Rex Reed

A feel-good fairy tale that collapses under the weight of its own silliness, Red, White and Royal Blue is a gay rom-com that dazzles visually but defies all attempts at anything resembling plausibility.

A single idea stretched out for nearly two hours, it’s an odd but strangely compelling film, but so ponderously paced that it doesn’t always convince.

Wonderful, honest and low-key performances inform and enhance The Yellow Handkerchief, an otherwise unexceptional little drama.

Nothing much revelatory here, but what makes the movie a keeper is the energy of director Ben Younger (Boiler Room) and the charisma of Miles Teller, the sensational young actor from "Whiplash," who invests the role of a prizefighter with the same intensity he brought to the role of an obsessively driven drummer in that film.

The caterpillar crawl that passes for pacing succeeds in putting any number of viewers to sleep, including me.

Most of Ted eludes description, analysis and explanation. You just have to hold onto your own certifiable sense of humor and let Mr. MacFarlane take you where he wants to go. Then get out of the way and enjoy it.

Too bleak and wrenching to recommend unconditionally. You need a strong constitution to watch it soberly, but it is a gripping experience that left me weak in the knees.

Boring and sedentary, not to mention only occasionally coherent, this creaking-door mystery is not much of a vehicle to display young Mr. Radcliffe's range and charm.

Wakefield is a terrific movie, with a devastatingly bravura performance by Bryan Cranston that seizes and grips attention from first scene to last.

The target audience — people who waste their lives playing video games — might be amused by a movie about devices designed for the sole purpose of destroying everything in sight, but the serious audience the film industry wants to lure back to brick-and-mortar cinemas won’t find much substance here.

It's a Clint Eastwood role that only proves you can't send a boy to do a man's job.

There’s always room for another first-rate action thriller, and Plane breathlessly packs its punches in spades.

It’s one of the most important and revelatory films of the year.

Daddio is a dreary two-hander with the look, feel and sound of one hand clapping.

You watch the movie like you read a book, which leads to eventual tedium. You can’t put a bookmark in a movie, come back later, and pick up where you left off.

The Trollhunter writers either have an abundance of imagination or they've been smoking a controlled substance.

Valhalla Rising is nothing more than an updated version of the kind of time-honored Hollywood Viking movie Kirk Douglas used to do in his sleep, which means lots of inhuman, bone-crunching violence and no plot.

A 2½-hour art film that is something of a well-intentioned mess.

Filled with nuance, intricate emotion and a refreshing absence of melodramatics, Conviction is a moving exploration of light and love shining through the darkness of despair. Its impact cannot easily be shaken.

Sensational entertainment. This $100 million extravaganza is — let’s face it — rampantly over the top. Hell, it’s by Martin Scorsese, who is always over the top.

It’s one damned thing after another in Suncoast, a leaden, melodramatic soap opera with forced comedic elements inserted to drag out the playing time.

Directed with polish and restraint by Ritesh Batra, this is a gripping film that seizes your focus and never lets go. If this one fails to move you, then you don’t really care much about the power of movies.

Dog may be man’s best friend, but Dog, a snooze about a boring 1500-mile road trip shared by a dog and a man—both war-ravaged, brain-damaged soldiers—should have stayed in the kennel.

Except for the admirable testosterone on display that represents hours in the gym instead of the acting class, the rest of Magic Mike XXL is seriously stupid.

An all-star cast of #MeToo celebrants are now determined to prove how empowered women can make the same smart, entertaining heist movies as men.

Movies like Sleeping Beauty are as sensual as cottage cheese, not to mention passé.

Jennifer Hudson is so spectacular in Respect, the Aretha Franklin biopic, that she makes you overlook, ignore and eventually forgive the film’s multitudinous flaws.

The realism is honorable, the acting is exemplary, and all do good work, but life among the unlucky and disenfranchised who exist without hope is not a subject that will put a glow in your heart or a smile on your face. Be forewarned: The depression is inescapable.

This is one terrific movie about one terrific horse. It enthralls on so many levels-emotional, cinematic, historic.

Brilliantly directed by Jason Reitman, from an intelligent, carefully researched and fast moving screenplay by Reitman, Jay Carson and Matt Bai (based on Bai’s marvelous book All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid), this enthralling film is a mirror to the shifting relationship between the media and politics, and the events that changed the last 30 years in American history.

Incompetently directed by Scott Coffey and weakly written by Andrew Cochran, a rotten egg called Adult World is anything but.

Scathing and funny and cynical about contemporary society and the hypocritical way we live now, Carnage may not be the dream movie I expected, but it has a dream cast of pure, unimpeachable ensemble perfection.

Flawed but different, well-crafted and consistently powerful, At Any Price is the best film about impoverished farmers in the economic agricultural crisis since Jean Renoir’s "The Southerner."

Gorgeously photographed by Linus Sandgren, it’s both beautifully directed and cleverly written by British Oscar-winner Emerald Fennell, who follows her highly regarded Promising Young Woman with a film of even more staggering impact.

Expensive, derivative and boring as mattress ticking masquerading as designer fabric.

A horror anthology consisting of five episodes by different directors with more imagination than skill, Nightmare Cinema will make you scratch your head more than your goosebumps. Each story is designed and determined to scare the living daylights out of you, but I promise you more yawns than screams.

A mesmerizing, engrossing and beautifully made cinematic experience, rare as a pink unicorn, that enchants for more than two hours and makes you wish for at least one hour more.

Good Neighbors is a hotbed of twisted ideas with a straightforward yet novel approach to the Gothic horror in the hearts of mistakenly everyday people. Stressful and disconcerting but highly recommended, it gave me nightmares.

Watching The Lost City is the cinematic equivalent of slogging your way through monkey poop.

Despite a plot trajectory that changes so often they seem to be making it up as they go along, everyone on and off the screen seems to be doing it by the numbers.

The result is half docudrama, half suspense thriller with the constant threat of seeming artificial and fictional. Amazingly, the actors are so engaging and believable, and the facts are so riveting, that the movie, despite its flaws, held me spellbound.

Billed as a comedy, it’s never funny. Taken as a rural western drama about sibling rivalry, it does not take place in the West and the drama never involves. The game cast is chock full of talent, but nothing percolates.

The May-December romance is an overworked genre, but steady hands guide this one with intelligence to a sad but satisfactory conclusion.

Bryan Cranston brings the complex personality of Trumbo to life with substance and humor.

You go away from Mary Queen of Scots sated but exhausted. The problem, as I see it, is that in spite of director Josie Rourke’s solemnity, her passion for translating history into modern terms doesn’t always jell.

Beautiful, bold and blazing with sex and suspense, Allied is a gorgeously photographed, intensely romantic, action-packed film by the great director Robert Zemeckis with two titanic star performances by Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard that delivers something for everyone.

A stupid waste of time and talent, but it might be just what his (Damon) fans are waiting for.

Motherless Brooklyn is so messy, confusing and pointless that you don’t know what’s going on half the time, and couldn’t care less.

The Whale has moments that touch the heart and passages that engage the mind, but the insufferable parallels it constantly draws between Charlie’s obesity and Moby Dick, Charlie’s favorite book, may have worked better in the stage play by Samuel D. Hunter than they do in his screen adaptation, where they merely ring false and drag the pace to a crawl.

If your own expectations are not too high, you crave period-costume drama and you’re one of those unfortunate people who refuses to watch anything in glorious black-and-white, this Great Expectations is worth the time and effort.

While Crawl never quite achieves the classic status of Jaws, it’s so convincing that you forget about the mechanics and become petrified by the gore.

The film is as disappointing as his fate, but it’s worth watching for the rugged, nerve-wracking performance by Colin Firth.

With little action, no suspense and an ending that fails in every way, Matt Damon is the only thing memorable about Stillwater.

The result is pretty to look at, with the misty lakes and foreboding forests of Denmark beautifully photographed and the costumes lavishly designed, but the sad (and boring) result has none of the bold thrust or festering passion originally created by the Bard.

Half modern western, half thriller, an unspeakable waste of time called Bad Times at the El Royale is depraved, self-indulgent trash that is a narrative mess and, at nearly two-and-a-half hours in length, seems to go on forever.

Another riff on the aftermath of tragedy, Tumbledown is the meaningless title of a tender but clumsy romantic comedy.

Disappointingly tedious, On My Way is a contrived vehicle for Gallic icon Catherine Deneuve. At 70, she’s still the embodiment of placid ripeness we know and love, but the movie has little substance.

Entertaining dialogue and a collection of tightly knit performances — especially a wonderful, unexpectedly funny star turn by Andy Garcia — make At Middleton a nice surprise.

I cannot count the number of reservations I had about Anything, an idea with every possibility of being a cheap publicity gimmick aimed at selling the sensational and luring the lurid. What a shock, then, to discover that Anything is anything but.

A ponderous spoof of movie rom-coms that plummets stupidity to a new low even by Hollywood standards.

Not a great film, but Moving On is a pleasurable enough way to kill an hour and a half without regret.

Whatever you think of Mr. Gibson, whatever he has lost, he still has talent, and here displays acting of power and resonance. It's a pleasure, for a change, to see the best side of his split personality at work.

The point of The Iceman is “Even monsters are human,” but it takes a great actor to make a dubious theme convincing.

The dialogue is dull as dried glue, but the acting is fine, although the boundless range and skill of Redmayne is wasted, which might account for the reason he doesn’t appear to enjoy the ride as much as he could. Unfortunately, we’ve seen it all before with motorcycles, submarines, airplanes and ships at sea in peril instead of hot-air balloons.

One only wishes they would put their talent and intelligence to better use than a formulaic and manipulative tearjerker that is really nothing more than a woman’s picture from a man’s point of view.

Juicy, extravagant, glamorous, decadent and a crowd-pleasing carousel of euro-trash camp, Ridley Scott’s sordid saga about the rise and fall of the Gucci fashion empire has something for everybody.

Call this embarrassing dog’s dinner Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again or just call 911. Either way, it is nearly two hours of relentless, plotless, artless junk.

Equally touching and disturbing, the French film Standing Tall is an outstanding work of social realism by actress and writer-turned-director Emmanuelle Bercot.

Enhanced by a moving, three-dimensional performance by the underrated veteran actress Mary Kay Place, Diane is a thoughtful, well-made first feature by Kent Jones, who programs the films every year for the New York Film Festival.

It leaves you feeling desperately in need of a hot bath to wash off the dirt that rubs off just from watching it. This mess is so bad that even the title is disgusting.

If "Mother" is still the worst abomination ever perpetrated on an unsuspecting and undeserving public, Mom and Dad is at least the perfect companion piece.

Put this one at the top of your must-see list. Angelina Jolie might not, in my opinion, have yet reached the heights of the acting profession, but with this passionate, inspired, technically awesome and profoundly exciting chronicle of the life of Louie Zamperini, she rises to the top rank of first-class film directors in a male-dominated field overcrowded with hacks.

Director Gilles Paquet-Brenner has done an elegant job of reducing a complex piece with many components into a riveting narrative that grabs you by the lapels and refuses to loosen its grip.

It does have a dark, satisfyingly sinister feeling of gothic creepiness that I somewhat reluctantly admit appealed to my enjoyment of perversity as entertainment.

I expected more from a movie about the most feared man in America for half a century. Whatever else you think about him, in retrospect, he had balls of brass - an essential quality replaced in J. Edgar by dull indifference.

Intelligent, dignified and emotionally satisfying.

Wrenching, profound and beautifully made, The Railway Man is one of the stunning don’t-miss surprises of the still-young 2014.

Some subjects grow weightier and more substantial with time, and this one has never been more relevant.

A riveting homage to an extraordinary force as dynamic as she was unique.

These are neither good people nor interesting savages, and they're not worth caring about. Neither is the movie.

Unflinchingly written and directed by Austin, Texas-based filmmaker Ric Roman Waugh, it’s too unnerving to recommend to the squeamish, but for anyone curious enough to find out what really happens to turn decent people into savages in the bedlam of the American prison system, this is one for the must-see list.

Exploring the suffocating complexities of domestic life in the social isolation of quarantine, this volatile couple explores the shifting values of their relationship, from sex to politics (including the possibility of — God forbid — marriage!), with an insight that is never less than a candid talisman to learn from and live by in troubled times.

Rarely has Mr. Gere walked through any movie with so little energy and so much indifference. I've seen more fervor on the face of a man parking a car.

It’s Deneuve’s movie from beginning to final frame, and she dominates every scene with a gorgeous and contagious charisma that is bewildering.

The Forgiven is not a journey every viewer will want to make, but it’s a rewarding experience to watch Ralph Fiennes play the emotional subtexts of such a complicated role with such power and nuance.

Directed with a pulsating fervor by Neil Burger, Limitless is absurd but entertaining action-adventure escapism. Bradley Cooper is versatile and virile, and a valiant leading man.

A movie only a hedge fund manager could love.

A grisly, authentic, meticulously researched, pulse-quickening political chiller about a hot-button topic that will keep you on the edge of your seat from start to finish.

The keenly observed patterns of behavior and the witty, intimate dialogue pay off.

A movie that borders on genius—repellant, dark, terrifying, disgusting, brilliant and unforgettable.

It’s rare to see a film directed by a woman who knows more about men than they themselves do. With Handsome Harry, the widely respected independent filmmaker Bette Gordon has hit a bull’s eye.

Nothing to line up for or write home about, but it’s a pleasant time-passer, not a regrettable time-waster.

It’s been years since either Meg Ryan or David Duchovny appeared in a feature film, but now that they’re back, co-starring in a two-hander called What Happens Later, it’s fairly obvious that neither has forgotten anything about charm or how to keep a mediocre movie alive. They’re still appealing. This film is not.

As agreeable as she is to watch, the disappointing thing I feel is that she plays everything the same way. For a film about one person that reveals so little about the subject, 94 minutes is longer than it sounds. My advice is to wait for the DVD. This is definitely a movie to watch with a remote control.

Remakes are odious, even when they’re nothing more than harmless television takeoffs on successful feature films, but The Roses is an especially egregious waste of time and talent because it takes itself so seriously.

Directed by the accomplished Joshua Marston, who made the riveting "Maria Full of Grace," this one is slick and wonderful to look at but too slight to hold its own weight and too inconsequential to generate much suspense.

It’s a tormented Tony Perkins at the Bates Motel, re-imagined by "Saturday Night Live," with all the risks implied.

Plotless and almost mute, To the Wonder is the kind of fiasco that keeps film-festival programmers salivating and discriminating audiences stampeding toward the exit doors. It’s a simpering yawn that makes "The Tree of Life" seem like an action thriller with Bruce Willis. It is about … nothing.

In another in a long line of memorable, effective and inspired performances that resonate with truth, Anthony Hopkins is a magnificent centerpiece.

The brilliant screenplay by Mr. Letts sets up the narrative story of the Weston clan in a carefully constructed series of episodes in which the family history is finally revealed. There’s great acting in every frame, but by the end of the ordeal, the viewer may be too exhausted to care.

Judi Dench can do no wrong, and playing Queen Victoria for the second time in the richly satisfying Victoria and Abdul is an acting lesson par excellence that proves how rapturous it is to watch this great artist do everything right.

In the often illustrious career oeuvre of Clint Eastwood, Trouble with the Curve is a minor entry, a cinematic footnote.

The film is awkward, the situations tenuous and underdeveloped, the pacing torturous as a slow drip from a leaking faucet, and the narrative just plods along, with the body count rising for no clear reason.

It’s not much of a movie, but it feels good and leaves you with life-affirming optimism.

As Earl, Clint Eastwood is so believable and such a charming curmudgeon that when the cops from the Federal Drug Administration led by Bradley Cooper turn the tables, you don’t want them to.

Danny Collins is nothing to write home about, but it kept me entertained without too much guilt, and I didn’t wince. By today’s American movie standards, that’s becoming very high praise indeed.

Okay, The Prey is ridiculous hokum that proves the French can make overwrought Hollywood thrillers with the same indefatigable energy and implausible realism as anyone else. It is also a slick, suspenseful adrenalin rush disguised as unexpected, nerve-wracking fun.

It’s a well-meaning idea that never quite succeeds on the levels of either comedy or drama. Call it a noble failure.

The fun wears out fast and so does the “gotcha” factor.

Don’t be misled by the title Leaves of Grass. Do not expect literacy, either. This stoner comedy has nothing whatsoever to do with Walt Whitman or poetry of any kind.

If you have a strong stomach it is well worth seeing for the lessons it teaches about the value of survival in the pursuit of redemption.

Rambling, well-shot but inconsequential curio.

Like Steven Spielberg, [Howard]'s films are usually polished, coherent, and suitable for all ages. His obsession with Eden delivers none of those things, and it’s so vile, pretentious and confusing in style over substance that a lot of it is downright unwatchable.

2024 is very young, but in the months ahead, I seriously doubt things will get any worse than Mean Girls.

Hope Gap is pithy, engaging, and insightful — the kind of movie we desperately need more of.

For the most part, this is a film with a pulse that wastes no time—a highly invigorating crowd pleaser that does nothing momentous but packs a big entertainment wallop doing it.

Only masochists try to make movies out of Chekhov. They keep trying, and they never get it right.

Moronic drivel that truly qualifies as the worst movie of the year, it sinks amateurish moviemaking aimed at audiences with no taste to an alarming new low.

It stars Woody Allen, but it still drags along like an oyster trying to walk.

The result is a somewhat reserved but sensual and gratifying movie that finds and polishes connections between literature and the screen while further catapulting the wonderful British actress Gemma Arterton several notches up the ladder toward international stardom.

We Bought a Zoo has more soul than substance, but I'll be darned if it didn't put a smile on my face and keep it there.

A well-meaning but desultory descent into darkness based on a memoir of the same name by Amy-Jo Albany, daughter of Joe Albany, the great jazz pianist who died in 1988 at age 63. The book, published in 2003, was subtitled Junk, Jazz and Other Fairy Tales From Childhood, and that just about covers it.

This one is so bad it’s hilarious. Sheri Moon Zombie is no Mia Farrow, Rob Zombie is no Roman Polanski, and The Lords of Salem seems to have been made by people on the rubber bus headed for a rubber room with bars on the windows.

You go away slack-jawed with shock and sated with the chilling bedtime-story elements of a great unsolved mystery novel you can't put down.

The latest in this ossified cornball genre is The Cured, which at least tries for a soupçon of freshness.

But after three dog-eared attempts, including the awful 1992 sequel, enough is enough. The time has come to bury Pet Sematary once and for all.

In the end, it’s the animals who conquer the emotions and provide the suspense in The Zookeeper’s Wife.

Dreamland doesn’t quite work, but she (Robbie) deserves an A for effort.

It has warmth, humor and an understated sweetness that is not to be taken for granted.

This anemic little so-called thriller is the next best thing to a prescription for 30 mg Dalmane.

The welcome surprise is that it’s quite thoughtful and sensitive, thanks to a captivating performance by Will Brittain that dispels any preconceived notions of cavemen as the hairy, misshapen, grunting brutes depicted in Hal Roach’s One Million B.C.

Well-considered and sincerely acted, Kodachrome is a character-driven drama that has been wrongly labeled a comedy by some so-called critics. There is nothing funny about it.

I found it flawed but fascinating, and a no-fail showcase for Tina Fey’s real talents as a serious actress. Best of all, this movie is never boring for a single minute.

In a movie without adults, the children are spontaneous and natural. And Ms. Ronan is captivating throughout.

Overexposed and barely awake in the most dramatic scenes, Ewan McGregor is the star, but it’s not one of his most energetic performances.

Balanced and solid, with equal measures of terror and suspense, the movie is Arcadian and I’ll be darned if it didn’t scare the daylights out of me.

Although the going is so sluggish at times that the film often looks like it needs artificial respiration, stick it out. The end result is oddly entertaining.

A middling attempt to peek through a lace curtain for a glimpse of the other Upstairs/Downstairs staff members only leads to too many distracting social functions that fail to relieve the film's otherwise solemn pacing.

Jane Fonda's first French-speaking film in 40 years finds her leading a joyous ensemble of septuagenarians in a sweet, thoughtful and spirited examination of how to grow old with dignity and pride in a regrettable era when senior citizens have been reduced to the status of a political agenda.

What makes this one different is the dedication, commitment and sincerity the star brings to every aspect of the role. This is a pugilist with a heart.

Add up the ingredients and you get a mostly enjoyable dog-eared formula for escapist entertainment without critical perception.

It's still worth seeing for its two dazzling centerpieces.

It’s a high-class thriller without a single goose bump, but between the mother, the daughter, the lawyer, the Mafia, and the investors determined to separate Renée from her money and power, there’s enough material to juggle several balls in the air at the same time.

I guess I’ve seen worse teen sex comedies, but it’s rare to encounter one this stupid.

It’s obvious that something got lost in translation.

It’s meant to be a gritty slice of cornpone about revenge from a woman’s point of view, but the female protagonist who emerges is nothing but a cartoon.

As the corpses pile up on every side of the law, it reminds me more of those nasty, sometimes laughable Charles Bronson genre vehicles from the 1980s, buried under 50 feet of snow. Call it "Death Wish" with icicles.

Never catches fire or fully engages the imagination in the nightmarish way it should.

Directed by Jon Gunn with no frills but a lot of suspense that comes out of the story naturally, without the need for any manufactured Hollywood thrills, and co-written by actor Meg Tilly and Kelly Fremon Craig, this is one of those rare emotional sagas “based on a true story” that begs to make it to the screen but seems preposterous when it gets there.

Some of the on-camera bitchery between Mr. Ford and Ms. Keaton is laugh-out-loud witty. For the most part, Morning Glory is a delicious movie that will make you jump for joy.

The film eschews a Hollywood happy ending in favor of bone-chilling reality, which makes Viper Club doubly relevant amid current headlines.

From Germany, the deeply disturbing domestic tragedy Three Peaks is another film of understated but driving intensity starring Alexander Fehling, a.k.a. the Paul Newman of German cinema.

It's one of those revolting, raunch-fueled movies churned out in their sleep by the Farrelly brothers and Judd Apatow that I usually hate, but with real cleverness, off-center wit and edgy imagination. Imagine an X-rated Three Stooges farce, and you get the picture.

Trading in her red locks for kohl-lined eyes like a raccoon and the vampire look of Rooney Mara in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, [Chastain] is the spookiest thing in Mama. Everything else is cable television.

It’s only April, but this is one of the best films of 2013.

I'm sure there is much to be learned from Forks Over Knives (the title means fruits and veggies can be forked, but anything you cut with a knife is lethal), but what does it have to do with real life?

Although it is based on a true story, Breakthrough is another glib and unconvincing faith-based movie that pushes miracles, spirituality and divine intervention, hoping for box-office gold. A terrific cast is the only thing that saves it from last rites.

Unfinished Song moves too slowly for its own good (mourning is doubly taxing in a country where it’s always raining), but it’s a great showcase for Terence Stamp.

By my rough calculation, the real Jack Ryan should be approximately 103. Preposterous but moderately engaging, Jack Ryan has outlived his welcome, and there’s no end in sight.

The whole thing has a certain “been there already” deja vu that dilutes the movie’s intended wow factor. Everything else in The Commuter is a yawn.

Kristin Scott Thomas breathes new life into a woman who was invented by Flaubert and copied by Francoise Sagan.

Die Another Day is the most thrilling, lavishly designed and imaginative Bond picture in years. It is also the most preposterous.

The nicest thing that can be said about this demure little Canadian trifle is that it’s a film that finally gives the gifted, self-assured and sadly underrated Alessandro Nivola a leading role.

Diary of a Chambermaid doesn’t quite add up to the chronicle of decadent abuse endured by the servant class in turn of the century France that it hopes to be, but it’s still worth seeing as another entry in the rise of Léa Seydoux, a star of Gallic charisma if ever I’ve seen one.

As good as Citizen Gangster is, it would be even better if you could understand the dialogue.

In a footnote to history that is still too close for comfort, he’s the real meaning of paradise lost.

It’s a true story, basically a two-hander about a pair of courageous lovers lost at sea, as crushingly hard to imagine as it is to watch, but every element is so perfect that it left me shaking and devastated.

Still, in spite of its flaws, I liked The Eyes of Tammy Faye a lot—mainly because of its dedication to period accuracy in every visual detail, and Jessica Chastain’s baptism by fire in the complex leading role.

Colin Firth is brilliant as the patient, uncompromising and introspective Max Perkins, and the explosive performance by Jude Law as the wild, unpredictable and tragic Thomas Wolfe is one of the greatest triumphs of his career. I was spellbound.

There are some lovely and moving things here, but over the long haul it’s more like watching an hour and a half of someone’s weekend trip to Knott’s Berry Farm.

It’s beautifully photographed and entertaining, with charming performances by Will Smith and newcomer Margot Robbie that tease and tantalize. You won’t be bored.

Everything works miraculously here, making Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky one of the most bountiful experiences of the year.

The situations in Little Accidents cry out for more clarity than the script delivers, but the carefully observed performances are worth perusal, and the dark, industrialized joylessness of Rachel Morrison’s cinematography is a somber mirror to the sad dead-end life of Appalachia.

Like "Moneyball," this is real movie making that packs a solid entertainment punch.

The movie is about how he learns to show what's in his heart even when he can't find the spoken words to express his feelings aloud. Under the careful guidance of Mr. Nunez, Mr. Becker does both, in ways that reminded me of a Hispanic James Dean.

Unknown makes no sense at all, so you not only worry about Liam Neeson's judgment in movies, but you begin to wonder if he's forgotten how to read.

Johnny Depp is dismally miscast as the alter ego of the rebellious author with the "screw you" attitude.

Michael Shannon is a convincing and resourceful actor who is now too established and viable to settle for enigmatic roles in meaningless, throwaway movies with zero possibilities for commercial success like a thing called Frank & Lola.

There is plenty of excitement and pulse in Hereafter, as well as a reluctance to provide easy answers to life's great mysteries. I'm happy to see a great director take on the challenge of new and different material with his customary grace and impressive two-fisted technique intact.

A dull, pretentious trifle from director David Gordon Green with Al Pacino in another of his late-career mishaps that does nothing to elevate his fading film status. How I wish he would stick to the stage.

The film is extraordinarily well directed by Alexandre Moors, realistically written, and uniformly well played by an excellent supporting cast that includes Jennifer Aniston, Toni Collette, Jason Patric, and Jack Huston. As “war is hell” movies go, this one is better than usual.

The film knocks itself unconscious trying to be whimsical and offbeat, but is so contrived that it is as embarrassing as it is unfunny.

Beautiful and challenging, Bokeh has a pristine look and chilling feel of its own that contributes enormously to the mood and tone of the whole film.

Redundant, unnecessary and a colossal waste of talent and money, you can pretty much sum up Man of Steel in the scene in which a lady police officer watches with her mouth wide open as Superman tosses aside tanks like Tinker Toys. “What are you smiling about, captain?” asks another cop. “Nothing, sir — I just think he’s hot.”

The actors are superb. The nuanced writing and direction have insight. The three-dimensional portrayals of women in the rural South during the war are praiseworthy.

Almost three hours long, a lugubrious sludge of mud soup called Cloud Atlas deserves a limp nod for pure guts, I suppose, but what I'd really like to do is burn it.

This is one of the best movies of 2012. With rich performances, a riveting and articulate screenplay, meticulous direction and enough grounded emotional intensity to keep your pulse pounding, Hitchcock grabs you by the lapels like a suspense classic by Hitch himself - a knockout from start to finish.

Never Let Go never manages to answer any of a number of recurring questions adequately, and the movie makes no more sense than one of those head-scratchers by M. Night Shyamalan, which it annoyingly resembles.

The movie is not particularly well directed by Justin Kelly (a protégé of Gus Van Sant), and his screenplay (co-written with the real Savannah) has the toxic naturalism of a drag revue. Dern is never less than fascinating, even in Gothic raspberry wigs, and does everything possible to bring a sense of human urgency to an unconventional dual role, but the film deserts her midway.

In beauty, tone, technical achievement and cinematic artistry on every level, Hyde Park on Hudson is a movie unto itself - funny, believable, historic and hugely entertaining.

Old is asinine.

The actors are so good, though, that they make you want to see what they could do in a better movie than this tedious acting-class experiment.

This is a director whose only interest is in entertainment without a trace of originality. He isn’t interested in quality, only in length, noise, and stale ideas from old movies. There’s plenty of all three in Ambulance.

The Boogeyman, a pointless, misguided and totally incomprehensible waste of time, is yet another horror film that exists for the sole purpose of exploiting the endless desk-drawer doodlings of writer Stephen King.

Ineffectual, irrelevant and amateurishly conceived from start to finish, this movie is so bad it could kill off Nancy Drew forever.

To pass the time and justify the film’s nearly two-hour length, director Elliott Lester and screenwriter Chris Kelley concentrate on loading everyone with enough oddball characteristics to convince jaded viewers who hate Westerns that they are watching something unique.

Part of the problem with Close to You is Hillary Baack, who plays Katherine. Miscast and inexperienced, she is not up to Page’s standards and mumbles so incoherently that whole scenes clumsily pass by without clarity.

The script may be flawed and the narrative storytelling mechanical, but the period details are fascinating, the camerawork swaggers across a maze of squalid row houses and nightclub floors with visual velocity, and whenever either one Tom Hardy (or both) is onscreen, Legend is engrossing stuff indeed.

This first-cabin director returns to top form, with this revelatory film his best in years. More than that, Mao's Last Dancer is a masterpiece.

Linus Sandgren’s lush camerawork and the glittering, throbbing musical score by A. R. Rahman contribute a distinctive flavor of their own. The performances are superb.

Even when it occasionally falters, it is polished, heartbreaking, and worthy of attention.

Richard Brooks made a tougher and much better film about the tragedy of compulsive gambling in his 1985 film "Fever Pitch," and in 1949’s "The Lady Gambles," even Barbara Stanwyck made a more convincing fall from respectability into casino hell than Mark Wahlberg does here.

And there is Ewan McGregor, who makes entirely too many movies and only occasionally makes an effort to speak the kind of English anyone can understand.

Quite the most appalling piece of junk I have seen lately, Hobo With a Shotgun just lies there like an autopsy.

You can't fault the theme that life's darkest moments brighten when two people need each other, but there's no drug strong enough to get me through another movie like Love and Other Drugs.

It’s a good story, but too slow-moving for its own good. The cast works diligently, and Keener is scrappy but calm throughout, with a convincing naturalism as a woman with tremendous strength and a powerful belief in civil rights—at a time when most women were reluctant to speak out against political corruption.

No matter where your political leanings lie, the great thing about The Conspirator is that Mr. Redford is wise enough to let the audience decide what the parallels are. See it, enjoy a ripping good yarn and learn something.

Michael Caine is such a consummate actor that it's a major cause of concern to see him in Harry Brown, another hateful vigilante flick the wags in England have already labeled Dirty Harry Brown for reasons that are immediately obvious.

It just seems exaggerated and silly. Maybe there’s an idea rattling around in here somewhere, but I’d like to see it in a better movie than Bushwick.

This movie goes downhill so fast it turns inadvertently from horror to comedy, but when they see the box-office grosses, I don’t think director Brad Anderson or screenwriter Will Honley will be the ones who laugh.

Together, they redefine rapture.

Better films about senior citizens displaced by a greedy housing market have been made. (Anyone for Vittorio De Sica’s Umberto D, or Ira Sachs’ recent heartbreaker Love is Strange, about a homeless elderly gay couple?) But the humorous script by Charlie Peters (based on a novel by Jill Ciment), fluidly directed by Richard Loncraine, makes this an agreeable experience.

Anesthesia is a pile of incomprehensible existential gibberish by the vastly untalented actor-writer-director Tim Blake Nelson about the meaning of life in an age of technology, told in the tiresome style of multiple characters who intersect at odd angles in a follow-the-dots plot centered on a single tragic action.

I call it cinematic freebasing. It’s tired, repetitious, superficial, dreary and done to death before, by the same director, movie to movie and—forgive me for the unpardonable pun — song by song.

The D Train is so confusing it’s hard to track what anyone had in mind.

Surprising, inventive and crisply, merrily written and directed by Derrick Borte, The Joneses is a brisk, captivating entertainment. Think Ozzie and Harriet on speed.

Gun Hill Road is worth seeing for the acting. The great character actress Miriam Colon makes a brief but memorable appearance as the strong matriarch of the household, and Ms. Santana, a true transgendered teen who has never acted before, is especially wrenching.

I love the publicity quotes by Baz Luhrmann stating that his intention was to make an epic romantic vision that is enormous. Also: overwrought, asinine, exaggerated and boring. But in the end, about as romantic as a pet rock.

A master stroke of enchantment from one of the few legitimate cinematic geniuses of the modern cinema, with a nimble and tender performance of enormous elegance and charm by Colin Firth that is heart-meltingly romantic.

To Rome with Love has moments of isolated charm, but it's only moderately entertaining, it isn't very funny, and it's entirely too long.

Like any good cautionary tale, Puncture tells a suspenseful story responsibly, creating food for thought and leaving the audience both enlightened and entertained.

Life is not a great film, but it has its thrills.

OK, it’s an action thriller with a maximum of preposterous set-ups, fraught with a minimum of actual thrills. Lamely directed by Baltasar Kormakur, every scene is built on cinder blocks of tension, but the riotous screenplay is so silly and one-dimensional you find yourself laughing in spite of yourself.

It’s still worth seeing, mainly for the depth and feeling Mark Wahlberg exhibits in the title role, but fails to expand a viewer’s vision and understanding of an otherwise hot-button topic beyond a superficial surface.

May not appeal to every taste, but it marks an arresting feature debut for Jordan Scott, a director who is well worth watching.

It’s a universal, American “anyone can make it” success story that has uplifting appeal onstage, and in Mr. Eastwood’s capable hands, the joy spreads like apple butter.

Written by Emma Thompson, it’s literate and respectful, but a dose of lithium in a champagne glass that is too stolid to ever come alive.

The script, by Melissa James Gibson, is as scintillating as a dead rodent.

The film has beautiful cinematography and occasional peaks of high drama, but lacks the kind of significant tempo necessary to sustain enough interest for nearly two hours to keep a viewer focused.

Not very funny, and it takes so many liberties with the actual facts of the case that it doesn’t ring true, either.

Woody Harrelson in the title role has enough spice to keep the viewer alert and attentive. That’s more than I can say about most of the junk that greets the year-end 2017 holiday season.

Sensitively directed by the Israeli duo Mihal Brezis and Oded Binnun, The Etruscan Smile is a perfect example of what can happen when a great, versatile and powerful actor raises familiar material above and beyond the level of mediocrity.

Under the careful guidance of Australian director Benedict Andrews, Kristen Stewart’s Jean is a doomed star emerging in the center ring of her own drama, distinctive and refined, with an elegant mask that fails to cover the twitching nerve beneath the surface that feels like it’s always on the verge of exploding.

The Girl sounds like a real mess. It isn’t. It’s just a slow, well-made human interest story on a very small scale, ultimately touching but as inconsequential as a slice of pineapple at a Hawaiian luau.

It’s a nail-biter that sends ice down the spine and proves that in the hands of a master director, any genre is capable of achieving new heights of imagination.

A benign slice of life about suburban angst on Long Island. It's not much, but thanks to the noble efforts of a very good cast, I've seen worse.

The results are a mixed bag of charm and calamity, marking the feature-length directorial debut of Trudie Styler who, in real life, is the wife of singing star Sting. She’s a talent worth watching.

Agreeable, multifaceted Michael Keaton has been away from the screen for a while, but as both star and director of Knox Goes Away, his fresh and sophisticated new crime thriller, he proves he’s forgotten nothing about how to invest an offbeat film with his own unique sensibility and control it with precision and power.

If you’re patience doesn’t wear out, the movie culminates in that clever shock ending that not only explains everything but gives what you’ve just seen a rewarding jolt.

Watching the misguided artistry at work in Empire of Light, it’s hard to fathom just what attracted so many top-tier talents to a project of such torpor.

What passes for a plot has been done a thousand times before — in much better films than A Single Shot.

Avoid it at all costs if you value your sanity.

I wish all the agony in The Big Year was leading up to something fascinating in the end, but the most inviting thing in the movie was the exit door.

It’s such a pleasure to see four mature women, more beautiful, glamorous, desirable and pulled together than most of the ladies today who are half their age, share the screen in all their glory that it’s easy to forget how disappointing the movie is.

Armstrong is played by Ben Foster with an astonishing lack of animation or personality, and his literary prosecutor is played by the usually colorful, award-winning Chris O’Dowd with a dreariness that is stripped bare of his usual dynamism.

With the corpse of a nightmare called Knight of Cups, I have finally given up on Terrence Malick. This dog of a film is as riveting and fascinating as a walk-in bathtub.

At an obvious crossroads in his life, Woody Allen has been thinking about guilt, morality, consciousness and the limitations of the intellect. I wish he had done it in a more entertaining and satisfying film than Irrational Man.

A lumbering bore called Inside is a crucially wooden and mechanical vehicle for the peculiar talents of Willem Dafoe that amounts to nothing more than nearly two hours of pretentious bilge.

Aiysha Hart delivers a mesmerizing performance.

Big Ass Spider, lazily directed by Mike Mendez and unwisely written without a trace of necessary camp by Gregory Gieras, aims for satire and settles for stale shtick. It ends with the song “La Cucaracha,” leaving the door open for more insects to come. Cockroaches, anyone?

Too small and dark to appeal to a large audience, it's not a movie to cherish.

Another of those fact-based semi-documentary style films about the need for government transparency that is responsible, sobering, worthwhile and, in my opinion, as boring as the recent halftime show in the 2021 Super Bowl.

Awkward music cues and choppy camera work add baggage to a film so overwrought that its excesses seem more unintentionally silly than bleakly disturbing.

Directed by Paul Dektor from a disarmingly offbeat screenplay by Theodore Melfi, American Dreamer is fresh, original, unpredictable and unexpectedly funny.

In a violent, stupid and nauseating creature feature called Ma, she (Spencer) plays a cruel, bloodthirsty monster who tortures and kills off half of a suburban town for fun. It’s a horrible disgrace, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.

The only reason to waste money and risk COVID exposure in any theater showing Jungleland is the privilege of seeing Charlie Hunnam and Jack O’Connell, two of the best and most charismatic actors in films today, struggle to turn a turgid, cliché-riddled bore about the underground game of bare-knuckle fighting into something better than it could ever be.

Written and directed by Mike Pavone, with a fine, understated, atypical performance by Ed Harris, it may be a feel-good family picture centered on kids, but it offers talismans to live by for people of all ages.

Considering the subject, ripe with titillating possibilities, it's surprisingly about as sexy as a week-old meat loaf. Tastefully directed by Tanya Wexler, it is a total joy from start to finish.

By the Grace of God is still one of the best films of 2019.

It is not a sequel, just another retread of tired material in a franchise that is more than ready for the big comic book bonfire. And why the title? There is nothing amazing about it.

Because it’s written and directed by slick slasher king Eli Roth (Cabin Fever, Hostel), expect some genuine, well-executed thrills that keep the adrenaline going. This is a good thing, because Keanu Reeves has the adrenaline rush of road kill.

No contemporary film that promotes love instead of war should be overlooked. Private Romeo will undoubtedly be regarded by some as a curio, but it's a sweet, sympathetic and surprising one, highly recommended to the adventurous spirit in an enlightened and changing world.

The worst film since Babylon, this surfeit of loud, obnoxious, violent junk audaciously claims to call itself a vampire farce, but there isn’t a genuine shred of originality anywhere in sight and it’s as witty as an ambulance with a flat tire.

This movie is so staggeringly violent and stomach-souring disgusting that when it screens, it is occasionally greeted with boos and almost always accompanied by massive audience walkouts. Don't say I didn't warn you.

The good twin/bad twin conceit in 2014 doesn’t have a shred of the original surprise, and Zoe Kazan doesn’t have the chops to carry it off anyway.

While the folks back at the Pentagon say stuff like “Where are our Navy Seals?” the audience is treated to jaw-dropping action sequences, enhanced by awesome special effects and staggering cinematography.

It’s an espionage cartoon sideshow that is inarguably pointless, with occasionally entertaining moments. Color it preposterous.

A miserable hunk of depressing junk.

Expertly mounted, beautifully acted and meticulously detailed, it’s another harrowing Holocaust drama in the line of endless films about World War II, notable primarily as a rare entry in the filmography of Vadim Perelman, the highly regarded director of House of Sand and Fog.

At a sorry time when most movies are about nothing, Fly Me to the Moon, a rom-com set in the chaos and cross purposes of the heroic Apollo 11 moon landing, deserves attention because even though it is a sad, silly, over-produced disappointment, at least it’s about something. Not very much, I’m afraid, but something.

Our Brand Is Crisis adds up to a toothless exercise in missed opportunities that is half cautionary tale, half political satire and oddly insignificant as both.

From this less than enchanting excuse for a feature-length movie comes 5 to 7, featuring delicious performances, extremely witty dialogue without the customary Hollywood television punch lines, a convincing believability quotient, and some beautiful cameos, especially by Glenn Close and Frank Langella as Mr. Yelchin’s disapproving but modern, adaptable parents.

A fresh and valiant attempt to breathe some fresh air into the #MeToo movement, Submission is stimulating and intelligently rendered until the final act, when predictability sets in.

Despite the danger of G-rated sentimentality, which everyone involved heroically avoids, The Penguin Lessons is a work of surprising depth and subtle, irresistible impact.

Based on a story by Edgar Allan Poe, directed with style and imagination by Brad Anderson (The Machinist), filmed in the creepy darkness of Bulgaria (you hardly get this kind of movie anymore), and starring an illustrious cast solid and dedicated enough to craft to make you believe they’re in a depraved version of Hamlet staged in Elsinore Castle, this is a movie that is several cuts above your usual straitjacket thriller. Enter at your own risk.

The film is so realistic and remote from any modern reality that you will never once imagine a catering truck parked nearby or makeup mirror for the actors to check their wounds.

Despite good intentions, the movie never lives up to the breathless excitement the real-life story promises.

Every complex member of the writer’s legacy has an agenda, with varying gains and losses, and the power of the film rests in the way it captures so many tangled lives as they cross and intersect at curious angles. The camera is literal, so the film sometimes fails to escape its roots of literary inspiration. This did not bother me. How many times do you get the chance to curl up with a good movie?

The result is the kind of harrowing suspense that doesn’t come around very often, charged and informed by another powerful, galvanizing performance by the great Christopher Plummer.

As Robin Williams’ final film, it tolls a wonderful bell for the legacy of a distinguished career.

Deadfall is an above-average genre piece with a terrific cast that builds to a bloody Thanksgiving dinner shoot-out I found pretty close to unforgettable.

The new, inferior and totally unnecessary 2017 re-make is a sorry disappointment in which nothing measures up to the Sidney Lumet movie, including the train.

Detachment drives a coffin nail through a noble profession with such ruthless virulence that it makes no point at all.

It’s pretty foreboding, loaded with atmosphere, dark as midnight and thick as a deadly fog. Also very well made and justifiably terrifying.

As valiant and important as the film is, Alone in Berlin is not perfect. The director is the French actor Vincent Perez, whose commitment to the material is obvious, but whose lack of experience (it’s only his third effort behind the camera) shows badly.

Shot is sobering, suspenseful and exemplary.

Let it be said that Ms. Streep is galvanizing, even as the film slogs through too much information and not nearly enough illumination.

The results are realistic and refined, but uneven and disappointing.

You won't find yourself yawning. It's a great double stretch for an actor and Mr. Cooper plays both the smoldering Latif and the bombastic Uday with combustible energy.

In the title role of the sometimes clever but mostly contrived Carrie Pilby, she (Bel Powley) taxes the boundaries of both.

This is their story. It is true. It is history. As a film, it is riveting, suspenseful, harrowing and exciting, and somehow, it also manages to be something rare among war pictures—a big-scale entertainment.

All of which makes me sad about Denzel Washington's disillusioning participation. I forgive him if the money was irresistible enough to pay off a mortgage or put his kids through Harvard, but Safe House is total junk, and he is one of the producers.

It resonates with delicacy, passion and restraint, touching the heart in places where cynics fear to go.

The story behind Touching Home is more inspiring than the film itself, but don't let that deter you. It's the kind of can-do miracle that reminds us all that anything can happen and everything is possible.

The movie doesn’t know if it’s a teen fantasy-romance or a more sophisticated satire that the material can’t support.