Peter Rainer

Slaboshpytskiy doesn’t attempt to get inside the psychology of these people, or expand the meanings, political or otherwise, of their descent. There’s a stolidity to the filmmaking, with lots of overlong takes, that is meant to be ruminative but often just seems negligent.

The most perplexing thing about this portrait is that, against all odds, the kids mostly seem outlandishly resilient and good-natured. I say “seem” because, again, I don’t entirely trust this portrait. Too much of what Moselle shows us looks tenderized.

Despite some occasional moments of real sadness and terror, the turmoil in this movie is decidedly on the upbeat.

There’s real verve in the animation and wit in the byplay.

A winning movie about losing. I didn’t always warm to its coy quirkiness, but it’s the rare American movie about contemporary teenagers that rings more true than false.

The Normandy locations are evocative, but director Sophie Barthes compresses Emma’s multiyear rise and fall into what seems like a month or so.

Trevorrow and his co-screenwriters (Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver, and Derek Connolly) do bring some nice low-key touches to the thudfest, and action is satisfying, if not galvanizing.

This slick doodle of a movie is nothing so much as an advertisement for itself.

Dano and Cusack never let us forget that Wilson is human before he is anything else – genius, icon, legend. The film provides him with the succor that was so lacking in so many aspects of his life. I would like to think that the real Brian Wilson, looking at this film, would be OK with it.

Has the stately picturesqueness of old-fashioned “quality” British cinema. At its center, though, is a performance that cuts right through the decorum.

Boenish’s wife, Jean, who trained to jump with him, is interviewed extensively, and, although Strauch doesn’t provide much backstory for her, she emerges as that rarity – a perfect matchup to a seemingly unmatchable man.

Crowe is deft at keeping the various plots spinning, but there are too many of them, and they don’t intersect pleasingly.

The CGI effects in this film, directed by Brad Peyton, are quite remarkable and help take one’s mind off the cornball disaster-brings-families-together underpinnings.

This is Téchiné’s seventh film featuring Deneuve, and it’s not one of the better ones. (The best is probably 1986’s “Scene of the Crime.”) Still, it has its true-crime fascinations, and, until its misbegotten 30-year flash-forward to Maurice’s trial, it has a silky allure of sun-kissed depravity.

From scene to scene The Connection is never less than watchable, although it is also never less than predictable.

Tomorrowland is a rather sweet excursion into speculative sci-fi, and, wonder of wonders, it doesn’t even seemed primed for a sequel. But this movie about the thrill of the visionary is, alas, mostly earthbound.

Although I Am Big Bird is no great shakes as a piece of filmmaking, and skews into treacly inspirational terrain, it’s still worth seeing to make the acquaintance of a man who, although he would probably be the last to say so, is an artist of the first rank. And a nice guy, too. What a rare combo.

The film is too artsy for its own good, but it has some marvelous Coen Brothers-style black humor.

The action sequences, at least as feats of engineering, are mightily impressive. But Miller is so caught up in all his hardcore allegorical hoo-ha that he never lightens up. Does he think maybe he’s Homer?

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

The action sequences aren’t especially well designed, and the plot, such as it is, is essentially one catastrophe after another.

It’s always gratifying to see a movie in which an ostensibly closed-off community is depicted humanely rather than voyeuristically.

There are some touching interactions between the players, but the film’s humanism is too predictably calibrated.

A sloggy, heartfelt piece of quasi-magical realist storytelling.

Director Rupert Goold keeps things appropriately creepy, but True Story is no “Capote.” It’s all buildup with little payoff.

This is one of the few films that captures the complex intensity of the diva/personal assistant dynamic.

The dense interweave of relationships, a Farhadi specialty, is continually compelling.

An extension, temperamentally if not altogether thematically, of such earlier films of his as “The Squid and the Whale,” “Greenberg,” and “Frances Ha.”