Peter Rainer

It lacks the delirious inventiveness and irreverence of the best Pixar movies (which for me would be the “Toy Story” trilogy, “The Incredibles,” and the first 10 minutes of “Up”), but there’s always something spacious to look at, and the songs, mostly by Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez, aren’t bad either.

The marvelous Japanese director Hirokazu Koreeda shows a strong affinity for the humors and longings of childhood. It's an adult movie about children that feels made from the inside out.

Granted, this is not automatic laugh-riot material, nor should it be, but didn’t Fey recognize how hackneyed it all is? Does being a movie star mean blanding out everything that makes you special?

Solid and uplifting, but it doesn’t extend Spielberg’s range. Perhaps one day he will make a movie about a historical character whose complexities are not quite so untainted.

When something heartfelt occurs in this movie, you accept it without too much squirming. The disciplined yet intuitive way in which these actors connect is a model of ensemble performance.

In the scenes between Hanks and Newman, we get glimpses of greatness.

A bit too satisfied with its own sweet sensitivities.

The story is so powerfully observed that it does indeed become larger than itself – an American tragedy.

All of this has its value, but Plummer, in rollicking good form, without a shred of sentimentality, is primed for greatness, and Mills keeps cutting away from him just when things are getting interesting.

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.

For a movie so sensuously mounted, it's remarkably grounded.

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.

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.

The script by Bean and Tolkin is potentially more interesting than what’s been made of it.

Would Caro’s books have been any less great if he and Gottlieb had never met? Who knows? But as this bracingly affectionate film makes clear, it was the gift of a lifetime for both that they did.

This is not just a musicologist's dream; it's our dream, too.

R.M.N. is one of the most searing cinematic examinations of xenophobia I’ve ever seen.

A kind of companion piece to Altman’s “The Long Goodbye,” and it’s the sort of failure that only a director (Paul Thomas Anderson) of his talents could make – a movie about a stoner private eye (Joaquin Phoenix) in Los Angeles circa 1970 that seems to have been concocted in a stoned haze of its very own.

It brings the nature versus nurture debate into shattering focus.

American Fiction is a serious-minded satire about race relations that is often exasperatingly at odds with itself.

The tone of uplift is earned. Larraín’s unarguable point is that, in politics, if we wait for good to issue only from the pure in heart, we will be waiting a very long time.

In addition to the marvelous lead cast, all sorts of funny performers show up in cameo roles, including Steve Coogan, Bill Nighy, and Timothy Dalton.

This intermittently terrific cerebral thriller does, indeed, hinge on the proper use of dictionary definitions, but the film is really about the oppressive blahness of small-town, postcommunist Romania. In such surroundings, parsing definitions can almost stand for high drama.

Will Tarantino, who is more talented than he allows, ever break out of his perpetual adolescence and make a movie that does more than glorify his love of schlock? Will we ever get a "Tarantino Unchained"?

The Kaijus make zombies look like wusses, so at least the fights in this film are battles royal. But overload sets in early, and it all turns into battle boring.

Her film is closer to Truffaut's "The 400 Blows" in the way it gets inside the gumption and desperation of childhood lived on the edge. It's a terrific, bracingly sad movie.

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.

I rue the day when this becomes a Broadway musical.