Walter Addiego

Doesn't allow the story's considerable nostalgia and sentimentality to overwhelm it.

Outstanding in support roles are Alison Lohman, playing a friend of Jerry's, and John Carroll Lynch, playing a neighbor who befriends Jerry.

The film takes its time detailing his mundane activities, often withholding the kind of information audiences usually expect, and it's Puiu's talent to transform it all into a highly disturbing portrait - both of an individual and a society.

Quibbling aside, Free Fire mainly works, as an indulgence in cinematic overkill for moviegoers who realize that sometimes too much is just enough.

Doesn't add up to much, but it's fast and funny and lets a bunch of top-drawer actors exercise their comic muscles.

In Amigo, a story of the Philippine-American War, veteran filmmaker John Sayles allows his political convictions to get the better of him. The movie is a heavy-handed attack on U.S. imperialism with little to compensate in the way of character interest and genuine drama.

I liked this movie somewhat, even if I'm not sure exactly what it means. Possibly it has something to do with arriving home, in the broadest sense. But in a Maddin film, uncertainty comes with the territory.

There so much entertaining information in Art & Copy, a documentary about modern advertising, that it takes a while to realize we are being sold something

Too much of what we see feels contrived and ham-handed.

It's soft-edged fun that loses direction (or, given the scattershot plot, directions).

It's a sumptuously mounted melodrama that aims to make a big statement about big themes, but a stilted quality in the filmmaking drags it down.

Director Anthony Fabian lets the story sell itself, and it does so partly on the strength of the lead performance by Sophie Okonedo.

Eventually comes into its own as a wacky commentary on the state of America in the fifth year of the Iraq war.

It serves up a broad humanistic lesson with absurdism and black comedy more sad than barbed.

A giddy French comedy.

Too much of nothing and far from the potentially star-making material that Foxx deserves.

Teller’s work is the film’s soul, and he completely convinces us of Vinny’s affability, flaws and steely determination. The performance has intelligent touches, some of them comic — such as the hint that Vinny’s rehab battle is heroic but also a bit goofy. It’s the kind of thing that first-rate actors can pull off.

You may experience Visitors as more of a sedative than a punch in the guts.

Painfully sincere but tired.

There are “gotcha” jolts that definitely got me, but for each of those, there must be a half-dozen scares telegraphed in very large letters. I think Annabelle: Creation is suffering from sequelitis.

By showing so many examples of his art, the film attests to Giger’s real gift for startling images. But it’s hard not to see, in addition, elements of repetitive adolescent provocation.

The overall mood is out-and-out misty-eyed, a feeling emphasized by the movie’s piano score. Ramen Shop has some flaws — the movie jumps jarringly back and forth in time — but voluptuous closeups of delightful dishes like chilli crab make up for a lot.

It's not as good as the original - which was fresher, funnier and scarier - but if it were, then by the criteria of the film's resident movie scholar, it wouldn't be a genuine sequel.

A remarkable study of the corrosive effects of fear and power on an establishment insider who puts duty above all else.

There's an Impressionistic feeling to all this, and sometimes it plays like a travelogue -- Bush is trying to do an awful lot at once. But the material is so compelling that we keep watching.

A lot of what takes place in Roadie feels overly familiar, and the film could have been a wallow in pathos except for the performances, especially that of Eldard.

He Named Me Malala gets good marks as a laudatory piece about a genuinely valiant young woman, but it could use a modest dose of objectivity.

At its best, Gordon's work is bracing and pointed, though it's not for the queasy.