Ty Burr

It’s fiery. It’s big. It’s deafening. It’s dull.

The movie’s a galvanizing, tragicomic work of 21st-century schadenfreude, marred only by a barely repressed giddiness on the part of the filmmakers.

Gorgeously shot (by Lee Hyung Duk) and well worth seeing for Jeon's deceptively simple performance. Unlike its heroine, though, it gets away without a scratch.

Shane Carruth's extraordinary work of shoestring speculation throws you into a deep ocean of techno-jargon and lets you dog-paddle or sink like a stone.

Real satire must be savage, and Four Lions, for all its daring, finally doesn't dare enough.

The actor is magnificent -- ravaged, desperate, aware -- and no more so than in a scene toward the end when Bob's cardsharp cool finally breaks. It's a risky scene, the one note of corn, but Nolte brings it home. Too bad the movie doesn't.

Once is the first rock musical that actually makes sense. People don't burst into song in this movie because the orchestra's swelling out of nowhere. The guy and the girl are working musicians -- or they'd like to be, if they could make a living at it -- and they're played by working musicians.

It rockets along entertainingly enough for most of its running time - only that it's made with a self-importance the story itself doesn't warrant.

A clever and heartfelt comedy-drama that remains aloft as long as it retains its sense of humor; when the going gets serious, the dialogue turns therapeutic and heavy. Still, it’s a decent debut and an ambitious attempt to juggle tones.

Predictable but still keeps you laughing along the way.

The film is a shrine to a hardy subculture, its people, and the animals they love. Long may they run.

It's a unique trip that flirts with hokeyness at the surface but that grows more compelling, awe-inspiring, and tragic the deeper you go.

The acting is playful aces all around: Fillion gives good exhausted incredulity, Banks gives good virginal idiocy, and Rooker gives great conflicted monster arrogance even before the aliens get him.

Fiennes's energy gets the film over the finish line.

The new film is a return to form after that sagging midsection, and the coterie of Hartley admirers still paying attention will find frustrations, rewards, a few darkly intelligent laughs, and an ending that unexpectedly haunts.

I don’t mean it as a cheap shot, but Nocturnal Animals is very like an exquisitely rendered window display. It’s something at which you pause and peer into and catch your breath — and then move on.

The film isn't especially deep, but it's mostly delightful.

T2 Trainspotting wears out its welcome slowly, like a group of old men running out of stories to tell in an afternoon pub.

[A] crass, patchy, often shamelessly funny farce.

A stunningly well-acted drama for grown-ups.

The movie makes the case that the best American filmmakers may be the uncelebrated ones who helplessly turn life into art simply as a means to get out of bed every day.

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

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

As franchise reboots go, the new Halloween is top shelf. Jamie Lee Curtis returns with a vengeance to the role of Laurie Strode.

Goblet of Fire is the entry in which Rowling finally took off the gloves.

The Armstrong Lie is one for the time capsule, because it preserves for future generations a very particular modern response to scandal: confession without remorse.

A sociopolitical prankumentary in which the prank blows up in the filmmaker's face, exploding-cigar style.

The cast — Rose Byrne, Ethan Hawke, comic sad sack Chris O’Dowd (“Bridesmaids,” “The Sapphires”) — is in a higher weight class than the material and, rather than be dragged down into formula, they raise the movie up to the nearly scintillating.

In its unstated cynicism, beauty, and self-pity, Last Days fits the myth of Cobain like a torn pair of jeans.

Unfolds with an absolute minimum of dramatic highs and lows, and it's so disaffected that it prompts laughter at the wrong moments.

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.

In spite of the entropy, Jellyfish is close to a comedy, with a gentle sense of absurdism and a welcome generosity toward its characters.

An entertainingly brutal portrait of feckless privilege and buried tragedy, hewing reasonably close to those points we know to be true and juicily provocative about what happened in rooms you and I weren’t privy to.

The performances are worth a look, especially since Christopher Walken so rarely gets to play a sane person.

It's an altogether satisfying drama -- the sort of movie some people complain they don't make anymore. So here it is; what's your excuse?

Korengal is a more diffuse film than “Restrepo,” less reportorial, and not nearly as emotionally overpowering.

Suffice to say that Shawn Levy, director of the "Cheaper by the Dozen" movies, is no Blake Edwards; for every finely tuned slapstick fillip, there's a ton of messy, family-friendly buffoonery.

Lynch (one) may be the documentary David Lynch wants, but I'm not sure it's the one he or we deserve.

Doesn't derive its power from the turning wheels of plot suspense but from the simple act of looking and not blinking.

The filmmaking is shallow but assured, the star charisma thoughtful but undimmed. As for the character, I'd vote for Mike Morris. Actually, I wish I could.

Flow preaches to the choir with a starry-eyed NPR eco-humanism that can set the wrong kind of person's teeth on edge.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower finds an unexpectedly moving freshness in the old clichés by remaining attentive to the nuances of what happens within and between unhappy teenagers.

Everyone in the film is an uninteresting grotesque.

Daniel Anker's Music From the Inside Out is so intent on divining the mysteries behind the creative act that it comes up frustratingly short on specifics.

The movie has the indulgent fondness of a gift from a son to his talented mum and aunties. But it also feels the funk, and that’s what counts.

The first two hours run the gamut from interesting to delightful. The final 20 minutes are roaring, ridiculous business as usual. We should be thankful the tide of mediocrity is held back as long as it is.

Everyone is equal parts emotional victim and villain in Unforgivable, an elegantly rambling Franco-Italian affair about the ways we do each other wrong while trying to do each other right.

Long Shot is awfully funny when it’s not being completely preposterous — and sometimes even when it is.

If you’re up for a film that tells its own tale, rather than the one it thinks you want to hear, this one has a touch of madness to it, and it seems fashioned from love and old parts for people who genuinely don’t want to know what’s going to happen next.

A delightfully deadpan comedy from Germany, is one of those movies where nothing whatsoever seems to happen until you look closely, at which point everything happens.

Essential viewing for builders, graphic designers, visual artists, and other optically inclined folk, but it’s a bit of a slog for the uninitiated.

There’s a lot of talent here and a lot of enthusiasm; also a lot of influences that haven’t been successfully reprocessed into something convincing or fresh. It’s a mess, but a reasonably charming one.

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

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.

Death" builds slowly and inexorably to a comic explosion that's just too good -- too insanely, impossibly mortifying -- to spoil here. Let's just say it dwarfs everything that has come before it.

The Surfer feels overthought and underwritten, a cacophony that builds to an undeserved power chord of acceptance, transcendence and retribution.

The sharp comic timing and devil-may-care breeziness of the original only return intermittently, and the new film’s emphasis is on family feuds and forgiveness. It’s heavy on the feels. There are hugs.

It’s an easy film to watch and become engrossed in, and it’s just as easy to forget, despite a true-life twist that darkens the final minutes without making much of an impact on the whole. Expertly shot, excitingly edited, smartly acted, The Connection never quite connects.

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.

The movie's sharp-tongued and softhearted, a Sundance kind of film that mostly sidesteps generic Sundanceyness.

As sympathetic and well-turned as it is, Nowhere Boy only gives us more mythology.

Hot gospel singing and earnest family squabbles are all that distinguish Joyful Noise.

This needless sequel amps the silliness to DEFCON-4 levels of frantic surrealism and overstuffs the running time with famous faces. It’s a pop quiz instead of a movie, and it’ll be dated by tomorrow morning.

Rebirth recycles elements of the earlier movies, and, other than the news that T. Rexes can swim, it makes no claims to originality. It just wants to leave you thoroughly, happily wrung out by the end.

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.

A smart, well-acted two hours at the art house, full of witty observations and fellow feeling. But, really, it has no business being a movie.

The gap between storytelling and story is rarely as wide as in The Last Tree, a coming-of-age drama that is rapturously shot and dramatically trite.

It's an angry story, but also a strangely hopeful one, in the sense of new life sprouting through a battlefield. Above all, it's personal and specific, and that IS news we can use.

More predictable than it ought to be - you can set your watch by the appearance of the mournful Nick Drake song on the soundtrack.

Screenwriter Kaufman is in fine meta-fettle here, even if he's still losing control of his material toward the end, and while it's too soon to tell whether Clooney has the stuff of a great director, he certainly knows who to hire.

To appreciate Solaris, the new film by Steven Soderbergh, it helps to downshift your moviegoing metabolism to a level approaching the cryogenically frozen: The movie's that cerebral, that contemplative, that slow.

Rudo y Cursi is a grave and calculated affront to the men of Mexico, and that's the source of its roistering charm.

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

The filmmaking is cool, watchful, and ultimately too distanced. Outrage isn't outrageous enough, and it hurts.

The film’s chief flaw is that it’s in the room but never really in the room — the key figures talk about passionate interoffice policy arguments, but we never actually see them. Still, The Final Year takes in setbacks, breakthroughs, gaffes, and a steady drumbeat of talking-head criticism from televised outsiders, heard on the film’s soundtrack but not seen.

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.

It’s a literal cliffhanger and the next worst thing to being there.

Cinderella — the new, live-action Cinderella, that is — is an attempt by the Mouse House to revive one of Walt’s oldest fairy-tale adaptations with care and class and modernity and timelessness.

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

Expect Demonlover to become a midnight-movie staple in the coming years. And expect shards of it to roil your dreams for weeks.

Time to Leave is an unintended litmus test for lovers of foreign films.

Above all, the film is lucky to have one of the better character actors in recent movies in a lead role: Ciarán Hinds as Michael Farr.

A scuzzy little cross between a crime movie and a horror freak-out that gets under your skin and stays there, even if you can't understand half of what the characters are saying.

In sum, the movie’s a passable time-waster, but it might be better — for Kravitz’s filmmaking future and for us — if we just forgot the whole thing.

Eric begins this story as a sad-eyed cipher and ends it as a whole man, and maybe that’s structure enough, and reason enough, for one film.

One reason World Trade Center is such a good, healing cry is that it absolves us of the discomfort of thinking about everything that has happened since.

Here is where All Is By My Side runs into trouble. The real Etchingham has said, forcibly, that this didn’t happen — not the beating nor her subsequent attempted suicide, shown in the film.

From the neon-sign opening titles to the derivative angst of the dialogue, it's a touchstone of '80s pop culture, and a schizophrenic one, too.

The Take represents the downside of the new documentary renaissance.

Whenever The Girl Who Played With Fire threatens to stall, Lisbeth whips out her Taser and tortures another sleazy, abusive man into vomiting forth his dirty secrets. In Sweden, I believe they call this "light entertainment.''

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.

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."

In many ways, Son of Rambow plays like a pint-size, even cheekier version of the recent Michel Gondry film "Be Kind Rewind." Both are stories about people making movies not because it's their job but because doing so brings a vast sense of play into their lives.

Cheerful and easy to watch but surprisingly inept in the telling.

Perhaps because Campbell is a purist at heart, My Name Is Bruce is as awful as anything he has done - a broadly silly gore comedy in which no gag is too cartoonish to be indulged in at least once and preferably three times.

Unmistaken Child stands as a window on a beautiful and mysterious world. The questions it leaves hanging are for us to untangle.

Ultron’s goals never make much sense beyond the basic kill-the-Avengers-and-destroy-the-Earth checklist, nor does he develop as a character over the long haul. He’s just a static baddie, fun to look at and handy with a quip but ultimately as dull as unpolished chrome.

Gore fans will want to bump the two-and-a-half-star rating up a star, whereas those who can't handle on-screen violence will want to stay the hell away.

A strident, contrived, surprisingly lovable Noo Yawk City family farce.

Fair warning: I had to see The Girlfriend Experience twice before its pieces settled into coherent shape.

All right-thinking minds will properly detest the movie. I have to admit I laughed my asparagus off.

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.

Horror movie Rule #1: The only way to kill a zombie is to shoot it in the brain. George Romero himself laid this maxim down with his first film, the endlessly influential 1968 gutter classic "Night of the Living Dead." Forty years later, with George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead, the venerable filmmaker has done something almost as startling: He has put brains back into the zombie genre.

White Hunter, Black Heart wants to show us a specific heart of darkness — a man who, by striving to kill one of nature’s grandest creatures, hoped to annihilate part of himself — but the theme gets lost in shades of gray.

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.

Sure, go ahead and take the kids. But, for pity's sake, read them the book first.

Uplifting? Not bloody likely. Mesmerizing? Very, thanks to Greg Kinnear's eerie performance as Crane and director Paul Schrader's lucid depiction of the character's happy-go-lucky descent into hell.

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.

The Founder is a solid, smart, worthwhile film and the only remaining mystery is why the Weinstein Company is burying it with a quiet January release rather than pushing its much-loved star into the awards race with the usual fanfare.

In the end, Mulan 2020 stands as an inspired oddity: A reenvisioned remake that improves on the original even as it owes everything to movies that have come before.

Sasquatch Sunset is a goofball curio touched with genuine sadness. It’s “The Cherry Orchard” of cryptozoology.

Absurdly entertaining even after it disappears up its own hindquarters in the last act, and it gives some of our weirder actors ample room to play.

The performances are uniformly excellent, but pride of place goes to Bennett’s Sir James, an upper class twit of Pythonesque proportions. Rarely has a character this moronic been this happy.

These actors offset the modern-day ordinariness of the leads -- Jackson, especially, seems as if he's just driven over from a mall tour -- and so, ultimately, does the exquisite moral dilemma of Tuck Everlasting.

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

The studied impassivity of The Bling Ring feels increasingly like a dodge as the movie progresses; we sense an anger and a moralism that the director’s too cool or too wary or too close to engage.

Tales, which (as the title suggests) is an "Arabian Nights"-style omnibus, has similarly eye-bending backgrounds but a creatively monochromatic foreground that comes to feel like a limitation.

The movie’s fun to watch, but you can tell it was a lot more fun to make, and that’s a problem. The party stays up on the screen; down here, it’s been over for a year.

This is a film that believes deeply in ghosts, and half of them are in its director’s head.

This is an unusual role for Mortensen, but after you’ve played a thinking woman’s hunk so long and so well, what else is there?

The movie has its cheesy pleasures, and some of them are even intended. I'm just not sure whether Tom Cruise's impersonation of Axl Rose is one of them. 

Too eccentric to be a massive box-office hit yet too mainstream for a cult following; it nevertheless deserves to be seen. Mostly, it works as a singular and slightly wobbly mash-up of two creative artists and their differing sensibilities, and it benefits greatly from the contributions of one brilliant actor and one little girl. Maybe I’m squibbling, but I think it’s pretty delumptious.

The movie is strong and holding as long as it's shambling about in the Montauk dusk; when Dieckmann has to bring things to a resolution, Diggers turns ordinary -- sweet, but you've seen it many times before.

Its characters come straight from the assembly line of screenwriting archetypes, and too often they act in ways that archetypes, rather than human beings, do. You can feel its creator shuttling them here and there on the grid of greater LA, pausing portentously between each move.

The Danish Gir” wants to introduce us to a woman who helped forge a new way of thinking about what defines a person as a man or a woman. Mostly, though, it’s about the joy of sets.

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

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

The film's most natural appeal is to adolescent athletes -- in particular, cleat-wearing young ladies who will bask in its hard-won girl-power message. This is a movie with bruised shins and a huge heart.

It's quite watchable date-night cheese - the kind of movie you can simultaneously snort at and enjoy.

It's like "The Illusionist" crossed with a really hard Sudoku.

If you saw Judy Davis as Garland in the 2001 miniseries “Me and My Shadows,” you know that’s a performance to beat. Zellweger matches it in her own way, through hair and makeup but mostly by channeling a kind of terrified bravura that’s riveting to watch. This Judy knows she’s an icon, and she knows it does her no good, and it’s all she’s got.

It's a deceptively small film, one whose observations may continue to detonate quietly in your mind after the lights have come up.

Elegy drifts helplessly into melodrama, and it loses its bearings and its head in a ridiculous final act.

It's a little short on coherence and long on comic-book sensationalism -- dig the hokey, climactic Battle of the Minds between the hero and a cadaverous Mr. Big -- but there's no denying the nightmarish pull of the film's aesthetic.

It’s just another wry New York family-dysfunction farce, with a stronger supporting cast and (slightly) better production values than Robespierre’s first film but also a propensity for playing it safe and dulling the pain just when the pain should be sharpest.

Like many of us who cherish the safe harbor of old movies, Rose and Cary mourn the fact that they don't make 'em like they used to. If they'd paused to ponder why not, they might have a better movie.

Bulging with period details and a large and busy cast, Parkland is well made and at times queasily fascinating. At others, it gives in to melodrama and the ticking off of facts.

Part of the shoujo genre of gently fantastic romantic dramas about and for young teenage girls, it's also funny and creative enough to charm parents, brothers, cousins, and anyone else looking for an openhearted fable.

When Dandelion is wholly inside her music — performing or composing or even idly picking out melodies while sitting beneath a city bridge — she carries her own magic hour inside her, and the refusal of the rest of the world to see it is what’s wearing her down. “Dandelion” is the story of how she gets her groove back, and only the star’s gift of presence keeps it from floating off on the breeze.

The best moments are cinematic or actorly; the former come early and the latter are concentrated in the poised, agonized figure of the title character.

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

A broader work than Baumbach's last movie, and it's funnier, too, even as you gasp at the misbehavior.

Well-mounted and expertly played, Winter in Wartime is a class act that lacks only focus and originality to raise it above the ordinary.

Fusing teen comedy, bad-boy raunch, Tarantino-style gonzo mayhem, and tossing in a bloodthirsty little girl vigilante who swears like Steve Buscemi in a Coen brothers movie, the film has its moments of high-flying, low-down style. It’s also nowhere near as subversive as it thinks it is.

In inviting us along to peek into the life, filmmakers Kerthy Fix and Gail O'Hara don't give us quite enough about the art.

Second verse, same as the first, a little bit shorter and a little less worse.

Another Earth is being sold as an indie sci-fi drama, but that does both the movie and its proper audience a disservice. This muted story of atonement, forgiveness, and parallel universes is more of an extended metaphor - a work of earnest poetry rather than science.

The movie’s a paean to hard work and hedonism, and if its pleasures are mostly surface — grass, clay, emotional — it’s still been too long since we’ve had an intelligent frolic like this.

Dumbed down, tarted up, and almost shockingly uninspired, it's the worst superhero movie since "Green Lantern."

Largely plotless, confidently self-indulgent, and more leering toward those acting students than seems wise, Tommaso is worth a look for the Rome locations and the burnished widescreen cinematography of Peter Zeitlinger. Above all it’s a showcase for Dafoe, who continues a remarkable late-career run.

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

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

As female-bonding comfort food goes, ''Sisterhood" is that rare meal both adolescent girls and their mothers will be able to agree on.

A stirring if somewhat ham-fisted telling of a life that needs to be known by all Americans.

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is a sturdy new entry in the revived Planet of the Apes franchise, itself one of the more successful second go-rounds, commercially and artistically, of Hollywood’s modern corporate era. Yet the movie, like its three predecessors, is a fascinating case of content following form.

The new film is a juicily enjoyable crowd-pleaser that works hard at expanding to fit the size of its ambitions and that wants to give the audience a high old time while slipping in reminders of how low some people may sink in the pursuit of power.

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.

The sugar highs of this rambunctious thrill ride are fun, in other words, but in the end “Elio” is most memorable when it eases up to celebrate the invisible ties of love and friendship that bind all of us aliens to each other.

The movie could have used a little fire and brimstone itself. It’s a little too cautious.

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.

It’s a fond comedy of manners and pretentions, a film for literate audiences that gently bites the hands that buy the tickets.

It’s a comedy, and a brutally dark one, that draws blood and appalled laughter for two-thirds of its running time before jumping the shark in the final stretch. Once again, a brilliant TV writer finds the compact format of a two-hour movie more challenging than expected.

A problematic memory play, shot through with honey-colored nostalgia, that backs nervously into darker matters.

It’s worth a look, if only to get in on the ground floor of a comic mind who will hopefully continue to grow. And it’s worth a listen, if only for observations like “You know what’s ironic? Arguing about Alanis Morissette with your gay boyfriend.”

The film ends with a plea for viewers suffering from depression and other mental health issues to reach out for help. “Steve” is a deeply compassionate drama of why they should.

Deadpool 2 is very good at what it does, which is flattering the audience into feeling like it’s in on the joke. If you’re a doubter, though, you may wonder if the joke’s on us.

The Way Back is the first real Sad Ben film. It’s earnest and old-fashioned and sturdily made, and I wish that were enough to make it good.

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.

Mary Poppins Returns is torn between taking audiences back to their childhoods and treating them like children. You might have a good time but don’t be surprised if you feel a little dociousaliexpeisticfragicalirupus afterward.

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

If you have ever loved the Downton Abbey franchise, you will most likely enjoy this one while finding it pretty weak Darjeeling.

Even in the city’s most crowded place, Giroux makes his lovers seem like the only couple on Earth.

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 powerful as the movie is, it stays on the outside of a culture looking in.

It seems to play as vastly different movies depending on who's looking at it.

The cast does good work, despite a less-than-great screenplay.

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.

Albeit slumming with style and a fairly sharp scalpel. Married Life delights in peeling back the bright postwar social veneer to expose the characters' hidden agendas, and if this is a mystery movie, the mystery is other people.

It’s tempting to see Tigertail in the tradition of the Ingmar Bergman classic “Wild Strawberries,” with its emotionally constipated hero looking back over a lifetime of mistakes and missed connections. But the comparison only highlights Yang’s weaknesses as a first-time feature director: flat dialogue that mistakes subtext for text, glacially paced scenes that lack dramatic momentum, stolidly unimaginative camerawork, and a central character so unsympathetic that you end up siding with his ex-wife and daughter.

The Butler is a remarkable, even exhilarating movie not for its inherent Gump-itude but for the social portrait that gimmick allows.

In the end, it's a lovely little movie about very big things, and the smallness both illuminates it and keeps it from greatness.

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.

Jarmusch has come up with a dud.

Settles for the cliches of American suspense films, right down to an ending that leaves the door open to a possible sequel.

The film's a potboiler but a gripping one, and it leaves you chewing on both its nuances and implausibilities.

For a movie that's mostly a plotless mix of old sci-fi flicks and Bowie-esque gender-bending, Rocky Horror continues to charm. That's due in part to the honest delight we take in the freedoms this movie so cheerfully flaunts.

Don't see the movie if you can't handle two rather sexy senior citizens threatening to meet in body and mind.

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.

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

You can feel her (Bening) drag Being Julia uphill for an hour and a half until the final 15 minutes, when the ground finally levels out and the picture becomes fine, vengeful fun.

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.

It's both achingly affectionate and a terrible mess.

Hearts Beat Loud is gentle, funny, humane, and predictable, kept from becoming tiresome by a cast of pros that includes not only Offerman but Toni Collette as Frank’s landlady and possible love interest and a frisky Ted Danson as a philosophic stoner who owns the neighborhood watering hole.

Worth seeing as further proof that Annette Bening can do anything and for a touchingly flummoxed performance by Jamie Bell, once the kid of “Billy Elliot” and now a strapping romantic lead. But if it sends audiences back to explore the filmography of Gloria Grahame, the movie will have truly provided a public service.

Where it works best is in the domestic dance of death between a husband and a wife. Linney flutters with increasingly panicky intelligence throughout the film, while Byrne sinks further into his own bulk.

A touching but fairly clumsy effort that only acquires the depths of sadness and resilience it needs if you have the memory of the earlier film shoring it up. It proves that second-hand grace is, after all, still grace.

Writer-director Djo Tunda Wa Munga deplores the corruption, gunplay, and oversexed misogyny plaguing his country - and he's going to show you as much of it as possible before the end credits roll.

A tart, smart, closely observed satire of the television industry.

A rhapsodic erotic romance that takes place in a cultural prison, and it pulses with a defiance that would be mischievous if it weren't so rip-roaringly angry.

Wilde is stuck with the harder job of simultaneously playing sexy, innocent, conniving, and heartsore, and the effort appears to give her a headache. "This is kind of like an old movie," Liza says to Jay in one scene. Lady, don't you wish.

In short, “Imaginarium’’ is a Terry Gilliam movie and it’s a mess, which over the years have come to mean much the same thing. It’s one of his better messes, though, or at least this critic was won over by its ramshackle whimsies.

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

Sympathetic and a little colorless, Butler makes an effective maypole for everyone else to spin around.

The Salt of Life is about that moment in a man or woman's life when members of the opposite sex stop seeing them, and while the mood is jauntily sensual, the undertow is fierce.

In rock, it's about the attitude as much as the music. In some cases, more so. And the Runaways were all attitude.

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.

The point of "My Week'' appears to be that Colin is the one person in Monroe's life who isn't using her, but if squeezing two books and a movie out of one brief encounter isn't exploitation, I don't know what is.

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.

Merely grand old-school fun - a rollicking class reunion that stands as the second best entry in the venerable series.

“If we die, let it be for a cause, not a spectacle,” the heroine barks at one point. If such a statement sounds fairly insane coming from a series that has grossed (to date) $2.3 billion worldwide, Mockingjay — Part 2 is sturdy enough to render it moot while you’re watching. After that, it’s up to you whether to swallow the irony or choke on it.

Best taken as a dazzling showcase for Collette, an actress who fits none of Hollywood's ideas of glamour or artistry, yet who grows like a beautiful outback weed with each new role she takes.

Takers might have made a perfectly decent little B heist movie, but someone had to go and forget to give the cameraman his Ritalin.

It's fast, it's funny, and it works.

A comparison to Carver's original story - called "Why Don't You Dance?," easily Googleable, and all of 1,600 words long - is instructive.

It's a doughty movie, stuck halfway between Masterpiece Theatre and Classics Illustrated, but, to his credit, gifted journeyman director Michael Apted understands he's playing the long game.

Because it’s a Hollywood movie from a major corporation looking fondly at itself, it concludes that, while art may heal our psychic wounds, craftsmanship and commerce heal them better.

The movie moves, but it doesn't breathe.

In short, there’s plenty of spectacle in Beauty and the Beast, which will be enough for many if not most young audiences. But there isn’t much magic, and what there is coasts on 26-year-old fumes.

Rossi gives us a survey course when what we need is a seminar; the movie is a useful “What’s Wrong With College 101” but the advanced study remains to be done.

Perfectly fine summer folderol, epic enough on its own terms if not quite big enough to expand beyond its genre and matter to people who find it difficult to care about characters who spit gobs of flaming phlegm. I realize there are fewer and fewer of us, but we're a hardy band and stubborn.

There are a number of reasons “Covenant” works where “Prometheus” struggled to work. The characters are more incisively drawn this time, and their relationships inherently more dramatic.

Bull is one of those quiet heartland indie dramas that can serve as a tonic after a steady diet of blockbuster. It’s about human connection, which is much on people’s minds in these days of global pandemic. And it’s about rodeo bull riders, a group of people I’ve always thought should have their heads examined.

This is not a bad movie, and to small children it will be a very good one. But it is closer to average than one would wish from the company that gave us “Up,” “Wall-E,” “The Incredibles,” and “Toy Story 3."

In illuminating how upper-class bigotry can encompass both the actively fascist and the politely passive, School Ties is actually one of the more realistic — and least insufferable — entries in the recent prep-school genre.

The magazine changed hands a number of times before shuttering in 1989, but JJ Kramer now owns the brand and the archives and with this movie hopes to reintroduce them to a new generation. And why not? One thing about CREEM is that it always rises to the top.

James Scurlock's documentary horror show has a critical message to impart -- your credit cards are out to kill you -- and a naive, ham - handed way of imparting it.

A sequel that is noisy, fast, and pretty smart but that lacks the spark of gonzo originality that made the first movie an out-of-nowhere treat.

The remake is stranded between pushing the scatological envelope and caving in to the formulas the 1976 movie established, and until the well-nigh foolproof ending, it comes up gasping for air.

In its refusal to connect the dots, Wild Grass is playful unto tediousness, and between Azéma's overly cutesy performance -- all Harpo Marx hair-frizz and popped eyes -- and Mark Snow's painfully (purposefully?) banal lounge-jazz score, the movie functions as a theoretical irritant rather than a film.

Twisters isn’t art and doesn’t want to be. Like “Twister,” it’ll never be held up as a classic but will instead be reliably watched for the next 28 years until someone gives us “Twister 3: Maximum Vorticity.”

There's a great movie to be had in the notion of a busybody whose advice keeps blowing up in his face, but Dan in Real Life merely sets it up and walks away.

If the movie’s all too predictable in its broad outlines, it’s scurrilously funny in the details, and it pushes its two leads and one of its supporting actors in entertainingly fresh directions.

Forgoes that split-level wit to concentrate on mere rock 'em sock 'em mayhem.

Casey is possibly on the spectrum, but one of the problems with The Art of Self-Defense is that all the other characters seem to be, too.

It's a hell of a story, and Cadillac Records wants to tell it so badly that it threatens to warp the narrative out of recognition.

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.

The movie stands as a statement of a gifted, troubled actor’s intense commitment to his craft. Beyond that, it is a punishment.

With Clerks II, the director retreats to home turf, but is Smith playing it safe or is he really interested in seeing how the old nabe has changed? Bit of both, actually.

The Unknown White Male that Murray has made asks profound questions. They're just not necessarily the right ones.

What makes Shop timeless, ironically, is the specificity of its setting: a small department store in Budapest at the end of the global Depression.

There’s something happening here and it isn’t exactly clear. What is clear is that Eytan Fox may yet make a great film for the 21st century.

The movie is cruelly frank about the ways damage cascades down to the powerless, but while it's not for the fainthearted (or for animal lovers), rewards are there.

Oppenheimer has made a chamber play of and for the damned, and while it never fully escapes the laboratory of ideas, it shows a daring and lethally sharp creative mind at work. More, please.

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.

Isn't a first-date movie. As a third -date movie, though, it's just about perfect.

The result is an expertly made, very watchable film that's curiously lacking in impact. By Polanski standards that has to be a disappointment.

Despite the film’s length and aspirations, its anthropological correctness and historically accurate gore, Bale’s transformation from stone killer to empathetic ally is unconvincing.

A bonbon of embarrassment comedy.

Pacific Rim is, hands down, the blockbuster event of the summer — a titanic sci-fi action fantasy that has been invested, against all expectations, with a heart, a brain, and something approximating a soul.

It’s acceptable scary-silly kid fodder that adults will find only mildly insulting. Unless they’re Bette Midler fans. In which case it’s depressing as hell.

The movie stands as evidence that Benny Safdie is not just half of a stellar brother act (and a fine actor, as attested to by his Edward Teller in “Oppenheimer”) but an intriguing directing talent in his own right.

The film’s greatest strength is its lead actress, Haley Bennett, who’s on camera for almost the entire running time and who portrays a desperately lonely woman’s journey through self-destruction toward something like sanity.

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.

The performances are deep and rich -- Wood is coming to seem like a smarter Chloe Sevigny, Rory looks to be the Culkin with talent, and Norton's portrayal of Harlan aches with ambiguity.

Another tale of timid souls united by a sweet movie gimmick.

The Way is a good, cheap vacation. At times, you wonder if Estevez isn't creating a cracked therapeutic remake of "The Wizard of Oz.'' He's got the nerve and the heart, all right. I'm less sure about the brains.

There’s a thin line between the iconic and the generic, and The Rover, a grim post-apocalyptic drama from down under, wanders back and forth across it in an adrenaline daze.

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.

An inspired dead-end stunt that keeps delivering snarky laughs far longer than it has any right to.

This is a slacker detective story, emphasis on the slack, and if you can downshift into its loping rhythms, it's pretty wonderful.

The film's a propulsive international espionage thriller, built on the hurry-scurry bones of the "Bourne" movies.

The movie, which is both formulaic and powerful, dramatizes a paradigm shift that has been largely smoothed over by history (which is hardly the same as saying all the battles have been won).

One comes away from Interview exhausted and a little unclean, entertained by the acting equivalent of a pit bull fight but needing a hose-down. The movie confirms that in every relationship "there are winners and losers." True enough, but for the audience this one's a draw.

Directed by the inventive Uruguayan horror specialist Fede Álvarez (“Don’t Breathe”), the new “Alien: Romulus” was billed as a back-to-basics reboot, and to its credit, it’s a no-frills, straight-up genre piece built largely on the bones of the first two movies. All that’s missing are originality and a convincing final act, and, honestly, you could do worse for a Saturday night eek-a-thon.

Mother and Child glows for a good 90 minutes before an increasing reliance on contrivance and coincidence makes the lamp flicker and then fizzle out.

The filmmakers bank against their impulse toward melodrama and deliver a reconciliation that is heartbreakingly understated.

Disconnect is far from a bad movie. It’s just better at melodrama than drama.

The problem with making homages to junky genre movies is that sometimes you just end up with a junky genre movie.

Preposterous, luridly entertaining.

Watching Adoration is like juggling three tennis balls, a porcupine, and a graduate thesis, but eventually it finds a unifying theme, that of tolerance melting away racial and intergenerational hatreds.

JCVD may not be the first meta-musclehead movie, but it's certainly the most surprising.

In fact, without in the least playing like an agenda-driven blockbuster, Captain Marvel posits that female superheroes don’t have time for bullroar and might just be better at taking care of business.

The dolphin is, quite simply, remarkable, and the unstated message of resilience and adaptation ripples easily off the screen to the smallest viewers.

It's a handsome, often funny piece of work with a nearly fatal inability to settle on a tone.

The movie is almost willfully dull, for its real subject is everything we never say to our parents, or they to us.

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.

Thriller fans might remember a terrific 1987 B flick called ''The Stepfather.'' One Hour Photo is that film, directed by an art student.

Quartet is a sweet-tempered, rather fuddly drama about retired opera singers, and compared to a slick crowd-pleaser like "Best Exotic Marigold Hotel," with whom it shares a star and a sentimentalized view of old age, it's a mess.

Watching Prometheus is like opening a deluxe gift box from Tiffany's to find a mug from the dollar store.

At its best, “The Lost Bus” offers a testament to people’s courage, solo or in groups, when faced with nature’s deadly chaos (albeit a chaos intensified by human-caused climate change). At its worst, it reduces the biggest fire-related calamity in recent memory — 85 deaths, about $16 billion in damage and an area five times the size of San Francisco burned to the ground — to an effective but impersonal disaster movie.

Regrettably, it’s terrible poetry: a roughly chronological jumble of archival footage, unconvincing period reenactments, gauzy voice-overs, and half-baked ideas that makes one yearn for the stolid dullness of a History Channel documentary.

A startling fantasy of Muslim feminist empowerment that allows the Iranian-born actress Golshifteh Farahani to put on what amounts to a one-woman show.

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

I don't think I've seen a mainstream movie get fatherhood so right since "Kramer vs . Kramer": the fear, the indulgence, the snappishness, the pre-occupied "uh-huhs" as a child natters about his day, the steamrolling waves of love.

At one point in ''Praise,'' Godard mentions that the Bois de Boulogne, the Parisian park, is all that's left of the French forests from the time of the Roman conquest. In Praise of Love, glowing like an ember, is all that's left of genius.

When art-minded film directors stoop to genre-minded filmmaking, it’s generally a good idea to duck. Despite sequences that may lodge in your memory forever, Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria is no exception to this rule.

Aside from pretty people behaving cutely, there's just not much here, and even devoted Francophiles may nod into their cafe crèmes.

This is a buddy movie in which one of the buddies is dead. Yet, if anything, the emotional bonding is — or wants to be — more resonant than ever.

There’s not a lot of depth to Keep an Eye Out, but there is a singular vision at work and at play.

Youth is, among many other things, a lovely valentine to both Caine and Keitel, two performers who have seen it all and know what to do with it.

“Pick” often feels like a project that has been overly groomed. Will you still be moved to tears? Most likely.

Could fairly be described as a Robert Altman ensemble movie without the flab, or "Magnolia" with a mean streak and bigger laughs.

It's a predictable but acridly pleasant 12-step bonbon: self-help noir.

A bleakly comic, brutally Darwinian gangland saga that at times comes close to being this year's "Drive." It also does something that, if you're from around these parts, seems downright perverse. It takes the Boston out of George V. Higgins.

The film’s ultimate message — help other people, basically — is, while useful and necessary, dramatically rather slack, and you notice with a shock that the film’s central conceit has almost entirely dropped off the table by the final third. Payne’s microcosm is so like our macrocosm that after a while he simply forgets to make the distinction.