Wesley Morris

This is moviemaking that honors the craftsmanship of its subject.

For 75 minutes or so, Air Doll is the lightest of Kore-eda’s movies, which include the superb “Nobody Knows’’ (2004) and “Still Life’’ (2008). Gradually, though, the tender music-box score — by one-man Japanese band world’s end girlfriend — is tinged with foreboding.

The film is actually a major artistic breakthrough for Araki, a onetime bad boy of independent filmmaking. Its psychological intelligence, attention to emotional currents, and humanity are surprises.

As amusing as it is, the comedy here consists mostly of predictable potshots.

The film is often at odds with itself as a sincere work of romantic comedy, as Wilder's sometimes were, too. Nonetheless, it's determined to keep Clooney's considerable comedic skills front and center. He's never been looser, sexier, or more antic.

The director has concocted a tragedy that actually feels tragic.

The movie is always entertaining and frequently smart about the new ground one girl will break to humiliate another.

Ben Stiller is like a guy on the 1919 White Sox. He's rigged to lose. His comedy is the stuff of failure, and sometimes it's pleasurable watching him flit around in funny get-ups, only to have a pretty costar put him down.

Streep is in movie star mode, and she’s irresistible. But Baldwin achieves something not many men have been able to with Streep: You notice him.

Deceptively keen as both a paranoid political thriller and a caveat against the trustworthiness of your friends and neighbors.

Into the Blue is as much a mesmerizing aquatic expedition as it is a reasonably suspenseful action adventure.

What remains of the book's psychological underpinnings -- there are enough here to leave a permanent dent in the couch of any Freud-loving shrink

At the heart of most of these encounters is talk about the nature of relationships -- cousins, twins, and peers. Mostly, though, Jarmusch displays an unexpected interest in the ironies and banalities of fame.

This is an easy movie to spoil. It's rather plotless. But things happen in precisely the way that life happens.

Spirited, madly educational docu-quickie.

The film's insistence on the men's innocence is matter of fact. But it's also an urgent corrective to the suspicious eye the movies so often cast on Arabs and Islam.

The movie is corny enough to remind you that boxing rings are square.

Debbie gets away with being such a cauldron of extremes because the airy-voiced Mann is extremely good at playing them. She happens to be Apatow's wife (the kids in the movie are theirs), and with the possible exception of Téa Leoni , it's hard to imagine who else could get away with this combination of needling and affection.

It's as much a satire as a mystery, a film as much about art as it is about faith.

They're not looking to say anything grand. What they do say - and what we see - is smart and true.

Stirs excitement about exploration of all kinds.

The movie is seriously sexy and seriously entertaining.

Seemingly limitless access is what makes the movie interesting.

Busch combines French absurdist theater and American performance art with a drag queen's flamboyant wit.

Demonstrates an idiosyncratic human touch. Kon is unafraid of the unseemly and unsightly. People are captured as they really might be.

Overnight is about all kinds of in-the-moment emotional rawness.

Everyone Else is not about hurricanes and earthquakes and knives in the back. It's about private, emotional phenomena: the tiny tremors and imperceptible shifts that bring a couple closer together or drive them apart, almost without their noticing.

The movie's assemblage of audio interviews poured mostly over astounding race footage is fit for a shrine.