Ty Burr

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.

Open Water is a stunt, one you either buy into or not.

Looks steam-cleaned, and that can't be right.

There's a thin line between the subtle and the dramatically inert, and Intimate Strangers pitches a tent on it.

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?

It's a lovely dream that, in the end, feels too dreamlike. The director coaxes an intentionally passive performance from his daughter Marie, so that Nannerl's eventual waking to cold patriarchal reality doesn't sting as it might.

Trumbo never wavered in his belief that his persecution was only a horrible symptom. He understood the real victim of blacklist America was America itself.

Anyone interested in Buddhism and the chance to see the high-altitude, deep-spirited landscapes of Bhutan from a movie theater seat is herewith directed to Travellers and Magicians.

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

Works more in your head than on the screen.

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

The movie's an unexpected end-of-summer tonic: a trash guilty pleasure with a healthy (if really violent) sense of outrage. It's also Rodriguez's freest movie yet, and possibly his best.

I walked out of the movie on a cloud of happiness that was only slightly dissipated after a night’s sleep. A critical acquaintance found the whole thing much too icky-sticky sweet. It may be a generational issue.

A brisk and reasonably thorough dog trot through a life that was simultaneously invisible and all powerful, and it’s goosed along with slick production techniques that more than once get in the way.

Poppy Hill doubtless plays most strongly to Japanese audiences — especially the musical score made up of old-timey jazz and early-’60s pop that sounds like corn syrup to Western ears — but its central conflict is gentle, unyielding, and universal. Which is to say that it turns out to be a Hayao Miyazaki movie after all.

A hugely enjoyable shambles. It’s a comic deconstruction of that most useless of Hollywood artifacts — the blockbuster sequel — that refuses to take itself seriously on any level, which, face it, is just what we need as the summer boom-boom season shifts into high gear.

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.

A rambunctious joy.

I have seen the future of Hollywood movie stardom, and its name is America Ferrera.

The movie is almost wholly lacking in the Pixar touch — that extra oomph of wit, invention, creative craziness, darkness, depth of feeling, whatever, that makes the company’s products among the very few items manufactured for children in our sold-out popular culture to not feel like products.

The director is Lee Daniels, of Precious (2009) and The Butler (2013), here evoking the historical era and its figures with verve and intelligence but unable to find a dramatic center other than his electrifying star.

Watching these pint-size Astaires and Rogerses practice the fox trot, tango, rumba, and swing is the immediate hook to Mad Hot Ballroom.

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.

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.

For once, too, David Mamet the director outshines David Mamet the writer.

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 tough balancing act and probably a futile one. As greedily as Hollywood looks upon these books as a franchise to strip-mine, the hard fact remains that what's good about them - Ted Geisel's untrendy gentleness, humor, and intelligence - resists translation to the big screen.

It’s still a clever-clever cartoon version of the book, with broad physical business in place of wit and Austen’s insights on gender roles and social hypocrisy tossed overboard. But I guess if the Empire waists are high enough and the male leads strappingly repressed, nothing else really matters.

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).

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.

Whenever a band plays in “Persian Cats,’’ the director treats us to a fast, vibrant montage of Iranian faces and street scenes -- as if to say, look, this is who we REALLY are.

This version of Where the Wilds Things Are isn’t about childhood at all but about childhood’s end and what’s gained and lost by it. That’s why very young kids, dull Disney princesses, overprotective parents, and self-serious grown-ups should probably stay away.

A documentary love letter to Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and it assumes you love her too.

It's a treat, nevertheless, to watch the daughter of Catherine Deneuve and Marcello Mastroianni in a rare leading role. Chiara Mastroianni has her mother's hair and face with her father's sorrowful eyes stuck smack in the middle, and she moves as if conscious of the weight of her genetic splendor.

The most playful film to come out of the French New Wave, it's also the last time Jean-Luc Godard appeared to have any fun.

Preposterous without being much fun about it. That's a shame: How often do you get to see Cruise play a professional assassin with Bill Clinton's hair?

It’s a strong story with devastating implications, but also one told at an artistic remove that renders its meanings less subtle than diminished. There’s a fury underlying this film that goes unexpressed to the point of almost going unacknowledged, and it saps The Third Wife of a strength and momentum it could use. If Ash Mayfair ever taps into that fury, she may become a filmmaker to reckon with.

The admirable feminist agenda occasionally trips up the narrative, but the film's performances keep it on track.

It’s tempting to think of Molly’s Game in poker terms: Sorkin’s holding a queen, a king, and at least a couple of aces, but the tell is that he talks too much, and in the end you realize he’s bluffing.

The movie’s sentimental, predictable, fairly sloppy. It’s also a thoroughgoing joy — a cherry popsicle for the end of summer. If certain elements seem familiar from the recent “Yesterday” — classic rock and a South Asian lead character, primarily — “Blinded” is the better bargain: less slick, more cliched, but also more genuinely felt.

The movie feels loose and unpredictable. You're never sure where Paul or the story is going, and while that makes The Big Picture unexpectedly gripping for much of its running time, the shapelessness ultimately wins out.

Flatly filmed, drably lit, and sluggishly paced, Yes, God, Yes takes a cheeky premise and slowly lets the air out of it.

Sweet little crowd-pleaser.

Baldwin knew that hope is the engine that takes us to the future, to a changed and better day, and whether that hope is embodied in action, in expression, or in a child is immaterial. If Beale Street Could Talk is a stained-glass window looking out onto what could still be.

Black Book takes the conventions of the WWII epic -- the prison breaks, the interrogation scenes -- and undermines them with craft and muscle and the ripe lack of restraint we've come to expect from this director.

She (Tsai Chin) and she alone makes the movie worth your time. Written by Angela Cheng and Sasie Sealy and directed by Sealy, Lucky Grandma is a low-budget labor of love that’s very funny until you realize it has no idea where it’s going.

[A] stagy, troubling, bizarrely entertaining movie.

Drinking Buddies is further evidence that Wilde has more depth and ambition than mainstream Hollywood can currently handle, and it marks Swanberg as one of the subtler talents of his generation — a deceptively casual moralist whose films observe their characters without judging them yet whose conclusions are unmistakable.

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.

The leads are all vaguely Protestant and all suspiciously chipper, yet this dopey farce somehow backs itself into cross-dressing, gender reversal, and gay camp while insisting that everything's in good, butch fun. [23 Feb 2007, p.D10]

The movie convinces us that the hero sees and understands Simone’s evil even as he continues to enable it — even as he allows his own life to be ruined. Dogman ends with a paroxysm of cathartic violence and an eerie echo of Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita” (also with Mastroianni).

Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Time is a lovely visit to a Budapest that yields its secrets more willingly than the sad, repressed woman at the story’s center.

The enjoyment of the film comes from watching Mesrine's ambitions grow slowly but exponentially; the shock is in being reminded and re-reminded of his sadism.

A triumph — a messy, qualified triumph that even at 138 minutes makes an incomplete case for Brown’s meaning to American life and culture, but a triumph nevertheless.

Steve McQueen’s “Blitz” is a triumph of production design; unfortunately, what it triumphs over is story.

The stone-faced silent comedian’s influence on every possible aspect of physical comedy is wide and deep, attested to in this movie by entertainers old (Bill Irwin, Paul Dooley, Richard Lewis), ancient (Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner), youngish (Bill Hader, Quentin Tarantino), and random (Cybill Shepherd, Werner Herzog).

The Brink shows a salesman tirelessly peddling poison door to door and knowing it’s only a matter of time before someone lets him in.

It’s a galling and provocative experience to viewers of any political persuasion, and a reminder to the left of how easily idealism can run amok.

Mrs. Henderson Presents is a very old hat, and Judi Dench wears it beautifully.

In any event, from whatever impulse, [Almodóvar] has given us a movie that is both an uneasy tribute to exiting with grace and a rationale for sticking around for one more movie, one more meal — one more day with the door open.

A fascinating shambles of a documentary - fascinating because its subject is so influential and so deranged, a shambles because its filmmaker can't decide which approach to take and so takes all of them.

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

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

As gripping as it is grueling, with performances that swing for the fences and a central mystery that seems an unresolvable tangle of knots until those knots come undone in a somewhat forced final act.

In Batman Begins, Christian Bale gives us the best Bruce Wayne that has ever graced the screen.

As a tale of adolescent sexuality warped by passion, though, Bad Company is less compelling and more exploitative than its makers think.

With Trance, story becomes just another element in Boyle’s commercial pop-Cubism, and the results are nearly fatal.

The bitter, funny dialogue by director Craig Johnson and co-writer Mark Heyman gives the two stars room to work both comic and dramatic sides of their gifts.

In Standard Operating Procedure, Errol Morris does something inconceivable and, at first glance, ill-advised. He gives the US soldiers of Abu Ghraib back their humanity.

The movie stakes out a whole new arena - male social performance anxiety - and ruthlessly mines it for comic embarrassment.

A honey, but your response to it may depend on where you fall on life's big curve.

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?

Marla Grayson is less a three-dimensional person (or even an interesting two-dimensional one) than a symptom of a sick society. And symptoms wear out their welcome pretty quickly. That shallowness renders Marla’s sexuality and stated feminism cynical rather than ironic, and it turns I Care a Lot into a lesser Coen brothers movie: No Country for Old Fogeys.

Cancer dramas are not uncommon; what lifts Ordinary Love just enough out of the ordinary is its concern with how a married couple survives the ordeal. Intimate, unsparing, and attuned to the micro-nuances of a longtime relationship, it is made special by the two actors at its center, both out-size talents who here relish the opportunity to play close and draw from life.

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

The parts, in other words, promise a brilliant whole. So why is this movie one of the signal disappointments of the year? You have to go back to the basics: Public Enemies has everything going for it except a reason and a script.

It's a solid, earnest drama of moral redemption that places old cliches in an unfamiliar setting.

For a movie predicated on slapstick forward momentum, we spend an awful lot of time driving backward.

Hoffman confessed he was drawn to the role because ''this was a guy who didn't know how to feel, and I found that fascinating.'' His challenge is our frustration

The Friend is a better dog movie than it is a people movie, but it’s such a wonderful dog movie that you may not mind that the people are merely fine.

About halfway into Colossal you may experience the novel vertigo that comes when you genuinely have no idea where a movie is taking you but understand you’re in competent creative hands. That sensation holds until you’re deposited, happy and a little worse for wear, at the end.

A charming, spiky period piece that might be called "Boo Radley: The Final Years."

Emilia Pérez is a big, bulging bag of eye candy, in other words, and like a lot of candy, it can give you a sugar high without much genuine sustenance and perhaps an attendant headache.

Monkey Man seems hellbent on establishing itself as the latest wrinkle in post-Wickian cinema: nonstop mayhem featuring an actor previously thought of as a sweetie pie.

A bleakly funny character study of a very particular species of urban fauna - the sports radio call-in fanatic - Big Fan’ is compulsively watchable.

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

The new film isn’t nearly as bleak as Christopher Nolan’s take on Batman (in general, Marvel seems more risk-averse when it comes to fiddling with the crown jewels), but it still creates an action-movie landscape torn between patriotic ideals and harsh post-9/11 realpolitik.

This isn't a movie -- it's an author in love with the sound of her own voice.

Freaky Friday version 2003 is a shinier, snappier animal, partly because young girls now dress like Avril Lavigne, and partly because Jamie Lee Curtis has her best role in years and knows it.

Would it be rude to suggest that your time might be better spent with your own children?

Together Together sounds like a really bad idea on paper, and for the first half-hour or so, it’s a really bad idea on screen. Yet a funny thing happens to this surrogate-pregnancy romantic comedy (I told you it was a bad idea) as it bumps along: It develops curious and unexpected pockets of feeling.

Brisk and deeply engrossing.

If you were alive in 1991, the televised images may still stick in your mind and your craw.

The whole thing's weightless: An upscale date-movie bonbon that keeps yielding pungent aftertastes.

Less a straight doc than a psycho-cinematic inquiry into unknown territory, it’s really something to see. Whether it’s something to believe is another matter.

Touches smartly and wistfully on a number of themes, not least the notion that the marginal members of society - the ones who get spit out on the sidewalk with no idea of how it happened - might benefit from a helping hand and a friendly kick in the pants.

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.

Rebuilding Paradise is well worth seeing, but know that Howard’s taste for the upbeat keeps getting drowned out by a dire and dissonant doomsday drum.

A stricken teen trapped in a polyurethane isolation tent. That’s a potent metaphor for adolescence, which may be why this made-for-TV movie was a rite of passage for an awful lot of us.

The only question his movie doesn't ask is "What do you want your next car to run on?" That's up to you.

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

Seems on the face of it to be one of Zvyagintsev’s simplest and saddest stories, but it widens in the mind like ripples spreading out from a body dumped in a lake.

If the new Wuthering Heights makes you uncomfortable, that's part of Andrea Arnold's game plan.

The penultimate moments of “Bombshell” are moving, re-creating the lost Vienna of Kiesler’s childhood and overlaying the voice of the aging Lamarr, interviewed by an Austrian news team in 1970, as she speaks of never being understood in America. Adrift in the Land of the Lotus Eaters, she spent a lifetime being looked at and never once being seen.

The Lady in the Van ultimately presents a number of facts that would seem to “solve” Mary Shepherd. I’d like to think Smith knows better than that. In her hands, the lady in the van remains complex and unknowable — a mystery to the end. And that, friends, is acting.

For all the talk, there's not a lot of chess here, and the game remains stubbornly on the level of metaphor. You don't feel rooked, exactly, but by movie's end you're more than ready for the check.

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

Something to see and little to remember, an acrid character study undone by narrative implausibilities and its own lack of purpose.

Creative, colorful, and unexpectedly wise, The Painting is the latest offshore animation to show to kids burned out on computer-generated Hollywood toons.

Don’t be surprised if you come out wishing that there actually were a late-night comedy show starring Emma Thompson instead of just a movie about one.

The movie also rather sweetly suggests that the apartment being shared is Europe itself. There's a reason this warm, stylish human comedy was a big hit all across the Continent: It conveys a new generation's conviction that borders no longer matter.

A proudly Calvinist work - I mean the comic strip character, not the philosopher - that understands the delights of deep play.

Andrew Currie's stylish satire falls into the narrower niche of zombie farce, as pioneered by "Shaun of the Dead ," "Slither," Robert Rodriguez's half of "Grindhouse."

The movie ends with a sentimental vision of unity that, admittedly, warmed this weary moviegoer's heart. If that vision was earned, I might even have melted.

A broad, foursquare piece of populist filmmaking that happens to be tremendously moving.

Without question, not for the children. It is, however, just the cup of rancid black-comedy eggnog for anyone fed up with holiday cheer in all its manifestations.

Innocuous amusement for 5- to 8-year-olds and other people stuck in the anal stage of development.

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

The movies have a long history of “kids putting on a show.” Summertime belongs to that tradition even as it expands its boundaries into the heartsore world offscreen.

Gunda ― which doubles as the name of the movie and the name of the pig ― is as close as we may ever come to experiencing the world as animals do, specifically the animals that become our food.

The Coens also understand the stark immediacy of this tale, and they visualize it with brilliantly judged details.

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.

The results are about what you'd expect: friendly, unfocused, occasionally laugh-out-loud funny.

A sweet, slight drama of midlife readjustment, I Will Make You Mine is the belated final film in a trilogy about a struggling indie rocker and the three women in his life. The first two movies are “Surrogate Valentine” (2011) and “Daylight Savings” (2012), and they haunt the new film like a phantom limb. Do you need to have seen them to take in I Will Make You Mine? Yes, but that’s OK.

Scorsese and his team of Grade A talents are working on an operatic scale here, and like many operas, this is long, overwrought, sprawling, and more than frequently brilliant. It also hits just enough discordant notes to keep it from greatness.

Hyper-stylized, funny, a crowd-pleaser.

A manically playful revenge fantasia made from the spare parts of Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns and strapping World War II action flicks.

As sympathetic — and therefore potentially biased — as “Prime Minister” is to its subject, former New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern, it’s also one of the most arrestingly intimate political documentaries you’ll see.

Babel is a ziggurat of brilliant pieces built on sand. It's also this season's "Crash," a movie you know is Important because it never stops telling you so.

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.

Eventually it straightens out into a fast, funny, emotionally resonant story about mothers and daughters, but it takes a while to get there and it's never less than weird.

Maybe it's a cheap shot to call Revolutionary Road "American Beauty" without the laughs, but it gets to the heart of the problem.

Sorry, boys. After two decades, the first film still does more with one skyscraper than Live Free or Die Hard does with an entire country.

The film's an even four-hander, with awful behavior spread evenly among the characters and spellbinding performances by the quartet of co-leads.

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.”

Lion is shameless and heartfelt and you’ll probably have a good, happy cry at the end. When a story pushes buttons so deeply wired into our consciousness...craft seems almost beside the point.

It all feels studiously artless - some people huffily insist that Bujalski’s movies aren’t movies at all - but the more you contemplate his landscapes, the more his control over their various elements is revealed. He’s the real deal: a maturing artist obsessed with how and why - and if - his generation will mature.

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

In its tactful, observant way, the film is unrelenting in assessing the damage that blind faith can wreak on its children and heartening in showing how those damaged find strength in each other.

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.”

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.

Paul and Mary Bland stop at nothing to open a restaurant in Paul Bartel’s scabrous black comedy.

Most useful and enlightening as a historical tour through the major crises of the Kennedy administration.

The latest update, directed by Cooper and built on the sturdy bones of William Wellman’s and Robert Carson’s 1937 script, has heart, soul, and sinew. Above all, it has Lady Gaga, both before and after her character’s transformation from an outer-borough duckling into a superstar swan.

A delicate, observant, and rather too quiescent drama of coming home to a strange land, Monsoon is an interesting change of pace for star Henry Golding (“Crazy Rich Asians”) and another musing on diaspora by the Cambodia-born British filmmaker Hong Khaou.

The film is spiked with moments of gleeful violence, but Coen and Cooke understand that the primal reason we go to the movies is to look at beautiful people in nice clothes, and on that score ‘Honey Don’t!” is a rousing success. On every other score, it’s a short, shambling, surprisingly horny mess — amusing if you’re in an indulgent mood, obnoxious if you’re not.

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.

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

The movie’s a comedy. And while it has its charms, Swanberg is tilling soil here that has been churned since humanity began, and he doesn’t come up with very much that’s new.

At its intermittent best, “Tuesday” pulls a rough and breathtaking beauty from the cataclysm. At its worst, it’s for the birds.

At its best, The Sleeping Beauty reclaims fairy tales as a kind of oral folk REM state, chewing over anxieties about adulthood, behavior, sex, and belonging in potent symbolic form.

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.

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

It’s clear that Thunberg knows the science and can talk about the Keeling Curve and the Albedo Effect, even if the journalists and heads of states she meets can’t.

It's a soapy, simplistic, but surprisingly affecting ambisexual melodrama that plays a little like Pedro Almodovar without the surreal frills.

This Is Not Berlin is a relative rarity: a coming-of-age drama in which the student may have more maturity than the teachers.

It’s the kind of movie that hammers on your heart even as it’s tripping over its feet, hobbled by unexamined notions of race, ethnicity, and class. Don’t look too closely, and you’ll have a very good time.

Boy Erased is strongest when it simply focuses on Jared as he copes with the trauma of coming out in a repressed society. This includes, in the film’s most shocking scene, a sequence of collegiate gay rape that leaves the boy with PTSD, which goes unnoticed and untreated by parents, authorities, and, to some extent, the film itself.

“Venus in Fur,” the 2010 David Ives play that conquered off-Broadway in 2010 and Broadway in 2011, has been thoroughly and maliciously Romanized.

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

A sloppy mosh note to the genre, with its own excesses and oversights. It's like a flier for a band you've never heard of: torn, soaked with beer, itchy with aggression.

The Piano Lesson offers a spirited if uneven testimony to the playwright’s great gifts.

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 follow-up, Revenge of the Electric Car, arrives today and it's a lesser animal, more hopeful but also more complex and lacking the focused urgency of the original.

Remembered for being the best Boston movie of all time. [27 Feb 2005]

Rumours is too slap-happy to function as the fine-tuned political satire one might want it to be, and too often the gags hit a nonsensical dead end.

Chronicle will never be mistaken for an artistic breakthrough, but it has a solid gimmick and pieces of it are brilliant.

Into the Woods is forced in some places but exquisitely right in others, and it gains strength as it goes.

Can a vastly talented cast raise a heartfelt but banal screenplay on their own? The verdict is mixed, to put it kindly.

Little of this comes through in the film, which is about the mayfly moment and three people at its center. For those who don’t have enough information to connect the dots, that may not be enough. Maybe you had to be there, but it’s a movie’s job to take us, and this one gets only partway.

What played as glorious period tomfoolery to European festival juries and discerning U S audiences in the early 1950s now just seems quaintly pleased with itself.

The movie keeps you guessing, mostly in pleasure, at both its meanings and its methods.

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.

Climax is the first Noé film, though, to flirt with the novel sensation of boredom.

Too shapeless and cursorily plotted to fully work as a story, but Koppelman and his co-director, David Levien, generously surround the hero with reliable actors doing solid work; if you can get past the catastrophe of Ben’s behavior, the film’s a genuine pleasure.

The film itself suggests a sketch video on Ferrell and McKay's "Funny or Die" website, padded out to the dimensions of a character comedy.

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?

Produced, co-written, and directed by its star, The Birth of a Nation is very much a first film, its hesitancies disguised as bluntness, and the best things about it are Parker’s acting and his ambitions.

Cranston’s performance is the motor that runs Trumbo, and that motor never idles, never flags in momentum or magnetism or idealistic scorn. At its entertaining worst, the movie’s a high-spirited game of Hollywood dress-up.

Spider-Man: Far from Home isn’t really a superhero movie. It’s a wholesome teen comedy disguised as a superhero movie.

Without even trying, Coccio may have stumbled over the truest metaphor for Columbine yet.

A transporting cinematic experience with a churl at its center, and how you feel about the movie may depend on how you feel about the churl.

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.

At best, it's unnecessary. At worst, it's vaguely insulting.

Intelligent and earnest, The Fault in Our Stars works well enough to keep a doubter from feeling mugged by sentiment.

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.

This is frostbitten Fellini -- a film that finds fresh beauty and contentment in the wake of centuries of conquering armies. The great joke of Vodka Lemon is that the conquerors missed what was there all along.

That uncertainty is the strength of writer-director Tayarisha Poe’s debut feature and ultimately its undoing. There’s dramatic ambiguity and there’s a muddle, and you may spend the movie’s 97 minutes trying to untwine one from the other.

Fair Game takes one of the more shameful sub-chapters in modern US politics - and turns it into a strident, condescending Hollywood melodrama.

The result is, like its characters, a good and decent film in a world that rather heartlessly demands more.

The producers include Phil Lord and Chris Miller, the inspired duo behind The Lego Movie and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-verse, and The Mitchells vs. the Machines has the same breakneck gift for comic timing and a willingness to throw anything at the screen if it’ll get a laugh, including an angry Furby the size of an office tower.

The result is Grade-A agitpop, a mixture of archival footage and cheeky, creative animated reconstruction that's funny and frightening in equal measure.

Fans of the animated wildlife adventure show will be in warthog heaven; others need not necessarily apply.

Wants to be as shocking as its title, but it doesn't have the nerve.

It serves as testimony to the ghosts that continue to haunt such men as ex-senator Bob Kerrey.

The movie is of this precise moment and you should probably see it now, since it will be dated by next Tuesday.

It makes a nicely grim little Halloween appetizer, although you may want to go home and hide under the bed afterward.

It spreads the punishment around, from the executive suites of Hollywood to the mean streets of Baghdad. Everyone here comes out smelling bad - that's why the film's so good.

Watching Happiest Season is like opening the wrong present on Christmas morning: You’re a little bummed out and it’s too late to put it back in the box.

Crazy Love doesn't downplay the awfulness of what happened , but it also knows a good media circus when it sees one.

It takes its sweet and sour time getting there, but eventually “Sacramento” finds a satisfying seriocomic groove in the plight of men facing the prospect of fatherhood and realizing adulthood has to come along for the ride.

It's all breezy and predictable.

It’s a lot of fun before it wears you out, and it wears you out sooner than it should.

A tale of narrow talent destroyed by pop hubris, raging insecurity, substance abuse, and murder.

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.

When Shirley MacLaine made this same movie, more or less, as "Madame Sousatzka," there was a whole lot of acting going on. Sharif brings us to Ibrahim with a modesty that oddly reminds you of why the actor is a legend.

A sizable amount of national pride is on display in Ong-Bak.

Fascinating, like a car wreck seen through a rearview mirror.

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.

In its best moments, Reign Over Me quietly says that we're our problem friends' keepers. At its worst, the movie IS a problem friend.

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

Star Trek Beyond plays like an episode of the old “Star Trek” TV series. This, I submit, is what’s enjoyable about it.

They're both tales of growing up in the shadow of Islamic fundamentalism, but Persepolis is everything "The Kite Runner" is not. It's a personal memoir rather than fiction, coolly observant instead of melodramatic, female rather than male in sensibility and sense of humor - it has a sense of humor.

Like Crazy gets the evanescence of young passion right - the way it ultimately has to burn off, leaving us standing in an unfamiliar adult world. But it never convinces us of the fire itself.

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.

There isn't much to The Housekeeper, really, but it plumbs depths of male unease that louder and less wise movies strain to reach.

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

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.

Abramoff may be in prison but the mindset that produced him -- and the pay-to-play government it needs to survive -- is triumphant.

Like its hero, the movie doesn't flinch for most of its running time.

A taut, engrossing action movie about real-life heroes, so why is it a disappointment? Because director Peter Berg is telling the wrong story.

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.

What the movie utterly fails to resolve is what François Ozon is up to here and where he's going next.

Yet for all the gags that fall flat and scenes that don’t quite play, there are enough that fuse shock humor and sly moral commentary to combust in your face.

Quite simply, The Adventures of Tintin is a model of modern movie craftsmanship. It's also, I'm afraid, rather dull.

The Conjuring digs up no new ground — indeed, it seems almost proud of its old school bona fides — but it plows the classic terrain with a skill that feels a lot like affection. The ghost that’s really haunting this movie is nostalgia.

There’s sorrow here to fill a thousand Hollywood movies—and in the end, it swamps the boundaries of movie convention.

Leave it to James to sum up a legendary, culture-altering talent: “She turned her lack of self-awareness into a triumph.” Both sides of that coin live on in our modern culture, and Kael’s voice fills every self-satisfied corner of the Internet. Two decades after her death, she’s still the ghost in the machine.

As documentaries go, it's an able introduction that doesn't make its subject nearly as relevant to our current discontents as it could.

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.

Ramsay delivers an overdirected, conceptually obnoxious art film that's torture to sit through, listen to, and think about.

Australian rocker Nick Cave talks of how discovering Cohen during his small-town youth "just changed things." Bono calls the singer "our Shelley, our Byron."

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.

Honestly, the chilly dog days of February are crying out for a good, smart, silly stop-motion family film, the kind you can fully enjoy under the pretext of spending an afternoon at the movies with your kids.

Monster House is the first horror comedy made exclusively for fourth-graders.

It’s a solid if not stellar crime drama, well put together, very well acted, and lacking only a genuine reason to exist.

There's an evenhanded humanism flowing through The Edukators that may strike doctrinaire viewers on either side of the divide as mushy, but it's tough enough for the rest of us to chew on for a long time.

How many bicycling movies are there, let alone ones that know from frame geometry? "Breaking Away" is probably the champ, followed by "American Flyers," the hilariously awful Kevin Bacon bike-messenger movie "Quicksilver," and then we're already into "The Bicycle Thief " and "Pee-wee's Big Adventure." It's a small pack, and The Flying Scotsman rides close to the front by default.

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

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

The film's comic observations are rich, droll, and more than a little sad: Everyone in this isolated community seems beaten down by life.

One of the most enjoyable movies I've seen lately, but it has a biting knowledge of that which history gives and history takes away.

This is a movie that’s 168 minutes only because Quentin Tarantino is an uncontainable Rabelasian. He believes that more is more. And sometimes it is. But a truly great craftsman knows where to locate the line.

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.

This tale of a leather coat that wants to be God may not be the director’s finest work, but it’s certainly more than a fringe benefit.

Braverman has a number of aces up his sleeve, including a wealth of interviews filmed in the 1990s by Kaufman’s girlfriend, the film producer Lynne Margulies, and his writer and best friend Bob Zmuda, for a project that was never completed.

Illusionist is like an overupholstered wing chair in the corner of a men's club -- you settle in only to be startled by how ridiculously comfy you are.

Queen and Country shows a modern sensibility in its young hero’s all-encompassing disgust with the military mind-set, but it has one foot in Britain’s old “Carry On” comedies, and a subplot in which Percy and Redmond steal the RSM’s beloved regimental clock could come straight out of the old Henry Fonda classic “Mr. Roberts.”

About the only thing the title doesn’t tell you is that the movie’s a loving, sensitive exploration of S&M bondage techniques and polyamorous relationships.

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.

It's maddeningly chowderheaded, simplistic, pretentious, and not a little silly. You can't take your eyes off it.

This is a film lover's film, and as if to underscore the point, Bon Voyage opens and closes in a movie theater.

Genial, silly, and instantly forgettable, Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping is just another piece of product from the larger “Saturday Night Live” universe, a way for a former cast member to try to prove he’s capable of carrying a movie.

The new movie's a visual achievement and a narrative muddle: A color-drenched story of lust, love, and infidelity, it suffers from a vagueness that may be the point but that feels accidental.

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

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.

He’s the dreamer in the machine, and if he truly is retiring, the world stands to look a lot more ordinary.

Rambles without apparent purpose, and yet it blooms in emotional impact as it goes.

Land Ho! is a hot spring of a movie: It fizzes a lot, and you come out feeling better than you went in.

Picking up where Joss Whedon, director of the first two “Avengers” films, left off, sibling filmmakers Anthony and Joe Russo have so many pairings and sparrings to work through that the movie is essentially a mixed martial arts extravaganza with a severely overcrowded undercard.

A lot of the movie works, but enough doesn’t for Maps to the Stars to go down as a lost opportunity and one of this director’s braver missteps.

A powerful documentary that, with a wider scope and a bit more shaping, could have been even more powerful, perhaps unbearably so. What's there is strong enough.

The movie’s a minor pleasure rather than a major work. But minor pleasures have their place, especially in summertime, and at its best The Way, Way Back goes down like a popsicle on a hot July day.

An engaged, engaging voyage of (re)discovery that’s too in love with its subject to qualify as food porn. It’s food romance.

An agit-doc of unusual depth. It has a point -- that the primary business of America over the past half-century has been waging war -- and it supports that point with nuance, research, and a willingness to hear the other side of the argument.

Dream Horse is a very nice movie, about very nice people, but nice is rarely enough, and thank goodness Toni Collette knows that.

Shirin Neshat's film, a magical-realist cry from the heart, is as up-to-date as last year's pro-democracy protests.

Ultimately, the problem with An American Carol is the problem with far too much political discourse in this country, left or right: It highlights the worst excesses of the opposition for the sole purpose of discrediting the vast middle.

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."

Voyeurism is central to the cinema and to acting, of course, and you'd better believe these women know it. Still, Casting About feels oddly disingenuous.

Mad Detective is equal parts gonzo inspiration and overwrought indecision. It could be called "The Lunatic From Kowloon."

Everyone here is obsessed with finding "the real thing" - the next hot actor, the next revealing paparazzi shot, the lover or the friend who'll make it all worthwhile. Everyone settles for the illusion of reality instead. It's prettier, and it doesn't hurt so much.

Has John Sayles finally lost his mojo? How anyone could take a subject like the moment the Delta blues went electric and suck the joy and fury out of it is anybody's guess, but the talky, dull "Honeydripper" represents playwriting rather than filmmaking. And didactic playwriting at that.

With an aptness that may even be intentional, The Double feels both over-familiar and oddly new. It’s safe to call it a Kafka-esque tale, even though the Fyodor Dostoyevsky novel from which the movie is adapted was written in 1846.

A slow-burner — deadpan and mysterious, funny and sad — about a young Japanese woman obsessed with a pot of gold no one else knows is there. The fact that it doesn’t really exist has no bearing on the matter.

It's that gulf between earnest idealism and beaten-down realism that's the unexpected drama of Beauty Academy.

The movie, airing on Hulu, is a strange but worthy watch: cringey here, unexpectedly revelatory there, sincere and blinkered and articulate and dumb.

As true-story dramas about innocent men on death row go, Just Mercy is just above average. I still hope it reaches the widest audience possible. To quote a statistic cited in the film, for every nine prisoners executed in this country, one is found to have been wrongfully convicted. That’s a number to shame a nation.

It’s very much a film about men, their yearnings and discontents, and about the way sins tumble down from one generation to the next. It’s a bank-robber movie, too, as well as a drama about the pressures teenagers face from parents and peers. You can feel Cianfrance biting off more and more until his mouth is too full to chew.

Ye bites off substantially more than he can chew.

As eye-opening as this movie is, the real story is outside the Times building, in the browser windows and iPads of me and you and everyone we know.

The result has the dingy grace of pigeons flying across an urban wasteland.

Beatriz at Dinner has been directed with subtle but damning chamber-comedy finesse by Miguel Arteta (“The Good Girl,” “Chuck & Buck”) and written by that great deadpan satirist Mike White (“Chuck & Buck,” “School of Rock,” TV’s “Freaks and Geeks”).

The real deal, an often awkward but nonetheless terrifically compelling high-stakes human drama.

The best armchair holiday going - the cast is lovely to behold and the plot dips in and out of the arrondissements with panache. You almost don’t mind that none of it adds up to terribly much.

This is the kind of tastefully poignant drama that asks its audience to confront taboos and then pats them on the back for doing so.

The new movie is tart and weightless, and it entertains without leaving a mark. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but at 85 minutes, The Valet at times feels like a blueprint for a farce rather than the farce itself.

As a depiction of extralegal activity, 12 O’Clock Boys is eye-opening but sometimes needlessly ambiguous.

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

Above all, it’s a meditation on art and creativity that’s by turns earnest, troubled, sentimental, and middlebrow. It’s a big, glossy affair that somehow feels rather small.

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.

This War/Dance is among the most affecting films I've seen all year; it cuts to the core of being and gives individual faces to sorrow and to hope.