Peter Rainer

Driver’s low-key charisma in the role rescues it from terminal dullness, and there are a few fine sidelights.

Almodóvar is attempting to create a continuum of genres as well, one that particularly involves the traditional Hollywood “women’s picture” and film noir. That he doesn’t altogether succeed is perhaps due to the fact that Almodóvar is too enraptured by old movie conventions to give them a new life.

The strongest exchange in the film comes when he is confronted by several angry black activists who believe what he is doing is self-abasing and hurtful to the cause of civil rights. It is left for you to be the judge. I think he’s a hero. Every little bit helps.

I, Daniel Blake is one of his better efforts because the story is powerfully focused and the acting is strong, which is not always the case with Loach's films.

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.

Pratt does a creditable job of playing distraught without seeming like a ninny, and Lawrence at least looks stylish, though she’s not called upon to do much acting. You can almost hear her saying to herself, "I wonder what David O. Russell has planned for his next movie and can I pretty please have a role in it?"

The result, as might be expected, is strong on acting and overly stagey.

The fact that neither Stone nor Gosling are tip-top song-and-dance artists is, in some ways, integral to their appeal. If they were Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, we might not feel as much of a kinship with them.

This meta-biopic is more about Jackie Kennedy as perceived in the popular imagination than it is about the woman herself. And what Larraín has to offer on this score is not terribly enlightening.

Huppert never loses sight of the fact that Nathalie’s wounded heart often overrules her steel-trap mind.

This is a movie about how one’s passion can burn away and leave in its place a vast nostalgia.

I rue the day when this becomes a Broadway musical.

A movie about unremitting grief and yet it has a boisterousness, a comic twirl, that makes it much truer to the zigzags of life than most similarly themed movies that simply pile on the gloom.

The only performances worth discussing are delivered by the always excellent Michael Shannon, the Texas detective who tries to set things right, and Aaron Taylor-Johnson as the scurviest of the marauders.

It provides us with a window into the psyche of a person worth caring about.

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.

This is a technological breakthrough, all right, but a breakthrough to what?

Unless there’s something truly momentous going on, I prefer my sci-fi to be a lot more weightless than weighty.

Loving is a decent and heartfelt movie that, rarity of rarity these days, suffers from being too decent and heartfelt. It is so careful not to give offense that, in some ways, it’s more admirable for what it doesn’t do than for what it does.

The war scenes in Hacksaw Ridge, which take up almost half the screen time, are almost on a level with the D-Day invasion sequence from “Saving Private Ryan.”

Allow me a quick lament: Do we really want to see a great actor like Cumberbatch, not to mention Chiwetel Ejiofor and Tilda Swinton, entombed in yet another superhero franchise?

The film, some of which looks staged, is too slick, and its feminist emphasis, complete with Australian performer Sia singing “You can do anything” on the soundtrack, grates. But Aisholpan triumphs over these excesses.

There’s something borderline dishonest about the way Rosi intercuts the oblivious, life-goes-on Lampedusans with the harrowing, too-brief footage of Africans inside the immigration center and aboard the rescue ships. His stylistics keep these two groups cruelly apart, but who knows if this is the way things actually play out?

So few unexploitative movies are made about young black men, especially young black gay men, that the overpraise for this frail, sweet, discursive fantasia is understandable – and forgivable. It’s a beautiful film around the edges.

Unless you are a Dante scholar, and perhaps not even then, following Inferno is a wild goose chase – without the goose.

The film is a dutiful attempt to convey some of the vehemence of the novel – of the counterculture of the 1960s and early ’70s especially – but McGregor, making his directorial debut, lacks the temperament to do this era justice. He’s an innocent bystander in the melee.

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

This is a movie about people trying to make sense out of the senselessness of what happened.