Ty Burr

It’s the best Tyler Perry movie to date - the writer/director/actor/mogul’s most confident and competent mixture of uplifting black middle-class melodrama and low-down comedy.

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

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

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

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

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

It’s an eerie mood piece that slowly and surely tightens the thumb screws before all hell breaks loose; that and the fact that much of Hereditary takes place in one rambling dark house is evidence that Aster has spent a lot of time studying “The Shining,” “The Exorcist,” and “Rosemary’s Baby.” It’s nice to have a classicist back in town.

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

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

De Armas simply doesn’t have a purchase on the cultural affection that Reeves has built over four decades of stardom, and that lack keeps “Ballerina” firmly in the minor leagues for about two-thirds of its running time.

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.

Brisk and deeply engrossing.

It's like an After-School Special version of "Pan's Labyrinth ," and I actually mean that as a compliment.

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

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

A modern comedy-drama in the Woody Allen-Noah Baumbach mold — urban intellectuals talking their lives in circles — but what keeps it from being a live-action New Yorker cartoon is the heart beating away in the script and the performances. At over two hours, it’s long but it’s true.

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

The Academy accepts submissions only from real countries, and Palestine isn't one. This is as good a joke, and as dark, as anything in the movie.

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

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

Shockingly, the new film turns out to be very good, at times close to brilliant: a darkly detailed marvel of creative visualization that does well by Dickens and right by audiences - when it’s not trying to sell them a theme park ride.

A hell-for-leather action film with a healthy serving of scares. It really is "Aliens" on the open plains, "Independence Day" for the nation's centennial, and what the movie lacks in originality and stick-to-your-ribs Western authenticity, it makes up for in pell-mell multiplex entertainment.

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

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 writing is sharp and the performances bright, and if you've been through the forced gestational march known as pregnancy, there are knowing laughs to be had. If you haven't, do yourself a favor and stay away.

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

"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.

It’s a relief to find a rock-doc that eschews the usual grainy hand-held wobble for steady camerawork and crisp compositions. The movie looks gorgeous — an artful frame into which Cave can pour his demons.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

Short, suspenseful, funny, and profane, the film's a throwback to the neat little B-level thrillers the entertainment industry used to crank out by the dozen in the post- World War II era and the early days of TV.

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

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

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

The movie lands like a punch.

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

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

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

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

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]

Longley takes us through that country without a map; he's an artful, optimistic empiricist who believes what we see matters infinitely more than what we're told.

This charming, bittersweet 90-minute monologue consists of the actor telling tales of his childhood and early years, when he was an ugly duckling from an uglier family. The anecdotes are bruisingly funny and delivered with clarity and light mockery.

Black Bag is a movie about pros made by a pro, and either you’re up to the challenge or you’re not.

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.

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."

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

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.

The bones of this memory play are familiar, but Davidtz is a natural filmmaker, and the sense of a tattered but privileged world teetering on extinction is visualized with fresh and evocative details.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

So few Hollywood movies go here that this one's oddly welcome, even in its most turgid moments, of which there are many.

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

You probably won't see a better directorial debut this year than David Michôd's Animal Kingdom.

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

The Orphanage gets by on mood and a mournfulness that's not easily soothed. Sadness and loss, it says, are the threads connecting the spirit world and our own, and women, who bring life into the world, understand that far better than men ever will.

Against the odds, John Carter is itself pretty amazing - an epic pulp saga that slowly rises to the level of its best imitations and wins you over by degrees.

It’s rooted in observed reality and idiosyncratic individuals. It’s possible, Silva is saying, to live among people and still be terribly, crushingly isolated.

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.

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

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.

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

Almost as generic as its title, Fatherhood is made real enough to matter by the strength of its performances and the sincerity of its makers.

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.

It’s not her greatest work but it’s warm, witty, and thorough. It’s a little like visiting a beloved old aunt who you suddenly remember has more smarts and creativity — more balls — than anyone else you know.

True, the CGI dwarves (not “dwarfs,” thank you) are a pox upon the eyeballs, but other than that? It’s pretty good.

A multi-character melodrama about the supernatural that's affecting both in spite of and because of its flaws.

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

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

Debuting at last year’s Cannes Film Festival and updated in light of recent events, it’s a failed film whose failure makes it interesting; it’s less a portrait of Assange than an account of how the scales fell from one admirer’s eyes as she looked at him.

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

Souleymane’s Story presents its hero’s life as an open-air prison. Scrupulously researched by Lojkine and co-writer Delphine Agut, it’s brutally frank about the predatory practices of some of Souleymane’s fellow West Africans.

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

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

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

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

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

Belushi was at his best when he was allowed to build, moving from soft-spoken sanity to a maelstrom of fury over the course of a two-minute sketch. We get the infamous Joe Cocker impression, flailing away next to the real thing; we’re reminded of his truly remarkable skills as a physical comedian; and we get most of my favorite skit, the “Little Chocolate Donuts” ad. But a full measure of the man’s art (and it was art) is missing.

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.

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

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

It has its own bizarre charms and a breezy confidence that renders it the very definition of a simple pleasure.

The movie is “Gravity” cubed, an epic of space travel and human destiny that swings by Saturn, slingshots through a wormhole, and pinballs across a handful of planets on its way to a rendezvous with infinity, conveniently located inside a black hole.

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.

Marston's a miniaturist even when The Forgiveness of Blood calls out for larger gestures, and you occasionally sense a more bruising, compelling movie lurking behind this one.

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

Much of the horror in Midsommar unfolds in bright sunlight; it’s the star who really takes us into the dark.

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.

Is it worth crawling across the broken glass of the initial hour to make it to the balm of the second? That’ll be up to you, as will the incantatory visual style of Waves — a powerful artistic undertow that sucks viewers in and spits them out gasping.

The trick of a movie like this is to ensure it speaks to an audience outside its creator’s trauma. The direction by the Israeli filmmaker Alma Har’el goes a long way to making Honey Boy watchable, bearable, relatable. Poetic, even. Certainly it should resonate with anyone who’s tried to form themselves in the shadow of a difficult or abusive parent.

Immense, mystical, and deranged beyond immediate comprehension, Ilya Khrzhanovsky's 4 is an apocalyptic allegory of Mother Russia and its current state of squalid exhaustion.

Ironically, the film itself is as gentle and unexploitative as they come. Yes, it deserves the rating, and yes, it depicts teenagers doing things the grown-ups would rather not admit they actually do, but it does so with a poetic curiosity and a sense of what it’s like to be young, poor, and rootless — both future-less and free.

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

Dreamlike and the slightest bit precious, the film is a beautiful, over-cultivated hothouse flower.

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

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

French Exit allows Pfeiffer free rein to play, and her performance is glorious in a major key of scornful hauteur and a minor key of self-pity.

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

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.

Lupita Nyong’o (“12 Years a Slave”) finally gets a movie role worthy of her status as an Oscar winner. She isn’t hidden behind pixels, as in “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” or “The Jungle Book.” You can see her. She’s magnificent.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

A generally thrilling entertainment that's not quite the grand slam you want it to be.

It’s a slap-happy movie and often scurrilously funny — the sound of a gifted comic mind finally finding its onscreen voice.

So spectacularly bent that it exudes a contact cough-syrup high all its own.

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.

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

War for the Planet of the Apes plays like a mash-up of about five different movies, but at least one of them feels like a masterpiece.

To paraphrase the old ad for Levy's rye bread, you don't have to be Jewish to love "Keeping Up With the Steins," but it helps.

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

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

Not just one of the best but, at its best, an exercise in pure action-movie propulsion and an essay in how to get from Point A to Point B in the most ingenious and exhausting way imaginable.

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

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

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

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

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

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

In its sneaky, cheeky way, Defamation is a mitzvah, an act of kindness.

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.

It's a merry deconstructive delight and easily the best party in town.

Run the game, bow to the movies that did it better and before, keep the dialogue on the line between hard-boiled and hokey, and throw one last curveball before the lights come up. It's a con in itself, but the reward's in the playing.

The great satisfaction of this documentary is seeing the troubled children of the early scenes emerge with a maturity and equanimity that comes from pushing oneself past the furthest you thought you could go.

Promises minor pleasures and delivers them. In the process, it's gracious enough to kick in a few extras: a nifty central gimmick, a self-effacing lead performance, and a big slice of ham from supporting actor Jeff Daniels .

You really don't need to borrow someone else's kids to ponder and enjoy what Millions has to offer.

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

A hardly fair, not especially balanced broadside that has the advantage of being correct.

This Robin Hood is mostly a smart, muscular entertainment; it doesn’t breathe new life into a genre as did “Gladiator,’’ Scott’s first pairing with Russell Crowe, but it’s a brawny reimagining of a beloved old myth, a period popcorn movie turned out with professionalism and gusto.

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

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.

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

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

How you feel about About Schmidt may depend in large part on how you feel About Jack.

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.

What separates the good teen romances based on young adult novels from the soppy, ridiculous ones? Emotional conviction, mostly, and committed performances. Everything, Everything is mostly one of the good ones, even if it has everything (everything) that makes these movies head south for everyone (everyone) but the target audience of teenage girls.

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.

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.

The movie won the grand prize at this year’s Slamdance, an even more indie Sundance-adjacent festival, and it marks the arrival of an earnest talent in writer-director-star Cooper Raiff. It’s also the rare youth movie to dispense with cynicism and wear its heart on its sleeve.

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

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

Hyper-stylized, funny, a crowd-pleaser.

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

A Most Violent Year, then, is something of a science experiment, with Abel the good rat trying to make it to the other side of the maze, uneaten and in full possession of the cheese. In its weaker moments, the movie struggles to get out of the lab. At its best, it reminds us that the maze is as big as the world and as timely as today.

Isle of Dogs is a fascinating (and furry) place to visit, but visit is all it does. It’s a good boy. But it’s not a great one.

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

It's a guaranteed good time at the movies.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

What Zombieland’ has instead - in spades - is deliciously weary end-of-the-world banter.

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.

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.

Its strength and limitation is that it’s a gimmick that works.

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

The results feel a little life lesson-y but also well-earned and well-observed, and Hahn takes advantage of a rare lead role to locate both the ugliness and beauty in her character.

Anne Hathaway's Jane is headstrong and clever, balanced and true.

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

It's not so much a remake as it is a loving re-creation of the 1933 original on extra-strength steroids, with a side order of Botox. You've seen it all before but most assuredly never like this.

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

Best of all, An Education isn’t alarmist. It knows other people can’t seduce us if we don’t seduce ourselves first and that Jenny is level-headed enough to handle it and learn.

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

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

Opens itself up to some splendid drive-in philosophizing.

There's conspiracy here, as there is in all of Dick's books, and it wraps the film up with a moving but somewhat neat bowtie.

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. ''

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

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

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.

"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]

The smarter, scarier horror movies know it’s not how much you show an audience but how little. A Quiet Place takes that maxim in a surprising direction: The tension in this movie — and it’s nearly unbearable at times — comes from how little we hear.

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

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

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

What saves the movie are those sequences of massed animals running riot through Budapest, overwhelming squadrons of police sharpshooters, and taking over a student performance of Liszt’s “Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2.” Hardly subtle, yet the scene yields one shot — of dogs glaring down from the box seats of a fancy concert hall — that’s nearly worthy of Buñuel.

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.

As always, it’s a good idea to do your homework before or after seeing an Oliver Stone movie. You may come out convinced of his point of view and still feel hustled by how he got you there.

Odd, moving, strained cinematic poetry.

A documentary that falls somewhere between overlong and compelling as it follows the 39th president on his controversial book tour.

“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.

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

The movie 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.

Tim Burton has got his groove back.

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

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

I like this movie a lot, but it may be too intimate, too slow for some moviegoers.

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

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

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

Through a fluke of release-schedule timing, it arrives as the anti-“Inglourious Basterds’’ - a story about heroic Nazi-killers in which heroism itself sinks under bewildering crosscurrents of motive and uncertainty.

When all is said and done, the movie's a steaming plate of corn -- and, indeed, that's part of the pleasure. Myles, though, delivers a fine comic performance with no strings attached.

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

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

Heights breathes, is briefly and immediately present, and is over. In this summer of noisy steroid cinema, such small favors are welcome.

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

A hugely entertaining personal documentary about what steroids mean to American pop culture.

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

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.

In Darkness is a disaster movie, and the disaster is the Holocaust. In the space between the two halves of that sentence, you have what works about the film and what's a little creepy.

Bring Her Back is close to, but not quite, a triumph of style over substance — foreboding, unnerving and ultimately very gooey in ways that linger like the aftermath of a bad dream yet lack the nightmare cogency of truly great horror.

High-concept, low-budget, proudly set-bound, Hotel Artemis shouldn’t work at all. Somehow, miraculously, it does.

The film’s energy is contagious.

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

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

Thankfully, the movie approaches this subject the way one might a used car, with suspicion and an extra helping of mordant humor. It just folds in the endorphins gradually, until you understand why audiences voted it their favorite film at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

A celebration of a time when secret agents dressed impeccably, bantered with style, and had exceptionally cool toys. That the movie is almost instantly forgettable is part of the pleasure.

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

In pace, sensibility, and big, beating heart, this is a child's first indie film, and it's the better for it.

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

The result is a genuinely cathartic night at the movies - which is one of the reasons we go to them in the first place. Art it ain't, but popcorn is rarely this skilled or seductive.

The word “feminism” itself has become toxified. For young women who might be despairing as they fight the good fight, this film provides context, roots, and the wisdom of elders.

Because its subjects are so driven and so talented, First Position, which is about ballet, is more gripping than the norm.

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

American Dreamz pitches its softballs with style. Martin Tweed, the preeningly heartless British host of the title TV show, just may be the great comic role that has always eluded Hugh Grant.

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

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

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.

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

A bleakly allusive look at frozen lives, Curling is very much a specialty item - a movie that goes nowhere slowly.

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

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

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

Harrowing and inexorable, the film recaptures the progressive insanity of Jim Jones and the hundreds of worshipers in his thrall, and it certainly gives you willies to last for days.

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

This is all far beyond silly, of course - the most inconsequential sort of winking, meta-movie in-joke.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Spider-Man: Homecoming, a superhero movie is adolescent in all the right ways: limber, reckless, full of youthful brio and uncertainty. Trying on new identities, overreaching, doubting, starting over again.

Not all of Nine Lives clicks, but at its best it finds an inarticulate sisterly solace that makes you want to see what this director could do with one life per film.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

As with “American Sniper,” Sully gets a little gooey in the final scenes, opting for a simplistic celebration of American know-how, where everything up to that point has been darker and more nuanced. Whether you want to accept it or not, Eastwood remains one of the best and most quixotic filmmakers we have, torn between jingoism and doubt, exceptionalism and despair.

A gruesome, helpless spiral barely saved by an actress locating humanity where few would have cared to bother.

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.

Co-directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman cut their teeth on 2010's glib social-media mystery "Catfish,'' and since they're clever boys, they make the most of the series' new toy. Otherwise, Paranormal Activity 3 is almost identical to, and just as eerily effective as, the first two films in its alternation of cheesy "boo!'' tactics and genuine scares.

A cheerfully rambling documentary that's much more thought-provoking than the sum of its parts.

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

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

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

Slow West doesn’t really go anywhere we haven’t been, but because Maclean is discovering the genre for the first time, we see through his fresh yet jaundiced eyes.

After Innocence isn't bravura filmmaking, and it doesn't have to be -- this is one of those documentaries where the subject is compelling enough to do the legwork.

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

So forget about taking anyone under 12. But if you want to see what a benign demon looks like when he's eating nachos and unwinding to Al Green, this is the movie for you.

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

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

True to its title, Schizo is both gripped by the past and pulled toward an unknown future.

A sweet-natured trifle, as flavorful and as thin as a crepe.

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.