Ty Burr

Hearts Beat Loud is gentle, funny, humane, and predictable, kept from becoming tiresome by a cast of pros that includes not only Offerman but Toni Collette as Frank’s landlady and possible love interest and a frisky Ted Danson as a philosophic stoner who owns the neighborhood watering hole.

If you can adjust to its rhythms, which move according to the seasons and to long-held family grudges, you’ll find it quietly funny, sometimes quite sad, and ultimately rather profound. If you can’t, you’ll be left in the cold with the sheep.

It's the sort of thing you'll either find enchanting or an excellent reason to reach for the Scotch.

Despite exotic locations, epic cinematography, and much spectacular crash and bang, this "Mummy" feels like a threadbare toss-off.

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.

The movie’s a paean to hard work and hedonism, and if its pleasures are mostly surface — grass, clay, emotional — it’s still been too long since we’ve had an intelligent frolic like this.

Pig is a thoughtful, well-made movie for an audience primed for junk: It’s pearls before swine.

Some of Loach’s movies have breathing room, but this isn’t one of them. That’s a feature, not a bug. Sorry We Missed You depicts the vise into which many people are forced to put head, hearts, and lives in order to pay the rent and feed their families. It dramatizes a daily sprint up an escalator that pulls workers backwards.

We don’t go to Hollywood movies for hard facts, but it’d be nice to think we’re getting some kind of truth with our entertainment. Maybe Aaron Sorkin thinks we can’t handle the truth.

Smartly filmed (aside from a few distracting editing fripperies), but it's so dazzled by its subject and saddened by his martyrdom that it never moves past the heroic politics of dissent.

As sagas of endurance in the face of ridiculous odds go, this story is up there with Shackleton and ''Into Thin Air.''

The final moments, however, are all Ruben’s, which is to say they’re all Ahmed’s, and the actor makes his character’s ultimate decision feel both hard won and achingly simple. Coming out toward the end of a year of great and terrible cacophony, Sound of Metal understands the gift that is hearing and the blessings of silence alike.

At its most interesting, the movie offers us the sight of people desperately embracing faith in the hopes it will pull them through.

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.

Breezily enjoyable for about 10 minutes, until you realize the entire movie is going to be pitched at the same exuberantly manic pace. It's like being trapped in an elevator with a performing poodle that doesn't know when to quit.

Genocide is hard to decorate with the trimmings of dark farce. The Hunting Party wants to get at political truths through audaciousness, but it keeps bumping into that problem of taste, only to back down.

Burma VJ’ retorts that eyes and ears are everywhere in our ever-tightening global communications mesh. Voices, too, and they get heard. The generals and the ayatollahs have every right to be scared.

Filmed with a cold, poetic beauty, The Return slowly strips away motivation until it arrives at a place of myth both private and oddly universal.

Is Kelly Reichardt the most under-acknowledged great director working in America right now? Her new movie, Certain Women, is one of the glories of this or any other year, but it stays true to Reichardt form, which is to say it’s low-key, allusive, lit up with implied meanings without ever leading us by the hand.

Does what too many independent American movies only pretend to do: Takes you to an unnoticed corner of our country and shows what it's like to actually live there.

One of those lovely little movies that starts out being about a handful of people and ends up being about all of us. That’s a tricky act to pull off and the talented writer-director Ira Sachs stumbles occasionally over moments of self-conscious lyricism. But then the film recovers its balance, looks at its characters with fondness and with faith, and quietly soars.

The Assassin achieves a pitch of the cinematic sublime of which very few filmmakers are capable, but it doesn’t make much traditional sense. Hou could do that, if he wants, but he’s after more rarefied game.

Cleaner is a “Die Hard” knockoff with just enough fresh elements to make it watchable on a slow streaming night.

It's spookily touching to see this massed group of former rock gods gathered to honor one of their fallen. Bald spots and graying shags predominate; the giant velvet lapels of 1969 have given way to sensible sport coats; the granny glasses are for real.

From the opening shot of a burnt-orange GTO cruising a high school parking lot to the strains of Aerosmith's ''Sweet Emotion,'' Richard Linklater's film nails mid-'70s adolescence so precisely that you'll need Clearasil by the end credits.

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

In a way I’ve never before seen done onscreen, Madeline’s Madeline fuses triumph and tragedy until the two feel strong and indistinguishable.

Director Paul Greengrass creates an aura of urgency so compelling, so rooted in detail, that we temporarily forget what we know and hold our breaths for two-plus hours of tightening suspense.