Peter Rainer

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.

The linkages between these mostly brief snippets is somewhat haphazard, but, given the waywardness of her travels, that’s appropriate.

Clint Eastwood's Letters From Iwo Jima is his companion piece to "Flags of Our Fathers" and in almost every way is superior.

Roger & Me is a terrific movie, but if it were a great one, those images would reverberate with the shareholders' meetings and the AutoWorlds and the Gatsby parties.

The wonder, the astonishment, is that these puppets are invested with a full range of human emotion.

Resembles nothing so much as a workmanlike TV crime thriller.

The film medium has often been discussed in academic terms as a vehicle to contain the passage of time. But “Three Minutes” does much more than that. Although it raises all sorts of issues about the nature of the film image and how it can affect us, it is also the least theoretical of movies. We are bearing witness.

On the personal betrayals that accompany Capote's ache for literary transcendence. The betrayals were necessary to create "In Cold Blood." This is why Capote is such an unsettlingly ambiguous experience.

The central conceit of The Death of Stalin is that what is funny is not always just funny. In this sense, the film is closer in spirit to “Dr. Strangelove” than, say Mel Brooks’s “The Producers.” The latter was a jape; the former was a cautionary howl.

It would be too convenient, I think, to write this movie off as a study of untreated mental illness. The performance of Jean-Baptiste (who was so memorable in Leigh’s “Secrets & Lies”) transcends the clinical. She shows us what lies beneath Pansy’s suffering. This woman who can’t abide other people is terrified of being alone.

McDormand is a bit too spartan and sealed off in the role. Her steeliness doesn’t have enough emotional levels.

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

Gustave’s protégé, the “lobby boy” Zero Moustafa (played as a young man by Tony Revolori and as an adult by F. Murray Abraham), is as much an enigma as Gustave.

The paradox of Train Dreams is that we are looking at a vanishing way of life that, at the same time, has a startling immediacy. That immediacy is more than a matter of careful observation. In its widest sense, the movie is asking what makes life worth living.

Winter Sleep, winner of last year’s Palme d’Or in Cannes, runs almost 3-1/2 hours. These will be some of the best three-plus hours you will spend at any movie this year. I’ve seen movies half that length that felt twice as long.

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

The larger point in Citizenfour is that dictatorships have always relied on the massive gathering of information in order to control their populations. In this brave new cyber world, it is all too easy for democracies to cross the line, too.

A hushed, small-scale masterpiece that moves into the shadowlands of tragedy.

Given the subject, the movie is too romanticized, and Christie's eyes remain too sharp here to convincingly convey someone whose memory is fast slipping away. Much of it is powerful anyway.

It's a marvelous performance in a marvelous movie, one that sneaks up on you while you're watching it.

With scrupulous fairness, Ferguson meticulously lays out for us the whole sordid mess.

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.

A remarkable movie about a remarkable friendship. It honors the audience's intelligence, which makes it a double rarity.

A lean, efficient modern Western that is so satisfyingly constructed I’m tempted to say it’s just about perfect. There’s a special pleasure in watching a movie that knows exactly what it’s after and then, in scene after scene, gets it.

As a piece of poetic compression, it ranks with the opening of Orson Welles's "The Magnificent Ambersons."

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

It’s easily the best of the Marvel superhero movies but it’s also a film that foregrounds a cornucopia of powerful black faces, garbs, traditions, and conflicts. It’s a stealth movie: Like “Get Out,” it’s a genre film jam-packed with social relevancy.

It’s possible to be heartwarming and tough-minded, as this wonderful film demonstrates. And it’s possible to be both “old-fashioned” and vibrant, too. It’s the best new/old movie in town.