Todd McCarthy

Carey Mulligan shines in a captivating performance.

It’s an impressive debut, an ambitious project pulled off with confidence.

An intermittently compelling and occasionally hilarious road movie.

It takes a little while to get in gear — or perhaps just to adjust to what's going on here — but once it does, Deadpool drops trou to reveal itself as a really raunchy, very dirty and pretty funny goof on the entire superhero ethos, as well as the first Marvel film to irreverently trash the brand.

Ending is on the conventional side, more so than anything else in the picture , but script by Ann Biderman and David Madsen keeps the tart surprises coming throughout most of the picture with only occasional lapses into red herrings and artificial manipulation.

An eye-popping visual spectacle that serves up a vivid picture of what the planet might have looked like when reptiles ruled the Earth.

Eastwood's latest picture boasts tight storytelling, sharp acting and an eye for unexpected, enlivening detail.

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.

The result makes you realize how few realistic and three-dimensional date movies have been made in an era of throbbing hook-up encounters and R-rated horny teen gross-outs.

Strong action, special effects and by far the most credible ape "performances" yet seen will spell box office to inspire chest-thumping in all markets.

Darker and more dramatic, this account of Harry's troubled second year at Hogwarts may be a bit overlong and unmodulated in pacing, but it possesses a confidence and intermittent flair that begin to give it a life of its own apart of the literary franchise, something the initial picture never achieved.

Pleasantly involving and sometimes annoying throughout most of its running time, this is also a vibrant, thoughtful piece about modern life in a very particular gentrified neighborhood.

Dramatically powerful, surprising in its strong narrative differences from previous cinematic tellings of "the greatest story" and bold in the extent to which it presents Jesus as a confrontational and threatening figure in the Judean context of the time.

Occupying a dramatic, philosophical and sensory twilight zone that casts a considerable spell, this intensely focused piece soars not only on the director's precision-tooled style but also on the outstanding interplay between leads Tom Cruise and Jamie Foxx.

A sharp-minded, plenty entertaining toon that will keep children of all ages wide-eyed and on their toes.

An absorbing, shades-of-gray look at home-front intrigue in Nazi-occupied Denmark during World War II. Ole Christian Madsen’s accomplished fourth feature plays out on a much larger canvas than he’s used previously and offers nuance and ambiguity in equal measure with violence and tragedy.

Endlessly stimulating and provoking, Ivory Tower presents a solid overview of an urgent problem that some claim is about to implode and others believe can be worked through with the intelligent application of fresh ideas.

An engagingly up-to-date melodrama steeped in local color and steered by a treacherous sense of morality.

There is absolutely no doubt about who wrote the elaborate, pungent, profane and often funny dialogue that a fine cast chews over and spits out with evident glee, nor as to who staged the ongoing bloodbath that becomes a gusher in the final stretch.

This story of suffering and almost inadvertent humanitarianism is harrowing, engrossing, claustrophobic and sometimes literally hard to watch.

The script dares to go deep and confront what is going on in the hearts and minds of all three family members, but it does so articulately and without hysteria.

After a buoyantly funny first half-hour, stylish animated comedy takes a breather before ramping it up again for a rambunctious, girrrl-power finale that provides a convenient springboard for further adventures to come.

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.

A tour de force of artifice, a dazzling pastiche of musical and visual elements at the service of a blatantly artificial story.

Volume two gets down in ways the first half doesn't, although anything resembling real sensuality remains MIA.

An intelligent, insidiously plotted Hitchcockian thriller directed in souped-up, modern expressionistic style.

Like a Rousseau painting splattered with carnage of warfare.

Very clever and imaginative indeed, and its pictures are so gorgeous that they alone could warrant a second viewing.