Peter Rainer

One of the letdowns of Vera Drake is that once Vera is arrested, we lose her voice.

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.

Audiences knowing nothing about hockey will still be able to appreciate this movie as a somewhat jaunty take on the cold war and its aftermath – and resurgence. A curious kind of cold-war nostalgia can be felt in the West these days; President Vladimir Putin is the kind of comprehensible villain Americans feel comfortable with.

As is true of most movies about “important” topics, The Post is least successful when it’s glorying in its own righteousness. If the movie has any shelf life beyond the current historical moment, I suspect it will be because of Meryl Streep’s performance.

Goldfinger happened upon a story far larger than he must have anticipated. The Flat is about the persistence of denial, and of hope.

When it comes time for some of the girls to flee, the result is one of the most emotionally satisfying of all prison breaks.

Cronenberg has a distinctive style – deadpan absurdism laced with fright and all executed with slow deliberation. But too much of Eastern Promises is cultish and silly.

At its best when it gets into the cutthroat dynamics of academic competition, which are both horrifying and amusing.

A marvelous documentary that brings home the terror and heroism brought forth by the Katrina debacle.

And yet the great conundrum of the Holocaust is that it was perpetrated by human beings, not monsters. Few movies have rendered this puzzle so powerfully.

It has one big thing in its favor: Sally Hawkins’ performance as Langley. She’s perfectly cast, which, as a general rule, does not always translate into a perfect performance. Not so here.

A considerable achievement even if, on balance, it's more of a Tim Burton phantasmagoria than a Sondheim fantasia.

Nolan sustains an arty note of existential dread that probably will work better for noir-steeped film critics and overserious philosophy grad students than for general audiences, but he brings off a few brisk bravura moments.

In the end, the finest achievement of Wright's movie is that it fully captures what Martin Amis, writing on Pride and Prejudice, said of Austen: "Money is a vital substance in her world; the moment you enter it you feel the frank horror of moneylessness, as intense as the tacit horror of spinsterhood." All that, and a great love story, too.

There are wonderful sequences strewn throughout, like the moment when Lazhar, at a school dance, begins to slowly sway to the music as if in a trance.

The screenplay is by Hanif Kureishi, who wrote "The Mother" for Michell and also scripted the classic "My Beautiful Laundrette." He has a feeling for outsiders.

His (Hamer) new film, 1001 Grams, is almost as good as “Kitchen Stories,” with a story equally unpromising – but only in theory.

The film’s wrap-up, in which Jessica reveals some family secrets of her own, seems too engineered, too pat. Muylaert doesn’t do justice to the potential complexities of her premise. The film ends on a note of forced sunniness, but the outlook actually looks more like cloudy with a chance of showers.

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.

As a testament to positive thinking, 127 Hours will probably stand as a ringing affirmation for reckless survivalists. For those of us not so affirmed, Boyle's paean to heroism – a better title for it might have been "A Farewell to Arm" – is merely the best gross-out music video ever made.

Canet has a good feeling for lowlife atmosphere and he works up a few fine Hitchcockian twirls. Kristin Scott Thomas and Nathalie Baye round out the sleek cast.

A breathtakingly beautiful achievement in every way.

A creaky and slow-going morality play.

Directed by James Ponsoldt from a script by Donald Margulies, the film gets at the wariness and competitiveness inside the journalist-interviewee dynamic and, in Segel’s performance, captures the quandary of an immensely gifted and immensely troubled writer who disdained the celebrity he also, without fully fessing up to it, sought.

Spacious, headlong entertainment.

The film could have been improved by dropping a few battles, and I wish Caesar were not the only ape with the power of human speech. I, for one, would love to hear what Maurice the orangutan sounds like spouting the King’s English.

Ballard filmed across hundreds of miles of South African desert, and there are times when the whole throbbing universe seems to resound for him.

Essentially two movies for the price of one. But those halves add up to more than most movies right now.