Stephanie Zacharek

It's valuable for both the vintage footage Rostock has collected and for the observations provided by Belafonte, who is as charming, handsome and persuasive in his mid-80s as he ever was.

Argento always gives us something to watch, and maybe even something to fear. I've never seen her in a movie where I haven't been at least a little bit scared of her.

Along the way, it even gives the adorable manchild Michael Cera the chance to reinvent himself as a possible sex symbol -- in other words, it allows him to be a man.

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.

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.

Almost always a pleasure to watch. Pushing Tin is, essentially, a western -- Cusack really is the fastest gun in the West.

This loose retelling of Carlo Collodi’s weird and often unsettling 1883 fantasy novel (the screenplay is by del Toro and Patrick McHale) is a little too long, and hammers away too eagerly at its central idea: that fathers who expect too much of their sons can do untold emotional damage. Even so, del Toro’s creation is clever and lively and just strange enough to keep you guessing what’s coming next.

Mori — director of the 1991 documentary Building Bombs — assembles the information here with clarity and sensitivity.

Lavish in its approach -- it attempts some rather extravagant battle scenes -- yet it still seems modest in its goals: It's more interested in being a Saturday-afternoon entertainment than a blockbuster.

The picture has an unsettling, haunting quality that I haven't been able to shake.

In her adaptation of The Namesake, Mira Nair hits it right at least half the time. In places, the movie feels aimless and misshapen; it doesn't have the gentle but focused energy of Lahiri's book. And sometimes Nair goes overboard in heightening the cultural contrasts -- the inevitable incongruities between East and West -- that Lahiri navigates so subtly.

In the end, Spectre is just too much of a good thing. Though each scene is carefully wrought, there's little grace, majesty, or romance in the way the pieces are connected. The whole is bumpy and inelegant — entertaining for sure, but hard to love.

It's hard to imagine Ms. 45 with any other actress. Lund is a particularly effective avenging angel, easily making the leap from innocent mouse to worldly wise killer.

The picture could use a little more dramatic tension; in places it goes a bit slack, losing its way on the path to its conclusion. Even so, its refusal to push the usual buttons is one of its finest qualities. Back-alley scare stories serve their purpose, but Call Jane has something else in mind. This is a story about women getting the job done when they have no one to rely on but one another.

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 genius of Ghost in the Shell is that you don’t have to care about cyborg-anything to enjoy it. In fact, you’ll probably enjoy it more that way.

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.

The third installment, Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb may be the best, and even the generally wound-too-tight Ben Stiller — once again playing a bemused Museum of Natural History guard — is easy to tolerate.

If it isn’t a great movie, it’s at least a fascinating and thoughtful one, an even-handed film that doesn’t need to resort to extremes to paint an accurate picture of what America and the world are up against right now, in terms of one particular past and possibly future president.

It’s one of those movies you watch not necessarily for its whodunnit complexities, but for the pleasure of watching a group of actors having fun, in a storybook English-countryside setting complete with happy, well-kept flower beds and cemeteries dotted with gravestones both ancient and new.

This is a story about a seemingly unforgiving landscape that’s actually giving back every minute, once Rona reopens herself to its windswept language.

Two of Us keeps you guessing where it’s headed until the very end. But it’s not giving too much away to say that it’s about the unconscious dance steps a person takes as she moves toward the person she calls home.

While Sicko is the most persuasive and least aggravating of all of Moore's movies, it still bears many of the frustrating Moore earmarks -- most notably, a deliberately simplistic desire to render everything in black-and-white terms, as if he didn't trust his audience enough to follow him into some of the far more complex gray areas.

Vengeance is a small but ambitious film, and the murder mystery is its weakest element: Novak has so many threads going that he doesn’t quite know how to tie them up. But he’s made a shrewd satire that’s a pleasure to watch.

Gordon's best not-so-secret weapons, though, are his two stars: Vaughn and Witherspoon are an inspired pairing, not least because they're such a mismatched set of salt-and-pepper shakers.

Who cares about the fate of privacy, of all things, when you can watch three sexy babes stamp out crime in zip-off suits and high-heeled boots?

Represents a failure of nerve: As if Gondry and Kaufman weren't sure that the story of Joel and Clementine would hold us, the doomed couple's unfolding-in-reverse romance is intercut with a subplot filled with zany touches.

Zola’s comic absurdities are entwined with its horrors in a way that almost shouldn’t work. But Bravo—who co-wrote the script with actor and playwright Jeremy O. Harris—shows a lightness of touch in navigating the story’s quicksilver tone shifts, and the movie’s two leads bring their best.

It’s a love letter to the gorgeous, disorderly patchwork that is New York. It’s also a story about how we all need to reinvent ourselves as we age, and part of that is to be more forgiving of ourselves.

Crisp, informative documentary.

It's the kind of small pleasure that can make you feel intensely grateful.

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.

Smart, tightly coiled.

Although 3 Faces is far from Panahi’s best work, it’s still a solid primer on how much a skilled filmmaker can achieve with very few resources.

It's an amusing enough story, all right, and it adequately fills up Tabloid's 88 minutes - but a minute longer would have been too much.

The picture is frisky and casual; it doesn’t try to be something it’s not.

It's made with an accurate and loving, but also wary and squinty-eyed, view of the South. If only the movie hung together better overall.

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.

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.

If the story is a smidge predictable, at least the movie is pleasingly old-fashioned and grown-up, with a ’90s paranoid-thriller vibe.

Even after The Ice Road overcomplicates itself, there’s enough gas here to keep the thing going, including some nicely sustained bridge-crossing suspense and several fine demonstrations of stunt dangling.

Its considerable charm lies in the way it fulfills, rather than bucks, our expectations.

At least entertaining enough to keep you amused for an hour or two.

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.

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?

A mini-showcase of smart, thoughtful contemporary horror.

Hardwicke still manages to find the sweet spot where Gothic literature and the iPod meet and make goo-goo eyes at each other. Without embarrassment, she and screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg dig right into the almost generic simplicity of the story.

With big Hollywood movies getting glossier and more mechanical, and indie movies increasingly mistaking drabness for seriousness, we need Waters' sub-B-movie aesthetic more now than ever.

At times Jonah Hex carries whispery echoes of The Searchers and Sam Peckinpah.

It’s both intimate and almost comically egotistical—yet Branagh has clearly poured so much love into it that you can’t be too hard on him. It’s hard to resist the movie’s affectionate energy.

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

The picture may end a little too breezily, but Demme knows we have to be left with some hope for these wandering souls. Someday, they'll find their way home; it just may not be the same thing as going home.

The delirious and sometimes nasty little pleasures that Taken offers don't hinge as much on surprise as they do on the action (which is crisp and fast, with a minimum of computer enhancement) and on the story's unabashedly sentimental underpinnings.

The picture is so fluttering and tender, so guileless, that you almost can't believe it was made by an old hand like Van Sant. Then again, maybe you can.

Gervais doesn't have movie-star good looks; it's his line delivery that has sex appeal.

Highly amusing for grown-ups, too.

The Mastermind is a sneaky, undulating movie; it’s perhaps even less direct than Reichardt’s usual brand of sly, behind-the-beat filmmaking. But O’Connor’s slippery charms hold the picture steady.

Mojave’s real reason for existing is the wiry, woolly dialogue that Monahan has spun out for his actors.

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 grand scale of this Frankenstein is unavoidable; what it’s lacking is intimacy.

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.

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.

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.

Beautifully worked out, and the movie's final sight gag, set to Charles Trenet's shimmery seaside masterpiece, "La Mer," is a gracefully orchestrated bit of silliness that's a visual love sonnet to Chaplin, Lloyd, Keaton and, yes, Tati.

The picture is devilishly entertaining, not least because it's laced with just the sort of dumb raunchy jokes you hate yourself for laughing at. But it also preserves, to a degree, the elemental sweetness that made the original so distinctive.

It’s one thing to dole out the happy pills that make an audience love you and another to earn their trust minute by minute. Sandler, it turns out, knows how to do both.

A weird delight.

Even though Laggies is clearly well-intentioned — and the anxieties it tussles with are completely believable — the film is awkward in ways that are sometimes charming and sometimes off-putting.

Charm City Kings lands on an elegiac, bittersweet note rather than a happy one, and doesn’t feature as many crazy, exhilarating bike stunts as you might hope. But in its view of a world where kids make their own fun and also, sometimes, their own bad choices, it rings true. Sometimes becoming a man is the hardest stunt to pull off.

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.

Not all of Hill’s movies are great, and The Assignment certainly isn’t. Maybe, in the strictest terms, it isn’t even any good. But even a mediocre Walter Hill film has more style and energy — and a finer sense of the sweet spot between joy and despair — than ninety percent of the action thrillers that get made today.

While End of the Century feels a bit straggly toward the end (the rise of the Ramones is exhilarating; their slow, unfair demise is a downer), and its chronology is sometimes a little vague, the movie captures the spirit of both the band and the era they helped shape.

Writer-director Rian Johnson’s Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery is that plate of morsels in movie form, a breezy caper that mostly sustains its novelty, even if it stumbles a bit in the last third.

Because Nope, enjoyable as a spectacle but conceptually barely thought through, is all over the place. Peele can’t take just one or two interesting ideas and follow their trail of complexity. He likes to layer ideas into lofty multitextured quilts—the problem is that his most compelling perceptions are often dropped only to be obscured by murkier ones.

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.

Remarkably Bright Creatures is a movie, like its cephalopod supporting star, with a gentle soul and an elusive spirit. It might not stick with you long, but it leaves a delicate print behind.

The Accountant 2 is not, and is not trying to be, a movie about the realities of autism. Even so, it challenges us to think about how our brains work, why we do and say the things we do—and to recognize that even though we may think there’s a normal way to respond to social cues, not everyone is wired the same way.

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.

I Am Legend is a blockbuster like no other, one that finds its grandness in modesty. It's a star vehicle with a star who knows his place in the universe.

A well-meaning little picture that's piercingly genuine in places and annoyingly affected in others.

The picture works because Brevig and his actors -- not to mention his effects -- maintain a sense of humor and lightness. It doesn't hurt that Fraser, a fine actor who's made a name for himself not with his serious performances (which are reliably solid) but for his recurring role in the "Mummy" series.

The most of-the-moment movie on the landscape right now — it may end up being the most politically and culturally relevant movie of the year. As a piece of filmmaking, it’s far from perfect.

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.

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.

I found myself almost literally leaning closer to the screen during Megalopolis, trying to grasp exactly what Coppola is seeking to communicate. I might have caught about a third of it, at best, but I’ll take a messy, imaginative sprawl over a waxen, tasteful enterprise any day.

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.

[Fanning] plays Wendy as a person and not a condition.

Get Smart could have been smarter. But like the show that inspired it, it's still smarter than it looks.

Shot for shot, Sheridan's approach isn't radically different from Bier's. And yet Bier gives us more to read between the lines: In her movie, there's an unspoken moodiness, a crackle of sexual tension, between Tommy and Grace's Danish counterparts. That understated but potent secret ingredient is missing from Sheridan's version, as sensitive and as artful as it is.

Director Brett Haley, who co-wrote the script with Marc Basch, brings enough understated sympathy to Lee's character to make the picture work--it throws off a gentle, sweet-spirited energy.

As black comedies go, Grosse Pointe Blank is just sort of gray.

At its best when Creadon is burrowing deep into the world of the puzzles themselves, particularly when he sits down with puzzle constructor extraordinaire Merl Reagle.

The funniest bits in the movie are, by and large, the small, offhanded gags stuffed into the corners.

The sort of small, independent-minded picture that so much of American indie cinema strives, and often fails, to give us. It's a conventional picture, but it feels so deeply alive that it's practically a novelty.

This is a thriller where the cutting, even in most of the action sequences, is meticulous but leisurely. The elaborate set pieces are so beautifully worked out that you could take them apart, shot by shot, and fit the pieces back together like an intricate Chinese puzzle.

Winterbottom is a gifted and extraordinarily versatile director. In the Trip projects, he may have found something of a meal ticket, but he still goes beyond the call of duty in making them cinematic.

Clooney is the soul of Syriana, and his face is what you're left with long after the movie's obsessive plot details have sifted away.

A cupcake of a movie, a sweet and lightweight little thing that's all but served up in a ruffled paper cup.

Whose Streets? is rough around the edges, like a torn photograph whose borders have also been raggedly burned. But that's more a strength than a liability.

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

An unsettling but ultimately joyous little picture, a movie that's as self-conscious as anything Baumbach has ever made, and yet far more open: It reaches out to the world instead of insisting on hugging its own pain, tight.

Smith deserves a better romantic comedy than Hitch, but at least he somehow manages to improve the material around him.

Gripping: Even when it wobbles off-track, it has some juice to it.

The small details are what give this Father of the Bride its gentle glow.

Overall, the picture is accomplished, intelligent and, in places, a little dull. Mangold isn't an economical filmmaker, and parts of 3:10 to Yuma suffer from needless bloat. The new version doesn't use the same kind of blunt, visually arresting shorthand as Daves' original...And yet somehow, maybe just barely, Mangold -- succeeds on his own terms, largely because the actors he's working with here.

A very gentle-spirited picture, but it's not a self-consciously precious one.

The Kingdom is distasteful in several obvious and irrefutable ways: For one thing, the idea of setting an action-thriller against terrorist activity that's all too close to real-life events is simply opportunistic and creepy.

Seeing Tom Cruise swathed in leather pants and fake tattoos, as Axl Rose-style metal god Stacee Jaxx, is supposedly Rock of Ages' big draw. But the movie is much more fun when he's not around.

Craig never overreaches, and yet he accomplishes the unthinkable. He's not the Bond we ever asked for or hoped for, yet he's reimagined the character in ways we never could have foreseen. He's Bond with soul.

Watching Tetris, you’re likely to feel lost now and then, even though director Baird and screenwriter Noah Pink lay out this increasingly convoluted story as clearly as humanly possible. But it’s still a lively and, at least for a computer-game origin saga, strangely charming picture.

Even if Captain Phillips treads into some ideologically rough waters, there's one thing that's hard to find fault with: Hanks gives a performance that goes from good (through the first 124 minutes) to extraordinary (in the last 10).

Cold Weather is partly a movie with an actual plot, not just a portrait of young twentysomethings adrift in unfulfilling circumstances.

Both Mary Queen of Scots and "The Favourite," as entertaining as they are, end in a place closer to despair than to triumph – not necessarily because the Queens in question rendered poor judgment, but because, in their treacherous worlds, it became impossible to know whom to trust. And, to put it bluntly, men didn’t help.

Forster's meticulousness—coupled with ample excuses to blow stuff up—isn't enough to turn World War Z into one of those class-A end-of-everything movies that leaves you feeling just a little bit queasy, momentarily uncertain of your own small place in this unmanageable world.

A flinty and deeply enjoyable little comedy. There's genius in its absurdity.

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.

Fleming's movie is, at the very least, a tribute to Nancy Drew's longevity -- and a valentine to all of us who, even as we strive to live in the present, just like old things.

Adams gives a nicely polished, muted performance: She keeps the story grounded when the ideas Villeneuve is striving for threaten to get too lofty. And the picture is intelligently and effectively crafted, one of those enterprises where the cinematography, sound design and score, as well as the special effects, melt into a seamless, organic whole.

Ocean's Thirteen has a pleasingly casual, raffish quality -- it's enjoyable to watch, particularly if you've got nothing better to do.

Clerks II has its problems: It rambles into sentimentality, and it doesn't need to -- the movie is more affecting when the characters are just cracking jokes. But Smith, an inherent optimist, has made a movie full of crude humor that also manages to explore the enduring qualities of friendship.

A Mouthful of Air makes it past those potential flaws on the strength of Seyfried’s performance. To look at her face—to watch as her delight in her son shifts almost imperceptibly into a private hell—is enough.

If the movie is handsome in an oak-paneled-office way, there’s life in it too. You feel there’s something at stake for the two young would-be heroes, as there is for the world.

It's a universe invented for our delight and pleasure and nothing else, a world made up of colors not found in nature but in a little girl's sock drawer. In Powerpuff Girls, shapes, images and colors make up the most crucial part of the message. It's a hot-pink little movie.

Fast and funny and brings back some of the wonder to the series.

Coach Carter, its flaws aside, is as interesting for what it doesn't do as for what it does.

Bell is terrific at conveying Peter’s impatience with Grahame’s movie-star neediness as well as his ultimate reckoning with how much he loved her. And Bening is extraordinary, serving up a seemingly contradictory cocktail of fire and vulnerability.

Bones and All is fastidiously romantic. It’s so carefully made, and so lovely to look at, even at its grisliest, that it ends up seeming a little remote, rather than a movie that draws you close.

Its easygoing structure may also be what makes it feel so intimate. Davis and Einhorn — both of whom are New York Times reporters — don’t have to spell out codes of masculinity, familial duty and love for one’s country. Instead, we’re allowed to bear witness as Eisch and his family show us what those values mean to them.

Almost embarrassingly enjoyable, despite the fact that — or maybe because — it's ridiculous in a shiny, Hollywood way.

If a movie can be elegant and brutal at once, this one is: the dissipating smoke from the grenade hangs in the air, a pinkish-gold mist; polka dots of sunlight stream through a scattering of bullet holes in a door.

Parillaud's performance is sharp on its surface and soft at its core. And if Jeanne truly is Breillat's alter ego, she is a pitiless self-portrait.

Villeneuve lays it out before us without smirking or winking; his go-for-broke earnestness feels honest and clean. And the effects, while lavish, also have a tasteful, polished quality.

It may be slight, but it's also buoyant and pleasurable, partly because the leads make the whole thing feel like a spontaneous duet. Lawrence trusts them to carry the picture, without feeling the need to throw in a lot of extraneous fluff.

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle has a pleasant, affable spirit, and Johnson is wholly charming.

Six Minutes to Midnight is a tribute to those real-life girls who, as guests from a land that would soon become a vicious enemy, represent a strange little intersection of English and German history—the human element behind symbols clashing on a badge.

There are whispers of Chekhov and Shakespeare in His Three Daughters; both of those writers knew a thing or two about the fractiousness, and the durability, of sisterly connections.

Ridley Scott's A Good Year is a bonbon made by a mechanic, a well-intentioned diversion put together by someone who clumsily adds the right ingredients in the wrong proportions at the wrong time. But sometimes, if you get the sugar level close to right, you can do OK, and A Good Year offers some pretty basic pleasures that movies often fail to give us these days.

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

Sometimes raw but mostly just raucous, Hart generally pulls it off in his third concert film.

Garner is perfectly cast, a pixie of steel. You can see by the stern set of Jane’s lips and by the way, time and again, she just barely represses an eye roll, that she’s tough enough to handle all of this–and yet she knows she shouldn’t have to.

Fortunately, Curtis isn't completely tone-deaf, and he does manage to capture the mood, and certainly the sound, of the era. The best parts of Pirate Radio take place in the movie's margins, in the vignettes and asides that don't necessarily have much to do with the plot.

Sandler is terrific here, even if you’re not sure you can stomach another man-child shuffling around in rumpled shorts.

It has the heart and spirit of a true romantic comedy, and a lightness of touch that you rarely see in a debut picture.

At its best, it’s a chronicle of how a great team made a great show—and proof that the “behind every great man is a great woman” aphorism can work the other way around, too.

It's an openhearted picture, an unintentional goodbye that feels more like a beginning than an ending.

If Lorne is nothing else, it’s a portrait of a guy who knows when to zig and when to zag.

There's a curiously ho-hum quality to the murders, despite the fact that the two victims are bludgeoned, sliced, chopped and jabbed, and also (the movie suggests) get their eyeballs gouged out.

It’s bad-gal blasphemy of the highest order.

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

80 for Brady is brassy, ridiculous, and shameless. It’s also irresistible, maybe because watching older ladies having fun is almost embarrassingly seductive.

People who don't understand movies often speak of them as escapism, a kind of passive fantasy. Lohan's performance in The Canyons, so naked in all ways, is the ultimate retort to that kind of idiocy: To watch it is to live in the moment.

[A] tender and low-key documentary.

Directed by Australian filmmaker Sarah Spillane, the picture is appealingly breezy, though it does have its share of tense moments involving killer waves and charcoal-toned stormy skies. Mostly, it’s an anthem of teenage independence and daring, the story of one young woman who set her sights on a dream while still a child and willed it into reality just a few years later.

A flawed movie with life in its veins is better than a pristine one that’s dead on arrival. Satrapi made her name with the autobiographical comic book Persepolis, which she later adapted into a marvelous animated film. She brings an animator’s touch to Radioactive, an often fanciful-looking picture that nevertheless holds tight to its dignity.

Nomadland isn’t a manifesto — there’s nothing dutifully somber about it. And although it doesn’t romanticize life on the road — for one thing, it shows that you need to be comfortable defecating in a bucket — joyousness is its chief characteristic. Like "The Rider," it’s a window into a specific world, with one key character as a guide.

A seemingly straightforward story about an addict barely holding his life together on the streets of London, Urchin is effective because of all the things it doesn’t do: there are no grand revelations, no horrific bottoming-out or OD moments. We’re simply left alone with an addict and his feelings—or, occasionally, his seeming lack of them.

When did everything, including our expectations, get shrunk so small? We can ask more of romantic comedies, and there’s no shame in yearning for spectacle and glamour, too: J. Lo rising from a foamy faux ocean like a showbiz deep-sea goddess, anyone?

The material has crackle, but its vibrancy feels far off and muted, like a fireworks display going off in a neighboring town.

May December could have more fire; it could be even more twisted. But it’s seductive enough to keep us following along, one betrayal after another.

The sections detailing the men’s childhood in Sacramento, with Judy Greer and Jenna Fischer playing beleaguered moms? Not so exciting. But then, the very averageness of these conscientious, gutsy guys is precisely the point.

Johnson has a sense of Anastasia not just as part of a pristinely arranged tableau but also as a sensualist, with all the attendant nerve endings and complex emotions that that implies. Johnson is fearless about stripping bare, but her bold flirtiness is inextricable from her dignity: the sauciness of her mother Melanie Griffith and the marble-cool poise of her grandmother, Hitchcock blonde Tippi Hedren, merge in her.

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

The Substance is distinctive less for its nutso, over-the-top gore than for a single scene midway through the film that exposes a different kind of body horror—or, more specifically, the way insecurity can be its own kind of horror.

It’s so carefully designed to feel laid-back that its breeziness comes off like a calculation; its emotional pull is sometimes irresistible, which may make you want to resist it all the more. But the movie has flashes of wit and originality and feeling.

Is God Is is fanciful and brutal, sometimes simultaneously, taking a page or two from Tarantino’s Kill Bill.

On the Come Up is a thoughtful and generous-spirited entertainment, and a reminder of how hard it can be, when you’re young, to figure out who you really are.

A breezy, uncomplicated, unapologetically broad comedy.

That a movie can run on empty and still be so obscenely enjoyable is a pretty slick stunt in itself.

The movie's tone counts for a lot: it's silly and funny, and you never feel you're trapped in a civics lecture. Good Fortune is amiable, but it also has some bite.

The Founder is so entertaining, it scans like a tongue-in-cheek satire. But processing it is a little like taking a watch apart — suddenly, you get a sense of how complicated the world’s inner workings are, even today. It’s all there in Keaton’s watchful, calculating eyes. The world has changed a lot in 60 years. But the art of the deal hasn’t.

The pleasures offered by The Gambler are simple, but don’t hold that against it. Wyatt, director of the 2011 surprise hit Rise of the Planet of the Apes, brings some bristly, swaggering energy to the thing, and that in turn may have loosened Wahlberg up: He’s both more intense and freer than he’s been in years.

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.

I'll Sleep When I'm Dead has its problems: As beautifully made as it is, Hodges leaves some crucial portions of the story maddeningly unclear, particularly at the end.

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

Cavendish would become a lifelong advocate for the disabled, and the film’s tone is at times overly reverential. But the actors carry the story ably.

A wild and sweet little picture about sex, redemption and music, though perhaps not necessarily in that order.

It may follow a formula, but sometimes formula equals comforting routine. And there are times, in the movies and elsewhere, when routine is exactly what you need.

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 nothing cuddly about the were-creatures of The Cursed. But there’s no question that they get the job done.

It’s convenient to grumble about updates that mess with the classics, but there’s nothing in the new Snow White that dishonors the earlier Disney version. If anything, it reminds us why we loved it.

Super Size Me is exploratory, as opposed to being just numbingly didactic, and that's what makes it so engaging.

This is a child’s-eye view of a parent rendered without a sheen of nostalgia—it feels less like a story being told by a thoughtful adult looking back than one springing directly from the fierce, untamed mind of a child.

Not everything in Dog works—you can sometimes see its directors scrambling to find the right tone, and not quite succeeding. And the movie is not wholly free of hokum. But watching Tatum is pure pleasure.

It's nice to see a bit of intimate, offhanded moviemaking that focuses on actors, as opposed to stars.

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.

Pawn Sacrifice clicks along with crisp efficiency. Zwick, the director behind movies like Glory and Blood Diamond, is old-school in his attention to craftsmanship, alive to telling details.

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.

Cumberbatch and Colman make it all believable, their jokes pinging off one another with delightful, rancorous buoyancy.

It offers glancing pleasures of the atmospheric kind – the impact is the equivalent of a filmy cobweb brushing against your cheek. It tickles more than it bites.

Working from a script by Justin Kuritzkes, Guadagnino takes pleasure in teasing us, toying with us, getting us all turned around. This is his most buoyant movie.

The picture consists mostly of performance footage of Silverman, which, despite the fact that it's shot on grainy, anemic-looking digital video, is a pleasure to watch.

Marley & Me gets so much surprisingly right. It may be designed to reach a broad audience, but it doesn't pander.

Debra Granik's Winter's Bone is one of those movies -- like last year's inner-city down-a-thon, "Precious" -- that can't quite make a distinction between profundity and plain old bleakness.

While 9 Songs is sexually explicit in the basic sense, its DIRECTNESS is what's most fascinating, and ultimately most moving, about it.

Janney's role is smaller than Moore's, but it's hardly insignificant. Moore has youth on her side, and youth is timelessly appealing. But Janney is the bigger, more memorable presence, and she's much more fun to watch.

May have said more about race in America today than any other movie of last year.

Tillman is clumsy in his handling of a few scenes, and considering what these kids are up against—junkie moms, drug-dealing pimp neighbors—the ending might be a little too implausibly upbeat. But Tillman seems to know that we need to go home feeling hope for Mister and Pete, who, it turns out, aren't so easily defeated.

Catching Fire suffers from the movie equivalent of middle-book syndrome: The story is wayward and rangy, on its way to being something, maybe, but not adding up to much by itself. Still, it’s entertaining as civics lessons go, and it’s a more polished, assured picture than its predecessor.

This isn't so much a movie about sports as it is a riff on politics in the broad sense of the word, and the ways in which smart, insightful people play along to get along -- and then change the game for the better by following their gut.

As its title suggests, the picture is something of a ballad, an ode to an elusive character who's both quintessentially human and so outlandish he almost seems unreal.

Tower Heist is overstuffed with actors, and yet Ratner manages to give each of them one or two good moments.

The picture feels weirdly, and disappointingly, disjointed, something that starts out as poetry and ends as product.

Duchovny gives a nicely shaped performance here -- he still has the ability to suggest the boyish eagerness beneath Fox's blasé demeanor. But the movie really belongs to Anderson.

Mama is one of those pictures that holds you aloft on its vaporous mood of dread – the occasional silliness of the plot mechanics don’t matter so much.

The timing couldn't be more opportunistic for a new Steven Spielberg movie that mines the thrilling uncertainties of childhood - even if it happens to have been made by J.J. Abrams.

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

Mostly, The Mechanic creaks and groans as it goes through the motions, and not even its lavish violence - which includes much smashing of heads and a nasty screwdriver stabbing - is particularly electrifying.

So why can't I love Moonrise Kingdom? For all the movie's technical meticulousness, the storytelling still has a wiggly-waggly quality, like a dangly loose tooth.

Most of Stephen Frears' Tamara Drewe is so breezily entertaining, and so bracingly clear-eyed about what total pains in the asses writers can be, that its final 15 minutes feel like an all-wrong slap in the face.

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.

A movie like Norwegian Wood is a peculiar case – its intentions are sterling, and it's hard to pinpoint any technical flaws. The problem, maybe, is that it's trying too hard; Tran has such firm control over the storytelling that the resulting picture has no room to breathe.

Suspenseful in a few places and absurd in plenty of others; if she were a real person, Lisbeth Salander herself would have no patience with it.

Though it's a bit of an oddity, it's an affecting curio suitable for both Hardy enthusiasts and Winterbottom fans alike.

As potentially appealing as these two actors might be, there's just nowhere for this story to go.

The bad news is that The Conspirator - doesn't have enough crackle.

Either in spite of or because of its whimsically convincing quality, Man on a Ledge is reasonably fun to watch along the way.

MacGruber never gathers any momentum. Once in a while a funny line or absurd sight gag will amble into the foreground, only to recede immediately in the rear-view mirror of memory.

Dirty Girl is harmless enough, and the early scenes, in which Danielle surveys poor Clarke with snobbish contempt, have a pleasing nastiness.

The picture is cluttered and convoluted and big, and Marshall - taking over the reins from Gore Verbinski - doesn't seem to grasp how exhausting nonstop action can be.

But there's so much going on in Big Miracle that the biggest miracle of all – the whales at the center of the story, get lost amid all the criss-crossing love stories, political wheeler-dealing and well-intentioned but inadequate rescue missions.

Bier appears to have a delicate touch with actors: In a Better World is loaded - perhaps overloaded - with nuance, and her performers never overdo a thing.

At what point do we stop applauding the Duplass brothers for their gumption and stick-to-itiveness and admit that, maybe, their storytelling just isn't so hot? Or that their characters sometimes seem more like groovy-cute constructs than believable people?

For every line or gag that works, there are three or four more that seem to belong in a different movie altogether, either a darker one or a breezier one.

Nearly everyone, and everything, in Micmacs is at one point or another guilty of trying too hard.

The big problem with Iron Man 2, maybe, is that it so dutifully gives the people what they want, instead of giving them what they didn’t know they wanted.

Hopkins is having a blast, and he's fun to watch.

Nothing Cruise does seems to come from the inside -- every eye crinkle, every grimace, every brow furrow seems plucked from the air, collected from the universe around him and bent to do his bidding. Maybe that’s one kind of acting. But it’s not cool. Never will be.

Fiennes works hard to keep the rhythm going: He stages hand-to-hand combat sequences and knife fights as if he were making a smart action movie, not adapting Shakespeare, which is precisely the point.

Turteltaub strives to show us realistic-looking magic, without realizing he'd be better off if he acknowledged that there's no such thing. Instead, we get human figures that emerge "magically" from swarms of cockroaches and sorceresses who dissolve into dust particles right before our eyes. It's the best CGI money can buy, and who cares?

The problem isn't just that the gags feel airless and pointless; it's that the performers - many of whom have done wonderful work in other settings - seem more bent on pleasing each other than on entertaining us.

The point of Babies, to the extent that it has one beyond allowing us to revel in unstoppable baby cuteness, is to underscore that infants everywhere are more similar than they are different, regardless of what country they’re born and raised in.

Tries too hard and ultimately achieves less. It's undone by its own inferiority complex.

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.

The picture is at least spirited, a jaunty trifle that's low on eroticism but high on cartoony coquettishness. Like the little motorized whatsit that is its subject, it does have its charms.

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

What’s remarkable about Looking for Eric is the number of ways in which it ALMOST works.

The Tree of Life is gorgeous to look at. It's also a gargantuan work of pretension and cleverly concealed self-absorption masquerading as spiritual exploration.

If nothing else, Rio is unabashedly jubilant.

Seyfried has spent too much time lately in vehicles that aren't worthy of her, "Red Riding Hood" being the most egregious example. Gone at least takes her seriously – except when, to delicious effect, it doesn't.

Between the Truffautish voice-overs and Jacques Demy-style musical interludes, it's a wonder anyone in this sort-of drama, sort-of comedy ever gets any rest.

Bridesmaids is the Bride of Frankenstein of contemporary comedies, a movie stitched together crudely, and only semi-successfully, from random chick flick and bromance parts.

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.

The picture is also weirdly compelling, maybe most notably for the way Dafoe's character - who is, in this respect, perhaps a stand-in for the Bronx-born Ferrara - seems to be grappling less with the idea that the world is ending than that the city is ending.

Just the latest forgettable thriller that might have been enjoyable if only its conclusion lived up to its windup.

May be overly sentimental at times, but at least it's about something.

Licorice Pizza feels pleased with how casual and effortless it is, which is the exact opposite of being casual and effortless.

But for sheer, go-for-broke nuttiness, The Greatest Showman stands alone in the landscape of this holiday season’s crop of movies, and I urge you to give it a chance.

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.

Del Toro loves his creatures. Maybe he loves them too much: He always wants us to get a good look at them, and that's one of the things that saps the spookiness from this Don't Be Afraid of the Dark.

As an ode to fatherhood, Jersey Girl is sweet without being particularly deep; but Smith is really onto something when he nudges against the ways in which the geographic landscape of a life merges with the genetic one.

Greengrass, a meticulous, thoughtful filmmaker (he also directed the second and third films in the series, The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum), clearly believes in what he’s doing. But his earnestness is at odds with the movie’s desperate, frenetic desire to keep us engaged every minute.

Cars is an elaborate concoction all right. But it feels soldered together from a scrap heap of tired ideas.

Actually, The Intouchables isn't bad - its merely shameless, but at least it's overtly so.

It's too bad that the glamour wears off about halfway through Entrapment, when it stops being a movie about art heists and starts being one about stealing (ho-hum) money.

The picture—directed by David Yates, who also gave us the last four Harry Potter films, terrific ones—feels both sprawling and crowded, as if it were trying to pack too much mythology into one cramped crawlspace.

This well-cast adaptation somehow feels obvious and overblown.

The 33, directed by Patricia Riggen, makes a valiant effort to tell this harrowing story onscreen, and there are moments when every shifting plate clicks right into place. In the end, though, the picture stumbles, and it may not completely be the fault of the filmmakers.