Steven Rea

Opens the window on a pivotal time in 1960s (and early 1970s) pop culture.

Unlikely to be remembered in decades to come - or even in months to come, once the next teenage dystopian fantasy inserts itself into movie houses.

There's a fine line between bag lady and belle of the ball, and Apfel instinctively knows it. Her sense of style is uncanny.

Spinney comes across as a man whose warm spirit is literally at the core of the loving, if loopy Big Bird.

George Miller's Fury Road is a hundred things at once: a biker movie, a spaghetti western, a post-apocalyptic dystopian action pic, a tale of female empowerment (The Vagina Monologues' Eve Ensler was a consultant on set), a Bosch painting made scary 3D real, a Keystone Kops screwball romp, and an auto show from hell.

The line between ha-ha funny and sorrowful reverence has been crossed - more deftly than you'd think.

This quiet, aching film - punctuated by dead-on music choices, a blues song, reggae, the requisite Leonard Cohen - doesn't answer those questions. It's enough to raise them.

The thing's a behemoth. And as the franchise thunders on, it's also becoming more and more a bore.

A riveting sci-fi investigation into humankind's experiments with A.I. (with pages from Spike Jonze's Her and Stanley Kubrick's 2001), Ex Machina marks the extremely able directing debut of British writer Alex Garland, of the novels "The Beach" and "The Tesseract," and of the screenplays for Danny Boyle's "28 Days Later" . . . and "Sunshine."

Tcheng finds Simons in moments of haughty self-confidence and tremulous self-doubt.

After toiling for the likes of Ridley Scott, Ron Howard, and Peter Weir all these years, Crowe takes command of his own camera crews and castmates, mounting an ambitious and sentimental period drama.

Hugely affecting - and reflective and witty.

Never mind the facts. True Story, slick and shaky, doesn't know where the truth lies.

Unrelentingly grim, plodding, and close-to-incoherent adaptation of Tom Rob Smith's best-selling mystery.

Baumbach, whose films include the searingly funny, autobiographical "The Squid and the Whale" and the brilliantly uncomfortable "Margot at the Wedding," writes wry, sharp, poignant stuff.

White God offers a dark - very dark - take on the way humans exert authority, and superiority, over our fellow creatures.

The transformation of Reynold's lawyer from a bumbler and stumbler to a victorious litigator, sticking it to an entire nation, is the stuff of a Frank Capra/Jimmy Stewart pic.

Effie Gray is peculiarly compelling, even if the issue of sexual repression, all the Victorian manners, seem light-years gone and close to unfathomable.

Comedy, pathos, and some schmaltzy couplets about the changing seasons follow forthwith.

If Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter takes its time, it's time worth taking. The cinematography is lovely: great swirls of midnight snow, frosted trees in glinting sun, the bustling modernity of Tokyo, a big library, subway stations exquisite in their orderliness.

Merchants of Doubt shouldn't be a hard sell. The fact that it is should make you very mad.

A masterfully creepy and beautifully turned variation on the teen horror formula.

Serena is one long eye-roll of calamities and corn.

The polar opposite of the J.K. Simmons character in "Whiplash."

Like "Hope and Glory," Boorman's Queen and Country finds exhilarating comedy in places usually reserved for drama, violence, loss.

In fact, no one in The Gunman looks happy. And what happened to chivalry? If a fierce squad of goons is coming after you and your ex, whom you still love, and there's only one Kevlar vest to throw on, don't you offer it to her? Apparently not.

Watts' Evelyn is a tricky character - it should be entertaining having her around in the cloven-in-two-to-cash-in-at-the-box-office final installments.

Elkabetz, alternately resigned and raging, stoic and sad, bitter humor in her eyes, is riveting. Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem takes its time to unfold, but like its star, the film presents its case in powerful, persuasive ways.