Ty Burr

Implicitly acknowledges and celebrates the glorious chicanery and self-delusion of this most American of businesses, and for that reason it may be the most oddly honest Hollywood document of all.

Mines laughs from the ways in which its antihero's reductive philosophy consistently goes kerflooey in his face, but there's a weary sadness to it as well.

If you've ever staggered out of IKEA oppressed by the clean, inhuman lines of a thousand affordable dinette sets, you may get a kick out of Bent Hamer's comedy Kitchen Stories.

Nothing if not a celebration of our willingness to be gulled by life's charming strangers.

“Days” is fast, smart, well-acted, and intermittently inspired, and if you don’t know or care who Beast or Blink or Storm are, you can safely skip it.

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.

Feels both masterful and hesitant - it’s the work of a born filmmaker who’s still not quite sure what she wants to say.

It all feels studiously artless - some people huffily insist that Bujalski’s movies aren’t movies at all - but the more you contemplate his landscapes, the more his control over their various elements is revealed. He’s the real deal: a maturing artist obsessed with how and why - and if - his generation will mature.

Charming, melancholy, and, in the end, not terribly memorable.

A much better movie than the one it honors.

A very entertaining romantic comedy, conventional on the surface while standing all sorts of genre clichés and gender assumptions discreetly on their heads. Its subversions are lower-case, embedded in the laughs, but they’re there and they matter.

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

A tremendous human drama, with each stage of its characters' journey a white-knuckle thriller in miniature.

What the movie doesn't do, oddly, is leave much of an impression after it's over.

In its occasionally over-gentle way, the documentary testifies to the ego necessary to be a great star and to live a great life.

As we’ve come to expect with this director, “A House of Dynamite” is itself an act of professionalism, from the calmly ruthless editing by Kirk Baxter to Volker Bertelmann’s ominous score to the way the many pieces of the film’s narrative puzzle snap together.

No one, but no one, makes movies like Bong, a South Korean master who combines baroque concepts, epic visuals, international casts, and a sense of humor that can make you laugh out loud in the middle of the darkest doings.

The movie lands like a punch.

Rogue Nation unfolds with fluid, twisty, old-school pleasure — you settle into it like a favorite chair.

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.

He (Kurzel) wants this “true history” to be a Rorschach blot of Australia’s national psychology, but he’s made something closer to splatter art instead.

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

There’s still enough to chew on to recommend the movie, not least the oddly touching sight of two siblings whose very identities have been altered by surgery.

The bitter, funny dialogue by director Craig Johnson and co-writer Mark Heyman gives the two stars room to work both comic and dramatic sides of their gifts.

The film reveals its secrets slowly, and Chabrol tightens the screws not according to the rules of Hollywood suspense but with a cool, level gaze.

In other words, this movie isn’t just about an adolescent boy — it pretty much is an adolescent boy.

Porcelain War is a testament to how life’s beauty — all the world’s fertility an artist is trained to see — endures among privation and death.

Sicko is Moore's best, most focused movie to date -- much more persuasive than the enraged and self-righteous "Fahrenheit 9/11."

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

The performances are expert.

It's a guaranteed good time at the movies.

What Maisie Knew flirts with sentimentality but mostly keeps it at bay until the very end, at which point the filmmakers and we realize the kid has probably earned it.

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

The movie, a simple yet immensely pleasurable tale of a little boy and his undead dog, is good enough on its own. If you know the back story, it's even better.

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.

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

There's a delicate balance here between expression and belligerence.

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

The documentary any American with an opinion on our involvement in Iraq owes it to his or her conscience to see.

Serves up some caustic laughs before fizzling out.

Should be seen: It's a worthy ordeal, with flaws that, ironically, make grist for later arguments.

It's a bit of a mess but strong stuff nevertheless -- a mournful, often wickedly funny religious satire that suggests what Kafka might have come up with had he been raised Catholic.

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

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.

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

A blood-smeared and almost completely scurrilous love letter to anyone who ever appeared in the junk movies of the '60s through '80s.

As written by Park and performed by Stella and Plaza — both players with crack comic timing — the interplay between the two Elliotts is the best part of “My Old Ass.”

Judging by the title, though, Sprecher made the movie she wanted to make, and if you're in the right damp-wool mood, you may connect with it too.

It's one of the small, pitch-perfect treasures of the movie year.

Computer Chess is deeply strange and occasionally impenetrable, yet it’s also surreally funny, with touches of science fiction that bedevil the proceedings with outré possibilities.

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.

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

It's a bizarre, provocative story and a moving one, but it doesn't access the richer levels and themes of the film the publicity campaign obviously wants you to think of: 2006's "The Lives of Others."

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.

Unearths the expected footage from the crypt -- including a hilarious live video of the band arguing onstage over what to play next. The anecdotes are pungent and revelatory.

Primarily a one-man show for Darroussin, and the actor, a longtime pro in the French film industry, comes through with a scarifyingly believable portrayal.

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

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

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

In a way, Howard has made a philosophical drama about the way men move through the world. It’s just a really, really fast drama.

The lead performers put it over, with Lewis very appealing as Ellie. She plays this small, fierce character as comfortable in her social invisibility yet increasingly exasperated by the insularity and ethnic slurs of her small town.

The director can work wonders within his celluloid universe, but when the time comes to hand us back to reality, he stumbles. With this movie, that hurts.

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

Wants to be as shocking as its title, but it doesn't have the nerve.

How do you make a movie about this story? Do you spin it as a thriller, a true-crime drama, a horror film, a sick pop-culture joke? Actress Anna Kendrick, making her debut as a director, does something fascinating. She juggles all four and then adds a fifth layer undergirding the others: the unceasing dread that comes from being a woman who knows men like Rodney Alcala are out there.

With all that good will and with an abundance of source material, why does the documentary Love, Gilda feel like such a disappointment? It’s fine for casual viewers: you’ll come away reasonably satisfied if you want to catch up on the basics of Radner’s life and career while having your nostalgia gently stroked.

The film’s made with more heart than art and more skill than subtlety, and it works primarily because of the women that it portrays and the actresses who portray them. Best of all, you come out of the movie knowing who Katherine Johnson and Dorothy Vaughn and Mary Jackson are, and so do your daughters and sons.

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

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.

The end result's a muddle and a good argument for why actors shouldn't direct themselves first time out. Farmiga's a generous and observant performer, but she lacks a shaping hand, not to mention the ruthlessness that's probably a necessity for any director.

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.

It’s a secondhand vision, when all is said and done, but that doesn’t have to be a bad thing when the craft is rapturous.

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.

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.

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.

What Herzog almost accidentally captures in his viewfinder is profound and unsettling: an entire American underclass where at least some prison time is the norm and where only luck and the grace of God keep a person from either wrong end of the shotgun.

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.

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

It's a wrenching, ennobling essay on teamwork and the hard struggle to change one's life.

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

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

The filmmaker's obsessions have got the better of him. That said, I can't recommend the film highly enough, since bad Miyazaki is still leagues better than anyone else.

Will parents be able to sit through Kangaroo Jack without plunging sharp sticks into their eyes? The short answer? Yes. Barely.

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.

The movie sprawls, almost entirely in a good sense, and it lets the audience draw its own conclusions. None of them is likely to be rosy.

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.

This is a movie to see and a director to watch.

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

Beneath the japery and rough-edged filmmaking is an abiding love for the work — its passion and resilience — and respect for the women whose hidden lifelong language that work may have been.

Freeman portrays Mandela not as a saint but as a man who knows he has the political freedom of being seen as one; it’s a majestically two-dimensional performance with glimpses of a third dimension peeking through.

It's foreign, it's inspiring, it has an adorably resourceful kid; it depicts grinding misery in a land far from West Newton, and it holds out the possibility of clambering over all that misery to attain your dream.

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

The film's a minuet fetishistically repeated until either the audience or the lovers go crazy. I'd say it was a tie.

The storytelling here is at times as awkward as its hero, and since it is a Gray film Two Lovers takes itself dreadfully seriously. Yet it's one of the few movies I've seen recently that improves on a second viewing, in part because Phoenix does such remarkably subtle work.

Tarantino may have nicked the title first, but this is the real ''Pulp Fiction," with all the drama and the dead ends that implies.

Sweet little crowd-pleaser.

Neil Young Journeys is easily the least of the three documentaries director Jonathan Demme has made with the legendary rocker; but in its shaggy, eccentric way, it may be the truest.

If you've seen the Beatles documentary "Let It Be," you know what four men who are heartily sick of one another look like, and in 2001, Metallica had been recording twice as long as the Fab Four.

I'm still not sure what "source code" means here. I suspect the actors, the director, and the screenwriter haven't a clue either. But the thing keeps you watching.

Under DaCosta’s sure, steady direction, Little Woods belongs with movies like “Frozen River” (2008), “Winter’s Bone” (2010), “Wind River” (2017), and last year’s “Leave No Trace” — dramas about overlooked communities that ache with empathetic detail. The movie steers clear of polemics, though, and puts its faith in its characters, specifically the exhausted, unbreakable bond of sisterhood that unites these siblings.

Barrels along on a diverting enough sugar high, but in the hangover that follows you may wonder where the wonder was.

There are pieces of a great movie here, but they never quite come together in a way that allows a gifted filmmaker to take flight.

Referencing the popular song, the movie's title reminds us that "the fruit of the poor lemon is impossible to eat." That, in a rind, is Riklis's deeply frustrated view of his country's stalemate, but you can only take a metaphor so far before it falters in the face of endless geopolitical complexity.

It’s a tale as old as time and a story ripped from the news feed; a dream of connection and an anvil to the heart. See it for the arrivals of a directorial talent and a stunning young actress, and see it to remind yourself of this country’s ancient and eternal sins.

A compelling and eerily effective little drama.

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

A damn-near great end-of-the-world zombie movie, terrifying on the basic heebie-jeebie level, respectful toward its B-movie forebears, and all the more unnerving for coming out in this fretful era of SARS and germ warfare.

By turns strikingly original and dramatically slick, deeply felt and a little cooked up. It’s well worth seeing, though.

It’s an agreeable diversion.

The movie trades the paranoia of modern omni-cam culture for a tighter, more personal drama, and while it sticks with you, you feel the missed opportunity like a phantom leg.

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

Miss Juneteenth is a simple story but a resonant one: modest but impactful, focused on one woman’s pride and her daughter’s future while unfolding in the bedrock of a known and loved environment. You can feel the history coming up through its pores.

The new film is a lightly poisoned amuse-bouche that’s made with tasty high-end ingredients, but at 71 minutes it leaves you hungry for more.

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.

An almost fetishistic re-creation of a horror-suspense movie from around 1978.

The leads save it, particularly Cotillard, who once again subverts her own glamour with ferocious lack of ego. The movie itself only occasionally matches her intensity.

Inland Empire may be the most aggressively surreal feature film ever released to movie theaters in this country, and it's possibly close to the movie David Lynch carries around in his head.

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

Frantz is pleasurable slow going, developing its themes at an amble but with a measure of suspense, sympathy toward its characters, and a lasting faith in filmmaking craft.

Sweet, indulgent, and surprisingly soft in the center; the most minor entry in the brainiac-doc genre to date, it's nevertheless a perfectly entertaining hour and a half for crossword adepts.

It's assured and neatly crafted - the time zips by while you're watching it.

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.

The film is arriving on these shores in the wake of such successful foodie nonfictions as “Jiro Dreams of Shushi,” a 2012 art-house hit about an 85-year-old master of raw fish. Like that film, Ramen Heads reaches for the lyrical with slow-motion shots of roiling broth and soaring classical music on the soundtrack. Unlike the earlier movie, it goes so far overboard in ladling out praise that viewers might wonder if they’re being sold a bill of goods.

Kim is a hard director to pin down. This is the first time the inconsistency has spilled onto the screen, though.

The strangest thing about Todd Haynes's new movie isn't that he cast six actors to play the various faces and phases of Bob Dylan. It's that he needed only six.

Bright Star is a thing of beauty and a joy for a movie season that needs it.

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

A near-masterpiece of mood and menace, and one that deserves to be seen on the largest screen possible.

The way Greengrass lets you feel the violence is impressive. Most movie heroes punch through armies without scraping their knuckles, but Bourne's a believable wreck by midpoint.

It’s an unexpectedly charming diversion — a studio film turned inside out, with the stars sent out to pasture and the worker bees front and center.

The production numbers in “Wicked” are garish and cluttered, but they have snap and a pleasing sense of unified mass movement; their effect on the eyeballs is somewhere between an assault and a massage.

Compact, nasty, and altogether wonderful, a tale of brotherly greed and New York comeuppance that shows an old dog dusting off old tricks using new technology.

The great pleasure of le Carré-land — for some, it’s the frustration — is that one’s own moral certainties are quickly stood on their head.

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

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

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

A heart-rending account of people trying to dodge the hurdles that politics puts in front of them. By the end of this humanist epic, some are ennobled by their struggle. Most are exhausted.

The cast is earnest and they almost convince us they’re doing important rather than self-important work.

Poised at the midway point between an ultraviolent video game and a neo-classic dance musical. As midnight-movie mash-ups go, it's pretty amazing.

Queen and Country shows a modern sensibility in its young hero’s all-encompassing disgust with the military mind-set, but it has one foot in Britain’s old “Carry On” comedies, and a subplot in which Percy and Redmond steal the RSM’s beloved regimental clock could come straight out of the old Henry Fonda classic “Mr. Roberts.”

This is music to gorge on, raw ethnic survival in the form of sound.

McQueen has matters of life and death on his mind, and the final act of “Supernova” puts them on the table with a frankness that’s admirable without wholly succeeding as drama; the script’s schematic nature shows through the cracks even as the actors themselves can’t be faulted.

An earnest, extremely grueling, prodigiously crafted true-life drama that takes one of the worst natural disasters in recorded history and reduces it to a bad day at Club Med.

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.

I don't usually make recommendations of this kind, but if you or your kids have gone to a burger joint in the last few weeks, you really do need to see this movie.

Cantet does something that educated, upscale audiences may find exasperating in the extreme: He takes a tinderbox of racial and sexual exploitation, pours gasoline all over it, and refuses to light the match.

The movie's straightforward and ingratiating, and as pretty-boy history lessons go, it's a lot less obnoxious than "Pearl Harbor."

Three quarters of Cold Mountain consist of some of the most masterful and absorbing filmmaking of the year. The final quarter is Hollywood business as usual.

The British actor Christian McKay resurrects the young Welles as a magnificent mountain of talent, ego, and unsliced ham. He, and he alone, is reason enough to see this movie. The problem is the “Me’’ - Zac Efron.

The movie's overlong and there are lumps in the batter, but this is a ''Charlie" that the author would recognize as upholding his playfully dyspeptic tradition.

When it's not opting for whimsy, Rocket Science makes you cringe, which is what's good about it.

American Sniper may be the hardest, truest movie ever made about the experience of men in war. Why? Because there’s no glory in it.

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

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: 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.

Mostly Election tracks the shifting of power among men for whom power is all that matters, no matter how much lip service they pay to loyalty. The final sequence is a shocker but it's also completely logical.

Of all the "Liaisons" adaptations, this may be the most sentimental.

There’s no backstage dirt, then — for that, pick up the 2002 “uncensored history” written by Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller — but there is an honest appraisal of the show’s peaks and valleys over the years.

An endlessly fascinating movie. If only it were a good one.

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.

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.

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

The movie wins you over through crack comic timing and an awareness that the point of driving isn't how fast you get there but what you see on the way.

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 .

News of the World is a satisfying movie without ever becoming a great one.

It's a worst-case-scenario of bachelor party morning-after, and it is howlingly funny.

Legend is more than a gimmick, but not quite enough. The movie’s a testament to the Krays’ ability to get away with everything — for a while, anyway. But it’s better evidence of Tom Hardy’s ability to do just about anything.

Battle of the Sexes is slick and wholly enjoyable, a pop provocation whose medicine goes down easy via outsize, engaging performances in the leads.

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

Robert Altman's gossamer, tension-free meditation on the ballet life, never quite recovers from a performance scene that arrives about 20 minutes in.

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

It’s rife with fey, unintentional camp like the scene in which a newlywed couple pledge eternal love on the deck of an ocean liner — only to move away and reveal a life preserver labeled Titanic. Cavalcade really won its Oscar because of Hollywood’s raging Anglophilia — the insecure sense that if a character says, ”Let’s all have a cup of tea!” the movie must be art.

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

The New World is something I don't think I've ever seen before on a movie screen: an epic lyrical dialectic. Self-indulgent, gorgeous, maddening, grueling, ultimately transcendent, it's a Terrence Malick movie all the way, and possibly the director's most sustained work since 1972's "Badlands."

A Royal Affair is tosh but it's ripely entertaining tosh, with emotions as flamboyant as the window treatments. There is nothing like a Dane.

Ostensibly a road-trip farce, Chair really depicts the highway to man-child hell: The laughs come from the gulf between how mature the characters think they're being and what emotional toddlers they are.

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

The film's slick and entertaining, an obvious must-see for musical hounds.

The movie's a must for baseball fans in general and Red Sox fans in particular - if nothing else, it will help remove the battery-acid taste of the season now stumbling to a close.

Thirst is deliriously bonkers and keeps getting more so; you watch it holding your breath, waiting to see where Park will zigzag next.

Notes on a Scandal is a nice mug of poisoned eggnog for the holiday season -- a movie so smart and entertaining you almost don't feel its chill sicken your bones.

This is still a rich and worthy journey, comfort food that’s also food for thought. It invites us to consider timelines longer than a day, a year, a war, and a life, and to tread carefully on the kings and commoners who might lie beneath our feet.

The Host will make perfect sense to 12-year-old girls, while their college-age sisters will probably laugh themselves sick and their mothers will look at Hurt and wonder when he got so old.

The sex scenes, when they arrive, are unexpectedly, passionately frank, and the characters and the film alike seem stunned in their aftermath. It’s not a movie that has figured out how to end.

The joke's on us, it turns out; as a director, Affleck has come through with a sharp, morally ambiguous piece of pulp crackerjack.

The Insult is optimistic enough to leave the door open to hope. But it’s also realistic enough to only leave it ajar.

Director Steven Soderbergh is working very near the top of his game here, and if Magic Mike tells an old, old story about a young man, his talent, his rise, and his fall - see everything from "Saturday Night Fever" to "Boogie Nights" - he brings the confidence of a born filmmaker and a cast that's sharper than their characters and ready to play.

Milo and Otis is an okay babysitter for the very, very young, but for anyone who truly loves animals it seems pretty fishy.

Eastwood was never much of a cinematic stylist to begin with, and this film in particular has the dull, proficient sheen of a TV movie.

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.

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

Boyhood is a stunt, an epic, a home video, and a benediction. It reminds us of what movies could be and — far more important — what life actually is.

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

Clearly, a lot of grown-up types are going to despise Matilda: gym teachers, school psychologists, used-car salesmen, critics who like their family fare immobilized by homiletic virtue. But kids will understand.

You're left with the bewilderment and joy on Kane's face as he plays the old songs, and the sense of ghosts just behind his back.

The movie balances nicely on the edge of meta-horror, with characters breaking free of their assigned roles (in more ways than one) and monkey-wrenching the very urban legend they're dying to get out of.

By the end, Mesrine: Public Enemy #1 has turned nearly as flabby as its aging antihero.

Weaver's randy, impatient, very funny performance is the main reason to see Imaginary Heroes.

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

It's crisp entertainment even as plot absurdities gum up the works.

Grueling, heavy-handed, and surprisingly insight-free. For once, a gaggle of Leigh characters hasn't jelled beyond the level of its cast's conceits.

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.

Dancing on the edge of dullness, ''Girl'' is continually saved by the look of things: the hush of an atelier in midafternoon, dust-motes swirling in a sunbeam, pigment blooming under mortar and pestle. Impatience is forestalled, time and again, by rapture.

Fennell is a fearsome sensibility and a talent to watch out for, and the arguments you may have after the lights come up will be well worth having. But it’s the sadness behind Cassie’s practiced smile, the wildfire fury behind that sadness, and the reasons for that fury, that may haunt you when the arguments are over.

Shut Up is intentionally slapdash, with jumbly hand-held cameras and random bursts of feedback. But there's a beguiling sense of quiet to it, too.

Hal is a soft-edged memorial that should direct you, or re-direct you, to some terrific and tough-edged films.

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

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.

Seesawing between despair and soul-affirming inspiration, God Grew Tired of Us is a documentary to make you proud of what America offers to the rest of the world and worried that it can't keep its promises.

In the end, Seabiscuit gets right the things that matter.

A structural mess that turns contrived just when it should be hitting home.

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

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

The movie’s pretty great — not quite “Fargo” with lobsters but close enough, and about as good as regional filmmaking gets. Filmed in Harpswell, Maine and environs — the cobwork of Bailey Island Bridge curves through one scene — Blow the Man Down delves cleverly and suspensefully beneath the surface of a small, well-appointed fishing town in winter. There are bodies and there is blood. There are also a lot of quietly furious women.

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

The real struggle in The Alamo is between historic revisionism and Hollywood notions of sacrifice, and it's not much of a contest: Hollywood wins, as it did in John Wayne's sprawling, factually spurious 1960 film.

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.

If you haven’t left your house since March, this movie counts as a legitimate vacation.

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

A handcrafted jewel of a movie, The Illusionist understands the illusions that sustain us in youth and that we have to let slip in the end. It's the rare work of art that cherishes both the magic and the trick.

The Outrun is a recovery drama lifted above the genre’s necessary clichés by the star’s prickly, incandescent presence. It’s also boosted by the film’s setting in the stark Orkney Isles in the north of Scotland and by Fingscheidt’s poetic approach to time, place and chronology.

It's pure plastic product from plot line to the pro forma 3-D to the tidy moral lessons - ersatz family entertainment as disposable as it is diverting. It made me want to go read a book.

ParaNorman is supposedly for kids, but it's really aimed at their snarky older brothers, and it illustrates the limits of the new family creepshows.

Knappenberger can’t paint his subject as an imperfect human being because Swartz simply means too much to too many people right now. He’s a focal point for social and political change, with communal grief as its engine.

It has been said before but it’s worth saying again: Gore Vidal was born to the toga, even if he never actually wore one.

It’s noted that General Tso himself was a guardian of Chinese tradition and would himself shudder at what the dish named for him has become. On the other hand, what does “authenticity” even mean when it comes to cuisine that has assimilated into another culture along with the people who make it? The best food — the kind we want again and again — always tastes like home. Wherever that is.

In more ways than one, Mark Wexler gets the release he's seeking.

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.

There are the serious Coen brothers movies, like “No Country for Old Men” and, um, “A Serious Man,” and there are the not-so-serious ones. Hail, Caesar! is the opposite of their serious ones, and it is delightful.

There's an interesting movie in here, too, about the isolation of Indian brides brought to a new country by strange new husbands and mistreated, but Provoked rarely ducks below its glossy surface to go there.

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.

Across the board, the performances testify, often hilariously, to the pain these characters feel and inflict but are incapable of expressing.

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

The final scenes deliver a payoff worthy of the film's scrappy optimism, but that may not be the reason you walk out of the theater on a cloud. It's the sight of a character coming rapturously into her own at the same time as the actress playing her.

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.

All Abrams wants to do is give us a great ride while holding firm to our longstanding emotional investment in these characters.

A book that got under the young Guadagnino’s skin, about the ache to merge with a forbidden lover’s body and soul, has become a film that uses the play of light on a screen to hint at the light we carry inside ourselves and that only the queer know we share.

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

These are some of the questions raised and left on the table in the fascinating but frustratingly murky Author: The JT Leroy Story, a documentary by Jeff Feuerzeig that’s worth seeing if only to argue with the movie and with yourself.

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

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

Kendrick gives a truly bad performance here - she's a self-conscious actress playing a self-conscious person and getting her signals all mixed up - and it's unclear whether she has been hung out to dry by her director or if it's just that the character makes no sense whatsoever.

There's a thin line, though, between honoring what came before you and replicating it, and Super 8 occasionally wobbles over that line into predictability.

War Horse is the best film of the year. The year, unfortunately, is 1942.

The Aristocrats -- the movie, not the joke -- is a working demonstration of the pleasures of the profane.

Until it spins manically out of control in the last act, Easy A is a charmer: a high school satire with a lethally sharp script and a big, smart, adorable star performance from Emma Stone.

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

The hidden message of The Oath is so inescapable as to be Shakespearean: Character will out.

Priceless is a bauble - an art-house diamond made of paste that somehow still gives you good glimmer for the money.

An amiable if not especially urgent celebration of the life and work of Wayne White.

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

If Gimme Danger never quite solves the secret of Iggy’s onstage atavism — how he pushed the myth of sheer, unhinged rock ’n’ roll abandon until he embodied it better (or worse) than anyone else, ever — it reminds us of when he was, verily, the velociraptor of popular music.

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.

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

Scorsese and his team of Grade A talents are working on an operatic scale here, and like many operas, this is long, overwrought, sprawling, and more than frequently brilliant. It also hits just enough discordant notes to keep it from greatness.

The movie's strength is its refusal to offer easy answers.

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.

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

It’s a long, jangling, melodious soak, rich with backstage incident and wall-to-wall hits.

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

An honest, honorable indie chamber drama that, if anything, errs on the side of caution. It benefits from a scrupulously observed performance by Kevin Bacon.

His abiding interest is in the ways that human beings work together, his famous fly-on-the-wall shooting style revealing the constant struggle to connect and create. Wiseman's are the movies to show to the aliens when they arrive.

Brick is Bogart goes to high school, in other words, but that thumbnail description doesn't begin to convey the lasting pleasures of Rian Johnson's directorial debut.

Someone once said about W.C. Fields that he had the rare ability to despise amusingly. I can imagine no greater compliment than to say that Ricky Gervais seems, at his best, like a young Fields.

Dunham has been justly praised for her determination in getting Tiny Furniture made, but the movie itself has been overpraised as a result.

Works more in your head than on the screen.

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

The movie struggles to find its shape throughout. Jacobs favors observational moments rather than linear narrative, and that's fine, but you still sense he's drifting toward a point that never quite coheres.

Vanessa Gould’s charming and soulful documentary Obit should convince the doubters and cheer those who already know. As someone who takes great pleasure in both reading and writing valedictions to the recently deceased, I can personally attest that the movie’s dead on.

People Like Us is neither optimal nor prime.

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

At its best, Still Alice is a moving inquisition into the emotions and memories and connections that make us us and how we might cope when they’re taken away with slow, impersonal cruelty.

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

Despicable Me has enough visual novelty and high spirits to keep the kiddies diverted and just enough wit to placate the parents.

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

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.

Sarah Silverman is far and away the best part of I Smile Back, a strained entry in the Mad Housewife genre.

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

The new film's not only almost double the length of the original, it's four times as ambitious - a sprawling, surrealist, ultimately disturbing portrait of a society lurching uncertainly toward democracy. What's really on trial in this movie? Just the Russian soul.

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

Darker, leaner, less expansive , and meaner, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is all business, and it casts a spell utterly unlike the first four films.

It's a performance (Giamatti's) so nuanced and so real in its everyday pain that it doesn't stand a chance of winning an Oscar. But it should.

The Boss of It All finds the common ground between business and acting -- panicky improvisation -- and wonders whether applause or an executive comp package is the greater reward.

The film that director Morten Tyldum has made from Hodges’s book is a shinier, less trustworthy thing, but it’s ripping old-school Oscar bait, and if it sends moviegoers off to check the facts, all the better.

The movie's masterstroke is to avoid interviewing the usual anti-globalist suspects and let solid, hard-working middle Americans speak.

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

If you want to take the kids to a cockle-warming tale of humans and computer-generated critters, do yourself a favor: Skip the singing rodents and head for the baby Loch Ness Monster in The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep.

Green unquestionably has a rare, intermittent knack for rapture.

Haneke has become known as a dour modern master of cinematic pain, and in this movie he scrubs civilization down to the root level.

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

Despite a similar setting-the never-never land of the Arabian Nights — the new movie is hipper, faster, more topical.

The movie clips are luscious, as you'd expect, and Cardiff's own "home movies," shot on various movie sets with a 16mm camera, catch the gods during downtime.

Holes functions as a film, but just barely: Readers familiar with the book may negotiate the film's antic crosscutting, but newbies will need to pop a Dramamine before the lights dim.