Todd McCarthy

Reasonably engaging as far as it goes, Searching for Ingmar Bergman evinces great appreciation for the writer-director's legacy and offers the testimonies of numerous eminent enthusiasts, but it leaves a good deal to be desired.

What is gratifying about the film is Volf's obvious love for and devotion to Callas, as well as his completist's urge to track down and include every scrap of footage at all relevant to telling her story and documenting her greatness.

There is plenty to relish here in the first-hand accounts offered up by the couple of dozen witnesses called upon by Ferguson.

Venom feels like a throwback, a poor second cousin to the all-stars that have reliably dominated the box-office charts for most of this century. Partly, this is due to the fact that, as an origin story, this one seems rote and unimaginative. On top of that, the writing and filmmaking are blah in every respect; the film looks like an imitator, a wannabe, not the real deal.

A film that’s pleasurable to engage with, even if the latter stretch doesn’t come close to realizing some of the early promise.

In what does have to be perversely honored as some kind of special accomplishment for Moss as a performer, Becky sustains such an abusive, mad, pathetic and immature display for well over an hour that you just want to bolt. What edification can possibly be gotten from such a grotesque form of exhibitionism?

Distinctive and amusing turns by Viggo Mortensen and Mahershala Ali make Peter Farrelly’s first solo feature outing a lively and likable diversion.

Running a farm is a tough life of never-ending work, and once the film drops its initial idealization of back-to-the-land fantasies in favor of a more realistic assessment of the challenges involved, it becomes genuinely involving and heartening.

The mix of commentators is unusual and lively, hardly the usual crowd that often pops up in documentaries like this, the clips are illustrative and on point in addition to often being eye-popping, and the film looks certain to please Keaton aficionados. Most importantly, it's likely to induce newcomers to investigate the great stone face for themselves.

Widows is a solid piece of genre fiction made more resonant by how its creators have bored down into its characters and sociological implications in ways specifically designed to examine some of the rotten underpinnings of business as usual.

As enacted here by unquestionably fine actors, this story does not emerge as compelling or convincing, and the film is aggravatingly narrow-minded in its interests. However, if one stays with it all the way to the end, it is absolutely worth sitting still for the end credits, over which is played a monologue by Nic which is the best thing in the picture.

Digging deep into the archives for rare and revealing material to accompany interviews with many of his collaborators and intimates, filmmaker Amy Scott packs a lot into 90 minutes with this insightful and warm look at an artist whose best work always revealed a heightened social conscience.

As ambitious and sometimes unsettling as it is, the film, after crossing back and forth over the line many times, ultimately feels affected in its aspirations toward making some profound statement about self-abasement and sacrifice, making one feel like rejecting the whole thing despite some striking individual moments.

This first English-language outing by the ever-adventurous French director Jacques Audiard (A Prophet, Rust and Bone) is a connoisseur’s delight, as it's boisterously acted and detailed down to its last bit of shirt stitching.

It's as if Neville, inspired by the scattershot commentary of the party guests in Wind, felt he'd been given permission to be a bit wild, even chaotic, with his documentary film style, an approach that proves both apt and a bit frustrating.

The film makes plenty of mileage from trading on the charm of a good bad boy, and Redford’s long experience in playing such roles serves him beautifully here; he knows by now he doesn’t have to push his attractiveness to be ingratiating. His work here is natural, subtle, ingratiating and doesn’t miss a trick.

Part sincere and part smarmy, part amusing and part windy nonsense, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs plays like an old Western-themed vaudeville show featuring six unrelated sketches of drastically differing quality.

Wellesians will vigorously debate the aesthetic results of this torturously achieved accomplishment but, to the credit of those who, against daunting odds and nearly a half-century's worth of obstacles, arduously pushed this project to completion, the end result feels like a plausible fulfillment of the style Welles himself established for it.

Roma may not be the memoir film many might have expected from such an adventurous, sometimes raunchy, sci-fi/fantasy-oriented filmmaker, but it’s absolutely fresh, confident, surprising and rapturously beautiful.

Like an athlete who leaves it all on the field, the film leaves it all in the moment and on the screen, and there's really nothing to take away afterwards. There is nothing to think about, no nuances to contemplate, no connection with these characters who exist only in moments of hyper-tension and crisis, no greater truths to consider other than to prevail.

Blandly internationalized, generically derivative, drained of any personality, edited as if by computer and bleached of the slightest hint of emotion other than a holiday card-like sympathy for children and allegedly cute animals, The Meg is a one hundred percent inorganic meal, something made from pre-tasted and then regurgitated ingredients.

Christopher's lengthy two-hander scenes with Pooh quickly wear out their welcome; what at first is agreeably amusing shortly becomes grating, then just tedious.

The central premise is arresting, as is the style, but there's a lot more that could have been done with it than just show how one ill-defined individual instantly opts to join his country's lowest form of life.

At a certain point, anyone who reads Bowers’ book or sees this film has to decide whether to believe him or not. At this stage, there is no reason not to; Scotty does not seem remotely like a braggart or someone desperate for a sliver of late-in-life fame.

Even though the evil impulses of the villains feel rote and arbitrary, The Equalizer 2 is not without its pleasures.

Even as the narrative becomes more perplexing — as before, realistic masks conceal true identities, characters' actual agendas remain hidden — the fast-moving spectacle unfolds in extraordinary fashion.

A densely packed documentary that earnestly and obsessively addresses campaign finance reform, its history and vital importance.

The result is an effects-laden goofball comedy in which anything goes and nothing matters. Not that this is an entirely plot-free extravaganza or just an excuse for comic riffs. But the filmmakers are so cavalier about the idea that any of this is supposed to make any sense that there's a certain liberation in not burdening two human-brained insects with the fate of the entire universe.

Emerges as a dynamic action drama in its own right. Making sure of that is writer Taylor Sheridan, who's hatched a compelling new yarn that triggers rugged, full-bodied work from returning leading men Benicio Del Toro and Josh Brolin.

Boosted by central characters that remain vastly engaging and a deep supply of wit, Incredibles 2 certainly proves worth the wait, even if it hits the target but not the bull's eye in quite the way the first one did.

One imagines Godard spending whole days playing with dials, switches and buttons to discover the very moments he wishes to emphasize in his clips, and a good many of them are passingly arresting.

This is a beautifully crafted film loaded with glancing insights and observations into an understated triangular relationship, one rife with subtle perceptions about class privilege, reverberating family legacies, creative confidence, self-invention, sexual jealousy, justice and revenge.

Lee and his writers have thrown as many logs on the fire as they’ve been able to find to signal the persistence of racial injustice; they have also endeavored, and mostly succeeded, to entertain.

Pairing his usual boundary-pushing sex-and-drugs fixation with a vital presentation of wildly exuberant dance and movement, Gaspar Noe has made a film that’s seductive in its rhythms and bold visualization of his young dancers’ sometimes beautiful, other times brutal somatic expressiveness.

Gibson still has all the energy, impulsive gear-shifting ability and growly vocal command to anchor a muscular film such as this; he co-wrote it for himself, after all, and he certainly knows by now what he does best. Hernandez is entirely credible as a tough little customer with real guts, and all the actors playing bad guys seize their opportunities with relish.

This is one of those films that, if shown overseas, could potentially make people think that the U.S. is going down the tubes even faster than imagined. Everyone in it — adolescents and grown-ups, too — is beyond stupid and content to remain that way.

With so many ingredients to stir into this overflowing pot, you have to hand it to the two experienced teams of Marvel collaborators who had a feel for how to pull this magnum opus off.

Despite the estimable talent on hand both behind and in front of the camera, the story never comes to convincing life and doesn’t, in the end, have anywhere particularly surprising or interesting to go.

An attractive cast led by a vibrant, all-in Paula Patton and spiffy visuals courtesy of renowned cinematographer Dante Spinotti make the sleaze and predictable plotting go down a bit easier than they would have otherwise, but there's still no disguising the project's fundamentally lurid underpinnings.

Despite the highly mobile and often arresting work of cinematographer Christina Voros, The Broken Tower is not a heady experience like many of the semi-experimental 1960s films he emulates. Instead, it's mostly a tedious chore, much akin to listening poetry you don't much like.

We have a monotonous conjectural melodrama for the faith-based crowd that does nothing to reach out to others. It does indicate how a very important seed was planted for the blossoming of Christianity, but is banal where it needed to be charged with passion and a palpable religious compulsion of its own.

Brandishing impressively packed abs and enough upper body strength to pull herself out of countless jams, Alicia Vikander gamely steps into the kick-ass role twice played by Angelina Jolie, but the derivative story and cardboard supporting characters are straight out of 1930s movie serials.

Although well made and acted, the real question surrounding this microscopic look at men enduring the severe pressure of trench warfare is what relevance it may have for a modern audience. The answer is, probably not much.

Only the faintest glimmers of genuine, earned emotion pierce through the layers of intense calculation that encumber Ava DuVernay's A Wrinkle in Time.

First-time screenwriters Taylor Allen and Andrew Logan have done their homework in organizing the material but haven’t brought an argument to the table that might have zapped the film to life; everything is methodical, it covers most of the bases, but passion and vitality are crucially missing from director John Curran’s treatment.

To be sure, the climax delivers copious amounts of blood and guts and tension and look-away temptations. But there are enough interesting surprises, in addition to the narrative promise, to provide for the presumed, and now quite desired, sequels.

Eastwood's main achievement here lies in trusting his hunch that the young men could handle playing themselves onscreen, with an acceptable naturalness and without self-consciousness. This they do, without a false note.

The actors are all seen to very good advantage. Boseman certainly holds his own, but there are quite a few charismatic supporting players here keen to steal every scene they can — and they do, notably the physically imposing Jordan, the radiant Nyong'o and especially Wright, who gives her every scene extra punch and humor.

It's virtually all Hemsworth's show and he's entirely up to the task of carrying the film on his broad shoulders: He's charismatic, fearless, confident, jokey and a good old Kentucky boy who just wants to get the job done and return home to his wife and daughter.

It's a true-life yarn loaded with extremes, of wealth, personal eccentricities, grief, tension, daring, criminal means to political ends, maternal drive and luck, both bad and good. It is also a peek into a rarefied world where money knows no bounds and yet means everything.

Loaded with action and satisfying in the ways its loyal audience wants it to be, writer-director Rian Johnson's plunge into George Lucas' universe is generally pleasing even as it sometimes strains to find useful and/or interesting things for some of its characters to do.

More unconventional and downright weird on a moment-to-moment basis than it is in overall design and intent, it's a singular work played out mostly in small rooms that harks back to psychological melodramas of the 1940s/50s but hits stylistic notes entirely its own.

It's a dramatic tale loaded with all manner of dynamics, political and personal, and Spielberg charges out of the gate at a brisk clip, extends his hand and all but enjoins the viewer to grab hold and be swept along for the ride.

Garishly unattractive to look at and lacking the spirit that made Wonder Woman, which came out five months ago, the most engaging of Warner Bros.' DC Comics-derived extravaganzas to date, this hodgepodge throws a bunch of superheroes into a mix that neither congeals nor particularly makes you want to see more of them in future. Plainly put, it's simply not fun.

Given the confined nature of the material as well as its period-specific aspects, this is a yarn that does not exactly invite radical reinterpretation. As such, its appeal is confined to the traditional niceties of being a clever tale well told, with colorful characters that are fun to watch being made to squirm by the inimitable Belgian detective.

A resourceful, if rather hyperbolic documentary that devotes 90 minutes to analyzing one of the most famous scenes in film history.

Marshall is a solid, straightforward courtroom drama with proud liberal credentials, one that could have been made by Norman Jewison around 1967.

Because of its cast of young men being buff and hormonal and good at their jobs, one could say that Only the Brave is the Top Gun of firefighter movies, the difference being that the new film feels like it's embedded in reality rather than in an aerial wet dream.

As a contrast to Gosling's deliberately deadened, emotionally zoned-out turn, Ford almost single-handedly amps up a film otherwise intentionally drained of character vitality.

This fleet-footed, glibly imaginative international romp stays on its toes and keeps its wits about it most of the time, with entertaining and pointedly U.S.-friendly cast additions.

Sorkin both entertains and makes you lean in to absorb every detail of this wild tale, which boasts a stellar cast to help tell it.

Just about everything about this film is winning and gratifying.

The film abounds with pinpoint insights into its mildly rebellious heroine's hunger to shed the restraints of home and Catholic school and bust into an independent life, and does so with a wealth of keenly observed detail.

This is a tale that, like any number of fanciful genre outings, both pulls you in with its intriguing central dramatic situation and pushes you out with some mightily far-fetched plot contrivances.

McCarten’s scene writing is tart and efficient and Wright infuses the drama with unquestioned energy. But this is a film in which every point and meaning is hit directly on the nose.

Captivating, funny and possessed of a surprise-filled zig-zag structure that makes it impossible to anticipate where it's headed, this is a deeply humane film that, like the best Hollywood classics, feels both entirely of its moment and timeless.

Working with a script by first-time writer Rebecca Blunt, Soderbergh has made the sort of breezy, unpretentious, just-for-fun film that scarcely exists anymore, one almost anyone could enjoy.

Intense and physically powerful in the way it conveys its atrocious events, the film nonetheless remains short on complexity, as if it were enough simply to provoke and outrage the audience. It's a grim tale with no catharsis.

Dunkirk is an impressionist masterpiece. These are not the first words you expect to see applied to a giant-budgeted summer entertainment made by one of the industry's most dependably commercial big-name directors. But this is a war film like few others, one that may employ a large and expensive canvas but that conveys the whole through isolated, brilliantly realized, often private moments more than via sheer spectacle, although that is here too.

Lemon represents a feature debut of unusual assurance and control with a style all its own.

At no point along the way does the film provide a reason to invest your interest in any of this.

Telling the entire story of Chaplin's 88 years was probably a hopeless goal, but the biopic does offer the saving grace of a truly remarkable central performance by Robert Downey Jr. and some lovely moments along the way.

The fact that a genre entry of this nature, with no intrinsic need of being philosophically nuanced, goes out of its way to endow even its ostensible villains with comprehensible motives rates as a notable achievement.

The two creators hit it off famously and collaborate with great ease on a journey driven by mutual curiosity and creative application.

Although the film manages some disarming insights into the man’s complex makeup and difficult behavior, a service enhanced by Louis Garrel’s very good lead performance, serious cinephiles will likely reject it as glib and disrespectful, while more mainstream viewers could be amused but not that interested.

The Rider is a rare gem, a small, acutely observed portrait of a few lives on what used to be the frontier but is now a desolate backwater, the windswept badlands around Pine Ridge, South Dakota.

What’s perhaps most impressive about Ostlund’s evolving style as a filmmaker and social commentator is his compulsion to enrich every scene he creates with a multitude of tones and nuances across the serio-comic spectrum. He’s like a virtuoso chef driven to try increasingly wild combinations of spices and ingredients; often the result is terrific, once in a while it’s too much.

It’s hard to detect a strong raison d’etre behind Sofia Coppola’s slow-to-develop melodrama.

Baumbach’s film for Netflix is more conventionally conceived than some of his best work but benefits from sterling turns from a wonderful cast, most notably Dustin Hoffman and, no kidding, Adam Sandler.

The film's scabrous, sometimes arch, other times spot-on critique ultimately comes together in an effective finale that retroactively puts a better light on the entire film than might have seemed possible during some of the earlier, rougher moments.

It may be a specialist’s rarified sort of work now, but Gordon and Abel really know what they’re doing. It’s gentle and admittedly closer to a divertissement than a full-course comic meal. But no one else is doing anything like this at the moment.

From one moment to the next, it's possible to on some level enjoy the shaking up of tired conventions in a swordplay fantasy such as this and then to be dismayed by the lowbrow vulgarity of what's ended up onscreen. The film gives with one hand and takes away with the other, which can be frustrating in what's meant to be an entertainment.

The drama flows gorgeously and, unlike in many other franchises in which entries keep getting longer every time out, this one is served up without an ounce of fat. It provides all the tension and action the mainstream audience could want, along with a good deal more.

While one can admire the commitment, technique, concentration and stamina required to keep the pressure cooker at maximum temperature, it still feels like an exercise, one so dramatically monotonous and tonally high-pitched that you want to escape almost as much as the characters do.

Swicord took on a daunting challenge in adapting this piece, and she’s met it more intelligently than convincingly. It would have been asking a lot from any actor to carry this film, and Cranston has done the heavy lifting and more.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 plays like a second ride on a roller-coaster that was a real kick the first time around but feels very been-there/done-that now.

Suffern puts this tragic story to purposeful and, in some respects, inspiring use: The power of forgiveness can be remarkable, and some countries in the world have actually improved over the past 25 years.

Smartly shaped and vigorously told by prolific documentarian John Scheinfeld (Who Is Harry Nilsson, The U.S. vs. John Lennon), the film bulges with insights offered by everyone from family members and close collaborators to the likes of Cornel West and Bill Clinton.

This highly entertaining return of one of the cinema's most enduring giant beasts moves like crazy — the film feels more like 90 minutes than two hours — and achieves an ideal balance between wild action, throwaway humor, genre refreshment and, perhaps most impressively, a nonchalant awareness of its own modest importance in the bigger scheme of things.

First-time director McMurray, who worked as an associate producer on Fruitvale Station, does a decent job of staging the action and maintaining viewer attention on the straight-line story. But there’s no subtext, investigation of his characters’ various stories or motivations for doing what they’re doing. It’s a very shallow film.

Over-produced and under-thought-out, this unconscionably elaborate attempt at an old-fashioned Gothic thriller looks great but is beyond silly.

Geremy Jasper’s dynamic debut crackles with energy and grassroots authenticity. But it wouldn’t have worked at all without the right leading lady, which it found in Danielle Macdonald, whose rapping seems convincingly born of her character’s rough life experience.

The unstated angst, desire, suspicion, frustration and emotional turmoil is almost entirely expressed by Keegan DeWitt’s extraordinary musical score, which runs like an underground river through this elegant and supremely expressive gem of a film.

Heineman offers up a double portrait of devastation, of a truly destroyed city and of partially decimated survivors, leaving the viewer with an empathetic sense of deep sorrow.

An excellent novel about the Iraq War and its homefront fallout has been turned into a rather flat and disappointing film in The Yellow Birds.

If you’re going to attempt a quasi-farcical look at the behavior of thirtysomething strivers in Hollywood, you need to cut more sharply and dig more deeply than does L.A. Times.

The film yanks the viewer to attention with its keen sensitivity to the rough winter conditions and limited prospects faced by the locals. It also features one of Jeremy Renner’s best recent performances, but does fall into some traps when it ventures into Tarantino and Peckinpah territory.

Unfortunately, after its fine start, this brainy slice of provocative speculative fiction slowly but surely loosens its grip on audience involvement rather than increasing it.