Steve Davis

Close is a true joy. Without question, she's the heart and soul of Cookie's Fortune.

This is an action flick for those who like form over substance in their popcorn movies which explode onscreen every summer.

It's a good, solid little film about a man whose story deserves better.

Be forewarned: Anthropocene is often an overwhelming experience. The human accountability on display can be tough to swallow.

Damage brings to mind Last Tango in Paris, although Malle's elegant, precise direction is drastically different from Bertolucci's work, a film that celebrates the loss of inhibition and control. Although relentlessly somber, Damage offers a perverse humor in the idea of father-and-son rivalry over the same woman: it's like the Oedipus complex in reverse.

This is the rare movie to acknowledge the impact popular music can have on our lives, particularly during the period of your life when you’re struggling to figure out who you are and – more importantly – who you want be.

It’s one of the few narration-dependent films in recent years in which the words don’t get in the way of the story.

Although Scott Frank's screenplay has more than a few holes in it...they're forgivable, mostly because this movie is so utterly likable. Little Man Tate is a small movie by industry standards, but it nevertheless stands pretty tall.

For the incomparable Streep, it’s yet another performance in high C.

What takes The Theory of Everything into the cosmos is Redmayne’s extraordinary performance. The disciplined precision with which he progressively embodies Hawking’s failing body is nothing short of astonishing.

Veteran Italian director and co-screenwriter Crialese (Respiro, Golden Door) embraces a vivid visual sense here, abetted by Gergeley Pohárnok’s sumptuous cinematography and the Me Decade fashion sense of Massimo Cantini Parrini’s breezy, eye-popping couture. It’s a look that idealizes memory, much like when you conjure up something from the past in your mind and try to make it stick there for a while.

Theater Camp may not qualify as a 24-carat enterprise, but when it occasionally shines, it glimmers with a love for the transformative magic of the stage.

Well-researched and candid, this documentary will not change anyone’s perception of Cohn or rehabilitate his character in any way. Although his self-loathing insecurities may slightly humanize him, he will always be one-dimensionally evil.

Embrace the simple pleasures of pen to paper.

For a comedy about an old weapon with a dulled blade, Sword of Truth is razor sharp in just about every way.

Director Porter has done an excellent job assembling archival footage and interviews to tell Lewis’ story; she has the markings of a great storyteller.

It never really rollicks like a good political satire.

There’s enough intelligence and wit here to sustain your interest, especially when Curtis and Lohan are in peak form. They put the freak in this Freaky Friday.

Though the movie delivers its chuckles and elicits its sighs in a calibrated narrative arc that softens the hard edges of its late bloomer’s life, it would be shortsighted to hastily dismiss Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris as sentimental escapist fare that quickly evaporates into the ether of silly romanticism.

The last ten minutes or so are heartwarming to the point of schmaltz. Even the adept Lassgård, as the old fogey version of Ove, can’t make this increasingly feel-good schtick stick.

Rebuilding Paradise speaks to the resiliency of human beings, and maybe something about the American can-do spirit.

All said, Nightmare Alley is something to be admired, rather than treasured. It’s big, classic moviemaking with a moral in the end. And there can be a lot to be said for that.

It feels like a veiled apology for Babs Johnson and other exercises in bad taste. In my book, the filthiest person alive will always win the prize.

It may not sound like much of a storyline, but there’s a subtle beauty in the ability of human compassion to cure one’s shortcomings.

No doubt, the under-10 crowd will love this bathroom vulgarity, even more so when their adult chaperones experience a flush of embarrassment.

Predicated as it is on Huppert's pensive, provocative blankness, the action moves a bit slowly, although, as is often the case with Jacquot, events make more sense after the movie is over. Dares to provoke rather than titillate in its delineation of love's strange ways. As the French might say, “L'amour, l'amour, toujours l'amour.”

Renaissance man extraordinaire Michelangelo Buonarroti is frequently accused of greed in the incohesive historical drama Sin, but the only real transgression is his pride, whether it’s nurturing his own divine genius or badmouthing the mediocrity of contemporaries like Leonardo and Raphael.

As the down-on-his-luck Roth, Orser gives the darkly comic performance of a man barely able to keep his head above water.