Roger Moore

This is spooky on an effects and story-telling level, downright chilling on a personal one.

The very “slam dunk” nature of the case in the court of public opinion makes 3 1/2 Minutes, 10 Bullets drag along and feel incomplete as it does.

Advocate is a reminder to audiences everywhere of the importance of the rule of law, its equal application and appointing judges who understand that importance.

There was a better movie in this story, this setting and this cast.

McQueen makes the viewer work towards understanding the themes and subtexts of these films. He gloriously recreates the jaw-dropping delight the bullied, racially-taunted kid experiences the first time he sees the shops and colorfully-attired street life of “his” people on moving day.

Chi-Raq is Spike Lee’s most audacious film in decades. DECADES.

You’ll want to catch The Wave because it’s fun to see Hollywood disaster movie cliches rendered in Norwegian.

As she tastes the foods of the country, delighting in this old favorite or that new regional wrinkle on a traditional recipe, you may find yourself fretting that you’re watching this on an empty stomach.

It’s historic, set in Kowloon’s long gone but infamous high rise “walled city” slum, and between the over-the-top action, deadpan underreactions and silly supernaturalism, it is laugh-out-loud funny

The closing image of We Feed People, Ron Howard’s uplifting documentary about Chef José Andrés and the righteous work he and the non-governmental-organization charity he helped found, World Central Kitchen, is a kicker, one of documentary cinema’s great story-in-a-single-shot punchlines.

In showing us the upside of turning a deaf ear to those with the money to amplify their self-interested voices of doubt, Gameau and 2040 give us the tiniest of hopes that maybe things will get better soon enough for us to escape the very worst.

The most adorable “action” pic of the summer is a senior citizen’s caper comedy that’s novel enough and clever enough that the fact that it also has something to say is merely the cherry on top of the cinematic sundae.

An intimate and moving drama.

Dark, darkly funny, surreal and nauseatingly violent, Love Lies Bleeding is a serious shock to the system.

I like the way Moss and McBaine set us up to accept stereotypes — about teenage girls and their priorities, about conservative Emily or confident liberal Faith — and then upend those expectations.

Calvary is a compact and biting tale of a righteous man being tested by his faith, his peers and his predicament.

The picture’s a bit dry and too quiet for my taste. The puzzle at its center is funny and intriguing, and hardly enough to drive the narrative.

It’s wacky. You scratch your head at the training ground, a veritable digital brothel (quite chaste) where aspiring hostesses learn the art. You wonder who on Earth would spend money for “gifts” that impress these young women (and young men), and are also meant to impress their fellow “fans” with how “rich” you are.

Paul Negoescu’s deadpan film finds a few grins as it slowly gets up to speed, and manages a fine finish that makes it worth recommending.

It’s a pretty conventional “Lifetime Original Movie” sort of story. But co-writer/director Thomas Vinterberg (“Dear Wendy”) makes it work by building a sense of frustrating unease into it all.

And the viewer is left with one inescapable conclusion. Conservatives further to the right than Buckley could ever have dreamed control Congress. And gays, like Vidal, can get married. They both won.

Coppola stripped the tale, cut the length, eschews menace and goes easy on the malice, which made the earlier version of the story work. Even as an arch, serio-comic female revenge fantasy, this Beguiled fails to cast the necessary spell.

Winter Kills is flawed and screwy and “out there” and the cast is mostly very old, never a recipe for box office success. It’s found its select audience over the decades on home video and streaming, with critics coming along and reviving interest in its bracing set pieces, big laughs and dark, uncomfortable chuckles.

Martinessi has made a modestly engrossing, too-too-tasteful film about older “ladies who lunch” and cope with their own form of quiet desperation. If only it had more spark, conflict, color and heat.

Clermont-Tonnerre never surprises with The Mustang, but in stripping the story to elemental visuals that tell a simple, touching story, she’s announced herself as a cinematic storyteller to watch.

Fletcher and his players never quite hit on a tone that works. Fantastical dream sequences and side trips to the store to get “more bullets” never quite rise to the level of wry commentary. This just isn’t as cute and funny as Fletcher seems to think it is.

It doesn’t amount to much more than some winsome smirks and a chuckle or two, but its mere existence is a delight.

It’s still a half-decent movie, closer to Neeson’s late-career “Taken” peak than his most recent films. But if he’s letting the audience see the writing on the wall, it might be time for him to stop and read it, too.

Colman is brilliant, Ward brings a lovely wounded nobility to Stephen and the warm and cuddly Jones is set up to sum it all up. But Mendes will not or cannot take us there in this personal project that perhaps needed another person or two’s input, and workshopping and re-writing before the camera rolled.

An animated comedy that’s passably animated but generally unfunny.

It makes for an engrossing character study, a Latin film with lots of local color, a hint of magical realism and an air of hopelessness tinged with menace — a unique cinematic experience.

Most credit goes to Coogan for the success of this odd coupling.

If you haven’t sampled the works of Miike before now, here’s the perfect introduction. And yakuza action-comedy fans, you never forget your First Love.

Duvall, an American Lear not going gently into that good night, reminds us that it will be a sad day indeed for movie fans when it's about time for him to Get Low.

If Bigelow cannot quite bring herself to gracefully end her difficult, challenging movie — which changed studios and finds itself parked in theaters on the tail end of popcorn picture season — it’s because it’s too important a subject to risk shortchanging, too pointed a message to risk letting audiences miss.

It's a delightful cartoon that truly feels African in the way it carries the wisdom of the ages. It feels like a great fable, preserved for generations because of the wise lessons it imparts. [04 Aug 2000, p.19]

It’s more engrossing than terrifying, horrific instead of simply scary.

The best teen comedy since the heyday of Hughes, raunchier and randier as befits the passing decades, but with kids just as mixed-up as ever, and over exactly the same things. Teen angst never goes away, it just deserves a witty updating every now and then.

Logan is a bloody and noble finale to Jackman’s turn with the sideburns and metal claws. It broods and growls, lashes out and swears, and Jackman is magnificent at every one of those.

Boyle and Garland have made a go at making a zombie movie for the moment, a post-Brexit, Israeli genocide, Middle East war, insensate MAGA ICE-goons thriller that makes you think even if all the technique, editing and new levels of violence can’t hide the fact that the filmmakers haven’t quite made up their minds about what they’re trying to say.

The portrait that emerges is of a guy who could tell you why you’d want to see “Putney Swope,” and how he’d sell it to the masses, but not somebody you’d want to work for or ever suffer through a disgusting meal with.

It’s just too much — too much graphic violence, too many plot wrinkles, too much stupidity, too many supporting players to track...For a movie as physically fit as this one wants to be, Pain & Gain is carrying way too much extra weight.

Dweck mixes cheerfully amateurish interviews and staged moments with the driving community and track eco-system with poetic and visceral footage of the action on the track, racing sequences often set to sacred choral music by Mozart.

McGarry, with this slick, invigorating film, whose action is set to a pulsating James Lavino musical score, has broadened a national debate that anti-healthcare reform folks have narrowed via the courts and political demonization.

In just 70 minutes, Hymanson has shown us what “soul mates” look like, and leveled with us about the best possible outcome for our final years, months and days. Not bad.

It’s a movie decorated with glittering performances, and not just by its leading lady and leading man.

This German story, when it works, is fraught with the tension young people there recognize as the stakes in this struggle

A cartoon with better animation and livelier action, if fewer jokes. If there’s one thing these sweet-message/great flying sequence movies don’t need is fewer jokes.

It’s more clever than brilliant, more respectfully mocking than affecting, and it allows us to step back and consider the wisdom of the whole enterprise — hurling legions of stars and lots of Hollywood cash at a movie about making a really bad — though not the “worst ever made” — motion picture.

For a movie that doesn’t have an actual interview with the subject of the film, Kaepernick & America isn’t half bad, although the material they have to work with is so thin the co-directors had to pad out their movie with one of the strangest tricks I’ve ever seen in a documentary.

Herzog asks if one and all if they think “the Internet dreams of itself”?

The objects he assembles or carves out of stone will outlive him, but it’ll only be a hint of the mind that saw beauty in the destruction, decay and rebirth that nature itself was creating all around him.

Brighton 4th is the kind of ambling, immersive movie that you check out for the chance to visit a different culture and see the world through others’ eyes, but that you remember for its warmth, the connection that binds people who never let themselves be simply resigned to their family obligations.

Blue Caprice is a chilling portrait of motive, manipulation and mass murder.

Tramps tends towards cutesy, with its “Bonnie & Clyde” bluegrass banjo chase music and Ellie’s biting “Who’re you to judge ME?” baiting, every time moon-eyed Danny steps into it, over-sharing sexual experiences, implying she has a lot more.

The movie loses its purpose and coherence whenever it drifts away from Hanif.

The Oscar winning Moore slings just enough of an accent for her lines to be funny. Her top-knot hairstyle says everything about the character we need to know — frosty, severe.

It’s a quiet, thoughtful and handsomely mounted film, offering another plum role to Alicia Vikander (“Ex Machina”) as Brittain. Vikander and the film take Britain, and Brittain, from idealism and hope to grim reality and regret.

Be Natural, from the moment of release, becomes one of the seminal documentaries on early film history and must-see movie watching for any serious cinephile.

The climax is deflating and lets down a fabulously grey woods, heather and moors production design and the wicked promise contained in the story’s premise — that there’s a little Lady Macbeth in every woman, at least as far as men are concerned.

Still waters may run deep, as the old saying goes. But Beside Still Waters there’s nothing deeper than “The Big Chill.”

Ebrahimi, dogged and fierce in “Holy Spider,” carries the picture by simply humanizing a character who could be Anywoman facing this sort of crisis in a foreign land, or a home country that disregards women’s rights.

As foul-mouthed and politically-incorrect (era appropriate) as Dolemite is My Name is, it is a classic Hollywood feel-good movie, a sentimental tale of an underdog overcoming obstacle after obstacle to follow his bliss.

Laugh-out-loud funny and production-designed to death, Guardians of the Galaxy pops off the screen.

An engrossing but frustrating movie, so subtle in its depiction of a teenager struggling to come to terms with a world and worldview utterly upended that it almost trivializes the tragedy that Lore, we suspect, is just beginning to feel responsible for.

The execution of writer-director Seth Worley’s doesn’t turn up pathos or laughs. And the kids? Well…

We Are Little Zombies is the most entertaining thing to come out of Japan since sushi, “Iron Chef” and the Miata.

It’s not a reinvention of the genre, but it is a fairly engrossing variation on a theme. And that’s in large part due to the violence — sexual and otherwise — it recreates.

I Carry You With Me is an innovative take on the classic “coming to America” immigrant saga.

It is Krieps’ performance that carries Corsage, a woman in all her many moods, shadings, fears and desires, treated as abnormal and gossiped about and controlled by insults from pretty much every male in her life. And more than a little annoyed about it.

The combat sequences are good, if nothing we haven’t seen before and staged and shot more impressively in films from Europe, America, Australia and Turkey.

An adoring portrait of a Star at 80.

It makes its points, takes the intensely-unlikable guy where he was always headed, and then sticks around a full half hour after the climax, another 15 minutes past the anti-climax.

Breaking Fast is an Islamic “Wedding Banquet,” a West Hollywood rom-com so cute it flirts with “cutesy,” almost cloying when it isn’t being cute, but damned adorable in the bargain.

A Monster Calls makes a case for remembering that fairytales can terrify as they teach and test us.

Taken on its own merits, this profile of "Buck" Brannaman is a pleasant and touching but somewhat superficial insight to the man and his methods.

A lovely, nostalgic look not just at a war the Brits just can’t stop memorializing, but at the way movies were made way back when, with a little magic and a dollop of sentiment could carry a story for audiences starved for anything that offered them the possibility of a happy ending.

It’s not the most surprising story of its type, and it’s far from Bahrani’s most graceful film. His more intimate, less sprawling tales never felt this clunky, with all the seams showing. But Gourav makes a barely-likable and yet entertaining tour guide.

For a fairly generic sports documentary, Rising Phoenix still manages a few thrills, some moving moments and a lot of sports action.

Director Darrell Roodt does nothing to build suspense and little to build empathy for the character.

The film manages to be intriguing but seriously dull.

The God Committee is the sort of solid drama you get when actors you think you know are gifted with a script they can sink their teeth into, and make the most of their moment to shine.

The writer-director, perhaps for reasons of economy (surely not vanity) cast himself as the romantic lead. And Rik Swartzwelder, competent behind the camera, is an utter stiff on screen.

Thoughtful performances render this intimate drama a rewarding and engrossing look into life after prison, and a mystery well worth waiting for its unraveling.

Alex Winter’s Zappa is perhaps the most thorough Zappa screen biography to come along, and that’s acknowledging how hopeless the job of making The Compleat Zappa bio-doc is.

All involved are to be commended for taking a shot at modernizing a classic novel and rendering it into another lesson that history does repeat itself, that as the philosopher said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Of all the scary guys Michael Shannon has ever played — sociopaths, murderers, hell, even General Zod in a Superman movie — none is more frightening that his character in 99 Homes.

It is Sorkin’s film’s sense of “right now” that sticks with you.

A Cop Movie is a slick exploration/explanation of Mexican policing. But as the style drifts from first-person, dash-cam point of view “reality” to a laughably generic foot chase through the city and onto the subway, it becomes obvious that believing what we see and hear is meant to matter here. And the gimmicks undercut that too many times along the way.

It’s an adorable small-scale romance with music.

It’s an intimate, quiet and slow-paced romance, a simple, richly rewarding movie in the classic style of India’s greatest filmmaker, the late Satyajit Ray.

It’s an authoritative take on “How we got here.” And it’s a lot to take in, almost too much at times. But Citizen K serves up these insights — from an admittedly tarnished “hero” who has used his exile to attempt to induce change — in Gibney’s usual arresting style. We’re meant to be appalled, edified and forewarned.

It’s not a great film, but Beatriz grows in stature as Bonnie searches for firmer footing. She and Stahl create a relationship that feels lived-in and fragile.

The Breaker Upperers is a rude and rowdy Kiwi comedy about two friends who run a service that helps people get out of hard-to-end relationships.

The Mother is watchable, here and there. Decently acted. Over-the-top, but not far enough over it to make it fun.

Saulnier’s made a slow-burn thriller that surprises and keeps us guessing and waiting, mostly for that moment when somebody draws “First Blood,” and even then he trips up expectations, and deliciously so.

Relationship Goals is as generic as a self-help book cover, and doomed to be forgotten as quickly as the book it’s based on will be.

It is both intimate and sweeping, a John Woo/Howard Hawks “men with a code” epic, with William Friedkin grit, and maybe a pinch of Peckinpah for those who like their gun violence realistic.

If you see just one “Hitler” film this year, make it this one.

Nathaniel Kahn’s collected interviews with artists, hype-driven dealers, well-heeled collectors and art historians and visits to Sotheby’s and the Frieze Art Fair and elsewhere give us the scale of the business, the birth of competitive modern art collecting and a sense of the recent history of this winner-take-all playground of the richest of the rich.

What’s Love Got to Do With It? manages to show us a classic rise/fall/comeback tale with a little flair and a lot of heat.

Matt Palmer’s film is an engrossing but unsurprising swirl of self-preservation instincts, grief, panic and terror. It achieves pulse-pounding only once, and rarely strays from the predictable path set for it.

A clever and claustrophobic thriller that will trip you up and leave you with a wicked, blood-stained grin.

Alarming, inspiring and yes, laugh-out-loud funny, Hail Satan? is a delightful documentary dissection of America’s favorite anti-religion, The Satanic Temple.

The Student makes a chilling allegory for the post-fact age (Russia invented it, remember), and a cautionary tale for cultures everywhere. There’s such a thing as being too tolerant of the intolerant.

The Whistlers is that rare cops-and-criminals picture that gives us a little to chew on and a new skill to practice — whistling.

I Am Not an Easy Man works, an over-reaching satire that gets at the horrors women face in a world where they don’t have equality or the entitled initiative to succeed and a film that suggests God help us if the shoe is ever on the other foot.

A hilariously dark and dirty road comedy built on a stripper’s “my hand to God this happened” tweets.

Kudos to all involved for making a horror movie with a simple gimmick, a lot of gore and a few things to say about teen culture in a social media age, none of them having anything to do with TikTok.

I was fascinated, but I can’t say I liked Ghostbox Cowboy as much as I enjoyed the films it seems inspired by.

It’s an absolutely chilling road picture, filled with tension, dread and a threat of violence. The longer we don’t know where that threat is coming from, the more suspenseful it is.

The helplessness one gets being pinned down and tickled, the chilling fear of that, nicely parallels the chill and fear of reporting a story powerful people don’t want reported, which Farrier shows us in this odd and shocking expose.

A stop any literary-minded movie-goer will want to make.

Damn this is fun.

This compelling-acted film explains, better than any soundbite, why people have taken to the streets, "occupying" centers of finance. If their rage is unfocused, Margin Call suggests, that's with good reason. There are no real heroes or villains here, just human beings with human failings making BIG human mistakes.

Polsky takes us on quite the sleigh ride, from the sunny silliness of gambling on Russian hockey, and then marketing it, to the grim reality that sets in — threats, intimidation and even murders.

As random as it all is, The Hand of God does add up to a “movie” in the broadest sense, just not a very coherent or interesting one.

Corben doesn’t stop with just the “sex scandal” part of this. “God Forbid” takes us back to the blackmail-worthy “quid pro quo” of Falwell’s endorsement of the profane, obscene and hilariously Godless Donald Trump. Then journalists, academics and historians tie Falwell’s father, the dynasty-founding racist turned anti-abortion opportunist Jerry Falwell, to Trumpism and the State of the Nation today.

The movie is a derivative hash of comic book picture plot points and origin story touchstones — half “Captain America: The First Avenger,” half “Thor.” But director Patty Jenkins, who did not get enough credit for “Monster,” keeps Gadot in frame and the tone light.

Kusijanovic has given us a “Lolita” without exploitation, a “Knife in Water” with spear guns, and a disturbing riff on toxic masculinity and rash teenaged impulses simmered in a seaside chowder of sex and gamesmanship, making for a dazzling first feature.

What Benson and Moorhead have conjured up here is their oddest, most esoteric dramedy yet, a tale quirky and weird, more serious than silly and certainly worth a look just to pick through the torrent of references herein. You’ve just got to be on their wavelength to get anything more than passing pleasure out of it.

It’s lightweight, vague and a tad obscure, never quite delivering the parable it promises, limiting the young, quarelsome and randy new couple next door as mere decorative titilation, the priest is unrealized comic potential.

It takes a while to settle into Loznitsa’s storytelling style and get a handle on the points he’s making. Non-natives aren’t going to pick up on every allusion, the nuances of accent or even the differences between the Russian and Ukrainian being spoken (with subtitles).

If I’ve seen a better performance in recent years than Stewart’s in this “fable from a true tragedy,” I can’t remember it. She’s stunning.

A riveting saga of pain, grit and the brute moral relativism of revenge, the first law of all, and the only one that mattered back then. The Revenant is one of the best pictures of the year.

It only manages a couple of big laughs, but its droll, judgy tone and some fun performances put it over.

A damned clever neo-noir with a top-drawer cast, genuine suspense, dark humor and a plot that keeps you guessing for a very long time, this Steven Soderbergh thriller has everything a good heist picture needs to get over.

I laughed at a few of the more audacious butcherings, but that was early on. The narrative settles into a slog in the middle acts and no pull-out-the-stops train ride finale could drag it out of the mud.

It may be generic and inspiring TV movie subject matter, but Green immerses us in this world and punches up the limited horizons that face these characters.

For a movie about a tragedy and the struggle to cover it with professionalism and compassion, September 5 is more historically intriguing than compelling and in the end, an emotionally hollow experience.

The film is both touching and infuriating as Boyle shows us as direct a cause-and-effect in an addiction case as any documentary ever.

It is Dafoe’s compact, internalized turn as the artist, letting us feel his pain rather than bellowing about it (see “Lust for Life” for that) that pulls us in and gets us as close to the artist as any film ever has. It’s glorious work, and a grand capstone to a fabulous career, with or without Oscar recognition.

Yes, it’s a thriller with a murder mystery at the heart of it. But “whodunnit” is immaterial to the film’s thrills, and the one thing I seem to forget every time I watch it anew.

A fascinating documentary experiment in fathoming the heretofor “unfathomable” genius of Johannes Vermeer.

The performances don’t register, the filmmaking produces a couple of hair-raising images and a few ghoulish/gross ones.

In the end, we’re left with a gimmick movie that doesn’t come off, an accurate-enough artifact of the global lockdown of last spring that will be remembered for that, and little else.

Offers a decent if superficial portrait of the man and a vast sampling of the work that identifies him, undeniably, as an artist.

From watching and reading their saga as it played out, one could only imagine the worst of this “tennis parent” from hell and what he put his kids through. King Richard and Will Smith good-naturedly and affectionately upend that.

The film’s scruffy charms do not dim with age. If you’re in the mood for a musical roman a clef where the songs are sharp and the singing is effortlessly on key, don’t underestimate Songwriter.

Slick but cheesy, dubbed, filmed and set in Australia but really for the enormous Chinese film market. And Chan fans will find it memorable for one sequence which shows the 64 year-old can still make a fight funny.

Director Decker (“Madeline’s Madeline”) folds in all the pieces of the plot almost haphazardly, and instead concentrates on character and mood — gloomy people mostly trapped in a gloomy house.

First time feature director Jeannette Nordahl puts us in Ida’s shoes and makes us ponder her uncertain fate just enough to make Wildland work.

A one-joke comedy about vampires, and yet another mockumentary/fake documentary, a gimmick that has turned seriously stale in recent years.

10 Cloverfield Lane is built on the fear of an unknown that we know. Turns out, all that secrecy and hype and branding the “Cloverfield” name were not just this product’s marketing strategy. That’s all they had. Period...So, “Room” is still in theaters. It’s more harrowing, more terrifying, more thrilling and moving than Cloverfield Lane could ever hope to be. Go see that instead.

Nobody should be making serious vampire or zombie movies at this stage of the horror cycle, so this riff on the genre absolutely fills the bill. And making it a commentary on gentrification? Inspired.

That message, this script and these actors make Rabbit Hole one of the best films of 2010.

Sally Field brings a bubbly, misdirected vitality to Hello, My Name is Doris, a cute better-late-than-never romance tailor-made for her talents and lifelong image.

It doesn’t trivialize Mud to label it Tennessee Williams lite — at least in its romantic notions. Nichols gets good performances out of one and all, but lets himself get so caught up in his sense of place that this potboiler hangs around more than a few minutes after that pot has come to a boil.

Rene Russo is spot-on as Nina, an aging TV news director who is the only person Bloom will sell his footage to.

The Woman King reminds us that the real history we don’t know makes for a great story, and a grand action yarn. You want to learn where all the good parts and “realistic” elements of that comic book movie “Black Panther” and its sequel came from? Gaze upon “The Woman King,” and be thrilled.

The film invites us to imagine interior lives, a narrowing of the “pursuit of happiness” to tasks at hand, modest goals, music, food and love. As our pandemic waxes and wanes, “Lunana” becomes one of the great cinematic escapes of recent years.

In the end, perhaps it is less important that Cold Case Hammarskjöld finds or doesn’t find its “smoking gun,” or that it makes or doesn’t make its case beyond a reasonable doubt.

Asteroid City is like a stop-motion animated Anderson film, in which he uses real actors in stop-motion. How is indulging oneself in that reductive, self-defeating cleverness a good idea?

Making it all work is the cast, all experienced but mostly just-unknown enough to give How to Blow Up a Pipeline a genuine indie anarchist feel.

Deep thoughts about re-directing cynically manipulated celebrity, lump in the throat moments at people rising up against their oppressors, a couple of memorable deaths and attempts at sacrifice play as flat when there’s nothing around them to serve as contrast.

Does well in capturing the cruelty of school life and the assorted "types" who inhabit schools there and here. But it's more twee than clever, more affectionate than romantic and more promising than satisfying.

It may be too “Cinema Appreciation 101” for many. But for those of us really into film history and the birth of a screen master making a movie DIY style, on the fly, on the cheap and destined to “change cinema,” even if only briefly as those “rules” for how to tell a story got set in stone for a reason, “Nouvelle Vague” checks all the boxes.

As he did with “The Dallas Buyers’ Club,” director Jean-Marc Vallée covers this inner and outer journey with a minimum of fuss. The flashbacks and their revelations, filling in the puzzle, are sparingly doled out. The stunning scenery Cheryl hikes through is barely noticed.

No, there’s little in the way of fireworks and it’s not “stop the presses” news that film actresses have to be fiercely self-absorbed. But a film-lover’s movie like The Truth gets at the vulnerability that comes with that in cute but cutting, sly and subtle ways. Thank Deneuve for that. “I could play this role dead drunk!” Damn right she could.

It’s self-indulgent and self-referential, more a humorless counterpoint to “X” than a precursor.

Audiard has conjured up a fascinating snapshot of love in the age of easy, online-assisted sex. Paris, 13th District feels both authentic and thanks to its dreamy setting, as romantic as only affairs in the City of Love can be, whether they involve courtesans or college students.

The script is tighter than the direction and editing. But the set-pieces dazzle (think Korean war toys) and the performances by the cops have a nice cynicism about them.

The Lovers is a compact tale, a chamber music melodrama underscored by lavish, romantic strings and a Prokofiev waltz. It never quite escapes the stage-bound feeling.

Marissa Taylor, one of over 100 journalists worldwide involved in the expose, adds “Why are people going to care that the rich don’t pay their taxes and crooks are crooks?”

Her sound, her look, her fashion sense and her politics are discussed and marveled at by those interviewed, who see her as a woman decades ahead of her time whom the passage of time has largely validated and exonerated.

The Amateur may be a mixed-bag of coincidences, not-quite-plausible technological traps and narrow escapes, and a tad old fashioned feeling in this post-justice/post-accountability world. But Malek keeps us invested and interested in this quest.

If Final Account has a shortcoming, it’s that few moments stick out as most chilling of all.

It’s still a passion project, in all the best ways, a jaunty, juicy ramble through music history from Johnny Cash to Nine Inch Nails, Neil Young to the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

Baumbach overreaches, making this character a selfish, off-putting cultural (LA) and generational scold. But Stiller, in his most “real” performance in ages, finds the function in this catalog of dysfunctions, the humanity in this humanity-hating crank.

A chilling detective tale, a horrific sexual abuse drama and an overlong, emotional, tie-up-every-loose-end melodrama that is sure to be half an hour shorter when Hollywood remakes it without the Swedish dialogue and probably without the cool Swedish edge.

An intimate portrait, a slice-of-life that goes just far enough beyond the cliches to be fascinating.

Valadez lets her actor’s faces do most of the talking here. It’s a music-free film of long, tense silences and splashes of fraught shakedowns and terror.

The Fire Inside is a feel-good picture that feeds off our disappointment that not everybody who succeeds against the odds wholly “succeeds” against those odds, and makes us wonder if this will ever change.

It's stunning work, movingly narrated by actors from Josh Lucas to Robert Duvall, all telling the stories of those who fought and bled and lived to tell the tale. [23 Mar 2007, p.21]

I found Encanto more aggravating than entertaining.

It’s bracing and inspiring, what filmmakers Keith Fulton and Leo Pepe show us in that first hour.

The script is a passing parade of grace notes, most delivered with a light touch.

Cedar has given Gere his own “House of Cards” to move into, where the game analogies spin out as chess and, most tellingly, dominoes. Norman needs them to fall just so, and if they do, he will be a man to be reckoned with.

It makes for a chilling portrait of fanaticism at work, even if it is more historical than anything worthy of “let’s feel that fear again” topicality. Even if we suspect its designed to gin up more support for our Islamic ally in the Middle East.

A blend of comedy, song and dance, drama and male and female servicemember interviews, it’s funny, biting and tuneful, and it takes you right back there if you lived through it, and might be an eye-opener for activist “Ok, Boomer” millennials.

Mistress America is Baumbach’s version of a Wes Anderson comedy. Strip away the gaudy colors, snippets of animation and earnest loopiness and you get lots of witty banter, breathlessly delivered by an engaging cast of believable and unbelievably glib characters.

It’s another one of the many Israeli films over the years that emphasizes connection, accidental or forced, in the close-quarters of Palestine — Israel, the Occupied Territories, lands under the Palestinian Authority. And like most of these films, it offers a glimmer of hope, even if it’s too much to expect Orit Fouks Rotem’s film to play out as wholly neutral.

Fitfully amusing or not, the whole demented enterprise of Rango comes into question when you're that tone-deaf about what's appropriate for children.

Emily the Criminal is the face and voice of not just the summer, but an American generation right now, looking for a break and desperate enough to cross the line if they don’t get it.

Here’s an eccentric tragicomedy, with music, built to play like gangbusters at Austin’s South by Southwest music-movie fanboy/fangirl festival.

The Kindergarten Teacher is a great performance, the latest from an actress with a reputation for giving them. Watch it on Netflix and see what the Academy missed.

Two very good looking people play two offbeat and abrasively charming lovers in Love & Other Drugs. And when your screen romance is as sexual as this one, it helps if your stars are about as good looking with their clothes off as human beings get.

It’s a bracing, damning indictment of a world where women have no bodily autonomy wrapped in a visceral, on-the-lam chase thriller in which every man our heroine meets is not just an existential threat, but a real one.

If Booker goes on to unseat the hilariously hated, Russia loving Rand Paul for a Senate seat this fall, From the Hood to the Holler will make a fascinating footnote for a sea change in American politics.

There are maybe 20 minutes worth of jokes, sight-gags, slapstick bits and innuendo in those 85 minutes.

For its first 90 minutes, Bodied dazzles, ducks and dishes through a corner of hip hop most of us only experience through documentaries or Youtube clips. Here’s a movie that takes the form seriously, and gives us a taste of how hilarious it can be — for those not on the receiving end of these epic couplets of insult.

Once you get past the cliched Spanglish dialogue and the sentimental tone of the early acts, A Better Life settles down into something both involving and moving.

Animated musicals are only as good as their songs, and this one isn't on a par with "Beauty and the Beast" or even "The Princess and the Frog."

It’s more clever than smart, but here’s an animated film for adults (violence, nudity) that challenges and rewards the viewer who — yes — paid attention in class, and whose bucket list includes MoMa, the Louvre, the Musée D’Orsay, the Reina Sofia and Prado, Met and Musée Rodin.

North Circular is geographically and emotionally evocative, just gorgeous to see, to hear and to immerse yourself in, enveloped in an ancient city’s lore via its music.

Stewart and Yeun (“Minari,” “Nope”) do their best to animate their flesh-and-blood scenes with confusion, curiosity and attraction. But they don’t have enough screen time to make this learn-how-to-love experiment come off.

The robberies and shootouts are staged to brilliant effect. And even the over-the-top acting moments can be forgiven by the “period piece” nature of the history being told.

Labiki isn’t above manipulating us as she lightly underlines the points she wants to emphasize, but she never lets Capernaum turn into a lecture.

The rawboned Hawkes manages both charm and menace in the same look, and Dancy gives his character a testy, fearful edge that doesn't make him scary, but rather someone we fear for.

The scenario here is soapy and a tad familiar. But Cheng’s vivid depiction of the life going on all around his characters . . . enriches the story and makes José, his life, his world and his predicament something anyone can relate to.

Musician Dave Grohl and music mogul David Geffen wax enthusiastic. But leave it to Bruce Springsteen to find the poetry of the place.

Extraction runs into the same problems any movie that’s on-the-run/fighting-your-way-out faces. It’s wearing, characters get shortchanged and the temptation to take absurd shortcuts in logic just to get us from point A to B is irresistible.

It’s perfectly watchable, but let it play on during the bathroom breaks and search for snacks. It’s so slow you probably won’t miss anything vital, not until the third act.

A rom-com that almost goes for it and almost comes off before losing its nerve.

A leg up on the first “Trip,” an altogether more delightful vacation with two blokes who might wear us and each other out along the way. But then, that’s half the fun.

It’s not all that coherent either, a filmic piece of flotsam that one and all drift along with, touching on themes but never wrestling with them, glimpsing the sights but never really showing them to us.

Perhaps only an Iraq War combat vet would dare to tackle Post Traumatic Stress Disorder with the sort of sarcasm and gallows humor of My Dead Friend Zoe.

It’s a somewhat sprawling and almost ungainly film, years in the making, very revealing and yet notably incomplete.

An eye opener.

Stan & Ollie treads too lightly on the conflicts and never quite delivers that big belly laugh that their silent comedies managed.

Petzold emphasizes the dreamy nature of the story, which can be nightmarish if you fear drowning in the dark.

The costumes — cop, soldier, Spartan and cowboy — and lack of them mimics “Magic Mike.” The melodrama — keeping his sideline secret from his mother and would-be girlfriend — duller.

It’s jarring and stereotype-smashing, for starters, and just plain disturbing on top of that.

A brisk blast of bloody good fun, sci-fi with a little social commentary as subtext. Attack the Block is the movie that "Battle: Los Angeles" was not - thrilling, nerve-wracking and fun.

Judging from this, The Fate of Lee Khan was to die of boredom waiting for the “fun parts” to begin.

Leonardo DiCaprio’s most charismatic performance ever anchors Martin Scorsese’s robust and raunchy lowlifes-of-high-finance comedy The Wolf of Wall Street.

It’s an utterly immersive Franco-Haitian gumbo, complete with flashbacks, “magic” as practiced by those who know “the old ways,” teen hormones and the zombi origin story.

“Ashkal” manages to pique our interest and burn itself into the memory.

Diamond Tongues is a witheringly funny but still sympathetic portrait of a show business “type.”

A revealing, intimate and interesting peek behind the fresco-bedecked walls of an institution trapped in a past of its own invention, confronting a future in which it still relies on a succession of very old men to meet.

To fans who know the tunes by heart, hearing their history is never less than thrilling. And if you’ve heard that line about “Swampers” and never new who they were, you should. They have been known to pick a song or two.

With Win Win, McCarthy has found his emotional sweet spot, a sweet and complex story to set it in and the perfect title for it.

The design is brighter and sharper, the jokes are broader and the villainy utterly generic in this by-the-(comic)-book adaptation.

It’s still an intriguing and somewhat cerebral entry in the horror canon, a movie that reminds us that the real “monsters” are trauma and the real confrontations are best handled in a therapist’s office.

The novelty of having a real homeless junkie play a version of herself drives Heaven Knows What, a gritty hand-held character portrait of heroin addict life in New York today.

At least this time, some of the laughs are intentional.

This magazine of a movie is something to be savored, a rarefied delight that’s intellectually aspirational, as the great magazines used to be. It rewards the well-read, the art observer, the film lover, the Francophile and the Wes Anderson fanatic.

The harrowing nature of the work is the primary focus of this film and many others on this subject. But Colvin never comes off as the classic adrenaline junkie/Hemingway wannabe that too many of these films turn their heroes into.

This tiny Catholic school for women dominated the sport at a turning point in history, and this plucky, old-fashioned sports drama sets the scene and tells the tale with a lot of heart and a dash of wit.

This is "Her Hangover," a smarter and sweeter stumble to the altar that never quite gets to Vegas, and doesn't seem to mind.

The movie’s tedious overuse of voice-over cripples it.

Benedetta is a gripping, graphic and shockingly moving film biography.

The energy in Timur Bekmambetov’s latest thriller — he did “Night Watch,””Wanted,” the “Ben Hur” remake, and produced the similar online thriller “Unfriended” — dissapates almost by default after that heady first act.

It’s a bit slow in the later going, but Travis Stevens’ (“Girl on the Third Floor”) latest film works on several levels, due in no small part for a good cast that buys in completely.

There is nothing, simply nothing, to make you feel that you’ve led a sexually-sheltered life, that your understanding of the modern fluid, on-the-spectrum nature of sexuality is superficial at best, than Queer Japan.

It’s “uplifting,” but conventionally so, with a certain dignity surrounding it. These are, after all, “the finest palettes in Africa.”

Fiennes holds it all together by force of what he does show us about the man, his kindness tempered with cruelty, the charity he practiced and preached, the morality he could never live up to. It’s the visible great man who makes The Invisible Woman worth watching.

This isn’t Cody’s most witty script, and the Oscar-winning Theron isn’t the most gifted at delivering these warmed-over one-liners.

The musical comedy whimsically and often cleverly revisits the characters, their shtick and and the TV show and movies that made them most famous.

Thanks to Oldman’s unerring portrayal of a deeply flawed man rising to face a crisis, and inspiring a nation to rise with him, it’s an equally worthy reminder that there have been bad times before today’s, and that people, great and small, saw them through.

A compelling drama about self-image, dashed dreams and the growing up that might be on the other side of despair.

It’s a fast and sometimes funny fantasy with an anime vibe. Jokes and sight-gags are more important than plot originality or coherence or characters that are little more than caricatures.

I can’t say I loved it, as it drags and drags and only occasionally springs to life. But this “tale as old as time” resonates as well as it ever has, and its songs still stick with you long after the closing credits.

Rag Doll is a boxing-my-way-out-of-a-jam drama that flirts with being interesting, in between passages of middling melodrama and wilder, illogical “Nobody’ll see THAT coming” surprises.

Thanks to the distinct look of films from Cartoon Saloon, this Nora Twomey (she also directed “The Breadwinner”) project plays and feels like a fairytale that has a bit more going on than sight-gags and punchlines.

This short, not-quite-brisk film’s real shortcoming is that writer-director Jérémie Rozan makes it all about the MO and the VO — “how they’re doing it,” and having his hero explain how, ad nauseum, start-to-finish, in voice-over narration.

Goswami’s understated performance drives this brilliant debut feature, a sometimes silent observer who can barely register shock at some of what she sees and experiences.

It’s a wonderful time capsule and a warm — with some reservations — remembrance of growing up in showbiz, the children of famous people who’d get stopped on the street, in the restaurant or wherever by strangers, even when the kids were the ones desperately wanting and needing their attention.

The fights and deaths are somewhat comical, the one-liners hit or miss and the stunts faked with less sleight of hand than a director experienced in action might have managed. And Feig can’t bear to end this thing, which goes on far past the point of endurance. But he’s done better by McCarthy here, and she has delivered a performance that’s more deft than her usual daft.

Reichardt hangs her film on Eisenberg, who subtly suggests a loner whose primary gift for the cause is he whole in his soul where a longing or human contact should be. It’s a terrific performance and it holds the movie together even as Night Moves stumbles toward its foregone, and rather poorly handled, conclusion.

The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness is a great name for a documentary about Hayao Miyazaki and his animation house, Japan’s Studio Ghibli.

On celluloid or in person, Billy Friedkin’s still a great storyteller.

It can feel superficial and less revealing than we might want. Much is left out, but for that we can probably turn to the book got out of the experience. “Mister Satan’s Apprentice.”

The fists fly, the bullets blaze and the mayhem borders on magnificent in John Wick: Chapter 2, a sequel that ups the artistic ante even as it boosts the body count of that sleeper hit about the assassin’s assassin played by Keanu Reeves.

A sturdy melodrama, more enjoyable for its performances than from its aged, time-tested and formulaic plot.

Even though it gives away one twist/gag too easily and tends to pummel us in the finale, I have no notes. This is a damned funny riff on “Survivor” and the very idea that the dainty McAdams might have a little “Misery” era Kath Bates in her.

Belfast is a moving, tense and yet often lightly comical experience. And as one of the best pictures of 2021 ends, you remember how good a filmmaker Branagh can be, and marvel at how he was able to pack all this warmth, wit and trauma into just 100 minutes.

Dreamworks hired the directors of "Lilo & Stitch" to turn Cressida Cowell’s romp of a novel into an animated film and can’t be too surprised that they made, in essence, "Hiccup and Stitch."

Two big themes run through Meow Wolf: Origin Story. One is “inclusivity.” Even people who get into tiffs and storm off find themselves invited back in, “a lot more like a family than friends,” Caity Kennedy says. The other is uncompromising idealism.

Unrest could have been a lot of things that it’s not — “fascinating,” “illuminating,” “entertaining” and even “inspiring” among them. Instead, we’re treated to engrossing details that never add up to more than watching a second hand labor its way around a clock face.

It’s sometimes riveting, almost wrenching at others and kind of depressing. And it generally succeeds in its main mission, de-romanticizing “civil war” and “secession,” words that the glib, the rural, old-enough-to-know-better low-information voter types and their leaders throw around.

Steven Soderbergh, rightly considered one of Hollywood’s smartest movie makers, is at his cleverest in Side Effects, a canny, cunning big idea thriller in a minor key, an engrossing zeitgeist whodunit about Wall Street, Big Pharma, prescription drugs and the power we give psychiatry and psychologists.

The wow factor alone makes Oceans a great Earth Day/Earth Week at the movies.

By equal turns hilarious and right on the edge of horrific.

Pike is magnificent in this part, giving us layers to the hard-drinking live-for-today chain-smoker who could be moved to tears, repeatedly, by the suffering she saw.

Moselle, granted all this access, leaves so many questions unanswered that The Wolfpack is frustrating to sit through.

In a cinema recently overrun with combat documentaries, Marshall Curry’s Point and Shoot manages a first. Here’s a film that captures the romance of war amongst today’s young and testosterone-fueled. Want to know why young men from all over the world have flocked to fight for ISIS? Point and Shoot explains it.

They make this one tick over like clockwork, jumpy opening to nerve-wracking finish.

Brie and Franco know how to find their way from grim to funny. The laughs come in their deadpan underreactions and freaked-out over-reactions at their plight.

Cinematically-static if well-acted, and dramatically-flat throughout, it’s an end-of-the-date story of gamesmanship, competing agendas and differing interpretations of what’s going on in a coupling towards copulation sense.

This meandering Pietro Marcello (“Lost and Beautiful”) film seems to exist out of time, a fictional “struggling artist” biography as rife with cliches as it is obtuse in story and message.

There’s a “for fans only” feel to the latest “Avengers” movie, Captain America: Civil War, that won’t be to every taste. A talky, often ponderous exercise in comic book movie elephantiasis, it overdoses on characters, old and new, sometimes not even bothering to name them.

It is essential viewing for any fan of ’60s music history and The Rolling Stones’ place in it, even for those of us who haven’t forgotten Brian Jones and his place in it.

Actor-turned-director John Asher’s warm and fuzzy picture undercuts a big chunk of the goodwill it earns by parking multiple endings after its climax, and beating its sappy theme song — a cover of The Carpenters’ “Close to You” — into our heads, scene after scene.

The lyrics aren’t all that. But in an action film, it’s tempo that matters. The Rhythm Section never loses the beat.

Collision is the title of this South African variation on an Oscar winning theme. It’s a slow-footed, convoluted “coincidence” riddled take on the movie in which all of LA’s problems are laid bare thanks to a traffic pileup. So it’s not like director and co-writer Fabien Martorell was hiding his cards or anything.

The truth is far stranger. And Maloof and Siskel reveal it only gradually. They structure their documentary thusly — negatives found, fame and acclaim follow, a post-mortem triumph. And then the REAL Vivian starts to emerge.

The documentary does the best job of any film of rescuing the painter from the iconic, tragic artist who created the work by getting beyond the hair, the fashion sense and the eyebrow-lidded stare that one can’t help of think of when one hears the name Frida Kahlo.

The grey gathering gloom that hangs over Super Dark Times seeps into your bones.

The message delivered isn't subtle, with Kendrick delivering toss-away lines that suggest he doesn't even tolerate "the option" of divorce. But the bigger message might be that the Kendricks haven't sold out, "gone Hollywood" or watered down their Baptist beliefs based on efforts to reach an audience beyond the faithful.

The Square may be played in a thick Aussie dialect that’s hard to fathom. But thanks to bravura filmmaking that never violates the classic rules of the genre, they could be household names here someday, too.

It’s fair to say that this “Charlie Brown Christmas” length film is pretty much an instant classic.

When Evil Lurks is still one of the most original horror films of recent memory and a pretty convincing argument to turn out the lights when you’re not using them, no matter how scary the dark is, especially out in the sticks.

As we watch David Osit’s documentary Mayor, we see a public figure who is sweating the little things because the big things are all but off limits to him.

Cluzet brings a marvelous edge to the tit-for-tat exchanges that ratchet up the anger, which is pretty much what his character wants. Oh yes, he’s easy to hate.

Houston was a real mess, to be sure — probably abused as a child, certainly abused as a wife, ill-used by her crooked Dad, not saved by friends, family or the industries that made fortunes off her. But she was a “singular talent, a huge figure in the culture.” “Whitney” is a touching naked look at how that American Tragedy played out.

Days of Future Past is most everything we’d hoped the summer’s earlier popcorn pictures would be, most of all — fun.

The humanity of the performances and pathos of the tale shine through the tropes and cliches to make this smart movie with the dumb-pun for a title a worthy enterprise and well worth your time.

Writer-director Nida Manzoor’s debut feature is outlandish, over-the-top and furiously funny.

It’s disquieting and then disturbing, almost from start to finish.

No, it’s not particularly cinematic. It’s not a must that you catch this on the big screen. But if you’re a fan of the show, or have the faintest inkling that you could be one, you should. It’s not deep or all that sophisticated. Yet it’s always quick, and often damned funny.

It’s the filmmakers’ unsparing depiction of violence against children that overwhelms this story of supernaturalism or desperate, misguided superstition. That seems excessive, a shock-value cheat that gives this “wrenching nature of loss and grief” story a sense of overkill.

“Raya” is a pleasant enough kids’ adventure — “Raiders of the Lost Ark” meets “Mulan” who is now a “Tomb Raider.”

At 104 minutes, this CG/looks-like-stop-motion cartoon, drags. The screen is overcrowded with characters and gadgets that make it feel like a long, LEGO commercial.