Stephanie Zacharek

Mostly, Kung Fu Panda 3 is just fun.

Perhaps only a marginally effective movie about 9/11, because, I suspect, there can be no such thing as an effective movie about 9/11 -- at least not right now.

Whatever its flaws may be — and there are many — John Ridley's Jimi: All Is By My Side is compelling for one specific reason: It's more attuned to the women in Hendrix's life than it is to Hendrix himself.

The Other Guys isn't easy to peg. It's not a comedy that loosens you up and mellows you out; it works by needling you progressively into a state of anxiety.

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.

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.

Van Warmerdam keeps such a calm, firm hold on the material that he practically hypnotizes you into following along to the end. The craftsmanship is precise; the result is enigmatic.

Pleasurable.

Streep isn't playing Julia Child here, but something both more elusive and more truthful -- she's playing our IDEA of Julia Child.

In the end, the action sequences are just overblown and dollar-squandering, with no particular payoff in the entertainment department. The supporting actors - particularly Jones, Tucci and Luke - are the thing to watch here; they do all they can to keep the movie's gears running smoothly.

There's a sly intelligence at work here -- in the writing, the filmmaking and the acting -- that makes it deeply pleasurable to watch.

The surprises of The Life Ahead are the gentle kind: There are no wild revelations or transformations, no hyper-dramatic turnabouts. But the movie has a quietly enjoyable power.

Even if you’ve never heard of the Peterloo Massacre, this picture–beautifully staged and shot, with a you-are-there urgency–will reward your patience.

Hits every color note just right. It's a visual antidepressant.

Kinnear's performance has to be one of the most sympathetic acts of decency one actor has ever extended to another. Crane always wanted to be a real, respectable movie actor. Channeled through Kinnear, he finally gets his wish.

It's so uncomplicated you could go out for spaghetti after the first 10 minutes and slip back into your seat just in time for the last 10, and you wouldn't feel you'd missed a thing, save a rumble or two.

There’s some comfort to be found in the predictability of its beats. But only at the end does it muster any real vitality. Any ribs it breaks along the way have healed seamlessly before you’ve even left the theater.

The movie is so assertively about the social issue at its heart – the way opioid addiction tears families apart – that it barely leaves room for its characters to breathe. At times it feels more as if they’re spokespeople with jobs to do. That takes its toll on both lead actors, especially Roberts: one minute she’s Denial Mom, the next she’s Tough Love Mom.

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.

Brings honor to its predecessor, but it’s somehow lacking in joy.

It's either genius or madness to put Diesel and Johnson in the same movie, or the same scene. They're both enormously appealing performers.

The real problem with Sasquatch Sunset is that it’s distancing, in an art-project way. The movie is just too coy, too overt in the way it signals when we’re supposed to be appalled and when we’re supposed to be moved; it advertises its weirdness even as it strives to convince us how much these Sasquatch are like you and me.

A neo-vampire movie for tender-hearted preadolescent girls who are afraid of sex. If that's your thing, go for it. But there's something genuinely creepy, and not in the good way.

Even though Coppola is one of our most compassionate storytellers, she can't bring herself to like these kids much. She's not cynical enough to turn this story into satire.

At times fun but mostly maddeningly uneven, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back feels less like a full-fledged movie than a side project Smith took on to amuse himself and his buddies.

Joe Wright’s well-intentioned adaptation of Erica Schmidt’s stage musical (itself drawn from Edmond Rostand’s 1897 play Cyrano de Bergerac) can’t survive its own petulant, self-centered love object, Roxanne (Haley Bennett).

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.

This ambitious blend of live action and computer animation runs the risk of being overwhelming and sterile, but it turns out to be a pleasing and sweet-natured adventure thanks in large part to Spielberg’s big, friendly secret weapon: Mark Rylance, as the BFG himself.

These interlocking stories don't move along as swiftly or as urgently as they should, and much of the dialogue thumps along on square wheels.

It's a comedy that moves with a sense of purpose, as Gordon-Levitt does in the title role.

Bend It Like Beckham is supposedly a movie about youth; its biggest shortcoming is that it rarely feels young.

The Prestige is a trick box with too many false bottoms. Ultimately, the last one simply gives way -- leaving us with a hole, and a little residual darkness, but not much else.

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

The subject of Spurlock's movie is Spurlock, and while he may be reasonably affable, and sometimes extremely goofy, it's a stretch to call him controversial.

This is less a straight-up biopic than a meditation on the texture of one vibrant but troubled life; Zellweger goes just far enough into Garland’s pathology of suffering without fetishizing it.

The charm offensive that is Wonka toils way too hard for its meager pleasures. It may leave you feeling more worked over than invigorated.

The actors are all terrific.

Imaginative and intricate, but it's also joyfully casual, maybe to the point of being a little messy in places. But even its flaws work in its favor.

An affable entertainment, both a celebration and a satire of lowbrow pleasures.

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

By the end of Trembling Before G_d, you desperately wish that at least some of DuBowski's subjects would see the light.

As with most animated films today, there’s lots of boring bromides about “family” and “belonging” that you have to suffer through to get to the good stuff.

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.

For all the ways in which Plan B is sometimes thunderously obvious, there’s still a lot going on beneath the surface.

May be very much about feelings, but it's made with a drab, juiceless, tasteful efficiency that distances us from the characters instead of drawing us closer to them.

Movies about tough subjects don’t need to be torture, and if Pieces of a Woman proves anything, it’s that too much is sometimes also not enough.

Byzantium isn't Jordan's first movie about bloodsuckers—that would be 1994's Interview with the Vampire—but it's the right vampire movie for today, poetic and elegant in an artfully tattered way.

Part of what makes "ackass Number Two so frighteningly watchable -- even against your better judgment -- is the way the guys delight in one another's bumps, bangs and bruisings: First, they feel one another's pain; then they laugh like hell.

It’s hard to know exactly what Baumbach is going for here, other than perhaps reminding us that the key to living is just going about your life. But you probably don’t need two hours and 16 minutes’ worth of movie to tell you that.

Derek Cianfrance’s based-on-true-life caper Roofman feels like a mainstream studio movie from 10 or 15 years ago, and that’s a good thing.

Never lets us forget that it's a nonmainstream story about a nonmainstream subject, when ideally, it should simply be a story about a person. The picture too often feels like a lesson in tolerance.

It's a mishmash of decoration, drapery and debauchery that's both deeply pleasurable and kitschy.

A smart, sophisticated songsmith in the tradition of Cole Porter, or an inscrutable, pretentious twit? In the course of his near-20-year career, Stephin Merritt - the sort-of frontperson for the indie-rock collective Magnetic Fields - has been considered both.

Mann turns Miami Vice into an exploration of tone and mood, and he makes that enough.

Dahan's filmmaking damn near sabotages the performance.

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.

Probably not as good as you hoped or as bad as you feared.

Luckily, we have the benefit of being able to read the future even as we watch Thirteen Lives, and that leaves us free to enjoy Howard’s crackerjack storytelling skills, not to mention the picture’s bracing, casually heroic lead performances.

Rodriguez is that rare filmmaker who doesn't draw a hard, fixed line between entertaining kids and grown-ups -- he knows that in order to understand what will delight kids, you have to know what will tickle adults as well.

The script is teasingly, pleasingly raunchy in places.

The picture is a bit arty and decorous; it could do with fewer swimmy camera moves. But Young vests it with a fascinating, flinty grace.

How many human beings among us are capable of making a comedy with wit and intelligence that also takes bold pleasure in unabashed silliness? I think this is what happens when you let an elf loose with a movie camera.

Lemmons – who has directed some splendid pictures over the years, among them "Eve’s Bayou" and "The Caveman’s Valentine" – is fully alive to both the danger and beauty of the landscape of the American South – even the shape of a tree, craggy and twisted or lush with leaves, could be either a warning or a welcome. Erivo shines through it all, giving us a glimpse into the mind of a steadfast woman of purpose.

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.

Deadpool, intended as a spiky antidote to superhero oversaturation, ends up impaling only itself.

Although there's nothing sensationalistic about his approach, [Graf] treats the characters' tentative, often problematic bohemianism as a wild, brave, and precious thing, and the lead actors — restrained where it counts and bold where it matters — are a pleasure to watch.

Clearly designed to be an action thriller with emotional underpinnings. But you can't get blood from a stone, no matter how hard you squeeze. And so Cruise, a huge box-office star, is the single bright, blinking emblem of the failure of Mission: Impossible III.

Mystery Men is supposed to be an action comedy, but there isn't nearly enough of either.

The Way Back has an indescribable something that’s missing from so many modern movies. It’s filled with emotional textures, most notably the serrated edge of shame.

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.

Some of the numbers are dazzling, some are exhausting, and many are a mix of both—and still, somehow they work.

Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale transports you to a time and place that seems so much more glamorous than our own, and to see it all splashed out on the big screen is almost overwhelming. It’s a genteel fantasy worth leaving the couch for.

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.

Although these vignettes are unified visually -- they're all in black-and-white and they all have the same gorgeous, silky visual texture -- they were shot by several different cinematographers.

It's not quite as crazy as it needs to be: There's something listless about Life After Beth — it starts out as a reflection on the potentially morbid nature of grief and then doesn't seem to know where to go.

The story hits every expected beat, right when you expect it to. And it squanders some of its best resources.

Summer of 85 delights in romantic excess, ending up as an almost literal evocation of one of the songs on its era-specific soundtrack.

Last Night in Soho soars at the beginning, only to crash in the end. It’s a broken promise.

Your enjoyment - if that's the right word - of Buried will hinge on two things: Your ability to tolerate situations in which characters are confined to very tight spaces, and your willingness to be emotionally manipulated in the cheapest way imaginable.

Daniels is that rare contemporary filmmaker who's not afraid of melodrama. The Butler is so old-school it feels modern: Stylistically, it could have been made 30 years ago, but its time is now.

Not half as clever as its setup leads you to think it might be: It's all buildup and no payoff, the kind of romantic thriller in which if just one sensible character called the police at the moment as any normal human being would -- well, then, you wouldn't have a movie.

Toback has hit a new low. The candor and shrugging good humor Toback, at his best, used to show has been replaced by a repellent slurpiness: The whole picture seems coated with a slimy sheen of drool.

So bloodless that it feels like an act of arty dishonesty.

Charlie Victor Romeo shows us how much of life's weight and meaning can be packed into one second of thought or action; it's a work of shivery intimacy.

This is a movie that seems to be striving to please a crowd, but its cornpone humility only becomes wearying.

The movie chickens out. In the Valley of Elah could have been really interesting -- and really daring -- if it had focused on Hank's realization that his own child, supposedly a good kid, had perhaps committed the kinds of atrocities that would make any decent human being recoil. The movie (which Haggis also wrote) dances around that territory, but doesn't dare to march straight into its terrifying maw.

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

What people want from Bill & Ted Face the Music matters a lot less than what it actually is, a crazy, imperfect but deeply gratifying burst of optimism at the end of what has been — inarguably — a terrible summer. Its ramshackle earnestness, its certainty about nothing beyond the fact that we need to get our act together as human beings, is its great strength.

You come away with the sense that you should have come to care (or at least to know) more about its central characters than you do.

Like a truffle in a fluted paper cup, a small delight made with care and attention to detail.

Cruise plays Barry as an aw-shucks raconteur, and the routine is amusing at first. But midway through American Made, even Cruise devotees might decide enough is enough.

Movies don’t have to be bigger and bolder than we ourselves are. Haley’s films are things we can reach toward – there’s an intimacy and candor about them that feels welcoming.

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.

Weighed down with self-important messages, but it's also splashily opulent.

Astute and painfully relevant political comedy.

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.

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.

On the surface, The Salt of Life may seem like a movie made just for old folks. The trick is that it really is about the youth that stays with you, even when your aging body is working hard to convince you otherwise.

Aside from the fact that Operation Mincemeat features not one but two former Mr. Darcys (one from the much-loved 1995 Pride and Prejudice mini-series, the other from Joe Wright’s similarly marvelous 2005 film adaptation), and works beautifully as a romance, it’s also a cracking espionage caper.

The best rock 'n' roll movies are less about strict authenticity than about capturing a vibe. And The Runaways gets the vibe just right, from its opening shot.

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.

One thing My Week with Marilyn does get right is that women were as enchanted by her as the men were, if perhaps in a different way.

It miraculously pulled off the effect of feeling like a surprise: The picture both fulfilled some vague, unexpressed hopes I didn't know I had and also left me with the sense that I'd just seen something I wasn't quite prepared for -- the kind of contradiction that great showmanship can bridge.

Like its star, Salt is a spare and lean piece of work; it's everything a modern action movie should be, a picture made with confidence but not arrogance, one that believes so wholeheartedly in its outlandish plot twists that they come to make perfect alt-universe sense.

This is a love story in which one of the partners repeatedly does some really bad stuff, and while it's easy enough to admire him for his ability to get away with it all, it's harder to square the way he so cheerfully dupes innocent people, including his beloved.

It comes to the party overdressed and still fails to make an impression.

In the first 10 minutes, I feared the picture would be dull and earnest -- until, about a half-hour later, I realized it was lively and earnest, and also refreshingly, unapologetically movielike.

There’s no need to worry that this version might crush the gentle charms of the 1991 picture: Even though Condon more or less faithfully follows that movie’s plot, this Beauty is its own resplendent creature.

So while X-Men: First Class at first takes its source material with just the right amount of self-deprecating seriousness, it founders in the second half, when it becomes overburdened with squirrelly plot mechanics and an excess of self-evident dialogue.

Alien: Covenant is reasonably entertaining. But it slips off course after that opening section, and the problem is caused by the very creatures we presumably came to see.

It’s simply a movie that makes you feel welcome.

The movie is an act of loony generosity we shouldn’t refuse. This is ludicrous entertainment for frazzled times.

The Courier is almost two films in one: the second half is much darker and more intense than the first, but the shift is so delicately abrupt that at first you barely register it. That’s part of the movie’s edgily engaging artistry; what begins as a shadowy spy adventure ends in a place of mournful resignation.

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.

The Horse Whisperer is just the latest example of tab-A-into-slot-B moviemaking to come out of Hollywood, a weeper that's built according to a solid set of rules.

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

At least Linklater isn't just picking the bones of his forebears; he honors them as they deserve.

There's nothing groundbreaking about Dan in Real Life -- it's a picture that could have been made 10 or 20 years ago -- and yet its easygoing, affable nature is exactly what makes it pleasurable.

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

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.

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

Such an exhilarating, spirited piece of work that its embellishments and omissions cease to matter.

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.

Though it works hard to make us believe it’s really a social statement about hospitals’ lack of scruples...its garden-variety true-crime roots are painfully visible.

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.

Alfredo de Villa's Washington Heights feels stiff and overworked in places, and sometimes the acting is a bit awkward. And yet the story is both compelling and easy to identify with.

If this wigged-out modern Western doesn’t quite work, it’s at the very least a cry of vexation over what our country, messy at the best of times, has become, thanks to a virus that found its way not just into our lungs, but into our very lifeblood. Dr. Aster has listened in on America’s heartbeat; the diagnosis is that we’re basically a mess.

The look of Burton's Gothic dream landscape, both lulling and energizing, is vested with so much power that it could almost substitute for narrative drive.

This is that rare movie version of a great novel in which watching IS reading.

Pacific Rim is big and dumb in a smart way.

These characters don’t always behave as we want them to; they feel lived-in, not written, with flaws and attributes that chime with things we see in our family, our friends, ourselves.

Isn't a great movie; I'd say it's barely a good one. But it's a war movie that at least acknowledges the distinction between macho and masculinity, always putting the dignity of the latter over the bluster of the former.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 is probably about as good a movie as you can make from just half of a rather complicated book. But then, it's not just a movie but a promise: When Part 2 arrives, next summer, a cloud of desolation is likely to descend upon us.

Ondine suggests that coincidence and magic are often the same thing.

While Jacobson navigates the first half of Down in the Valley deftly, he loses his way in the second.

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.

Coppola captures the luxe insularity of Marie Antoinette's world in a way that leaves no doubt why the revolution had to happen. The picture's final image is a moment of devastating stillness that wouldn't be out of place in Luchino Visconti's end-of-an-era masterpiece "The Leopard."

Almost all of the movie's romantic lunacy is too calculated and sly; the picture never quite sweeps us away.

So captivating to look at that you can almost forget there's virtually nothing to it.

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

Pearce may be the other big star in Traitor, and while his performance is serviceable, it doesn't cut deeply. Taghmaoui, as a radical motivated by moral certainty, is the real actor to watch here.

One of those unapologetically cerebral space-exploration sci-fi movies that's both boring and compelling at once.

In the early minutes you might not be sure what you're watching. Tangerine's a comedy, of course, laced with rambunctious, exuberantly ragged dialogue. But by the end, Baker and his actors have led us to a place beyond comedy — you may still be laughing, but your breath catches a little on the way out.

Starts out, and ends up, as a thriller trying valiantly to show us layers of moral depth. But in between that beginning and ending, Paxton's vision (as well as that of Brent Hanley, who wrote the script) becomes wavy and indistinct, a blurry muddle of sensationalistic, prurient grisliness masquerading as a meditation on the nature of evil.

iIt sits on the screen in the flattest way imaginable, and the brightest colors in the world can't make up for all that's missing. 8 Women is perfumed kitsch, and it reeks.

Fast-moving and bloody, enjoyable even within its unapologetically generic limits. But McAvoy is its real secret weapon: With his X-ray blue eyes and lips that look bitten with anxiety, he has the miraculous ability to fool us into thinking there's really something at stake here.

It's a shame when an actor like Sylvester Stallone, who's always at his most appealing when he just hunkers down and lets himself be a big galoot, feels he has to make a bid for respectability.

By the time I got to the end of Captain Marvel...I heard the voice of my own inner superhero, Peggy Lee, whispering in my ear: Is that all there is? The most heinous supervillain of all is Boredom.

Even if Dolphin Tale hits every note square on the nose - or maybe because it does - watching it is surprisingly pleasurable.

A picture that's fully open to some pretty rough truths. But it's also a joyful, heartfelt movie, one that speaks to the openness and vitality we see in Bettie's pictures.

Just about gets us off the ground on its dreamy, feathery angel wings; it just doesn't have the strength or the stamina to keep us aloft.

It's imaginative only in a stiff, expensive way. Scott vests the movie with an admirable degree of integrity – it doesn't feel like a cheap grab for our moviegoing dollars – but it doesn't inspire anything so vital as wonder or fear, either.

Crude, violent and deeply enjoyable.

Some of the writing is sparkling. Joke for joke, there’s probably just enough to keep you laughing. But if Always Be My Maybe isn’t terrible, it’s still lackluster enough to make you feel that underserved and underrepresented audiences deserve more.

Even though Papushado and Keshales raise some ticklish questions, it's hard to know exactly what they're going for, beyond some mischievous, grisly thrills. At least they're skillful at delivering those.

The picture's ending -- which is satisfying, possibly even happy, depending on how you look at it -- is almost inconsequential; it's the texture of everything leading up to it that matters. The Pursuit of Happyness, even within its slickness, gets at intangibles that allegedly grittier movies fail to capture -- like how heavy a wallet can feel when you're down to your last dollar.

This is one of those lazy, lukewarm pictures that's even more disappointing than a purely bad one, and for one glaring reason: How could Marshall, his writers, and even his actors have let these dogs down so badly?

Theron is a superb and versatile actor, and she’s good here — it’s not that she always needs to play nice characters. But as Megyn Kelly, she’s like a Hitchcock blonde with all the allure drained from her.

There's a great story here, but Asante — who has made one previous feature, the 2004 drama A Way of Life — can't quite harness its power.

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

One night in 1408 stretches out until it ends up feeling more like a routine three-day business trip. The scariest thing in it may be the way the clock radio has a way of turning itself on, loudly, of its own accord. The song is always the Carpenters' "We've Only Just Begun." Now THAT'S horror.

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

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

It's hard to say whether Patric Chiha's unabashedly out-there drama Domain is actually good or whether it simply nuzzles very cozily against the shoulder of so-bad-it's-good. After seeing the movie twice, I'm inclined to say Domain splits the difference.

A mini-showcase of smart, thoughtful contemporary horror.

Luhrmann and his co-writers Sam Bromell and Craig Pearce use the story of Elvis’ supremely crooked manager, Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks, lurking beneath prosthetic jowls), to frame the larger, more glorious and more tragic story of Elvis.

It's all goofy stuff, played for laughs, but it's clear we've been catapulted into a world where things are not quite right.

(Harron) has made a passionless movie about a passionless man, and it's all supposed to add up to make us feel or even just think something, but what?

It’s sometimes boring and pretentious and often a little silly, almost to the point—almost—of parody. But even with all its flaws tallied and noted like battlefield casualties, there’s still something mildly compelling about it.

The movie is a surprise, the good kind, an instance of a filmmaker zigging just when you’re expecting him to zag.

With his charming, sympathetic picture The Lost King, Stephen Frears digs into the fairly recent rehabilitation of the misunderstood monarch’s legacy—as well as the 2012 discovery of his long-lost bones beneath a Leicester parking lot.

Much of what happens in Infinitely Polar Bear could be unbearably painful, but Forbes sees the cracked humor in everything

It pretends to examine how self-absorbed we are as a culture, only to be consumed by its own self-absorption. It's also badly constructed, humorless and emotionally sadistic .

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.

Emily Blunt shines as the tough-minded British queen in this lush, and even sexy, period romance

John Hillcoat's The Road is an honorable adaptation of a piece of pulp fiction disguised as high art; it a has more directness and more integrity than its source material, the 2006 novel by Cormac McCarthy.

Storytelling efficiency is one of Miss Sloane’s most effective calling cards — that, and Chastain.

Promising in its first third, only to end up shambling too aimlessly in the last. But as flawed as this picture is, there's one sequence in it that has already burrowed deep in my memory, and of everything in the movie, it's the one element that convinces me that Tykwer has it in him to one day make a truly great picture.

O'Brien describes a number of those basic human feelings that drop-kick all of us from time to time, like being resentful of anyone and everyone who still has a job when we don't.

The movie itself seems to be locked in a kind of adolescence; it never quite blossoms into maturity, into a fully rounded whole.

Davidson’s Zeke is one of those inexplicably winning losers with coolness in his bones. He just doesn’t know how to make it work in the real world.

While I don't think Blades of Glory is exactly homophobic -- it's not mean-spirited enough for that -- there's something a little too cheap and easy about the way it plays up to the ultra-straight guys in its target demographic.

An intelligent adult thriller about the death of newspapers.

As lukewarm as We Have a Pope may be as a piece of filmmaking, Moretti doesn't tread particularly gently into sacred territory. The picture could be more irreverent, but at least it dares to suggest that popes are people too.

Dragonfly wants desperately to be the spiritual heir to "The Sixth Sense," but it's not even as effective a thriller.

The picture is resolutely unhip and proud of it, which can be a good thing in the right hands or, in the wrong ones, just a gimmick. Nearly everything about Pineapple Express is a gimmick.

The Man Who Sold His Skin, from Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania, hits some ominous and sinister notes as it tangles with serious political and social issues, among them the plight of refugees, the nature of art and exploitation, and various facets of self-loathing. But it ends on a surprisingly airy note, and that makes all the difference.

If Appaloosa is something to look at, it's also unnecessarily lethargic. Even an intentionally slow-paced picture needs to have its own internal source of energy, and as a filmmaker, Harris can't quite get that motor running.

Everest is visually splendid, though it loses a few points for its murkiness in rendering its main characters as distinct individuals.

As a one-off, it’s a featherweight delight, like the prettiest pink-and-white cake on the tea tray.

Preachy infotainment that wants to offer thrills, too -- an uneasy hybrid.

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.

in its best moments, Bright Young Things is as lithe and as wicked as its source material. Depending on how much of a Waugh purist you are, its flaws may trouble you as you're watching it. But afterward, they might not matter so much.

An entertainment as billowy as a Shakespearean nurse's sail-shaped hat.

Even if Gladiator II is essentially an unapologetic retread of its predecessor, all of these actors are fun to watch—though none stands taller, literally or figuratively, than Denzel Washington, as slave-turned-schemer Macrinus.

Something New is the perfect date movie, not only because it explores a range of suitably romantic sentiments, but because it's so canny sociologically, as well as being delightfully good-natured.

Kinds of Kindness is too parched and mannered to be either disturbing or funny or both—and not even its capable cast can rescue it.

This isn’t just a movie about reawakened ambitions, but about how our teenage hopes inform our grownup selves, or perhaps haunt them. It’s a lot to pack into a seemingly unassuming little movie, but Pohlad—who also directed 2014’s superb Love & Mercy—pulls it off.

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.

Ambitious, sweet-spirited.

Proof isn't just a movie about mathematics; it's a mathematical movie. The scenes may as well have been laid out by diagram.

The picture is well-crafted; it just doesn't breathe.

The movie’s ending is little more than a fizzle. But wow, what a dog. The extraordinary animal actor Jumpy, a border collie mix with fabulous speckled legs and alert triangles for ears, listens attentively to every word from his master’s mouth, comprehending nothing yet understanding everything.

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.

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 tense and quietly thrilling, though it’s brushed with somber elegance, too. There’s an abstract, poetic quality to Greyhound; it’s less about rah-rah heroics than it is about the secret burden of heroism—because with wartime heroism, there’s always a price to pay.

The sex is the most unremarkable thing about it. What surprised me most about this gentle-spirited sprawl of a movie, set in post-9/11 New York City, is what I can only call the friendly, Midwestern quality of the filmmaking.

What is surprising is how poetic the movie is, partly thanks to its high-lonesome sound design and the desolate beauty of its visuals, but mostly because of its star, Liam Neeson.

The movie is designed to stir up controversy. (Linklater and Schlosser have admitted as much.) But can you really stir up controversy with a lesson plan?

This isn't an art house crowd pleaser along the lines of the 2006 "Paris, je t'aime," a freewheeling mixed bag of shorts made by the likes of Olivier Assayas, Wes Craven and Alfonso Cuarón. Tokyo! demands more patience, patience that it sometimes doesn't deserve.

The movie is neither cathartic nor entertaining. The action scenes (and there are many of them) feel mechanized and calculated.

Lars von Trier is a mechanic, not an artist. And his movies are meat grinders he feeds his characters through.

This is a sturdy little cop thriller, and even when it stretches the bounds of plausibility, you go with it, partly because you believe -- almost against your better judgment -- in what the characters are doing.

Visual tone poem.

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.

It's immediate and vital, and it doesn’t leave you feeling like you’ve got all the right answers.

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.

It's a liberating, kindhearted picture, one whose ending brings with it the feeling that something has finally been shaken free. How comfortable you feel with that is completely up to you.

Funniest in its first half, when you're not quite sure where it's going, and drags in the second, by which time you realize it's going nowhere.

Gyllenhaal’s Baylor is a man on the edge of time, reckoning with a deed he can’t take back and a possible future built on lies. Few actors can put this kind of raw yet strangely companionable self-loathing onscreen—and make you glad you didn’t avert your eyes, no matter how much you wanted to.

Furman keeps the drama taut when it needs to be, and loosens the reins easily when it's time to kick back - he has good control over the movie's rhythms.

Habicht has made a lovely film that’s partly about Pulp and partly about Sheffield: It’s hard to know where one leaves off and the other begins.

This is muddled and oppressive storytelling (the script is by William Monahan) dotted with elaborate but weightless battle sequences.

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.

Though there are patches that are sad to watch, it is for the most part a delight, a biopic that brings its subject to life in a way that’s both respectful and open-hearted.

Does so many things right, and still doesn't quite hit the mark.

The picture sparkles, but in the nighttime way - its charms have a noirish gleam.

Cooper may have gone overboard in delineating the hardships of blue-collar life in Out of the Furnace. But he has a gift for getting actors to put some muscle into their work, and enough finesse to make sure the sweat doesn't show.

The story is stuffed with subplots and gags that are sometimes fun by themselves but don’t quite cohere into a whole — the picture has a melismatic waywardness, as if it’s singing as fast as it can yet is never quite sure where it’s going.

There’s almost too much going on in Honk for Jesus. The film jumps from one thematic thread to another without exploring any of them thoroughly, and even so, some sequences go on longer than they should.

Downton Abbey: A New Era goes down as easy as a Nice sunset.

If you’re looking for a movie that speaks to the moment, a mindless action-thriller probably isn’t it.

Glowering from beneath the bangs of her moonbeam-platinum bob, Theron’s Broughton is equal parts air, light and iron. We’re just the moths clustering around her flame.

It's a relief to go to the movies and see teenage girls acting like teenage girls, as opposed to grown women acting like teenage girls.

Chéri is a perfect example of a movie that gets many of the details right and the vibe all wrong.

Every actor in Friends with Benefits, including the nearly indestructible Patricia Clarkson and Richard Jenkins, stalls out in the process of pedaling desperately to make this substandard material work.

If you're looking for thrills, you should know that you have to wade through a good seven-eighths of the movie before Sade does anything remotely disreputable, and even then it's a rather mechanical bit of business that would have been more effective (and more disturbing) if it had been handled with a bit of humor.

Sometimes, maybe, it's a little too unoffensive: It's Kind of a Funny Story is so gentle, so anxious not to put a foot wrong, that it doesn't have much sticking power. But its casually compassionate perspective is also what makes it work.

It has a pleasing, noodly elasticity about it -- the picture knows what its limits are and proceeds to boogie unself-consciously far outside them.

Unless you're a lover of tigers, there's probably no reason to see Jean-Jacques Annaud's Two Brothers. And maybe not even then.

A glum, listless affair that springs to life now and then, only to sag back into its saggy, depressive cushion.

Even by Shyamalan’s usual standard of reminding us that he’s a thinker of deep thoughts as well as an entertainer, the result is cumbersomely preachy.

When Pirates of the Caribbean is good, it's certainly something to behold.

This is a movie that recognizes there's no straight line to the truth, which is part of what makes it vaguely unsatisfying -- though it's also what keeps it honest.

After its deceptively fleet opening 20 minutes or so, Chamber of Secrets settles into a plodding amble, a rickety framework in which many allegedly exciting things happen -- and are forgotten only minutes later.

There’s a fantasy element to Master Gardener that bolsters the movie’s convictions rather than weakening them.

Unsane isn’t easily dismissible, especially if you think of it as just one fragment of the wild terrazzo of Soderbergh’s career, which includes jaggedly brilliant genre classics like "The Limey" and offbeat crowd-pleasers like "Magic Mike." The movie is worth seeing for its craftsmanship alone.

Watching McDormand navigate that transformation is the kind of thing that can keep your hope in movies, and in actors, alive.

As played by Rodriguez, Wise and Snow, these women embrace one another’s differences and help ease the way through tough times. The city is theirs for the taking, a backdrop for their raunchy jokes, furtive sexual encounters and procurement of various feel-good substances.

Stowaway pulls plenty of pages from the generic space-movie handbook, but it still builds a mood of dread and contemplative ennui, finding its resolution in a final, somber shot.

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

If nothing else, Rio is unabashedly jubilant.

Triangle of Sadness definitely looks like money. But it feels like a luxury item, a picture whose payoff isn’t as grand as you might have hoped. Östlund’s gifts are dazzling. If only he knew when to stop giving.

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.

Maria is a movie made with great respect, almost adulation, but very little that qualifies as real feeling.

Split is compulsively watchable.

Normal may not be groundbreaking, but it does come equipped with a wicked spirit and some great B-movie energy.

May not be a very grand picture, but it's a gently satisfying one. And if it brings Smith's book just a few hundred more readers, it's admirably done its job.

Roughly speaking, the characters in Kit Kittredge may be stereotypes, but they're stereotypes with soul. And they live in a very real place.

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.

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.

It’s the most magnificent act of oversharing you’ll see all year, a banquet of all the TMI you can eat, just for the price of a ticket. Though when you think about it, shouldn’t Aster be paying us?

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

The movie is straightforward in a way that makes it feel less manipulative than it might.

There are moments when Cage (with his perpetually worried eyebrows) and Caine (with his inherent emotional elegance) carry the picture admirably enough.

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

Made with confidence that borders on bravado, and sometimes it shows more conviction than it does grace.

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.

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.

Both oversimplifies and overcomplicates Moore's and Lloyd's vision, but it never cuts to the bone. It's a movie drawn with big, bold strokes and very little feeling -- a tracing-paper exercise masquerading as a masterpiece.

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

Star Wars lore is woefully lacking in sex appeal — even Han Solo is more of a guy’s guy — but Glover has an unruly, charismatic elegance. He belongs in a better movie, but at least he perks this one up.

The big problems with Iron Man 3 are less specific to the movie itself than they are characteristic of the hypermalaise that’s infected so many current mega-blockbusters—too much plot, too much action, too many characters, too many pseudo-feelings.

Even though Brody works hard -- and he's got those magnificent drooping eyes, which suggest both innocence and a seen-it-all-before weariness -- his scenes don't spark, and the movie drags around them.

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.

To his credit, Langenegger keeps things relatively simple instead of resorting to lots of fast cutting and fancy camera angles. To his detriment, the picture he has made barely moves at all. This no-style style isn't restraint; it's a kind of indifference to filmmaking.

Wonderful...It's funny and offbeat, sometimes raucous, but it still manages to come at you in gentle layers.

Godzilla is one of those generic, omnipresent blockbusters that's undone by the very spectacle it strives to dazzle us with: Everything is so gargantuan, so momentous, that nothing has any weight.

Lord of War skims along like a dance routine. Political morality doesn't usually get such fleet choreography in the movies.

This is an ambitious, handsome-looking picture that strives to capture the essence of life in the deep South in the mid-20th century in a way that makes movie sense, without excessively romanticizing it.

Catch a Fire just doesn't spark.

It's a breezy and entertaining little charmer.

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

Fans of "Swingers" may be disappointed. Made doesn't give us as many jazzy catchphrases to latch onto, or figuratively hoist us aloft on a giant martini glass of prolonged adolescence. But then that's precisely why it's the better movie.

tThere's life at the center of The Duchess, in the form of Keira Knightley. She carries the weight of the movie around her effortlessly.

Burton has just allowed himself to be silly and have fun; Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is filled with low-stakes wisecracks and kindergarten-style one-liners, but the effect works. The movie carries you along on its wriggling magic carpet of mayhem—and features one sequence of creepy-elegant-funny cracked poetry that’s classic, old-school Burton.

If you love actors, it's the sort of thing you might be tempted to see a second time, even after you've found out whodunit, just to examine more carefully the way the performers -- particularly the mesmerizing Cate Blanchett -- weave shining silken threads around what's essentially a pretty uninvolving narrative.

Black Sea is so almost-terrific that it's ultimately more disappointing than a movie that's merely badly or carelessly made.

The picture is grand and nutty and visually splendid: Vogt-Roberts knows he's gotta go big or go home, so he treads boldly.

If you've never seen the show, it's a great excuse for binge-watching. And if you loved the show, the movie is a welcome homecoming. It has the feeling of a story that has been, against all odds, loved into existence. Probably because that's exactly what it is.

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.