Sam Adams

Like the monsters at its center, it’s built from parts that don’t always fit together, but dammit: It’s alive.

While it digs deep into the eerie insularity of mediocre TV, Kelly’s movie is also informed by the understanding that some of the best children’s entertainment is driven by a powerful sense of the uncanny.

A delightful journey through the back catalog of one of the most playful and quick-witted bands in rock history. But its most important aspect is the way it restores the conceptual underpinnings of Devo’s music that half a century of radio play and contextless streaming has stripped away.

It’s devastating in its delineation of how brutally a determined and unrestrained state can strip citizens of their essential rights, and exhilarating in the way they draw strength from one another. In other words, it’s about as important and timely as it’s possible for a movie to be.

Rebirth’s dinosaurs are everywhere, but the more you see, the less it means. They’re good for a scare now and then, but the sense of awe is long since gone.

Pitt can mock his absurdly good-looking younger self in part because he knows he’s got something more valuable now: the kind of magnetism that mere attractiveness can’t compete with.

The movie suffers from a constant lack, not of resources but of imagination, of inspiration—of, to put it simply, fun.

Mufasa was almost inevitably destined to be Barry Jenkins’ worst movie, and it is. But it’s not a black mark on his record, just a blank space on the timeline.

Good One is a quiet movie, not because it has little to say but because it wants you to listen, to pay as much attention to what’s left unsaid as to its meticulously crafted dialogue, and to the way silence can be a power as well as a punishment.

Subtitled “A Fable,” Megalopolis can be read as a parable of what happens when you let artists take over the world, and while that may not run more smoothly, it’s a heck of a lot more interesting.

Girls State’s most engrossing characters don’t wind up being those who prevail, but those who persist, who dust themselves off and find a way to keep going forward.

It captures what it’s like to live in this chaotic and deadening world so well it might be the movie of the year, and last year, and next year too. If a visitor from the future wanted to know what it was like to be alive right now, this is what I’d show them.

It’s a travesty, a disaster, a blight on the history of superheroes and cinema itself. I enjoyed the hell out of it.

The Zone of Interest is a movie about what you don’t see, and what you are forced to imagine.

At times, the movie simply feels overstuffed, mimicking the episodic structure of the book—if very few of its particulars—to the extent that it can feel like you’ve nodded off and woken up in the middle of a different story altogether. But its inventiveness is so vivid that no matter where you are at any given moment, you’re happy to be there

Barbarian doesn’t feel the need to signal that it’s better than genre clichés by constantly winking at them, nor does it deploy them with the punishing determination of David Gordon Green’s Halloween movies. But Cregger has thought about why they work, and he keeps paying them off in unexpected ways.

Like the Maysles’ brothers documentaries about Christo and Jean-Claude, which followed the environmental artists and life partners over the course of several decades, Dosa’s movie makes the case that their private bond is inextricable from their public work, and it’s a toss-up as to which is the greater monument.

The movie can’t compete with the Missions: Impossible and Fast and Furiouses for visual spectacle, so what it offers by way of compensatory heft is a tangled plot full of double-crosses and hidden identities, combined with a ponderous gait that suggests that more than the mere world is at stake.

If you’ve ever watched a slasher movie and rooted for the killer, you’re ready for Dashcam, a found-footage horror movie whose COVID-denying protagonist is the scariest thing about it.

A New Legacy is much slicker and more appealing than the original Space Jam, in no small part because James is approximately 50 times the actor Jordan is. But it’s also because corporations handing a bag of unrelated IP and ordering screenwriters to come up with a story around them is the template for most studio filmmaking now, if not all of contemporary existence.

And after Into the Spider-Verse and a handful of Lego Movies, it’s further proof that producers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller are an animation brand as reliable as Disney or Pixar, and a good deal more likely to provide something that’s not only sturdy but genuinely surprising.

Watching Thunder Force, it’s baffling to remember that this is Falcone’s fifth film as a director. There’s a convenience store fight so ineptly staged I had to watch it three times to decipher what was happening, and running gags that aren’t funny the first time and grow worse with every repetition.

This isn’t just a hand-drawn animated feature. It’s a movie that wants you to know it was made by hand.

The Borat sequel’s best moments are when it turns from mockumentary to straight-up doc, finding Americans who look past Borat’s bushy mustache and try to connect with the human behind it.

She Dies Tomorrow is a movie you could watch several times before you understand it. (After two viewings, I feel like I’ve barely cracked the surface.) But there’s something magnetic at its core that makes you want to return.

Just let Charlize Theron kick some ass, and leave the thornier moral questions for the sequel.

Irresistible might be a movie for the moment before or the moment after, but it feels entirely out of step with the one it’s in.

It has a loping, lowkey charm and doesn’t require too much of your attention, and the plot is predictable enough that you could miss substantial chunks of it and not lose your way. You’re in the passenger seat, and it’s a nice ride as long as you don’t care where you’re going.

Trolls World Tour was made to play in theaters that can’t open, celebrating a kind of performance that’s on indefinite hold. All I could feel watching its climax was how much I miss that feeling of being together in the dark, and how long it’ll be before it feels safe to do it again.

The biggest problem with The Hunt is its phenomenally lazy script, which is by Damon Lindelof and his frequent collaborator Nick Cuse. (Booting the movie into the next year prevented Lindelof, who created HBO’s Watchmen, from having his name on one of 2019’s smartest entertainments and one of its dumbest.)

Birds of Prey often leaves you puttering around the edges, being grateful for its modest achievements: fight scenes that are, if not exciting, at least coherently staged, and Robbie’s comic timing, which is so often sharper than the lines she has to deliver.

A documentary about one of the most mediated, image-conscious people on the planet sounds like an oxymoron, and though director Lana Wilson is no hagiographer, Miss Americana is hardly warts-and-all.

It’s frenzied, briefly infuriating, and eventually, grudgingly, satisfying, but it’s like being force-fed fandom: Your belly is filled, but there’s no pleasure in the meal.

Frozen 2 doesn’t have its forebear’s ungainliness; in many ways, it’s more efficiently engineered. But it’s also far less surprising, even taking into account that a sequel’s first task is to give people what they expect.

The movie works on you cumulatively, wearing down the impulse to roll your eyes at its familiar parts and leaving you to appreciate how snugly they fit together, and the way the whole thing purrs.

Flanagan is more faithful to "The Shining" than he was to Shirley Jackson’s "Hill House," but he ends each with a twist that functions as a smug reproach.

Smith, to his credit, comes closest to selling the screenplay’s grandiose nonsense — that is, after all, a movie star’s job, and the movie works best, to the extent it works at all, as a reflection on his 30-year career.

There’s a hint of a fugue state about it too, as if Rambo, and whatever audience for his movies remained, is trapped in an endless loop, savoring past traumas as a way to avoid facing the present.

Hobbs & Shaw is a ridiculous movie, and sometimes it’s in the best way. I laughed at the audacity of its stunts, while shaking my head a little bit at their silliness. But I also despaired a little bit when I checked the time at what felt like it might be the climax and discovered there was still an hour to go.

If Hereditary was about being trapped, Midsommar is about the terror of being let loose, the giddy, sickening rush of freefall. You laugh at its audacity, or maybe just to keep from losing your own grip on reality. By the time it’s over, you can’t wait for night to fall.

Far From Home, which brings back Homecoming director Jon Watts and screenwriters Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers, sometimes strains to match the intensity of the all-out battles in its dialogue scenes, and there are too many exchanges where characters reel off a dozen overlapping half-jokes in the hopes that you’ll come away with the feeling something funny was said.

Despite its promise to find fact in fiction, the movie’s made-up characters offer little in the way of ecstatic truths, but there’s a moment when Stefan van Dorp says he realized that the way to keep Dylan from clamming up was to never ask him a direct question. Rolling Thunder Revue leaves it to us to ask the questions, or just sit back and enjoy the show.

Between the exhilaration of great movies and the disappointment of bad ones lie the particular pleasures of trash. Ma isn’t a bad movie, and it’s sure as hell not trying to be a good one, but it scratches a particular itch that neither noble failures nor cranked-out hackwork can touch.

The best way to watch isn’t with oohs and aahhs. It’s with laughter, savoring the beauty and the absurdity of each elaborate spectacle. Each movement is a joke, and death is the ultimate punchline.

Despite its sizable budget, Detective Pikachu has a similarly run-down quality. What story there is barely makes sense, and it feels as if large chunks have been taken out at random. But in a world packed full of franchise-extending would-be blockbusters, there’s something strangely appealing about its patchiness.

Although it’s technically about saving the world (again), Shazam! plays out at eye level, grounded by the belief that who people love and where they feel they belong is stakes enough. If that violates the exigencies of franchise filmmaking, so be it.

It’s goofy as hell and borderline inexcusable at times, but it’s also kind of glorious.

Like last year’s "Ralph Breaks the Internet," the movie evolves into a parable about toxic masculinity and the danger of mistaking darkness for depth, but Lego Movie 2’s frequent flips to the real world subject its underlying text to a scrutiny it can’t bear, and take the fun out of reading between the lines. Lord and Miller have always known what they’re doing, but here it feels like they need you to know it, too.

Neither movie is perfect, and each underlines the other’s flaws, but if you’re watching one, watch Fyre, which is both less self-righteous and less inclined to punctuate its insights with Family Guy clips.

It’s also hard not to judge it against the movie it might have been. In 2000, Unbreakable felt like an anomaly, a superhero movie that steered clear of camp and dug into the genre’s bedrock. It could have been thrilling to extend that approach into 2019, where superheroes storm the multiplex on a monthly basis, and there’s no longer a need to laboriously explain the culture behind them. Unfortunately, it seems that laborious explanations are the part Shyamalan likes. He’s the evil mastermind detailing his plot for world domination, knowing that the villain’s monologue is a terrible cliché but unable to resist the urge.

Welcome to Marwen is a tragedy, not because of how Mark’s story ends, but because it’s the work of a filmmaker who’s never been more sure of his craft, and never less connected to anything resembling actual human experience. The movie’s underlying theme is that fantasy is an escape from the real world that can help people return to it, but it doesn’t seem like Zemeckis is ever coming back.

Wan not only embraces the inherent silliness of a hero whose signature power is talking to fish; he revels in it, finding the childlike awesomeness at its core. You can still see every plot beat coming from miles away, but it feels like destiny rather than repetition, the fulfillment of a promise every movie makes and few deliver on.

After a solid decade of Marvel movies modeled on the same template, it’s a thrill to watch one that’s allowed to find its own rhythms, to play with form and content without contorting the plot to fit in a minor character who might become important five movies from now.

Coogler’s Creed interrogated the Rocky series, including the great-white-hope subtext of the originals, from the ground up, but Creed II just skims along the surface.

Ralph Breaks the Internet is crammed with Easter eggs and fine details.

For Alvarez, Lisbeth Salander is an icon first and last, which is to say she never feels like an actual person. Here, she’s just a Goth version of James Bond, and if this is Alvarez’s audition for the next Bond movie, then give him the job — he’s exactly the kind of director with style to burn and not too many ideas who you wouldn’t mind seeing donate two years of his career to an aging franchise.

The Other Side of the Wind is a mess about messes, pretension about pretension, an exhausted movie about artistic exhaustion. And, eerily, it’s a movie about a director who dies too soon and is survived by his own unfinished work. Whether it’s great is almost beside the point. That it exists is astonishment enough.

It certainly doesn’t work in Mid90s’ favor that it is the third movie released in the past two months to focus on an outsider with a turbulent home life seeking out community in the world of skateboarding. Even without the unflinching documentary "Minding the Gap" and the sure-handed docufiction "Skate Kitchen," Mid90s would feel phony, but the former’s understated and thoughtful treatment of its protagonists’ real-life tragedies contrasts sharply with Hill’s attempts to wring pathos from his manufactured ones. Next to them, Mid90s just looks like a poser.

The movie’s most profound performance isn’t Stenberg’s, although their emotional lucidity makes them a good proxy for its intended young adult audience, but Hornsby’s, as a father fighting to prepare his children for a world in which the people who are supposed to protect them can be a profound threat.

Venom wants to be something different, an off-kilter dark comedy whose protagonist doesn’t need to be cleaned up so he can fight alongside Iron Man someday. But it’s also terrified to step out of line, and the stench of fear overwhelms whatever wisps of fresh air have sneaked through the cracks in the doorway.

Moore’s overarching points hit home with such force that sweating the details would be like picking fleas off a charging grizzly.

There’s a striking similarity in how American Dharma and "Fahrenheit 11/9" end, with the confident prediction that a revolution is coming, if it is not already here. Moore and Bannon are talking about opposite insurgencies, but they both see a country on the verge of explosion. Moore wants to light a match, and Morris wants to snuff one out.

Greene lets the contemporary resonances reveal themselves by implication rather than thrusting them upon us.

It’s a movie whose minor characters are cleanly etched without resorting to types, so richly detailed that you can imagine them living full lives off-screen, yet it reminds you that one of the virtues of movies is, or at least can be, their conciseness.

Skyscraper is like the last stage of a national trauma, the weakened form it takes before it passes out of the body politic for good.

For a massive summer tentpole, Fallout’s pleasures are gratifyingly straightforward, direct without being dumbed-down. It’s a meat-and-potatoes banquet, one that doesn’t need to be interesting to be satisfying.

Fallen Kingdom understands that, as much as Jurassic Park has the shape of an action movie, its roots are in horror, and Bayona takes evident glee in drawing out his scares.

It’s almost impossible to conceive of a movie better suited to the present moment of reckoning with sexual abuse, and one better equipped to extend and complicate that extraordinarily necessary conversation. The time for The Tale is now.

The action sequences in Incredibles 2, which was edited by Stephen Schaffer, are elegantly conceived and fluidly executed, as good as anything we’re likely to see on screen this year, in animation or live action, which only makes the rest of the movie seem that much clunkier by comparison.

Not too far beneath the movie’s superficial abrasiveness is a desperate desire to be loved, a puppyish determination that is both hard to resist and, eventually, difficult to endure.

It’s galling for a movie that costs so much and takes up so much cultural space to try to do so little, but it’s a familiar disappointment, like the dull ache of a tooth that only bothers you when you bite down on it wrong.

Sitting through its 2 hours and 30 minutes is like gorging on tapas: You wind up both overstuffed and unsatisfied.

There are moments when the movie takes us firmly by the hand and escorts us down a darkened path, and they lead to one of the most profound of communal pleasures: the sound of a movie audience screaming as one.

In a film of more prepossessing style, the glaring leaps of logic might be easier to overlook, or at least there’d be more incentive to do so, but the cellphone is Soderbergh’s enemy as well.

The best thing you can say about The Strangers: Prey at Night, the sequel to writer-director Bryan Bertino’s 2008 home-invasion creeper, is that it reminds you the original exists.

The back and forth between McAdams and Bateman is what makes Game Night sing.

Duncan Jones must have believed there was an incredible movie in his head. If there was, it’s still in there.

While the film is deliberately crude in some respects — Park once described his aesthetic as making sure that, no matter how carefully sculpted his clay figures were, he always left the thumbprints showing — it’s fastidiously detailed in others, dancing between broad humor and subtle, almost subliminal gags as it plays out the conflict between Neanderthals and their evolutionary successors.

Eastwood and Blyskal can’t seem to decide whether they want Stone et al. to be ordinary people thrust into an extraordinary situation or whether they were destined for greatness, so they waffle between foreshadowing and simply biding their time.

Great(ish) ideas and terrible ones sit cheek by jowl, original notions and blatant thievery corralled together with no discernible logic. It’s a horror movie one moment, a comedy the next, as if Netflix were streaming several different titles at once.

Focusing the camera on Vega, an openly trans actress (apparently Chile’s first), allows A Fantastic Woman to tell a different, richer kind of story and allows us to process the subtleties of her performance without always having to evaluate the success of the underlying transformation.

The world is not so full of beauty that one can wave away Mary’s visual majesty, especially now that its hand-drawn style is nearly a thing of the past. But the flaws in its writing are harder to overlook.

The Commuter has nothing so heady as the plight of the forgotten man on its mind. The movie, whose screenplay is credited to Byron Willinger, Philip de Blasi, and Ryan Engle, is flagrantly, even willfully silly, juiced with such corny audacity it frequently made me laugh out loud.

Like Barnum himself, it’s an elegant fraud, nice enough to look at as long as you don’t look too close.

Like many before it, The Last Jedi has already been hailed as the best Star Wars movie since The Empire Strikes Back, and while that’s true, it’s too faint a compliment. It’s a film of genuine beauty, one where you come away as eager to talk about the set design and the choreography as you do the fate of the galaxy or what might happen next.

The tone is tongue-in-cheek, with teeth gritted so hard you can taste just a hint of blood.

An engaging but safe journey towards a predetermined destination that engages the mind but not the heart. The movie doesn’t quite extract blood, sweat, or tears, even if it does toil.

The movie slips into a familiar rut and the scenery fades into the background.

Branagh is more preoccupied with the challenges of keeping a movie set in a series of steel tubes visually interesting than he is in engaging its story.

The whole movie starts to feel like a dare or elaborate game, the characters shuffling obediently about the board with no rules to guide them. Myths grow out of a need to understand the world, and to pass on an understanding of how to make our way through it, but Lanthimos just teaches you to be more cautious about his next film.

It’s easy to make The Meyerowitz Stories sound tortured, and less so to convey the immense but not blinding affection with which Baumbach treats his characters.

Barry is the closest thing Tom Cruise has played to a regular Joe in more than a decade, and the part isn’t a snug fit.

Vaughn hasn’t only run out of things to say but people to hate, and without that underlying aggression, the movie feels like it’s just going through the motions. Better luck next time, bruv.

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is a luxurious, appealingly daffy spectacle, a true vision unchecked by the standards of good taste, and that in and of itself is a quality worth savoring. But its design is pixel-deep, without the underlying thought that makes great science fiction worth revisiting.

At its headiest, it’s like Singin’ in the Rain with a souped-up engine, but even if Baby is the Gene Kelly of the getaway car, watching Baby Driver always feels like watching someone else do the driving rather than being behind the wheel yourself.

Cars 3 is still lower-tier Pixar.

Cruise seems weariest of all, flogging outdated merchandise he can’t even pretend to believe in. It’s not Cruise that feels ancient; it’s The Mummy.

This is a film of highs and lows; there is no middle ground, no moment of silence, reflection or introspection. “Joshua” stays frustratingly on message.

The relationship between these two Fassbenders is at the heart of Alien: Covenant, and it’s one of the few things that really entertain on a level beyond the technical.

Ponsoldt—who also directed The Spectacular Now and The End of the Tour—has a great feel for intimate conversation, but he’s all thumbs when it comes to The Circle’s attempt at stylized allegory.

With The Fate of the Furious, it feels like the movies have gotten as big as they can get, and the gleeful absurdity that drove them is losing ground to the specter of obligation.

Even at his most indulgent, Malick brings something to the movies that no one else ever has, a way of looking at the world that is easily imitated but has never been equaled. It’s worth sifting through the sometimes half-baked philosophizing and breathy poeticism to see through his eyes.

Where Hiddleston seems perfectly at home in the digital trenches, gamely swinging at fiendish foes to be added in postproduction, Larson looks like she’s staring into thin air. That leaves us with the monsters, who are, to be fair, mightily impressive.

Like Ghibli’s classic films, especially Hayao Miyazaki’s, it lavishes as much attention on the natural world as the creatures who inhabit it. But though it has the shape of a fairy tale, The Red Turtle’s perspective is distinctly adult, and its vision of nature is harsher than Miyazaki’s.

It’s the kind of movie that wouldn’t exist without awards, and makes a compelling argument for phasing them out altogether.

McGregor’s movie is a half-hearted transcript with no heart of its own, one that commits the ultimate sin of making you wonder whether the book it’s based on could possibly be any good in the first place.

As with most documentaries drawn from books, it feels like you’re getting the Reader’s Digest condensed version, handy for those who have 90 minutes to spare but no substitute for the real thing.

White Girl wants credit for its provocations, but it’s not provoking us towards any particularly insights, just pointing out that white privilege exists and then calling it a day. It’s “Woke af: The Movie.”

The Intervention is a movie whose small moments are worth savoring even when the big ones don’t come off as intended

Many of Herzog’s recent documentaries have been produced under the aegis of TV channels, and “Lo and Behold” often feels like a miniseries compressed into feature form. Its segments broaden an understanding of the internet’s impact, but they don’t meaningfully interact with each other.

It’s not a flawless movie, but there’s real magic in it, and that’s more important, and no less rare, than perfection.

Little Men is a deceptively slight movie which brings us towards the revelation that life is disappointment, and that happiness comes in being ready for it.

Indignation is a movie of great thoughtfulness and and rigor, but at times it feels like you’re buckled into Marcus’ straitjacket along with him, and you yearn to loosen the straps.

"Hillary’s America” isn’t designed to stand up to skepticism. It’s not intended to convince or to provoke thought, but to confirm the biases its intended audience already holds.

Because the Zero Days subjects who are best positioned to provide new information are also the least likely to talk, much of the movie is devoted to rehashing previously published reports, which Gibney does with both cogency and style.

Central Intelligence doesn’t feel like the birth of a great comic duo — more like a blind date that goes a little better than expected. The chemistry’s not there yet, but let’s give it another shot.

No matter where Ferguson goes, he finds a way to sit someone in a chair and point a camera at them, resulting in a movie whose stultifying dullness works against the urgency of its message.

Like any artist, Miller has the right to reinvent herself, but we don’t need one more director of winsome, Sundance-ready rom-coms. That said, as winsome, Sundance-ready rom-coms go, Maggie’s Plan is a pretty winning one.

There are moments in Sunset Song that rank with Davies’ most poignant.

The Cold Lands goes flat in this middle section. Gilroy’s visual style is strong, but he doesn’t frame the images to chart Atticus’ development, and Yelich, whose only previous screen experience is starring in the video Gilroy directed for R.E.M.’s “It Happened Today,” doesn’t suggest what’s going on beneath the layers of trauma and withdrawal.

It’s hardly a masterpiece, but then, it shows no signs it ever wanted to be, and sometimes that’s a relief.

Perhaps Gurfinkel means to suggest a society off-course, but the game feels rigged, his conception of male and female roles so limited that the characters have little choice but to fall in line.

Perhaps fittingly, part of the problem with Everyday is that it’s too short, both in micro and macro terms. Ninety-odd minutes isn’t long enough to make the full weight of the elapsed time register.

Paris Countdown has style to burn, where “style” means “uses lots of lighting gels and some camera flourishes,” but it doesn’t have a coherent point of view or a solid take on the genre.

Hellbenders mostly feels like a doodle, an amiable lark that will amuse genrephiles and anyone else with their sights set appropriately low.

Unfortunately, Kill Your Darlings doesn’t know what to do with Radcliffe and DeHaan, good as they are; there’s little sense of how they fit into a larger framework, or what bearing, if any, it might have on its more famous subjects’ later output.

Putting Faulkner’s dialogue in actors’ mouths only underlines the fact that it was never meant to be read aloud, and simply cutting between one perspective and the next does nothing to evoke the rushing stream of collective consciousness that runs through Faulkner’s South.

Once the battle is joined in earnest, what began as sharp-edged parody starts to feel more like a cheap imitation, even if it’s still shot through with a few priceless zingers. The tough thing about genre hybrids is that they have to fulfill both genres, and Grabbers only nails one of them.

At its best, though not often enough, 100 Bloody Acres is as mercurial as its central character, breezily offbeat one moment, spattered in gonzo gore the next. It’s as if the filmmakers ground the bits of other movies fine enough that it made a rich foundation for their own.

The movie is a character study in search of a character.

It’s a brief wisp of a movie, but one that’s not easy to shake.

Twenty Feet From Stardom touches on fascinating issues, but too often it does no more than that.

Watching the movie is like riffling through an author’s index cards: It’s all detail and no big picture.

If the idea is for the audience to feel similarly yanked around, then What Maisie Knew succeeds wildly, but it fails to bring much insight to what essentially amounts to a massive parental guilt trip.

Kon-Tiki, Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg’s modern dramatization, while well-acted and smartly filmed, rarely musters any actual sense of excitement.

This might be the best week for The Reluctant Fundamentalist to open or the worst, but the timing doesn’t matter when the powder is damp.

This story isn’t untold, just largely unknown. It’s a minor point, perhaps, but a sticky one, a needless elision that blurs the all-important question of how memories, and history, must be recounted to endure. One telling is not enough.

In spite of its attention-grabbing opening and provocative title, Free Angela And All Political Prisoners is less a work of agitprop than straightforward history, intriguing but never unsettling.

It’s hard to imagine a more potent symbol of good intentions gone to seed than the decrepit Buenos Aires building that gives White Elephant its title.

Gavilán’s performance bears out Parra’s advice to “hate mathematics and embrace chaos,” and falls between private and public, assurance and self-doubt.

Like a Rand Paul rally rendered in the style of Grand Theft Auto, Silver Circle engineers the perfect marriage of sub-par animation and sloppy thinking.

Part of Snoop’s protean quality comes from the fact that his rhymes only cut so far: He can pivot freely because he’s never dug in too deep.

Though it might be unreasonable to expect Karel and Manera to succeed where others have failed, simply punting on the amount of autobiography in Roth’s novels seems like a cheat. Sticking to what’s on the page pays off, especially with regard to Roth’s undervalued late novels, but also means he has them just where he wants them.

Shot with tiny digital cameras to minimize the sense of intrusion, The End Of Love sometimes feels like a home movie, but that’s also the source of its strength.

From its lone-wolf mythology to the high, pealing guitar wails in its score, The Sweeney plays like a forgotten ’80s action movie recently discovered in a dusty vault. A treat, perhaps, for those who prefer their cop thrillers pre-meta, but tiresomely plodding for everyone else.

It’s a deeply confused movie, sometimes productively so.

Petzold handles personal, formal, and political concerns in such perfect balance, it's difficult, and not especially desirable, to separate one from the next. The movie is dense but never feels it, assembled with easy mastery and engrossing throughout.

Without a source as rich as Jane Austen to draw on, Cheerful Weather feels incomplete, caroming off previous stories without forging its own way.

Newcomer Følsgaard is the wild card, but he manages to make the king both villain and victim, sometimes a vindictive schemer, at others far-eyed and helpless, a puppet for the forces behind him.

Trouble is, even a finely tailored suit needs a body to fill it, and A Man's Story never gets its man.

Yaron Zilberman's first feature has a solid structure, but as with a piece of music, the way it's played makes all the difference. His principal actors aren't great at faking their instrumental prowess, but they're perfectly in tune with each other, playing artists who've postponed life's decisions in the name of pursuing their craft.

The film makes a convincing argument that, in spite of some recent setbacks, movements for democratic change are alive and well, but it glosses over the problems that arise once the people have to implement the power they've seized.

The power of Middle Of Nowhere is cumulative, conveyed in sustained tone and deepening character rather than bravura sequences or explosive confrontations.

A toothless, insufferably smug satire using competitive butter-carving as a weak-tea stand-in for Midwestern politics, Butter is so contemptuous of its corn-fed rubes, it might as well be a Trojan horse crafted to prove the movie industry's liberal bias.

Thomas, credited as writer, producer, and executive producer, is the obvious auteur, orchestrating a star vehicle she lacks the screen presence to anchor.

Keep The Lights On feels less like a memoir than a collage made from diary scraps, evocative but not prescriptive.

The movie's attempt to position Detroit as the canary in the coal mine - there but for the grace of God goes any other city - falls flat, but it isn't a fatal flaw. It might not happen in any city, but for it to happen to one is bad enough.

Chen can't seem to decide whether he's making a fable or something more down-to-earth, but Sacrifice works either way, if not both at once.

Continental Drift feels less like an extension of a theatrical franchise than an episode of a middling TV cartoon, lolling around on territory that's already been settled. Jokes are recycled so frequently, it's as if comedy writing was eating a hole in the ozone layer.

For a movie that spends so much time extolling the virtues of the imagination to show so little of its own is more than ironic - it's offensive.

Sherman's feature turns out to be enamored of the kind of reality that gets left out of movies not because it's provocative or controversial, but because it isn't particularly interesting.

The heart of any concert movie is the concert itself, and in the case of Neil Young Journeys, it's a great one.

It's a tribute to Plaza and Duplass that they're able to make such slight material resonate at all, let alone with the poignancy they occasionally find.

While it's fascinating to observe the workings of the mammoth apparatus grafted onto an intensely personal decision, the movie's heart is the moments that take place in private (meaning, in this case, in front of only one camera).

Black seems to be aiming for some sort of loopy fantasia, a tragic fable about struggling with difference in the small-town South, but he's got more half-finished ideas than he can handle.

Sy and Cluzet give their parts more conviction than they deserve, even when the former is forced to re-enact the falsetto-singing-in-the-bubblebath bit from Pretty Woman. But even their energy can't revive a corpse this dead.

It's difficult to describe The Samaritan, in which Samuel L. Jackson plays an ex-con trying to return to the straight and narrow after 25 years inside, without overlapping a dozen other movies in his nigh-endless filmography, nor watch any scene without thinking of how many times he's drawn from the same bag of tricks.

Moving fluidly between gory sight gags and implied, insinuating terror, The Road is a movie made to be seen after midnight, preferably in a mildly dilapidated theater with a full house.

Portrait Of Wally tells a gripping story, but the filmmakers should have been more forthright about their own part in it.

It's true that Americans contribute disproportionately to the problem, but catering to the idea that we're separate from the rest of the world isn't part of the solution.

The character-building is proffered in bad faith, like every scene in Safe that doesn't involve bloodshed. Statham can sell a punch, but not his own vulnerability.

Lagos draws strong performances from her young cast, as well as David Oyelowo, who plays Ross' uncle and guardian, but they don't have much to work with.

Headhunters' title rapidly turns literal, and what seemed like a lightweight heist thriller careens into a bloody-minded game of cat and mouse.

Entering the minor canon of movies named after sports regulations - move over, "Offside!" - Don Handfield's Touchback takes a handoff from "Peggy Sue Got Married" and "It's A Wonderful Life" and runs it up the middle for a modest gain.

The movie fumbles badly when it's time to turn those actions toward resolution, forcing an ending that seems both arbitrary and cruel. At under 80 minutes, the movie is terse enough that it could do without trumped-up events.

There are many appalling moments witnessed and described in Lee Hirsch's documentary Bully: children beaten and humiliated, ostracized by their peers and misunderstood by their parents, left to face an apparently heartless world without a soul to turn to.

The improvised dialogue takes hairpin turns, some less fruitful than others, holding onto just enough traces of structure to sustain the film's brief length.

For all its untrammeled excesses - and Kaye has proved that he'd sooner torpedo his own career than accept a little constructive trammeling - Detachment is almost forcibly moving, body-slamming its audience into submission.

Good For Nothing is billed as the first Western shot in New Zealand, but that tourist-brochure distinction pales besides its more pungent claim to fame as the first Western whose hero spends the entire film attempting to overcome a bout of erectile dysfunction.

At least Black Butterflies gets the tortured-soul part right.

The fact that Last Days Here cares more about Liebling's personal redemption than his professional triumph is ultimately a saving grace, a telling demonstration of the film's well-ordered priorities.

As Wesley Deeds - get it? - Perry is stripped of Madea's fat suit and fright wig, but his performance is so muted, he might as well be swaddled in cloth.

Like its characters, who can't believe their stable nation could be threatened by ethnic unrest, Cirkus Columbia looks to the past, evoking the kind of unreal, vaguely politicized tales that were once the lifeblood of arthouse cinema.

During a dinner with Stephanie's colorfully ethnic family, including a squandered Debbie Reynolds, the reaction shots arrive with bludgeoning regularity, and the soundtrack's burbling organ serves as an incessant reminder not to take anything seriously. Fortunately, there's no danger of that.

Growing up, Smith relates, he thought Halston - born Ray Halston Fenwick in Des Moines, Iowa - "was the coolest," which sets the tone for the movie's googly-eyed viewpoint.

Tran's visual precision is betrayed by his jumbled script, which fails to impose a cinematic structure on the source material.

Levinson stuffs the movie with so many emotional cross-currents and minor revelations that it's hard to keep them all straight, but the movie works the audience's nerves with enough determination to get under the skin and stay there, a sensation that comes awfully close to an earned emotional response.

Chances are, Norman would have seemed like a retread whenever it came out, but it does the movie no favors to release it in the shadow of "Terri" and "Submarine," both far more compelling portraits of high-school loners, and both released to DVD in the last few weeks.

Perhaps it's a tribute to the breadth of Goodman's life that even after 90 minutes, it feels as if we've just scratched the surface.

Perhaps it's unfair to compare Circumstance to the very different "Persepolis," but it's hard not to drift off to Marjane Satrapi's more pungent and personally inflected evocation of the same terrain, in which the characters are as vivid as their surroundings.

The credibility Bowen and Amy Seimetz, as his fearful ex-girlfriend, bring to their roles nearly legitimizes the movie's underlying silliness.

The actors' charisma is a draw, but mostly, the movie relies on Pavlovian reaction to the genre: The audience has its designated place as surely as any element in Cavayé's relentless machine.

The movie's gathering of third-rank action heroes provides sufficient brawn but precious little onscreen charisma, although Brian Cox's reliable bluster lights up his handful of scenes as a bellicose baron.

While the back-and-forth between various parties grows tiresome through repetition, Rapt rallies with a lengthy epilogue in which the aftermath of Attal's ordeal proves more draining than the physical privation that preceded it.

As an actor, Turturro brings wit and a healthy sense of absurdity to many of his roles, but his directorial efforts are notably lacking in self-awareness or restraint.

Perhaps Brannaman's art is too subtle and instinctive to be captured on camera, but it's a shame Meehl doesn't do a better job of capturing exactly what makes him, by all accounts, a miraculously successful trainer.

A fine enough piece of work, but it's a shame Werner Herzog didn't get to Gunther Hauk first.

The subtitles and period setting conjure a smattering of respectability, but in essence, this is arthouse pap, particularly for older audiences, turning the past into a concatenation of worn-out tropes that comforts as it distorts. Think of it as instant mashed potatoes for the soul.

There's something grating about the way The Last Mountain keeps returning to picket-line confrontations between environmental activists.

Like a well-crafted garment, it's seamless. There's plenty of amour, but not enough fou.

Wexler breaks the cardinal rule of first-person documentaries: Don't make yourself the subject unless you're worth paying attention to.

The character's miraculous gift never plays as more than a melodramatic contrivance-it's a gimmick, not an outgrowth of faith. The movie reaches for the heart, but only comes back with a balloon filled with fake blood and chicken livers.

Bal mingles the bitter and the sweet, but it gets mired in its own stickiness.

Not withstanding rich performances from Wilson and Lonsdale, the film never comes close to embodying that level of complexity.

It's to the film's credit that its inescapable conclusion seems in doubt until the very end.

If anyone's likely to have trouble with Carancho, it's fans of Trapero's previous films, who won't be able to help noticing the sizeable step he's taken toward conventionality.

Rather than peering into the heart of darkness, North just slaps a coat of Art atop her true-crime subject, and the upshot is akin to an especially pretentious episode of "Law & Order."

Zandvliet's direction lacks Steen's gradations. The handheld, rubbed-raw style wears thin after a while, growing monotonous and wearying.

For Washington, the wounds of the past are just beneath the surface, as close as the bullet holes under her kitchen wallpaper.

For the most part, Neshoba is content to treat progress as a matter of reconciling with the past rather than dealing with the present.

A defiant, mad gesture of a film that features some of the most exhilarating sequences in movie history.

There are moments when Big Wednesday strains under the weight of Milius’ ambition, but they’re balanced with lively authenticity and a brisk lack of sentiment.

Viewers may not realize how far they've been pulled in until the movie ends, and they might feel a sense of loss that it can't keep going just a little while longer.

While it doesn’t have the lunatic fervor of The Good, The Bad’s climatic cemetery shootout, For A Few Dollars more feels like its successor’s equal, which is about as great a compliment as I can bestow.

The result is not to make the emperor sympathetic so much as it is to tug at the mask of despotic glory. In the end, he is only a man.

The visual scheme of Leone’s movie leaves no doubt as to his familiarity with Kurosawa’s movie. Plopping Eastwood’s roving gunman down in the middle of a dusty street with opposing gangs lodged at either end, Fistful replicates Yojimbo’s visual plan to an almost distracting extent. The bigger problem with Fistful is that Leone is still attempting to work with a conventional plot, which never plays to his strengths.

Miyazaki so effectively captures the feeling of a child’s life, inside as well as out, that little ones are often mesmerized by the movie, and adults are returned to a time when they could enjoy mystery for its own sake.

The movie's exterior is solid, but it's hollow inside, like a safe filled with air.

What redeems the movie, and then some, is the soulful weariness of Clooney's performance, which is in some ways an earthier and less glib version of the go-go axeman from "Up In The Air."