Ty Burr

You come out of the theater impressed by the scope of Eastwood's reach and frustrated by how little remains in his grasp. As gifted as this filmmaker is, this isn't the sort of thing he does best.

Reprise is exceptionally smart about the crushing expectations brought to the table by those who love us.

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.

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

The Fighter is this close to a triumph: a movie that steeps us in the grit of its time and place - Lowell, Mass., in the 1990s - and electrifyingly dramatizes Ward's battles with the family that almost loved him to death.

In retrospect, it’s obvious why the film was never produced: The director was a lunatic.

The idea that there may be life after war and murder, even for the murderers, and what that might look like — what burdens you might be allowed to put down and what you’ll carry forward forever. The movie’s too wise, and too weary, to have a moral beyond that.

The early scenes are so shamelessly, stupidly funny, with a hit-to-miss gag ratio of about 75 percent, that you can’t help be disappointed as that ratio steadily sinks over the course of the movie.

The movie’s dramatically uneven, as anthology movies tend to be, but is it worth watching on the big screen? If the idea of Monument Valley peopled with classic Coen misfits hits your sweet spot, by all means go.

Violence in Green Room is just bad. Unfortunately for its heroes and for us all, it’s also sometimes inevitable.

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.

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.

About the search for common ground, among journalists on all sides of the conflict and, through them, between viewers in America and the Arab world. Only within that common ground, Noujaim believes, can something like a workable, personal truth be found.

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

It is harrowing, heartbreaking, cheering, and unforgettable.

A straight-up drama and thus the only film in "The Trilogy" not forced into a genre straitjacket -- suspense thriller ("On the Run") or farce ("An Amazing Couple") -- "Life" is also the finest of the three. This isn't a coincidence.

Selma is at its very best when it gets into the nitty-gritty of the SCLC’s arrival in Selma amid colliding factions and forces.

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.

The Assistant is a stealth bomb of a movie: It barely makes a noise but it leaves a crater in your heart.

Visually, this movie is big, bold, often awe-inspiring.

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

The filmmakers are smart to cut between their primary interview and later footage of Junge watching that interview and offering further commentary -- living footnotes, as it were.

Plays a little like “Sex and the City” as reconceived by a Minimalist composer. That makes the movie sound like a threat, when actually it’s a dry, lightly sad, and very French comedy of romantic neurosis, brought to us by two great artists, director Claire Denis (“Chocolat,” “Beau Travail,” “White Material”) and star Juliette Binoche.

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

It's an honorable attempt, but there's still no genuine need for this film to exist.

You don’t get groundbreaking cinema from Fences, but what you do get — two titanic performances and an immeasurable American drama — makes up for that.

James Sweeney seems intent on leading us all merrily to hell.

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.

You never know where Mother is going to go next. All you know is that you're in the hands of a master with an appreciably bent sense of humor.

A stinging, gorgeously filmed tragicomedy about male insecurity and the power of positive drinking.

The triumph of this fond, uncontainable documentary is that it lets you hear that voice again loud and clear.

From its title on down to the rugelach, Shiva Baby is an instant classic in the Jewish comedy of mortification, a genre that combines hilarity, anxiety, resentment and schmaltz.

Isn't just lame; it's neutered.

2 1/2 hours of tumescence disguised as a motion picture.

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

The star is so engaging and her story so compelling that this well-edited profile easily hangs together.

It takes nerve to make a documentary about the most unpopular period of a massively popular public figure’s life. “One to One: John & Yoko” demonstrates that it’s worth the effort.

So compelling is The Painter and the Thief — and ultimately so powerfully moving in its faith in human resilience — that you may not notice the illuminating ways in which Ree plays with form and viewpoint. The documentary won a special jury award for creative storytelling at the most recent Sundance Film Festival and it comes to streaming video as one of the year’s most affecting and subtly radical movie experiences.

With Black Bear, Plaza pushes her talent into raw new places.

Culkin walks a line between obnoxiousness and delight; it’s a performance both liberating and touched by a deeper, more inarticulate sadness.

Writer-director Russell, a producer and co-writer of TV’s “The Bear” and “Beef,” knows his Hollywood existentialism — the dread that you’re not anybody unless you know a Somebody, the easy California vibe that hides gnawing insecurity, the understanding that a friend today can and certainly would cut your throat tomorrow.

You could argue that Gandolfini doesn’t have enough screen time, but what’s there is, as they say, cherce. The scenes in which Albert and Eva get to know each other are delightful miniatures of emotional intimacy, two bruised romantics amazed to find someone still on their wavelength.

An existential black comedy delivered with flair and a steady gaze — and two remarkable performances at its center — it mucks about in themes of identity and exploitation, perception and personality, fate and foolishness.

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

It’s rough and observant, stacked with finely etched characters whose sympathies keep shifting along with ours.

July may have lost all faith in the strategies of the parents' generation but holds out hope for the future. I think this may be her idea of a family film.

The result is both a surprisingly lucid portrayal of clinical depression and dramatically a bit stiff.

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

Written by Preston Sturges and directed by the great Mitchell Leisen, it's both sexy and touching. [19 Dec 2007, p.F6]

Flatters its audience by dividing the grown-up world into mean idiots and nice idiots, which might be interestingly subversive if the movie had anything on its mind. Instead, it's just a Hollywood crash course: Heist Films 101.

The trick is in the details — in letting the personal bring specificity to the universal while letting the universal illuminate the personal. It’s a balancing act, and writer/director/former teen disaster Sean Wang gets it mostly right in “Dìdi,” his fictionalized memory play of being a floundering Taiwanese American skate kid in 2008 Fremont, Calif.

One of the transporting film experiences of this or any other year.

Jasmine is a creation to stand with this filmmaker’s best, but Blanchett makes it better. She finds the grace notes in a disgraceful woman and leaves us stranded between horror and pity.

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.

The final scenes are both ambiguous and terrifying, and they left a preview audience as shaken as any I’ve seen. I had the distinct feeling, though, that a lot of them wouldn’t be recommending the movie to their friends. It gets very far under the skin.

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

Please Give is a moral comedy that feels at times like one of the late Eric Rohmer’s deceptively breezy miniatures, or a mid-period Woody Allen movie minus the fussiness.

Polite but emotionally devastating, How I Killed My Father throws such questions out like smart bombs, and they detonate long after the end-credits have rolled.

This is the kind of film that reminds you of what movies, at their best, are capable of.

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

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

It's a honey of a performance: controlled, achingly human, and funny in the deepest ways.

O'Horten is a precise, deadpan drama of slapstick existentialism - a Bent Hamer movie, in other words.

Reiner's penchant for hip little riffs -- Billy Crystal as a yiddish wizard, etc. -- dilutes primal power in favor of genial fun.

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.

Some movies rest on an actor's face, and The Counterfeiters has a great one.

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

Nolan brings his Batman trilogy to a close with a majestic, almost completely satisfying crash. Everything feels epic about the film: the characters, the effects, the emotional stakes - even the missteps (and there are more than a few).

The movie is 141 minutes long but you rarely feel its weight; that’s how confident a filmmaker Gray has become. All The Lost City of Z lacks is a great leading actor, someone magnificent and flawed like a Peter O’Toole.

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

The movie is more pure, profane enjoyment than a body should have in the dog days of August.

Shot on Ramsey Island and other locations along the coast of Wales, the movie is gorgeous to look at, and it’s endearing enough to warm one’s hands and heart on a cold entertainment evening.

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.

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

On the basis of The Sisters Brothers, we’d all be better off handing our westerns to Frenchmen. Especially if the results do right by John C. Reilly. That fine, ursine character actor — our generation’s Wallace Beery, as I live and breathe — is one of the four corners of the movie’s acting pleasures, the other three being Joaquin Phoenix, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Riz Ahmed (HBO’s “The Night Of”).

A comparison to Baz Luhrmann is useful: Where Taymor self-consciously aestheticizes pop vulgarity, a movie like "Moulin Rouge!" just dives right in.

The movie is largely set in a busy Paris restaurant, and, not surprisingly, the food looks terrific. You may come out hungry for poached sea bass and a little starved for drama.

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

Joss Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing is just about the sloppiest Shakespeare ever put on the screen. It may also be the most exhilarating — a profound trifle that reminds you how close Shakespeare’s comedies verge on darkness before pirouetting back into the light.

The film bears a resemblance to such multicharacter dramas as Robert Altman's ''Short Cuts" and Paul Thomas Anderson's ''Magnolia" -- like them, it's a portrait of a society straining at the seams -- but it manages the neat trick of being both charming and bilious.

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

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

There are a lot of reasons to be thankful for Sorry to Bother You — one being that it represents the return of the inspired/demented midnight-movie satire — but the rise of Lakeith Stanfield to leading man status is probably the most satisfying.

Too often the movies view the problems of Africa through Western eyes, but "Devil" turns that weakness to a literal strength, because Steidle could do nothing in his position except take photographs.

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

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

One of the most hopeful and heart-rending movies I've seen this year.

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

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.

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.

“Nosferatu” haunts as you watch it and vanishes when the lights come up, leaving a viewer shaken but not stirred. Still: Fangs for the memories.

Self-consciously poetic and shot within a luscious inch of its life, the film's also an engrossing heartbreaker: a family saga that spans continents, political administrations, and decades of travail to arrive at a harder, wiser place.

The new film lives up to expectations and, indeed, pushes past them into virtually unmapped territory.

No matter how you feel, we still get the poetry, stitched throughout the film and occasionally soaring above it like an uncaged bird: hard, far-seeing, and waiting for the day it will be understood.

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

Clemency observes its characters with a steady, unmodulated pace and a minimum of frills.

As luscious as the filmmaking craft here is, it lacks the rude vitality, the unpredictability, the pure American craziness of the films that should have won him (Scorsese) the Oscar: "Mean Streets," "Taxi Driver," "Raging Bull," and "GoodFellas."

A pretty decent crime drama - not a patch on the best parts of his directorial debut, 2007's "Gone Baby Gone,'' but it's moody and grim and engrossing if you approach it with the right expectations.

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

James has the forward drive of a trash-compacted Ralph Kramden with some of Ed Norton's random gentility and, here at least, he has a knack for fine-tuned physical comedy that gets you laughing even when the script's not there.

The question remains: Why would Herzog want to dramatize what he has already captured as nonfiction? To better control the material, I think, and to bring it in line with his own obsessions.

The movie's an uncategorizable mixture of the tacky and profound, and on some weird level, you have to respect it.

Essential viewing for anyone who wants to know the roots -- and perils -- of modern political dissent.

Jiro Dreams of Sushi is a foodie's delight, obviously, and best seen either on a full stomach or with restaurant reservations immediately following.

Should you see it? Of course you should. Anything Miyazaki does is worth your time. But the movie’s a gorgeous, problematic anomaly in an illustrious career.

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

A film of singularly boneheaded conceits, Butterfly is populated by, and appears to have been made by, stoned college dudes more hung up on oh-wow twists than the need to make sense.

Wild Tales rockets along with sleek, amoral charm and a masterful sense of cinematic storytelling; it’s worth noting that one of the producers is Spain’s Pedro Almodóvar.

"No God and no religion can survive ridicule," wrote Mark Twain, but for once the sage of Hannibal was wrong.

You’ll be in the mood for it or you won’t. 24 Frames is slow cinema at its slowest, and as meaningful as you want to make it. Above all, it breathes with the sensibility of an artist who saw beauty in people and places where most of us never thought to look.

Personal Shopper is as coolly, beautifully ambiguous as we’ve come to expect from France’s Olivier Assayas, and it contains the kind of mysteries that can leave adventurous audiences tingling pleasurably while others spit out their gummi worms in frustration.

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

Neighboring Sounds unfolds like a casual nightmare in the light of day.

Throughout, Knightley gives this genteel silliness conviction, grace, heart, and nerve. Sarsgaard gives it smolder and sex appeal. And sometimes, dear reader, that’s all a movie needs.

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

Under Murphy’s direction, the tone is darkly comic — not what you’d expect given that plot synopsis but to which the actors respond with deftness and creativity, like downhill skiers facing a challenging slalom.

The chief attraction of the film is the ersatz India created by the pixel pushers at special effects houses WETA Digital and the Moving Picture Company.

The Hunting Ground does a fine and fierce job of portraying campus sexual assault as a national disease. It never dares to suggest that it’s a symptom.

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.

For all its pessimism, the movie prompts a viewer to search his or her own memories for actions rather than reactions, and to mull over the differences between the two. It's a dark little ride, but at the end the lights hesitantly flicker back on.

The strength of Kopple’s film (as opposed to the strength of Sharon Jones, which is mighty) is that it honestly depicts the vulnerabilities of an indomitable woman.

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

Elegant, insistent movie -- a great gray filmmaker's finest in years.

This payback-revenge storyline, told mostly at night with minimal dialogue, is tense but familiar, and Bruno's quick-draw costume changes are fun to watch.

There’s a lot, in fact, that keeps this film from greatness. One performance alone recommends it. That’s enough.

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

Jeff Feuerzeig's film is as good a portrait of the artist as a beloved basket case as you'll see, but it's kept from greatness by the questions it refuses to ask itself.

Normally I’d recommend a rock ’n’ roll documentary to the band’s fans, but since the cult of the Mekons is infinitesimally small, if fanatically devoted, I have no problem recommending Revenge of the Mekons to everyone who hasn’t heard of the group. All 99.9 percent of you.

The Nightingale strives to be an epic and pulls it off, even if there are one or two false summits before the final scenes. It’s painful to watch because the truth is often painful, especially when so many myths of empire have accreted around it.

It’s predictable in many places and acerbic in others, sentimental when you expect it and poignant when you don’t. But it stars Lily Tomlin, and that’s all you really need to know.

Best of all, “Presence” is short and sure of itself, a tidy 84 minutes that explore a fraying family dynamic as observed by the household poltergeist.

One of the year’s surprises, a defiant, funny, and multi-layered saga of talent and class resentment, marred only by some technical oddities and a certain smug awareness of everything the moviemakers are daring themselves to do right.

Tarantino and Rodriguez want you to cover your eyes in disbelief and get the unholy giggles at the same time. You do, but in two very different ways, and that's the movie's strength.

The Twentieth Century exists somewhere on the Venn diagram between midnight movie, fever dream, Turner Classics fetish object, and all-Canadian prank. Does that sound interesting? By all means. Does the movie go anywhere? Not really. Will you mind? I didn’t.

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.

The movie is a steady, frightening depiction of a baton of awful knowledge being passed.

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

Thelma is about the indomitable human urge to keep going and the hard-won wisdom to know when to heed time’s warnings. It’s a movie that rages against the dying of the light — at 30 mph.

I'm wary of implying that it's your civic duty to see The House I Live In, but - guess what - it is. And see it with someone whose views are different from your own. We're going to need everyone to help get us out of this mess.

Screenwriter John Osborne and Richardson (both received Oscars as well) came up with a smart solution to the problem of adapting an 18th-century literary classic: Turn it into bawdy slapstick with generous helpings of then- daring sex and violence.

As the title implies, though, Keep on Keepin’ On has more on its mind. The film’s as much about the young Kauflin’s struggles — as a 21st-century Asian-American naïf trying to succeed in a 20th-century art form created by African-Americans, as a blind man navigating the often callous New York jazz scene. It’s also about the ongoing health of jazz itself as the music recedes further from the mainstream into the protective world of festivals and small clubs.

It’s hard to be a saint in the city, but “Road Diary” reminds us why it’s worth it.

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

For all its smarts, however,the film feels the slightest bit impersonal and risk-free. Coppola has been faulted in various quarters for dropping a female slave from her remake.

It isn't often you get to meet the devil in all his glory, but here he is in Deliver Us From Evil, and his name is Father Oliver O'Grady.

Somers Town, is a trifle: A short black-and-white lark with sharp edges and a soft center. It has its raptures, though, and then some. A disarmingly slight tale of adolescent friendship, Somers Town is one of those rare movies that seems to discover itself as you watch it.

Philomena is a tearjerker of rare honesty and craft.

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

Tommy Lee Jones makes his feature directing debut here, and the film is as weathered, subtle, and sympathetic as the actor's own face.

Lines are drawn and connections are made. The intentions are pure. The results are enraging, often in accordance with the filmmakers’ hopes, sometimes against. Personally, I came out of Detroit angrier than I’ve been at a movie in ages, and not entirely the way director Kathryn Bigelow probably wants.

With mother!, Aronofsky throws caution to the winds and delivers his most abstract cinematic experience yet. It’s also arguably his worst.

When Fiennes appears, 28 Years Later becomes even more clearly a meditation on what comes after humanity’s downfall — what memories we save and who we choose to love and remember. There’s still enough flesh-rending and severed body parts to sate the average horror fan.

Wants to claim Bukowski (1920-1994) as a 20th-century West Coast Walt Whitman -- a people's poet of modern degradation. Through a selective presentation of his writing and a reverently crass treatment of his life, it makes a funny, often intensely moving case, and you're having such a good time that you're glad to let it.

Pain & Gain, a jokey but fatally tone-deaf true-crime caper, plays like “Fargo” for idiots.

A less than inspiring documentary about extremely inspiring individuals, High Ground is worth seeing for what it shows rather than how it shows it.

Think of it as "Glee" without music. Without a net, too.

What unites the film’s two halves — what makes it worth watching, period — is the road Close’s Joan travels as she decides whether to reclaim authorship of her own life. It’s a diamond forged under pressure — a performance of great fury that only finds its voice at the end.

The quiet strength of Dheepan is how it shows these lives — the people in our midst we never see — rolling on forever, adapting, struggling, and finding their way.

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

The result is one of the most unforgiving ground-level documentaries about the music business ever made -- the six-string equivalent of "Hoop Dreams."

In “Kneecap,” a frenetic, funny, searingly angry film from Northern Ireland, language — Irish Gaelic — serves as an active force of rebellion channeled through the beats and braggadocio of African American rap. Very little gets lost in the translation.

As with the simpler and stronger “Rivers and Tides,” there are moments where you may want to stop the film to assure yourself you’re seeing what you’re seeing, so disordering to the senses are Goldsworthy’s re-orderings of nature.

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

This is the rare occasion when one of these brittle, neurotic social comedies serves as the vehicle for a woman’s sensibility rather than a man’s. In the process, Miller quietly but forcefully reinvents an entire movie genre.

The new film is slender, and it plays obliquely with the style of the 20th-century Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu: simple shots of simple people revealing universal truths.

Lady Macbeth” is thus simple in the telling while leaving us with a lapful of thorns; it’s as sensual as a tryst and as wintry as a grave.

A likable but cliched star-crossed romance set along the post-WWII Havana-New York jazz axis, the Spanish-made film features terrific music, passable artwork, and characters who stubbornly refuse to become more than sketches.

With a minimum of melodrama and a fluid camera style that weaves restlessly in and out of the throng, Something in the Air is attentive to the users and the used in this generation of supposed equals. There’s no anger to the film, though, and what sometimes feels like passivity is really just the fond, unromantic gaze of an artist carefully considering his younger self.

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

I’m not sure Lore holds up to repeated viewings — Shortland’s style is so feverish it could quickly turn precious — but it demands to be seen at least once.

I Carry You With Me is an act of memory, of romance, and of friendship all in one — a movie that takes the kind of undocumented immigrants’ saga we think we know and recasts it in a dreamy, bittersweet light.

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

Hobbled by its vaguely insulting comic-book version of the '60s and by a humorlessness that can only come from talented people convinced they're creating work for the ages.

Both actors are among the best, most intuitively creative we have, and whatever transpires offscreen in Crowe’s case, onscreen they only serve their characters. Neither man showboats here, and it’s a thrill to watch them work.

This may not be the greatest movie version of the novel, but it's possibly the truest.

Deeply, proudly average..."Mean Girls" it's not; a plastic butter knife has more edge. But sometimes it's nice to know your kids won't cut their fingers.

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.

Director Bahrani has always buried his social concerns in story and character; he’s one of the very few American filmmakers to pay attention to this country’s poor, and he applies his creativity to the paradoxes of India without missing a step.

Silent Souls is a road movie, a guy movie, a treatise on burial customs in northern Russia. Mostly it's a sigh at the way entire cultures can slip away in the flow of time. It's lovely and slow and melancholic and short - 75 minutes, yet you feel you've been gone for an epoch or two.

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

The movie works as a twinned character study, a moral suspense thriller, and an indictment of an America stacked against its working classes.

"Trial” is so inherently compelling — and so directly germane to an America where the government labels cities “anarchist jurisdictions” and states are drawing up laws against free assembly — that it doesn’t need the frills. Let the kids know what happened the way it happened. They can handle the truth.

The Lunchbox isn’t an example of bravura moviemaking or cutting-edge style but simply a tale told with intelligence, restraint, and respect.

Shine a Light did something I didn't think was possible. It got me caring about the Rolling Stones again.

At nearly two hours, Mirrors is overlong for a summer horror toss-off, and the movie's three or four false endings make it seem even more of a haul.

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

Turns out to be one of the finer peeks into the creative process of staging a play. Granted, that's a tiny genre, and the film's core audience -- theater majors and the people who love them -- is narrow. The lessons, however, are big.

Flattens you with concussive detail and the awfulness of war; it plays like "Saving Private Ryan" as remade by a Continental mathematician flipping out on Ecstasy.

By far the best part of Say Her Name: The Life and Death of Sandra Bland is that we get to see her face and hear her words.

Behind the cool, nonjudgmental gaze of Cartel Land is a despair that never comes to terms with itself.

Much about the new film feels simultaneously playful and dangerous, with fanciful inventions like the whistling language taught to the hero by the gangsters so they can communicate out loud in secret.

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

The truth is that this is a mystery movie, and the mystery is trying to figure out exactly what the heck is going on here.

The film's case against overdevelopment needs to be, and could be, aggressive, airtight. It should play to the unconverted. Instead, The Unforeseen gives us . . . poetry.

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.

The movie’s a chocolate box of nougaty performances, from Christopher Plummer’s delightful depiction of Tolstoy as a ribald old naïf to Paul Giamatti twirling his waxed mustache and playing to the gallery as Vladimir Chertkov.

Jason Schwartzman is a fine actor, but he has a knack for creating characters you want to punch in the face, and Philip, who has a second novel coming out and is intent on burning all his bridges, is almost marvelously obnoxious.

I wish Hotel Rwanda felt like something more than a very, very good TV movie.

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

A bumptious splatter farce that manages to improve from awful to moderately engaging as its cast is winnowed down to the five guys themselves.

It's an "Annie Hall" for the iPod generation: über-designed, pleasing to the touch, making up in generic sweetness what it lacks in bite.

Remarkably, ''Me and You" doesn't shock so much as soothe.

Like much of Godard’s recent work, The Image Book is a rumination on art, politics, history, and mankind’s eternal folly disguised as a cinematic collage. It’s plotless but it has shape; random but with purpose. After initially fighting the movie, one might find oneself giving into its flow, the visuals scudding across one’s retina, the assemblage of quotes and mournful pensees on the soundtrack seducing one into following along in its wake.

May not be the best movie ever made about the perils of family life, but it is among the most ruthlessly comic.

Iñárritu has his eye so firmly on the myths of America that he loses sight of the men who made them. But he’s hardly the first person to do that.

The arrival of Raúl Ruiz’s final work, Night Across the Street, brings the total to four, an elegant, clear-eyed bridge game of artists playing their last trump cards.

No Sudden Move is a terrific movie — an unflashy near-masterpiece of professionalism on both sides of the camera.

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

September 5 is an exciting, well-made, thought-provoking movie. Sadly, it couldn’t matter less to where we are now.

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.

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

The deeper Tim’s Vermeer takes you, the peskier and more profound the questions get.

The movie’s a funny, dark, increasingly razor-sharp inquiry into the metaphysics of modern fame — how the dream of “being seen” and thus validated on some primal level can completely unhinge the average schmo.

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

In reality, it's messy in the way that life is, and with a rare and welcome obstreperousness.

By contrast, the undercard of Shirley is the bruising, scintillating war of wills between Jackson and her husband. Stanley Hyman was by all accounts a larger-than-life figure, and Stuhlbarg plays him with the exuberance of a clown and the insecurity of a bully.

Thorough and sadly engrossing documentary.

Rabbit Hole is a personal project for Kidman - she produced the film after falling in love with the play - and it seems to have revived the quickness in her. That ice-blue gaze has found its focus again, and it looks deep into the one thing none of us want to face.

The most striking aspect of Mud is the air of myth and tall-tale telling that hovers lightly over the settings and characters.

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.

Very few people will take in this spectacle of a society amusing itself to death, of “reality games” and the vapid media hysteria that surrounds them, and not draw a parallel to our own televised bread and circuses. At its best, “Catching Fire” is a blockbuster that bites the culture that made it.

Turns out to be rather less than the sum of its headlines.

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

Marguerite strives for ambiguity and settles for a muddle. It piles too much on its serving plate, and at 129 minutes it’s definitely overlong.

Where Wild disappoints is in the didactic, show-and-tell approach of Vallée’s direction and of the screenplay.

Using compassion and the slightest touch of syrup, Kore-eda brings his characters to a place where they realize with shock that they’re finally on the same page.

The first "Candidate" was inspired pop art, a two-dimensional coloring book about 1962 America's subterranean political fears. Demme's film is more nuanced, less crazy-brilliant and, yes, probably less necessary, but it's still a confirmation of all the anxieties out there on the table and festering in our heads.

A lot of the humor, sage as it is, comes from the players, Winger and Letts in particular.

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

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

A gracefully subtle metaphor about life's Deep Magic has become a war film; what was a one-chapter battle toward the end of the book is now a ripsnorting Armageddon that looks like something Hieronymus Bosch might dream up after a heavy meal.

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.

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

Sloppily made at times and it comes close to wearing out its welcome, but you can't blame Walker for not wanting to let his subjects go. And as the movie progresses, a viewer begins to understand why: These people are literally singing for their lives.

You can feel the actors tossing energy, one-liners, and limbs off each other with gusto.

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

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

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.

The movie’s never less than entertaining, but you often feel like arguing with the screen, and not in a good way.

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.

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

My Little Sister comes from an unusual creative team: Stéphanie Chuat and Véronique Reymond, Swiss friends from childhood who write and direct films together. Their fourth feature, it combines a fluid visual realism — there are some astonishing sequences of Alpine parasailing — with an emotional intimacy that’s its own form of jumping off a cliff. This time, they’re collaborating with an actress willing to take a blind leap and bring us with her. It’s a bracing trip, a work of daredevil nerve that serves as its own reward.

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

As pointedly as The Punk Singer looks at the past, the movie’s uncertain where the energy of that original moment has gone. Where are the riot-grrrls of today? Take your daughters to the movie, then ask them.

Capernaum is a hard, hard watch meant to force comfortable moviegoers out of their bubbles of ease. The rewards, in no particular order, are the central figure, the young actor playing him, and the film’s magnanimous windows onto suffering and resilience.

Ends on a note of triumphant populism, but the film’s bitter aftertaste hints that when we ignore the details, we only ensure they’ll be repeated.

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

If this is daring in theory, it's a failure in practice. Exactingly well-made, the movie is grueling and unpleasant in the extreme - that's the point - but it's also working from a specious premise, that film-school Brechtian devices can bring on mass enlightenment.

A meat-and-potatoes action movie that manages to extract the charisma from one of our most likable sides of beef.

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.

If The Trip to Italy begins shakily, it ends with expansive bliss, a father and son reconnecting off the shores of Capri as Gustav Mahler’s art song “Ich Bin Der Welt Abhanden Gekommen (I Am Lost to the World)” sends everyone heart-stoppingly home.

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

A chick flick of a particularly intelligent, ruthless, and loving sort.

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

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.

In the Shadow of Women, a portrait of a troubled French marriage, has the simplicity and subtle punch of a good short story.

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.

Reilly gives it his all, and he’s both very enjoyable and about as scary as a stubbed toe.

Cousins succeeds at his main task. He brings back a genius in all his contradictions, and his movies in all their deadly delights.

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

Confident enough to simply go with the exotica of average middle-class Americans who are well-intentioned, flawed, and dog-paddling like crazy to keep their heads above water. There's nothing at all unusual about them, and that's unusual.

Has its moments of visual invention and self-aware humor — mostly when the hero’s trickster brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston) is around — but otherwise it’s an awkwardly plotted extravaganza.

Clean has the same mixture of human tenderness and borderline-silly Eurochic that marks Wenders films like "Until the End of the World."

When all is said and done, Goodbye to Language may simply be about Jean-Luc Godard exploring 3-D filmmaking, in the same way “The Shining” is really just about Stanley Kubrick wanting to fart around with a Steadicam. Which, honestly, is fine. Great artists use new tools to discover new vehicles for seeing, understanding, living. Be thankful we get to come along for the ride.

It is an honest, dumbstruck, not particularly deep demonstration of how insanely difficult it is to make a movie, any movie, no matter how blithe the end result may appear on screen.

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 Mighty Macs sticks so closely to the underdog-sports-movie playbook that it's practically generic.

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

Less a documentary than a cry of outrage -- a series of exotic images that slowly turn horrifying.

Beneath the period décor and lamp-lit elegance, this is a story of a profound emotional crime prompted by profound love.

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

A decent biopic, rousing and well-made and unruffled by depth, with an expertly judged performance at its center.

The film confirms director Audiard as a master of visual mood, in this case one of barely expressed emotional panic.

Unfolds with the serenity of a fable but underneath it draws intelligent, deeply troubled connections between the personal, political, and spiritual.

The thread that winds through their stories is love lost and connections found, but only the audience is able to weave it into something to keep.

If there's a larger theme in Zatoichi, it's that nobody is quite who he or she seems.

What works best in Shrek 2 are the smaller roles, the pile-driving pop-culture jokes, and the moments of weird, early-Mad-magazine comic invention.

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

A work of quiet, crystalline empathy, I’ll See You in My Dreams is notable for reasons that nearly overshadow its modest yet indisputable charms. It’s a drama about the kind of people invisible to the movies and much of our culture — senior citizens in the early evening of their lives — and it grants its characters individuality in ways that are almost wholly free of cliché.

It’s Dyrholm’s film, though, and Nicchiarelli’s, and between them the two women do honor to their subject in all her contradictions.

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

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

So, yes, something needs to be done, and if it takes Sting reuniting the Police in-concert to sing “sending out an SOS’’ on behalf of the plaintiffs (among other worthy causes), so be it.

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

The best parts are the breezes of real, observed life that breathe through many of the scenes — the street corners, the storefronts, the rough camaraderie of guys hanging out, the wary warmth of women.

A reporter is never the story — the story is the story. But if looking at the reporter helps you see the story, and the human beings the story is about, then the effort may be worth it. A Private War is worth it.

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.

While Morris From America trundles along familiar tracks, Hartigan’s eye for detail and individuality yields enough dividends to keep the film moving tartly and congenially along.

With pained gentleness, her film insists we make our homelands within us and take them wherever we go.

That the two stars are married in real life is part of the movie’s genius and certainly key to why “Together” is as outrageously funny as it is scary.

By the Grace of God shows how one man’s evil acts spread into the cracks of not just his victims’ lives but the lives of their loved ones as well. But the film’s gathering crowd also testifies to the sustenance people take when their pain is shared and they pool approaches and resources.

Rich Hill might fairly be called “Boyhood: The Documentary,” and, not surprisingly, it offers a reality harsher than — if just as compassionate as — Richard Linklater’s dreamy time-lapse drama.

The tragedy of this grand and artful movie is that the individuality Martin craves to make him stand out leaves him in the end standing very much alone.

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