Scott Foundas

Director James Gunn’s presumptive franchise-starter is overlong, overstuffed and sometimes too eager to please, but the cheeky comic tone keeps things buoyant — as does Chris Pratt’s winning performance as the most blissfully spaced-out space crusader this side of Buckaroo Banzai.

Perverse, funny, and ultimately profound.

Under Mangold’s sure if uninspired hand, the new Yuma is reasonably exciting and terse, and, like its predecessor, built around a memorable villain of ambiguous villainy.

To call Shine a Light a documentary doesn’t quite nail it; it’s more of a macro-mentary, shot in such tight close-up that you can see the fillings in Mick’s teeth and the sweat stains in the armpits of his sequined magenta top.

Not as insightful as "Topsy-Turvy" or "Vanya on 42nd Street" about the process of putting on a show, it's nonetheless a fascinating meeting of the minds -- between iconic New York indie filmmaker Michael Almereyda and laconic American cowboy and dramatist Shepard.

It casts an increasingly hypnotic spell, thanks in no small measure to Wright -- a fearless actress (and the real-life wife of writer-director Ruscio) who brings this sometimes despicable, often heartbreaking character to life with every atom of her being.

“Dogtown and Z-Boys” meets “The Lives of Others” in This Ain’t California, a spirited not-quite-documentary portrait of the skateboarding subculture that flourished in East Germany in the early 1980s.

It’s a familiar tale, but one told by Perry with immense filmmaking verve and novelistic flourish, and acted by an exceptional ensemble cast.

Chandrasekhar is a master forger of images and situations from horror movies past, but unlike Wes Craven did in "Scream," he doesn't build on them in any way, and the result is the opposite of what's intended; the movie is stultifying.

Brings a fresh perspective to age-old human dilemmas.

At more than two hours, The Dance of Reality unquestionably has its longueurs, but on balance it is alive with enough images and ideas for several movies — as if Jodorowsky were afraid he might have to wait 20 more years before making another.

Touches of apocalyptic comedy run throughout Nightcrawler, but the movie’s overriding tone is one of strident, finger-wagging self-seriousness.

A low-key but powerfully affecting urban drama that tells a familiar story — of drugs, power and respect on the inner-city streets — with such unusual authenticity and dramatic force that it’s as if we’re seeing it for the first time.

If nothing else, Mistress America confirms Gerwig as one of the great, fearless screen comediennes of her generation — a tall, loose-limbed whirligig who careers through scenes with the beatific ditziness of a Carole Lombard or Judy Holliday.

The film’s appeal is at once sentimental and perverse: It’s not every day that you get to see a 92-year-old woman soloing on “Should I Stay Or Should I Go.” Not surprisingly, a feature remake is already in the works.

Garbus embraces Simone in all her multitudes and contradictions — or at least as many of them as can be comfortably squeezed into a 100-minute running time.

Testud, who learned to speak Japanese phonetically for the role, is nothing short of sublime, her expressive face morphing from tear-stained frustration to slaphappy delirium with the speed of lightning flashing across the Tokyo sky.

Now and then, Winterbottom nudges the movie in the direction of narrative... But even when it’s just ambling about, The Trip to Italy casts a warm, enveloping spell.

A tightly focused romantic drama that exudes the narrative terseness of a good short story and the lucid craftsmanship of a filmmaker in full command of the medium.

A big, unruly bacchanal of a movie that huffs and puffs and nearly blows its own house down, but holds together by sheer virtue of its furious filmmaking energy and a Leonardo DiCaprio star turn so electric it could wake the dead.

The emotional truthfulness of Clean enters into our bloodstreams with its muted vigor, and we find ourselves getting hooked by this tale of getting unhooked.

Holmes may not have the polished technique of a formally trained actress, but she has an innate capacity for drama, and whether or not she can go on to play roles further removed from her own experience, she’s electrifying in this one.

As in all Godard’s best work, precise meaning is subsumed in an exhilarating tide of sound and light, impish provocations and inspired philosophizing.

So tastefully mounted and brilliantly acted that it wears down even the corset-phobic’s innate resistance to such things.

If this is what qualifies, as some critics have suggested, as an artistic advance for Mr. Park, let us pray for a hasty retreat.

It’s the sort of buoyant, all-ages entertainment that Hollywood has been laboring to revive in recent years (most recently with Hairspray) but hasn’t managed to get right until now, and the glue holding it all together is the incomparable Adams (an Oscar nominee for 2005’s Junebug), who gives the kind of blissful screwball performance that seemed to go out of fashion after "I Love Lucy" left the airwaves.

A fast-paced valentine to Russell and his quixotic vision so rife with underdog victors and hairpin twists of fortune that, if it weren’t all true, no one would believe it.

So weirdly fascinating is the tale of the Angulo clan that one wishes The Wolfpack were that much sharper, more searching and coherently organized. Still, there is much to enjoy in director Crystal Moselle’s debut documentary feature.