Peter Rainer

Whatever the approach, there isn’t enough psychological heft to the drama to make it seem much more than generic.

First Man pays lip service to the politics of the cold war that surrounded the moon shot, but it’s not that kind of movie, really. For all its scale and ambition, it’s essentially a small-scale character study. The character, Armstrong, is microscopic, and the backdrop is macroscopic. It’s an odd, uneasy fit.

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

The cast is strong, though, and demonstrates yet again how good acting can carry audiences through movies that otherwise would not be worth the trip.

I hope this won’t be his last acting job. He’s too vital to go in for such a soggy send-off.

It’s impossible not to be charmed by these students, by their aspirations and idealism, not to mention the fact that one of them, or someone like them, may well end up winning a Nobel Prize. It’s also impossible not to recognize, although the movie does not make a political point of it, that a goodly percentage of these participants are first- or second-generation immigrants to the United States.

The best part of the movie is when the few who make it through are introduced to their new owners. It’s love at first touch.

A better movie would not have hinged its thesis so closely on Anna’s innocence. The film doesn’t fully allow for the fact that the issue of Anna’s veracity, or lack of it, is essentially a sideshow.

For a movie that is about a collection of oddballs, it can sometimes feel rather generic. But at its core, the film is not a comedy at all. The eccentricities issue from real adversity.

The movie is all nuance and it continually wafts away into artiness.

One of the bright sidelights to Juliet, Naked is the bemused way it deals with the crazy-making ramifications of hero worship.

Although the role may not have been written with great depth, Hussain’s performance as Mirza is richly layered.

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.

It takes awhile to get going but, still, it’s rather sweet.

The documentary is an attempt, in the words of those behind the film, to “investigate the very nature of family itself.” That this attempt is overreaching and diffuse does not detract from the film’s sporadic power.

Dark Money should set off warning bells for even those who believe that the Citizens United decision, equating corporations with people and money with speech, was a First Amendment victory for free speech.

Burnham avoids most of the “Mean Girls”-style tropes in favor of a more gently humorous and nuanced approach.

As summer franchise movies go, Mission: Impossible – Fallout is near the top of the heap.

What rescues the film from melodrama is that Legrand drew on extensive interviews with psychologists, emergency police personnel, female victims, and batterers. The bone-deep chill of real, observed experience cuts through this film and gives it a verity that at times reminded me of Frederick Wiseman’s harrowing documentary “Domestic Violence.”

The film cuts back and forth between the present and 1979, when Donna, blandly played as a young woman by Lily James, met her three beaus and went gaga for Greece. Scenery-wise, I can see why she did. I trust that everyone connected with this film had time to work on their tans.

It’s a rote piece of work that, oddly, also feels dated even at a time when the press and the White House have rarely been more at odds.

It’s a perplexing, fascinating, maddening movie, not quite like any other film biography of a famous painter, most of which tend to be equal parts ho-hum and hokum.

Most of the film, which also has links to Spike Jonze’s "Being John Malkovich," plays like a variation on some of Spike Lee’s more scabrous racial fantasias like “Bamboozled.” It’s also very much in the vein of films like “Get Out,” which also mixed horror, racial comedy, and social consciousness, though here to far less effect.

It brings the nature versus nurture debate into shattering focus.

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.

McKay is very good where it counts the most: He understands these immigrants from the inside out, and, against all odds, he allows us to rejoice in their hopes.

Zahs, a genial obsessive, is a lot of fun, and so is the movie.

It’s another one of those films, like “Book Club,” in which the cast far outshines the material.