The film is a startlingly original and haunting take on our ageless fear of otherness.

For each of the film’s visual achievements, there are narrative and developmental issues. As much as Edwards’ world invites us in, we are constantly befuddled by the way his characters move through their environments.

Perhaps the film’s most telling moments, however, are wordless ones in which no actor appears. They’re the bird’s-eye views of American tableaux – suburban tract houses, elementary schools, interstate highways – that mimic similar sky-high perspectives just before a drone fires its missile.

Vanilla and sweet, it's an overly generous helping that, if it doesn't make you sick, will put you in a good humor all day long.

This documentary is as soothing and edifying as watching a video loop of the Yuletide log.

This is entertaining fare that's still potent today in all its pre-censorship seediness.

To be fair, this isn't The Killer. Woo's unique penchant for over-the-top male bonding is basically nowhere to be seen, but then this is, after all, a very American story, despite Woo's name at the top.

Does little to dispel the creeping feeling that Washington’s getting himself in something of a rut.

Poses a problem for reviewers. The entire story hinges on a plot device that occurs roughly midway through the film and alters everything that has come before. To give away this massive, unavoidable spoiler would be disastrous and unforgivable.

Secretary is a testament to the importance of tonality in telling a story.

Good, clean fun, with none of the icky aftertaste so common to “family friendly” ware, Drumline proves irresistible in more ways than one.

"We, the people" have never been big fans of movies about the American Revolutionary War. The Patriot, however, appears to be the movie that will break that historical jinx.

A Perfect Getaway is, in its own delightfully silly and manipulative way, one of the most effective paranoid thrillers of the new millennium. That doesn't make it a great movie by a long shot.

In her first feature, Bleed With Me, director Amelia Moses used vampirism as a tool to explore toxic friendships: in Bloodthirsty, it's clear that the lycanthropic fate that awaits Grey is less than metaphorical.

It’s apparent that the sharp comic forces behind this epic are simply a couple of juvenile men who think it’s hilarious to show a man’s penis on screen just for the sake of itself. But the embarrassing truth is that, well, sometimes it is.

It turns out globalization has its good points after all, and they're sporting Chucks, Kangols, and post-Gomi DIY gear. Spin again.

Ultimately, The Guilty is a worthwhile remake, even if it fails to perfectly calibrate performance and production.

Although flawed in many respects -- it's not as smooth and silky a movie as it could have been -- Don Juan DeMarco nevertheless evokes a romantic mood that tickles and caresses.

An incredibly evocative film and one of the most evocative neo-Westerns of the past decade.

My Cousin Rachel 2017 retreads du Maurier’s luscious mix of Gothic trappings and psychological mystery, but it’s a wan concoction that’s never fully convincing or engaging.

Has very little soul to speak of, but it's got swagger to burn.

Taken on its own fluff piece terms, Piece by Piece is an interesting sprint through three decades of cultural relevance and relatively scandal-free living. If Pharrell’s happy, then it seems we have to be too.

William Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice may help in bringing some of the Bard's language to life, but this rendition is hardly a freshman course.

While Flamin’ Hot might be of questionable truthfulness, Longoria used that history to craft an undeniably charming Mexican American success story. Nyad offers shades of that same charm, but more than a few creative choices get between the film and success.

When all is said and done, director bob Fosse (Cabaret, Lenny, All That Jazz) delivers a sluggish movie that exhibits none of his usual flash and even less psychological drama.

The story's parallels with the present are sometimes inescapable, as when Saladin's fireballs catapulted at Balian's castle strike an eerie resemblance to the "shock and awe" of the U.S.-led coalition's initial assault on Iraq.

The transitions from performance to song and to reality are strained and awkward.

Wain's psychosis is shown from the inside, the Victoriana giving way to psychotronic visions that re-create Wain's futurism and dalliances with Cubism.

Like its protagonist, Cordero's film is a nimble thing, darting from hot-button topic to prison-cell metaphysics in the blink of a blind eye, but it never quite achieves the level of journalistic condemnation it so clearly seeks.

It's nonstop chaos, and the everything-and-the-kitchen-sink style of comedy is taxing despite the frequent moments of pure comic genius.

Home Alone is the apex, the pinnacle, the culmination of every bad bit Hughes has ever written or directed. It overflows with primitive, disastrously unfunny sight gags and neo-hateful familial humor.

Courtroom dramas can be tricky, tetchy things, but director Jackson, working from a script by David Hare (The Hours) keeps the suspense and moral indignation peaking high throughout Denial’s slightly overlong running time.

Cinematically well-made, The Other Son is nevertheless workmanlike. The actors are all excellent, the storytelling compassionate, and the overall sense one takes from the film is more humane than political.

There’s also something to be said for wanting a little bit more.

The whole of it plays like a dark and dreary tone poem, only marginally interested in explaining the ticking, bloody clockwork of the inner beast and only occasionally touching on his fractured humanity.

Out of the Furnace brims with atmosphere and Bale, Affleck, and Harrelson deliver some of their finest acting work. Smokestack lightning this film is not, but Out of the Furnace nevertheless provides a solid whiff.

Erich von Stroheim might have made the definitive film about human swinishness way back in 1924 – sorry, Gordon Gekko – but Cheap Thrills cuts deeper, darker, and straight to the bone.

Time and time again, Ritchie proves to be an effective action director. When it comes to writing the picture, less so, and The Covenant stands as another reminder of that sturdy dichotomy.

Mostly succeeds in spite of the apparent strain to serve the agendas of both its loyal audience and its fledgling stars.

It’s a fascinating world to explore; I just wish Honk for Jesus had done a better job in doing it.

Die-hard Downton fans aren’t going to grumble at the chance to spend more time with well-loved characters, and there are plenty of bright spots along the way.

The performances are all strong (particularly Landau's) but, as a whole, the movie suffers from competing impulses that push and pull Mistress from comedy to drama and back again. It can't quite seem to make up its mind and as a consequence loses a lot of its steam and momentum.

He seems to be everything anyone might want from a pope, and this commissioned film seems to be part of the PR campaign to spread that particular gospel to the world.

It also has wild plot holes and requires an almost inhuman suspension of disbelief, but it's still a fun ride up to a point.

Pushing the concepts of consensual BDSM to their very furthest extremes, Pesce's curious, stylized, and perversely erotic romance will inevitably make the audience flinch.

Considering how lame the bulk of teen movies made in the late Fifties and early Sixties look in retrospect, Where the Boys Are stands up respectably well.

I’m all for ambiguity, but Dear Frankie’s multiple dangling threads indicate incoherent storytelling, not profundity.

Here, watching Theron is just about the whole show, and to the film’s credit, this is usually a mesmerizing rather than crass experience.

At a two-hour run time, Hart attempts to make you feel every moment, but most of these plotless, meandering moments just seem to feel empty. The magic never clicks, and this rich-looking, Seventies-set thriller ends up feeling more like a drag on an unlit cigarette than a burn.

Purrs with uncommon emotion.

This kind of a dance film lives and dies by the routines, and this one wins: Mixing elements of gymnastics, karate, and break with the almighty step – an exceedingly polite term for what is really an awesome stomp.

There's no denying the dazzling effect, but a fireworks sequence midfilm only underscores the sad fact that there's no lasting illumination here, only the fast-burn spitzing of bang snaps.

If you had any notions of getting through The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 without having your emotions pushed, prodded, pounded, and kneaded like so much pizza dough, you can forget about them right now.

They don't make women, sexy but regal, like Pfeiffer much anymore, and Cheri is quite a monument to her.

The middle of a movie is often where filmmakers lose their way, but Friends With Benefits nails this stretch, in which nothing very remarkable happens as two people talk, in bed and out of bed. There's a fine line between fun-dirty and ick-dirty – sometimes you can't identify the line until it's been crossed – and this film keeps its toes on the right side of raunch.

Thankfully there are no weight-loss montage sequences; what you see with Muriel is what you get, like it or not. This refusal to change or convert the main characters makes the film so appealing.

The movie remains patchy as it continues to jump somewhat arbitrarily from day to day without fully realizing its subject matter. The one dependable constant in all of this is Christo himself. Smiling ecstatically one minute, despondently hangdog the next, he exhibits a genius lunacy on par with his life’s work.

The shock ending isn't all that shocking if you're a fan of genre films, but it's nonetheless effective despite the fact that it sidesteps several key questions. Never mind: It's hellishly fun.

Boden and Fleck's unabashedly warmhearted film is a sensitively wrought but also very funny portrait of the way we respond to pressure.

True, the melodrama on display here can't compare to the likes of Larry, Moe, Curly, and the cannibals, but then this goofily charming quartet of Western outsiders is far more real than reel.

Apparently fit and reasonably trim, Deal's honesty touches a nerve that the band's music only gnawed on back in the day.

Summer Wars is a magnificently manufactured piece of film entertainment that goes beyond the obvious and manages to comment, often obliquely, on everything from Facebook to virtual war and/or terrorism without ever seeming heavy-handed or strident.

Dafoe, as expected, is magnificent in the taciturn role, but the film tends to falter when he's not out stalking, combining as it does elements of family drama, environmental outrage, and outright suspense.

When Les Misérables is good, it is very, very good, and when it is bad, it's usually because Russell Crowe has opened his mouth.

Consider this yet another nail in the Eighties coffin.

A dead-chamber misfire, a hollowpoint dud.

What we get is more of the same from Ferrell – funny faces, goofy accents, pratfalls aplenty – and that ain't bad. It just could have been a lot better.

The film’s simplest pleasure is its naturalism – the illusion it creates of observing the animals undetected.

Eastwood's grim handling of even grimmer subject matter could have used some paring down toward its histrionic ending, but Changeling is still one of the director's most assured and engaging historical horror shows.

It’s harrowing to ponder, but a joy to watch unfold when told by someone with such distinct cinematic prowess.

It’s still a hellish glimpse into one of climbing’s worst days ever, and there’s no way to resolve the unresolvable, but as it is The Summit, like K2 itself, remains an icily beautiful and altogether deadly mystery.

Time and again, Devor sabotages his own attempt to bring "zoos," literally and figuratively, into the light.

Like the character of Rocky, it's got heart to spare, and is by turns one of the sweetest of the sweet-science pictures as well as one of the most doleful. Fighters fight, it's what they do. And Balboa, god bless him, fights on.

Bruckheimer -– always eager to egg on the public’s thirst for bigger, louder, stupider –- has done a scandalous amount of damage to contemporary cinema, but for once, his dubious talent for big-buck bombast is exploited for good rather than evil.

If you ever thought "Footloose" might’ve been improved with an Irish brogue and a short pour of agitprop, then by all means look to this latest from Ken Loach, Britain’s elder statesman of cinema and its evergreen champion of the working class.

Its view of mankind is unkind, to say the least, but any race that can produce such remarkably garish gore as this is perhaps salvageable somehow, someday.

Pearl, in other words, is one of those guys put on earth to make the rest of us feel like we're wasting our lives.

Wright is terrific – sensitive and alert – in the live-action opening. But that opening runs more than 45 minutes long, a way too heavy-handed preamble to the crazed animation to come, and the actress’ vocal delivery – soft-spoken, gently bewildered – is too soporific to pull off lines like, “Look at me, I’m your prophet of doom.”

Honeymoon in Vegas is what every stupid comedy should be to justify the price of admission, sadly it is no more than that.

Blood Quantum operates from a place of tribal identity and that no white audience members will truly be able to understand. In this way, Barnaby’s film rejects the default white gaze of so many horror films, choosing to tell a story through an unapologetically Indigenous lens.

No matter where your political gullibilities lie, Green Zone is a riveting piece of actioneering.

Penn's Bicke is often so pitiable it's hard not to want to look away – but what else to expect from perhaps our most compulsively watchable contemporary actor?

The story is simple, sometimes to a fault.

Austin mainstays the Zellner brothers have managed to make a Western genre film appropriate for the #MeToo era’s audience.

Great fun to watch, thoughtful and timely, Thomas in Love is likely to generate some decidedly interesting post-film conversations as well.

A movie about life and death; its underpinnings are soaked in the perfume of artistic expression.

Columbus never quite captures the depth, the rich complexities of Rowling's novels. She's written four Harry Potter books for kids that adults swoon for, too. Columbus has made two Harry Potter movies for kids … and we'll leave it at that. That isn't bad. But I suspect there's something better just around the bend.

What (a kinder and gentler?) Schrader has crafted with Master Gardener is a fable of redemption. And there lies the deviation. For all its looming menace and potential violence, not to mention what the biracial Maya will make of Narvel’s past - a past literally written on his body - Master Gardener is sweet, and, horror of horrors, hopeful.

The elegant emotional narrative is informed by their toxic relationships with their fathers.

While it's a well-constructed doc, full of relevant information and geared toward those people who still might be fence-sitters on the subject, there's something missing from The 11th Hour's lengthy procession of talking heads: a sense of maddened outrage.

The film tracks the laborious training process of how anxious, heartbroken Helen forges a bond with Mabel, and it’s fascinating stuff.

The trailer for the film is more gripping than the feature itself.

When the movie shifts from psychological to physical terror, the film (like Sawyer) unravels and finally loses its bearings.

The comedic success of this pair of dramatic archetypes, the radiant flibbertigibbet and the gray, lumpen elder spinster, in a lightweight bit of piffle such as this is a testament to both Adams' and McDormand's smarts. It's tough to play dumb when you're not and even more difficult to dial down your own innate brilliance.

Did I fall in love with Undertow? Not in the least. But I liked it alright, and amidst the mediocrity, even rot, that constitutes 98% of contemporary American movies, that'll do fine.

The Jungle Book is far more thrilling than frightening and is easily capable of entertaining three generations of filmgoers simultaneously.

For the most part, it works well at this level with the added bonus of some unexpected intellectual twists. The predominant thing that bogs down SWF is the script. It has too many plot holes to be fully believable and too little psychological background on our unbalanced roomie (and when it is revealed, it's revealed all in one stroke).

Spring Breakers is Korine’s most cogent take yet on society’s outsiders.