Ty Burr

Nancy is an eccentric, pungent gift of a film about a woman without identity played by an actress without persona.

As a portrait of dysfunctional pedagogy, it's both refreshing and more than a little terrifying.

How’s the movie? Extremely entertaining and fairly pointless, and it will probably be taken for a classic by a generation that has likewise never heard of Tim Burton’s “Ed Wood” (1994), a movie that plumbed the wayward soul of its misbegotten moviemaker to depths The Disaster Artist never manages to touch.

Looks brilliant while you're watching it and stands revealed as counterfeit only in the strong light of day. What Baldwin does, though, is the stuff of supporting actor Oscars.

If you miss Anthony Bourdain — and for many, the celebrity chef’s death in 2018 felt like the loss of a close and troubled friend — Morgan Neville’s Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain is a salve.

It’s a showcase for an actress who wins us over by degrees and a reminder that there are no new stories — only fresh ways of telling them.

That Ginsberg is played by Daniel Radcliffe might come as a shock, but the shock wears off as the movie rolls on and you realize you’re in very good hands.

In the end, Seabiscuit gets right the things that matter.

Pig is a thoughtful, well-made movie for an audience primed for junk: It’s pearls before swine.

Especially wonderful is Taraji P. Henson as Petey's longtime girlfriend Vernell , a vision in Foxy Brown period clothes with a pixie smile, lollipop legs, and a filthy mouth. After "Hustle & Flow ," this is at least the second movie Henson has stolen, and will Hollywood please do something about it?

It's earnest and well-acted and sturdily filmed: We're in good hands and we know it.

Their film is a fiendishly detailed toy -- the sort found at the back of a forgotten museum -- and while the shadow play it presents is an old and eternal one, you never cease to hear the whirr of the gears.

Focuses on a parallel universe that moviegoers rarely consider: that of the invisible, hard-working craftspeople who put the illusion together.

I do know that Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem make this brooding suspense melodrama with tragic undertones more watchable than it deserves to be.

Frantz is pleasurable slow going, developing its themes at an amble but with a measure of suspense, sympathy toward its characters, and a lasting faith in filmmaking craft.

The movie’s electrifying without being completely satisfying. Zonca and his star don’t play by Hollywood rules, which is both good (keeps us off-balance) and less so (at times the film doesn’t seem sure where it’s going).

The way Greengrass lets you feel the violence is impressive. Most movie heroes punch through armies without scraping their knuckles, but Bourne's a believable wreck by midpoint.

Its quirks are exactly what make Signs interesting, entertaining, and good.

It's that central dance between teacher and student that makes the movie both hard to watch and worth your attention - a subtle waltz of power in which it's difficult to tell who's leading until too late.

This is the art-film Carrey: repressed, lovesick, unshaven. Essentially he's doing the same intellectual sad sack played by John Cusack in "Malkovich" and Nicolas Cage in "Adaptation"

Sweeney Todd comes as close to raging at normalcy as Burton has dared. It's no coincidence that the rage is borrowed from a greater artist.

The leads save it, particularly Cotillard, who once again subverts her own glamour with ferocious lack of ego. The movie itself only occasionally matches her intensity.

The closest cinematic approximation to a beach novel that money and skill can buy.

I wish I could tell you that Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again is ridiculous and I hated it, but the fact is that it’s ridiculous and I loved every minute.

In After the Wedding Susanne Bier pushes the envelope further, toward operatic passion and the visual symbolism of Ingmar Bergman.

Writer-director Casimir Nozkowski has great fun coming up with new exasperations for his main character, and Henry has a slow burn to rival old-time masters like Edgar Kennedy.

This wistfully charming slice-of-life comedy celebrates an elderly man defiantly thumbing his nose at old age.

This is the meatiest role Tautou has had post-''Amelie'' and she drops the zombie-pixie act for once, giving us a character who's caught in a daily dance between propriety and abandon, and who can only dance faster as desperation sets in.

The Outrun is a recovery drama lifted above the genre’s necessary clichés by the star’s prickly, incandescent presence. It’s also boosted by the film’s setting in the stark Orkney Isles in the north of Scotland and by Fingscheidt’s poetic approach to time, place and chronology.

In Fanning, Potter has found the perfect vessel, and the miracle is that the actress doesn’t even seem to be trying. She just is.

The time for poetry is past, the director seems to say, as his camera looks deep into the eyes of the mob in the film’s final image. The chaos may be just be getting started.

Until it goes kerblooey in the last 15 minutes, “Relay” is the very model of a modern genre thriller: Taut, tight, squeezing the maximum of suspense and character detail from the minimum of gestures.

If you don’t really understand women — or don’t even want to — it’s easier to just call them a mystery and let it go at that. For all the close-ups, that may be why Blue Is the Warmest Color never gets close enough.

It's pretty endearing - a low-budget labor of schlock.

A straightforward and rather sane version of the events described in the book and, against all odds, a surprisingly effective movie.

There are sequences in The Big Red One that you can't forget, and every one of them could have been made better with a bigger budget and a realism that was beyond Fuller's grasp at the time.

The movie is Hawke’s fourth and best feature as a director; it’s immensely touching, and only deceptively shapeless.

The Inheritance is a welcome reminder of film’s flexibility as a medium of protest, a vessel of cultural history, and an agent of change.

Of all the "Liaisons" adaptations, this may be the most sentimental.

Wicked Little Letters manages the paradoxical trick of being both broadly played and finely acted, the first due to a director intent on underlining every action with a heavy Sharpie and the second to a cast that colors in the outlines of their characters with finesse, depth and life.

The Green Fog is a cinephile’s mash note — and a glimpse of the beautiful film library of Babel that lives in Guy Maddin’s head.

Helmed by James Madigan, a second-unit director moving up to the big chair, from a screenplay by Brooks McLaren and D.J. Cotrona, “Fight or Flight” is high-spirited junk, too full of itself at times but mostly content to work out every last variation on a theme: How do you kill someone on an airplane?

American Made really does deserve to be on a double-bill with “Top Gun,” and I’m betting Cruise knows it. The first film embodies the glorious shallowness of the Reagan Era. The second wallows in that shallowness while hinting at everything it cost.

As directed by Kevin Macdonald (The Last King of Scotland), it’s a steady, compelling accounting of events that intends to leave you infuriated and succeeds.

Dancing on the edge of dullness, ''Girl'' is continually saved by the look of things: the hush of an atelier in midafternoon, dust-motes swirling in a sunbeam, pigment blooming under mortar and pestle. Impatience is forestalled, time and again, by rapture.

One last thought: Fahrenheit 9/11 is many things, but for pity's sake let's not call it a documentary.

No one has really been asking for a fusion of "Independence Day," Fritz Lang's "Metropolis," and an old Buck Rogers serial, but here it is anyway, and the only thing keeping it from greatness is a good story.

Whose Streets? gives us more than enough stories from people not often enough heard, and their refusal to remain silent is invigorating.

Battle of the Sexes is slick and wholly enjoyable, a pop provocation whose medicine goes down easy via outsize, engaging performances in the leads.

The more interesting drama of Babygirl is watching Romy and Samuel try to figure out what they can get away with under the watchful eyes of her family, her human resources department, her ambitious office underling Esme (a terrific Sophie Wilde) and, more importantly, with each other.

In Polanski’s hands, it’s an unholy pleasure: a diversion that stings.

At its best, Still Alice is a moving inquisition into the emotions and memories and connections that make us us and how we might cope when they’re taken away with slow, impersonal cruelty.

Begins and ends as a fulsome Kerry campaign bio along the lines of the famed Bill Clinton convention short, "The Man From Hope."

A documentary lovingly and somewhat shambolically directed by James D. Cooper, gives the duo their due and in so doing opens up a singular view on an era, its energy, and its excesses. For fans, it’s a must-see; for others, a slightly overlong tour of a seminal pop explosion and the men who made it.

A Complete Unknown just tells the story. But maybe that’s enough for a fresh generation to feel the joy of his apostasy at a moment when the world seems once more poised on a precipice of chicanery, treachery and disaster. If so, well, how does it feel?

What sustains the film is its tone of almost hallucinatory foreboding. White Material isn't about the calm before the storm but the seconds before the deluge.

Either you'll find the man hilarious -- or he'll seem like one of those awful, tedious comedians who only THINKS he's hilarious.

It's assured and neatly crafted - the time zips by while you're watching it.

Of all the comic book movies that have spun out of theaters this long and pulpy summer, Guillermo del Toro's Hellboy II: The Golden Army is the most unapologetically comic book-y.

Less striking for its storyline than for the world it presents -- a rural moonscape of coal-dust, casual environmental disaster, and atavistic behavior.

Isn't so much a story of perseverance and musical triumph as it is of despair, acceptance, and social commitment. The movie's a call to arms: We are our brothers' keepers, it says, and our brothers are in terrible shape.

More than anything else, Oldboy recalls Alfred Hitchcock with all restraint tossed to the wind, or Hitchcock's most obsessed devotee, Brian De Palma, at his most nastily inspired.

Rise is very consciously a drama about a Simian Spring, and it's close enough in its details to a recent documentary to be thought of as "Project Nim: The Revenge."

Through luck or Huber’s eye for the odd detail, it adds up to an unexpectedly moving portrait of a maverick at twilight.

Too many of the sequences are two-character dialogues that take place in restaurants; after a while, the film starts to resemble sketch existentialism.

Acridly funny.

As literary desecrations go, this makes for perfectly acceptable, occasionally very enjoyable children's entertainment. You'll forget about it by Monday, though, and if they're old enough to have developed some taste, so will your kids.

By the end of this sincerely calculated, always watchable movie, everything has burned away but the fury, including whatever you may think or have thought about the actor you’re looking at. That’s how good the performance is.

Godzilla vs. Kong has speed, wit, and a refreshing refusal to take itself very seriously.

The scariest aspect of New Order is that in 2021 it doesn’t feel far-fetched at all.

Because its gaze is so level and so unyielding, it stands as one of the better dramatic films made on this subject (although it's not nearly as fine as Louis Malle's "Au Revoir les Enfants."

Drop is the sort of unpretentious suspense exercise that takes a single absurd premise and works every variation it can within a streamlined 100 minutes. Your brain is not required, but a certain amount of suspension of disbelief is the price of admission.

A playful French meta-mystery that's occasionally too proud of its own cleverness.

Halfway into this film, I wanted to smack the mopey bohemian couple played by July and Hamish Linklater; by the end, I realized the director was smacking them for me, and hard. In a case of biting the hand that feeds her, July has made possibly the worst date movie ever for trendy modern couples - a work that traps a pair of passive-aggressive hipsters in a drift of their own making.

Reducing Life of Pi to a homily does it a disservice. Lee gives the framing story short shrift and concentrates on visualizing the inner tale with as much detail and power as possible.

My Dead Friend Zoe is straightforward as filmmaking and it’s fairly obvious as therapy, but it comes from a place of deep respect and deeper love, and everyone here honors that.

Durkin has a filmmaking style of indirect direction, one that leans on certain ’70s suspense-movie tricks: slow zooms into figures standing at windows, eerie soundtrack drones. But the performances are bold: Law making the grand, obvious gestures of a poor kid pretending to be rich and Coon turning Allison’s unhappiness into open rebellion in a restaurant scene that leads to a delirious solo night on the town.

To a Western audience, the movie may at times feel pat, cooked up, wishful beyond realistic measure. But we're not the ones who need to see it.

What the movie doesn't do, oddly, is leave much of an impression after it's over.

Love hurts in Secretary -- but not too much. It's not impossible to imagine adventurous young couples seeing this movie and rushing home to try out the handcuffs and paddles.

Kong: Skull Island isn’t a remake or a reboot or a re-anything. It’s just a Saturday matinee creature feature with a smart, unpretentious script, a handful of solid supporting players, and a digital Kong who feels big enough and real enough to provoke the necessary awe. This is all to the movie’s credit.

The acting is strong (especially that of 13-year-old Roddy McDowall as the youngest son and Maureen O’Hara as the lovelorn daughter), and Arthur Miller’s Oscar-winning photography gives the images a spooky luster, but a little bit of Ford’s salt-of-the-earth piety goes an awfully long way.

Boys of all ages, by contrast, will be mesmerized by the relentless, breathtakingly visualized action.

The Last Winter sounds like a genre-movie platypus - a little bit of this, a little piece of that - but it stops short of laying an egg. In fact, it works eerily well.

Here's a film made by grown-ups for grown-ups, on grown-up themes of statelessness and belonging. Yet you could show it to a 6-year-old and have him or her understand all the nuances of plot and characterization.

A sweeping romantic period drama, heavy with themes of love and duty and fate, lifted up by cinematic craft and great performances.

A Royal Affair is tosh but it's ripely entertaining tosh, with emotions as flamboyant as the window treatments. There is nothing like a Dane.

It’s unnerving in ways that elude easy explanation and that slip under your skin and stay there.

All that’s missing, really, is a story. “The Bikeriders” is almost good enough to convince us we don’t need one.

What Redbelt reminded me of more than anything else was a modern version of a classic film noir, particularly 1950's brilliantly seedy "Night and the City," with its pro-wrestling subplot.

Her chattiness here is unexpected and disarming, and if the film's overindulgent, it puts you in a forgiving mood. How often do we get to hear a lioness speak?

A cautionary tale for the fleet-fingered social media generation, Zola explodes off the screen in a burst of emoji confetti.

Imelda is at its most acridly useful when comparing the former first lady's recollections with others' less sanguine memories.

They’ve built up a vast ensemble of character types, all of them played by better-than-average actors, and that they can mix and match the drama, comedy, or action as they see fit.

By turns strikingly original and dramatically slick, deeply felt and a little cooked up. It’s well worth seeing, though.

There’s no backstage dirt, then — for that, pick up the 2002 “uncensored history” written by Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller — but there is an honest appraisal of the show’s peaks and valleys over the years.

The Cuckoo is smart enough to steer away from allegory and into the specific every chance it gets, though -- so much so that when the film finally does slip the mortal coil, you still hang with it.

Part detective story, part coming of political age saga, and all teenage identity crisis, Captive is the first film written and directed by Gaston Biraben , who has worked steadily as a Hollywood sound editor since the early '90s. That professionalism shows in the polished filmmaking as well as an occasional tendency toward shallower melodrama than the situation deserves.

War Horse is the best film of the year. The year, unfortunately, is 1942.

Actually, the movie's a better movie than the book was a book, in part because Meyer struggled to put her characters' galloping emotions into print whereas director Catherine Hardwicke just visualizes them in all their inarticulate purpleness.

A novelist and screenwriter, Claudel's directing for the first time here, and he leans on melodramatic contrivances more than he needs to. Still, he gives us a lean and observant weepie, and the mystery of Thomas's Juliette pulls you in.

Pope Francis: A Man of His Word is an essay in radical humility capable of moving a viewer regardless of his or her religious persuasions, or lack thereof.

Alive with infectious rhythm, likable characters, and slick dance moves, Step Up gives clichés a good name.

Parents are another matter. Almost to a man and woman they lay expectations on their children that ignore who those children are.

Like its protagonist, the movie is smart, soulless, glib, and utterly charming -- just the thing to warm up a movie season that's been late to bloom.

The crassly funny, not entirely irrelevant comedy Neighbors represents something of a watershed: the moment when all those Judd Apatow bad boys tremble on the edge of maturity, look back, and see the soulless face of a younger generation gaining on them. The face belongs to Zac Efron.

Patti Cake$ charts a path of rise and fall, breakthrough and disappointment, montage and romance that would be woefully predictable if we weren’t having so much fun tagging along. What’s fresh is the central figure, her talent and presence, and an exuberance that all that concrete Tri-State armor can’t hide.

This is very much the bargain that Northfork offers an audience: Buy into the brothers' elegiac meditation on angels, Eden, and the death of American innocence or sit back and scoff at it as so much David Lynch lite.

Sollett's working with stale material, clearly. He genuinely likes people, though, and his fondness revives "Nick and Norah" and sets it spinning with camaraderie and hope.

I don't know if the first zombie date flick is a step forward or backward for civilization as a whole, but I can say that Warm Bodies pulls off a pretty impressive trick: It has its "Twilight" and goofs on it too.

A pretty good movie expansion of a pretty good stage musical; what bumps it up into contention and makes it of interest beyond devotees of musical theater — you know who you are — is Kendrick.

Ham on Rye will frustrate literal-minded audiences, but it’s a work of gentle, genuine American surrealism — a lo-fi love song to those left behind by character and chance.

The movie's a cheeky, low-budget goof on dice-and-slice horror films, but for all the visible seams, it's a lot cleverer than "Scream."

Some things remain a mystery. If we were a little bit better as people, this decent, clear-eyed movie hints, they might not.

Predictable but still keeps you laughing along the way.

The Syrian Bride could be one of those big, teeming matrimony comedies like "Monsoon Wedding" or "Father of the Bride" but for the barbed wire running right down the middle of the aisle.

In My Skin takes that pain/pleasure principle and magnifies it until you're either dumbstruck or running screaming from the theater.

The film is an astonishing visual experience and at times almost profoundly suspenseful.

Hauser, who’s excellent, uses his bulk and heavy-lidded eyes to keep the character a cipher; Eastwood knows we’re judging Jewell as much as the real cops who mock this naïve wannabe behind his back.

You come away enchanted less by the character than by the woman playing her.

I can promise you a fairly good thriller with mixed-bag elements: preposterous plot, smartly elegant direction, one of the worst recent performances by a major actress, and a dynamite stick of an action scene that can stand close to the greats (the car chase in "The French Connection," the single-take battle sequence in "Children of Men") and from which the movie never really recovers.

A breezily stylized, very enjoyable trot through the writer's life, theme by theme, era by era.

The film is something to see, and when it addresses the mysterious bond connecting creative people, it has an urgent, ugly splendor.

What Don Jon is, surprisingly, is honest. R-rating aside, it should be required viewing for every 15-year-old boy on the planet.

The movie balances nicely on the edge of meta-horror, with characters breaking free of their assigned roles (in more ways than one) and monkey-wrenching the very urban legend they're dying to get out of.

Disarmingly direct and charmingly directed; it’s a bona fide love story, if an exhausted and occasionally thin one.

Sean Penn and Robert Duvall basically played the Two Faces of Dennis: hyper young firebrand and cautious older lion.

The ‘"unreasonable man" himself is interviewed, too, and he comes across as patient, articulate, and maddeningly uncompromising.

His carnival-esque filmmaking style, which can leave some Spike Lee joints in tatters, helps this one expand in sorrowful heart and indomitable wit. Chi-Raq is a vibrant community mural of a movie, and it stretches to the horizon.

Is it horror? Drama? Love story? Allegory? Maybe best to think of it as a chilly Scandinavian bedtime tale, the type to unsettle bothersome children and leave them identifying with the ogre.

The movie's not even close to Pixar standards - the animation is slapdash and the story construction's a mess - but the vibe is loose-limbed and fluky, and the gags have an extra snap that's recognizably Seinfeldian.

Alan Partridge is the cinematic equivalent of Marmite: a much-loved condiment in Britain and a puzzlement almost everywhere else. An acquired taste, certainly, but on the basis of this movie, well worth sampling at least once.

Succeeds at its main tasks. It re-creates new wave New York with Proustian force, from the Kiev (the diner) to Fiorucci (the clothing store).

It's raucous and loud as hell; the hyperactive editing could trigger grand mal seizures.

The film’s a character piece with a tightening noose of suspense, and while it has its artsy-indie-dawdly moments, it’s disturbing in ways that aren’t easy to shake. Is the movie necessary? Do we need a “John and Lee: Portrait of Two Serial Killers”? Because it shines a light, however hesitant, into the cramped, resentful mind-sets that fester in the corners of America, I’d have to say yes.

It’s a juggling act that Russell can’t sustain and doesn’t: The last 20 minutes feel aimless, and the movie doesn’t end so much as coast to a halt. And still you walk away giddy and full. American Hustle takes your money and makes you glad you were fleeced.

What makes Palindromes bearable is that Solondz has yet to come up with an answer.

While Crosby is painfully frank throughout this documentary about his knack for destroying friendships and driving people away (we learn in one brief aside that there’s a daughter who hasn’t spoken to him in years), one senses that it’s easier for him to say these things now than to have done the hard, human work of repair. David Crosby: Remember My Name is a testament of achievement and a portrait of ego, but it never quite gets past its subject’s illusions to properly consider his art.

The movie ultimately seems to suggest that the evils unleashed upon Mexico come from a place beyond humankind, which seems an easy way out after all Magdalena and Miguel have been put through. That said, this remains a terrifying cinematic vision that can’t be ignored, from a young filmmaker who won’t be.

Animal lovers stand to flinch at the hunting scenes and other moments of violence, all of which appear to have been staged aside from documentary footage of creatures fleeing from gunshots. By contrast, the movie makes a dark but compelling case that the people on the other end of the barrel deserve whatever’s coming to them.

Steel City may be the only movie released this year that's so observant you can hear what the characters AREN'T saying.

The filmmaker's obsessions have got the better of him. That said, I can't recommend the film highly enough, since bad Miyazaki is still leagues better than anyone else.

Open Hearts, like all good melodramas, is ruthless in its insistence that people are dragged, uncomprehending, in the wake of events.

The movie has a devilish wit that works for parent and child alike, and it moves like a bobsled. It's funny and fun, and if it's not up to Pixar level, it still represents the best of what the competition has to offer.

Any movie on this subject that’s not uncomfortable isn’t really doing its job, and Ben Is Back puts an audience through a wringer of emotional and physical suspense. If you’ve dealt with addiction, personally or in your extended family, the movie should probably come with a trigger warning.

This odd, ungainly western is harsh in its details, wayward in the telling, yet increasingly powerful as it wends its way back East toward civilization.

Warmly shot (by Yves Sehnaoui) and comes with a strong, burbling soundtrack of Arab pop; it slides down easily and occasionally too easily.

"Hobbs & Shaw” is fine summer meathead entertainment, a brainless bone-cruncher with clever players, a decent script, and enough demolition derby mayhem to satisfy the yahoo lurking within the most civilized of moviegoers.

The sex scenes, when they arrive, are unexpectedly, passionately frank, and the characters and the film alike seem stunned in their aftermath. It’s not a movie that has figured out how to end.

Off the Black is a small, dry, emotionally loaded short story that has been carried to film like baked fish to a platter.

Crank is an efficient, witty, junkyard dog of an action movie for its first hour. Unfortunately, the script runs out of gas before the hero does. While it's cooking, though, it's violently preposterous fun.

The film itself is a classic of romantic wish fulfillment, exactly the sort of beautiful lie that Hollywood specialized in. [Review of re-release]

This doesn't feel like art, it feels like a cop-out, as though Durkin couldn't decide how to end his movie, so he didn't. He's a mature filmmaker - a natural - but he's still thinking in shorts.

The Theory of Everything, in other words, is Jane’s movie as much as it is Stephen’s, and while Eddie Redmayne’s performance deserves every bit of praise and statuary it will get, Felicity Jones has the subtler, less showy role to play and matches him frame for frame.

A violent, melodramatic, feverishly overplotted tale of midlife crisis and crazy love. It's good, nasty fun until it gets boxed in by its own contrivances toward the end.

When it's not opting for whimsy, Rocket Science makes you cringe, which is what's good about it.

The final questions in Pervert’s Guide to Ideology nag at us, and in a culture so built upon and so profiting by fantasies of Hollywood apocalypse, they deserve to.

Bronson isn’t a story in the traditional sense at all. It’s a meditation on the art of rage - an action painting passing itself off as an action movie.

This is still a rich and worthy journey, comfort food that’s also food for thought. It invites us to consider timelines longer than a day, a year, a war, and a life, and to tread carefully on the kings and commoners who might lie beneath our feet.

Thirst is deliriously bonkers and keeps getting more so; you watch it holding your breath, waiting to see where Park will zigzag next.

It's a mixed bag almost by definition. Yet the good is good indeed, making this show worth a look for devotees of the form.

The fact is that this is a pretty good summer-kablooie movie, and Cruise is better than pretty good in it.

With Looper, Johnson proves he can finesse the most complicated notions and visual setups his mind can imagine. It's the simple things that still elude him.

A stylish and very funny teenage coming-of-age story graced with surreal fringes and a mysteriously hushed core.

Midnight Traveler unfolds in many kinds of limbo, and the one between living a disaster and recording it for the world to see is the least problematic. Like its makers — all four of them — the movie is flawed, human, hopeful, and desperate for a place to land.

McQueen has matters of life and death on his mind, and the final act of “Supernova” puts them on the table with a frankness that’s admirable without wholly succeeding as drama; the script’s schematic nature shows through the cracks even as the actors themselves can’t be faulted.

Until it spins manically out of control in the last act, Easy A is a charmer: a high school satire with a lethally sharp script and a big, smart, adorable star performance from Emma Stone.

Yet not only does this bares-bones “Close Encounters” make a virtue out of found locations and empty night-time streets, it has the confidence of a story sure in its telling. It feels original.

Say what you will about Gibson, but he's a genuine filmmaker, and Apocalypto gallops along the thin line between the deluded and the inspired with such conviction that you're yanked into its wake.

Take away the storming music and grand vistas, and it's all a standard sword-and-sorcery adventure; director Andrew Adamson is more than a journeyman but much less than the visionary Peter Jackson is.

The performances are excellent, but it’s the direction that lifts the movie up and spins it around. Like Hitchcock, Park storyboards everything ahead of time, and while that level of control might seem claustrophobic in theory, it ends up freeing Stoker to sail into zones of malevolent visual sensuality.

Greeson writes dialogue that’s shallow but clever; and under Nisha Ganatra’s direction, The High Note tells a brisk, improbable tale.

Watermark feels less focused than “Manufactured Landscapes.” While it presents us with awful and/or awe-inspiring images and ideas, the movie lacks the tightening grip that made the earlier work so unforgettable.

In more ways than one, Mark Wexler gets the release he's seeking.

A very entertaining romantic comedy, conventional on the surface while standing all sorts of genre clichés and gender assumptions discreetly on their heads. Its subversions are lower-case, embedded in the laughs, but they’re there and they matter.

The Aura is richer and less showy than "Nine Queens," and it lifts off from the gangster genre to contemplate deeper mysteries.

Dreams Rewired is scattered by necessity and intent, and it throws off enough sparks to set your brain reeling.

Travels around the world via the oceans' floors to show us symbiosis at work in a variety of ecosystems.

A broad, very funny, unexpectedly graceful comedy of character and community.

It’s silly of mind and open of heart, full of visual and sonic eye candy while telling a predictable story with pleasurable generosity. The laughs are pitched right over the plate with the skill and enjoyment of a team of vaudeville pros. As reunions go, it’s a success.

Like last year's Inuit sensation ''The Fast Runner,'' the Maori drama Whale Rider is based on a folk myth, and it's told with an elemental timelessness that feels like a swan dive into prehistory.

A remake of Ang Lee’s 1993 film of the same title...the new film is unnecessary as such, but it’s a determinedly openhearted crowd-pleaser with a handful of delicious performances, and it’s just about impossible to dislike.

Miss Juneteenth is a simple story but a resonant one: modest but impactful, focused on one woman’s pride and her daughter’s future while unfolding in the bedrock of a known and loved environment. You can feel the history coming up through its pores.

Museo is slightly frustrating on first watch, as its themes lie partly hidden behind Bernal’s intentionally abrasive performance and the mix-and-match filmmaking of Ruizpalacios: Bursts of faux-epic movie music in Tomas Barreiro’s score, camerawork that can be ironically portentous, scenes that flit along the edge of the surreal. The connective tissue is sometimes hard to discern.

The final scenes deliver a payoff worthy of the film's scrappy optimism, but that may not be the reason you walk out of the theater on a cloud. It's the sight of a character coming rapturously into her own at the same time as the actress playing her.

Yet The Life Ahead works admirably well — meaning you’re reduced to soggy Kleenex but honestly — in large part because of the grounded, magnetic performances of the two leads.

Should be seen: It's a worthy ordeal, with flaws that, ironically, make grist for later arguments.

Summer of 85, the latest from the prolific director of Swimming Pool (2002) and By the Grace of God (2018), looks like a sunny, sybaritic gay coming-of-age story along the lines of Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name (2017), but it turns out to be something darker and more ambiguous, less about sexuality than self.

''Bonjour" is especially lucky in having Shlomi Bar-Dayan, the 16-year-old misfit of the title, played by a young actor named Oshri Cohen, who's able to convey the impossibility of ever making sense of the world with a single bruised gaze.

It also made me laugh harder than anything I’ve seen at the movies this year.

George Nolfi directs with a TV-movie straightforwardness and at two hours the film is overlong, but the story is an eye-opener and the central performances are terrific.

A sleekly clever murder mystery, the film plays as many games with the audience as it does with its characters, and for the majority of the running time — the challenge comes from matching wits with what you’re seeing.

Clearly, a lot of grown-up types are going to despise Matilda: gym teachers, school psychologists, used-car salesmen, critics who like their family fare immobilized by homiletic virtue. But kids will understand.

Bandslam is “Camp’’ with rock ’n’ roll instead of show tunes, but its roots go back to the Busby Berkeley backstagers and Mickey-and-Judy let’s-put-on-a-show musicals of the 1930s.

For fans of African music, "Sing" is a rich archeological dig; for newcomers with open ears, it might be a revelation.

What The Hunger Games does have is a game cast, a large budget well spent, Collins on board as co-writer, and Lawrence as Katniss.

What it feels like, mostly, is a Whit Stillman movie made by someone other than Whit Stillman.

If you prefer your domestic clashes sunnier and more strenuously poetic, Respiro may be your respite. If nothing else, it's a reminder of how severely underutilized Valeria Golino is as both actress and cinematic glory.

A clever, gory, often very funny piece of genre junk — a B+ movie — that carries a hidden warning: When we turn other people into cartoons of our worst fears, the only thing left to do is kill each other.

Far From the Madding Crowd is a Masterpiece Theatre version of Thomas Hardy’s 1874 novel, shot with sumptuous taste and care, rife with emotions repressed and unbound, and featuring expertly nuanced performances from a tony, mostly British cast. It will greatly please discerning audiences while causing Hardy to spin discreetly in his grave. That’s a fair trade-off, especially if the movie sends you back to the book.

[A] sweet, dumb, unnecessary, and absurdly charming movie.

The pleasure of Infamous is in its gallery of larger-than-life portrayals.

Cool, carnal, and lethal, The Last Mistress is a period drama with a difference.

It's Lopez who's the proper focus of this dream. So intent has she been on becoming a superstar in the past few years that many people have forgotten that, given decent material, she can act.

The movie has a curious and cumulative power.

It’s a solid debut, and it gets to the heart of suburban adolescence in ways that slicker, more ostensibly mature movies don’t. That includes Aunt Sofia’s “The Bling Ring.”

Lord of War is advocacy entertainment -- an act of mainstream provocation -- and, for the most part, it works unusually well.

The film is especially clear-eyed about the ways the state bureaucracy designed to help women like Sandra can sometimes stymie their best efforts.

Stuffed with smart performers doing graciously silly work, and all Levy has to do is manage traffic.

One hell of a party, and it doesn't let anything get in the way of that.

Because it’s an Icelandic movie, and absurdism seems to bubble up in the hot springs and the bloodstreams, Woman at War exudes a puckish sense of humor even as it deals with dire matters.

Beneath the japery and rough-edged filmmaking is an abiding love for the work — its passion and resilience — and respect for the women whose hidden lifelong language that work may have been.

I don't want to sell Like Mike as something it's not. It's a cash-in, all right - just better written, more tightly edited, sharply performed, and a little more heartfelt than most.

What you may not be prepared for is the way that humor does play a part in the story, in the sense that recognizing the total absurdity of a theocratic police state is one way to rise above fear and keep one’s mind free. In Rosewater, ridicule becomes a weapon of liberation.

Under DaCosta’s sure, steady direction, Little Woods belongs with movies like “Frozen River” (2008), “Winter’s Bone” (2010), “Wind River” (2017), and last year’s “Leave No Trace” — dramas about overlooked communities that ache with empathetic detail. The movie steers clear of polemics, though, and puts its faith in its characters, specifically the exhausted, unbreakable bond of sisterhood that unites these siblings.

Noah Baumbach makes nature documentaries disguised as indie comedy-dramas.

Slick, impassioned, and guardedly upbeat, Ted Braun's film is a morale booster aimed at US audiences rather than the 2.5 million displaced Sudanese tribespeople whose villages have been destroyed and families slaughtered. That we need a pick-me-up more than they do is pathetic, but there you are.

Revolutions, the final installment in the trilogy, parcels things more neatly. You get 45 minutes of the Wachowskis' patented theosophical bong water, followed by an hour of the most muscular, hard-core special-effects rama-lama yet to hit the screen. Only then does Jesus show up.

In its occasionally over-gentle way, the documentary testifies to the ego necessary to be a great star and to live a great life.

It’s like Sinatra said: If you can make (do without) it there, you can make (do without) it anywhere. The movie leaves it up to you.

As long as Rocketman is charting the jet-propelled rise of Elton John in the early 1970s, it is an absolute gas. As soon as it plunges into the burnout years — addictions, betrayals, diva fits — it plays like every other rags-to-rock-to-riches saga you’ve ever seen. Especially “Bohemian Rhapsody.”

Darkly funny though it is, Sightseers has undercurrents of genuine and very British weirdness...Way down beneath the whimsy is a class rage as heartfelt as it is warped.

For a passive-depressive Norwegian crime drama with not a lot in the way of plot, A Somewhat Gentle Man has a charmingly fluky sense of humor.

How often are psychosexual lunacy and classic cinema combined so fiendishly well?

All Peter Pan lacks is a Peter Pan with any discernible personality, no matter that Jeremy Sumpter is the first actual, genetic boy to play the role on film.

Unstoppable is edited for maximum impact without showboating. The central situation sustains the drama and the way it's filmed, and when that situation is over, so's the movie. More films should be this enjoyably functional.

Submarine has its own specific miseries and darkly funny vibe. It makes quirkiness briefly seem like a good thing again.

Zappa also gently touches on Frank’s contempt for the general run of humanity, not just Tipper Gore and other members of the Parents Music Resource Center. He spoke witheringly of his appearance on “Saturday Night Live,” where the cast made fun of his lifelong no-drugs stance.

It’s the lack of depth that ultimately may keep you from committing to 1917 or even respecting it — the movie’s sense that war is simply something that happens to people rather than being caused by them. Don’t forget that World War I was once called The War to End All Wars. It wasn’t and according to the headlines it still isn’t, but this movie never stops running to bother ask why.

There's a thin line, though, between honoring what came before you and replicating it, and Super 8 occasionally wobbles over that line into predictability.

Maybe it’s too early in his career for Corbet to reach for a ring this big and this brassy. Yet “The Brutalist” earns its weight in the telling, if not in cumulative impact or meaning.

The film reveals its secrets slowly, and Chabrol tightens the screws not according to the rules of Hollywood suspense but with a cool, level gaze.

Most bewildering of all, Bridge of Spies is a moral drama driven by an insurance lawyer. That it works at all is a miracle — or would be, if anyone other than St. Steven were involved.

It's a tale powerfully told, nevertheless, with an unusual vantage point in its upper-class young hero.

The movie's overlong and there are lumps in the batter, but this is a ''Charlie" that the author would recognize as upholding his playfully dyspeptic tradition.

Misbehaviour is intersectional to a fault, and keeping all those balls in the air is almost more than the movie can handle.

Morlang is a repressed creep whose worst crime, as far as the audience is concerned, is dullness.

The latest and most creatively unhinged film from director Takashi Miike.

Mostly Election tracks the shifting of power among men for whom power is all that matters, no matter how much lip service they pay to loyalty. The final sequence is a shocker but it's also completely logical.

Harvey is so thin it barely registers as a movie, yet these two actors - British apples and American oranges in their respective approaches to character - almost miraculously weave something memorable out of nothing much.

The Fairy may be as close as we'll ever get to a live-action cartoon.

A shamelessly enjoyable retread, an ode to la belle vie that has been well turned on a factory spindle.

It's foreign, it's inspiring, it has an adorably resourceful kid; it depicts grinding misery in a land far from West Newton, and it holds out the possibility of clambering over all that misery to attain your dream.

How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World has a visual sumptuousness and a fluid agility that make it worth experiencing even if you’re not paying attention to the story. It moves the way you imagine a flying dragon might.

It’s a harsh experience, at times engrossing, at other times stiff and unconvincing, but it asks a necessary question: What happens to the country’s whites after white rule is gone?

Some of Loach’s movies have breathing room, but this isn’t one of them. That’s a feature, not a bug. Sorry We Missed You depicts the vise into which many people are forced to put head, hearts, and lives in order to pay the rent and feed their families. It dramatizes a daily sprint up an escalator that pulls workers backwards.

Theron is so good that when Tully climaxes by revealing whole new depths to her character, an audience can’t help but feel cheated. Maybe the rosy, complacent final scenes can fool the filmmakers, but not us, and certainly, one senses, not Theron. The movie’s over, but it feels like the star’s just getting started.

A patient, slightly stiff, often intensely moving portrait of a girl who believes her choices are literally black and white.

It's fast, lean, satisfying, and forgettable; nothing special, really, until you realize that the movies have largely lost the knack for brisk mayhem like this.

Murphy grounds the film, in part because the actor has the gift of motormouth hustle himself, but also because he gets the anger at the core of Rudy Ray Moore — the rage to be noticed that propelled Moore away from Arkansas, an abusive stepfather, and the life of a black sharecropper.

Orlowski does share Balog's smoldering rage at a society that refuses to face the consequences of its actions, and that rage forms the necessary spine of Chasing Ice. This is an agit-doc with no apologies and a lot of sorrow.

The film's no masterpiece, but at least you're in the hands of people who know what they're doing.

Kang balances the uproariously comic with the profoundly sad, and the two tones amplify each other with subtlety.

With wit, style and ruthlessness, Fargeat has made a movie that’s an example of the soulless pop-culture object she’s spoofing.

A very good drama about the difficulties of being young, black, and gay. With a bigger budget and a sharper focus, it might have been a great one.

In general, the more young people who see the film, the more who will be made aware of a fascinating, complicated near-relative whose numbers are dwindling rapidly.

Renoir may be too decorous, but it’s about decoration — the intense beauty of surfaces.

Like a meal prepared by an extreme chef, ''Hustle" is more than a bit of a mess. It still tastes like nothing you've ever had before.

Computer Chess is deeply strange and occasionally impenetrable, yet it’s also surreally funny, with touches of science fiction that bedevil the proceedings with outré possibilities.

Dolls is an art film, and a languid, inexplicably haunting one at that.

As a coherent, well-judged alternative history, the movie's a mess. As a thought-provoking and frequently hilarious jeremiad, it scores again and again.

The movie works.

National Anthem is that rarity, a genuinely sensual American movie, and in that sensuality it connects its characters to the transcendence and union promised by Emerson, Whitman, Melville and all the rest of our country’s great literary dreamers.

I thought of “That’s Life!” while watching Memphis, Tim Sutton’s sometimes forced, sometimes extraordinary tone poem about a modern-day bluesman. Enigmatic and brief — all of 79 minutes — the movie seems to fall into the cracks between documentary and fiction.

A fully felt, decently crafted teen B-movie melodrama, plenty preposterous in places but alive to the vibrant miseries of being young and misunderstood.