Stephanie Zacharek

What Lawrence does in Die, My Love is so delicately textured, even within its bold expressiveness, and its fiery anger, that it leaves you scrambling for adjectives. It’s the kind of performance you go to the movies for, one that connects so sympathetically with the bare idea of human suffering that it scares you a little.

It’s the kind of story that was made for the intimacy of the movie theater, and for the possibly lost tradition known as movie-date night. As ambitions go, that’s a pretty noble one.

Mulligan is terrific here, and restrained in a way that suggests an actorly generosity unusual for someone so young: Her scenes with Fassbender don't so much say "Look at me" as "Look at him."

The picture is celebratory, in its own quiet way, as well as clear-eyed.

Doctor Strange has one significant quality that most Marvel adaptations lack: A sense of humor about itself, which it wears as lightly as the most gossamer Cloak of Levitation.

Ghost Town is a rarity, a contemporary romantic comedy that honors the traditions of the genre without checking them off some plasticized list. The picture is breathing, and alive, every minute.

Curiously and disappointingly lethargic.

I suspect many Cash fans will think it's too conventional. But I think its conventionality is part of its power.

Subtle emotional intelligence has always distinguished Bellocchio's filmmaking, and Dormant Beauty is constructed from fine-grained layers of it, the filmmaker's equivalent of a master cabinetmaker's craft.

Unsettling, energizing and more than a little mystifying, Amer is the kind of movie that may leave you feeling indifferent or puzzled at the end. But damned if it doesn't return, days later, to visit - kind of like a killer in black leather gloves.

This is a straightforward family comedy-drama, a movie made for adults, and one that actually gives its actors – among them Chris Pine, Elizabeth Banks, Michelle Pfeiffer and Philip Baker Hall – something to do. That's more of a rarity on today's landscape than it should be.

Match Point is a fatally neat exercise in detached craftsmanship, and maybe that's the best we can expect from Allen at this point.

The triumph of Still Alice is that it’s not about an illness; it’s about a person.

To hell with that childlike sense-of-wonder crap: Despicable Me, instead of trying to return adults to a false state of innocence, reminds us that we all started out as ill-mannered little savages.

Bully is much better when it sticks to simple storytelling. And storytelling, not grandstanding, is the thing that just might grab the attention of, say, school administrators, people who can have some effect on how bullies are dealt with.

Silverman has taken serious, or at least semi-serious, roles before, but she's never had a part that demanded so much of her. She has been open about her own battles with depression, but what makes her turn here work is that it isn't nakedly expressive.

Moss is good at these roles, so good that she should probably take a break from them. But The Invisible Man is still an excellent vehicle for her; you can’t imagine the film without her.

The Batman is a moderately well-made film, with some appealing performances, most notably from its star, Robert Pattinson, and from its cryptically glamorous Catwoman, Zoë Kravitz. And it looks like a movie, which used to be something you didn’t even have to say: The Batman may be dark, literally—its doomy, underlit ambience comes courtesy of cinematographer Greig Fraser—but at least it’s pleasurably cinematic, a picture that creeps to the edges of the big screen with an operatic flourish.

This is a gangly, confusing sprawl, and yet there are enough patches of beauty scattered throughout that it's impossible to reject it wholesale.

This new Suspiria is bland, grisly, boring and silly. There is nothing poetic or erotic about it.

The big problem with it is that the setup is treated as just that, a scheme around which many things that are intended to be funny (but aren't very) are packed like ice around a fish.

One of those gentle surprises, a kids' picture made with enough thought and care to keep adults entertained too.

By the end of Wonderland, I might have felt completely pistol-whipped if not for the gracefulness of some of the movie's actors.

The sad thing about All the Real Girls is that Green seems more in love with his perceived unconventionality than he does with his characters. If that's not a town without pity, I don't know what is.

How much human love is too much for an elephant? That's the question Lisa Leeman's One Lucky Elephant attempts to answer, without sentimentality but with the right amount of compassion.

A mildly rousing and reasonably satisfying picture about one man's efforts to mend the rifts among his countrymen.

The chief problem with Thank You for Smoking, isn't that it's over the top; it's that it fits so neatly UNDER the top.

Kentis and Lau succeed in doing what all filmmakers worth their salt strive to do: They make us care about their characters.

Lowery stumbles, working too hard to squeeze a response from us.

An imperfect work of genius, a satire of Hollywood excess and vanity that dares to tread territory laden with minefields.

When Craven says "Jump!" we all do it at once, and giggle at how easily we've fallen under the spell. The key is that Craven is laughing with us, not at us.

Wonderstruck embraces so many shimmery, evanescent ideas, it’s a marvel that any one picture—let alone one you can take your kids to—can hold them.

I don’t think you could tell this story properly or honestly without being forthright about the horrors of the Pacific Theater, and as Gibson dramatizes them, they put Doss’ actions in jaggedly sharp perspective.

We all make mistakes, and we all have the ability to wound when we’re just trying to be clever: Holofcener makes allowances for all of that. But she always favors warmth over sarcasm. And as if she could read our minds, she puts in her characters’ mouths words that we ourselves have sometimes failed to find the guts to say.

22 Jump Street isn't uncharitable or mean-spirited; at worst, it's just confused. Tatum is, predictably, adorable. His Jenko is a pumped-up naïf bumbling through life with a crooked smile, and Hill again makes a great sparring partner.

To paraphrase a line from another Dickens' novel, Nicholas Nickleby is too much like a fragment of an underdone potato. The chef tended it very, very carefully, and still, it didn't turn out quite right.

The United States vs. Billie Holiday may be at times unfocused, but it’s never boring. And as always, Daniels rounds up the finest performers and gives them great characters to dig into.

A Quiet Place Part II is effective, all right—Krasinski holds all the keys to turning us into nervous wrecks by the end. But just because you hold the keys doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to use them all. And a horror movie that gives us space to breathe is also more likely to hit us where we live.

Craig has one clear advantage over Michael Nyqvist, the actor who played the same character in the Swedish Girl movies: He has erotic charisma to spare, as opposed to Nyqvist's perfunctory, doughy sexuality.

As human beings, we're geared to desire an actual plot in our movies, and I regret to inform you that nothing really happens in Syndromes and a Century -- and yet the experience of the movie is all about the NOT happening.

Autumn de Wilde’s bright and lively adaptation of Austen’s 1815 novel Emma — its title is Emma., with a definitive period — feels both modern and authentic in the best way, inviting everyone, diehard Austenites and newbies alike, into its embrace.

As written by Hardy, Bathsheba is bracingly whole and human; here she’s been outlined, and thus circumscribed, by an eager student’s highlighter.

Jonze's ideas, visual and otherwise, spill out in a faux-philosophical ramble that isn't nearly as deep as he thinks it is; at best, it's a scrambled tone poem. Even the look of the picture becomes tiresome after a while -- it starts to seem depressive and shaggy and tired.

If you boil the psychology of Collateral down to its essence, what you get, mostly, is Vincent badgering Max for not having enough chutzpah -- in essence, for not being enough of a tough guy.

Berlinger covers lots of territory, including heartrending accounts from the family members of some of Bulger's victims. The whole exercise is fascinating, if vaguely unsatisfying.

What comes through most vibrantly in Mayor of Sunset Strip, shining through Bingenheimer's low-key, laid-back, almost monotone manner of speaking, is how much the music has meant to him, even if it never exactly lined his pockets.

Joyous and funny even as it strikes the occasional melancholy chord, Blinded by the Light is a testament to the small miracle of how the right music manages to find us at just the right time, even when it has to travel from New Jersey all the way to that four-letter word, Luton.

Girls Trip is just fun, a movie that—even within the context of its broad, exaggerated humor—never seems to be trying too hard.

The film is striking, at times even piercing, for the way it infiltrates some universal realities of marriage.

A character who triumphs over a clumsy story line is a very rare creature. It takes a smart director and a sensitive actor to bring him to life, and to keep him breathing all the way through.

Get On Up isn't a perfect-picture; there are moments of awkwardness, little gambles that don't quite pay off. But it's one of those experiments that's both flawed and amazing, a mainstream movie (with Mick Jagger as one of its producers) that fulfills old-fashioned, entertainment-value requirements, even as it throws off flashes of insight.

This is a movie about the way resilience can blossom from vulnerability. No child asks to be a victim of war; sometimes survival, with your soul intact, is the best possible outcome.

Shazam! just breathes, and it’s bliss.

This is a shimmery beaded curtain of a movie, a slight, charming picture that's almost all facade. But what a facade!

The colors of The Room Next Door are its secret message, a language of pleasure and beauty that reminds us how great it is to be alive. If it’s possible to make a joyful movie about death, Almodóvar has just done it.

Needs much more energy and kinetic flow -- less dolor and more dolomite.

If this Hamlet weren't so perfectly conceived visually, it would probably stand solidly on the basis of its acting alone.

It's an unapologetic dazzler, which is why it's never overwhelmed by its themes.

A quiet, raggedly beautiful mini-epic, Eden isn't a success story; it's a failure story. But it's also a glittering acknowledgement of the fact that failing is the only path toward growing.

Rudd's timing has always been good, but in I Love You, Man he gives the finest performance of his career, breaking his comic beats down into weird and wonderful fractional increments. It's as if he's invented a new comedy dialect.

The Walk, in its last half at least, is a dazzling piece of work, particularly in 3-D; even so, its most luminous effect is an actor.

Which would all be well and good, if only Arcand's approach weren't so deliberate and stupefyingly superior.

Dior and I is a great fashion movie, but it's also a superb picture about the art of management, applicable to any field.

There’s something about A Complete Unknown that pushes against traditional Dylan worship and cuts a path toward something far more beautiful, flawed, and human.

With I Care a Lot, Blakeson (whose credits include The 5th Wave and The Disappearance of Alice Creed) takes the easy way out, showing smart women doing bad stuff without bothering to write actual characters for them.

Reverence can sap the life out of a film—that and too much acting. And boy, is there a lot of acting in The Bikeriders.

Even though it has some amusing moments, Swimming Pool crawls entirely too slowly toward -- well, toward nothing much.

Undeniably pleasant, but British actress Samantha Morton quietly explodes it: Her performance is like nothing I've seen in recent years.

The picture throws off an aura of wistfulness, which may be Mann's acknowledgment that of course he can't re-create the past. The best he can do is to honor the idea of it, storybook-style, and to remind us that before there was gangsta, there were gangsters.

Her Smell is an uneven movie, occasionally dipping into clichés. But Moss’s performance works as a distillation of one of Love’s signature lines, from the song “Doll Parts”: Becky knows what it costs to be the girl with the most cake.

The modest pleasures of The Nice Guys lie not in following the wiggy story twists but in watching Gosling and Crowe mix it up and mess everything up.

It's so almost moving -- a meticulously crafted mechanical bird -- that it nearly feels like the real thing.

Just doesn't give us enough to hold onto, perhaps partly because it's executed with so much restraint and subtlety. It's often a tense, uncomfortable little movie.

More Than Honey isn't just 91 minutes of dead bees. Who could bear that? Instead, it's a delightful, informative, and suitably contemplative study of the bee world and the bee-population crisis, though in the end it does offer enough dewdrops of hope to fill up a bluebell or two.

If you’re not already familiar with the play, you may find yourself a little lost in Hedda—or perhaps just bored.

The movie swirls around Kline a little too much -- he's a brilliant comic actor, but he isn't allowed to cut loose as much as we'd like, to show us the slightly loony person we know is lurking beneath this ultrasane. character's veneer.

The pleasures Get Low offers lie in the process of simply getting there, in watching performers take material that has some limitations (the script, inspired by a true story, is by Chris Provenzano and C. Gaby Mitchell) and turn it into something that has the rough-hewn, no-nonsense veracity of folk music.

If you’ve come to The Devil Wears Prada 2 looking for laughs, be prepared for a feathery fringe of existential angst on the side. Yet I'd argue that that makes The Devil Wears Prada 2 more pleasurable than less.

Now that those rights are even more imperiled than before, a movie like Emilia Pérez—one that, instead of pleading for trans acceptance merely treats it as a given—feels even more like movie fireworks, fierce and glorious, a radical act of the imagination with kindness in its heart.

Whatever Patel is going for, he's at least singing out with conviction—not just from the diaphragm but also from the muscle better known as the heart.

There’s a great deal of slow story buildup until the last 10 minutes or so, at which point about three movies’ worth of plot hit at once. This gives the picture’s ending a rushed feel that’s vaguely unsatisfying. It’s not that you want things to be harder for Sandra; but her challenges—particularly her emotional conflicts—might have been explored in a little more depth.

It has to be more of the same, but better, and the movie doesn’t quite succeed. You can’t really make a bigger, better Ant-Man — that just means defying the diminutive, carefree scale that made the earlier movie work in the first place.

John Lewis: Good Trouble shows us an activist and an effective politician — as well as a powerful and passionate public speaker — who has devoted his life to public service, often putting himself at risk to defend basic human rights.

Even though this is a light, cheerful picture about family relationships, it never feels overplayed -- its tone is bright without being garish. And it moves breezily.

If you boil Thirteen down to its flimsy bones, you'll find that it's not really so much about peer pressure in contemporary teen life as it is a story about a classic bad egg. That right there dilutes its highfalutin aspirations.

Matchstick Men isn't even remotely intricate; it's not even particularly interesting.

Perceptive, probing and ultimately devastating, The King is for anyone who cares about where this country has been and where it’s headed.

There's a lot that works in Heartbeats - so much that its flaws stand out in disappointingly sharp relief.

This is a story about following one’s dreams and then learning there’s a lesson attached to those dreams—you might catch more than a perfume whiff of sanctimoniousness here. But it’s rare to find movies that value the mere idea of beauty, and this one—directed by Anthony Fabian—does so unapologetically.

As usual for Farhadi’s films, A Hero is beautiful to look at. Even the interior scenes are brushed with a golden light, and sometimes that light feels like a benediction. But as humanist works go, A Hero demands extra measures of patience on the viewer’s part.

Shanley offers no resolution to this Sharks vs. Jets conflict. For that, we have to wait for "Doubt! The Musical."

Being fortunate enough to survive a catastrophic event doesn’t necessarily protect you from future heartbreak. Rebuilding Paradise recognizes that, though it also offers some cautious optimism. This is a movie about how life goes on, in defiance of whatever may have been burned away.

This an unnervingly compassionate portrait of a truly bad egg.

An entertaining botch of a movie.

Crisp, informative documentary.

Sweet, modest and quietly classy, it's the perfect late-summer entertainment -- and it also happens to feature the most relaxed and nuanced performance Renée Zellweger has given in years.

Big Gold Brick may be a bit too enamored with its own quirkiness, but everything Garcia does, no matter how outlandish, feels perfectly natural.

Here, the effect of merely hearing his voice and watching his hands is so intimate that we walk away with an almost tactile sense of who Martin Margiela is, the way we confidently, yet only sort of, know what the man in the moon looks like. His mystery becomes our secret too.

It's the kind of movie whose value lies between the lines, not directly on them, and if the pleasures it offers are slender ones, at least there's something good-hearted about them.

The joy of Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe is that these two haven’t gotten the memo.

It has the wiggy energy of a workplace that might sometimes drive you crazy, but is never boring. This is a great workplace comedy about the ways in which people who seem to be holding you back can also, sometimes, be the ones pushing you forward. Crawling under your desk gets you nowhere. It also means you miss all the fun.

The Boys in the Band is anything but a relic. This version, produced by Ryan Murphy and performed by the same cast that appeared in the play’s 2018 revival on Broadway, is like an unusually strong telescope, giving us a clear and vivid view into a not-so-distant past.

Even if [Garland] offers no clear solutions to this crisis, he throws his full weight into exploring it. Just be warned that the path he cuts is a thorny one.

In its craftsmanship and soul, it has more in common with the 1990s films of action genius John Woo than with anything that’s been extruded through the franchise Play-Doh pumper in recent years. If an action movie can be elegant and thoughtful, this one is.

Although Pieces of April doesn't quite stick together as a whole -- in some places it's conventional and a bit contrived, particularly the ending, which feels rushed and a little tough to buy -- Hedges peppers it with enough wonderful moments that you can't help warming up to it.

Cinderella Man is ostensibly the kind of old-fashioned drama that sends audiences home with a satisfied glow. But like so many of Howard's movies, there's something canned and phony about it -- it left me feeling cooked and dehydrated, as if I'd fallen asleep on a tanning bed.

But Bad Santa does feature one last turn from the late John Ritter as a twittery department-store manager (his name, Mr. Chipeska, is a stroke of brilliance that I still can't quite put my finger on).

Materialists is more bittersweet than sweet—which is what makes it so wonderful, in a wistful, elusive way.

There's something grand and enveloping about Fearless.

With seamless grace, Zimny matches vintage footage of Springsteen and the band with their current-day versions; we see how the young faces have blended into the old. Aging, because it means surviving, is the best.

The Phoenician Scheme has none of the lavish, kooky excess of, say, The Grand Budapest Hotel. And the plot, with its fixation on intricate, not-quite-cricket business deals, is—let’s just come out and say it—boring. But Anderson seems to be expressing an indistinct dissatisfaction with the current world order in the best way he can: in a parade of color that’s somehow less colorful than usual.

Movies are often about so much more than what they’re about, and the riches of Louder Than Bombs—which borrows its name from a compilation album by The Smiths—lie in the way Trier reveals the secret fears and longings of nearly every character, showing, ultimately, that even when people fail to connect, that itself can be a kind of connection.

It's a movie that needs to look down its nose for its laughs, which generally isn't the best place to find them.

"Gunsmoke" meets "Planet of the Apes" in Martin Scorsese's overlarge, overcooked epic of 19th century Manhattan. You should see it anyway.

This is a scrapbook, a happy jumble, of many of the things we instinctively respond to in movies: color, shape, sound and movement, all intensified by heightened emotion.

Unwieldy, long-winded, self-indulgently nutso and, in places, very, very boring. It also caps off its two-and-a-half-hour run time with an extended finale – partially orchestrated to David Bowie's "Cat People" theme song, no less – that I could watch again and again with pleasure

Less like a movie than an interpretive-dance piece, with Cage as its lurching, depressed-satyr star.

The thrill of Tony Scott's Unstoppable, in which a runaway freight train hurtles through rural - and toward not-so-rural - Pennsylvania, is that its setup asks us to believe only in human ineptitude.

My heart belongs to Bear Elinor, whose movements and mannerisms are a tender echo of Human Elinor's – her character is designed and drawn just that carefully.

God’s Creatures is a story about women doing the best they can by one another in a place where the odds are stacked against them. It’s a chilly film but not a heartless one; sometimes the nature of forgiveness is captured best in a small sliver of light.

A joyful mix of high and low humor, pulled off with style and an eye for glamour (Danielle Hollowell deserves special praise for her costumes; she's the high priestess of fitted snakeskin).

A picture that's by turns inventive, tender and boring, and one that uses a variety of novelty point-of-view techniques: If Penisvision isn't your thing, then Vagin-o-rama just might float your boat.

This is a movie about two people in pain; the last thing they need is for Mendes to turn his cool camera on them. But that's all Mendes knows how to do. He's a clinical director, and whatever feeling he puts into a movie is measured out in careful quarter-teaspoon increments.

Willis' John McClane, with that sly, sideways smile, is like an old acquaintance you don't mind running into. He may be older and balder, but he's none the worse for the wear. And he can still take a punch.

Is it entertainment? Is it satire? Is it art? It's probably a little of all three, and yet ultimately not quite enough of any.

The movie perfectly captures the vibe of late high school, in a way that's both of its time and timeless.

By the time Lion has really begun, it already seems half over. That’s not to say the picture isn’t satisfying in a straight-to-the-gut way.

Behind the gloss of Vogue, a revealing look at work, creativity and two strong women

The Miseducation of Cameron Post may not hit as hard as it should. But it at least suggests that the only real losers in life are those who presume to read God’s mind.

Rocketman is magnificent and ridiculous, a feathered melanage of clichés and originality, of respectful homage and unrepentant nostalgia. Sometimes it’s comfortingly conventional; other times it’s gloriously off the charts. Even when it doesn’t quite work, it’s just so damn alive, meeting right at the intersection of the human heartbeat and the also-human love for shiny things.

The heart of The Cooler is in the performances, and in the way Kramer shapes the interplay between the characters with the right amounts of ease and tension.

It’s wonderful to see a first-time filmmaker who’s more interested in effective storytelling than in impressing us; telling a story effectively is hard enough. Best of all, Cooper has succeeded in making a terrific melodrama for the modern age.

The structure of Duplicity is its own worst enemy.

Curran, his actors and screenwriter Ron Nyswaner have made an old-fashioned melodramatic epic that, as steeped as it is in the language and tradition of old movies, is never less than thrummingly alive.

Director Andy Muschietti’s It, adapted from King’s disquieting 1986 epic of the same name, doesn’t cut very deep and isn’t very scary. At its best, it’s a sometimes-entertaining evocation of the way kids think and talk within their little cliques, and of the way they protect one another with fierce loyalty.

Works precisely because its ambitions are somewhat mellow; this isn't a relentlessly high-strung picture. Barthes and Giamatti do more with less, turning the idea of excessive navel-gazing into a kind of game.

Breillat manages to give us a lush, quiet spectacle with The Sleeping Beauty.

Handled more delicately, Monster's Ball could have been a fine little movie about human beings' capacity for growth and change. As it is, it's less than half a fine movie. The great surprise is that its actors come through in the clutch.

Bitter Christmas is so enjoyable to watch that you almost will yourself into believing that Almodóvar isn’t simply reworking, with certain beats that feel a little too familiar, some of his recent preoccupations.

There’s something inexplicably Wenders-like about it; he’s a filmmaker who looks for joy in the corners, and finds it.

Blockers has a loopy sweetness, but it’s smart, too.

Big Star may not be the best introduction for those who don't yet have at least some passing familiarity with the bruised-knee wistfulness of songs like "Thirteen," or the quavery undersea despair of "Kangaroo." But for anyone already curious, Nothing Can Hurt Me delivers the goods.

Even though Boy Erased is well acted and thoughtful, there’s something vaguely disappointing about it.

The picture is broken down into narrative chunks that ultimately don't tell much of a story – what you get instead is a series of mini-climaxes held together by banter between characters.

Polanski orchestrates this cat-and-mouse game with devilish delight, dancing around Ives's play as if it were a pagan bonfire, jabbing at it with his figurative pitchfork.

If you focus on the acting alone, it’s fun to watch these two circle each other–but the movie around them doesn’t bring us any closer to the heart of this aggrieved city.

All lives are made of shadow and light, and The Times of Bill Cunningham acknowledges that. But through it all, spending time in Cunningham’s presence is bliss.

Bodies Bodies Bodies is one of those movies that wins you over scene by scene, before sealing the deal with its marvelous, ludicrous ending. See it with a group of friends you love. Or even just low-key resent.

The film’s rhythms occasionally falter—this is Malcolm Washington’s feature debut, and it's an ambitious project for a beginner. But the inherent strength of the material always shines through, largely thanks to Deadwyler.

Prince Caspian is elaborate filmmaking, all right. It's the magic of the human touch that's missing.

Blue Story, at its essence, is a narrative you’ve seen before. But Onwubolu vests it with firecracker energy — the pace never drags, even when you think you know what’s going to happen next.

Undone by simply trying too hard.

It’s all so silly. But it’s also kind of great, like a single glass of sparkling wine after a really bad day. And the light dancing off the brilliant blue sea isn’t so bad, either.

Leto is one of those movies that whisks us into a world that feels both familiar and fresh, like a sense memory of a life we might have lived if we’d been born in another decade or on another continent.

The Spierigs had the framework for something wonderful here, if only they’d trusted themselves to keep things simple.

Sodden and glum, even in those moments where it's supposed to feel funny and light. It makes you feel trapped and flailing as the minutes tick by. If it encapsulates anything, it's the experience of drowning, not waving.

Entertaining and subtle at once, it doesn't just dazzle us with the hows and whys of a particularly wily brand of thievery; it transports us to a specific time and place that often seems to fall between significant eras. The Bank Job is set in a country that's in transition, an extended metaphor for the way its characters are in transition, too.

Wedding Crashers may be the most optimistic Hollywood comedy of the year, because it restores at least some dim hope that directors, writers and actors with actual brains in their heads can somehow triumph over unimaginative studio execs. In that way, Wedding Crashers isn't just the life of the party, but its pulse.

An imperfect picture that's alive every minute, a movie that perfectly captures the vibe of a person, a place, a time and a way of being, and even gets, indirectly and without a whiff of sanctimoniousness, to the heart of what being an American ought to mean.

The Birth of a Nation isn’t a great movie – it’s hardly even a good one. But it’s bluntly effective, less a monumental piece of filmmaking than an open door. Parker stars as Turner, and his performance is grounded and thoughtful – he may be a better actor than he is a director.

The whole teenage soap opera is so pleasurable, and the performers so much fun to watch, that it’s a drag when Spider-Man: Far from Home has to get down to the business of being a regular old superhero movie.

A rare and tender delight.

Although the Coens are consummate craftsmen, they don't always show the lightness of touch or the depth of feeling they do here.

Patriots Day, muscular and confident, falls right in line with Berg’s other work. And you might feel a little dirty after watching it, as if you’d been granted access to real-life suffering and tragedy that perhaps should have remained private.

The Fault in Our Stars doesn't quite capture the discreetly twisted humor, or the muted anger, of Green's book, and its problems can be attributed to a constellation of little annoyances rather than any one serious, North Star–size flaw.

For now, 21 Jump Street is a small puff of fresh air simply because it's not, like umpteen other releases coming down the pike, based on a comic-book series.

The Company Men is infinitely more despairing and yet also, paradoxically, more hopeful. It suggests that work can actually mean something to people, beyond just giving them the means to afford a nice house or a fantastic car.

As visually arresting as Kill Bill often is, there's a stultifying blankness about it. Despite Tarantino's obvious enthusiasms, he comes off jaded and cynical: He's seen plenty of movies, and this is his proof.

With Scott Pilgrim, Wright leaps over the line from chattery cleverness to all-out self-consciousness.

At the center of this clever pinwheel of a story—Moore co-wrote the script with Johnathan McClain—is Rylance, whose economy of motion and emotion is a marvel.

The Wonders has an intimate, subtly buzzing power.

The Harder They Fall is fueled by Tarantino-style energy and grim wit, and if nothing else, it’s a spectacle—those glossy, muscular horses, and the gorgeous people riding them, are almost enough to carry a movie by themselves. But this picture works so hard at entertaining us that it strips its own gears; its churning style can’t quite keep the story going.

A very gentle picture, intended to soothe us, not to jolt or shock us. But it's so gentle that it lacks any discernible energy; sometimes it seems there's barely enough tension in the story to keep the images from sliding off the screen.

Lin keeps this tense adventure (co-written by Doug Jung and Simon Pegg, who also reprises his role as chief engineer Scotty) from stumbling over its own excess: he knows that any good Star Trek needs wit as well as spectacle.

You don’t need to be a woman working in finance to get a shivery thrill—and possibly a few chills—from watching Equity, a modestly scaled but perceptive drama about an investment banker who just happens to be a woman.

There's action here, too, and a great deal of vitality that feels true both to the spirit of Collins' book and to the idea of movie entertainment as it exists.

A weaselly little thing.

A small movie with modest ambitions, and accordingly, it packs only a modest emotional punch.

Crazy, Stupid, Love. is, for the most part, an effective love story, but the two figures in thrall to one another aren't the ones you think: The magnetism between the movie's two male stars, Steve Carell and Ryan Gosling, is what really makes the movie tick.

Malkovich sure isn’t subtle, either, but that’s the point: his job is to get your blood boiling, and boy, he’s good at it.

The chief reason to see Potiche - maybe the only reason - is Deneuve.

If Borat Subsequent Moviefilm makes you laugh, what does your laughter say about you? My laughter told me — reminded me — how angry I am. As 2020 rounds to a close, I have zero sympathy for white Americans who are happy to show kindness to a stranger — just as long as that stranger, too, is white.

Everything in The Adventures of Tintin is meticulous - this is a Steven Spielberg movie, after all.

A Place at the Table is a fairly no-frills effort, but the ideas behind it are sound.

We Need to Talk About Kevin is a little too facile in the way it sets up the horrific climax: Just one look at this kid and you know he's trouble, yet no one besides mom can see it.

This is Lunson's debut picture and she's smart enough to keep the whole affair very simple.

Black Mass is a tightly wound piece of work, and Cooper (Crazy Heart, Out of the Furnace) keeps its many small parts moving with ease. He's skillful at merging telling, minute details with bigger, looping schemes.

The Wave, with the exception of a few overwrought moments, is low on sadism and high on humbling. We’re all at the mercy of nature’s power. It’s the Whatever we can never outrun.

Doesn't quite have the goods.

Dancing, like being in love, sometimes means making a mess of things. Born Romantic makes glorious sense of that mess, trampled toes and all.

A Separation doesn't try to make easy sense of that world, or of this family's suffering. It's simply a quiet cry of anguish.

Its glorious, snow-capped visuals aside, The Hateful Eight comes off as haggard and atrophied. It’s bloodless even in the midst of all its bloodiness; its characters are devoid of nobility, even the horrible kind. These are uglies not even a mother could love.

One problem with social-issues documentaries is that you almost always know where they stand, and where they’re headed, from the start. But Collective is as tense and as taut as a great fictional drama.

Deep Water comes dressed up as an ‘80s-style erotic thriller, a genre that I, for one, would love to see revived. But it’s so tepid, so lacking in heat or even a pulse, that it’s about as sexy as a clogged artery.

So beautiful to look at that it practically feels like a drug.

Best of all may be the narration, by Sam Shepard: His voice, the kind of voice God might have if he'd ever smoked Camels, frames this gentle but potent little story with good-natured authority, making it feel modern and ageless at once.

So few filmmakers even know how to make an entertaining trifle these days, and For Your Consideration is that, at least.

In a world of movies that try far too hard to move, entertain and dazzle us, the artistry of Hustle & Flow lies in the way it waits for us to come to it. We can walk as slowly as we want, but sooner or later, it's going to get us.

Richard Jewell is one of those expertly crafted pictures that reminded me how little I care for craftsmanship when a filmmaker’s ugliest impulses are thrumming in the background.

Tykwer's actors seem completely clued in to his intentions. Both Blanchett and Ribisi give performances so restrained they're almost subliminal.

The best and most moving part of Miracle may be the closing credits, in which we see pictures of the actors accompanied by the names of the real-life characters they played and a strip of type that tells us where they are now.

Hall strives to carry The Night House on her more-than-capable shoulders, but she can’t quite compensate for the moments when the movie is outright silly or, worse, boring.

Together, the three wheel through absurd gags that shouldn’t work and somehow make them sing, giving the movie a loose, joyous energy.

Everybody Knows — which is billed as a psychological thriller, though it’s really more of a family melodrama — feels meandering and indistinct.

It’s a fun, open-hearted picture, and even if it lacks the wistful subtlety of the original, it ends up on the same landing note: the people we love best are always worth fighting for.

Hustle works its smooth moves scene after scene and ends with a satisfying whoosh, something like the sound of a ball sweeping through the net after circling the hoop for a suspenseful second or two.

There’s no pacing in Avengers: Infinity War. It’s all sensation and no pulse. Everything is big, all of the time.

The fact that Cronenberg directed almost works against Maps to the Stars: We expect greatness from him, not just proficiency, and he doesn't exactly have a gift for comedy, not even the black kind. But the movie still has the darkly glittering Cronenberg touch, even if it's just a light brushing.

It all boils down to the actor, and how good he is at vibing with universal aging-guy feelings, including the realization that your grandest achievements may be behind you. Brad Pitt, at 61, has finally aged into roles like these. And sometimes, as F1 proves, they’re the best thing that can happen to a guy.

Reeves is wonderful here, a marvel of physicality and stern determination — he moves with the grace of an old-school swashbuckler.

Too earnest and dour to be a silly bit of summer fun, but it's not exactly scientifically sound, either.

In some ways, X2 is an obvious improvement on its predecessor: It looks more expensive, and its special effects seem to swoop out of nowhere...But "X-Men" was undoubtedly the most elegiac comic-book adaptation of the past few years.

With his fifth movie as 007, Craig is so extraordinary he leaves only scorched earth behind. There will be other Bonds for those who want them. For everyone else, there’s Craig.

There's nothing so frustrating as a small movie, made by a clearly gifted filmmaker, that flies close to magic only to be sternly jerked back to earth.

The movie’s lo-fi vibe is part of its charm.

It's an English movie doing its best to masquerade as the shallowest kind of Hollywood romantic comedy, as if somewhere along the way someone had made a calculated supposition that would be the only kind of comedy American audiences would buy.

While the media desk isn't the whole of the New York Times, it does give Rossi a solid perch from which to survey the paper's recent and ongoing struggle for both relevancy and revenues.

Every minute he's on screen, Whitaker makes Ghost Dog worth watching.

The story's aims are noble, but it works too hard at scoring its points to succeed as either entertainment or lacerating social commentary. The picture needed to bite harder and deeper.

I suspect this picture is pretty close to what fans were hoping for, and for their sake, I'm glad it's markedly better than the two that preceded it. But Revenge of the Sith is still crap.

As a character, Siegel and Shuster’s creation deserves better than Gunn’s Superman. And that’s unfortunate, because we probably need a great Superman now more than ever.

Represents a breakthrough in the moviegoing experience. It may be the first time we've been asked to watch a book on tape.

The picture is clever, somber, quiet: There's just no reason it has to be as deadly boring as it is.

The best sequences are those incorporating vintage footage from the 1970s-era Chez Panisse, where Tower, as a young, rakish beauty — quite clearly gay, but also pansexual in the dashing way people were allowed to be in those days — was the crown prince of the kitchen.

El Crimen Perfecto is a joyride that leaves you feeling drunk and dizzy and swearing that you haven't touched a drop.

That rare sequel that builds on the movie that came before it without crushing its attributes to death. "Escape" doesn't feel belabored. Giddy, freewheeling and sweet-natured, it pulls off the effect of seeming spontaneous, a tall task by itself.

The chase scenes in The Italian Job are the most exciting ones I can remember seeing in a movie in a long time, probably because they're the only ones I can remember -- and that's saying something.

Noah is here not to set the record straight, but to set it on its head. This isn't a lavish work of mad genius, it's a movie designed to be a lavish work of mad genius, and there's a difference.

You might not call this picture a major achievement—it’s both elegant and rather silly—but you can’t fault it for lack of vision.

Unfortunately, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, a meta-comedy of ostensibly epic proportions, is not nearly grand enough to embrace those multitudes.

If Black Widow follows the standard Marvel template in some basic ways, it deviates enough to make its own mark. It’s blissfully free of that “Avengers working together” baloney, and all the smirky-cute bickering that comes with it.

Has such a sweet spirit that it's easy enough to let its flaws sail by.

The film works on its own terms, capturing, at least, the mournful vibe of O'Brien's book. What's more, Zobel's revision opens up plenty of space for the three actors who inhabit this circumscribed little world, all of whom are terrific.

This is a household in which the rules are very formal, and they're matched by the formality of the filmmaking.

The idea, in the end, is that even lovable loonies can do a lot of damage.

Although there's plenty of music, and plenty of joy, in Once, it's ultimately a quiet, wistful picture.

Forgetting Sarah Marshall follows the Apatow formula faithfully enough. All that's missing is charisma -- the je ne sais quois that makes us fall in love in the first place.

Concrete Cowboy—directed by Ricky Staub and adapted from a novel by Greg Neri, inspired by Philadelphia’s real-life Fletcher Street Urban Riding Club—is your classic story about an irritable young man redeemed by an animal, and the embrace of a community. But it’s satisfying even so, largely because watching Elba is such a pleasure.

Avatar: The Way of Water is both more extravagant and dorkier than Avatar, which was pretty dorky to begin with.

It’s not as self-absorbed as you might expect. It’s more about the nature of memory itself, the kind of movie Chris Marker might have made if, instead of an experimental filmmaker and mixed-media artist, he’d been a former Hollywood child star.

Brigsby Bear is a sweet-natured picture with an undercurrent of prickly energy.

As shot by the gifted cinematographer Seamus McGarvey, Nocturnal Animals is beautiful—or at least arresting—every minute, and it sure isn’t boring. But it’s unclear exactly what Ford is trying to say, though it’s clear he’s trying hard to say something. And that’s the most frustrating thing about this picture.

Bolt is just too knowing; it keeps reminding us, loud and clear, of how culturally savvy it is.

T2 squeaks by on the charm of its actors, all of whom still look pretty damn good -- especially McGregor, who remains a charismatic wag.

It's hard to say whether Sound of My Voice is a wholly bogus and pretentious indie enterprise or a weirdly compelling bit of low-budget storytelling.

It all seems calculated to churn up excitement, a promise that there's lots of dazzle, glamour and intrigue to come. An Ideal Husband actually does deliver all those things, but mostly in a pleasurably understated way -- no need for the noisy signals.

Moore's supporters are quick to impugn the liberal credentials of anyone who criticizes his presentation of the information he digs up (or, in some cases, makes up). For them, Michael Moore is the issues he talks about, so his detractors must be enemies of democratic principles. It's an old trick, akin to the way Pauline Kael was accused of being insensitive about the Holocaust when she didn't like "Shoah."

Sturdy and rudimentary, Magician may be Welles 101, but it's dotted liberally with TV and radio clips of the famously loquacious auteur talking, talking, and doing more talking — and how could anybody with ears and a brain resist that buttery voice, spinning out clause-laden sentences that take more twists and turns than the streets of Venice but always end, somehow, in a place that's ravishingly articulate?

Strives to be a work of greatness. But Kaufman's overarching vision is a lot less interesting than the small insights he gathers along the way. This is what happens when life imitates art, and blows it.

Philip Seymour Hoffman utters one of the year's most refreshing lines in this terrific tale of political wheeling and dealing.

Its look has the same grudging beauty that, once you get used to it, English weather does: It's so defiant in its grayness that you come to appreciate its conviction.

It just doesn't have the buoyancy, or the resonance, that this kind of semifactual flight of fancy needs.

There’s nothing overtly dislikable about the film, and there are a handful of scenes that are beautifully written, acted, and directed. But Jay Kelly feels more sentimental than truly thoughtful, particularly in the motif that resounds like a clanging bell in Jay’s brain: Why didn’t I spend more time with my kids?

That she makes it all look so effortless is part of the fun – as long as you're not unlucky enough to be the guy with his nut in the nutcracker.

Even if you don’t care much about whales, or don’t think you do, Joshua Zeman’s enthusiastic documentary The Loneliest Whale: The Search for 52 might make you care about people who care about whales.

Annette is an extravagant-looking and often inventive film, but it’s not a great one.

Although Chappaquiddick doesn’t address Kennedy’s subsequent legislative record, it’s the silver-lining storm cloud that hangs over the movie.

The brilliance of The SpongeBob Squarepants Movie -- as well as the show -- is that it's cognizant without being self-consciously knowing.

Has the rare distinction of being slight and tragic at the same time.

How, I'm wondering more and more often, do studios put movies like this one in front of audiences and assume they'll just buy it? The secret to making a great, or even just a good, thriller these days seems to have been lost.

To Crowley's credit, Closed Circuit is decidedly unflashy. But maybe that's a liability: There's a fine line between restrained and drab, and Closed Circuit falls just on the wrong side of it.

Loose-jointed and openhearted, a wink of reassurance in our age of anxiety, it’s that rare comedy that may actually play better in the living room than it does in the theater.

The Ides of March doesn't cut as deeply or as sharply as Clooney might like, but at least he found the right actor to navigate its dark emotional twists and turns.

Though Lawrence’s views of sex overall were complicated and sometimes contradictory, and not always what you’d call progressive, Clermont-Tonnerre and her actors draw from his ideas with clear-eyed generosity, presenting them so that they feel fresh as a new crocus.

The Extra Man is something of a love letter to the marvelous weirdos of New York.

Demme, following in the footsteps of the late Louis Malle, takes a spare, direct approach to the material -- his economy pays off in quiet eloquence.

The Sapphires may be your stock triumph-over-adversity show-biz story – but then, how is it that we never get tired of seeing that story?

Braff, and Garden State, give it the old college try, and at least some, if not all, of the sparks catch. Even if the movie doesn't quite take off, it doesn't leave you feeling stranded, either.

Gadot is simply marvelous. Physically, she’s bold and commanding. But there’s a sweetness about her too, as if she and Jenkins understand intuitively that Wonder Woman can’t just be blandly awesome. She's got to be able to feel wonder too.

She’s (Theron) a marvelous comic actor, as at home with bawdy humor as with the brainier kind, and her timing has its own rare and specific style: her lines tend to tilt sideways, with the quiet finesse of a balsa-wood glider, before coming in for a soft but neat landing. She’s an elegant goofball, funny in an over-the-shoulder way, not an in-your-face way, and every moment spent watching her is a pleasure. Hail to the chief.

For all the full-throttle dazzle of Furious 7, the best scenes are the quietest ones, in which these characters make observations about love, life, and family that would seem overcooked in any other movie.

Patti Cake$ motors along steadily on Macdonald's unsentimental charisma.

In striving to surprise us every minute with its seen-it-all irony, Guardians Vol. 2 is actually the surprise-spoiler of all time—our every “Wow!” or “Haha!” has been scripted in advance.

The picture coasts along quite nicely on the strength of its contemplative sensuality, its macaron colors, and the exquisite beauty of its three chief actresses, Léa Seydoux, Virginie Ledoyen and Diane Kruger. Oh, and there's nudity in it too, not to mention lesbian undertones – or are they overtones?

From its cute-fake soundstage-town setting to the authoritative yet chummy voice-over narration (courtesy of Nick Offerman), The Life of Chuck works doggedly to give you the warm fuzzies—and a little bit of that fuzz goes a long way.

Rosewater is an earnest picture, but it's also got some juice — there's vitality and feeling in it, the secret ingredients so often missing from even the most well-intentioned first features.

The picture is an overworked trifle: There's so much going on in it that it becomes hard to care about ANYTHING that's going on in it. The story in Stranger Than Fiction is stranger than fiction. But what good is it if it's unreadable?

Like so many movie love stories before it - from Murnau's "Sunrise" to Linklater's "Before Sunrise," and beyond - Cairo Time is about two wandering lovers, people spending time together without realizing how precious that time will come to be.

How much you enjoy Damsels will depend on your tolerance for Stillman's particular brand of duct-taped Sperry Topsider whimsy. It's a comedy! It's a musical! It's a trip down memory lane to revisit the blissful confusion of our - or someone's - college years!

It’s big, extravagant, and at times very beautiful to look at. The story is the problem: packed with expository dialogue, it feels as if it were written to be digested in 10- or 15-minute bites.

Wakanda Forever is set in a world that many people desperately want to revisit—in the first film, Wakanda and its citizens were so vivid it’s no wonder they took a hold on us. But Wakanda Forever feels a lot like Marvel business as usual, marred by the usual muddily rendered action sequences and ungainly plot mechanics.

Its pleasures and charms lie in its very crudeness, in the way the characters' thoughts begin in their d---s and spill out of their mouths, completely bypassing their brains.

A well-intentioned, pleasant-enough picture that shoots off in too many directions to ever ignite.

Edwards (director of 2016's Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and the 2014 Godzilla) and Koepp (who wrote the scripts for the first two Jurassic Park movies) know what they’re doing here: they locate the perfect ratio of human business to dinosaur antics, favoring the dinosaurs when in doubt.

This tale of filial love and family baggage is Wes Anderson's most heartfelt feature film yet. Its companion short, "Hotel Chevalier," is darn near perfect.

Barney's Version is too much of a sprawl to have much of a lasting emotional effect.

This film's intelligence and forthrightness about the things women sometimes do to one another -- and its resoluteness about where the line should be drawn in terms of selflessness between friends -- set it head and shoulders above most contemporary movies that deal with friendships between women.

The story Levine spins out of this premise has a rambunctious, woolly quality, though in the end there may be too many stringy loose ends for him to weave in properly. Still, Wild Canaries has its quiet charms.

Watching it, I saw him from some new angles -- painful as well as celebratory -- and I realized that this isn't it: This, as with Elvis' posthumous career, is only the beginning.

Coppola is a filmmaker who fills up a big canvas with small moments: That's the opposite of working in miniature, even though she's attuned to the tiniest details.

This Barbershop is simply a place where we can all laugh together, sometimes at ideas that veer close to being explosive.

Save Yourselves! was completed well before the pandemic hit—it played at Sundance in January — but it’s one of those works that has magically landed at the right time. It takes itself just seriously enough, but not too seriously.

Like all of Branagh's films, even some of the bad ones, Cinderella is practically Wagnerian in its ambitions — it's so swaggering in its confidence that at times it almost commands us to like it. But it's also unexpectedly delicate in all the right ways, and uncompromisingly beautiful to look at.

Wheatley drops enough unnerving bread crumbs in the first two-thirds to leave you wondering where the hell he's headed, and even the big finale should be satisfying enough: It just belongs to a different movie, and it's unsettling in a way that doesn't feel earned.