Ty Burr

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

Ayer, who has dealt with charismatic bad boys before — he wrote the script for “Training Day” and directed the sharp police drama “End of Watch” — makes the paternal “Wardaddy” into a figure both monstrous and upstanding.

A frolic that keeps tripping over its own gorgeous feet.

It’s a muddled but plush experience overall, and if you’re a royalist completist or a historical romantic, you’ll probably have a decent time.

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.

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.

Far from perfect but completely unique, the film could best be described as a paranoid South American metaphysical political thriller -- you heard me -- and whatever its failures, they're not ones of nerve or imagination.

Too much of the show, though, feels like frenetic movement for its own sake, as though Conan were one of those cartoon characters who runs off a cliff and stays in the air through the ceaseless pumping of his legs.

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

The movie’s OK, nothing more.

It’s a cheat, a cash grab, and it makes for 125 dystopian minutes of set-up with no resolution. But come back next November, folks, and we’ll show you the rest! They should have called it “Mockingjay, Part 1 — The Shakedown.” Or “The Hunger Games 3: Rubble Without a Cause.”

As visually overstuffed as a hoarder’s apartment, the movie improves as it goes.

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.

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.

Whenever it stays with Piccoli, though, it's mysterious and moving, struck by the humility of a man who's not up to playing God.

Disappointingly, Pineapple Express is less than the sum of its ingredients, even if it's still a good stupid time at the movies.

So it is with St. Vincent, which might be Murray’s “Gran Torino” if you squint at it from one angle, or “Old Meatballs” if you come at it from another.

Arctic Tale has a very precise audience in mind: Young children who aren't yet ready for the graphs and sociopolitical alarm bells of "An Inconvenient Truth."

As an entry in the advocacy-entertainment genre, in which glamorous movie stars bring our attention to the plight of the less fortunate, Blood Diamond is superior to 2003's ridiculous "Beyond Borders" while looking strident and obvious next to last year's "The Constant Gardener."

The movie works.

The problem is that both Philippa Goslett's script and Paul Morrison's direction lack the stylistic craziness - the sense of real, lunatic danger - a project like this desperately needs.

Acridly funny.

Yet Crudup does good, mercurial work despite a silly surfer-dude haircut.

This third go-round for the "Wolf Pack" doesn't bother to Xerox the original 2009 hit comedy, as 2011's witless "Hangover 2" did. Instead, the new movie heads in different, if utterly formulaic, directions. So it's not terrible. It's just bad.

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 title itself is a marquee-buster that bites off more than it can chew. So does the movie’s main character and so does the movie. But the chewing’s interesting and there’s food for thought here, not to mention a central performance that may stick to your ribs for quite some time.

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.”

At nearly 2½ hours, the movie is fun to watch until it’s not, and then it becomes a chore.

It’s a shame: Odenkirk begins the movie with a rep as a smart and slippery performer, but by the end of Nobody, he could be anybody.

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.)

Greenland, a solid, stolid disaster film arriving on major streaming platforms this week, posits that the sky is falling, puts manly Gerard Butler in the middle of it, and asks us to be diverted by the spectacle of civic breakdown and mass panic. Are you not entertained? Somewhat surprisingly, yes.

Lanthimos and his company still dare to find a bracing, disconsolate farce in our brief and helpless thrashing through life. For that, most people will never forgive them.

The movie has a curious and cumulative power.

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

It overuses ’80s nostalgia as shorthand for genuine emotional involvement, and it presents us with a rapturous digital wonderworld only to sternly lecture us that reality is the better value.

Proof is proof that you can drain most of the juice out of a play and still have an enjoyable night at the movies.

This is one of those rare movies that genuinely likes its characters and wishes them the best; as agonizing as it can be to watch Jack fumble toward human connection, Hoffman knows the fumbling's the point.

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

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

Seems calculated to shock, but what’s most disquieting about Nymph()maniac is how funny, tender, thoughtful, and truthful it is, even as it pushes into genuinely seamy aspects of onscreen sexuality. Obnoxious he may be, but von Trier knows how to burrow into our ids.

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

It has the era’s soundtrack down, from Studio 54 disco to Suicide’s “Ghost Rider.” But it doesn’t have much of a point.

“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.

The novel is a sharp, Dickensian comedy; the film is just plain dull.

The joy is in the details, and they are unrelentingly comic.

In Shortbus, the impish writer-director John Cameron Mitchell does the unthinkable: He puts the joy back in movie sex.

Opens itself up to some splendid drive-in philosophizing.

There’s no dazzling CGI in “Words of War” — no stalwart, spandexed action figures flying through the air to land nuclear uppercuts on the villain of the hour. There’s just one woman: Anna Politkovskaya, a Russian journalist who went up against the villain of our age and paid the ultimate price for it.

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.

But it's Polanski who pries the genre open until it goes metaphysical.

It’s an occasionally plodding but rarely dull movie, and one whose stakes outweigh its impact as drama. In the end, the message is both illuminating and disturbing.

A rigorous and bracingly charming movie about moviemaking.

Monsters is a genuine curio: a moody, low-budget road-movie romance that takes place against a background of alien invasion.

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.

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

An overly constructed little thriller that squeezes a fair amount of suspense out of its far-fetched plot.

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

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

For every line of dialogue that's truly, glitteringly acid, though, there are five that are merely clever, and Lee, likable as he is, never really taps into the misery of the teen misfit.

A Perfect Getaway may not play fair by the audience but at least it cheats honestly. These days that's something.

My Cousin Rachel is a well-turned, well-acted literary adaptation that suffers from a built-in problem: The hero is a twit.

Formulaic enough to suggest that franchise would be B level at best, a TV series at worst. But it's also just good enough to make you want to watch it, anyway.

The movie serves as product placement for a brand of toys but also as a form of creative brick-olage, one that reflects a modern music producer’s ability to weave small units of musical noise into an epic canvas that gets the whole world up offa that thing.

The reason to see The Merchant of Venice is Al Pacino.

A mostly lumbering, occasionally rousing epic that walks a bizarre line between historical fact and Hollywood wishful thinking.

As a director, Minahan knows his way around a track, but on the evidence of this film, he’s not yet ready to run wild.

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

Out of the Furnace could have been a starkly powerful human drama or a cheesy, vibrant action film. It splits the difference and ends up playing like a lesser Springsteen song.

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

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.

The movie's still shameless; the difference is you don't mind.

It's a quietly wrenching eye-opener.

It’s film noir meets Jason Bourne with a dash of John le Carré, and its chief claim to your attention is our reigning lady badass at its center.

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.

When the cast starts clomping atop a car, their synchronized bodies joining with the booming cross-rhythms, we're sold.

Kleine's film is rambling and unfocused but mostly charming, and it steps into deeper waters almost in spite of itself.

The new film staggers under such a weight of self-conscious visual style that the story never connects with a viewer's emotions. Leo Tolstoy's classic novel has been filmed often, but this is the first time it takes place in a snow globe.

What makes Cheri’ worth your while is that its true subjects are women and age, and its observations apply to both 19th-century France and the modern film industry.

That it works like a charm - that it mostly keeps its manic energy in check, and that it plays to chick-flick formulas without ever groveling - is due almost entirely to the leads.

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.

An amusingly damning portrait of a man trying to impose his will on a world that, really, has better things to do.

Even a fan, however, might prefer the excellent, recently released concert DVD "Pixies: Live at the Paradise in Boston" to this tepid behind-the-scenes experience.

Well intentioned on every level, the movie is successful only on some, and it falls flat when trying to visualize the innards of the poem itself.

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

The Hunter becomes turgid with corporate conspiracies, hired assassins, and offscreen tragedies, and the appealing leanness of the early scenes gets lost.

Depressingly, and in keeping with the stringent rules of bad-boy shock-comedies, all the women here are bimbos, shrews, and slutburgers except for one cool chick -- Cusack’s love interest, played by Lizzy Caplan -- who acts like a guy.

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.

Honors the power and beauty of these beasts even as it underscores the cultured savagery of the men who are crowding them out.

This is no corporate project made to squeeze a few more dollars from a fading cash cow. No one else has been asking for another "Rocky," other than maybe Burt Young . No, this is a rarer beast -- an auteur sequel -- and it's so wrapped up in its maker's personal mythology and psychic needs that it becomes a hall of mirrors to which we're given a slack-jawed ringside seat.

Pirates offers something for everyone: Bloom and Depp for the ladies, big action and Knightley for the men, self-aware gags for the postmodern crowd, Depp and Rush for fans of top-rank scenery chewing.

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

For most of its running time, the movie works as a sharp, generous human comedy about fear of family (among other things), with Page once again reminding us that she’s one of the most deft and underutilized actors of her generation. You’re already sold on Janney, I hope.

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.

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

Damsel, goofy, absurdist, and subversive, feels like a brave step in an uncertain direction.

Moves the franchise even closer to Indiana Jones territory, with bloodcurdling action scenes and a passel of climactic computer-generated slime beasties unparalleled in their potential ability to -- I'm quoting from both book and film here -- '' rip, tear, rend, kill. ''

The film pulls off the remarkable feat of immersing a viewer in their world without providing any insights whatsoever.

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

A deft, disturbing piece of work, as cold around the heart as the Kubrick film, if infinitely more dismissible. It gets in, it messes with your mind, and it vanishes, leaving only an unsettling aftertaste of unresolved narrative. It’s an exercise, but some exercise leaves you gasping.

Korine wants to give us a portrait of our nation’s children — the girls, especially — as beautifully depraved sharks, pleasure-seeking killers oblivious to the comedy and horror of their existence. And damned if he doesn’t pull it off, or come close enough.

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

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

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

World War Z is epically realized entertainment that feeds on our fears of apocalypse, but it’s just fast enough and smart enough — and, more importantly, human enough — to keep an audience on edge from start to finish.

Maria is still worth your attention for the spectacle of a statuesque actress playing a woman who willed herself into statuary.

Shot with intentionally banal anti-style - minimal soundtrack music, found sound, jitter-cam - the movie achieves a wisdom that's bigger than it seems.

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

The Dreamers isn't that bad -- actually, it's funny, affecting, interestingly twisted, and seriously erotic before it heads south in the final stretch.

The period ambience, comforting yet urgent, is the best part of Kit Kittredge - that and Breslin, who never once gets actressy.

There are enough indie clichés to blunt this movie’s edge.

Because Free Fire is a essentially a comedy of bad manners — a bedroom farce that only happens to take place in a warehouse, with volleys of gunfire rather than slammings of doors — it’s a highly enjoyable 90 minutes, especially if your tastes run to the violent, the absurd, and the violently absurd.

If you’re in the right mood and seeing it with the right crowd, Keanu can put you close to a giggle coma, even as you realize the material’s far beneath the talents of its stars. They’re Key and Peele, but the movie treats them like Abbott and Costello.

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.

Shallow and proud of it, an antic cartoon that lacks the comic inspiration to go the distance.

The immediate problem with making a movie based on Potter's life is that it doesn't seem to have been very interesting.

The improvisations are a mixed bag -- Reed and Fox are surprisingly hilarious, while Roseanne is a shrieking horror show -- but the air of gentle play and a wistful sense that Brooklyn is some kind of lost Eden put this one up on the more structured "Smoke."

The first Guy Maddin movie that feels as if it got only halfway out of the director's head and onto the screen.

The Phantom of the Opera was never a brilliant movie, but it remains great, ghoulish fun, with Chaney tiptoeing the line between sympathy and shudders.

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

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

Bubble is a stunt in search of a movie, and it almost finds one.

There are some good, sharp, surprising laughs in Youth in Revolt. So why does it feel so dreadfully familiar?

Both leads are excellent; you expect as much from Vance but the surprise is the quietly charismatic Athie, who gives his role shades of geniality, ambition, frustration, and pig-headedness.

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

The real villain is a cowed and lazy citizenry. Meaning all of us. Disappointingly, V for Vendetta makes this point early and moves on, at some point turning as shallow as what it protests against.

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

A suspense comedy as breezy and noncommittal as its title, this sophomore feature from writer-director Sophie Brooks is a deceptively low-fi affair, but it keeps a cheeky premise going for longer than it has any right to.

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

Youth recedes, the body decays, life is a compromised thing: These are truths. But they're not fresh truths, and Moss's riverdogs are hardly the first to have discovered them.

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

This crudely powerful film is a throwback. Unfolding at an elliptical pace that feels like a revelation, or tedium, or both, Japon recalls the glory days of 1970s art-house filmmaking.

Audiences should feel free to lower their guard — to adjust expectations into B-movie territory. And as a B-movie, “Solo” delivers, sometimes in a way that reminds a viewer of this franchise’s roots in classic Saturday matinee adventure serials and sometimes simply as proficient, dutiful, time-passing entertainment.

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

The best scenes are when Stark just cuts impatiently through the claptrap.

If you're up for a relentlessly overripe melodrama that takes place in movie-Europe as opposed to the real thing (the Parisian streetwalkers in berets are a good tip-off), by all means catch Head in the Clouds.

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.

While the climax of Beneath the Harvest Sky is a jumble of crosscutting, thunderstorms, and an inconveniently collapsing house, the movie never loses the pulse of people and tragedies it knows too well.

If you've got some very small fry on your hands and 75 minutes to kill, this is as bright, colorful, and fuzzy as you're going to get.

Turns out to be a sweetly grim lark: a road film through Limbo. It takes the self-pity associated with ending one's life and uses it for the purposes of mordantly aware comic fantasy.

It's a strained but heartfelt work of muted sentimentality, obvious in its symbolism but grounded in a sense of life's preciousness and brevity. Depending on your mood and indulgence, you may weep or you may be left out in the cold.

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

Kon-Tiki is stalwart and uplifting and there are passing moments of wonder.

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

Begin Again is pleasantly predictable if you’re in an undemanding mood. If you’re not, it’s unbearable, like hearing a treasured folk song given a Hot 97 makeover.

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

At a certain point, The Duchess stops attending to the topiary and becomes a women's melodrama instead.

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

A great measure of Abe’s success is that it made me hungry. More than that, it’s the first movie in quite some time to make me smile.

It’s an earnest and compassionate treatment of a story that is, by necessity, grueling as hell. It’s graced with sincere performances by Steve Carell (as David) and Timothée Chalamet (as Nic) that strive to steer clear of Actorly Moments. And there are mysteries here — of parenting, of human experience — that director Felix Van Groeningen looks at sharply before looking away.

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.

Big Eyes may not be Tim Burton’s absolute worst movie — we’ll always have “Planet of the Apes” — but it’s pretty close to the bottom. It’s also the film that reveals his weaknesses as a director and, by their absence, his strengths. Gaudy, shallow, shrill, smug, the movie proves beyond a whisker of doubt that Burton has little interest in human beings unless they can be reduced to cartoons.

Genuine, artful simplicity may be an impossible quality in a modern children's movie, so Curious George opts instead for mayhem under a blanket of sweetness. The little ones understand.

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

The most consistently funny of the ''Austin Powers'' films.

They’re calling it a movie, but no matter how you squint at it it’s a TV show.

The charm of Conversations With Other Women, a gimmicky but oddly moving two-character drama that flies in from who knows where, is its intelligentknowingness.

A fond, uncomplicated love letter to two irrepressible good-time Charlottes.

The performances are what put it over -- that and the observant camera of director Udayan Prasad.

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

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.

Teller is cornering a market on recklessness in the roles he chooses -- the energy from that demonic drum solo at the end of “Whiplash” seems to carry over into the ferocity with which Vinny pounds at life. He’s not very smart, he’s kind of a jerk, but he never, ever stops, and Bleed for This earns your respect for him.

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

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

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

Five Minutes of Heaven’reduces Northern Ireland’s troubles to a gimmick, but it’s an interesting gimmick, and the two men hoisted on its petard work at vivid cross-purposes. If nothing else, the film’s worth seeing as a demonstration of opposing acting techniques.

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

The thrill isn't gone from the sequel, but the surprise is, and it hurts more than you'd think.

If you want state of the art anime that comes within spitting distance of escaping the limits of its genre, this might be your cup of bootleg sake.

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).

A crass, foul-mouthed, mostly hilarious, surprisingly sentimental bromance.

Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F is the cinematic equivalent of trying on your prom suit from 1984. Maybe it still fits, but not in the places it used to, and if you try to moonwalk, you’ll probably get a hernia.

Dumbo flies! The movie, sadly, never soars.

The movie's cheap, it's clever - it's even a little scary in places.

If Saved! sinks into formula -- any movie with a showdown at a prom is treading a well-worn path -- you're grateful for its forgiving spirit.

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

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

Despite a frisky soundtrack that starts off with James Brown’s “Sex Machine” — trust me, it’s downhill from there — this is the visual equivalent of Muzak. You don’t have to see it to have seen it.

A sweet, splattery bit of in-jokery; if it’s not actually a good movie, on some level you have to admire the chutzpah of a film set in 1850s Ireland but shot on Staten Island.

Micmacs is the equivalent of a circus troupe setting up a tent in a war zone: You're entertained, even delighted, but after a while you suspect there are more serious matters at hand.

Once the cat is out of the bag, "Incident" becomes simultaneously entertaining and disappointing.

Extremely watchable, even if it never goes as deep as it should.

To see Au Hasard Balthazar is to understand the limits of religious literalism in movies -- the limits, even, of movies themselves. Bresson pares everything away until all that's left are the things we do and the hole left by the things we could have done but didn't.

How are girls supposed to behave in a culture that tells them they're Disney princesses for the first 12 years and sex toys after that? Girls Rock! has one answer: Strap on a Fender and rage against the machine.

Slow, unadorned, compassionate, and earnest, Loggerheads is a low-fi throwback to the independent films of the 1980s and '90s.

Story lines don't come any clammier.

Daddio may stay too long at the fare, but its maker is hardly a hack.

Leclerc and company manage to raise serious points and deliver intelligent laughs at the same time, which is no small feat.

Honey has enough charm, good humor, and wry gut laughs to smooth over the dull patches and flaws in logic.

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.

A bracing, highly enjoyable mix of medieval intrigue and epic action.

The film's meta-fey title alone is an example of why some people adore Anderson and why he drives others absolutely crazy.

"Bad Santa" it's not. Bumptiously entertaining it is.

The tumultuous emotional, sexual, and literary relationship between Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West would make a fascinating movie — it’s a shame that Vita & Virginia isn’t it.

A solid entry in the real estate horror genre and an impressively taut feature directing debut for actor Dave Franco. Relying far more on psychology than bloodletting, the movie nevertheless exudes a growing sense of dread that’s difficult to shake.

Seven Veils doesn’t crash to Earth, but it also never quite frees itself from the notebook of its ideas to become the gripping emotional thriller it seems to want to be.

It’s a fun movie to see with a rip-roaring midnight crowd; watched on its own, it’s a little depressing. You can only shock the monkey so many times before the shock wears off.

It's predictable fluff, sometimes pleasantly so, at others times irritatingly.

Amirpour has the potential to see things as no other filmmaker does, but she doesn’t yet have a vision, and she may not as long as she keeps fiddling around with genre conventions laid down by others. She’s an eccentric magpie of a director, and this time the pieces she collects glitter but never quite cohere.

It’s all ridiculous and enjoyable, and at the movie’s center is an actress creatively guessing at what omniscience might feel like.

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

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

Heavy metal, alt-pop, southern rock, orchestral swells, wailing Middle Eastern tunes all vie for our attention, but none of this noise drowns out the sound of good intentions twisting themselves into an impotent knot.

What Trollhunter isn't is particularly scary, but in its defense, it's not trying to be.

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

Taken as a whole, the film says, "We grieve too, but like this, and this, and this."

Fascinating for its gonzo formal daring and brooding attitude, "Valhalla'' is still a trial for audiences seeking characters, plot, and things happening.

Le Pont du Nord is not one of Rivette’s greatest works — honor goes to “Celine and Julie” or 1991’s “La Belle Noiseuse” — but it’s a useful compendium of his themes and it captures a very specific time, place, and sensibility.

At its occasional best, A Birder’s Guide to Everything hints at the profound pleasure of standing very still and witnessing wonders the rest of the world passes by.

It’s not a gimmick if it works, and “Tower” works unnervingly well. The film is essentially an oral history, with firsthand accounts from those who were there — survivors, responders, and onlookers — with their words read by younger actors.

The setup is ridiculous, but the playing is pure comedy of mortification and watch-through-your-fingers funny.

"Dead" isn't a horror film but a study of human character under pressure, with Karloff's flawed, imperious General Pherides torn between rationalism and a homicidal belief in elder gods. [23 Mar 2014, p.N]

A gorgeous, meandering travelogue that only gradually bares its teeth.

Parts of the film aren’t pretty because people don’t always act in pretty ways, and the speculation that such an event might create its own hermetically sealed reality, one increasingly distorted to our eyes, is intriguing, if not especially deep. It all plays out like a “Big Brother” reality show with 5,000 participants and no Big Brother.

We may someday look back on He Named Me Malala as a film that told us much about a future world leader — or one that told us surprisingly little.

Almost as funny as it is hyperactive, the new computer-animated family comedy is luscious to look at and as fizzy as a can of soda popped open in your face.

An intelligent, often touching, sometimes pedestrian drama.

Zemeckis and Hanks really seem to think they’re giving us a Christmas movie for the ages and a technology that will change cinema forever. They’re wrong on both counts. The Polar Express is merely a marvelous toy that has somehow become convinced it has a soul.

Disappointingly, the movie runs along the track of many earlier coming-of-age dramas, with appointed station stops at Cynicism, Puppy Love, Puppy Sex, Puppy Heartbreak, and Greater Wisdom.

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 movie itself suffers from hyperbole, hyper-self-consciousness, at times hyperventilation. A magical-realist coming-of-age fairy tale set in Buffalo and environs, it toggles between whimsy and grim realism.

Tost can’t match the oddball inspiration of his influences, and the results simply feel forced.

The Hero may not be a great movie but it’s a welcome tribute to a lanky, taciturn presence — a love letter to an actor that reminds us of why we ought to love him, too.

The forced hijinks, sub-John Hughes emotional tropes, and Screenwriting 101 conventions — which include what can only be called Chekhov’s Taser — cut crassly against the grain of a subject that is fundamentally personal and inherently political.

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

While Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues is a disappointment — how could it not be? — it’s not for lack of trying. If anything, the movie tries too hard.

One of the funniest yet most depressing movies in Martin Scorsese’s long career — a celebration and evisceration of male savagery, financial division. It’s like “GoodFellas,” only (slightly) more legal, which is very much the point.

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

A conventional New York-lonely hearts story made watchable by one element and one element only: Parker Posey.

The people who've made White Oleander appear to have spent a lot of time worrying about the audience. They should have told the story and let us take care of ourselves.

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

In its exuberantly smutty way, The To Do List is a revolutionary development: a teen sex comedy where the girls get to play nasty and the boys stand around looking vaguely terrified.

You come away with only the memory of Christie, the film's perfect California blonde, lying insensate on the beach in the final ravages of AIDS - a potent and frightening image the rest of The Informers can't live up to.

Young children and adults with high pain thresholds will enjoy the movie during its brief pause on the way to your On Demand menu.

The first hour of Magic Mike XXL is deadly.

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

Likably played by Bruhl, the castaway remains more dramatic device than living, breathing character. And without him truly being there, Dench and Smith are just volleying an imaginary ping-pong ball between them. That's not acting -- that's exercise.

This is a story that needs to be told, but McKay turns out to be precisely the wrong man to tell it. By comparison, Oliver Stone is a model of sober restraint.

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

Blackthorn is less interested in realism than in elegy, and in bringing this American folk hero in line with the Latin American places and people with whom he ended his days. Given a choice between the legend and the facts, Gil and Barros make up a new legend - and then gild it with light.

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

Because the "Harold & Kumar'' universe seesaws so delicately between the subversively smart and the ineffably stupid, even the lamest jokes get a witty spin - and even the cleverest ideas can turn into groaners.

Vol. II is less focused than “Vol. I” — less funny, too, although there are a few dank laughs — and you feel Von Trier’s inspiration and energy start to flag during the final laps.

This isn't a great movie, but it is a special one. And Penn is something to see.

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

13 (Tzameti) is an existential horror film, a violent prank, a metaphor for modern Europe, and a first-time director's startling calling card.

Any movie that shows its heroes firing up a joint between stints as high-school anti-drug crusaders is true to its black little heart.

Giuliani Time has an ax to grind and wields it with dull-edged force.

I'm of two minds about this. A movie that held on to all the breathless tearjerkery of the novel would probably have to star Bette Davis as Amir, but as amended by Forster the story is now touching and somewhat dull.

Haute Cuisine proves the limits of cinema: It’s a movie that needs Taste-o-Vision.

This is a movie that wants to reflect the limbo of war refugees and the greater limbo of life itself — the circles we run in while believing we’re walking a straight line. It does so with a precise, observant tone that’s cool, sometimes cruel, and ultimately coldly reductive.

It has a sense of drift that both vexes and beguiles.

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

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

Lust, Caution is a disappointment coming from director Ang Lee, but it's a watchable one, and it rattles around in your head for a long time after you've seen it, as much for what it does right as for where it goes wrong.

Bahrani is brilliant at small gestures and the way they can speak volumes, but in At Any Price he’s aiming for grand tragedy, and he doesn’t yet have the knack. The pacing of the final act is uncertain; the epic sweep doesn’t arrive.

Hampered by a mopey leading man.

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

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

The main, if not only, reason to see The Machinist is for Christian Bale's title performance, and even then you have to be a fan of hardcore martyrdom in the service of craft.

The one thing that should have been changed but hasn’t is the title, which makes no sense at all in a movie about kung fu.

Turns what sounds suspiciously like a gimmick into a concept that holds water. Or, in this case, the sparkling wine of comedy.

Directed in the breathless inspirational tones of an infomercial, the film's an acceptable document of a thoroughly remarkable individual.

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

Directed by Melvin Van Peebles as the '60s writhed to a close, it's very much a product of its time: unsubtle, psychedelic, truly weird, occasionally very funny. [08 Dec 2002]

Saturday Night is as entertaining as a movie can be that has no genuine point beyond nostalgia.

What’s best about Funny People, actually, is Sandler, who takes the weird, resentful anger that has always coursed beneath his comedy and puts it right on the surface.

As with most rock festivals, you had to be there, and if you're British you probably were, one year or another. In that case, Glastonbury is a pointed but essentially nostalgic tour of one country's more noble pop impulses. Otherwise, it's as muddy as Yasgur's farm back in the day.

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

It's an actor's film, all right -- peppered with rich supporting performances but unconvincing in the telling.

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.

I know the opening credits for a James Bond movie are supposed to be silly, but the start of Spectre achieves almost orgasmic levels of kitsch.

Fatale is, truthfully, a mess - an absurdly overwritten Eurotrash thriller that beggars an audience's suspension of disbelief. It's also great over-the-top moviemaking if you're in a slap-happy mood.

The loosest, silliest, broadest thing the Coens have yet committed to celluloid, and that includes "Raising Arizona," one of this critic's favorites.

The Invisibles favors quantity of remembrance over quality of any one experience.

The movie is genial, sloppy, slightly above average summer movie fun.

Freakier Friday is an inoffensive product with good intentions and a cardboard heart, but, these days, watching Curtis strut her stuff is an out-of-body experience all on its own.

A lot of this is naughty, overproduced egghead fun, and the scenes between Eisenstein and Canedo simmer with sexual tension. But too much is never enough for Greenaway, and while the leading men give bravura performances, the supporting cast is weak — Lisa Owen as Mrs. Upton Sinclair is actively dreadful — and the film’s hyperactivity ultimately wears you down.

The movie is superficially a comedy — and ultimately a love story, just not the one we think — but there’s a great deal of striving and sadness beneath its layers of glitter and soot and, beyond that, the exhaustion that comes from slowly admitting to yourself that the doors of the kingdom will almost certainly never open for you.

Where Do We Go Now? has a heart and an anger to offset its structural fuzziness. It's refreshingly open-minded about faith, too.

Involving and sometimes comically bleak but never fully convincing as drama.

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

An opaque kidnapping drama that features three expertly crafted performances operating on three different planets.

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

The movie is less a movie than a collection of scenes lined up in a row, and the tone wobbles between pomp and circumstantial melodrama.

A watchable disappointment. Sumptuous to look at, tastefully dull, and ultimately rather silly.

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

The film is at its most quietly powerful, though, when telling the story of a group of African-American high school kids who took their discontent to the highest court in the land.

Lushly engaging, even if it covers some of the same ground as ''The Pianist'' with less artistry and more melodrama.

Dans Paris provides a brooding, poetic echo - an after-dinner mint to a lasting meal.

The sequel isn’t a disaster, but it’s a dud.

What sinks the movie (rather than the character) are the tortured melodramatics of its backstage plot and dialogue that aims for clever — and sometimes is — but that generally approximates Shakespeare for, like, beginners.

If you’re going to make a dopey, bawdy, foul-mouthed, predictable lady-buddy-cop movie, you might as well make it funny. And until it overstays its welcome in the final half-hour, The Heat is shamefully funny.

Think of Red Doors as a promise, and hope that Georgia Lee keeps it.

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

Entertaining enough, but it's more pat than provocative -- this is what makes it a bona fide audience pleaser while keeping it from drawing real blood.

The thing barely makes a lick of sense. Rapturous on a scene-by-scene basis and nearly incoherent when taken as a whole, the movie is idealistic and deranged, inspirational and very, very conflicted.