it all, however, I couldn't escape the feeling that this movie belonged on television instead. It has the immediacy, but also the shallowness, of an extended TV episode. Talking heads proliferate and pontificate.

Other welcome faces include Alicia Vikander as a CIA analyst who has a better bead on Bourne than her superiors; Julia Stiles, in a repeat appearance as the spy’s former contact; and Riz Ahmed as a Silicon Valley billionaire.

If the film doesn't really explore the pain and bitterness of this marriage, it's still leagues ahead of most such attempts.

The bloody wrap-up isn't handled especially well, and I must confess that the most shocking thing about the movie was the casting of Carrie-Anne Moss as a suburban mom. I kept expecting her "Matrix" skills to show up in the final reel.

You get a strong whiff of what it must have been like to be Johnny Cash, or his exasperated manager, from this film. It would make a good companion piece to “Walk the Line.”

The documentary Gleason, a big Sundance hit, is difficult to watch – and that’s the point.

The director of this jamboree is appropriately named Olivier Megaton.

The film’s political scope is wide, beginning in 1917 and extending for sixty years, and, especially in the first hour or so, the antic, magical tone of Rushdie’s novel is sustained.

For a movie featuring so much emotional discord, Indignation has an overly cautious tone: It could have been made in 1951. I realize that this effect is largely intentional, but that doesn’t altogether excuse it.

Assayas doesn’t bring out the fiery best in this material, but he’s smart enough to know that revolutionaries like their comforts as much as the ruling class does.

Silence, though conceived on a grand scale, is an almost obsessively personal, at times even private, film.

Billy Connolly, as a scurvy priest who may or may not be a visionary, steals the acting honors.

But at its highest level of ambition, Proof fails to deliver. The film becomes a psychological whodunit where Catherine is shown to be either a martyr to her father or else his intellectual equal. None of it is terribly convincing.

Wilkinson artfully deepens a character who in Wilde's original play was rather boobish. It's a marvelous performance in a pretty good film.

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.

The Artist is full of homages to many other films. I suppose it will be fun for cinéastes to pick out the references, but not all of them – like the ones from "Citizen Kane" or "Sunset Boulevard" – are especially germane.

Branagh is marvelous at conveying his exasperation. His conceit is that Olivier offstage acted the same as Olivier onstage – as if all of life was a vast playlet. For someone as thoroughly actorly as Olivier, this is probably no exaggeration. I would like to think that the great man himself would have smiled at Branagh's rollicking rendition of tantrums.

The film targets the spinmeisters, hired by or associated with corporate interests, whose job, despite their lack of scientific training, is to discredit the science of climate change doomsayers. The fact that some of these spinmeisters proudly base their method on the machinations of tobacco-industry lobbyists is doubly damning.

It's a pleasant time-killer, nothing more. But nothing less, either.

In the House does at least engage us. It even enlists us implicitly as co-conspirators in Claude’s devious storytelling.

The whiz-bang stuff doesn't kick in until the Peter-Gwen relationship (which is the best thing in the movie) is firmly established.

He's (Giamatti) terrific throughout, although the movie, which is more clever than funny, sometimes resembles second-tier Charlie Kaufman stuff.

Ask the Dust does manage to cast a spell. The film is not only an evocation of a bygone era but an emanation of it as well.

Zemeckis has converted the epic poem about the warrior who slays the monster Grendel into a species of computer game. He employs the same motion-capture technology that he first used in "The Polar Express," to slightly better effect.

The action is nonstop and often harrowing and well staged. But van Houten, while a charmer, doesn't adequately convey the disgust (and connivance) that her character would inevitably feel in such a situation.

The film has a pleasing retro-ness that often mitigates the dullness.

Has its moments.

The plot has something to do with the primordial battle between light and dark forces in the universe, and though several critics have written that it contains everything but the kitchen sink, I beg to differ. I saw a kitchen sink spinning around in there, too.

The only character in the film who seems to have the requisite gravity is Oscar’s mother, Wanda (the marvelous Octavia Spencer), whose scene with her son in San Quentin is as hard-bitten as the rest of the film isn’t.

It's all a bit hokey, though the mountaineering footage is often spectacular.

A moderately creepy, often garishly violent action horror film frontloaded with heretics, Christians, mercenaries, witches, witch-burners, and necromancers. There's something here for just about everyone.

McAvoy succeeds in making the boy's mania for trivia endearing rather than annoying. As his (delayed) love interest, Rebecca Hall, playing a campus radical and the first Jewish person he has ever encountered, is stunning.

Inherently dramatic but needed a stronger director than Anthony Fabian, who overdoes understatement.

Less a documentary than a love fest for Al Franken, this scattershot movie, shot over two years, follows the zigzag trail of political satirist Al Franken as he feuds with Bill O'Reilly, campaigns against George W. Bush, and helps establish Air America.

It should all resemble a vanity project except for one thing: The film lays out the case for reform with steadfast rigor.

You may find, as I did, that the lovely twilit moments in this movie stay with one, and that summoning them up in your mind is like slowing down time.

Weir has an epic imagination but, unlike, say David Lean, he doesn't fill out the epic vision with epic characters. The result is a film that seems simultaneously grand and skimpy.

Isn't overwhelmingly good, but it's just nutty enough to keep you watching.

The film is certainly worth seeing, but it should be better than it is.

The movie has some powerful moments, but it's mostly superficial.

Writer-director David Jacobson has a good eye for widescreen compositions and sustains a low-key note of dread but is less successful in his attempt to graft a neo-Western to a neo-noir.

Much of The Runaways plays out in the key of dreary. But there's a flinty integrity in this movie's look at the rock grind, and Stewart and Fanning are intensely watchable.

An overstuffed odyssey that, while disappointing on many levels, has standout performances by Paul Giamatti.

As a writer-director, Edward Burns is as industrious as an occupational therapist. He makes sure each of his people is well positioned for happiness.

It's effective but schematic storytelling.

What hits home is Renner’s performance, which gives full weight both to Webb’s fierce, abiding love for journalism and his despair when his livelihood – his reason for being – is trashed. It’s a tragedy, doubly so since the core of Webb’s allegations remains unchallenged today.

State of Play is far from a great movie, but it's sentimental in all the right ways.

Writer-director Carl Franklin offers up a tone of heightened reverence that weighs down the material, but there are small, lovely moments when the magic realism approaches the magical.

Kevin Spacey gives a bravura performance as superlobbyist Jack Abramoff in George Hickenlooper's uneven but often loopily entertaining Casino Jack.

Karsin doesn't adequately detail the political complexities of the struggle, but how can one not respond to someone like tribal leader Flor Ilva, who declares, "We women are warriors, not with weapons, but with our thoughts and through raising our children."

Despite its deficiencies, and the inadequate screen time allotted to Theron (who's quite good), Sleepwalking has a core of feeling. It's about a do-gooder who, lacking all skills for it, does good anyway. His emotional odyssey has real poignancy.

It's been a while since we've had a good monster movie, and while Cloverfield probably won't give you sleepless nights, it will certainly keep you awake in the theater.

A high-class weepie for adults who disdain the lower forms of four-hankiedom.

The battle scenes and a few of the human vignettes are powerful, but too often the film falls back on conventional plot mechanics.

The best moments in “Parnassus” are not otherwordly but worldly. It’s a movie about a dying magician and the death of magic. This is a subject that obviously means a lot to Gilliam, and he makes us feel it in our bones.

What goes on inside the mind of a terrorist who is willing to blow himself for the cause? The War Within is one of the few films that attempts to deal with this subject in a nonexploitative way.

Mos Def makes it work. It's a truly daring piece of acting because it skirts racial stereotyping and is so out of key with everything else in the movie. But that's just why it is so good.

The timing is slack and the jokes repetitive. But, like most Will Ferrell movies, it has enough riotous moments to carry you through the dull stretches.

If Baron Cohen is going to continue making scripted comedies, he needs to work with directors far less slapdash than Larry Charles. He can be one of the funniest people on the planet, but he needs a real dictator – I mean, director – calling the shots.

Harry comes through loud and clear as a conflicted, edgy, avid young man. He's turned into EveryTeen.

Best not when it is preaching to us but, rather, in those moments when both King and Riggs drop their public faces and reveal the roiling underneath.

Exhaustingly action-packed.

Obviously a movie made by smart and talented people but sometimes you can outsmart yourself.

Too much of Wild is broken up by flashbacks that tend to dissipate rather than enhance Strayed’s trek. At times she is swallowed up almost to the point of vanishing by the immensity of the vistas.

Worth seeing for the expert archival selections, but a decidedly mixed bag for anyone familiar, or unfamiliar, with the times.

It's intermittently amusing, and Bening actually gives a performance instead of a star turn, but the claws should have been sharper.

The movie has a lush mysteriousness that represents a bygone, almost antique style of romanticism. It bears almost no resemblance to the current crop of mostly rat-a-tat movies. To view it is to enter a time warp, and there is some pleasure in stepping back into the languor.

You can blissfully zone out on the director's pretty pictures, which is a permissible indulgence when the pictures are as delicately alluring as they are here. Also, the performances of Kikuchi and Hatsune are first-rate.

In Aviva Kempner's affectionate documentary Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg, Berg, who once polled second only to Eleanor Roosevelt as one of America's most respected females, is given her due. Or at least her showbiz due.

There are some virtuoso moments (the discovery of the mutilated corpse is extremely well done and blessedly ungraphic), but overall the result is much less than prime De Palma.

The conceit of the movie is that everyone is obsessed by something and never really tunes into anybody else.

The real love story here is between Moore and his bullhorn.

The Mexican writer-director Fernando Eimbcke attempts to give this story a melancholy overlay, but its main interest is in its confirmation that teenagers are pretty much the same everywhere.

Crystal Skull is a fun ride, but if we have to wait 19 years for the next one, that's OK by me.

Writer-director Ray Lawrence, well regarded for his two previous films, "Bliss" and "Lantana," expands Carver's work into an indictment of colonialism and an examination of the chasm that supposedly exists between men and women over matters of the heart.

If you’ve ever fantasized about busting up somebody’s nuptials, this movie is for you.

Without her (Kelly Macdonald), the generally well-acted The Merry Gentleman would descend into terminal lugubriousness.

Her social activism often left her children, some of whom are interviewed, in the lurch. It’s a contradiction the film could have more sharply explored.

The entire enterprise ultimately seems designed to turn Austen into a self-help guru.

The saving grace of Queen and Country is that its nostalgia is not laced with sentimentality. Even working in this conventional mode, Boorman doesn’t try to strong-arm us into blubberiness.

Best performance, minute for minute, comes from Adriane Lenox, whose cameo as Michael's drug-addled mother is the film's standout.

Carrell has stated in interviews that his accent "falls someplace between Bela Lugosi and Ricardo Montalban," and that's about right.

The veteran rock musician Nick Cave wrote the screenplay and John Hillcoat directed, both somewhat in thrall to Sam Peckinpah. The bonds of family are the centerpiece of this highly uneven, hyperviolent film.

Whenever Jones is on screen, the film's energy level kicks up several notches, an indication, I think, that Spielberg otherwise overdoses on directorial decorum.

At least Erik/Magneto, as played by Michael Fassbender, is, well, magnetic.

It’s easy to call this film a video action game starring real people, but that “real” part means a lot.

Courtly intrigue should be intriguing, and in that sense, The Princess of Montpensier – although it's somewhat wan and too cerebral for its own good – does a fairly keen job.

The coolness here has its creepiness, as in the dispassionate way Fincher depicts Lisbeth's rape and her subsequent, harrowing revenge, but the suspicion remains: Fincher didn't make this movie his own because he doesn't consider it his own.

The CGI effects in this film, directed by Brad Peyton, are quite remarkable and help take one’s mind off the cornball disaster-brings-families-together underpinnings.

If you have a hankering for a pretty good Woody Allen movie and want to brush up on your French at the same time, Shall We Kiss? is the ticket.

Is there a moral objection to be raised about a movie that features a teenage girl as an assassin? I suppose there is, but I couldn't find it in me to object.

Not surprisingly, a documentary constructed entirely from newsreel footage proves inadequate to the task of sounding the depths of someone as complicated or driven (pun intended) as Senna.

As thin and jokey as this movie often is, I prefer it to the serioso treatment that usually encrusts this type of material. At its best, The Savages captures the lunacy that comes with coping with sorrow.

Because almost all animated films now are computer generated, the 2-D animated Curious George has the not-unpleasant patina of an antique.

The film is fine enough to make you forgive, if not forget, the fact that it exists primarily as a corporate enterprise and not as an imaginative tour de force.

It would have better if Brooks had invested more time trying to discover what makes AMERICANS laugh.

The film basically upholds the verity of the news story while not condoning the sloppiness, and it’s worth seeing mostly for Cate Blanchett’s firebrand performance as Mapes, a battler consumed by righteousness.

This is Eastwood's first acting job since "Million Dollar Baby," and his range, like his raspiness, is fairly one-note.

A pleasantly disposable romantic comedy starring the once and future indie-queen Parker Posey.

The black comedy Noise may be a one-joke movie but it's a resonant one.

The dense interweave of relationships, a Farhadi specialty, is continually compelling.

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.

This is one of the few films that captures the complex intensity of the diva/personal assistant dynamic.

From scene to scene The Connection is never less than watchable, although it is also never less than predictable.

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

Entertaining as the movie often is, this all-American, can-do attitude is also the source of its shortcomings. Given the enormousness of its subject, there is a radical lack of awe in this movie.

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.

Thanks to Tukur, what we get here is still something: a stunning portrait of a good man caught in a widening inferno.

What makes the film intriguing, and somewhat off-putting, is that Romain is deliberately portrayed as a heel; he strains his relations with his lover and his family, except for his grandmother (Moreau), to the breaking point.

This may be the first crime thriller to explicitly utilize superstring theory but, in its woozy romanticism, it's not that far removed from this year's other time-warp movie, "The Lake House," about two lovers living in parallel years - or "Frequency," which starred Jim Caviezel as a good guy.

The film's biggest unexplored question: Why is someone with a reputation for laying bare the truth so addicted to plastic surgery?

I wish the truly searing moments in this film were not continually counterbalanced by an overall historical-reenactment stiffness in the presentation.

Lee may, in the end, be too balanced a filmmaker to give Life of Pi the extra spin of lyric delirium it sorely needs. It's a sane movie about an essentially deranged situation.

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.

A richly appointed period piece, it features kingly tantrums, mistresses, bodices, roaring fireplaces, incest, and mutton. It also features sharply enunciated, period-perfect dialogue in which nary a contraction can be heard.

Clint Eastwood’s second film this year, American Sniper, about the late Navy SEAL Chris Kyle, is considerably better than his first, “The Jersey Boys.” As a piece of direction, it’s as taut as anything he’s ever done.

The film is frustrating because so many of its best possibilities are missed. But Bening keeps you watching, and, to a lesser extent, so does Jamie Bell as Peter Turner.

For the most part, plays like a pretty good TV police procedural.

I was expecting something raunchier. Instead, what we have here is a wistful, somewhat overextended but occasionally sweet comedy about a couple that can't – in more ways than one – quite get it together.

The actors, all of whom seem too posed and pretty, are not particularly accomplished, and director Luis Mandoki lacks the visual imagination to bring the story to a boil.

The best thing about the movie is David Oyelowo’s performance as King. He doesn’t simply portray King; he inhabits him.

August Evening is rambling, diffuse, and at times so "sensitive" it makes your teeth hurt. And yet it's also intermittently quite affecting.

The most pressing question I took away from the film is, Are they really still teaching "A Tale of Two Cities" in honors English classes?

It’s a skimpy, overextended riff, but some of the seemingly tossed-off moments are lovely.

Freilich includes interviews with three generations of kibbutzniks and some fascinating historical footage going back to the 1920s.

The only thing missing from Salt is Lotte Lenya's Rosa Klebb with her steel blade-tipped shoes from "From Russia With Love." Come to think of it, the Russian defector here does indeed kill with steel-blade shoes. Nice touch.

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

Biting as it tries to be, Tropic Thunder is mostly toothless. Its targets – Hollywood vanity, Hollywood tantrums – are easy hits.

Hallström conveys a bit of the circuslike atmosphere of the times. But he overreaches in trying to turn the film into a commentary on the politically corrupt 1970s.

The story that Hidden Figures tells is so irresistible that you can almost forgive the fact that the movie itself is resistibly unoriginal. It’s an unabashed crowd-pleaser with a heavy history lesson undertow.

The idealization of the native American existence in The New World, precolonization, is a pleasing fantasy but also timeworn and ahistorical. Surely someone as sophisticated as Malick - who once taught philosophy at MIT and was a Rhodes scholar - understands that he is putting forth a fabrication.

It’s a painfully uneven movie, but its best moments are ravishingly good.

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.

At its best it's refreshingly offhanded. It's a hit-and-miss movie that's worth seeing for the hits.

For western fans, watching this movie is like encountering an old friend after a long absence.

The best reason to see this documentary is for the stunning shots of polar bears and walruses in the Arctic Circle. If the filmmakers had just left it at that, they would have accomplished a lot.

No envelopes are pushed in Brave, which was directed by Brenda Chapman and Mark Andrews, and no genres are subverted. It's a safe experience; but safe, in this case, is better than sorry.

It has the requisite amount of knockabout silliness.

I’m not sure that anybody coming to this film to witness her for the first time would necessarily pledge eternal allegiance. Still, she’s sui generis, and in the theatre world, as in life (yes, there is an overlap), that counts for a lot.

The movie doesn’t delve especially deeply into the psychology of double-agentry, and the shifting viewpoints between Israelis and Palestinians flattens the drama instead of broadening it.

The new Superman has its visionary charms, but there's only so far you can go without great characters.

What Trust conveys, at its best, is that ultimately parental protections are not fullproof, and that is the greatest horror of all.

Without Bening, whose performance is a watchful and laid-back marvel, 20th Century Women, written and directed by Mike Mills, would still be borderline worth seeing because of its supporting cast.

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

There are fine, wry moments tucked inside the curdled whimsy.

It's a bewildering mix of very smart and very dumb, but the cast, which also features a hilarious Joan Cusack, Ben Kingsley, Marisa Tomei, Dan Aykroyd as the Cheney-esque ex-vice president, and Hilary Duff as a Turaqistan airhead pop star, is tiptop.

It has moments when the spiritual and the secular burst forth in stunning disarray.

Nothing in this film approaches the boy's-eye view of war that, say, John Boorman achieved in "Hope and Glory," but it's an affecting, if somewhat flavorless, journey.

Cash was a true anomaly: a poseur who was also the genuine article. A better movie would have made that contradiction its core.

It’s a miniature art history lesson that is also a rapt communion between two people who, at least in this moment, are joined in the ecstasy of creation.

A jagged, uneven, often unfulfilling experience, but there are a few first-rate scenes between Joseph and Hannah that convincingly put forward the capacity for redemption in even the most ravaged of souls.

It's nice to watch a political movie that, for a change, isn't trying to save our souls. It's possible to have a good time with this movie while, at the same time, regretting all that it isn't.

James Ponsoldt, who directed from a script by Michael H. Weber and Scott Neustadter, is a bit too glib to do justice to this material, but the young actors, especially Woodley, are quite fine.

What saves it all from being sordid is the open desire of the director, Gregory Jacobs, and his writer, Reid Carolin, to make sure the women in the film, not the male dancers, are ultimately the ones who are celebrated.

In addition to the usual pontificators like Gore Vidal, whose world weariness has assumed Olympian proportions, the director provides interviews with such right-wing counterparts as Richard Perle and William Kristol. Nobody is allowed much time to develop an argument.

A pleasant little dawdle and yet another example, in these dog days for cinema, that dogs are a movie's best friend.

This is a film that starts out cynically and gradually morphs into sentimentality of a particularly high gloss.

It's a lovely oddity, and one that will probably hit home for preteen audiences all over the world.

Intermittently gripping, but overlong.

My favorite line in the movie comes when Gordon-Levitt, in a face-off with his mob boss (Jeff Daniels), informs him that he'd like to leave the business one day and move to France, to which Daniels replies: "I'm from the future; you should go to China."

As a piece of filmmaking, Munich is rarely less than gripping. As a political essay, as a brief against despair, it is far less convincing.

As the "Empress of Fashion" who was the fashion editor of "Harper's Bazaar" before editing "Vogue" in its 1960s heyday, Vreeland comes across in the movie as something of a cross between Auntie Mame and Godzilla. She was a true original in a world where knock-offs abounded.

The good news is that, even though one must pace oneself through the dull parts, usually involving Mr. Popper's dullish family, he's in pretty good form whenever he's getting physical.

Grant is a fine actor ("Withnail and I," "Gosford Park") and, although he doesn't appear in Wah-Wah, his spiritedness as a performer carries through to some of the others in his cast.

More of a testimonial than a documentary, but it weaves together a portrait of a remarkable Irish-American friar, who was gay and a recovering alcoholic, and the many lives he inspired.

Marion Cotillard’s Lady Macbeth, however, is a triumph. She seems transfixed by her own capacity for evil, and her mad scene is one of the most unhistrionic, and therefore spookiest, ever filmed.

He intercuts documentary sequences from a French news crew and also includes Arab website footage of insurgents and YouTube confessions from soldiers who witnessed a barbarous act, which we also see, involving the platoon and a young Iraqi girl. The concept is audacious but the actors are too theatrical.

A disconcerting melange, Tokyo Sonata begins rather conventionally before spinning into black comic, almost fantastical, terrain.

The hardy fools - I mean, visionary pioneers - in this movie are so gravity-defying that I had to look at the press notes afterward just to make sure no computerized special effects were used.

It is one continuous fight sequence from opening scene to final credits, but lacks the blood, profanity, and gore that would have merited a more adult rating.

An extension, temperamentally if not altogether thematically, of such earlier films of his as “The Squid and the Whale,” “Greenberg,” and “Frances Ha.”

The film is actually fairly entertaining once you get past its overweening desire to be the bearer of bad tidings. A more adventuresome movie would have treated the down-and-dirty world of politics as its starting, not its ending, point.

This half-baked fairy tale always seems to be on the verge of becoming charming but despite a good cast it never quite succeeds.

On its own limited terms, The Infiltrator, like its hero, delivers the goods.

What’s clear is that many of Weiner’s supporters within the mayoral campaign stuck with him only because of Abedin’s connection to the Clintons. Hey, it’s politics.

Since 9/11-style terrorism is very much on display here, I suppose it’s fair to say that Star Trek Into Darkness is a sci-fi blow-out with overtones of the real. Series founder Gene Roddenberry would, I think, approve.

Adams has a good camera eye and a fine feeling for the regional mores of the South, where she's from. Judd, who for a change isn't being terrorized in a thriller, is more nuanced and intense than she's ever been.

Writer-director Rebecca Miller never wrests her movie free of its associations with the films of Woody Allen and Noah Baumbach, and some of it plays like a generic indie film rom-com.

Scurlock's filmmaking style leans more heavily on woebegone personal testimony than facts and figures, but politicians willing to go up against the credit industry's lobbyists would be well advised to take a look.

The Imposter has too many reenactments for my taste, and Bourdin is glorified by Layton more often than he is condemned. Still, this is one creepy mystery.

Although their responses too often seem rehearsed, their innocence is touching and redemptive.

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.

Well, it is shameless, and it tugs the heart in all the obvious places, but it has a winning vivaciousness and a trio of performances by its lead actors that transcend its “inspirational” niche.

Tony Leung plays Ip Man, the real-life kung fu innovator who most famously trained Bruce Lee. His life takes in the upheavals in China from the 1930s through the ’50s, including the Japanese occupation.

It's almost impossible to watch this movie and not, on some level beyond reason, succumb. The Pursuit of Happyness is an expert piece of calculation: a male weepie engineered for the whole family.

Seraphim Falls is essentially one long, bleak stalk-and-kill action thriller.

Much of the nattery byplay seems improvised, and the results are very hit and miss – inspired contretemps alternate with gabfests that seem to go on forever.

Given the high quotient of hypotheticals in the story line, Nixon & Elvis can’t really be said to add to the historical record, but it’s an entertaining, deadpan jape that, with a bit of tweaking, could probably work as a stage play.

He uses Vacth, a beauty who somewhat resembles the young Nastassja Kinski or Dominique Sanda, for her eerie, implacable hauteur. There is a mask behind her mask.

Although they might have wished for something less conventional, it's the thrills that make this movie.

Has some smart flashes, and a few of the young performers resemble real people and not the usual prefab teen idols.

Although the cast, which also includes Jennifer Jason Leigh and Christine Lahti in sharp cameos, is very good, Wiig’s performance is self-effacing to a fault. Like a lot of comic actors, she overcompensates in dramatic roles by wearing a very long face.

It's a sophisticated fantasia that adults should enjoy equally. (In other words, it's the perfect family entertainment.)

Jim Jarmusch has made a vampire movie, but, as you might expect, not just any old vampire movie. “Twilight” fans will not be amused, but Jarmusch’s usual coterie of art-film followers will likely find the movie his best in years.

The film’s title is derived from a magical black stone of Persian lore that reputedly absorbs the burdens of those who speak to it until it crumbles – freeing the speaker of her troubles.

The language of that poem, which periodically pours out from the screen, is the best thing in the movie. The worst thing: the interpolated animated sequences that are meant to "illustrate" the poem but which can't begin to compete with the imagery evoked by Ginsberg's words.

Often best around the edges. Without making a big deal about it, Scott reveals how the Mafia, while putting up a businesslike front, deplored the incursion of black gangsters into the drug trade.

Never entirely escapes its theatrical origins, and, by framing the story so pugilistically, the filmmakers don't bring out the full richness in this material.

Cillian Murphy plays a hyper-feminine transvestite who spends much of the movie traipsing about an increasingly violent landscape in search of his long lost mother. His whirligig encounters, political and sexual, rarely soar.

The acting is fine -- and so is the moody-blues direction -- but, given the subject matter, the movie should be blacker and more disturbing.

A sweet, not altogether satisfying variation on the fantasy-becomes-reality conceit he (Allen) used in his Depression-era "The Purple Rose of Cairo."

The script by Jeffrey Hatcher is overburdened with plot complications, but Bill Condon, who worked with McKellan on “Gods and Monsters,” has a real affinity for this actor’s capabilities. He brings out his best.

The Whistleblower is frustratingly uneven, but at least it affords us the rare opportunity these days to meet up with a movie hero who isn't wearing jammies and a cape.

Of course, on some level, no movie about this subject can fail to move us, and Son of Saul has its share of powerful sequences. I wanted it to be great, though, with a largeness of vision to match the awful immensity of its subject.

There are times in this lovely, complacent movie about uncomplacent circumstance when I wanted to be shaken up, and wasn’t.

A standout is Ben Mendelsohn’s Aussie nutcase.

Connery (an actor as well, and the son of Sean Connery) keeps the performers honest, and a few of the father-son tussles, with their admixture of love and envy, are powerful.

The footage of Gehry's work, notably the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, is often startlingly beautiful, and Gehry is forthcoming about how he achieved his effects. But too much of the film is taken up with gushy self-serving talking-head testimonials.

Just about everything connected to this movie is a tie-in, except for the popcorn. And even then I'm not too sure.

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.

Danijel, who cares for Ajla while at the same time carrying out his mission of ethnic cleansing, is the least fully explored character in the movie, which leaves a big blur at its core. Still, this is an impressive piece of work that doesn't flinch from the atrocities that no doubt motivated Jolie to make the film in the first place.

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

The actors play their roles to the hilt, but in the end, the role of these investors in extenuating the crisis they took advantage of is played down, as is the disastrous life consequences of all those who were severely hit by it.

The odd-couple pairing does yield its occasional rewards, though. The collision between Everett’s monosyllabic gruffness and Maud’s chatty ditherings is inherently funny, and so is her insistence on marriage before sex, which he finds confounding.

Director Chris Renaud and his team have fun with these dithery, frenetic characters. The film is less special when it slows down and takes a breath of fresh air.

Dano is still doing his ethereal, creepy underacting routine, but, compared with De Niro's scenery chewing, he seems almost dignified. The film, written and directed by Paul Weitz, has many touching moments and many more hokey ones.

The material veers a bit too predictably from near farce to serioso dramatics but the trajectory here makes emotional sense.

What gives the movie its poignancy – what turns it into something more than a polite entertainment – is Smith's role. Or, to be more exact, her performance, in tandem with Courtenay's.

There is one aspect of Conviction that is a real cheat. No mention is made that Kenny, six months after his release from prison, accidentally fell and fatally fractured his skull. Did the filmmakers think that our knowing this would wreck a happy ending? For a film that prides itself on its realism, this omission is unspeakably wimpy.

Schoenaerts has the gift of being able to make inarticulateness expressive. Perhaps this is why, in moments, he seems to recall Brando and Dean.

Director Hank Rogerson casts a sympathetic eye on the proceedings.

Succeeds in bringing a lump to the throat without, as is de rigueur these days, insulting our intelligence.

Michael Douglas plays US Secret Service agent Pete Garrison, and his jaw has never seemed tighter.

Even though the various patients too often come across as cutesy case studies, Fleck and Boden for the most part avoid working their lives up into some grand-scale "Cuckoo's Nest"-style microcosm of humanity.

First-time director James McTeigue's big, bold imagery, with slashing reds and blacks, is a close approximation of the novel's look and feel.

If we must endure yet another spring-summer cycle of comic book superheroes, this movie at least delivers the wham-bang goods (recycled though they may be).

One glaring question the film doesn’t raise: Why, given his history, is Tilikum still entertaining in sea parks?

None of Ferrell's movies have ever really done justice to the best of his "Saturday Night Live" work, but those of us who love his comedy have learned to take the good with the bad.

Both actors are a lot better than this material requires – or deserves.

Lindo gives a powerhouse performance of immense feeling and subtlety.

Moneyball presents a misleading story line in order to prop up Billy Beane as some kind of would-be miracle worker antihero. In truth, he's just another tobacco-chewing go-getter trying to make sense of a game that, thankfully, has never quite made sense.

I kept wishing that Still Mine had jettisoned the film’s true-story trappings and moved more deeply into the Craig-Irene duet unencumbered by bad-news bulletins from the building inspectors. Easily the best parts of the film are those in which husband and wife quietly summon up in often the barest of glances and touches a near-lifetime together.