Peter Rainer

Thankfully, the usual Disney cutesy factor is relatively low, and the script by Justin Marks is more literate than usual for this sort of thing. There are even some end credits that, for a change, are actually funny.

Sokurov is a playful philosopher. If his playfulness is sometimes juvenile – as in those Napoleon scenes, or, worse, in the scenes of an actress playing Marianne, the spirit of France, exhorting, “Freedom, Equality, Brotherhood” – at least he’s not stuffy.

The best I can say is that it’s another tour de force for Gyllenhaal, although his intensity isn’t matched by the movie itself, which sacrifices much of its power by too often settling for easy, nut-brain effects.

I persist in believing that Melissa McCarthy is capable of starring in a movie that not only makes a scads of money but is – you know – good.

Miles Ahead is obviously a labor of love, but it falls into the trap of so many biopics about anguished artists – it confuses the anguish with the artistry.

Overall this overlong movie is too knowingly coy for its own good.

The sunniness of Fastball leaves out a lot, but watching it can be as pleasurable as an afternoon at the ballpark.

It’s a strange, unsatisfying, fragmented movie, but at its best it belongs in the same unconventional continuum as Todd Haynes’s “I’m Not There” (about Bob Dylan) and “Love and Mercy” (about Brian Wilson).

It’s a delicate little fable that creeps up on you. It seems slight at first, but it’s held together by a performance from the veteran actress Kirin Kiki, playing an older lady who makes supernal dorayakis, that cuts very deep.

The plot, as it unwinds, is increasingly eye-poppingly preposterous, but it holds you anyway, not only because of its outlandishness but because Plummer, against all odds, brings pathos and dignity to a role that doesn’t deserve him.

It’s all meant to be funnier than it is.

You can laugh at her, but the film doesn’t encourage you to do so. Giannoli, with his co-screenwriter Marcia Romano, is asking us to take Marguerite’s passion as a value in itself.

The Wave, directed by Roar Uthaug, is pretty good. It’s also pretty strange. At least for American viewers – and Norwegians, too? – experiencing all these familiar disaster movie tropes in a Scandinavian setting, even on a relatively low budget, can be weirdly disorienting.

Knight of Cups isn’t quite as fancy-flimsy as “To the Wonder,” which, as I remember it, consisted mostly of Ben Affleck gazing dazedly at wave formations, but it’s close enough.

Not nearly as great as Herzog’s films, or as monumentally deranged as Coppola’s, it nevertheless casts a spell of its own. It’s one of those films that, at least for me, grows in the memory.

At heart, Lindholm may be more of a documentarian, a glib documentarian, than he realizes. He goes with the surface of things.

It seems less irreverent than self-congratulatory.

It does leave you with something, though – a deeply wistful mood, if not a full experience. It bears out the sadness in a line from Tao earlier in the film: “Nobody can be with you all through life.”

Rams confirms what I have long maintained: Often the best films come from the unlikeliest places.

The film is often​ sharp and amusing, but it’s a doodle in the Coen canon.

It’s not just the technique of this movie that is resolutely old-fashioned. So are its attitudes. The film may feature practically wall-to-wall monster storms but undergirding it all is a cushion of straight-arrow sentimentalism. It harks back to a rosy neverland when men were men and women stood by them.

With material this powerful, we shouldn’t have to continually be puzzling out what’s real and what’s staged.

One of the main rallying points of The Messenger is that birds have “something to tell us” about the environment’s mounting ecological hazards. The canary in a coal mine phenomenon, according to this film, has assumed global proportions.

I call it art. And as long as I’m on the subject, I think the Grand Canyon is the greatest sculpture I have ever seen.

Bay and his screenwriter, Chuck Hogan, adapting the nonfiction bestseller “13 Hours,” by Mitchell Zuckoff and the members of the Annex Security Team, resolutely avoid any overt political inferences.

If 45 Days is a tragedy, it’s a tragedy without a summation. Despite the ineffably moving speech Geoff delivers to the assemblage at the anniversary party, perhaps the finest piece of acting in Courtenay’s long career, it is not at all clear where these people are headed, or what shoals await.

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

Lawrence is terrific at playing tough, as she also demonstrated in her previous outings with Russell, “Silver Linings Playbook” and, especially, “American Hustle." But maybe it’s time for her to take a rest from him for a while. There’s a lot more to this actress than bold and brassy.