Ty Burr

If you’ve ever helped shepherd a parent or a grandparent in their final years, you may be better equipped to handle this movie’s gallows humor and to appreciate the care with which it separates the contradictory emotions felt by Kirsten and all grown children.

Lee has kept the bones of McBain’s and Kurosawa’s versions, but he’s made his own movie, occasionally for worse but mostly for better.

Where most documentaries offer us facts to hold on to, his (McElwee's) are obsessed with the mystery of things we don't know and never will.

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

Half melodrama, half Holy Minimalism, mostly engrossing, the film is guided by the idea of two women moving slowly toward each other in friendship and understanding, one an atheist doctor and the other a worldly bride of Christ.

One such paradox, which Into the Wild doesn't note, is that those who flee civilization more often than not bring it with them. The bus in which Christopher McCandless died is now a tourist destination.

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.

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.

Gibney lays out the full picture, availing himself of terrific concert footage, archival materials, and interviews with Fela’s colleagues and family members (including eldest son and musical heir Femi Kuti). The portrait that emerges is of a larger-than-life personality who seems to have been closer to those who didn’t know him than those who did. (Again, much like Brown.)

A rigorous and bracingly charming movie about moviemaking.

It's a perfect example of how far production design and editing WON'T take you when the story's not there.

Nightcrawler is about TV news-video parasites, but the freakiest thing in it — the biggest bedbug of all — is Jake Gyllenhaal as the movie’s hero, Lou Bloom.

Fish Tank should be seen for what it does well and for what it hints may come, if Andrea Arnold and her audiences are lucky.

If you miss the old cliches, consider whether, after 21 Bond films and countless parodies, your response is simply Pavlovian.

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

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

Don’t Think Twice is comedy inside-baseball, and it’s pretty delicious.

Comparisons have been made to the films of Jim Jarmusch and early David Lynch, both warranted. Amirpour wears her influences like a badge of honor but she also has a nascent sensibility of her own, arguably more feminine and certainly more sensual.

If Mary Shelley disappoints, it’s only because al-Mansour sticks to the tried and true bones of the bio-pic genre and plays it stylistically safe. Maybe the filmmaker hopes to prove her skill with a big-budget period piece; if so, she easily succeeds.

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.

The Traitor is a coolly epic appraisal of a country’s struggle with its dark side rather than a mobbed-up melodrama. If it’s “Godfather” clichés you want, there’s always “The Godfather.”

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.

Waitress isn't a great film, but it is great, deep-dish fun, with a generosity of spirit that extends first to the sisters on the screen and in the audience, then to the rest of humanity.

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.

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.

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.

"The Corpse Bride" with teeth, Bruno Bettelheim retooled for the multiplex, a nightmare of daft and creative consequence. I really liked it.

Baumbach has something of an evil genius for casting. If Driver — the mercurial Adam of “Girls” — and Seyfried are solid as the incoming kids, Charles Grodin (the original “Heartbreak Kid”) ruthlessly represents the boomers refusing to cede the stage.

Startling, dreamlike, frustrating, funny — Karan Kandhari’s debut feature, “Sister Midnight,” is an absolute original.

Bloody and bloody funny, and Jackson and Carlyle make the best salt-and-pepper team since Eddie Murphy and Nick Nolte knocked heads in ''48 HRS., '' but ultimately the movie can't find a way out of its own dead end.

In Summer Wars, it's what's old that's made to seem refreshingly new.

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.

Susan Stroman directed the show on Broadway and what she has done here is photograph that show -- no more, no less. This is good news for anyone who couldn't afford a trip to New York and $100 tickets, but it's a fairly odd approach to cinema.

Gyllenhaal’s excellent, but, playing his girlfriend, Tatiana Maslany (star of TV’s “Orphan Black”) is something special.

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).

Tina is celebratory and glossy, with no mention of her recent health issues, her son’s 2018 suicide, or other painful subjects. The life is still more than eventful enough.

If it were any more real - if it were Imax, say -- the audience would be molting.

The movie only looks like a coming-of-age freak show from the outside; in reality, it’s unexpected proof that flowers can grow even in a prison.

Still: The Hours is a book about people writing, reading, and living another book, and that literariness makes the movie resist itself.

Without stooping to the uselessness of style, Working Woman makes its points simply by staying with Orna as she proceeds through stages of shock, humiliation, self-loathing, self-censorship, all emotions her husband finds difficult to understand and which the Bennys of the world rely on.

The movie has more style than depth and it's sometimes in danger of confusing the two.

Hardly a consistent piece of work, but even when it falls apart toward the end in a mess of bad acting and amazingly youthful pretentiousness, you may find it hard to look away. Handmade and helpless, it's nevertheless the real deal, an artful blurt of sensitivity and rage.

The primary talking head is Ono, of course, who's serenely protective of Lennon's greater legacy. Her cooperation ties the film's hands, but only to a point.

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

That’s already more laughs than a month of Saturday Night Lives.

It's a genre film - the action is fierce and nonstop - with a brooding undercurrent of unease that aims for the complexities of John le Carre.

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 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.

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

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.

Like Field, the new movie has a sneakily dark sense of humor, a taste for the odd bit of gore, and a love of psychedelic mushrooms and cinematic hallucinations.

It’s [Bong Joon Ho's] first film since “Parasite” became the first foreign language movie to win a best picture Oscar in 2020, and while it’s not his best work, “Mickey 17” is still a great deal of acrid fun. In the bargain, you get three great performances from two very good actors.

The anti-"Kill Bill." This is an old man's movie in all the good ways: gentle, humanistic, rich with observation, quietly aware of all that can't be solved by the sword.

A note of paranoia creeps in that nods to classic film noir on one hand and baroque misogyny on the other. Or maybe this is just Garland’s dank idea of what men do when they’re left to their own devices: Create dream mates from the flayed skin of their fantasies.

The RKO Swiss Family Robinson isn't considered a lost classic — a lost pretty-good-movie is more like it — but the fact that Disney is finally releasing a movie they bought specifically to sit on is unexpected and welcome. [20 Oct 2019, p.N1]

The film is depressive, slow, darkly funny, unyielding in its formal rigor, and unsettlingly beautiful. It's obviously not for everyone, but only because not everyone can meet its stare.

It’s a sly, twisty little chiller, not ashamed of its B-movie bona fides and better for it.

The last time I felt the sort of outrageously kinetic action-movie high District 9 delivers, it was 1981 and George Miller, Mel Gibson, and "Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior" had just come roaring out of Australia.

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.

Downey’s deftness is so miraculous, in fact, that it’s a shame Heart and Souls never really lets him cut loose.

It’s the kind of movie that some will deem important enough to merit end-of-year awards and others will find portentous enough to give them the giggles — again, not unpleasurably.

Mostly, though, the movie succeeds because of the actress at its center.

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.

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

Tomboy is as visually beautiful as its 10-year-old heroine is defiantly plain.

When Spartan is good, it's surprisingly gripping and fresh, and when it's bad, it's just another overcooked Hollywood paranoid thriller.

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

Directed from the center-left with an ear to parties on both sides of the West Bank separation barrier, it’s knowledgeable and unhysterical, openhearted without seeming naïve. Those on the extremes will probably hate it.

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.

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

A charming, damning portrait that has been stinging audiences in the Czech Republic since its 2006 release. In any language, what the movie says about surviving fascism by rolling with it speaks loud and clear.

Mao had it wrong; in ''Revolution,'' political power comes out of the barrel of a TV tube.

It’s a warm, sympathetic, very sloppy, and often very funny little movie about a young woman who, among several other things, is not remotely ready to be a parent and knows it.

At 85, Ian McKellen doesn’t have many performances left in him, so any movie that lets the actor carve ham with such exuberant relish as “The Critic” is worth his time and ours.

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).

I’d like to think of the singer watching this movie somewhere, nodding in thanks at what it gets right and howling with laughter at what it misses.

It's a quietly wrenching eye-opener.

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.

So, no, August: Osage County isn’t all that original, and sometimes it’s just a lot of yelling. But it does rouse itself to a powerful fury every so often, and Letts knows an audience’s dirty little secret: We love the bloodlust of a family feeding on itself.

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

Mostly Let Him Go is about what would happen if “Death Wish” were cast with the couple from “American Gothic.”

Sister Act 2 is pretty much a mess. It takes forever to get on its feet and doesn’t make a lot of sense once it does.

Works more in your head than on the screen.

Way oversold in movie theaters, this pleasantly small shaggy-dog comedy seems more at home on the small screen — even if you do forget why it is you’re smiling by the time the tape finishes rewinding.

This is one of those follies that go beyond pesky, bourgeois notions of ''good'' and ''bad.''

The tapes of the TV episodes are in heavy rotation at our house, and the movie is not. And that’s because even a 4-year-old can tell when something has gotten a little too big for its Huggies.

Barney’s Great Adventure is insipid, but it’s also harmless, and, besides, why shouldn’t toddlers enjoy the pleasures of their own kitsch?

Relaxed, valedictory, exquisitely titled, Grumpy Old Men feels like an odd couple's last hurrah.

Sets, music, and imagery are rigorously controlled and undeniably stunning, but after a while flaws creep into the plot's double helix.

When Lambert is onscreen, Fortress is just an effective action cheapie. Whenever Smith is the focus, it approaches junk poetry.

Rodriguez makes the same mistake as other first-time auteurs: The world of this movie exists only in relation to other movies, particularly the Sergio Leone-Clint Eastwood spaghetti Westerns of the early '60s.

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

The best audiences for this thrilling confabulation may be younger ones: They’ll feel their minds expand with inspiration and be less inclined to deflate back to earth afterward. Somebody did something amazing back in 1862; The Aeronauts commemorates it with artifice, enthusiasm, and a smattering of the truth.

Faster is meat-and-potatoes action with a side of crazy.

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.

Lightweight yet alluring.

It's a fearsome and giddily unhinged performance in a movie that isn't entirely sure what to do with it.

Yet for all the love emanating from client-pals Michael Douglas, Sylvester Stallone, Emeril Lagasse, and Steven Tyler, there’s a sadness to this movie that remains just off camera.

The finest scene in Don't Come Knocking is its quietest...The movie could have used a lot more of it.

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

When it works, W. can take your breath away. When it doesn't, you can feel Stone still working out his feelings toward the man.

Watching Eagle vs Shark is like sitting next to a terminally awkward first date at a restaurant. You cringe and feel protective toward the poor, sweet dweebs at the same time.

If you've seen "Paris, je t'aime" or "New York Stories," you know the rate of return on these urban omnibuses is variable, and so it is here. Go in expecting minor pleasures and you'll be fine.

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.

Petzold is a gifted filmmaker pulled in opposite directions by politics and melodrama, and when they’re in perfect tension, as in Barbara (2012) and Phoenix (2014), a masterpiece can result. Undine, by contrast, is the slightest bit waterlogged.

Serves up some caustic laughs before fizzling out.

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.

A charming but terribly self-indulgent trifle that's less than the sum of its many parts.

An acceptable time-waster for a slow day in a movie theater or a slow night on cable. But it never makes you mad as hell, so what’s the point?

An absurd mess that's more entertaining than it has any right to be.

The ambitious new biopic about Robinson, is better written and produced than those children’s books, but it isn’t any deeper, and that’s a disappointment.

It flirts intriguingly with the unknowable, what it shows us of the knowable isn't terribly interesting.

Snyder knows how to put on a show, and Man of Steel has a massive scope that’s hard to resist... But what’s missing from this Superman saga is a sense of lightness, of pop joy.

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."

Still manages to be a Steve Martin vanity project in ways that are fairly creepy.

If anything, The Big Year plays like Ron Howard's "Parenthood'' with birds instead of children.

"Maybe" was watchable and blandly pleasant; "Theory" is a smidgen better than that, if not the cruelly funny farce the movie's best impulses and its own trailer would have you believe.

Writers John W. Richardson, Chris Roach, and Ryan Engle bet that the central hook — Who’s the bad guy? How’s he doing this? — will keep us paying attention. And they’re right.

A noble, shipwrecked folly.

What's largely missing from It's Kind of a Funny Story: genuine emotional pain. Still, the movie's an often charming example of "Cuckoo's Nest'' Lite.

City of Ember lacks the vision and scope of "WALL-E," but it's based on a pretty good kids' book and it makes a pretty good "Twilight Zone" episode, with hope dangling at the end rather than one of Rod Serling's cosmic black jokes.

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

Writer-director Gerard Johnstone and co-writer Akela Cooper, both returnees, keep the pace fast enough to paper over the incomprehensible plot and, more important, retain the first movie’s self-mocking humor. The result is enjoyably over-the-top summer junk, which, honestly, a lot of us could use right now.

The question that should be asked is whether Woody Allen has made a good movie this time out, and the honest answer is "almost."

True to its title, Moxie has a lot of moxie, and it’s an easy watch, smartly acted by a crew of young talents.

It's notable for some astounding urban wildlife footage and for the way it unintentionally reflects the giddy narcissism of the primate known as homo sapiens.

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

LeBeouf may yet mature into an American James McAvoy — a charismatically spineless leading man — but Sarandon and her character have him and his character for lunch.

What appears at first to be a Euro variation on David Lynch's patented mind games, though, ultimately settles for more conventional pleasures. The movie makes sense, more's the pity, although you may need to see it twice to figure out how.

It’s sprightly enough to make a lot of audiences and Warner Bros. bean-counters happy, but it also confirms that one of the most distinct visionaries in American film history has become a corporate repurposing machine. It’s not insane, and that hurts.

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.

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'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.

It's a smooth, compelling, almost suspenseful (more on that in a bit), and slightly hollow Hollywood period piece.

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

Walking a line between droll comedy and a darker, more unsettling drama that the filmmakers aren’t quite up to, Frank is an entertaining curio with flashes of inspiration. That’s also a pretty good description of Frank’s music.

This is more than retro, it’s a re-imagination of the past, of the stories and role models that could have been available to Black audiences (and white ones) but weren’t. Better late than never.

Sloppy, crude, pursuing the most far-flung tangents in hopes of a laugh, Anchorman still gave me more stupid giggles than I'd care to admit.

Simultaneously overplotted and simplistic, the new barnyard/racecourse comedy from Warner Brothers is predictable every step of the way, and it contains at least three too many poop jokes.

Visually playful and often good fun, it never settles on a convincing narrative shape.

So swollen with purpose, so titanically self-conscious in its mythmaking, that at times its nearly paralyzes itself with solemnity.

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.

In short, Besson builds a dazzling alterna-universe — a bit of Terry Gilliam, a dash of “Blade Runner,” a smidgen of “Star Wars” (which, to be fair, was probably influenced by the original comic), and a lot of extra-strength Besson-ian whimsy. And then he strands us with the two least interesting people there.

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.

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.

Throw out any expectations you might have of coherent narrative structure or directorial control, and you might have a pretty good time.

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.

Good comfort food for most of its running time, thanks to a cast of attractive, unchallenging pros and Ken Kwapis's smooth direction.

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

At the very least, Agora finally gives Rachel Weisz a role that almost exactly matches her intense, humorless, but undeniable star charisma.

The movie's an easy, engaging watch, even if it's literally all over the map.

The results are visually dazzling. The movie as a whole is something less.

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

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.

Has something many movies don't these days: interesting and attractive people talking to each other.

Good Kill is by necessity a grim piece of work, one that fields a powerful and unexpectedly terse performance from Ethan Hawke while stumbling over plot developments that seem increasingly forced. Niccol can be forgiven his outrage even as it leads him to create drama out of agenda instead of the other way around.

Pacino, thankfully, is on-screen enough to keep this stew on a solid low boil.

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.

That J. Edgar never ultimately convinces - that at times it's quite entertainingly bad - can be blamed on both an unfocused script and the project's very bigness. Somewhere in this ambitious, meticulously produced epic is a small love story struggling to get out.

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 classy unintentional hoot.

As a director, Cahill’s a capable and sometimes breathtaking stylist, and he accomplishes remarkable things on a modest budget, topping up the visuals with patterns, rhymes, and concordances.

The 1979 film was both more casual and much darker about the realities and infirmities of old age, and it had one of George Burns’s better performances. It was a funny, touching experience, and it was a bitter pill. The new movie is a placebo, with Hallmark emotions put over by a cast of solid-gold professionals.

War of the Worlds pushes some of the right buttons and enough of the wrong ones to make you wish that Spielberg would move on from aliens already and use his unparalleled talents to focus once more on earth.

Stark eye candy of the first order, the film is saddled with the oldest story this side of "Blade Runner." Still, comic-book fanboys and graphic designers with time to kill should feel no shame in checking this one out.

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.

It's a good movie for its type, but it rarely stops to let us marvel at the world it creates.

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

According to the closing credits, My Entire High School was six years in the making and is clearly something that Shaw felt he had to get out of his system with his feature film-directing debut. Mission accomplished, and very stylishly, too.

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.

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

Arbitrage is a breezy watch, with good performances that don't cut very deep and an eye for décor but little interest in what it's decorating. What's missing, really, is outrage, or a sense of the 99 percent.

My Salinger Year isn’t much, but it isn’t phony.

At times in Song to Song, the effect is mesmerizing, mostly when Mara is onscreen in all her tremulous bioluminescence.

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

It’s a letdown, but this director’s still a talent to be reckoned with.

I almost wish A Mighty Heart were about the Captain, and I'd bet director Michael Winterbottom does, too. The character contains all the contradictory impulses of this region of the world that the West tries and miserably fails to boil down to black and white.

Love Wedding Repeat isn’t more than the sum of its fairly foolproof parts, and it suffers from a leading man who’s likable but who lacks the mad gleam of a true farceur. The rest of the cast pulls their weight.

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.

Occasionally too pleased with itself, it's also pleasantly unpredictable, and it has a trio of sweet hambone performances at its center.

Pleasantly inspirational on its own terms, "Clear" is no one's idea of fresh goods.

The movie is sardonic, hip, heartfelt, surprisingly white, and for all its ensemble pleasures, it's squarely about a furiously prim young woman and how she learns to bend.

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.

Chatty, neurotic, maddeningly messy, often very funny, "New York" spins in a lunatic orbit of its own.

At times you feel Weitz flipping the pages and dog-earing wildly, and that's a shame: This is a movie that needs to be lengthy and discursive, the better to duck into the back alleys of its invention. A visionary is required. This director isn't one.

The best thing that can be said about The Bourne Legacy is that Renner will survive it.

One of the director’s more superficial efforts; it’s watchable but glib.

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.

A black-and-white fever dream, and, like all dreams, its meanings are elusive. It’s opaque, maddening, often pretentious, yet the pretensions may be on purpose, to push us away from the adulterous colonials at the story’s center and reveal the Africa they’re too obsessed with each other to see.

How deeply silly is The Lake House? As silly as a movie about two letter-writing lovers separated by a wrinkle in time can be. How much sweet, dumb fun is it? More than you might want to admit.

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.

At its best, Year of the Fish makes a virtue of naivete - its heroine's, its director's, and the fragile fairy-tale belief that everyone deserves a happy ending.

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.

He (Ray) was, a more complicated man than this film, or perhaps any film, dares allow. Foxx is not at fault here.

At 40, Mastroianni is looking more and more like her father, Marcello Mastroianni. She has his eyes and that air of existential befuddlement, and she's beginning to suggest the magnificent ruin he became in his later career.

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

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.

Parts of it are close to genius; most of it is actively torturous to watch.

Morning Glory is itself a work of extreme fluff, a lightweight bauble about the morning-show wars that floats on the updrafts of character comedy until it charmingly self-destructs in the final act.

The man's mythology precedes him, and it's the movie's failing that we don't understand how or whether he uses that mythology because he knows it's good business.

Three things and three things only keep Sex Drive from being teen-comedy landfill. The first is James Marsden, hilarious as the hero's bully-boy big brother. The second is Seth Green, beyond droll as an Amishman with attitude. The third is the Mexican doughnut costume.

There’s no question this exuberantly directed coming-of-age tale — a peppy slapstick drama, if you can get your brain around that — is a sight to see. Whether you want to see it is something you may not be able to decide until halfway through.

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.

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

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.

A vanity film refreshingly lacking in vanity.

At nearly two hours Lunacy becomes repetitive, at first ingeniously and then with a slowly dulling edge. The meat parade ceases to shock.

The special effects, when they kick in, are impressive, and the gore hounds in the audience will eventually get their gobbets of flesh, but the messaging of “Wolf Man” is so muddy that it’s not clear what the movie’s trying to say.

It’s a handsomely mounted, intentionally claustrophobic film; too claustrophobic over the long haul, with relentless close-ups that constrict the galvanic emotions on display.

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 as a satiric bourgeois psychodrama that “Armand” works best and reveals its genetic heritage to the works of Bergman and Ullmann (the latter no slouch as a director herself).

Everything about the film is a welcome rebuke to the happy-face apocalypse of “2012,’’ a movie that turns mass extinction into the Greatest Show on Earth. In The Road, what has been lost is recognized as infinitely precious; what’s left is bitter and our due.

For a series supposedly dedicated to the pleasure of superhero movies, Dark Phoenix somehow ends up illustrating their limits.

What happens when a rigorously non-mainstream filmmaker tries to reverse-engineer a mainstream romantic comedy? The result, in all its charming perversity, is Results.

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.

Delivery Man is predictable but likable, schmaltzy but sweet.

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.

You may be put in mind of HBO’s recent “True Detective” — the low-down Southern locations, the time period (here the mid-1980s), some truly horrible crimes, a general air of diseased moralism — but Cold in July, while stylishly done, isn’t close to that good.

This is not a well-made film but it is an enjoyable one, in part because it’s genuinely unpredictable and in part because it’s a pleasure to see one of the great stars of his era on a movie screen once more.

A guilty pleasure that’s guiltier than most, a southern-fried potboiler that seems to be settling in as a camp remake of “Body Heat” before it turns itself inside out and becomes something else entirely.

A predictable conspiracy thriller that somehow ends up diminishing the real urgency of the West's humanitarian disconnect from Africa. If it sends audiences home to log on to the Amnesty International website, terrific -- but that still doesn't make it a very good movie.

It's all breezy and predictable.

Private Fears says that life is a smoldering holding pattern, but Resnais is gracious enough to blanket the embers with eternal snow.

If product proves especially difficult to swallow, take with a grain of salt and three or more alcoholic drinks, or wait until such time as active ingredients Hathaway and Gyllenhaal have been more effectively utilized elsewhere.

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.

Luca has energy to spare and it’s certainly easy on the eyes, if not as visually outrageous as, say, the recent Coco. The moral lessons — be true to your friends, overcome your fears — are tidy and shopworn, fresh to young audiences but lacking the jolts of originality that make classic Pixar films an all-ages proposition.

Five-Year Engagement alternates between realistic scenes of couples bickering and broad character farce, and the two halves mesh uneasily.

Takes your angriest thoughts about urban public transportation and magnifies them into a grubby and rousingly antisocial fantasia on post-communist breakdown and bureaucracy.

In the end, the problem with movies like Dark Blue is that they willfully ignore the systemic, historical, cultural, and class causes of racism in favor of pinning it all on a few bad apples. Sure, that's entertainment. It's also a lie.

A big, sorrowful, dramatically trite period epic about a bleak chapter in the history of modern France.

It exists for no other reason than that people like Matt Damon, they like him as this character, and the producers know audiences are willing to see more of him.

Hart is interested in scrambling our sympathies yet not deft enough to manage where they land, and the female buddy movie I’m Your Woman wants to be unintentionally ends up feeling like a story about a Black couple as seen by their less interesting white acquaintance.

Kung Fu Panda goes nowhere surprising even as its images unscroll handsomely before our eyes. The sound could go out in the theater, and you wouldn't ask for your money back.

We go to heist films to see the suckers get taken in high style. This one just robs us bland.

Bring on the bread and circuses. Into the Storm features laughable dialogue, far-fetched situations, and generic characters played by actors who almost look like more famous stars. I still had a blast; and if you lower your resistance, you may too.

Perfume is a pitch-black period epic of squalor and enterprise.

If Woody Allen were a young, attractive gay woman, he might make something like this, or so Maggenti hopes. But it would probably be funnier, and it would definitely cut deeper.

Take the kids at your peril. Mismarketing aside, Step Brothers is crudely funny, which means that sometimes it's crudely hilarious and more often it's just crude.

[A] stagy, troubling, bizarrely entertaining movie.

Who’s the audience for this? Well, me and about five other movie junkies at the crossroads of history and art. Maybe you, too, even if your knowledge of Buñuel stops with the slashed eyeball of “Un Chien Andalou” (1929), still one of the most shocking images in all cinema.

A flaky, tedious, intermittently likable fable about being crazy in a crazy world.

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.''

“Dunkirk” or “1917,” this is not. But as a window onto an under-acknowledged arena of combat and a starting point for armchair military historians, Greyhound is seaworthy enough to make it across.

There are really only two kinds of big-budget action movies: stupid, and good and stupid. Surprisingly, XXX: State of the Union is good and stupid, which makes it an immediate improvement over 2002's meatheaded "XXX."

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.

It’s solid, well-acted, thought-provoking fare, if rarely rising to the level of inspired.

The dark nihilism of Sicario masks a reliance on easier solutions, ones we’ve been fed by decades of genre films and that feed our need for justice dispensed with violent, vengeful directness. The movie promises to clear the fetid air around the drug wars. In the end it’s just another drug.

Darling Companion would be instantly forgettable if not for Keaton, who imbues Beth with a sorrow, warmth, wisdom, and rage that feel earned.

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.

The First Beautiful Thing is the kind of movie - that escapes the sick room to cavort at carnivals and eat cotton candy until the inevitable relapse.

The Fall is what you'd get if you told a fiendishly gifted graphic illustrator the plot of "The Princess Bride" and sent him off to come up with his own version.

The film is a disquieting and often very funny examination of yuppie unease in the country. The problem is, it's disguised as a dopey suspense thriller.

Music and nostalgia are what fuel all this filmmaker's movies, though, even a half-baked translation like this one.

Black gets to play an actual character instead of a loudmouthed cartoon. The movie's bright and endearing and surprisingly lacking in a point. I wish I liked it better.

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

Parents will while away the time in moderate boredom until the film unexpectedly springs to life in its midsection, then just as abruptly goes back to sleep.

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.

For all the film's flaws, it has a caustic, nondenominational view of apocalypses to come.

It’s a movie made for the kind of audiences who feel that movies aren’t made for them anymore — you know who you are. If you go, you might want to bring a raincoat.

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.

Spectacular locations on the southeast coast of England and a handful of fine performances are the best that can be said for Summerland, but that’s still better than most.

Antic, cute, scattershot, it's a remarkable-looking but terribly uncertain bit of CGI fluff, with its richest humor off to the sides of the action and a whole lot of average in the middle.

Funnier than any low-rent rip-off of "There's Something About Mary" has a right to be. It's crass, it's unsophisticated, it aims right for the slapsticky pleasure center of the under-30 moviegoer's brain. So sue me, I laughed. A lot.

Low of brow and pure of heart, the movie plays like "Animal House" extra-lite, and as such it's decent indecent fun.

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.

At its worst, Vacancy is merely the kind of taut B-chiller they don't make any more, other than to riff on them in "Grindhouse."

The new movie, a heist comedy, has been described in some quarters as “Ocean’s 11” for the NASCAR crowd, and that’s not wrong. It also feels like the director is trying to reverse-engineer one of the Coen brothers’ loopier excursions and not getting every one of the pieces in order.

Hampered by a mopey leading man.

It’s all deeply felt and just as deeply unfocused, and that, more than the invented story line, betrays the movie’s subject.