Tasha Robinson

Essentially, The Way starts out as "Eat Pray Love" and takes a long, surprising trip toward becoming David Lynch's "The Straight Story." And that's a longer trip than a mere monthlong trek across Spain.

Everything about the way this story is rendered makes it feel much bigger than the characters and their limited travails can make it.

As a pure cinematic experience, it's exhilaratingly, brutally beautiful.

A gorgeous film, framed with an eye that makes every country seem beautiful in one way or another. It's probably fitting that the human element seems fragile and flat by comparison, but the contrast leaves Beautiful Country fairly bland.

The film doesn’t come across as ironic, satirical, or like a thoughtful analysis or commentary. It’s the first of the three that could actually be considered a new entry in the genre it’s referencing.

Peters periodically relaxes into moments of pure art, with the camera studying faces, skateboarders on the move, a young couple kissing, or whatever else catches his eye. Give Me Future is a remarkably dense portrait of a place and a moment.

A Better Life leans too heavily on sad music, broad symbols, and weighty speeches to tell its story; it's more effective when it lets images speak in place of words.

Most of the film isn't as willing to reach out to viewers, and most won't be willing to do all the work in order to connect with it.

Though Prometheus follows "Alien's" story beats, it's a looser and less satisfying story, more intellectual than visceral, and not fully satisfying on either level. But in part, that's because it's trying to do so much more.

The film is as low-key and internal as the meditation it touts, and nearly as uplifting.

Veteran slapstick fans may get a kick out of the free-form antics, and the party's chaotic ending is suitably memorable, but empathetic viewers are likely to be as uncomfortable with Sellers' improv as the partygoers he leads into havoc.

"Chasing Amy" star Joey Lauren Adams makes a competent, tender writing and directing debut with Come Early Morning, but the film is still entirely in Judd's hands.

It’s frustratingly good at first, and then just frustrating, because it veers away from the things that make it unique, intelligent, and exciting.

Mostly, it just stands out in a crowded field of tacky also-rans by being a reasonably acceptable, more or less non-obnoxious way to spend an hour and a half.

The filmmaking is prosaic, the pacing sleepy. It's a solid but unremarkable experience, perfect for insomniacs watching the History Channel late at night, but not nearly as satisfying as simply re-reading Lee's book.

It's the most glorious, wonderful mess put onscreen since Terry Gilliam's "Brazil."

For all the inevitable comparisons to March Of The Penguins, Arctic Tale isn't quite a nature documentary.

The sheer dynamism and energy of the movie are compelling, even when the character drama isn’t.

Jack Goes Boating tells a tender story reasonably well, but it rarely lets viewers feel the emotions instead of thoughtfully observing them.

It’s the work of a director deeply enamored of his source material, and determined to do right by it, even if it means frightening kids, baffling parents, and embracing whatever style works in the moment.

Café Society is an incredibly pretty movie, and a generally unobjectionable one. But like so many Allen films, it feels like it was made primarily for his therapist, and letting the rest of the world in to see it and make their own diagnoses is an afterthought.

Watching it is a cheer-along experience.

Too many films that rely on secrets stop being compelling once those secrets emerge. Marrowbone just becomes more compelling. It’s one of the year’s most immaculately crafted movies, and it’s the kind of story that keeps dodging convention right up to the final shot. It fits neatly into the Gothic genre, but it innovates within it at the same time.

This is a film about the wilds — internal and external — and Saulnier shoots both the natural and the human side of the story with his usual sharp instincts for startling and engaging images.

Ultimately heads into a standard mismatched-buddy drama that would nestle nicely into a Hallmark movie of the week.

It's daring and it's different.

It's stylish, pretty fun, but not the kind of ambitious effort that should make the world sit up and take notice.

The film is a sumptuous, handsome portrait of a woman poised fearfully on the brink of decline, yet too proud to grab at rescue.

The doc never feels propulsive, or even particularly informative, and it never has to. For people who remotely enjoy the existence of dogs, Well Groomed is one of the most wholesome, joyous, purely enjoyable documentaries in the streaming world, and Stern doesn’t aspire to anything more.

What makes Human Capital a worthwhile experience is the way [Virzí] focuses on understanding his characters’ desires, rather than deriding them as unworthy.

Nicolas Pesce’s gory writing and directing debut Eyes of My Mother goes all-in on the idea of a remote location where horrible things can happen, and no one will ever know. But Pesce does a lot more with the idea of isolation — emotional, physical, and even moral.

The problem is that so little about Hooper's Les Misérables feels integrated. The cast feels like a grab bag of talented stage vets and garish stunt-casting choices, particularly Baron Cohen and Bonham Carter, who perform the fan-favorite comic number "Master Of The House" as a jerky, staccato series of show-off moves and attempted but inadequate scene-stealing.

Three Of Hearts seems like an unwieldy mating of two films: one a glossy documentary about the fictionalized perfection that three lovers and a director wanted to believe in, and another about the all-too-human truth.

Svankmajer's nihilistic story isn't for everyone, but he skillfully manages its disturbing execution in ways no one else could, and he brings it across in a darkly comedic way that encourages simultaneous laughter, horror, and thought. If that isn't art, what is?

The 11th Hour is slick and passionate, but neither persuasive nor helpful; it's a headache of a film directed like an Errol Morris project, but with half the substance. It's clearly preaching to the choir, but even they may find it off-key.

Rio could use fresher ingredients and more spice.

Audience members are likely to feel like they're right there in the picture, suffering for no reason and trying to pretend it's funny.

In a world packed with information, it’s outright exciting to know so little about where a story is going, or how far it’s willing to go to get there.

For the first time, the formula feels strained, due to excessive baby/dog humor and not enough Powell/Loy interaction.

In the Earth is an immersive portrait of tribalism and madness, angst and survivalism. And in spite of the somewhat predictable narrative, the film builds to an unshakably tense, unsettlingly eerie conclusion.

There's nothing wrong with animation aimed at adults, but this may be the first kids' movie that throws fewer bones to its supposed intended viewers than to their parents.

Marquis herself rarely comes off as less than fascinating, in spite of her cheaply titillating material.

Ultimately, Amigo is as much about Iraq and Afghanistan as it is about a century-old chapter of history - and it's as much about human nature as it is about either era.

Once the plot finally kicks into gear, director D.J. Caruso (Taking Lives) effectively cranks up the tension.

It’s a strange and memorable film with a unique voice and a unique perspective, and that alone makes it worth seeking out. But just as Stearns’ characters seem to be constantly suppressing a shriek of dismay or despair or defiance, viewers may come out of this one suppressing the urge to go yell at Stearns and demand a satisfaction that the movie isn’t about to offer.

For a film about suicide, Wristcutters is agreeably loopy and game. Dukic is bitterly funny rather than maudlin, and his carefully plotted grunge chic, in addition to being cheap, lends the film a great deal of Jim Jarmusch grime to go with its unmistakable Jim Jarmusch quirk.

Begin Again is all about the untrammeled joys of music, but like a hit pop song, it works better in the emotions than it does through any close examination.

It’s amiable goofiness, delivered at an emphatic, feverish pitch. Inevitably, what works fine in 11-minute episodes becomes strained over 90 minutes on the big screen, especially during a grating musical number about teamwork.

There’s no sign of sincerity anywhere in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, and no hint of relatable feeling. The entire movie is an echo chamber crammed with incident.

The film bounces along on cheap but entertaining Mel Brooks-worthy audio and visual gags, like the live-chicken-throwing fight, or the sequence where the camera discreetly pans away from Dujardin and a partner making out on his hotel bed--only to focus on a full-length mirror in which they're still fully visible.

Conversations is well-calculated and well-ordered, and it manages an equilibrium that a science lab would envy.

Despicable Me 2 has its charms, in its spritely pacing, a rapid-fire gag-delivery system that hits as often as it misses, and especially in its innovative, expansive use of 3-D space.

The results are too often ridiculously excessive--Kites generally reads like the Jerry Bruckheimer version of "Slumdog Millionaire"--but to anyone versed in Bollywood conventions, it’s a natural outgrowth of the genre, and a comically overwrought but still generally fun time.

The ambition is laudable, but the execution is wanting, and the attempt itself may indicate that Watanabe and company have forgotten what made Cowboy Bebop so much fun.

At its best, Micmacs is a robust, enjoyably lunatic game. It's social commentary by way of a good Looney Tune.

In the end, it doesn’t feel like Jonathan fully commits to its own premise.

It's still a mixed bag with a lot of cutesy awfulness to wade through, but the acerbic ending is enough of a punchline to suggest that Westfeldt understands what a joke this kind of film can be.

The Cursed has its own mythology and some unnerving, bloody innovations around what’s basically a werewolf story, but Ellis gets a lot of his mileage around the standard creature-feature horror-story things he doesn’t do.

Delpy's work lacks Allen's wry humor and eye-rolling, philosophical acceptance of those characters and their quirks. Her stable of sniping couples and relatives are openly hateful in ways that defy comedy.

While the stitches holding together the plot are clearly visible, Igor breathes some enjoyable life into its stolen grab-bag of gimmicks.

Boxtrolls’ world is fantastically detailed and physical, with every frame crammed with complicated machinery, hand-painted textures and handcrafted props, and a sense of vast and focused attention.

By experiencing Block's films, we aren't merely witnessing his neurosis, we're abetting and validating it.

Brick Lane comes far too late to be groundbreaking, and tries to do too much to be fully coherent, but its talent for avoiding obvious choices on all fronts, narratively and stylistically, make it worth a look.

Real love is often as complicated and painful as Middle Eastern politics, and Fox might have been better off acknowledging that, rather than making his characters such vague, sweet, safe ciphers.

Compare any of this to the grinding series of vicious gags from, say, pretty much any Ben Stiller movie post-Flirting With Disaster, and Fast Times starts looking like a tame jokefest even grandma can enjoy. There's no crotch damage, no humorously dead animals, no pie-fucking, and no menstrual-blood-on-the-pants jokes, either. At its most graphic, it's got a little good-natured pot humor...It's just pure, lighthearted, relatively respectful fun. With boobs.

Largely, it’s a jellybean of a movie: bright, colorful, sugary, and with no real content.

The sequel loses the small-scale, intense focus in favor of The Conjuring-level supernatural effects and action. At its best, it’s much scarier than the first movie. But it also comes with a level of full-on action-goofiness that Derrickson and Cargill avoided in Black Phone.

The result feels cluttered, overcooked, and underfelt.

It's important to go in knowing the central secret of the movie: Nothing exciting is going to happen. Ever. Armed with that knowledge, viewers should be able to settle down and enjoy the extremely low-key, melancholy character study that plays out between a handful of excellent actors.

When it comes to time-wasting memory games, crossword puzzles are more fun than this movie.

Blackthorn could use more depth and less of a sense of weary inevitability, but it never lacks for the arid, vista-prone beauty of a classic Western, or for a sense of lived-in wear and tear that remains convincing even though it's more stylized than realistic.

It’s colorful and charming, and it’s certainly unique in its story specifics. But it also feels safe, simple, and soft-edged compared to Pixar’s wilder swings for the outfield.

Géla Babluani is unmistakably a first-timer, and his debut project is raw and rough-edged. But he aces the way simple images can make the most of a simple story.

A warm and enjoyable small-scale film.

Narratively, Trance is questionable, but Boyle and Hodges whisk past all the unlikely developments with enough verve and style to keep audiences from thinking too hard until after they’ve left the theater.

Turns the franchise into a terrible '80s comedy.

The stories Pérez-Rey's subjects tell are shocking, even moving. But they're also narrow, limited, and staid, and so is the film that contains them.

Velvet Buzzsaw is a messy movie, and not just in the sense that Gilroy ends up painting a room with blood at one point.

Sometimes too pat and sometimes ragged with omissions and confusions, but it's still a fascinating look outside of that familiar world and into a harsher one.

The lack of plot coherence is a lingering irritant in a film that otherwise seems to be trying to improve on its cinematic-series forebears.

The Pod Generation isn’t going to leave anyone with the dread and emotional impetus of a hard-hitting, scary sci-fi future, or the uplift and catharsis of a well-observed satisfying one. It’s more of a placid puzzler than a moving experience, though there’s certainly plenty to see on screen, and plenty to recognize in the commercialization it lampoons.

Cianfrance pushes too hard for his audience's emotional response, with little nuance and strange selectivity.

It's rarely tedious, but it's also rarely insightful or propulsive, and since there's nothing new to discover about the characters or their world, much of the film feels like a protracted, contrived pause, as everyone waits for Rapace to finally get back into the game.

Ghostbusters is a lively, hilarious crowd-pleaser, which is all that's really required of a big summer action comedy.

It’s a perfectly functional, fairly scary kids’ film, with plenty of craft and creativity to keep adults occupied. But with a story as sophisticated as its visuals, it could have been much more.

What the film lacks in specificity and interest in taking sides, it makes up for in style, authentic emotion, and terrific performances.

Trumbo’s writing was so terrific, the film emphasizes, that it outweighed his caustic personality, his unfashionable politics, and the career-threatening dangers of working with him.

As with so many Merchant-Ivory films, The White Countess glides along on restrained, skillful performances and tapestry-rich cinematography, but its beating heart lies deep below the surface, where only determined viewers will find it.

Lightyear is so clearly calibrated to be something more: a thoughtful meditation on the passage of time. And on that level, the film never hits as hard as it’s meant to.

For a movie about a love so powerful that it brings people back from the dead, it's curiously tepid. In spite of its repeated, overwrought image of grey, dead zombie hearts flushing and throbbing with new life, it lacks a beating heart of its own.

Weapons that send an enemy into a dream state or a phantasmagorical world give director Zhao all the opportunity he needs to radically change animation styles, or fill the screen with wild fantasy images. This is a movie worth seeing on the biggest screen available.

It acknowledges grief, horror, and loss, but never lets it get in the way of a big, bright laugh.

The whole exercise feels hopelessly shallow and artificial. In Her Shoes is basically a double-date romantic comedy, in which not one but two women find themselves and learn to live and love again, etc. etc., and while it's well-acted on most counts, it's also as plodding as it is obvious.

Tomorrowland comes across as a grinning rictus of a movie, a desperate door-to-door evangelist trying to force its foot into the door and push its salvation by any means possible.

Part of it is cheap thrills, of course; this is a capable, experienced cast with extensive acting chops, and it's trashy fun watching them descend to the level of the material.

While The Beaver starts with Gibson in "What Women Want" slapstick mode, it eventually goes to such exaggerated, extreme places that it becomes as much of a must-watch train-wreck as Gibson's own real-life situation.

Biographies of great artists often try to define their subjects via grand dramas and dark, defining moments. A Magnificent Life’s perspective is right there in the title: Even in its darkest moments, it’s a hopeful, comforting success story, framed in a way that encourages viewers to look back to their own childhoods, and confront their own wistfully ambitious ghosts.

As silly as it is, Sisterhood is smart as well, about the modern draw of victimization and attention, and how people (not just girls, and not just teenagers) who live life on a perpetually scrolling online stage can become starved for validation in any form.