Peter Travers

Get ready to be shaken and stirred.

A triumph for the machines, more proof that we do indeed live in the Matrix.

Lit with a poet’s eye by Deschanel and given dramatic heft by von Donnersmarck, Never Look Away lunges at the primitive forces that define our lives. Even when it trips up, it’s never less than exhilarating.

Colossal entertainment -- the eye-popping, mind-bending, kick-out-the-jams thrill ride of summer and probably the year.

You expect hardcore hilarity from Neighbors, and you get it. It's the nuance that sneaks up on you.

Hold off on burning Aronofsky at the stake till you see Noah, a film of grit, grace and visual wonders that for all its tech-head modernity is built on a spiritual core.

Is surgery the new sex? Body horror maestro David Cronenberg and a cast led by Viggo Mortensen, Léa Seydoux and Kristen Stewart tackle that question and more in a futuristic sci-fi shocker that will leave you laughing, squirming and—yikes—thinking.

Nicolas Cage plays Nicolas Cage in this whacked-out meta-comedy that doesn’t always hang together as a movie but cements its gonzo star as the eighth wonder of the world when it comes to highwire acting without a net.

Even when bloated Marvel action robs the film of intimacy, Johansson digs deep into how her Russian assassin once felt outside the Avengers bubble. And Pugh deserves Oscar love as her pretend sister in this fab and fitting salute to female empowerment.

At moments, especially in the conflicted intimacy between Marcia Gay Harden and Daniel Stern as Bliss' parents, Barrymore shows real directing chops. But in Whip It she's painting inside the box.

After all the hype, the movie of Dick Tracy turns out to be a great big beautiful bore.

The three actors work wonders. And Zobel, as he did in 2012's mindbending "Compliance," nails every nuance of intonation and posture.

This spellbinder about a politician in free fall would be hilarious if it weren't so agonizingly true. OK, it's still pretty funny because Anthony Weiner — the subject of this documentary — can't stop shooting himself in the foot.

Director George C. Wolfe had a dream to put unsung civil-rights firebrand Bayard Rustin front and center in a movie. And now, with the help of executive producers Barack and Michelle Obama and a thrilling acting tour de force from the great Colman Domingo, he has.

Nolte brings a raspy authority to the role, and director Neil Jordan (The Crying Game) surrounds him with colorful characters.

Andrew Haigh’s enthralling ghost story concerns a screenwriter (a flawless Andrew Scott) coming to terms with a new love (Paul Mescal) and the parents (Claire Foy and Jamie Bell) who died in his childhood. Watch out for Haigh and his four superlative actors. They’ll get you good.

DiCaprio, in his most haunting and emotionally complex performance yet, is the vessel Scorsese uses to lead us through the film’s laby­rinth.

Green sometimes hits his points too hard, letting his fierce human drama drift into polemic. But there’s no denying the righteous indignation that fuels Monsters and Men, a powerhouse that couldn’t be more timely or necessary.

Glorious, a colossus of rousing action and ferocious fun.

Moon is a potent provocation that relies on ideas instead of computer tricks to stir up excitement.

It's a magical, beguiling wonder.

As Hanna confronts her past, the movie becomes like nothing you've ever seen. I'd call it a knockout.

A raucous ride through one man's pain.

Love that Gus Van Sant has crafted his true-crime hostage drama in the grand 1970s tradition of Sidney Lumet’s “Dog Day Afternoon.” Bill Skarsgard drops his Pennywise psycho clown persona to make his unmasked mark as an actor. And does he ever.

An inner-city western featuring Black cowboys in a real-life setting deserves celebrating and the dynamite teamwork of Idris Elba and young Caleb McLaughlin heads off the father-son cliches in the script to keep you riveted.

Weigh the flimsy story against the eye-popping, jaw-dropping, shoot-the-works visuals that fill the screen to bursting and the choice is clear: James Cameron’s 3-D sequel to his biggest hit is the ultimate in-theater thrill ride. You’ve never seen anything like it in your life.

Despite over-ripe narration and an understandable urge to cram too much in, Ghosts of the Abyss is a thrilling documentary.

It also addresses questions of aging and neglect that Hollywood likes to run from. Langella, who's played everyone from Dracula to Nixon onscreen, is giving a master class in acting. Enroll now.

You should prepare to be wowed by Natalie Portman, who delivers a take-no-prisoners performance as Celeste, a swaggering rock diva who tends to burn down everything in her path, especially when she’s crossed.

A haunting and hypnotic movie, just the thing to get lost in.

Ford hits it out of the park again in Nocturnal Animals, a stunning film noir that resonates with ghostly, poetic terror.

This Trainspotting sequel may feel like that for many who raised a fist in unison with the first film's f--k-the-world defiance. There's a hard-won wisdom at work here, as well as an aching sense of loss. Any way you look at it, T2 takes a piece out of you.

There's no way you won't have a blast. In their directing debuts, Rogen and Goldberg come up aces, mixing hilarity and horror like pros and never letting up on the killer momentum.

You can't shut the door on this spellbinder. It gets into your head.

If "Sideways" made you curious about vino, this fierce, funny and challenging doc opens up a world worth debating.

Compared with ("The Sixth Sense"), there's no contest. Stir of Echoes has been outrun and outclassed.

Restores our belief in the power of movies to transform reality, even temporarily. So what if it's not perfect? It's magic.

What shakes the dust off this period piece is the vibrant acting.

Moore has marshaled what's on the record and off into a stinging indictment of where we're going. In a multiplex filled with Hollywood cotton candy, we need him more than ever.

Shelton obviously wants to distill something innocent and romantic from a relationship the world saw as sleazy. A noble mission. But he's left out a few essentials — like the facts.

That Green’s sequel works as well as it does — it’s still a slasher movie — is due only in part to the director and his collaborators’ copycat admiration for Carpenter’s blueprint. Mostly it’s the troubled times we live in that allows this energizing, elemental horror film to touch a raw nerve for #MeToo.

Philip Seymour Hoffman creates a mesmerizing portrait of the artist as a young, old and middle-aged man.

Rude, crude and hilarious, whether he's hitting on Joanne or brokering the sale of Soviet weapons through Israel and Islamic Pakistan, Hoffman is the film's sparking live wire.

With the cast getting looser and the mind games kinkier, it's hard to resist.

Kudos to Wilson (how has she not won an Emmy for her brilliant work on The Affair?), who builds what seems at first like a peripheral character into the defiant soul of the movie.

An idol had fallen, and Gibney and the superb director of photography Maryse Alberti were there to capture the descent, including a confessional interview in which Armstrong blames the corruption of the game far more than himself. The movie rambles at two-plus hours, but the provocation never stops.

A 40-ish single mom hooks up with a 20-ish boy band star. Cue the soap suds? Not this time. Somehow sensational Anne Hathaway and swoony Nicholas Galitzine make the cliches dance, bringing humor, heat and unexpected heart to a fantasy for daydream believers.

Jodie Foster speaks French with elan, but even her indisputable star power and fun bond with costar Daniel Auteuil can’t keep the lights burning in this frothy bauble.

Kidman and Bateman make a potent team in a provocative film that questions the limits of art in a world that forgets to be human. The result is funny, touching and vital.

Juliet, Naked is annoyingly hit and miss. But when Annie and Tucker connect with the gob-smacked Duncan, the movie substitutes the hard sell for grace notes and wins us over.

Van Sant, following "Gerry" and the superb "Elephant," is on the same elliptical quest. His journey is labored but undeniably hypnotic.

Here's a fireball documentary about the 1970s, when filmmakers were stoked by sex, drugs, rock and, oh, yeah, social conscience.

Lin is a talent to watch. There's a sting to this film that gets to you.

A maliciously funny and keenly observant movie -- director-writer Patrick Stettner makes a potent feature debut -- that serves its humor dark and without artificial sweeteners.

Tepid.

Glorious entertainment.

George Clooney is a movie star and Adam Sandler is his manager in a deceptively lighthearted Noah Baumbach comedy that hides a world of Hollywood hurt.

Les Cowboys pulls in with no intention of letting you go. It's a workout worth taking.

Haywire comes close to achieving Soderbergh's goal of creating "a Pam Grier movie made by Alfred Hitchcock."

The film is corrosive in its take on the injustice that allowed Ted to live and prosper in a protective bubble of privilege. Clarke makes it clear that the man himself most likely felt the same way.

Grace notes abound in A Late Quartet, a small, shining gem of a movie that works its way into your heart with insinuating potency of music.

Open Range copies the rain and flood of the Clint Eastwood classic but can't match it for dark-night-of-the-soul brilliance.

Lukas Moodysson, a young Swedish director, crafts a stunner of a film out of familiar turf.

It's a wet dream for anyone who's ever dreamed of getting an edge on the information highway. The worst side effect is that you won't believe a word of the damn thing in the morning. Fair exchange.

The result is both emotional and a comic knockout.

The once playful runt of the Marvel litter has come down with a case of bloated excess and despite the ever-likable Paul Rudd as Ant-Man and a pow villain in Jonathan Majors, the third time is not the charm for a sequel that ignores its own cardinal rule -- less is more.

A big, bruisingly funny moral fable etched in acid and Obama disillusion.

Offers something magical in the haunting and hypnotic performance of Sarah Polley...(the film) cuts deep.

A striking film that frustratingly never coheres but still holds you in thrall.

Bruckheimer and director Tony Scott have wisely set their course by Will Smith, who is sensational in a dramatic role that leans on him to carry a movie without the help of aliens or Big Willie-style jokes for every occasion.

A dynamite bundle from British writer-director Guy Ritchie. Even when the accents are as indecipherable as the plot, Ritchie keeps the action percolating and the humor on high.

Perks deserves points for going beyond the typical coming-of-age drivel aimed at teens.

Kline finds every nuance of mirth and melancholy in this wonder of a role and rides it to glory. You can't take your eyes off him.

You could call it an Aussie "Dreamgirls." I'd call it a blast of joy and music that struts right into your heart.

It's a hilarious and heartfelt ode to twentysomething angst. Braff has himself a winner.

The star is unstoppable and spectacular to see in motion. Watch her fly.

The result is a gleefully retro and raunchy funfest that walks a minefield of sexist traps it can’t always dodge. That the rom and the com both land is a tribute to Theron and Rogen.

Cera, still one of a kind and still making us love him for it (Arrested Development – yes!), never flinches. Jamie is impossible to like. And yet we do because Cera plays him without an ounce of bogus ingratiation. He's terrific.

Not every joke or jolt hits the mark. But thanks to a go-for-broke Vince Vaughn as a hulking serial killer who body swaps with a teen girl, you won’t find a better way to LOL while being scared senseless than with this ‘Freaky’ Friday the 13th.

Furious 7 is the best F&F by far, two hours of pure pow fueled by dedication and passionate heart.

What can I tell you? It works. Private Parts is a comic firecracker with a surprising human touch.

Hanging with Quill and his mercenary space misfits is still everything you'd want in a wild summer ride.

Joaquin Phoenix and director Gus Van Sant raise the bar when they use roguish humor and bruising pain to color outside the box.

By spinning something fresh out of something familiar, Reality Bites scores the first comedy knockout of the new year. It also brings out the vibrant best in Winona Ryder and Ethan Hawke as friends who resist being lovers, makes a star of Janeane Garofalo as their tart-tongued buddy and puts Ben Stiller on the map as a director.

Kudos to Stewart for making Rosewater more than an earnest plea for journalistic freedom. He makes it personal.

This is a Ferrell you've never seen before, nailing a role that calls for breakneck humor in the final race against the clock and touching gravity in the love scenes with Gyllenhaal.

It's a haunting and hypnotic film.

Welcome Damsels in Distress, an exhilarating gift of a comedy about college, the female intellect, the limitless male ego, inventing a new dance, and suicide prevention.

Missing is a sense of the interior life behind the smiling face that Selena showed the world.

It can’t top the original and the absence of the late Chadwick Boseman hurts real bad, but Ryan Coogler’s sequel proves to be more than cringey franchise building by putting women of color in charge (yay to Angela Bassett and Letitia Wright) and watching them fly.

It helps that the fun doesn't stop. It helps even more that the pitch-perfect script doesn’t step out of character for a joke.

Johnson doesn't resemble, much less embody, Lennon, but he does catch his distinctive glint of mischief tinged with pain. Duff and Scott Thomas are both exceptional, revealing how John's relationship with these two clashing sisters marked his character.

Lots of talented young singers decorate the scenery, notably Jeremy Jordan (late of Broadway's failed Bonnie & Clyde but soon-to-open in Newsies)who has vocal and acting chops that shine even in this bucket of Glee Goes Gospel cornpone.

Zoolander 2 sweats its silly ass off to please. The results are scattershot. But when it works — oh, baby. There's a bit with Justin Bieber and a selfie that, well, no spoilers.

Director Colin Trevorrow and writer Derek Connolly keep the film humming with funny and touching surprises. And Plaza is a flat-out enchantress.

All the acting is exemplary. Brody, new to Wes' World, is revelatory as Peter.

This lean, mean, R-rated action machine is way better than you might think since Momoa and Bautista take the time, between fights and jokes, to examine the bruised places in the hearts of these half brothers. You feel for them, and that makes all the difference.

Rosamund Pike is perfection as Barney's true love, and Dustin Hoffman makes magic as Barney's randy dad. It's acting heaven.

Clooney fashions a style all his own: visceral, vital and churning with off-the-wall ideas. That's what makes you want to see Clooney direct again. You can feel his joy in it.

At its best, The Russia House offers a rare and enthralling spectacle: the resurrection of buried hopes.

Clooney brings raw intensity to his role; his scenes with McElhone are rooted in a fierce romantic yearning.

Luna and García Bernal display the kind of chemistry that makes you overlook the clichés in the script by first-time director Carlos Cuarón. Sometimes good-natured fun is enough.

Within its small, darkly funny range, Trust is an exceptional film that stays alert to the mysteries of love.

Pulls you in, challenges your prejudices, rocks your world and leaves you laughing in the face of an abyss. It's alive, all right. It's also an uncompromising American classic.

What chills most about The Final Year is how unprepared Team Obama was for the victory of Trump and the ease with which many of its hard-won policies could be unraveled. Was it blindness, hubris or a combination of both?

Watching his struggle is illuminating, unnerving and unforgettable.

As in "Lost in Translation," Coppola keeps an eye out for the broken places. That's when Somewhere is really something.

The time shifting raises questions the movie never answers, but it's hard not to enjoy the ride.

Barbershop: The Next Cut is stagey, often simplistic and it talks too damn much. But, hell, the talk has flavor and snap and a real-world sense of a community in crisis. Not bad for an escapist romp.

Hartley's debut deserves heralding; he combines a rigorous social conscience with the exuberance of fresh comic thinking.

This two-hour film wrap-up of the unjustly cancelled crime series may feel patchy and uneven, but it still gives Liev Schreiber’s iconic Ray—a hardcase-for-hire who can fix anything but the nightmare of his past— the send-off he and we deserve.

Count Cinderella as a dazzling dream of a movie from director Kenneth Branagh, who can leap from the Bard (Henry V) to the boffo (Thor) with no apparent sweat.

Alice may be a minor work in the Allen canon, but when its grace notes manage to be heard above the whimsy, they ring true.

Don't think you can take another Hollywood version of Sherlock Holmes? Snap out of it. Apologies to Robert Downey Jr. and Benedict Cumberbatch, but what Ian McKellen does with Arthur Conan Doyle's fictional detective in Mr. Holmes is nothing short of magnificent.

The result is something you won't see coming. Don't look for sweet and embraceable. This movie is not afraid to show its claws. Like the spirited teamwork of Kazan and Dano, Ruby Sparks is honest, deep and true.

You cheered Jack Black in "School of Rock," now give it up for Paul Green in the real thing.

Until an ending that flies ruinously off the rails, A Simple Favor is raunchy fun that offers an unexpected take on the twists and turns of female friendship.

In a fresh film take on Amiri Baraka’s 1964 race play, Kate Mara’s sexed-up subway rider hits on André Holland like a white Eve out to destroy a Black Adam through assimilation, intimidation, and worse. You can’t watch it passively. It dares you to engage.

Sure, it’s a bit predictable, but actress Zoe Kravitz—in a promising directing debut— milks every ounce of suspense out of this #MeToo thriller set on an island paradise where pretty young things accept invites from tycoon Channing Tatum at their own peril.

Lazin's remarkable achievement is to catch Tupac in the act of discovering himself. It's something to see.

This English-language horror remake can’t touch the 2022 Danish original, but it gets in its scarefest licks thanks to a smiling devil of a lead performance from James McAvoy that will creep you out big time and fry your never to a frazzle.

Undeniably affecting, but you leave it wanting more.

Wonder is an emotional wipeout, that's for sure, but Chbosky handles it with such tenderness and delicacy, you won't hate yourself (too much) for giving in.

The movie has a tossed-off, caught-on-the-fly exuberance that works like a charm.

Ferrell is effortlessly uproarious. And watching hardass Wahlberg, in his first starring shot at farce, shake his sillies out is not to be missed.

Relentless suspense allows The Girl Who Played With Fire to hold you in a viselike grip. But it's the performances of Nyqvist and especially Rapace that keep you coming back for more.

Fresh comic thinking spices up this smart cookie of a satire from director-writer Paul Weitz (About a Boy). He makes it sexually provocative and subversively hilarious.

May lack the mythic pow of the 1984 original and the visionary thrill of T2, but it's a potent popcorn movie that digs in its hooks and doesn't let go until an ending that ODs on apocalyptic hoo-ha.

Meryl Streep -- at her brilliant, beguiling best -- is the spice that does the trick for the yummy Julie & Julia.

McGrath's script is faithful: fierce when it needs to be and devilishly funny.

A whole summer of fireworks packed into one movie. It doesn't just go to 11, it starts there.

Here's the funny thing: Despite all the Captain America rah-rah in costume and indestructible shield, the movie is at its best when the story sticks with skinny Steve.

A warmly hilarious movie about family members and their secret hearts.

In an era of dumb farce, Something's Gotta Give is something special.

Stylishly shot on the high-def cheap, runs 77 potently sexless minutes. Its subject isn't erotica, it's commodities trading.

You leave the f--ked-up funhouse of Sausage Party thinking: Did I see this movie or hallucinate it? I mean that as high praise.

The plot is flimsy, but director Mark Waters (Freaky Friday) trusts Fey's tart dialogue to carry the day. Wise man. Fey subverts formula to find comic gold. She's a brash new voice in movie comedy. Boy, do we need her now.

Get out your handkerchiefs. Directed by her son Edoardo Ponti, Sophia Loren, 86, returns to the screen after a decade to play a Holocaust survivor who raises the children of prostitutes. There is not a single false note in Loren’s magnificent performance. Just sit back and behold.

This one belongs with the leaders of the scare pack. Isn't it time that we give Romero his due? It's hardly an accident that Stephen King, Quentin Tarantino, Guillermo del Toro, Simon Pegg and Wes Craven recognize Romero as a master. He is.

Leigh’s visceral staging, especially in the climactic moments — brilliantly shot by his longtime collaborator/cinematographer Dick Pope — brings home the significance of a 200-year-old bloodbath that still speaks urgently to the disenfranchised.

The film is talky and often stilted. But Eastwood’s compassion for the character, warts and all, feels genuine. His performance, like the movie, is a high-wire act that remains fascinating even when it falters.

Michael Gerbosi's script might have reduced Crane to a clueless cliche were it not for the bruised humanity that Greg Kinnear brings to the role. Kinnear is dynamite.

A two-hour search for a pulse... A miscalculation from a prodigious talent who has forgotten that you squeeze the life out of romance when you don't give it space to breathe.

This psychological thriller about a demonic hand puppet only works in fits and starts. But watching virtuoso actors John Lithgow and Geoffrey Rush let their freak flags fly as nursing home patients in a fight to the death is a blast of fun and fright to make you squirm.

Ben Is Back ends up becoming into a penetrating look at how addiction wrecks lives from both sides of the parent-child equation. It’s unflinching and unforgettable.

What happens to the film's title character — and the audience — shouldn't happen to a dog.

The radiant Barrymore energizes Cinderella with a tough core of intelligence and wit.

Like Apple founder Steve Jobs, Kroc – who died in 1984 – had a genius for marketing the talent of others. Is that a lesser gift? Not in these United States. Not then. And not in the age of Trump. Set more than a half century ago, The Founder proves to be a movie for a divisive here and now. Step right up. You might just learn something. God help us.

Gia Coppola’s film has no more than a sketch of a plot, but soars on the quietly devastating performance of former Baywatch babe Pamela Anderson as an aging Vegas showgirl who learns her hopelessly outdated dance revue has been given the hook after 30 years.

Fast Five will push all your action buttons, and some you haven't thought of. So what if you hate yourself in the morning.

Blood splatters, heads explode, and McDonagh takes sassy, self-mocking shots at the very notion of being literary in Hollywood. It's crazy-killer fun.

I can't think of a more wickedly modern romantic comedy.

Olmos is unsparing in depicting the dark side of human behavior. His in-your-face style stresses the urgency of a situation most of us choose to ignore. Though powerful, the film is sometimes preachy; there's a sense that information is being disseminated instead of dramatized. But it's hard to believe anyone will remain unmoved by American Me or its final shattering image of human desolation.

Mara is funny, fierce and altogether wonderful, even up against an irresistible costar.

Emma Watson is sensational as Nicki.

Guided by the fierce, fully committed performances of Driver and Bening,The Report is a bristling reminder that truth still matters. Naïve? Maybe. But, damn, do we need it now.

In the context this documentary provides for the cult classic, it makes you want to see "Showgirls" again regardless of whether you belong to that cult or not.

Lumet has a reputation for speed, and when a film doesn’t engage him, as in Family Business, the result seems rushed, sloppy. But in Q&A, with all the actors perfectly cast and on his wavelength, he works wonders. Nolte is electrifying.

A blast of comic irreverence that serves as a starring vehicle for two stoner characters who had previously been relegated to the sidelines.

There is devilish fun in this look into 1990s white-collar crime. But the jokes are the kind you choke on.

A ghost story in which superior camerawork, costumes and production design work together to put the audience in a trance. It's tough on actors not to get swallowed up in the scenery.

Peter Dinklage sings! Pushing past the conventional elements in Joe Wright’s ravishing musical version of a unrequited love, Dinklage makes believers of us all. His Cyrano thinks his small size makes him a freak. But it's not a poetic ideal he can't live up to, it's his. That's his tragedy.

Mortensen and Isaac, expertly exchanging the faces of loyalty and betrayal, are both outstanding. Is the film too old-school for short attention spans? Maybe. Rest assured that Amini's shuddery endgame is well worth the wait.

The hugely enjoyable Rock of Ages is saved by its music, a tasty brew drawn from Def Leppard, Journey, Foreigner, Bon Jovi, REO Speedwagon, Pat Benatar, Twisted Sister, Poison and Whitesnake. It's near impossible not to rock along.

When a forty-four-year-old man makes a movie about his family and friends sitting around singing old tunes, you certainly don't expect an unforgettable amalgam of humor and heartbreak. But that is precisely what Terence Davies delivers.

For special effects alone, there's no problem: They're spectacular. And there's no faulting Mark Rylance, a newly-minted Oscar winner for Spielberg's Bridge of Spies, whose motion-capture performance as a 24-foot giant is both subtly nuanced and truly monumental.

The acting is dynamite, notably by Dillon and Newton in their shocking second encounter. Despite its preachy moments, the film is a knockout.

What Hooper has crafted is a work of probing intelligence and passionate heart.

Bateman's dazzling deadpan can raise tired zingers to raucous life with only a throwaway eyebrow lift. And McAdams takes to comedy with a natural actor's grace and precision. Talk about fun company. They're it.

Gordon-Levitt won't take safe for an answer. So Don Jon tends to stumble as it finds its feet. Still, you leave this movie feeling had at instead of had. The experience is elating.

The Pangs deliver enough shivery scares to keep you up nights. Eyes wide shut.

Writer-director Gurinder Chadha juggles all the angles with flair and fairness. Like Nagra and Knightley, the movie is a sweetheart.

The Vow is a sopping hankie of a romance for women who love to suffer and the men who love them.

Nolan directs the film exactly like a great trick, so you want to see it again the second it's over. I'd call that wicked clever.

Uneven in tone and pacing, Guillermo del Toro’s passion project about a monster and his creator still roars to life as a thing of beauty and terror.

Spurlock says he's not selling out, he's buying in. I'm buying into Spurlock. As ever, he makes you laugh till it hurts.

You’ll want to see this for Zellweger’s bravura turn alone. It’s one of the best performances of the year.

Sam Rockwell excels as a wild man from the future in this deceptively profound satire that holds up a dark mirror to the dangerous game we’re playing with AI. A true film for its time.

No one will ever play the bright comic exterior and dark soul of Willy Wonka like Gene Wilder did in 1971. But Timothée Chalamet takes a charming shot at it in this wispy, wobbly musical origin story that still earns a pass for offering much needed family fun for the holidays

Blanchett burns on a high flame, and Redford finds the wounded dignity in Rather.

Sherrybaby is the kind of pretend-arty Sundance thing that gives indie cinema a bad name.

Landline never finds its emotional footing. Amid all the shouting – and these folks really go at it – there's a void where a soulful core should be.

The laughs come and go, but Ferrell makes NASCAR his bitch funny. Funnier. And more fun. And then the fun skids to a stop. You know how it goes: Plot gets in the way.

It's Sagnier, a young Bardot, who lifts the movie, and Rampling, 58, who gives it nuance, not to mention a nude scene that shows off a body Demi Moore would envy. These two make it seductive fun to be fooled.

Sadly, what Parkland becomes is a crying shame.

What makes this so memorably nerve-frying is the way Alvarez and cinematographer Pedro Luque use night-vision and every trick in the book and ones not invented yet to trap us in their vise. Claustrophobics, you've been warned.

The Beverly Hillbillies is not, as the saying goes, a critic’s picture. Still, you want to root for a movie that wallows without shame in leering, fatuous humor. I did — for about 15 minutes — then the sameness set in like an overdose of Beavis and Butt-Head.

Director Matt Reeves and star Robert Pattinson see the Caped Crusader as more film-noir detective than comic-book hero in their mesmerizing mindbender that aims high even when it misses the mark. It’s a grenade of pure cinema ready to blow.

The film, sometimes talky and overemphatic, is also literate, erotic, brutally funny and touched by brilliance in its quartet of live-wire performances.

In this emotional powerhouse about an expectant mother who experiences her worst nightmare, the brilliant Vanessa Kirby delivers a tour de force that will leave you shattered.

Undeniably thrilling and troubling...Dazzling, era-defining.

Reality tv, welcome to the multiplex. If "The Hills" went back to high school and developed wit, perception and a conscience, it might play something like Nanette Burstein's wallop of a doc.

There’s a secondhand feel to the way this gangster movie delivers the goods. Carlito’s Way is haunted by a ghost from De Palma and Pacino’s past — Scarface.

The heart of Jackass - the adolescent drive to bash body and soul into the symbolic brick wall of maturity - remains pure.

Dissenters who see this film as a wallow in self-absorption aren't paying attention. Baumbach is acutely attuned to the droll mind games of smart people who only think they're impervious to feeling.

Noah Baumbach thonors Don DeLillo’s virtuoso 1985 novel about the comic-absurdist chaos of consumerism with a too cautious respect. The result is his most constricted film which only breaks free when he allows costars Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig to fly on their own wings.

Channing Tatum and Kirsten Dunst find the heart but not the soul in a true-life crime drama that should have cut deeper and hurt more.

The movie belongs to Moretz, whose sensational performance will be talked about for years. Her scenes with Cage, who wears a Batsuit and uses a voice borrowed from Adam West, are a hoot.

Ferrara’s blend of toughness and lyricism turns this visionary crime film into something stylish, seductive and haunting.

The movie's soul is with Huffman. Speaking in a low voice, her posture as stiff as her vocabulary, her eyes a pool of sadness and hope, she turns this small, resonant film into a cry from the heart.

The show belongs to Geoffrey Rush in a note-perfect performance as Harry Pendel, the tailor.

The grand becomes grandiose and the lyrical turns bombastic.

Paul Dano excels in this fact-based tale of how little-guy investors actually took down billionaire Wall Street fat cats. What’s not to like about this slapstick tragedy with a windfall of laughs.

If you're looking for a crime story that sizzles with action, sex and the visceral jolt of life on the edge, Miami Vice is the one.

Dahan's impressionistic heartbreaker of a movie gets it all in. And Marion Cotillard, lip-syncing Piaf's songs and digging into her soul with gale-force urgency, gives a performance for the ages.

But, oh, that dragon. I'd endure another slog through Middle-Earth just to spend more time with Smaug.

Another Earth offers imagination and provocation to spare.

Zendaya shines like a true movie star, and she and costars Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist will blow you away as tennis pros in Luca Guadagnino’s swoony, sexy romantic triangle that finds hilarious and hardcore erotic mischief off the court and on.

Near the end, Hill boxes himself into a sentimental corner that takes a little off the film’s edge. But before that, Mid90s bristles with fun, feeling and the exhilaration that comes with risking life’s hairpin turns.

Webb never loses touch with the film's emotional through line. And he allows time and space for Garfield and Stone, both stellar, to turn a high-flying adventure into something impassioned and moving. A Spider-Man that touches the heart. Now that really is amazing.

Premium Rush features fearless stunt work that shames most computer trickery. Too bad I didn't believe a minute of it.

Played as a child by Abigail Chu and as an adult by Delphine Chanéac, Dren morphs into a special-effects miracle, sexy and scary in equal doses.

Mamet -- crafts tangy, well-seasoned dialogue that a good cast can feast on. And this cast is prime.

Good-natured fun when it isn't stale, which is most of the time, this talky comedy set in a Chicago barber shop is a sitcom pilot disguised as a movie.

Delivers frisky fun for bruised romantics regardless of age, sex or nationality.

Ferrell makes the damn thing work. Even though he can't get naked or use naughty words, there's a devil of comedy in Ferrell, and he lets it out to play. Director Jon Favreau has the good sense to just stand out of his way.

The director, 66, brings his passion for precision to every frame of the film, refusing to hype or Hollywoodize the detailed richness of the story.

Working from a deft script by Delia Ephron, director Ken Kwapis labors hard so that guys won't cringe (too much) as four teen girls, of different body types, pass along the same pair of lucky jeans during a summer of love and loss.

If you survive that wrenching plot curve (some won't), you're in for an emotional workout. Knowing you've never seen anything like this, Moss and Duplass let it rip. You've been warned.

It’s a big role, written with dimensions of sainthood that might defeat a lesser actor. But Erivo is up to every challenge, never losing Harriet’s compassionate humanity even as the film moves to the Civil War and pumps up the action at the expense of characterization.

No. 10 in the series proves there’s still life, artful cosplay and action monkeyshines in the ape-verse that began in 1968, but a worrying case of franchise fatigue is sneaking in. Whatever happened to quitting while you're ahead?

Shelton's strong, stinging film — one of the year's best — wants to get at something ingrained in the American character: the irrational desire to make saints of sports heroes.

The real stars here are the beasts, supposedly ugly, weird and dangerous, but paragons of FX creativity in service of genuine ideas.

This movie's junky feel is part of its charm. Sure it goes on too long and repetition dulls its initial cleverness. Still, Deadpool is party time for action junkies and Reynolds may just have found the role that makes his career.

Forgive the airhead plot that hinges on a spaceship crash-landing in the swimming pool of a Valley-girl manicurist, played by Geena Davis. The fun comes from Temple's protean visual wit and the irresistible charm of Davis, who just won an Oscar for her role in The Accidental Tourist. The agreeably tacky Earth Girls earns points for warmth, color and high spirits.

The famous Assayas light touch keeps his film above the fray of didacticism. So dig in as an expert cast puts a scintillating spin on every verbal volley. Non-Fiction is a bonbon spiked with delicious wit and malice.

Bury the nostalgia. Like the rap twist Kayne West puts into the film's classic theme, this movie is best when it stirs it up.

The love story, beautifully acted by Richard Gere and Jodie Foster, makes for a ravishing romance. And British-born Jon Amiel (Queen of Hearts, TV’s Singing Detective) directs with admirable restraint.

The film wants to make a case for Parker as the first modern woman. It gets the look and the attitude right, but it can't find her heart.

Deadpool 2 throws everything it has at you until you throw your arms up in happy surrender.

Cornball? Maybe. But it helps that O’Connor dexterously avoids the usual lump-in-the-throat tearjerking. And it helps even more that the star radiates a soul-deep belief that it’s the small steps that matter more than a rah-rah victory. He makes us root for Jack — just us The Way Back makes us root for Affleck, no matter how long the road ahead.

A shockingly funny sendup of our money-trumps-morals culture starring a dynamite Rosamund Pike who outdoes her ‘Gone Girl’ evil by partnering in crime with the great Peter Dinklage for the most delicious, decadent treat of the new movie year.

Sadly, Furman keeps shoving the movie into the box of clichés he thinks the audience wants. We don't, and you can tell that Cranston doesn't want it either.

Kendrick is terrific, taking a role that could have slid by on snide and building it into something uniquely funny and touching.

When Blunt and Miranda cut through the film’s glucose overload and take off into the wild blue of their own unique and extraordinary talents, Mary Poppins Returns shows it has the power to leave you deliriously happy.

The surprise is how effective Wingard is at keeping the atmosphere jumpy and tense. And you can't help rooting for Erin, who could win Survivor if she went on the show. Vinson's take-charge performance is the life of this badass party. When you're ducking in your seat, it's nice to have someone to root for.

Hope Springs knows happy endings are provisional. What this exuberant gift of a movie offers Kay and Arnold is a renewed appetite for life. And that never gets old.

There's more killer suspense and shocking intimacy in this one-of-a-kind documentary than you'll find in a dozen thrillers. You'll laugh hard and cry too.

Trouble enters only when the script overcomplicates things in the end. Until then, especially in a growling dogfight, director Francis Lawrence (Constantine) keeps you squirming.

Jarmusch makes it a feast that plays like a haunting concept album.

Most movies stress the agony of art (think of Kirk Douglas' Van Gogh in "Lust for Life"). Schnabel's exceptional film honors his friend by showing the act of creation as a natural high.

There's not that much that's new in screenwriter Marshall Karp's sitcom-ish memoir, but Alexander keeps the laughs coming.

With the smashing Jones giving us a female warrior to rank with the great ones and a cast that knows how to keep it real even in a sci-fi fantasy, Rogue One proves itself a Star Wars story worth telling.

It's a tender love story that never goes soft on its provocations. It's a defiant cry from the heart.

What Shelton fails to provide is a coherent structure; the film is wearyingly repetitive. The boys do the same hustle and hurl the same racial epithets as our goodwill dribbles away.

Ninety minutes of being buried alive with Ryan Reynolds: Didn't we all suffer that in "The Proposal"?

Is there anything less shocking than a movie that thinks it's shocking? See White Girl and discuss — and you should see it, if only for the all-stops-out performance of Morgan Saylor.

Simplicity -- four-square, not sappy -- is rare in film. James C. Strouse had it in his script for Lonesome Jim. As writer and first-time director, he gives Grace Is Gonethe quiet power to sneak up and floor you.

The new Body Snatchers is the most graphic of all, featuring more overt violence and decomposing flesh than the other two films combined. But it sorely lacks the focus and resonance of its predecessors.

Though the third screen go-round can't top the magic of the first two Paddington gems, it’s still an exuberant gift of family fun that takes our bear home to Peru for new adventures and a tangle with a sinister singing nun played to the hilarious hilt by Olivia Colman

It's watching Cecil open his eyes, in Whitaker's reflective, powerfully understated performance, that fills this flawed film with potency and purpose. Striving really does bring its own glory.

Is the movie any good? At the dawn of the twenty-first century, when art is defined by commerce, this question is beside the point.

Even the great ones hit snags. With The Limits of Control, Jim Jarmsuch gets tangled up in his own deadpan.

Mike Nichols' haunting, hypnotic Closer vibrates with eroticism, bruising laughs and dynamite performances from four attractive actors doing decidedly unattractive things.

The Delia Owens bestseller about sex and murder in the Carolinas comes to the screen as an antiseptic, airbrushed, miscast misfire that takes so few risks with the publishing phenom that it feels more embalmed than a freshly imagined version of the book.

The haunting, heart-piercing Elah isn't perfect. It's something better: essential.

Chastain (a nifty match-up with Mirren) is a live wire, and her scenes with Csokas and Worthington have a spark the later scenes lack. No matter. The Debt holds you in its grip.

The lack of`cheeseball overload is refreshing. I could tell the good lie and say the movie is perfect. It's not. It's often earnest to a fault and fearful of its deeper, darker implications. Still, you won't leave The Good Lie unmoved. Its heart really is in the right place.

Get our your handkerchiefs for this live-action take from Italy on the Disney animated classic, starring Oscar winner Roberto Benigni as Geppetto, the woodcutter who builds a puppet to replace the son he never had.

Hungarian director Istvan Szabo (Sunshine) overplays his hand and traps Bening in a role that's all emoting, no emotion.

It's all true – but so what? American Made may be fact-based but that doesn't stop it from feeling monumentally generic, like you've seen it all before (Blow, Sicario, The Infiltrator, War Dogs, TV's Narcos ... the list goes on).

His (Chase) ardent, acutely observed debut makes him, at 67, a filmmaker to watch.

A hack would have turned Frank and Sam into overnight sensations. Instead, the writer-director recognizes the compromises that reality forces on dreams – and this soft breeze of a movie emerges as a scrappy surprise that's hard to shrug off.

What an astounding actress Annette Bening is. And she’s at her very best in Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool playing Gloria Grahame.

The compensation comes in watching these three marvelous actors have a go at it, which they do with piercing humor and heart.

What makes The Conjuring 2 play deeper and darker than a warmed-over version of The Exorcist is director James Wan (Saw, Insidious, Furious 7). This Malaysian-born filmmaker can make his camera do terrifying tricks that are almost supernatural.

The plot only slows a film that works best as a feast of sight and sound.

Not even Jackman, one of the most persuasive actors around, can sell the argument that personal weakness doesn’t stain public character in the era of #MeToo.

As actor, screenwriter and dynamite debuting director, a seriously funny B.J. Novak takes aim at an America broken by disconnection. He doesn’t always hit his target, but when he does this tale of a New York liberal battling Texas gun nuts comes alive with mirth and menace.

Housemaid Sydney Sweeney and mistress Amanda Seyfried go bonkers to the max and I mean that in the best way.

Haden Church gives the movie the joyous kick it needs. His flirty thrust-and-parry with Collette is beautifully played.

You'll have major fun at this movie. But what makes it something special is the way Kasdan laces the laughs with a sting.

Whether audiences are pleased or vexed, very vexed, by A.I., any movie buff worth his salt will want to sift through this fascinating wreck of a movie.

Despite a shaky framework, the magic works. It's a chance to see Ledger one last time in the act of doing what he loved. Take it.

Sometimes a shamelessly retro wartime romance is all the escape you need and Colin Firth and Matthew Macfadyen add class and wicked humor to this fact-based WW2 spy thriller about how British intelligence used a corpse to put one over on Hitler.

Say what you will about the Runaways – they never played it safe. The movie does.

The film offers few answers about Fischer's descent into derangement. But you watch Maguire and slowly, with pity and terror, you understand.

The luminous Michelle Williams goes bone-deep here. Monroe's beauty was one of a kind. No one, not even Williams, can act it. What Williams does, with fierce artistry and feeling, is illuminate Monroe's insights and insecurities about herself at the height of her fame.

It's sledgehammer whimsy, and it's not talking to me.

Sex, lies, betrayal and murder set among the gods of the Beat Generation. That's Kill Your Darlings, a dark beauty of a film that gets inside your head and stays there.

Audiences looking for emotional resonance in Indy 4 are doomed to the temple of disappointment. Spielberg and Lucas aren't upping their creative game -- they're taking care of business.

Primed to keep your pulse racing so your brain will stop thinking, "WTF!" Go with the illogic or you'll miss the fun.

The good news is that Mockingjay – Part 2, the big finale, has quit the ass-dragging in favor of what made the book a page-turner. There's the visual fireworks, for sure. But there's also the darkness of the theme.

It's one crazy love story, but Carrey and McGregor make it work by making us buy the romance as the real thing. There's something about these Marys that pulls you in.

Tsunashima is superb, and a never-better Collette (The Sixth Sense, About a Boy, The Hours) has a radiant intensity that hits you right in the heart. She burns this movie into your memory.

Ferrell delivers a performance of implosive intensity that rings true in every detail.

Think "Sex and the City" with men, only in Italian and with lots more hollering and hand gestures.

A tasty swig of holiday cheer.

Sally Hawkins is just plain irresistible in this funny, touching and vital salute to women in the work force.

It looks the same, moves the same and sounds the same (those Alan Menken songs!) as the original. But some of the magic has gone M.I.A.

What saves director Ted Demme's comic talkfest from sitcom slickness is a quirky script by Scott Rosenberg and an appealing cast.

In this cheerfully perverse origin tale of Magneto, Professor X and their mutant team, Vaughn delivers a fireworks display of action, smarts and fun, plus a touch of class from actors who can really act.

Even the stalwart Nolte drowns in the laughable idiocy of the Wingo-Lowenstein love affair, which lifts Tides to the fiasco class.

It's true that the film is covering old ground – the shocking originality of the first Alien is a one-time thing. No worries. I'd rank Alien: Covenant with the best of the series, right after the first two chapters. Fans are going to freak out. Join in.

It's all infectious fun, despite the lack of originality. In the art of tickling funny bones, Crystal and Goodman earn straight A's.

Tarsem uses the dramatically shallow plot to create a dream world densely packed with images of beauty and terror that cling to the memory even if you don't want them to.